Liverpool collectively hung its head in sorrow for Rhys – and waited for the inevitable yoke of the “self pity city” label to be once again hung around its neck

Only it didn’t happen.

The national Press, for once avoiding the usual “only in Liverpool” headlines, conveyed genuine UK-wide empathy for a community in turmoil, and rightly focused its wrath on the burgeoning gun culture as a countrywide disease rather than a localised one.

The dignity on show, particularly from Rhys’s parents Stephen and Melanie, and the solidarity shown throughout the city could not be ignored.

There was the poignancy of the Jones family standing pitchside at Goodison Park next to Everton manager David Moyes as the applause of 40,000 spoke volumes for a life lost.

Days later and across Stanley Park, the Johnny Todd Z Cars theme of Rhys’s beloved Everton echoed round Anfield in a moving tribute.

AND when ground-breaking activities such as the Liverpool Unites campaign – backed by the Daily Post and our sister paper the Liverpool Echo – and Concert For Rhys were organised to raise money for a community centre to be built in his name, they were not dismissed but praised as initiatives that could be mirrored in other cities blighted by the bullet.

The campaign has so far raised more than £100,000 for the Rhys Jones Memorial Fund.

Former Daily Post journalist Brian Reade, now an award winning columnist for the Daily Mirror, believes the general reaction to Rhys’s tragic death, if nothing else, showed what a massive sea change had occurred in how Liverpool is perceived.

“I was sent to Croxteth Park in the aftermath of what happened and what was immediately apparent was how all these national journalists were taken aback by what they saw,” said the 51-year-old Liverpudlian.

“They’d come expecting to find a s---hole where guns and drugs were the norm and a victim from an unstable family background. What they found was a pleasant, reasonably affluent suburb estate that could be anywhere else in the country and a victim who was an innocent young lad, who loved his football, who came from a loving, hard working, articulate, working-class family. It went against all the stereotypes traditionally associated with the city.”

HE ADDED: “The lack of flak the city as a whole got after that was an indication of how they don’t now always associate Liverpool with the worst kind of poverty, crime and underclass estates. We’re not the sole whipping boy any more – they know that other places such as Moss Side in Manchester, Birmingham and London have their own problems with guns and gang culture which are as bad, if not worse.”

Which, of course, doesn’t make everything all right.

After our celebratory opening weekend of Capital of Culture, one “quality” national Sunday still decided to make its main focus how two relatively minor firearms incidents had ruined the weekend.

Rhys’s death has also cast a lingering swathe of fear over an estate previously renowned as being relatively crime-free.