It’s 7pm on a Monday night on Merseyside, and all is quiet. Eerily so.
In the Winslow pub, yards from Goodison Park, there are no replica shirts and no queues. No noise, no sense of excitement, of fear, of tension. No customers. The same goes for the Royal Oak and the Brick, on nearby County Road. A few hundred yards away, the King Harry on Anfield Road is silent. The Twelfth Man and the Church too. No customers.
There are no police waiting to escort Liverpool supporters along Walton Lane. No helicopter hangs overhead, no touts linger, hopeful of a bit of quick business. The smell of burgers and beer and horse manure is absent.
This is Liverpool, 2020.
We should be getting ready for the 236th Merseyside derby. We should be talking about Mohamed Salah and Carlo Ancelotti, Jurgen Klopp and Dominic Calvert-Lewin. It should have been a night for blue and red, songs and banners, heroes and villains. Winners and losers.
Only, there are no winners round here at the moment. Only those who are losing less than others.
There is fear, for sure. Uncertainty and nervousness. Panic in some quarters. These are unprecedented times, scary times. There was no derby, of course. No chance for Liverpool to take a step closer to the Premier League title, or for Everton to end their 10-year wait for a win against their closest rivals.
There will be no football of any kind, officially, until April 4, although pretty much everyone accepts now that there is no chance of a return to action on that date. As the world deals with the spread of, and the fallout from, coronavirus, the suspension of the sporting calendar will run well beyond April, for sure.
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Everton took the decision last week to close down all club workplaces, including Goodison Park, their Finch Farm training facility in Halewood and their headquarters at the Royal Liver building in the city centre, after a member of their first-team squad reported a high temperature. The player in question, as yet unnamed, remains in self-isolation.
Liverpool sent their players home on Friday following the news that all Premier League fixtures were to be suspended, and as yet there is no indication of when Klopp and his players can even consider returning to their West Derby base.
Players with long-term injuries, such as Paul Glatzel and Nathaniel Clyne, have been allowed in to continue their rehabilitation, but on a staggered schedule so as to minimise contact. The entire base underwent a deep clean at the weekend, as did the club’s Academy in Kirkby, where staff have been advised to work from home wherever possible.
The players have been given tailored regimes and nutrition plans to follow from home, and told to heed government advice about avoiding ‘unnecessary social contact’. Staff, be it coaching, medical or nutritional, are in daily contact via WhatsApp or Skype.
Outside of the clubs, the effects are already being felt. Across Merseyside, pictures of queues and empty supermarket shelves are being shared. One video doing the rounds shows a group of men ‘dealing’ toilet roll in a car park. Gallows humour at a time of worldwide crisis.
The Grand National meeting at Aintree, scheduled for early April, was cancelled on Monday, a decision that, while necessary in the current climate, will leave a huge whole in the city’s economy. Forget the jockeys and the bookmakers, think of the pubs, restaurants, taxi drivers, hotels, hair salons, make-up artists and other small businesses who will be hit.
The manager of one pub in Crosby said on Monday that it expected to be closed “within a week”, while the cancellation of all sport across the region has left local football, rugby and cricket clubs fearing the worst.
Four non-League football clubs – Bootle FC, Litherland REMYCA, AFC Liverpool and Lower Breck – have already begun liaising over possible fund-raising solutions, as and when they are allowed to re-open their doors. These clubs, along with the likes of City of Liverpool, Southport and Marine, are rooted in their communities, but could now face a battle for survival.
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But also, there have been some positive stories to emerge.
On Monday representatives from the LFC Foundation and Red Neighbours, the club’s community programme, visited St Andrews Community Network in Clubmoor, a short distance from Anfield, to show its continued support for the Fans Supporting Foodbanks initiative.
The club made a donation of £40,000 ($49,000) to the North Liverpool Foodbank, which receives approximately 25 per cent of its donations from matchday collections at both Anfield and Goodison Park. Excess food from both Anfield and Melwood has also been donated, while Liverpool’s first-team squad, together with the LFC Foundation, has committed to jointly donating £10,000 ($12,000) for each of the four remaining home games of this season.
New foodbank collection points have been set up at all LFC stores in the city as well as the museum and tours area at Anfield for fans who wish to make a donation, while an online fundraising page has also been set up. Foundation staff will also offer support in the collection and distribution of food donations during the coming days and weeks.
These are, as stated earlier, unprecedented times. A week ago, Liverpool were worrying about when they would be able to lift the Premier League trophy, and if anyone would be there to see it. They were fearing Atletico Madrid, hoping their Champions League dreams would continue for a few weeks longer.
How quickly the world moves. How quickly life changes and priorities switch. But as Klopp himself said on Friday: “If it’s a choice between football and the good of the wider society, it’s no contest.”
Stay safe, everyone.