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Liverpool fans with a Diogo Jota banner at the FA Community Shield match at Wembley(Image: Javier Garcia/Shutterstock)

"So let me get this straight."

"Liverpool disrespect the National Anthem, then expect everyone in the stadium to respect their minute's silence?"

This was a comment left by a reader of the Daily Telegraph on a story about the fact that a minute's silence paying tribute to Diogo Jota - the Liverpool forward so tragically killed in a car crash alongside his brother this summer - had to be cut short following shouting from a small number of Crystal Palace fans ahead of Sunday's Community Shield showpiece at Wembley Stadium.

This Telegraph reader, whose comments were met with a range of deeply offensive retorts that Liverpool fans will have faced far too regularly in their lives - was not the only one to draw an equivalence between the disruption to the silence for Jota and the fact that Liverpool fans inside the stadium had booed the National Anthem a little earlier.

Football journalist Henry Winter drew the ire of some Reds fans as he tweeted: "Not the most dignified of starts.

A few Palace fans noisy during period of silence in memory of Diogo Jota and Andre Silva."

As many supporters pointed out, placing these two actions together in the same breath, both brought under the umbrella of "undignified" - incorrectly places them on the same level and fails to understand the rationale and history behind the protest of a city and its people.

This was far from the first time that Liverpool fans have booed the National Anthem and it won't be the last time.

It is a move that always manages to stir up a fair amount of froth from fans of other teams.

Some may disagree over whether it's right, but to say there are no reasons to boo is to ignore the frustrations borne by this city over decades.

The idea of a city that feels apart from the country it lies within is one forged through a history in which Liverpool and its populace have faced hardship and suffering at the hands of the nation's establishment.

Liverpool's identity as somewhere in England, but different from England, stems back as far as the Irish potato famine of 1845 when millions of immigrants arrived through the city's port.

While many headed off for the United States or Australia, a significant number stayed and changed the culture and make-up of the city forever.

Liverpool and Crystal Palace players stand for a minute silence in memory of Diogo Jota and Andre Silva during the 2025 FA Community Shield (Image: Offside via Getty Images)

If Liverpool has always felt it has been treated differently - and often unfairly - by other parts of the country, that may have initially stemmed from the hostile treatment of this new Irish population of the city during the second half of the 19th century.

That anti-Irish sentiment directed at large swathes of the city's population fostered something of an "us against them"

psyche amongst many that is likely to have been passed down to new generations.

But this is just one early facet of a complex and at times troubled history between Liverpool and England.

It's fair to say that Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government have played a significant role in the complicated sense of identity in Liverpool.

Many here believe Mrs Thatcher was at best indifferent - and at worst complicit - in the city's devastating economic decline in the 1980s in which soaring unemployment and poverty threatened to destroy the very essence of the place.

That same Prime Minister was in office when the Hillsborough Disaster occurred, in which 97 Liverpool fans would be killed.

Her government was the first of many to fail those fans and their families, allowing police lies that sought to blame Reds fans for the tragedy to permeate - which the loved ones of those who died would have to battle for decades to extinguish.

If you cannot understand why a fanbase at the tragic centre of the worst disaster in British sporting history, who then fell victim to one of the most despicable cover ups the collective organs of this nation's state have ever put together, may not feel proud and patriotic - I don't know what to tell you.

The fight for truth and justice over Hillsborough is one of the finest examples of how the city of Liverpool sticks together at the darkest times.