The red nets at Anfield look great, they may be a minor tweak within the context of Anfield as a whole, but anything adding to the character or personality of a stadium is a good thing.
For those unaware, today was the first time since 1995 that those nets have been used at a Liverpool home game, and have been restored on Brendan Rodgers’ recommendation. Understandably so, someone of Rodgers’ age will have grown up with those nets – they’re so intertwined with the club’s most successful period, that not having them at Anfield feels like an wholly unnecessary departure from tradition.
It’s easy to dismiss small details like these as being trivial, but as the game and stadia in which it’s played become more uniform, so the need for these subtle variations increases. Even a ground like Anfield, bursting with history at is, has lost some of its character with the modernisation of the game.
Goal nets, incidental as they are, should vary – because, for want of a better reason, square and white is actually quite dull. One of the trivial, yet intriguing, details of European football used to be the variety of nets across the continent – the saggy and shapeless, the no-nonsense triangle, or even the strange rhombus shape that used to be employed within the Portuguese league. It’s variety for the sake of it, sure, but it’s also identity – something you could associate with a specific ground or footballing region.
Let’s have more of this.
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