I have promised myself not to watch this match. Wednesday was bad. Result apart. The performance looked to have been somewhat scripted by Stephen King. We were expecting a belated pantomime and King seemed to have delivered as the farce was evident, but his second nature seemed to get the better of him as in the final act all there was for it, was blood as while the axe was dangling, nobody bothered getting at least out of the way.

I am a routine person by nature and by Friday evening I knew that I cannot miss what have I done for the past twelve odd years. Apologies were forthcoming, rallying cries were being heard, but when you know someone is almost dead on the kerb after being hit, the ambulance siren is more a formality than a straw to cling to.

The other formality was the team line-up. There might have been hopes that the newly signed Maxi Rodriguez will sign but I think the eleven men chose themselves, mostly due to lack of other options rather than by choice. But choices for us at the moment are as realistic as a beggar’s. And for a change, some of the players looked like beggars, as they begged and hurried for the ball all over the place. There wasn’t much quality shown, but when you’re in wretched clothes in the middle of winter, you’re not after designer labels but after anything that can warm you for a while.

And personally, I did warm a bit. The stars were sidelined, not because they’re too aloof but because circumstances dictated so. The first forty-five minutes weren’t easy on the eye but the heart kept beating, and the score-line ended as it started.

Then, from the unlikeliest of sources came the opener. Philip Degen was bursting forward and got fouled. Fabio Aurelio took charge and whipped the ball inside their area. Before we knew it, the net was bulging as Sotiros Kyrgiakos poked the ball in as the ex-Evertonian with the gloves mishandled. Liverpool kept fighting, but Stoke kept knocking and looked dangerous from set-pieces, and as the script for a bruised Liverpool demanded they leveled the score at the dying minute when another defender poked in following a set-piece.

Demanding fight from a Liverpool and being satisfied because you’ve got it is bogglish. In normal times at least. But these are no normal times. They’re supposed to complement each other as loyalty and dog. This is a time when the name of Liverpool Football Club is in peril. Everybody’s pointing fingers there and there. Still we seem to all agree that from top to bottom the club is in a rotten state. And even when you’ve paid good money, you’d be happy to find one good apple after a series of bad ones. It seems to be the law of relativity or maybe better the law of the market. It might be over the odds but common sense does not really prevail in today’s world.
In the grander scheme of things, by the end of the match and after seeing today’s results Liverpool are even further off a Champions League place. Liverpool will be missing the gravy train. When a city is in ruins though, the railway station is only a periphery.