Centreback Mountain: My Love For Liverpool’s Retiring Jamie Carragher…

“Who is the best footballer in the world?”

Hmm, good question. A point of endless debate, that one. A conundrum of infinite possibilities yet no apparent solution; a source of epic vexation that, as we speak, has broadcast journalism’s worst dressed pundits literally punching each other’s gonads to jelly in disagreem… Oh, hang on, it’s Lionel Messi, isn’t it? Of course it is. There is no debate. Cut. Dried. Unequivocal. Irrefutable. Unless, that is, you happen to ask my 3-year-old son. In which case he’ll frown disdainfully and blurt “Jamie Carragher” at you like you’re a idiot for even asking.

Forget the unrivalled joy of watching your infant child flourish from squalling bag of green excreta to full-sized homo sapien of limited earnings, brainwashing your progeny into supporting the same football team as you is the only real privilege of parenting. Frankly, it’s the one thing that stops me walking out. So, to that end, my son should be eternally grateful my implicitly bi-curious love for a bunch of athletic young men in candy-apple red shorts is vast enough to compensate for a loveless marriage and keep our family locked up together in a prison cell of animosity, viral tedium and mutual disgust.

 

Anyway, enough of the drum roll, on with the fanfare…

Like war, famine, death and the fretless bass, I’ve been around for way too many years and, as such, am fortunate enough to have witnessed the Boot Room dynasty in its all-conquering bubble-permed pomp. Yet while most Reds my age wouldn’t hesitate in crowning a certain already-deified Glaswegian genius their greatest player of all time/dream date, I’ve decided to Cruyff-turn predictability inside-out and bestow that dubious accolade on a man who, in my opinion, epitomises the leaner years since Dalglish departed first time round, and the relentless, beloved enthusiasm we fans have had to adopt as our default setting ever since: James Lee Duncan Carragher.

Sweet baby Jesus, how I adore him. And for many a reason, though primarily it’s his unswerving honesty – an ever-more-rare trait that manifests it’s self as much in press conferences and interviews as it does on the pitch.

Exhibit A: His legendary status long-since established thanks to a school-age Goodison-ectomy, 15 ensuing years of larynx-on-the-line service and that incident on a pool table, he had nothing further to prove in my eyes. But come the morning of September 4th, 2010, as I read the only bit of the weekend broadsheets I ever really pay any attention to – the Guardian sport section – our unidirectional bromance reached previously uncharted heights of rhapsodic Brokebackery thanks to Carragher’s veracity and some highly accomplished probing from Big Paper word-slut Andy Hunter.

I am of course referring to the oft-quoted interview that prompted Carragher to insist “[Ferguson] didn’t knock Liverpool off their perch… Graeme Souness did.” A gloriously direct gem that had Hunter lauding Carragher’s “prized interviewee” status and me laughing so hard I snotted egg across the table, through my wife’s hair and all over the Telly Savalas fridge magnet that stood some 6ft behind her.

Not to get too misty-eyed, but it’d be nice to think our club’s best defender and de facto figurehead will see us hop back on our perch before he retires, but chances are if it comes at all, it’ll come too late. And who’da thunk it way back in 1996 when the pubescent Bootle foghorn first announced his arrival in the Liverpool starting XI with a Kop end header in a 3-0 victory over Aston Villa and a celebratory scream so loud a passing seagull actually exploded?

Although it’d already been 6 years since we’d lifted domestic football’s ultimate prize, with the pedigree of the club in mind, not even the most optimistic Manc could’ve imagined young Master Carragher would go on to make 669,784 first-team appearances without ever realistically coming close to snaffling a league winners medal of his own (don’t bother quoting 2002 or 2009 at me, we were always going to come up short).

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But in the words of the Dalai Lama, sod it, it’s only medals. And glory. And success and pride and immortality. Besides, if JC had accumulated gongs enough to trouble a giraffe’s neck maybe he wouldn’t have gone quite so mental in Istanbul. Yes, Istanbul. You knew it was coming. And now it’s arrived, you can keep your three goals in 5 mad minutes; you can keep your Dudek’s save; you can even keep your blizzard of red ticker tape engulfing captain and cup. Because for me the finest moment of our finest hour came courtesy of Carragher and the utterly unhinged Sprint of Ecstasy he embarked on the second Shevchenko fluffed his lines.

I still don’t know how I got all my clothes off that quickly. A night of miracles, indeed. But as I jumped up and down, pornaments an unsightly blur of slapping flesh that owed more to Martin Clunes headbanging under a hedge than male genitalia, the only thing that kept me from running into the streets with my penis on show was the fear of never finding out where exactly Jamie was off to.

Here was a man who’d just suffered 120 minutes of bombardment from an almost exclusively ascendant Milan side – a biblical siege whose toll manifested itself in early-onset rigor mortis as two excruciating attacks of groin-cramp left a ransacked Carragher hobby-horsing through the last period of extra-time like a man with glass b*llocks and no knees. Yet come the Rossoneri’s definitive flinch, he still had enough juice in the tank to peg it full-beans in a victory charge as goofy as it was instinctive.

Nobody knew where he was going. Not even he did. Running. Running. Off on a random road to God knows where. Skipping and jumping and squealing with the high-range evangelism of a pre-teen trapped in a lift with Justin Bieber, passed Dudek, away from his team-mates dry-humping each other in the penalty area. Further. Far beyond his senses. And over to the fans. That was where he wanted to be. With us.

Beautiful.

And that my friends is why he is, and will forever be, the greatest player I’ve ever had the honour of gushing over in shameless, divorce-pending homo-erotic adoration. I don’t know how I’ll live without him.