Why Liverpool fans booed the national anthem: a lesson in history very few want to listen to

The pattern and the colours of the Union Jack stand out amid an ocean of red, white and yellow before most home games in Anfield’s Kop grandstand. Towards the end of last season, as Liverpool eased to a 2-0 victory over Porto in the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final, I noticed this for the first time and sent out a tweet which read simply: “A Union Jack flying on the Kop…” There is danger here, of course, of viewing the way things are absolutely through the prism of one person’s Twitter feed. “…is now literally impossible.” The two sides shake hands before Sunday’s Community Shield at Wembley When Liverpool played Cardiff City in the 2012 League Cup final the Football League decided not to play the national anthem, though then it was because of a “long-standing policy not to play national anthems when English and Welsh clubs meet in finals.” The statement referred to the play-off finals between Swansea and Reading in 2011 and Cardiff and Swansea in 2003 when Welsh supporters ensured enough disruption was made to force change. Pajak, meanwhile, was born in 1982, the year after record unemployment rates were registered in Liverpool – the year after, indeed, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe proposed a “managed decline” for the city. A major Manchester City fan account, for example, had a thread on the issue where there were dozens of comments about Liverpool being a “self-pity city”, a term first coined by Jonathan Margolis in a damaging Sunday Times article published four years after Hillsborough when the journalist went to Liverpool to gauge the mood in the days and weeks after James Bulger’s murder.