The Golden Sky
AN ARTICLE BY JEROME THE METROGNOME
This post was a draft I started writing when Liverpool lost the league by ONE point in 2019. This draft perhaps was one I’d started to write when Stevie G slipped and I didn’t think the world would ever be just again. For 29 years I’ve been writing this through the way I have lived life. Today, I came back to add just one line.
One of the very first lessons any athlete learns is- your best might not be good enough. It is an incredibly humbling thing. When you have that knowledge, it changes you. But it is also an equally intoxicating thing. Because somehow it also keeps driving you to keep coming back for more. This is a lesson that binds a Messi to a lowly non league footballer. They both share the knowledge and experience of their best not being good enough. Yet they will come back tomorrow for more. Because another lesson every athlete also learns and shares in experience with his fellow athlete- anything is possible.
This is the beauty of sports. This is why they sometimes equate sports to a drug. In other fields it might be that your hard work is always justly rewarded. That you are the unparalleled genius in your field. Peerless. Or that things follow an established pattern and if you follow that pattern, you will get your reward. Hard work always pays off doesn’t it?
One might disagree with this assertion. One might feel that other fields too share this equalising tendency and unpredictability. But seldom does any other field throw up fairytales and cruel lessons as rapidly and as regularly as sports does. Here a tiny little man can run rings around much bigger faster stronger men and conquer the world. Here you could lose one league game all season and still lose the title. Here anything is possible. The only certainty is that there is none. Records will be broken one day. Legends will be eclipsed eventually.
Success can be chaotic. Arbitrary. Success could depend on a slip. One worldie by a centre back. One additional run that should never have been awarded in the first place. Rain. Really, sporting failure and the nature of said failure could very well read like the most innovatively cruel and fantastical ways drawn up by a sadistic fiction writer. A phrase you’ll often see sports commentators use is “you couldn’t write this”. You really couldn’t. Most of the instances I’ve listed here would scarcely be believable if read in a book. They are only believable because they happened. History is witness.
Liverpool won the league after 30 years in the exact reverse order that it last lost the league in the most traumatic manner. In 2013/14 the 3-3 draw at Crystal Palace or Crystanbul was the seal on the lost title. Liverpool beat Crystal Palace 4-0 to almost seal it. Chelsea snatched the title away from Liverpool that year with Willian scoring the second goal that would be the final blow to its title hopes. The same man scored the second goal that officially gave Liverpool the title. The final whistle of the game that would make Liverpool champions blew after 96 minutes of play. Every Liverpool fan knows the significance of that number. Hard not to look up at the sky and wonder- was it written?
So there, Sports does change you. It is the relentless, eternal pursuit of human excellence. When you watch your heroes slip, and your dreams shatter, sports can destroy you. But then you watch your heroes get back up and go again, it changes you just a little bit. And when you watch them achieve said excellence, finally, stupendously, against all odds, it changes you again- from a doubter to a believer.
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