Let It Be Liverpool

It seems, then, that there are greater forces at work in this Premier League season than the mere to-ings and fro-ings of your average football match.


The stars have aligned. The 25th anniversary of Hillsborough, so eloquently and humbly marked on Tuesday of last week, has coincided with a Liverpool team on a relentless run of victories. Brendan Rodgers, who becomes less a manager and more a statesman with every passing week, has urged his players to embrace the sentiment and grief and use it to embolden them further.


I like this. Too often football is pilloried as being a marginal pursuit, one that exists in a realm outside the more productive worlds of work and community. Certainly it is a rich man's plaything these days, but the core of any football club is and always will be its fans, and when those fans have suffered such an egregious loss it seems only fair that in some small way the club finds a way to reward the fans with, for a change, a wonderful celebration.


A football club is - or at least still can be - its community. It has to be Liverpool's year, doesn't it? Set aside Hillsborough and you've got Chelsea's demise to a goal scored by Liverpool loanee Borini (and another in vertical red and white stripes, Stoke's Oussama Assaidi, grabbing a winner against the Blue Meanies in December) and you can see a pattern emerging.


Indeed, Sunderland's extraordinary revival after Poyet acknowledged that a miracle was required, could be almost as astonishing. As ever Chelsea's defeat was done to forces outside of Mourinho's control. This time he went to the scoundrel manager's first excuse. It was The Ref Wot Won It.


Really? Mike Dean got just about every decision right as far as I could tell... the main ones I'd argue with was Matic's nudge on a defender before Terry tucked the ball home - there didn't seem much in that but the linesman flagged for it anyway; and Ramires should have walked. (Jose didn't mention that... strange.)


The other decisions were entirely understandable and Chelsea only have themselves to blame for not having a decent fucking goalscorer when the means to acquire one are utterly limitless.


But for all this critical mass of fact and coincidence, emboldened by the sort of freakish deflections that saw Sterling's second dolly cruelly over Ruddy's head at Carrow Road yesterday, there is still a cloud on Liverpool's horizon. And it is Mourinho.


I seriously don't want the tediously charming old bastard to win the Premier League, even though my money's on them. For a while this season he seemed to have rewritten himself as a charismatic and philosophical been-there, done-that kind of chap. But no. He's still a snide and churlish little bleeder underneath it all.


But he's smart too, and even devoid of strikers worth the name and an overreliance on Brazilian midfielders who want to walk the ball into the net, there would be nothing more satisfying to old Maureen than turning over the Anfield Apple-Cart.


Hopefully, Chelsea will be too fatigued by European endeavours to put up much of a fight at the weekend. But Rodgers' resources are looking thin, despite valuable contributions by Allen and Lucas. One more rousing first 30 minutes and you feel that will do it for the Scousers.


As a neutral I'm not sure I've ever been quite so behind another club as they enter the last three games of the season. As a fan of a relentlessly unrewarded club, I have grown tired of hearing the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs fans suggesting that the winning of trophies is somehow an entitlement.


The griping Chelsea fans who bemoan the lack of success but can't acknowledge Mourinho's contribution to that failure. Perhaps most piteous of all are the wittering United supporters who can't quite believe that the new man hasn't delivered Fergie-style superiority on a plate for them, with a squad of squabbling chunterers and ditherers for Moyes to select from.


It's understandable, I suppose. Moyes have proved disastrously staid and indecisive about style and personnel. If, for example, Januzaj, was at Anfield, Rodgers would have him starting most games. But, really.. one bad season... GET OVER YOURSELVES...


So here I am, another anonymous Boro season almost concluded, left to cross fingers and pull on the lucky pants in support of another team in red. And it's not just sentimental. They have played the best footie. They are chockfull of exciting young Englishmen who have been encouraged by an excellent manager to be expressive, versatile and fearless.


And more than that, intelligent. Yes, it is possible to get talented young lads of local origin to imagine more than one way of playing and what's more to carry those plans out. Remarkable. Soon they'll be learning how to speak funny foreign languages and then where will we be? In some Faragean nightmare, that's where.


And then of course there's Steven Gerrard. Occasionally maligned, or played out of position; often tempted by the lure of more certain success at the Big Money Clubs (and we shouldn't forget that Liverpool are hardly short of a few bob); but ultimately, a one-club man who might even yet be rewarded with that most elusive of titles, the First Division Champions - at least that's what it was called the last time they won it.


I can't wish 'em more luck. I like a happy ending.