So on Thursday night, LIverpool won the league. They weren’t actually playing, they didn’t need to. The inevitable happened because Manchester City failed to win at Chelsea. And thus were unable, even in the theoretical, hypothetical world in which Liverpool lose all their remaining games and City win all of theirs, to snatch the title from the Scousers.

The City of Liverpool then issued numerous words of wisdom, advice, requests, directives and most things that fall short of direct threat or American police tactics, that Liverpool fans must NOT break social distancing stuff and coronavirus protocols, ‘just’ for some kind of ad hoc celebration. Which was so ‘ad hoc’ that everyone knew of its sheer inevitability and planned accordingly.

So on Friday night at the Dockside, about 200,000 drunken Scousers congregated to socially distance, avoid each other and adhere to strict instructions. Yeah, right. This was the wave that would not be stopped. Liverpool County Council can do their finest King Canute impression but it would have the same effect. The tide would come. And it did.

Because in case anyone missed it; football fans are not, when taken collectively, all that bright. Liverpool fans, in particular… ok, we’ll leave that. The sheer relief of winning the league, after ‘the years of sorrow’ (which, fans of Bury and Stockport and Watford don’t need reminding) when they didn’t win a league title, was so great that their sense of shared entitlement was laid bare.

And this created such a crisis that they’re going to lock down the city of Leicester as a consequence. Possibly due to Leicester having the sheer cheek and audacity to win the league a few years back, whilst being a distinctly ‘not-big’ club. Or maybe its just that they meant to lock down Liverpool but selected the wrong city from an alphabetical list. Who knows. They’re all the same anyway. Seen one northern city you’ve seen ‘em all. Long as one gets locked down, that’s the main thing.

Happy tai chi day

A xxxx