"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles - Two seasons with Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool" Part 4

My third self-published book and first on Liverpool Football Club, is a compendium of diary entries, match reports and personal stories wrapped up and around season's 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 and here, in Part 4 of 5, is a chapter entitled:

"Brighton March to Solly's tune"

and a humbling, embarrassing thrashing of 3-0 inflicted by the team from Sussex, Sussex by the sea.

BRIGHTON 3 (March 47 and 53, Welbeck 81)
LIVERPOOL 0

“Oh Sussex, Sussex by the Sea!
Good old Sussex by the Sea!
You may tell them all we stand or fall,
For Sussex by the Sea”.

"Ever the traditionalists, Brighton and Hove Albion still enter the field of play to the glorious musical refrain of “Sussex by the Sea” and I can’t help but think of a Sussex born gentleman who didn’t support Brighton but rather tolerated Manchester United to placate a wife who bore him four children.

A footballing agnostic, an Arsenal fan and two Liverpool fans isn’t a bad return for a passionate fan of Manchester United and boy can I still see her beaming smile as she used to sing this grand old seaside anthem in deference to the man who adored her.

That grand old anthem to a long ago footballing past reverberated around a stadium for a newer footballing future today as seventy year old records were broken by a team in blue and white stripes who thoroughly dismantled a team that were on the verge of quadruple winning greatness mere months ago. In the first half in particular, “the men from Sussex, Sussex by the Sea” were simply dismantling and pulling apart a team they played at their own, and now old, game.

Bloody minded determination to “rat around” in midfield, to grab that damn ball back, control the tempo of a pressing game, squeezing the life out of the middle third of the pitch with strikers retreating to defend and start attacks, midfielders pressing forward for transitional loose balls.

Brighton reminded me so much of the Liverpool team that were on the verge of ridiculous greatness less than a year ago.

And I have no idea where that team has gone".

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