How easily crisis comes upon you if you aren’t watching. Only rarely does it strike like lightning, out of a clear blue sky. The title of tonight’s piece was chosen because 1) we are all laughing 2) it is the title of Book 2 of Stephen King’s magnificent novel Hearts In Atlantis.
That Book tells the story of a group of male college students who, at the height of the Vietnam War, find themselves falling deep into crisis because they get sucked into a never-ending series of Hearts games. I’ve never played Hearts, I much prefer poker, but I understand the deep rooted message King was trying to convey in that story, which is why I love it so much.
Trouble comes up on you before you know that it has. Every time the narrator goes to a class and realises he’s falling further behind the more time he spends in the games room playing, the more he tells himself that he’ll quit the cards and put in some hours studying. And every time he passes the games room and hears the loathsome Ronnie call “We huntin’ the bitch!” his good intentions fall away and he ends up playing until he can barely see straight.
And slowly, for him and the rest of the boys in that dorm, it all starts to slip away from them … and back then if you dropped out of college you were a near cert for the draft and the chances were that you’d be in the jungle just a few months hence, dodging the bullets with the rest of the grunts. The stakes were enormous, ones you’d normally only find at an online casino Ireland has to offer, … and still, that wasn’t enough to break the spell.
At Ibrox tonight the spell lasted until Malmo scored the second goal, with only ten men on the park. That shattered all the illusions of the summer, especially those bizarre ones they entertained when they beat Real Madrid Reserves in a friendly match. After that, they had the road to the final all mapped out. They only had to show up.
When did crisis steal in amongst them? When did it happen? At which point did they land here? Not tonight, for certain, nor at the weekend when United beat them so effortlessly. Not last Wednesday either, although that’s where the media will trace it to.
But it had to have been before then. The wheels of this had to be in motion before Malmo did the double on them and Utd scalped them for three points. It had to have been eating them from the inside for a while now.
What we saw in these games wasn’t cause, it was effect. These games didn’t cause the crisis; they are just the outward manifestations of it.
So how deep are the problems over there?
Well, they are in a hole and its filling with water. The question as to whether they’ll drown comes down to how deep the hole actually is. They can doggie paddle for a while but if there’s a chasm below them then it’s going to get them. Whether it’s the cold or the flat-out exhaustion of trying to stay afloat, they are in trouble.
The money is part of it, sure. But I would wager that it might not even be the greater part of it. How united is the dressing room? Are there problems behind the scenes? We all hear whispers, and we know that Morelos has been taking the piss … but how serious does it run? Serious enough that you could see, the minute Malmo got the goal, that Gerrard was out of ideas.
I actually doubted the hypothesis of the crowd.
I didn’t believe that the crowd puts unbearable psychological pressure on their players, but the evidence is piling up in drifts and the more the media talks about – and they won’t talk about anything else for weeks – the more it starts to look real, like a major issue, like something they either learn to deal with or collapse under. It sure looks real tonight.
Questions will be asked about Gerrard; how can you not close out the game, at home, with a one man advantage and the tie perfectly level at half time, with so much at stake and so many alleged stars at your disposal?
It’s alright for me to have called this months ago – and I did, you can check it back, I said they would not reach the groups because the gulf in quality between the Europa League and the Champions League is bigger than they knew – but they expected to win, their fans expected it, the media expected it … and their financial backers definitely did.
So how did it transpire, then, that Gerrard conspired to throw it all away, not reacting until it was too late, not being able to see a way to qualification against ten men? There might be many answers, and there might simply be one; he is not as good as the hype.
The last 12 months are in the past. Glory is fleeting. Football isn’t what you’ve done before but what you do next. Gerrard is being found out again now that things are approaching equilibrium again. That result tonight shames him. His previous record was in the second tier tournament. All Europe will know tonight is that ten men beat him at home.
It was ten days ago that we heard how good they were, how ready, and how shambolic we were in contrast. But as we were building something, at Ibrox something was starting to rot. The picture from the outside is never the same as the picture from the inside.
I always think of it like this; a guy standing at his window watching people running around out in the garden, screaming, pointing, shrieking, some of them banging on the windows whilst he stands there, bemused, watching them. But from their vantage point they see a madman, standing there, impassive, as the floors above burn and threaten to collapse on him.
So maybe it’s just a simple as that; something we can’t see because we have the wrong angle on it. I know that it didn’t start tonight, that it can’t have, but tonight is where it’s become too real to be denied any longer and everyone knows they are in trouble.
On the forums the recriminations have started already; fear and loathing sweep through them like a new strain of virus. And it infects people as it goes. Once these sort of doubts take root they are very hard to shift. We should know. This was us twelve months ago, at the point where we all started to understand that things in the background were now having an effect in what we could see in front of us, and starting to grind down the team and affect results.
Tonight, I know we all remember what it was like and what they were like.
Which is why I know we all enjoyed that this evening, as we’ve all enjoyed the last week.
When that second goal went in tonight they knew they were out and we knew they were out.
And man, we just couldn’t stop laughing. I still can’t.