Shankly, a gruff Scotsman, was one of the great managers of the early modern era in football, the man who first set Liverpool on the path to sustained greatness during a long tenure in charge of the club throughout the '60s and early '70s. Although this line is generally attributed to 'Shanks', I have also seen it sometimes ascribed to other football managers of his time (including his successor at Anfield, fellow Scot Bob Paisley), and I haven't been able to find any definite citation as to when or where he's supposed to have said it.
The line has something of the cracked logic of the celebrated baseball coach 'Yogi' Berra, whose 'wit' was characterised by such apparently inadvertent paradoxes or tautologies (though one suspects that at least some of them were self-consciously crafted).
It was probably just a stumbling attempt to express the extremity of his - and many fans' - passion for the game, but....
I like to think there may be deeper layers of meaning in it: that perhaps he was suggesting that life and death are ultimately not that important after all, not as important as they are commonly supposed to be, that perhaps individual moments of experience matter more than states of being... or perhaps that all things are equally important, equally unimportant....
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