To understand the sheer swathe of time that
Liverpool
has traversed with its Premiership title win, this little detail should come handy: The last time they won the title, Sachin Tendulkar was still to score his first international century.
That's simply how far back it is.
Thirty years ago, cricket was still being played in whites,
football
was still a simple endeavour with player-managers calling the shots, the fearsome Mike Tyson was hitting the canvas in a shock defeat to James 'Buster' Douglas and hooliganism was English football's biggest export to Europe. Sporting celebrityhood was still to become an industry, yet the paparazzi would chase Paul Gascoigne as they did Princess Di.
Elsewhere,
Nelson Mandela
was released after 27 years in prison, the Scorpions recorded Winds of Change celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous November and the two Germanys were formally united. Glasnost and Perestroika became operative terms as dissolution of the Soviet Union became imminent. McDonalds opening its first-ever store in Moscow became a symbol of the times as cracks showed up all through Eastern Europe's socialist block.
It was believed had Yugoslavia beaten Argentina in the quarterfinal, they would have gone on to win the World Cup, and there probably would have been no war.
Closer home, 1990 would helm a decade of significant social and economic transformation. It would start with great social churn with the implementation of the Mandal Commission. There would also be a flashpoint brewing with violence taking root in Kashmir.
In August 1990, a curly-haired youngster on his first tour of England, would get an unbeaten 119 in a doughty rear-guard rescue in the Old Trafford Test. Four months earlier, on May 1 no less, John Barnes, Peter Beardsley, Ian Rush, Alan Hansen and fellow hard-nosed Liverpool pros, embodying the port city's working class ethos, would have overcome the Hillsborough tragedy for an emotional title win. But while Tendulkar would go on stack up Test and One-days centuries by the hundred, Liverpool would wither away to become football's most romantic also-rans.
For those who came in late, whatever the Premiership hype tells you, Liverpool will always be English football's most fabled club. We may be one of the world's largest viewership outposts today, we were once a sporting backwater not so long ago – county cricket would find more sports-page patronage than football, the news reaching us three days late. In all this, Liverpool was our window to the global football world.
If anything, the idea of club following was alien to Indians, the choices meagre too -- you were no more than either a Mohun Bagan or an East Bengal guy. And every four years, you'd turn mostly Brazil. A formidable AC Milan and Maradona's Napoli may have had begun to capture imagination in the late '80s, there was very little of
Manchester United, Real Madrid or Barcelona – a far cry from the ritualistic following of today. Did Chelsea flit in and out of our consciousness only because Raquel Welch had once worn their colours during a film promotional shoot? It is possible.
In all this, Liverpool managed to sneak in and stay a constant. Just as the Manchester United and cable TV explosion happened simultaneously in the late '90s, live TV owes its high noon to Liverpool's 1970s and '80s domination. "Liverpool is the team with the ball," was how the English superclub would be identified for Europe's neutrals in days of grainy black and white television.
But all this would change from 1990 onwards, suddenly it would become more fashionable to root for Cameroon than for Germany or Argentina. The world sat on the cusp of great change all over that year. A new world order had emerged, and with sports deciding to move in with commerce, nothing would be the same. Only it took Liverpool 30 full years to catch up.