Where Will You Be? What Will You Do?
Where will you be if it happens?
Yes, I know it probably won’t happen.
But it MIGHT. If it does, where will you be? What will you do?
Will some of you reading this actually be at Anfield tomorrow? Will you be in a pub? Will you spill your drink? Will you kiss the stranger next to you? Will you embrace MANY strangers? Will your breath leave your body, just out of your reach, while the rest of you refuses to stop screaming? What noises will you make? Will you run around aimlessly, so full of joy that you lose all sense of where you are?
Will your child be with you? Will you have the miraculous opportunity to see joy through their eyes, untainted by the cynicism of adulthood?
It Just Might Happen
Tomorrow, Liverpool may win the Premier League. They may become the Champions of England for the 20th time.
As ever, I will be on my couch in Dallas. BUT, I will be social, in my own, introverted, misanthropic way. I will be on the phone with Eric. Together, we will make every kick, head every ball, dictate every tactical adjustment, celebrate every goal by Liverpool and Villa, and (especially) mourn every goal by Wolves and City. I will have the LFC-Wolverhampton match on the TV, but my computer screen will be showing the Manchester City-Villa match. Whatever happens, it will happen to us both. Together.
Across the Red diaspora, across the world, we will all be together for this. Because it just might happen.
Let’s be real: we all expect the Reds to do their part. Wolves are a good team, and they will probably give us a tough match. But the Reds will be at home, and this is the last home game of the season. Anfield will be rocking, as the faithful give the praise that is due for what just may be the best team that Anfield has ever seen. Jürgen Klopp’s Mentality Monsters will be ready, and all of us believe they will find a way tomorrow to get the win. The Reds will do their part, and they will finish the Premier League season with 92 points.
Which, of course, means that it’s all up to Manchester City. Being real, Part II: most of us expect them to win. They are a sublime football team, and they are even better than Liverpool at beating up on bad or mediocre opponents, which is what they face tomorrow. They have shown a few cracks this season under pressure, but mostly they are unflappable. They are a machine, and we all expect that machine to do what it does.
But, miracles happen, y’know? As a bitter Evertonian has reminded us, football miracles especially happen to Liverpool Football Club (although the Bitters got one of their own for a change on Thursday, eh?).
How Likely Is It?
How likely is it that a miracle occurs tomorrow, and Manchester City actually drop points against Aston Villa? Let’s start with my default starting place, as a longstanding nerd: what do the stats folks tell us? At Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, they developed a fancy algorithm for ranking football clubs across Europe (much in the way that, years ago, Nate Silver developed an algorithm for taking polling data and assessing the probability of election outcomes). They look at gobs and gobs of data, across thousands of matches. The algorithm takes all of that data and uses it to rank every club. Fivethirtyeight.com’s algorithm gives each club an offensive rating and a defensive rating. And, then, based on that rating, fivethirtyeight has its computers run thousands of simulations of the rest of the season, which the stats nerds refer to as a “Monte Carlo analysis.” These computer simulations from fivethirtyeight.com tell us the probability, at any given point in the season, that a particular team will win the league, secure a Champions League spot in the Top Four, or get relegated. They also tell us the probability of what will happen individual matches. Again, all of this based completely on their statistical data, as sorted by their fancy nerd-people algorithm.
So what does fivethirtyeight.com and their stats nerd algorithm tell us about the probabilities of what will happen tomorrow? That algorithm says that there is a 22% chance that Man City will drop points tomorrow against Villa. That’s a real chance. That’s a bit better than one in five. That’s enough for real hope.
The Hope Doesn’t Kill You. It Makes You Very, Very Alive
Like our second-favorite football manager, Ted Lasso, I don’t like the British cliché (which we’ve also adopted here in the erstwhile colonies), that “it’s the hope that kills you.” Sure, sometimes I say it. Sometimes I feel it, too. But really, I don’t believe it.
Yes, by building up our hope that the Reds will win the league tomorrow, we are also setting ourselves up for a moment of tremendous disappointment. But we NEED that hope. It’s why we are fans. Some might call the disappointment that follows after a big build-up of hope emotional trauma. But here’s one of the delightful things about being a sports fan: none of it REALLY matters, even though it also matters so, so much. If, as we expect, City win the Premier League tomorrow, we will be down about it. It will make us miserable for a while. Maybe hours. Maybe days. For some of us, maybe even longer.
But, if City wins the league, our lives will go on. The sun comes up again the next day. Our loved ones will still be there. Our pets will still be there. If we’re fortunate enough to have jobs, those will be there, too.
What’s more, if City win the league, even our football hope will remain alive. In just six days, the Reds will be in the Champions League Final, and we will do it all again.
Meanwhile, for a couple of hours tomorrow, the hope will live. And we will live right along with it. We will really, really live.
What a time to be alive. What a time to be a Red.
What will I do if it happens? I don’t know. But I know it will stand among the most memorable moments of joy in my life.
Whatever happens tomorrow, thank you for the journey, Reds. Thank you for the hope.
