BfB

Mohamed Salah’s glorious time at Liverpool has all but ended following an interview in which he discussed the breaking down of various relationships at the club, with a suggestion that he should be in the first eleven despite a general consensus that he has played poorly all season.

Having signed a new two-year deal last season, it seemed that Salah was in a position to continue his career at Liverpool. The untimely death in the summer of teammate Diogo Jota saw the forward crying on the field following games. He leaves for The African Cup of Nations this week with the suspicion being that he will be excluded from the Premier League game with Brighton and Hove Albion at the weekend, and will transfer in the January window.

That Salah has played his last game for Liverpool.

Kübler-Ross

Sitting with a grief is a horror, literally. It stalks interactions, never far from thoughts. When it does assert itself, it does so without warning, stabbing into a conversation, leaving the sufferer debilitated.

There is a guide – the Kübler-Ross model – which details the five stages of. They are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Listen to It’s Quiet Uptown from Hamilton, and you can hear them sung to you, but knowing them and knowing what to do about them are different propositions.

Lines between the stages blur, depression and bargaining together, acceptance hinting at itself while one is furious, and making the fury worse. It is brutal, and it is present, and it is boring. Specifically, it is boring for other people to be around. The world moves on, the sufferer does not.

If you are even in a position to sit with someone as they suffer, then sit, and afford them the time and space to experience without the pressure of having to be for someone else.

Success

Three weeks ago there was a suggestion that Liverpool were going to send a message to Jürgen Klopp that the manager who delivered previous glories was required to replace Arne Slot, and to make Liverpool whole again.

Slot’s first season was success, the start of his second was five consecutive wins, but something changed and could not be restored. Slot has attempted to change how Liverpool play for a 433 to a 4231 and in doing so he changed the rhyme which gave reason to the Champions.

The notion, which never calcified, was that Klopp would revitalise the likes of Salah, who struggles for form, and Virgil Van Dyke who is in a similar situation while being able to embed the new signings like Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak as he had in the past. That Klopp would return things to how they were, and things would be good again.

Volatile

Denial and anger are a volatile mix. The denial would have the world kept as it was, restored to the state before grief and its emotional charges took root, and anger challenges anyone who acknowledges those changes. The clothes stay in the wardrobe, the chairs remain in place.

Grief comes in many forms, and no two are alike, but invariably bargaining starts with a question as to why that person has gone, and I remain. “If I could trade his life for mine / he would be standing here right now / and that would be enough.”

The attempt to retain a sense of what is normal is loaded onto a cognitive dissonance that that previous state of normality no longer exists, and even one’s sense seems to conspire against one. The brain knows a truth it whispers to the heart, so to speak, and so a sufferer is a conflict.

Stark

Andrew Robertson leads Scotland to the World Cup after spending a day in his room crying. Brentford’s former Liverpool skipper Jordan Henderson lays flowers. Portugal’s players day tribute to the player on what would have been his birthday.

That is boring. What is interesting is that Carra is having a go and Wayne Rooney is talking about Salah throwing Liverpool under a bus and having tarnished his legacy.

Football deals in grief – every game seems to have a minute’s applause in it, every season has more than one minute of silence for some cause – but it is incapable of showing empathy for actual, stalk, honest grief. Football wants if grief in the past, as dead figures to lionise, and shows nothing but contempt for people suffering actual, stalk, honest grief.

One to Five

Keep the chair in the same place, the clothes in the wardrobe so if they came back in the room they would spot nothing out of place, and perhaps they will.

Put everything back to how it was, and then I will go back to how they were, and these feelings will go away.

If everything was how it was, then I would not be bargaining that I’d rather it was me who died.

I’d not be thinking that the world would be better if they had lived and not me.

Keep everything in place and internal conflict, this sickening dissonance, need not be there.

Failure

And here comes the former Plymouth manager to give his thoughts. How useless, how asinine, how beneath contempt.