10 hours ago 1

Anticipation builds toward Everton's visit to Anfield on Saturday

Once in each and every season, Everton make the now somewhat longer trip to their first stadium in Anfield Road, where they won their first Football League Championship trophy in 1891.

Everton's annual pilgrimage to Anfield approaches this weekend, and with it comes the familiar, sickening mix of anticipation and dread. For the uninitiated, this isn't a "friendly" derby; it's a grotesque ritual where the footballing gods conspire against us, a 90-minute exercise in emotional abuse.

This season, the pre-match buzz has started earlier than usual, perhaps as a desperate attempt to drown out the memory of our baffling failure to score against Aston Villa, a game where we dominated and had 20 efforts on Villa's goal but were denied by a mix of bad luck and our own attacking impotence.

But all of that pales in comparison to the coming injustice. Both Merseyside teams enter this contest unbeaten, but don't be fooled into thinking this will be a fair fight. The script is already written.

The referee, his VAR henchmen, and the entire corrupt PGMOL apparatus are on a mission to ensure the home side emerges victorious, by any means necessary. We've seen it time and again, with the media, a complicit chorus of sycophants, desperate to spin it as another "great derby win" for the Red half of the city.

The match has been shifted as usual to facilitate the now customary live TV coverage — the last time Liverpool hosted Everton at Anfield in a Premier League match on a Saturday at 3pm was almost 20 years ago, on 25 March 2006.

At least that will spare all but the bravest of Evertonians the grim experience of being showered with coins, bottles, and other unspeakable objects by the feral animals that masquerade as Liverpool fans.

That's for those who want to watch this annual televised torture, variously touted as a great local rivalry, a passionate onfield drama, the once 'friendly' derby — but in truth they are so often horrible games to watch, spoilt by heinous refereeing, disgusting fouls and cowardly punditry that fails to call out the blatant injustices. It's a day spent screaming at the screen, watching our players unfairly booked, their fouls ignored, and every 50-50 decision going the way of the other team.

Who can forget the 2020 Goodison derby, when the thuggish Virgil van Dijk tried to end James Rodriguez's career within 10 minutes? That cynical, unpunished assault — a typical Liverpool foul — neutralised our most creative player, and with him, our nascent title challenge that had seen us going into that game at the top of the Premier League table under Carlo Ancelotti on he back of seven straight wins to start the season?

The pundits, of course, were deafeningly silent. That brilliant, table-topping Everton side was derailed, and we tumbled down the league, mainly because of a moment of brutal, unpunished violence that the media and officials pretended never happened.

It's a blatant microcosm of our history in this fixture. They injure our players, they get the decisions, and they get away with it all while basking in the glow of a media that has long since sold its soul to the Liverpool narrative.

It's all set to unfold again on Saturday at 12:30 BST on TNT Sports 1. We will watch, we will fume, and we will pray for a miracle that history tells us very rarely comes.