What about the fans who grew up in the 50s when we were a second division side? Do they think, F***ing hell we're doing some great sh*t right now because they saw us at our lowest?
I first saw Liverpool play in 1978, my brother took me to Anfield
Congratulations. Not all of us were fortunate enough to be born in that time period, it's not something we can alter.
and it was not the actual game i remember vividly, but the atmosphere.
My first game was in 95 and the atmosphere was just as good as anything in the 70s/80s.
When you are young, you want to belong to your older generations world.
No you don't. Most young people actually rebel against their elders, that's how life evolves.
Football can do this to you in a way you can never imagine. You are accepted by a family of all ages and ilk.
Surely this entire thread is the opposite of this sentence. You're saying we're all accepted regardless of our age, yet you're questioning whether young fans understand the game as well as older fans.
Now i have watched truly great teams and been spoilt at a young age on football , that , made me feel that this is the norm.
That's because it was the norm. "I've been here during the bad times too, we came second once." Wembley was affectionately known as Anfield South. Winning trophies was the norm for this club.
At one point in my late teens, i actually believed that we had a right to our success.
That's just daft. Nobody has a right to anything, they have to work for it and that's what was installed into the club's fabric.
Even though i watched team after team , player after player, somehow always come up with the goods. I now know i never really appreciated just how much hard work and planning actually went into maintaining our dominance .
You just assumed we turned up without prior work?
After watching our slow and horrible demise ( coupled with our greatest enemies rise)
When did Everton rise?
I started to truly appreciate what we had. But i also grew to appreciate the teams who took over our mantle, without ill feeling.
Taken what mantle? We're still the greatest club in the world, we're still the most successful club in England so what mantle have they taken?
My partisan hatred of rival teams started to mellow, and i saw more and more faults in the poor quality players who played for our club.
So you paid more attention to Liverpool than other teams, well F***ing done. That's what a Liverpool fan should be doing.
I never rated Rafa Benitez and got slated by a lot of my friends for saying it.
Well that's plainly obvious why.
I especially got slated by younger fans who, IMO, had grown sick of hearing older talk of European glory without having any stories of their own .
Well that's a load of bollocks because we did have European stories, even before Rafa arrived. There was the joy of 2001 for starters, telling tales of beating Roma, Porto, Barcelona and the final against Alaves. There's the night Gerard Houllier returned to the dugout in 2002 against Roma, one of the all-time great atmospheres in Anfield history. The complete F**k up against Leverkusen in the same year. The heartache of Basel in 03. The 6-3 against Sion in 96, which still ranks as one of my best European nights. So we did have stories to tell.
Rafa Benitez simply gave us more stories to tell.
As for growing sick of hearing of those from yesteryear, I don't know any fan who gets sick of hearing about our successes. I love hearing those stories.
Now, THEY, had one of the greatest European stories in history and Rafa had gave it to them. He was a god.
We had THE greatest European story.
But Rafa Benitez didn't give us to us, Liverpool Football Club did. We were all in it together. Rafa set us up, the players put his plans into action and the fans enjoyed it along the way.
Yet i found that later, a lot of older fans were being slated for saying we were lucky , or that although it was a great result, A poor team had got extremely lucky.
Don't be so F***ing stupid.
I know many fans who've been going the game from the 60s onwards and they've never said we were lucky, rather they talk about us winning our 5th European Cup. And this poor team, doesn't get lucky 15 times which is the amount of games we played in Europe that season. We won because we deserved to.
Having watched truly great players , i am surprised at how some younger fans think average players should be awarded hero status for nothing more than running around alot.
Sammy Lee is a hero and he'll be the first to admit his job was just to run round. When we played Bayern Munich in the 81 European Cup semi, Sammy's job was solely to run after Rummenigge and the German hardly got a kick over two legs because of it. So it's not just "younger" fans who give hero status to players who just a lot.
Also, a lot of "older" fans consider some of these modern day players who "run around a lot" to be heroes as well.
Is this a case of older fans standards being to high, or younger fans desperate to have their own heroes , building mediocre players up above their station?
It's a case of Liverpool fans supporting their F***ing club. Like we did in the 1800s right through to the modern day.