Transcript:
O The horror, the horror…
Famous words uttered by Colonel Kurtz and Macduff.
These dying words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's 1902 novel The Heart of Darkness express despair at the realization that beneath an exterior of civilized human behaviour lies the potential and hunger for savagery...
For Macduff, they express the shock at discovering Duncan’s murder and the subsequent realisation that such a deed is an affront to God and the whole natural order of things.
*
Leaving Goodison, we trudged disconsolately back to the car, through Anfield Cemetery - it’s beautiful gravestones and monuments reminding us that everything is finite, we are but mortals, miraculously clinging to a rock in the emptiness of the seemingly infinite cosmos.
Of course, we must remember that it’s just a stupid game which a stupid football club has lost. Again.
We’d took a chance and left a minute early. Neither prizes nor medals are given out for staying to the very bitter end.
Friend A got took his place in the back of the car. Friend B in the passenger seat.
An unearthly groaning noise came from the back seat from Friend A, followed by ‘Oh god…’ - the despair evoking Kurtz and Macduff.
He looked pale too.
For a second or too, I couldn’t work it out. What had happened? Had we conceded another three in the final minute or something? Or maybe - just maybe - we had somehow managed to stage a miraculous comeback and somehow drawn - or even won - but we’d missed it and would have to live with this - hence the horror.
No. None of these.
It was the statement.
‘That’ statement.
*
It’s been a tough week. Season cards. FA Cup replays. Losing against Everton. You know, all the usual stuff. And now this solid block of pure idiosyncrasy from the club. The drive home just got interesting.
It does sometimes feel that life is treating us wrong and everything is stacked against us and everyone has it in for us. But it’s also true that on far too many occasions, we simply haven’t been good enough to justify the whinging and moaning the club has done.
As much as I hold that we are something approximating a semi-competent team, losing twice to Everton this season without scoring a goal says as much about us as any hastily constructed statement. It was a game there for the taking given Everton’s nervousness which quickly manifested itself in the home crowd’s simmering anxiety and frustration.
But we lacked urgency and decisiveness. We seemed so preoccupied with not giving away free kicks and defending set pieces that we simply forgot to close players down who were running with the ball towards our goal, which causes all kinds of problems in itself. The home crowd seemed just as surprised at the opening goal as they were relieved.
As a team performance and as a club afterwards, it was a collective act of self-sabotage akin to Jerry Lundegaard from Fargo, a car salesman in Minneapolis who hatches a plan to have his wife kidnapped to extort a large ransom from his wealthy father-in-law. Jerry’s spiralling acts of self-destruction leads to an unending series of bad decisions, followed by more bad decisions.
While the audience may start by sympathising with Jerry to a degree - a lost and desperate soul who doesn’t really want to hurt anyone but just feels that life has somehow reneged on what it promised him, he slowly loses the audience’s goodwill, which transfers to local police chief Marge Gunderson, who quietly but effectively and without fuss gets on with her job of catching the bad guys and closing the net in on Jerry.
Just in case you were wondering, Jerry is eventually arrested and Marge blithely gets on with her seemingly uncomplicated and harmonious life. This is how things tend to work.
*
Lord only knows what might have transpired between me clumsily articulating this and you hearing it on Wednesday. As we all saw last week, lots of things can happen in a typical week of this increasingly weird football club.
It seems likely to deduce that the club will be charged with misconduct, that public sympathy with the club will be in increasingly short supply, that we will still be just one precarious point clear of Luton, and that we will face Manchester City in our next game. With each passing game, the stakes on us coming away from Bramall Lane with a result increase exponentially.
And the thought of having to go to Burnley and get something in the last game fills me with, well, to come back to Kurtz and Macduff, horror. Or more specifically, despair at the realisation that should we go down, we will do so in the style of a petulant toddler having one of those epic meltdowns in the aisle of a supermarket while others look on, not quite knowing whether to point and laugh or stage some kind of much-needed intervention.
The horror, the sheer horror of it all….
Everton 2-0 Forest 21 April 2024