A great friend of mine says that losing at Anfield Road always entails a double punishment: defeat on the pitch, with all the possible pain condensed in the final result, and torture practiced in the stands in the form of an anthem, a song. I admit disagreements regarding this. I don’t consider myself a monster and everyone is very free to be enthusiastic about what touches their heart, but I wouldn’t be at peace without pointing out that You’ll Never Walk Alone seems to me to be the most persistent epidemic in all of world football, a mix of religion and karaoke that Liverpool fans practice at every game as an Anglo-Saxon substitute for Cuban Santeria.
I could feel envious of such a black attitude, but no. We, Galicians, have A Rianxeira, which is not far behind in terms of pop iconography and popular fervor. And in both cases, my reservations no longer focus so much on the song as on the worship, not being able to assimilate so much effusiveness in commentators, music critics, rival fans and local fans, that chorus of deep and enthusiastic voices that have the ability to transform Liverpool into Lourdes for at least a few minutes. What was once an anthem has turned into a mystical experience – like eating at DiverXO or swimming with dolphins at Ningaloo Reef – an act of faith that makes the great rites of any organized religion pale in comparison: if they ever thought of charging admission just to hear it, they would fill Anfield without needing to get the ball rolling.
There are those who enter the field with the right foot, those who pray the Our Father and those who hum You Will Never Walk Alone alone. And I don’t know what worries me more: the blind faith of the act or the superstition of its staging. There is so much drama concentrated in a few verses that you no longer know whether you are welcoming eleven football players dressed in red or accompanying the widows of those who lost their lives in the war, the original spirit of a song converted by football into the best example of a coercive weapon: beating them on their own field is almost like shouting at mass.
Furthermore, no scientific study has been able to demonstrate how music can help you win a football game. Does it activate the heroic hemisphere of the brain? Or does the concentration of the winning gene in the blood increase? I don’t believe, nor do I fully believe in the promise contained in the central motto of the happy song: you will never walk alone… until you lose three games in a row and each missed pass is accompanied by a silence that freezes your blood. No matter how hard it tries to resist, Anfield is also starting to be a tourist attraction with its own soundtrack.
On Tuesday, as Real Madrid retired to the dressing room with the “small details” bandaged from the wound of a bad game, all I could think about was how much I miss the usual coldness of the Camp Nou or the Santiago Bernabéu: the sincere whistles that spring from the most authentic frustration, the impatient murmur of the old fan, their total lack of compassion for that twenty-year-old young man who is playing for the same shirt as you. It will be less poetic and will never move Spielberg, but it is more honest. Because it’s one thing to have soul – or to constantly boast about it – and another, very different thing, is to make each football game a Fokin musical.
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