Liverpool (h) – The ACN Review

On my walk to the railway station to catch the train to Norwich, I spot a fading poster outside an abandoned shop doorway, imploring patrons to keep their distance and wear a mask. Over the top of it, in thick marker pen, just like the graffiti Holden Caulfield sees in The Catcher in the Rye, someone has scrawled the words “FUCK YOU.”

Like the sight of anti-vax stickers, mask-wearing police officers or ripped yellow tape on the floor, it is a vibrant, real-life (i.e. not just madness on the internet) reminder of the utterly unfathomable period of time I happen to find myself living in. It causes my brain to shiver at the discombobulation, before I then reach for my mental safety valve with the realisation that as long as it does still seem weird, then it will never be normal. And we can get back to normal.

Yet this is still the world in which I will be watching the next football match of my team Norwich City, something I was last able to do when they played Leicester City on 28 February 2020, which marked the beginning of a period in which an unimaginable shake up of the world has taken place. Nothing but insanity for a period of one year, five months and 18 days since a Jamal Lewis goal that gave us hope of survival in the Premier League two football seasons ago.

I am a little bit hungover, the train is delayed, I am already exhausted from having walked two miles and the fact I don’t have a pocket for my scarf is annoying me. I am, finally, on my way to the football again. And, because why the fuck not, I am determined to make a day of it by taking the 11:50 train to Norwich. Chip shops, pubs and cathedral walks are my initial aim before taking in a glorious Norwich victory against Liverpool.

The train journey, finally of the new variety hauling Greater Anglia out of the 1970s after all of this time, is excitable and arriving in Norwich I see things I haven’t seen for ages: crowds of people. The City is absolutely packed. I hike up towards the Lanes on a glorious history-filled walk around the best city in the world, yet occasionally the reminders about Covid jump out. Graffiti on doors, whitewashed windows and weeds growing through paving slabs. A line of six businesses in a row that have gone to the wall serve as a reminder that the pandemic is always there looming in the background, no matter how hard anyone is trying to forget about it.

The air is thick and soupy, more Mississippi Delta than Norwich. Sweat drips down masked faces. Collars are continuously adjusted. Foreheads wiped. The sun is not out, but a short walk is like walking through a greenhouse that has its sprinklers turned on. It is not a day where anyone is looking their best and I consider if the stadium PA might later play Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks, just to add to the swampy and sludgy Southern Gothic feel of proceedings.

At the pub, I order two Guinness, (one for me and one for my soon-to-arrive companion) and a pint of lemonade, before vegetating quietly and staring into space – a luxurious activity that was rarely applied during the stress and pressure of lockdown, in which every waking moment seemed to be a race to try and distract oneself. The lemonade goes in two minutes. The Guinness I would go on to nurse for almost three hours, knowing that any more alcohol in this heat and humidity might finish me off during the energetic proceedings during the match later.

As the pub fills with the excitable babble of a crowd that is trying to play it cool despite harbouring inside the excitement of a child on Christmas morning, my senses pick up things I had forgotten existed. The smell of aftershave, Lynx Africa, stale tobacco. The analogue hum of chatter instead of a digitally compressed one. Friends arrive one by one. Team news is discussed. ACN stickers are swapped. Laughter is had at Ipswich Town’s expense.

Then with a roll call, we are off towards the gravitational pull of the football stadium by the river – finally once again. After all this time. Others are heading that way too, and we all filter quickly and purposely through the roads and streets like a colony of ants getting to the sticky, energy-rich, sweetness of a lollipop dropped on the pavement.

Though I do not witness it first hand, and slip into the Barclay easily, it is later revealed (inside the stadium from whispering rumours and then confirmed social media footage) that Carrow Road is chaos. Despite the obvious lessons to be learned from the Euro 2020 Final, a combination of being short staffed and a gap of 18 months since anyone last had to do this has caused a system meltdown. Well over half an hour before kick off, mass huddles of people outside the South Stand aren’t even instructed to form queues. In the gruelling humidity, excitement and pent-up emotion of the day, where anything testing had the potential to set off the most normally calm and meek individual, the club is playing a dangerous game by frazzling the patience of the crowd. I consider later how lucky it is that this did not happen outside the Barclay or away end, where there is a greater risk of things boiling over.

In the ground, it is sensory overload. A half an hour before kick off, the stands are practically full – a virtual unknown in the modern era. Noise, some of it chanting, some of it just intelligible vocalisation, builds to a Day in the Life-esque crescendo as the players take to the field in a slightly haphazard, supposedly Covid-safe, way. Tim Krul, assuming Norwich are going to kick off towards the River End in the first half – as is their wont – provokes a huge response as he walks towards the Barclay goal, only to find Liverpool have decided to kick off that way and has to run to the other end of the pitch.

But there’s only one thing everyone is waiting for.

I find I am fortunate in that the seat next to me is unoccupied, so I have plenty of space to raise my scarf properly without smacking someone in the eye. This is good because for the next 40 seconds I am completely unaware of what I am doing. Screaming the lyrics to the world’s oldest football song to the point my vocal chords start to give way and my voice cracks. The noise is like a riptide, drowning us with the force of Niagara Falls and the depth of the Mariana Trench before we can even contemplate coming up once again for air. The “On the Ball, City” refrain itself is like a bomb going off, shockwaves shooting out in all directions. A huge roar and applause greets its end and the game kicks off, as if we are showing we are still going to carry on despite exhausting ourselves in that one moment.

Unlike the game against Sheffield Wednesday I attended during lockdown, where I was so distracted by my twilight view of the Norwich skyline that I couldn’t help but feel relaxed, I am nervous. My leg is twitching involuntarily and I am constantly getting my phone out of my pocket, only to remember that Flashscore isn’t going to report a goal before I see it, as was the case with iFollow football – because I am actually watching the game live in front of me and the phone (amazingly) can’t see into the future. Everything that is shit about football’s modern financial imbalance desperately makes me want Norwich to win so we can show ‘em that it isn’t all about £100m in brown paper envelopes, so, as is inevitable, Liverpool’s first goal and seeing their fans erupt in that way that only an away end does, is a punch to the gut. Not just for my supporting-Norwich gut but for my wanting-to-give-the-establishment-a-black-eye gut. It’s sad, frustrating and grimly inevitable. I wince too, as I also level with myself that at this point that there is no way we are coming back. The odd Carrow Road moan, such a beautiful sound after all this time, makes itself known as the first half draws to a close.

Norwich fall way off the pace in the second half and, with watches being tapped and hands doing the globally recognised ‘sub’ motion, Liverpool score their second in front of the Barclay and do that really annoying light jog and hug half-celebration that big teams roll out when they score in a game they are expected to score in.

Despite not wanting to be anywhere else for the last 18 months, I find I am reading my phone for even longer extended periods of time and, despite the odd moment here and defiant chant there, the remainder of time drifts by like a semi-inflated balloon caught in a light breeze. I barely see Liverpool’s third, thinking to myself how much billions of pounds can get you in a playing squad, and when Norwich have an extremely Norwich moment at the River End by missing an incredible chance, I am secretly quite happy that our first goal to celebrate back at Carrow Road isn’t a meaningless consolation amid a thrashing. I can’t help but feel relieved at the final whistle, despite promising myself all this time that I would never feel like that again. Only Norwich City can rip your emotions around like that.

As I get in the door home, checking my smartwatch to see that I have walked seven miles in the day, I immediately fill a two-litre bottle with orange squash and drink it greedily, desperate to replenish the cells in my body with all of that fluid I have lost. I also neck two paracetamol, splash myself with cold water, sit uneasily in the armchair and then listen to…nothing.

It’s the sound of the last 18 months. Silence. Thank god it was finally broken.