Nerve 13 - "Get Our Game Back"

“Get Our Game Back”

The Liverpool number seven cuts inside the full back, leaving him 'for dead', looks up and slots in the Reds' fifth goal of the afternoon, with the Kop sucking the ball over the line and into the net.

Torres at Anfield? No, Wignall at Valerie Park. Valerie Park, Prescot that is, home of Prescot Cables Football Club, kind hosts to the new club on Merseyside. AFC Liverpool, playing in their inaugural season, in the second tier of the North-West Counties League. The unfortunate opponents for this opening encounter are Darwin FC, a club steeped in history, from the other side of Lancashire. The score remains 5-0 and 426 Liverpool supporters make their way home, happy and, more importantly, not skint. (Prices: £5 adult, £3 children, £2 OAP)

Almost all the fans in attendance are - or were - supporters of Liverpool Football Club, but have been priced out of 'going the match', by the corporate profiteers who dominate the club. The piecemeal robbery that has taken place over the past eighteen years or so, has threatened to rip apart an important part of the fabric of working class life.

Football culture has been turned into an expensive pastime, which relies on the ordered mechanism of a corporate ticket and booking system, more in tune with the Liverpool Empire than Liverpool Football Club, to plough in the revenue of millions, to keep the cult of sporting celebrity and corporate sponsorship firmly in control. Importantly - as far as the authorities are concerned - an orderly ticket system needs an orderly crowd. An orderly crowd means there can be no straying from these restrictions once you have been ushered to your seat, leaving little room for self-expression. This was the very impetus for 'going the match', to be part of a crowd of people, where individual expression ebbs and flows with the communal purpose of cheering the team on to victory.

I would suggest this culture lies within the oral tradition, a ritual experience, passed on from generation to generation, one which almost transcends reason or logic, a communal expression, which attempts to articulate a feeling - a feeling for a place and its people. Not like an undemocratically chosen representative of a place, artistically portraying, or trying to 'capture' that feeling, but a once or twice weekly living organism, which is open to participation for EVERYONE, allowing for spontaneity to thrive, once more.

As long as AFC Liverpool keeps hold of this ethos and does not attempt to replicate it’s corporate namesake, it can only benefit the community which it aims to serve, giving the game back to the people.

As Tommy, a founder member from 'Norris-on-the-Green' said the morning after the Darwin game, "I felt like I hadn't for years - the way I used to feel the day after we'd given some team a tonkin', at Anfield."

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