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Your support makes all the difference.As Liverpool celebrated another victory over the great enemy, Manchester United, to win last year's Charity Shield, one member of Gérard Houllier's squad was not in the mood to join in. Markus Babbel felt "unusually tired", although the defender put it down to playing in the stale air caused by the closure of the Millennium Stadium's roof.
It was nothing to do with a lack of oxygen in Cardiff but a virus that would leave the German international in a wheelchair, contemplating the end of his career, mingled in with a feeling that he was perhaps lucky to be alive.
By the time they overcame his former club, Bayern Munich, in the Super Cup in Monaco, it was obvious he needed treatment. "After the Bayern game I was dead," Babbel recalled. "You can see it in the pictures; all the other players are celebrating but I looked really tired, drained. I couldn't run, I couldn't even breathe."
It was to prove Babbel's final game of the season and almost the last of his career. He returned to Germany, where he was diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus and three months later Babbel was afflicted by the far more serious Guillain-Barré syndrome, which attacks the nervous system in the feet and spreads to the hands. Unless treated, it can be fatal.
Tony Benn suffered from it while campaigning for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981 and likened the experience to "walking in Wellington boots full of water with sponges in the feet." For a footballer, it was a frightening feeling.
"It was bad. I couldn't feel anything below the knees or my hands and even one side of my face. But there were other people worse off than me at the hospital. They were confined long-term to wheelchairs, I only spent a while in one."
Liverpool's assistant manager, Phil Thompson, and the first-team coach, Sammy Lee, visited him in hospital as did former Bayern team-mates such as Paulo Sergio. "The problem was I couldn't see them for more than half an hour. After about 30 minutes I had to ask them to leave because I was so tired. Seeing me in a wheelchair shocked everyone, Phil and Sammy in particular. But maybe being a professional footballer helped; we have to fight on the pitch, we have to fight for our places in training and now I had to fight against this illness."
At first, all Babbel could manage was a "10 metre trip to the toilet" but his recovery at a specialist nerve rehabilitation centre in the Alps was total. "To feel my body being able to respond to runs was wonderful, better than a summer holiday," he said. "To see the reaction from the other lads when I returned to training for the first time was touching. I enjoy playing and even living more. Now I see you can earn as much as you like but if you are not fit you don't have any quality of life."
Babbel is now back in the Liverpool ranks and grateful to the club. "The only way to repay them is with trophies, which is why I want to play on Sunday." It is fashionable to say that the renamed Community Shield offers no kind of form guide to the season – not since Manchester United thumped Newcastle United in 1996 have the winners gone on to lift the title – but last year's encounter in which Michael Owen exposed Jaap Stam gave Sir Alex Ferguson the clearest warning that his defence was deeply flawed.
Owen will again face the team from whom he single-handedly snatched the FA Cup in 2001 and Arsenal go into tomorrow's game with rather more problems and a much thinner squad than Liverpool. Robert Pires and Fredrik Ljungberg, who inspired them to such heights last season are long-term injuries, while Arsène Wenger's French contingent are recovering from the after-effects of a deeply-disappointing World Cup, although this did not stop Thierry Henry putting a hat-trick past TSV 1860 Munich recently.
And, for the first time in 20 years, Arsenal will begin a season without Tony Adams. The key figure at Highbury is now Patrick Vieira and the arrival of Gilberto Silva as a holding midfielder should allow the Frenchman more of an attacking role.
Given the time most South American footballers need to adjust to English conditions, the Brazilian World Cup winner, who has not yet received international clearance to play tomorrow, may not be a ready-made replacement for Ljungberg and Pires and for a club which has to impose itself in the arenas of Europe rather than the Millennium Stadium, it has been a rather queasy summer.
Still, they may have removed the Charity from the season's curtain-raiser but for Arsenal, like every other club, and especially for Markus Babbel, faith and hope remain.
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