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Photo by Carl Recine/Getty Images
Liverpool’s terrific run with Arne Slot at the helm continues apace. Which is good because the world beyond the Kop sometimes feels bleak.
What is joy in the midst of crisis? The joy is watching Liverpool torch Bayer Leverkusen at Anfield. The crisis, at least for this writer, is watching your neighbors insist that immigrants are a drain on life and must go.
The joy is shouting in cathartic release as Cody Gakpo finishes off a superb Mohamed Salah cross while at the same time part of me as an American fan, perhaps this week in particular, holds on to the terror of knowing my Black friends and my Muslim friends in my community are perhaps less safe and their lives more precarious today than they were a week or month or year ago.
The joy hearing the roar of a unified Kop. The crisis mourning living in what often seems an ever more deeply fractured society. In other words, a Tuesday in America.
It seems hard in this moment, then, to fully capture the depth of fear and anxiety coursing through my body—though my Apple Watch did warn me six times during an innocuous one hour meeting this week that my heart rate was abnormally high. Which is to say, I’m looking for just about any bit of relief.
So today I’m grateful for the existence of Liverpool Football Club as that distraction. I’m grateful, as silly as it might sound, for the diversion of football of any kind during a time when the world has begun to feel bleak. But that it is this brand of football, this style and approach that feeds on and fuels excitement when it all clicks into gear can feel a special treat. Like water to a parched tongue.
Tuesday’s match is, perhaps, my most bright memory in an anxious and, eventually, dreary day and week. And while I wish I might be more able to talk about the wonderful narratives surrounding the team or wax poetic about the attack or, simply, admire just how incredibly beautiful a human being Xabi Alonso is even when he arrives at Anfield as a rival manager, I cannot.
Because outside the moments when eleven men kick a ball about a pitch, I’ve spent much of the past week wracked with anxiety. My Google searches include such cheerful topics as “what are the visa restrictions to country [x]” and “is denaturalization a thing.” I kid, perhaps—in as much as I know that dentrualization is a an actual goal of some of the xenophobic ghouls likely to soon be put in charge of immigration policy.
Even with a knowledge of my nation’s racist history and its hostility towards immigrants (regardless of where they originate, but in the current climate especially pointed towards those of us from the Global South), it will never cease to take my breath away to see that animosity made manifest, millions lining up to cast a ballot against me. I want to believe so deeply and utterly that my neighbors don’t hate me on spec. But the past eight years have made it difficult to come to any other conclusion.
If I can be allowed to stray a little further from football, I do still believe deeply in the hope of America choosing its better angels, eventually. I cannot help but do so because my own, my community, and other minoritizied communities’ survival depends upon that coming to pass. But today, this week, is about the grieving.
And because of that, I’m grateful to have a little sweetness by way of Slot’s Reds and, more importantly, a community of people I can count upon within the massive fanbase. Here’s to you, Global Kop. And thank you to the ones who’ve had to put up with my missives on race, xenophobia, and movement on spaces both here and not here.
I am lucky for a lot of things, but two examples are the Reds and so many of you all. Up the Reds. Let’s take all three points on the weekend.
