A LORRA lorra laughs as Liverpool FC won the FA Cup Final at the weekend, both before and after beating Russia's club Chelsea again in a decider. Even if (especially because) the late, not-so-great Cilla Black wouldn't have enjoyed the preamble.
The Reds' supporters booing the English national anthem and also Prince William provoked a lot of ire from predictable quarters, many of whom must have been asleep just before the many finals the Pool have reached since the early Eighties.
Newsflash: many Liverpool supporters boo the English national anthem. They have done so for decades.
That's a practice which hardly needs to be defended in this publication, but nor should it really need to be explained.
Bizarrely, many of those shouting loudest in condemnation of those Liverpool supporters also proclaim themselves as advocates and defenders of free speech. Work that one out with a pencil.
As ever, all that 'free speech' means to them is that they defend their right to be offensive about minorities, but don't you for a second dare to criticise the Royal Family or the English establishment!
Of course there are Liverpool supporters who vote Conservative and/ or support the monarchy; that's their right.
Equally, it remains the right of others to boo the anthem and the Queen's grandson. For now, despite the worst efforts of this awful government, the UK ostensibly remains a democracy.
The booing of 'Abide With Me' seemed weird - to me; but then I do love that hymn.
Yet for all the laughable, hilarious outrage from right-wingers, the reasons behind the booing are very serious.
They go back to the mid-Eighties, when the execrable then PM Maggie Thatcher wanted a policy of 'managed decline' for the city of Liverpool.
The lack of sympathy from the Royal Family after the Hillsborough tragedy has not been forgotten in Liverpool either.
Think about that.
Ninety-six of your citizens, your subjects, have been crushed to death, many of them young people, teenagers, and yet the Queen doesn't bother to visit the city of Liverpool? It was four years before she came to Anfield. (In the interests of accuracy, the Prince and Princess of Wales did go to see survivors of the disaster in hospital, but there was no other public show of support or sympathy from the royals for the victims in Liverpool, as far as I know.)
Liverpool fans, especially those who had lost loved ones, were heartlessly told to 'move on' - yet more than 15 years after the Hillsborough disaster The Spectator, the house magazine of the Conservative party, chose to use the occasion of the brutal murder of a British hostage in Iraq - Ken Bigley - to publish the following bile:
The journalist Simon Heffer claimed there was "a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.
"They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.
"Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.
"The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.
"The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident."
The 'man' who had told Heffer to write that article? The odious Boris Johnson, now Prime Minster of the UK.
There was so much wrong with that article, but the fact that the so-called journalist deliberately downplayed the number of deaths, almost halving the total, was particularly contemptible. He absolutely knew how many had died, but wanted to twist the knife.
So, no, many Liverpool fans are not going to stop booing the UK national anthem, never mind sing it.
For decades they've had to suffer vile taunts about Hillsborough from little Englanders who wrap themselves in the Union flag. Plenty of Chelsea supporters in that category.
Even now, no one has served a single second of jail time for the failings which led to the deaths of 97 football supporters - with Andrew Devine having passed away last July from the injuries he sustained in the crush.
The lives of many hundreds of others have been scarred by Hillsborough, bearing both physical and mental trauma ever since; some couldn't bear it, and took their own lives.
And still the English establishment closed ranks, parroted the same lies about Liverpool supporters, and refused to punish those truly responsible for 97 deaths.
If you're annoying the likes of The S*n, The Daily Mail, and Bozo Johnson, and their fellow travellers and lickspittles, you're obviously on the right side of history.
After their triumph, once again, Liverpool fans celebrated not only with Champagne, but with that special bitter whine made from sour grapes.
One can understand Chelsea supporters being upset about losing another penalty shoot-out to the Reds, although there was certainly nothing 'unlucky' about it.
Truth be told, almost everything went Chelsea's way: they won the coin tosses so that not only did they get to go first, which is a significant statistical advantage, they also got to take the penalties in front of their own fans.
Liverpool were missing their first choice penalty taker, Mo Salah, who'd gone off injured, and their second choice, Fabinho, who was absent due to injury. Virgil van Dijk, who'd taken the Reds' third penalty in the Carabao Cup Final shoot-out, scoring with contemptuous conviction, was also off injured.
Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson Becker had sustained a shin injury in the first half.
Liverpool then suffered the psychological blow of Sadio Mane failing to seal victory from the spot, having done so for his country Senegal in the African Cup of Nations Final and in a World Cup play-off.
Yet still Chelsea choked - with the penalty missed by, you guessed it, an Englishman, little Mason Mount.
There always seem to be quibbles about LFC final triumphs, even (especially?) from supporters of clubs which haven't won anything for decades.
Yet do Chelsea fans not celebrate their 2012 CL win? Do Man U supporters discount their 2008 success?
Don't make me laugh - again and again and again, a lorra lorra times.
