The world’s best soccer team is visiting Shrewsbury, a quaint market town near the border of England and Wales, and the local mayor has mixed emotions.
“Being something of an armchair Liverpool supporter, I’m going to be a little conflicted,” Shrewsbury Mayor Phil Gillam said ahead of today’s fourth-round match in the FA Cup. “I just hope it’s a good game. It’s not just brilliant for Shrewsbury Town Football Club, but also wonderful for the town as a whole.”
Indeed, a couple of generations after The Beatles played in Shrewsbury — the band is believed to have written the No. 1 hit From Me To You while traveling there in 1963 — another famous lineup from Liverpool is making the 80km trip to the birthplace of Charles Darwin for a match that might not be as lopsided as first imagined.
Photo: Reuters
Liverpool are the European and World champions, and — holding a 16-point lead — are on the brink of winning the English league for the first time in 30 years. Shrewsbury are in 16th place in the third tier.
Liverpool have won the FA Cup seven times. Shrewsbury have never made the final.
The only competitive game between the two teams was also in the fourth round of the FA Cup in 1996. Liverpool won that game 4-0 at Shrewsbury’s old Gay Meadow ground, where a coracle — a traditional boat small enough to be carried on your back — would be used to retrieve stray balls from the adjacent River Severn.
Fred Davies, who was dubbed “Coracle Man,” did his duty for years in the small boat, which is now on display at Shrewsbury’s new ground.
“It was not uncommon for Fred to have to return the ball to the ground five or six times during a game,” the BBC reported.
It was at Gay Meadow where Shrewsbury dealt another Merseyside team, Everton, a shock with a 2-1 win in 2003. It is still regarded as one of the famous old tournament’s biggest upsets, with a 17-year-old Wayne Rooney in the visiting team and Shrewsbury 80 places lower in the English soccer pyramid at the time.
Seventeen years on and Shrewsbury are not without hope of another so-called “giant-killing.”
Liverpool are set to field a heavily weakened team for the match, which comes right in the middle of two important English Premier League fixtures for Juergen Klopp’s side as they close in on the title.
The Reds remain the favorites, sure, but this will not be the usual Liverpool team. Not that Shrewsbury’s manager is expecting any favors.
“Top players produce it game after game,” said Shrewsbury manager Sam Ricketts, a former Premier League player with Hull City and Bolton Wanderers. “The very, very top like Liverpool, they produce it Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Wednesday, and they do it every three or four days. And they’re getting chopped down every week. At our level, every player has a Championship [second-tier] game in them. Every player has the odd Premier League-standard game in them. It’s the consistency level [that counts].”
Under Klopp, Liverpool have never reached the fifth round and the Reds last won the competition in 2006.
That might mean it is a trophy on Klopp’s radar this season, though he has shown in his team selections that he has his sights set very much elsewhere, primarily the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League.
“Is it a test [on Sunday]? Yes, maybe, but it is not like I test the players, it is a test in general, as you play against a team who fights the fight of their life and we have to show how important the next round is to us,” Klopp said.
Klopp played a virtual youth side against Everton in the third round and Liverpool still came away with a 1-0 win at Anfield.
Shrewsbury earned a shot at Liverpool by beating second-tier Bristol City 1-0 at home in a replay, the 89th-minute winner coming from Aaron Pierre.
Shrewsbury also drew 2-2 with Premier League Wolverhampton Wanderers at the near 10,000-capacity Montgomery Waters Meadow in the fourth round of the tournament last year — having gone 2-0 up at one stage — before losing the replay 3-2 at Molineux.
Shrewsbury’s most famous resident is Darwin, the English naturalist famed for his theories of evolution and natural selection. He was born in 1812 — the same day as former US president Abraham Lincoln — in a surviving Georgian house.
Today’s match is to be televised live by the BBC and some viewers might recognize Shrewsbury’s blue-and-amber jerseys. A Shrewsbury replica kit is worn by bass guitarist Derek Smalls in the mock documentary This Is Spinal Tap.
The FA Cup is full of tales of top teams heading to cramped lower-league grounds and struggling with a setting they rarely experience. That will not be the case at modern-day Shrewsbury.
The club moved out of town in 2007 into a new stadium with a large parking lot, whose entrance has multiple signs warning learner drivers not to use the space for practice.
Shrewsbury’s fans will be hoping that Liverpool’s strikers heed the warning.
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