OLSC Spotlight: Delaware's Lockdown Edition

We recently caught up with Official Liverpool Supporters Club Delaware to find out what life in lockdown has been like for them and the OLSC.

How have you as a group managed to stay together during this time?

It’s been a challenge to stay connected to everybody, we’ve had 3 distinct groups – those who have been reluctant to join the virtual calls, those who joined at the beginning and dropped off, and then a core group of folks who have stayed with us. The core group has been quite engaged and have been able to support each other through this time.

We did see a drop off in the number of people who have been reading the bulletin we send out and in the number of people who have engaged on social media. That has started to change in the last week, as everyone is starting to get excited about the Premier League coming back.

It’s been tough for many of our members, some have lost parents to Covid19, some have seen their businesses fail and others have found themselves looking for work. We’ve tried to support folks as best we can. Publicizing some local businesses (and those of our friends like the Anfield Shop)

What has the OLSC gained from the experience?

The core group definitely knows more about each other now. We’ve talked about what’s challenging, how we are managing through these times and we definitely know more about what each other does outside of supporting Liverpool.

We settled on meeting twice a week, a short check in midweek and a longer happy hour/watch party on Friday. We had a few guests along the way – John and Craig from the Anfield Wrap and Chris Perkins who wrote ‘Let’s Talk About Six’.

We can cheer each other up at any point with Barcelona highlights and our 3 minute video from our pub at last year’s Champions League Final.

We’ve had a few quizzes, although I think they can be a bit divisive. We had a quiz night at the start and the questions were really hard for folks who have joined us in recent years – turns out Jari Litmanen is not very well known by many of our supporters. We settled for using random multiple choice questions as part of the regular meetings, rather than have a full blown quiz night. Small doses of questions

Actually found watching a few highlights/documentaries to be more fun – helping some of us remember and others the chance to learn about our incredible, and at times painful, history.

Are you still connected with your OLSC bar?

We are – we raised some money for staff laid off during the pandemic. We raised money online with help from a signed, framed James Milner shirt from the Carragher Foundation. They are open for takeout – we’ve encouraged people to do that, and now that they’ve opened at 30%, there’s an option to watch the matches there for a small group of fans.

We also donated some money to our local Food Bank as we weren’t able to do our usual food collections.

Tell us about your OLSC podcast? What triggered that? How did you choose guests?

Got to issue a health warning – it isn’t an OLSC activity, as that might imply that we are speaking for the club.

We had the idea before the lockdown as there were a few folks who were particularly prominent in some of the FB chatter – but it wasn’t obvious how we would do it. As I became a full time Zoom user at the start of lockdown, I figured we could easily record our conversations over Zoom. We had a long list of things we wanted to talk about, but we’ve landed on a format which basically sees us interview a guest or guests about their Liverpool experience, we look at what’s trending on our FB page and other topics that we’ve read about in the previous week. Given that format, we are now trying to book guests a few weeks out criteria has become, you have a Liverpool story that we are interested to hear – quite broad but Supporters Clubs, shop owners, writers and broadcasters have unique stories.

I think we’ll probably change the format once football comes back, it will be exciting to see what we can do with the format.

We had Alisha, Simon Hughes (writer at the Athletic), James Martin (writer for Fans Footy Corner), this week Craig and Neil from the Wrap, and some great people from supporters clubs around the US (Haitham, Amy Kate, Roy and Darren), as well as some members of our own club and my mate Chris from Liverpool.

If you are interested in being on an upcoming show, or want to know more, reach out to them at LFCDelaware@gmail.com.

Written by OLSC Delaware.