My mum had a significant birthday recently – significant in the sense it ended in ‘0’ – and as her present we managed to buy her tickets to a Premier League game at Anfield. She’s had a soft spot for Liverpool FC since the days of Tommy Smith – our family have no Liverpudlian link, but she developed a teenage crush on their football team, and has followed them from afar ever since.
It wasn’t my intention to go with her – I may have inherited her passion for sport but I’ve never been a genuine football fan. But since my dad and sister find the sight of 22 men chasing a ball offensively dull, I found myself sitting on the Virgin Pendolino up to Liverpool Lime Street, next to a gentleman who asked which stand our seats were in, and smiled indulgently when I got its name wrong.
As we joined the slow convergence on the stadium that evening, past rows of terraced houses and kebab shops, my mum told me all about the history of the area. I was surprised how much she knew about a place she’d never been before; surprised too, to see her so moved as the crowd sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before the match. I knew Mum had always liked the Liverpool team, but it had never occurred to me that she had such a strong attachment to something that she rarely, if ever, gets to discuss with her football-phobic family.
As she rattled through the form of the players, the problems with their defensive strategy, the board’s politics, my mind reeled; I had never before noticed just how much my mother knew about the Reds. Or indeed, how much they meant to her. When Steven Gerard scored from a free kick in front of us she hugged me tight and told me this would now count as the second-best sporting experience of her life (she was, after all, at the Olympic Stadium on Super Saturday).
We’re close, my mum and I. I’ve known her my whole life. I tend to think that I know how she will behave in any given situation. But when Luis Suarez dived right in front of us, my mother, a churchgoing charity worker and a fiercely ethical lawyer, defended him on the grounds that everyone does it. And perhaps it’s my own lack of imagination, but the idea that she would be caught shouting “off, off, off” at full belt, especially after what was arguably a 50/50 challenge, had never occurred to me.
The whole evening was a revelatory experience: the realisation not just that there were facets of my mother’s knowledge and personality that I hadn’t seen before, but that I’d never looked for them. My family may not have had a soap-opera style existence; we don’t have skeletons in our closets, and I suspect that any secrets that we’ve hidden from each other have been fairly mundane.
But if Brendan Rodgers has taught me one thing it’s this: never underestimate your mother.
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