RHAPSODY IN BLUE
On 18th May 2025, Everton’s legendary Goodison Park hummed to the siren sound of Z-Cars one last time, before closing her doors to the team that loved her, forever.
The first purpose-built football ground in England, Goodison held the hopes and dreams of the blue half of Liverpool for over 130 years. In that time the ‘Grand Old Lady’ witnessed a city’s growth as well as its darkest years, providing solace and hope, breaking and then restoring again thousands upon thousands of nervous hearts. The loss of Everton to its home in Walton is as yet untold and it will be heavy. But progress is a persistent force and The Grand Old Lady’s long task is done.
For a year I walked the streets around Goodison, watching the Autumn light of the first days of the football season turn to a flat grey before we basked in the Spring sunshine of the final game. I watched that changing light slip down walls of the historic pubs that satellite the ground, filled to bursting each fortnight with pilgrims wrapped in royal blue polyester. Each day knowing that the light would never touch fans’ faces at this hour, in this way again. That the pubs, the bookies, the corner shops, cafes, and bus stops that had echoed down the years would soon go quiet forever.
Every fortnight, sometimes at games sandwiched into cold week nights, thousands and thousands of people poured from trains and buses, cars parked dubiously on dual carriageways, paying homage to their team in this ancient cathedral located in one of the most deprived parts of the country. The wind ripping from the Mersey, the ever present fear of relegation. The footfall will be an echo now.
It was a good season, one of sometimes surprising victories that will live long in the memory, as well as those days that are the core fabric of football, when you go home deflated but knowing another day will always be waiting with the chance of new story.
I have loved football my entire life, but I’m not sure it has ever shown me the kindness of Everton. The warmth, the enthusiasm, pubs where you cannot buy a pint for the generosity of others, where you cannot turn down a free coffee or even a free scarf.
It is not easy to be a football fan for the majority, for those whose clubs like Everton were given and not chosen. Perhaps we would not have it any other way. Because the unique lows of football are what allow the moments of pure joy, however rare they may be. They give us the place for the sorrows and struggles of this difficult time in which we live, to turn however briefly into magic. And sometimes those places are special.
Everton have a new home now, on Liverpool’s docks where the wind from the Mersey will be even more bitter and the hopes ever higher. Goodison Park will pass quietly now into legend in this city of myth and ghosts. People will speak fondly of her best days and strangest quirks like an old love fondly remembered and that, among all the loss, will never change.