I'm glad Liverpool won the English Premiership this season. They were by far the best team, they play nice football, and the 30-year lapse since their last league title made them almost a good cause. Also, in Jurgen Klopp, they have a manager no reasonable person could dislike.
But even so, the outpouring of joy among their supporters in this country makes me wonder again at the sanity of Irish people – usually, but by no means always, men – whose emotions are so heavily invested in the professional soccer teams of the neighbouring island.
By what mysterious process do natives of Dublin or Galway or Killarney (where there was a celebratory cavalcade, God help us) come to think of Liverpool, or of any overseas football club, as an extension of their personalities?
Why, in the absence of an actual shareholding, would anyone from here habitually use the first-person plural when referring to such entities? “We did well last night,” their Irish fans say, or “we needed that kick up the hole”.
Four-Dimensional Green Fields – Frank McNally on unified field theory, de Valera’s Ireland, and a new GAA club in Belfast
Field of Dreams – Frank McNally on the heady days when Jack Charlton’s Ireland turned up in his back garden (or near enough)
Poetic Licence (Provisional) – Frank McNally on the woes of Mary Kenny and Barry Cowen
The Leaving of Limerick – Frank McNally on Robert Graves’s uneasy relationship with his ancestral city
This about a team which, even in Liverpool’s case, is a more-or-less randomly assembled group of multimillionaires, most of whom would not have been able to find the city on a map before a combination of chance and chequebooks conspired to send them there for the duration of a contract.
You could question the attachment to such passing phenomena even of people who live in Anfield, although at least they have proximity to the stadium – the one constant in such clubs, from generation to generation – on their side.
But as for Irish people – who when it comes to international football would cheer for a combined rogue-state XI, captained by Kim Jong-Un, if it was playing England – their undying fidelity to English clubs is one of the great mysteries.
I don’t understand it and yet I know how it starts, at least, because I too was similarly afflicted at one point in my life.
Back at national school, the day they were handing out the irrational life-long commitments to British football teams, I was not immune either.
The main choices at the time were Arsenal, Leeds, and Chelsea.
Manchester United were temporarily out of fashion. Liverpool hadn't entered it yet.
So I opted for Chelsea, and there were a few impressionable years thereafter when I was embarrassed to go to school on the Monday following a bad defeat.
Happily, I grew out of it with the onset of puberty, when the realisation set in that a professional football club in swinging London had nothing to do with my life, really.
Even then, and for years later, I still experienced a small Pavlovian response to the club’s weekly results, which as late as the 1980s could cheer or depress for up to five minutes at a time. Somehow, I trained myself out of that too eventually.
Okay, I hear Liverpool fans saying, you were right to consider Chelsea a bad habit. But Liverpool, by contrast, is the most Irish city in Britain and people from this country are justified in feeling a connection to it. Which is probably true.
On the other hand, how many of Ireland’s Liverpool fans will be celebrating in the (admittedly unexpected) event that the city’s other big club wins something next season? Not many, because part of the contract in supporting a big-city team in England is hating – or at least pretending to – the rival team.
In Liverpool’s case, that means Everton, a rivalry even less rational than the normal ones.
The great local football feuds are usually founded on real divisions: ethno-sectarian in Glasgow, for example, or left-versus-right politics in Madrid. And historically, in fact, Everton were the Irish/Catholic club on Merseyside. But that distinction has long evaporated.
These days, even most Liverpudlians would struggle to explain their inherited loyalties, red or blue. It’s like the big-enders versus the little-enders, if no less implacable.
Anyway, this is not about Liverpool. Supporters of the other main Anglo-Irish franchise, Man United, are if anything worse, just easier to talk to these days. But I also mentioned Leeds earlier, whose Irish support base is like an iceberg, in that it wears white and has been mostly invisible for years. That is about to change.
The club’s long-awaited return to the Premiership next season, and the real possibility it could do well there, will mark a second coming for a generation of its supporters here. If Leeds were to win the title next year, it would cause an emotional tsunami for Irishmen of a certain age.
I predict that some, unmoved even by the births of their now-grown-up children, might seize the belated opportunity to cry.