It is two years on since Liverpool beat Manchester City at Anfield in the game described in the introduction. Once more, I, Harry Collins, am in London, watching football with my son; this time we are in a pub. We are both, me especially, still carrying the emotional scars of what happened to Liverpool at the end of 2012–2013. With a brilliant season behind them, having played some of the most breathtaking attacking football that has ever been seen on British television, and with the Premiership nearly in their hands, they lost the trophy to Manchester City when their iconic player and captain, Steven Gerrard, inexplicably slipped and gave a goal away to Chelsea. Then their star player, Luis Suárez, bit another player during the World Cup in Brazil, starting a sequence of events that led to his leaving for Barcelona and Liverpool’s form took a dive.
In other ways, nothing has changed. Liverpool is a team whose history is rich with trophies and who spent “umpteen” million pounds on new players before the start of the 2015–2016 season. It is still a team with huge resources, skills, and experience, from one of the large northern towns that have dominated football for decades. Tonight the team is playing in the once-impregnable Liverpool fortress, population half a million, ground capacity 50,000, and tonight, August 17, 2015, the visitors are newly promoted Bournemouth, population 180,000, ground capacity 12,000—nobodies from an effete Southern seaside town mostly known for retirees; Bournemouth, a team that has never played in the top league before. Liverpool is expected to win by a healthy margin: three or four goals. In fact, they win 1–0.
But the truth of the matter is—and, remember, once more, that the writer of this passage is a Liverpool supporter—they should have lost 0–1. In the instant TV replay one could see that the goal they scored was offside, and should have been disallowed, while Bournemouth had scored a goal in the early minutes of the game that was ruled out for foul play. The TV replay showed that the fouled player had exaggerated the offense and the Bournemouth goal should probably have stood. Thus would have occurred one of the major dramas that top-level English football occasionally produces: a team from nowhere beating one of the powerhouses. This time, my son and I are not whooping, because what we have witnessed is Liverpool’s continuing decline in form obscured by rank injustice. Yes, we are pleased that Liverpool won, but this is not what we came for. I—and this will probably get me permanently expelled from the fellowship of Liverpool supporters—feel sorry for Bournemouth. The game of football and the Bournemouth fans have been robbed, their hearts have been broken, and the injustice is there for all to see. We hope this book will go a little way to changing things.