Scouse not English?

Article published by me on http://www.live4liverpool.com

If you are from Liverpool you may well regard yourself as Scouse not English? If you do, then you may find yourself on the horns of a dilemma during this years World Cup in Brazil.

“We’re not English we are Scouse.” proclaims the Kop in both banner and song. Why should Reds fans in the city feel this way? The reasons are many and complex. They owe as much to demographics, geography, politics and sociology as they do to football. You will probably be pleased to know that I won’t be going into all of those here. Suffice it to say that many of us (admittedly not all) feel we’re really citizens of an Independent Republic.

Growing up, I was never that bothered about the international football scene. England didn’t really inspire me, and as the years went by I began to see them as a distraction to the main business of club football. In short Liverpool FC was and still is the world to me. Besides our players seemed to always get injured turning out for the national side.

Now that same pride in our city threatens to turn all of that on its head. Today Roy Hodgeson stood in a car factory somewhere in England’s industrial heartland, and announced that no less than a quarter of his squad were Scousers. This is a remarkable turnout, given the size of our population. In fact if you add in Sturridge, Sterling, Johnson, and Henderson into the equation; then Liverpool FC and the city of Liverpool combined contributes 50% of the overall squad.

So will those of you who march under the Liver-bird rather than the Union Jack switch allegiance this summer? Not for me to be honest. I hope our lads have an injury free tournament. I’d even be happy for them if they pulled off a shock, but not out any sense of patriotism.  I won’t be putting the cross of St George in my window. If I celebrated, it would be more out civic, rather than national pride.

Now just before you prepare to hammer your keyboard, slating me  for not supporting my country, think about this. Am I really any different to a West Ham fan here?  To this day most of them claim that they actually won the World Cup in ’66. Mind you they only contributed three players to that team, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Bobby Moore. If England go on to win it Scousers should be able to dine out on that for years to come. Of course I am sure we would also be the toast of a grateful nation…….we would wouldn’t we?