Arne Slot, Anfield Boos and Liverpool’s Summer of Reckoning

Liverpool’s frustration is no longer confined to online noise. When Anfield turns, FSG must listen.

There comes a point when the noise can no longer be filed away as online hysteria. There comes a point when the club can no longer pretend the anger belongs only to the distant, faceless world of social media, where the so called e reds apparently sit in dark rooms, thumping keyboards with thunderous rage and precious little room for rational thought.

Well, I suppose that makes me one of them now.

Never mind the hundreds of times I have been to Anfield. Never mind the miles, the money, the years, the frozen nights, the bad trains and the worse football. These days, if you dare to say what your eyes are telling you, you are cast as a wool, a crank, a nuisance, someone whose view bears no resemblance to what the real fans in the ground believe.

Then Anfield booed.

Again.

For what I believe is the fourth time this season, the ground told Arne Slot and his Liverpool players exactly what it thought of the stale, sterile, turgid football being served up. The 1-1 draw with Chelsea was not an isolated irritation. It was another bleak exhibit in a case that has been building since November. A point, yes. A performance, barely. A team with purpose, no.

This was Liverpool stumbling towards the end of a season with the life drained out of it. Champions League qualification may still come, but if it does, it will owe as much to the mediocrity around them as to any convincing virtue of their own.

Anfield anger can no longer be dismissed

I have never booed at a match. That’s my choice. It doesn’t make me more loyal than those who do. It doesn’t give me the right to sneer at people who have paid a fortune to watch football this joyless and decide, at the end of it, that silence would be dishonest.

Booing does not make you a bad fan. Sometimes the only way to be heard is to make yourself impossible to ignore. Liverpool supporters have been reminded of that recently through the ticketing debacle, where audible and visible protest became necessary because polite dissatisfaction was too easily brushed aside.