They're sending the bricks and rubble from the great English football terrace to Royal Liverpool hospital. Better than sending the people.
Better to auction the debris from a dying era in aid of Mrs Bottomley's National Health Charity Service than cling to the nostalgic precipice of human disaster. Especially in the Mersey poverty zone.
Not that sanity makes much common-sense to the locals. Not just yet. Not this weekend. They've all been swept along on a gush of sentiment so powerful that it was threatening to wash the Kop away before the bulldozers could get stuck into it this week. But they'll get used to the idea.
They'll take to the notion of watching a football match in it's 90-minute entirety instead of straining for glimpses of the action through a mass of dangerously swaying humanity. They'll become accustomed to sitting in comfort and safety instead of cursing and striving to keep their feet in the second great river which runs through Liverpool, the one flowing from men and boys who would be reluctant to nip out to the lavatories even if they could fight their way through the crowd.
Like the Boers in the hilltop battle which gave the Spion Kop it's name, it has taken more than a little discomfort for them to surrender their vantage points. But they'll actually get to like being housed like humans instead of herded like cattle. And sooner than they think.
Don't just take my word for it. Not that dyed-in-the-blood Koppites are in the habit of paying much attention to a Londoner, even if he did grow up on the banks of Upton Park, White Hart Lane and - holiest of holies - Brisbane Road.
Listen to Peter Robinson, the ultimate chief football executive without whose vision and diplomacy Anfield might have had no hope of joining the 21st Century: "We will soon have a generation of supporters who've never stood at a football match and who may wonder why on earth anyone ever did." There speaks a man who has shared the Kop's exultation through the roaring decades of triumph and who has marvelled at the caustic power and colourful spontaneity of it's support. A man to whom the raucous volume of it's clamour has been music to the ears but a man with his mind tuned in to football's over-riding reality.
Robinson has joined the faithful in shedding a tear in memory of the cloth-cap era most vividly symbolised by the Kop. Yet he embraces the new age about to dawn over 12,000 classless seats which will fill a space once occupied by anything from 16,000 to 28,000 Anfield infantrymen.
Liverpool cannot strictly afford the 8 million pound cost of the transformation, not after pouring the last of their liquid assets into the new Centenary Stand ... but even less can they afford to provide anything other than the safest haven in the game at the lowest prices in the Premier League.
The tragic paradox linking the conduct of their fans at Heysel with their catastrophic suffering at Hillsborough put them at the focal point of the Taylor Report, which condemned even their own fabled terrace to closure by this summer at the latest.
The bitter - or should it be lager - irony persists to the end. Strong drink was accused of playing it's grim part. Yet without investment by Carlsberg - 1 million pound a year for at least four years - Liverpool would be unable to comply with the legislation.
Given their sponsor's hands to the pumps, they can follow their conscience through a reformation which Robinson acknowledges needed to be forced on many in football. Resentment abounded at Lord Justice Taylor's recommendations - in all their cost - but Robinson concedes: "Had it not been for Government intervention the game would still have been dragging it's feet instead of building stadia better equipped than all those grounds on the Continent which everyone admires so much."
What Mr Liverpool identifies, more keenly than anyone, is the continuing change in the nature of our society.
The massive majority of Liverpool's supporters have long been a phenomenon to celebrate. Still they were not immune to militant subversives using the terraces as cover for hooligan activity. That sinister tendency may have been less prevalent at Anfield than on many grounds but Liverpool was confronted by an additional social problem almost all it's own.
The population of the city has fallen rapidly from three-quarters of a million to barely 400,000. Not so much a drift, more a stampede. Were Liverpool not alert to the changing demands of it's shifting supporter base, gates would never have held up so loyally nor the club retained it's solvency.
Anfield works to a high majority of season ticket holders - maybe that 100 per cent of the seats on the new Kop when it opens in August - and more than a quarter of those now live beyond the boundaries of Merseyside. It is an astonishing quotient which is growing rapidly. And very few travelling fans want to stand between long journeys.
Regardless of the argument dividing those who demanded their traditional right to stand and those who believed it would be less practical to riot sitting down, Anfield was always destined for all-seater splendour. What price a glorious past without a golden future?
The spirit of the Kop will survive the transition, vibrant as ever. So, with much greater certainty, will the men, women and children who spend the most vital hours of their lives upon it. They've had enough wakes at Anfield. That was why Mr Liverpool worked so hard to make this a fun weekend.
No more flowers. By request.
Copyright - The Daily Mail
Copyright - The Daily Mail