We share heart beat with Liverpool..it never sounded louder than last week

AS deep and enduring as the timeless Mersey itself, freighted with the potency of a John Aldridge hat-trick, this last songless week has offered a powerful reminder of the profound confederacy bonding Liverpool to Ireland.

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The cavity which opened on Monday night where a million Scouse hearts so recently resided, the impotent fury that invaded the city's gut, all of it crossed the Irish Sea at the speed of light or, faster still, a goal-bound Mo Salah thunderbolt.

In that nanosecond, what had been billed as a night of full-bodied communal celebration - a first league title that could be properly marked in 34 years, mass gatherings banned at the time of the Covid-handcuffed 2020 triumph was rendered skeletal.

So many Irish lives are bound up in the fortunes of Liverpool Football Club. It is, to those deeply invested in the House of Shankly, their North and South, the compass by which they navigate their trek through the years.

Years that are measured out in life-affirming 38-game Premier League seasons.

Likewise, the smaller, equally passionate group of Irish Evertonians understood implicitly the hollow running through their adopted city in the wake of Monday's rapidly annulled festivities.

As with the darkness that enveloped the community in the wake of April 15th, 1989 when Hillsborough became a byword for tragedy, two tribes were rendered colour blind. Red and Blue seeped into each other until they became indistinguishable. One.

Of the thousands of moments that shape a life, for many some of the more indelible whether days of dizzying euphoria or the sorrowful mysteries of existence are linked to a city that sits a mere Caoimhin Kelleher kick-out across the water.

It is a brotherhood born of famine and football, a blood and cultural kinship. A twinning forged by poverty and emigration.

HEROES

More than 1.5 million malnourished, broken Irish passed through the port of Liverpool from 1846-51, the years of the Great Hunger an emigrant cascade so vast it would fill Anfield or Everton's new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock 25 times over.