Tonight Liverpool play Real Madrid and I hate to break it to you but they may not progress on aggregate.
They may not even win the game.
The Beckett quote above is actually shortened to make it more palatable. To make it fit nicely on a poster. The longer quote is:
"Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all."
Beckett wrote an awful lot about failure. Failure is part of the human condition and indeed in starting an enterprise it is a core part. He also wrote about absence.
Liverpool could be eliminated tonight even if the ground was full to the rafters. It is that bit more the case without us.
Absence has a quality, a negative capability as we have discussed. You can feel an absence keenly, you can feel it at key moments. My concern around this game and what Anfield has become for our football team in general is that Anfield has become a place not just where people are absent, but where absence is a live thing.
Absence becomes a sea they need to swim in when their opponents do not.
They will do their best tonight to keep it at bay and I am optimistic they will, to an extent, succeed. But the absence is felt not when the play is good but when the chance is missed.
I, for one, genuinely believe Sadio Mane would be feeling a lot better about life if, after a lot of hard work which culminates in an error, he hears 50,000 people singing his name rather than getting in his own head.
It is at those moments, both in general and for tonight, that I wish we were there.
We must remember this, frankly.
Things began to reopen this week and, while I remain in dire need of a vaccination and a haircut, it becomes easier to plot a route back to that moment when there will be all of us together and when the first pass is mislaid, the first shot awry, we must remember how it felt not to be able to say "don't worry, start again".
Don't worry. Start again.
I fancy Liverpool can do something tonight because they have a very solid record, since being beaten by Madrid in 2018, of starting again. Starting again is, in so many aspects of life so often, all you can do. Rebuild from here. Deal with the task in front of you. It is OK to fail as long as we fail with great style, fail with grand ambitions.
Liverpool will need to have patience at times and they must start again well enough over and over so that Real Madrid can't. They must create the circumstances where the fear will spread across that Real Madrid lineup.
Tonight is about starting again and it will be, for this Liverpool side, about togetherness.
Samuel Beckett didn't write very much about togetherness and that, to be frank with you, is his loss. I write about togetherness all the time and would venture that the best way to fail is while standing together. The best way to counter an absence is to acknowledge it and embrace it and remember what would be at its best.
In short, Samuel lad, I'll show you throwing up for good.
We want that same togetherness post match. Win or lose we will be here again and we will be here together and we, at The Anfield Wrap, want to be here with you.
We will be with some people tonight. We are at Taggy's on Anfield Road for the game and will be doing the shows from there.
After the match we will be putting Post-Match Pint out on YouTube and The Pink out on Audioboom for free. It was frustrating people not being able to access things after Aston Villa and we are moving servers very soon, so we want to just be able to get the content to you all. Do share it, win or lose, as an example of what we do.
Regardless, tonight we all start again. And then we will start again and start again and start again. All of us.
Tomorrow is April 15th marking the 32nd anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster. It is usual in things like this for someone to write "reminding us that whatever happens tonight some things are more important", but not here.
Firstly you don't need reminding of that. You aren't soft. But secondly the biggest issue around Hillsborough has always been how it is linked inexorably to football, both how it was perceived then and how it is perceived now. It has remained of football and of Liverpool primarily.
This has always been wrong. The truth of the matter is that it was a national disaster, a national tragedy, a national disgrace and it and its aftermath, up to today, tells us a great deal about what Britain is and was, as a country, much more than it has ever told us anything about football.
People tomorrow will mark the day as best they can with those they would most like to mark it with. There will be no email like this tomorrow. There will be no shows and nothing on our social media. If you are a bit worried about someone reach out to them.
