Topic: RAWK Archive: The Press on our 5th European Cup Win

[Rushian]

Ireland's Sunday Independent, May 29th

Harnessing history's burden, Dion Fanning

ON the morning after Liverpool's first European Cup Final victory in 1977, Bill Shankly sat in Rome's International Airport as he returned from the final. Shankly was alone. He would die four years later, as John Giles said, "of a broken heart." He had watched as his former assistant and successor Bob Paisley achieved greater success than he had and he had watched it from the outside.

A fan approached Shankly and asked for his autograph. "I don't have a pen," Shankly said, "but I'll give you my scarf" and he handed the fan the tattered red and white adornment which commemorated Liverpool's first appearance in a European Cup final.

In Istanbul, a city as magical and haunting as Rome, last Wednesday night, the fan who had received the scarf 28 years ago carried it in a trouser pocket. He spoke quietly about his possession and removed it gently, if requested, for worshippers to touch like Padre Pio's glove.

The history of Liverpool Football Club is a ghost on the shoulder, a relic wrapped up in a trouser pocket which has burdened every Liverpool team since 1990. In the Ataturk Stadium on Wednesday night, that history came alive, not only in the extraordinary communion between supporters and players for which Liverpool, among elite clubs, is unique, but in Liverpool's determination to learn from that history.

All players who sign for Liverpool are expected to bow before the gods who walked before them. Rafael Benitez's wife has spent some of her first season on Merseyside reading about the history of the club, while her husband watched the videos at night. It seeps into the players and when Jamie Carragher ran frantically to Jerzy Dudek and reminded him of the actions of Bruce Grobbelaar in Rome 21 years ago, Liverpool's history ceased to be an overwhelming presence. The club's modern day millionaires from across the world fed on it. Carragher, a son of Bootle, reminded Dudek, a Polish miner's son, of their shared heritage. Dudek responded and Liverpool won the European Cup again.

Rafael Benitez is taking a strange route to immortality. The first trophy, conventional wisdom says, is the hardest. Liverpool's most recent managers have made it a little easier by first winning the League Cup and not much else. Gerard Houllier boosted his CV by adding Super Cups and Charity Shields to his list with a brazenness which would make an estate agent blush, but the great trophies, the Premiership and the European Cup, remained elusive.

Benitez has begun with the most coveted trophy of all, the tournament that, traditionally, is the capstone to an illustrious career, not the starting point. By winning in Istanbul with a team in which 11 of the 14 players used had played for Gerard Houllier, Benitez signalled his remarkable abilities, not least of which has been to liberate the players from the scarring of Houllier's era.

When Liverpool were losing by a goal at half-time to Manchester City last August, it had been five years since they had recovered from a half-time deficit to win a game. Under Houllier, Liverpool's players had been coached not to lose and then, in the dying days, not to lose too badly. The work Benitez had to do was as much psychological as tactical. Liverpool came from behind to win that afternoon and eight months later, they would produce the most staggering comeback in the history of the game against AC Milan.

But Benitez's desire to be daring brought Liverpool right down last Wednesday before he dared again and won. Those who had categorised him as a defensive coach had ignored too many signs, not just from his first season at Liverpool, but his time at Valencia. In a coaching world dominated by men like Houllier and Sven Goran Eriksson, time-servers and bureaucrats, Benitez is courageous and, at times, a gambler. On Wednesday night, he plunged.

As the team was being announced, the 40,000 Liverpool supporters who had made the journey were descending down the winding road that led to the stadium. It had the feel of an evacuation, not a pilgrimage, a march into the unknown. All across the dusty hills, Liverpool's supporters staggered towards the stadium. Their clarion call, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, bounced around the mountains. By half time, Liverpool's dreams of a fifth European Cup had been tossed into the flames.

When he was asked last week if Liverpool would attack Milan as they had Juventus, Benitez announced, "it's a possibility". This was ignored by many, Liverpool would defend, they insisted. Benitez, instead, picked a team to attack. Dietmar Hamann was the midfielder to miss out. Harry Kewell was picked - Hamann was dropped because Steven Gerrard and Xabi Alonso were automatic inclusions.

Gerrard had struggled recently in the advance role where Kewell was asked to operate on Wednesday and maybe that influenced Benitez's thinking. By inclination and by ego, Gerrard is a central midfielder who controls the game. He has failed in this role whenever he encounters world-class opposition and last week, he failed again.

Of course, the early goal destroyed Liverpool and in this, Benitez must again consider his zonal marking system which allowed Paolo Maldini, hardly an unfamiliar face, to wander unmarked into the box to score.

But Liverpool had responded well when Alessandro Nesta appeared to handle the ball and Milan broke away to score. Those who think the Italian inadvertently brushed the ball with his elbow or that Gattuso later had no intention of fouling Gerrard for the penalty, are naively forgetting the Italian art of fouling while appearing to be virginally innocent. Yet Milan had too much freedom, Benitez had asked too much of his captain and Kaka was dancing through the weak Liverpool resistance.

Gerrard's strengths are physical and, in this Liverpool side, spiritual and symbolic. At times he appears to be a little boy, lost as he struggles with the enormity of situations on the pitch or in his head. He is not a thinker as his post-match comments indicated when he revealed his torment as the game slipped away from Liverpool. In the first half, Gerrard lacked the intelligence to conceive a way out for his side. Instead he became more and more frantic, giving the ball away casually and allowing Kaka to brush him aside in the build-up to the third Milan goal.

At times Gerrard appears to be a little boy, lost as he struggles with the enormity of situations on the pitch or in his head

At half-time, only the quixotic and the deluded in the crowd believed there was a chance for Liverpool's redemption, but among the 40,000 there were a few of those. As the teams came out for the second half, the Liverpool fans rose and sang You'll Never Walk Alone. The Liverpool crowd is sentimental and thin-skinned with a performer's ego, but they know how to put on a show.

Benitez's words at half-time included a plea not to let those supporters down. As they walked out for the second-half, the players could hear, in the staggering rendition of the old song, just what he meant. Milan had been celebrating at half-time, Djimi Traore revealed (although Jamie Carragher remarked he would have been too if he'd been in their position) and they must have felt like high-fiving again as they came out and saw that Traore was still on the pitch. An immediate mistake by the full-back led to a Shevchenko free-kick which Dudek saved brilliantly. The game was about to change.

With Steve Finnan injured, Hamann took his place and quickly showed his value to the team. It is perplexing that Benitez can allow the German to leave Liverpool this summer when he offers - as the Brazilians say - an "invisible wall" in front of the defence.

But Hamann was not the whole story. Gerrard, who could neither play nor think when the game was in the balance, was liberated by the doomed situation Liverpool were in. Where he led by physical force, his team-mates and the Liverpool supporters followed.

Since Liverpool's victory, the intellectual wing of English sports journalism (many of whom had insisted that Liverpool were wrong to discard Houllier - a cultivated man - last summer) have come up with a neat line in self-loathing for the remarkable scenes they witnessed. They wonder if an English side will ever dazzle in a European Cup final rather than relying on grit and steel. "Never the irresistible force, always the immovable object," one wrote yesterday. This ignores the stunning nature of Manchester United's victory in 1999 - and it completely forgets the manner in which they beat Juventus in the semi-final. It also begs the question, how an immovable object can recover from a three-goal deficit without being irresistible?

A stunned Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti described what happened between the 55th minute and the 60th as "six minutes of madness". There was madness everywhere as the game changed: madness in the performance of Gerrard who was free to take a physical battle to Milan now that Hamann was thinking for the two of them; a strange madness in the composure of Alonso, whose every touch seemed to be of a contemplative artist at work rather than a competitive sportsman in the biggest game of his life. Madness, too, in the way Milan collapsed.

The only explanation for the team Rafael Benitez picked was that he knew how brittle Milan were. Liverpool had to lose three goals before they found out what Deportivo and PSV had already established: Milan could be broken.

But as the game turned with Gerrard's header and his exhortations to the crowd, Liverpool were depending upon more than just Milan's flakiness, they were being guided by a collective will that revelled in the impossibility of the plan. Every moment seemed to contain an epic parable.

Jamie Carragher collapsed and was treated for cramp, returned to the field and immediately stretched for another crucial interception and cramped again. In the bars around Taksim Square later that night, they sang their song of praise: We all dream of a team of Carraghers. Number one is Carragher and Number Two is Carragher. Normally, they stop when they reach 11, but on Wednesday night they sang to 100.

It had just passed 12.0 when Jerzy Dudek proved that Liverpool's comeback was part of some pre-ordained plan. Andriy Shevchenko moved between the Liverpool defenders to meet Serginho's cross. He connected but Dudek saved, then, miraculously, saved again. It was midnight in the garden of good and evil. Dudek rose to his feet and nodded three times as if looking for affirmation that the ball had not crossed the line, that Liverpool's remarkable journey was not yet complete.

Liverpool had to lose three goals before they found out what Deportivo and PSV had already established: Milan could be broken

By the time Dudek had brought Liverpool's history alive by saving from Shevchenko, after putting Serginho off and stopping Pirlo's penalty, the evening had turned into a night of magic realism. There was mystery and wonderment and cruelty. Cruelty for Shevchenko who was outstanding, even when his team-mates were imploding in the second half and cruelty for Dida, the Milan goalkeeper who saved as many penalties as Dudek over the course of the evening, but had lost.

The scenes at the end were remarkable. Liverpool's players ran to Dudek, but some burst away before they got to him and sprinted to the Liverpool supporters at the other end. On this night, they were part of the brotherhood.

After the players had left the pitch, the supporters fled the scene of triumph, with smoke and dust mixing in the air to create an atmosphere of warriors returning from a mighty, medieval battle.

Liverpool had won, but comprehending it was difficult as the layers of one of the great mysteries of sport were uncovered.

When Liverpool won in Rome in 1977, it confirmed they were the dominant team in Europe, capable of ruling for a generation. In Istanbul - a city dedicated in the fourth century as the New Rome - Rafael Benitez achieved a different kind of glory. Like Bob Paisley, a manager he resembles in many ways, Benitez has achieved what his predecessors failed to do. Like Paisley, he will not rest and he will be ruthless in achieving his objectives. But Liverpool have a new story, perhaps the most remarkable of all. The club's history was sent into battle on Wednesday night, now it will no longer be a burden.

[Rushian]

Fantastic fans sent shivers down my spine

Sunday Mirror, May 29 2005

Cruyff hails Red Army

Exclusive By Simon Mullock
 

JOHAN Cruyff has created and savoured some of the most memorable moments in football.

As a footballer the Dutchman was a genius. As a European Cup-winning coach he demanded his teams play attacking football.

But in Istanbul last Wednesday Cruyff, 58, was moved by a new experience. He said: "There's not one club in Europe with an anthem like You'll Never Walk Alone.

"There's not one club in the world so united with their fans. I sat there watching the Liverpool fans and they sent shivers down my spine.

"A mass of 40,000 people became one force behind their team. That's something not many teams have. For that I admire Liverpool more than anything."

The moment that epitomised the emotionally charged Liverpool support came at half-time. At first it seemed a mere act of defiance as the red hordes sang their favourite anthem. But the noise swelled to a deafening, inspirational roar. And how Liverpool's players were inspired.

While the massed ranks of the Kop choir touched a chord, Cruyff was also unstinting in his praise for Rafa Benitez.

"Benitez is now in a new echelon of top coaches in Europe," he said. "Only the best coaches in the world can inspire comebacks like that.

"I always rated him when he worked in Spain. His vision, the way he made his team play, their style proves he's a very modern coach.

"Against Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final it was all about control and defence. That's not the way I like to see Liverpool play.

"Liverpool have a status around the world for the quality of their attacking and entertaining football. Their coaches in recent times all inherited that history. That kind of heritage is the hardest thing for a coach to cope with.

"Benitez and his recent predecessors are not just trying to live up to modern expectations of their club. They are always reminded of the great times in the past. The longer it was taking to come up with the European Cup the bigger the pressure, the harder it was to deal with the past.

"I knew that if Benitez wanted to win the Champions League he would have to change from his semi-final tactics.

"In the first half in Istanbul he was sticking to a similar, controlled approach. At half-time he changed it all.

"He showed, after all, how attacking he can make Liverpool play. Maybe he should have done it earlier - but he showed the character and quality of a truly top coach.

"In the second half he created pressure on Milan. He took a full-back out, put an extra man in midfield and we saw all the real one-to-one fights in the most important areas of the field. That's where Liverpool beat the great Milan."

Cruyff, who detests anything negative in the game, added: "The difference was also seen between coaches Ancelotti and Benitez. Benitez had the quality to put things right, while Ancelotti made big mistakes.

"Ancelotti kept his back four because he thinks defensively - but Benitez was thinking offensively.

"When Liverpool had pulled two goals back I saw fear in Ancelotti's eyes. He didn't know what was happening to him. He didn't make the chances he should have. He didn't change his tactics.

"With this victory Liverpool now have a coach touched by the glory of the great Liverpool teams of the past."

Cruyff singled out three Liverpool men as his heroes of Istanbul. "I rate Steven Gerrard so highly. He is one of the best midfielders in the world and I know from my connections that Barcelona have always liked him.

"I call Jamie Carragher my Marathon Man. He looks like a marathon runner whose legs are turning to jelly as he's about to cross the finishing line but he finds more energy to get there.

"The sliding tackle he made after receiving treatment for cramp summed up the character of the team. He was phenomenal.

"And Jerzy Dudek's the man whose saves brought Liverpool the European Cup. The man's been criticised for a year. The double save he made late on to deny Shevchenko gave him the confidence to perform like he did in the penalty shoot-out.

"He took the mickey out of the Milan players during the shoot-out. He drove them crazy!"

[Rushian]

The Times, May 30, 2005

Fretting while the scarlet tide make history

By Elvis Costello

I WAS ON A NARROW ROAD THROUGH ancient woodland when the awful news came over a crackling connection: “He’s left out Hamann and he’s playing Kewell!” My heart sank. I knew we were doomed. Minutes later I arrived at the University of East Anglia, where I have played concerts since 1977. I was booked to perform just as Liverpool were taking the field in their first European Cup final in 20 years.

I had tried everything to re-schedule the concert, remembering what Paul McGrath had once told me about an Albanian trip with Ireland: “I might pull a hamstring . . .” I had suggested a teatime show or even a late-night show but the best we could manage was to announce through the local radio and newspapers that the start would be delayed until the end of the 90 minutes. This way I would still have sufficient time for a complete set. I had remained quietly confident that it would not take very long for Liverpool to subdue an overconfident AC Milan. That was until I heard the team news.

Now I thought it might possibly require extra time. If so, I would have to get on stage and face the unusual torture of having the score relayed to me by semaphore or hand-printed cards. The last time we attempted this was in Glasgow during the infamous Michael Thomas game at Anfield in 1989. I played the longest song in my repertoire, while keeping my gaze from the wings, knowing that by the time I finished the tune, with the score at “0-1”, Liverpool would be champions. As the applause began, I looked round to see my stage manager holding up “0-2”.

The travelling musician often ends up following an important game in unlikely circumstances, listening to the World Service via an aerial hung from the curtains in a Hamburg hotel, or maybe that was in Nagoya. Then there was the 7am rendezvous in the “The Mad Dog in the Fog” pub in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, for Liverpool’s Cantona-inspired defeat in the FA Cup Final of 1996 and realising that Ray Davies, of the Kinks, was sitting at the next table. Perhaps, more pertinently, there is the memory of staying up all night in Australia to watch the broadcast of Bruce Grobbelaar’s “Spaghetti Legs” defeat of AS Roma in 1984.

So, in contrast, a large-screen TV in a university common room was an unimaginable joy. Then the game started. The absence of Hamann was immediately felt as no one picked up Maldini, even though his powerful downward half-volley might have been saved by a goalkeeper who had been on the park for more than 50 seconds. Things went rapidly downhill. Players who had performed superbly during the season — or at least when they hadn’ t been confined to the treatment table — such as Xabi Alonso and Luis García, looked like boys against Milan’s men. Liverpool’s most improved player of the season, Djimi Traoré, was suddenly returned to the nervous and accident-prone form that he had shown under Gérard Houllier.

At 23 minutes, with the midfield being totally overrun and the Reds’ usually resolute defence looking vulnerable, Rafael Benítez’s big gamble finally paid off: Kewell pulled up. Now, Australian Harry may be a very fine human being but he has the misfortune of appearing to many fans as the epitome of the spoilt modern footballer who places his agent’s agenda ahead of that of the club.

The commentator reported that Kewell had “asked” to come off. In Liverpool folklore you do not ask to come off in a final . . . or any game, unless you are dead. For heaven’s sake, Gerry Byrne played 117 minutes of the 1965 FA Cup Final with a broken collarbone and still managed to set up one of the goals. In 1956 Bert Trautmann, the former German PoW and Manchester City goalie, played in the Cup Final with a broken neck. Did he complain or ask to be taken off? Did he heck. They didn’t even discover his injury until three days after the game.

Then there is the matter of the “Alice” band. At the risk of sounding like a fogey reminiscing about the good old days, I honestly cannot remember “Sir” Roger Hunt, the legendary Liverpool striker, ever sporting one of these accessories. Even an Evertonian wouldn’t wear one. If big Duncan Ferguson grew his hair down to his knees, it is inconceivable that he would ever pace the Goodison dressing-room saying, “Wee man, does this make me look harder or just like a bit of a Jessie?” There doesn’t even seem to be any discernible benefit in wearing the “Alice”. Milan Baros has sported one all season and he still cannot find the goal.

OK, for a short while things did go from bad to worse. Milan continued to cut through the Liverpool defence like a chainsaw through a bucket of ghee. By half-time the scoreboard read 3-0 and I felt a horrible repressed memory welling up from childhood: the morning in 1966 when the paper reported that Bill Shankly’s invincible Liverpool side had been crushed 5-1 . . . apparently by a team named after a famous household cleaner. Now this game was also turning into a humiliation too dreadful to witness. I decided to do the unthinkable and go on stage early.

During half-time, as my crew completed the final checks on our equipment, I fielded a commiserating call from my one friend who is Chelsea fan and a stricken text message from a pal in Istanbul. I began warming up my voice and tried to locate the most reverberant location backstage. This turned out to be the stairwell leading to the now deserted TV room. “Oh well,” I thought. “I might as well see the first few minutes of the second half.” I found that Didi Hamann was on the field, as he should have been at the start, and that Liverpool were on the ball, looking far more organised. I pulled up a chair just in time to witness Steven Gerrard’s magnificent header.

I affected a nonchalant air and strolled back downstairs to indulge in the strange rituals and superstitious practices that precede every performance. “Well, they’ve made it look a bit more respectable,” I said, to no one in particular, as crew members hurried by in every direction. My stage manager called out “five minutes” and I decided to use two of them by taking another quick peek at the screen. It couldn’t hurt.

A member of the university staff was the only person in front of the television. He had a startled look on his face. The score read “3-2”. I heard someone bellowing down the stairwell, “HOLD ON” . . . and it was me.

The crew quickly deserted the stage and burst into the room just as Gerrard burst into the box and was flattened. You could see from Alonso’s eyes that he wouldn’t put away the penalty but he is 23 and much quicker to the goalkeeper’s parry than Milan’s veteran defenders. Unbelievably, Liverpool had levelled the score in just over five minutes. The members of the Imposters (my band) now joined the television audience. Collectively they know as much about football as I know about lacrosse. However, they tolerate my football-related monologues with the indulgence of an elderly aunt humouring an eight-year-old attempting to explain the mythology of Star Wars. Soon they were swept up in the drama.

When a substitute was seen pacing the touchline, doing menacing neck rolls like a boxer in a title fight, Pete Thomas, the drummer, let out a comic shriek of “Who is THAT?” I was inspired to a ludicrous bout of deadly serious Motson-like myth-making. “That is Djibril Cissé and he has recovered from a career-threatening double fracture of his leg in record time and he is destined to win this competition.”

Our American bass player, Davey Faragher, remarked that, with his dyed yellow hair and strange tattoos, Cissé looked more like a character from a superhero comic strip. Frankly, if the commentator had told us that he was part-amphibian and had webbed feet, it would have seemed quite credible then. However, by the time the striker was introduced, Liverpool’s most talented playmaker, Gerrard, was filling in at right back and García and Alonso seemed too exhausted to lift the ball over the head of Jaap Stam, who would have otherwise been left in the dust by Cissé’s astonishing acceleration.


Normal time concluded without a conclusive result and we could delay the show no longer. Steve Nieve, the pianist, who had just had the rules explained to him, confidently predicted that Liverpool would prevail in any penalty shoot-out. An ominous rumbling finally penetrated our theatre of football. We approached the stage to the sound of a slow handclap and catcalls. The promoter had spent the second half cowering backstage rather than taking responsibility for any coherent announcement explaining the ongoing situation. This was left to one of my soundmen, who is an Arsenal fan, and you know how they like to lie doggo and then win with the last kick of the game.

I can’t say that our entrance to the stage was greeted with wild acclaim. The lights finally went down and the booing actually increased. The lights came up and at first glance the people of Norfolk seemed to be divided into two sub-groups. Those who like to eat biscuits and go to bed early after a little light jiving and a handful of the kind of untamed flatlanders who are sometimes portrayed in Seventies horror films brandishing flaming torches at a lynching.

It had been suggested by my Chelsea-supporting friend that I might further ingratiate myself with a Norwich crowd by echoing the recent emotional outburst of Delia Smith. So my opening remark was “Let’s be having you” and I promptly received a glass of water across the neck of my guitar.

Now I have had many things thrown at me over the years but none of them has been less terrifying than half a glass of lukewarm water. At least it could have been some beer, preferably still in the bottle. I’ve had people seriously intent on killing me, and not just in the late Seventies, when a man wasn’t dressed without a hatchet in his head at couple of our more lively gigs. As recently as “Woodstock 3” , in 1999, Nieve and I faced down what looked like an irate mob of method actors auditioning for a remake of Apocalypse Now. Once the audience have their faces painted green and twigs in their hair, you know you are in deep trouble. Those crazy kids seemed to want to maim us for no other reason than that we were older than them. They were throwing full cans of lite beer and Diet Coke at us, but we pressed on regardless and managed to get out of town unscathed before they started to enact any of the more grisly scenes from Lord of the Flies.

Back in Norwich, it started to become apparent that some people had not got the message about the late start. The drunk who threw his glass of water was ejected by security but not before I identified him, in strictly literal terms, as “a tosser”, along with a couple of other adjectives that might have offended some Daily Mail readers, even if they are not usually that prominent at my shows, because I hate their guts. The offender was promptly taken outside and beaten to a pulp . . . by his girlfriend, who was angry about missing the show.

Once we got rolling, the boisterous start gave a different flavour to the show, although the Imposters played with their customary swagger and panache, not unlike the Liverpool team of the Hansen/Dalglish era. I tried my best to keep my eyes from the TV screen over the bar at the back of the room but the words “Oh s***, he’s missed” might have accidentally crept into the lyrics of Good Year for the Roses .

And suddenly it was all over. I could see people in the bar area punching the air and a rolling cheer overwhelmed the applause for Kinder Murder. Our security man, Paddy Callaghan, capered in the shadows at the edge of the stage with a balletic grace that belies his frame and this was all the confirmation I needed to cue You’ll Never Walk Alone, a song that we had never performed before as a band.

The audience took up the anthem like a mini-Kop and saluted the Liverpool victory with the massed illumination of their mobile phones. It was a bizarre and moving sight. I managed to make only a couple of football-related dedications during the rest of the two-hour set. I’m not sure that Benítez would really appreciate The Delivery Man but you can guess what I meant by it. We had already played I don’t want to go to Chelsea, so I couldn’t dedicate that one to Gerrard but we did end with The Scarlet Tide.

The next day I had to check the headlines to see that it wasn’t all some kind of crazy dream. Liverpool made the first edition and our antics made the late night final after a couple of “Angry of West Runton”-type people decided to get their names in the paper. Our promoter demanded £400 to compensate for the 16 souls who had asked for their money back, the cheap swine. He’s never had more publicity in his life. On the other hand, I was happy to offer free tickets for our next Norfolk show, if such a thing should ever occur, in the event that a ticket-holder had to catch the last bus home or relieve a baby-sitter.

Now I’ve seen kids wearing Liverpool shirts everywhere from Addis Ababa to Anfield and maybe, years from now, some of them may be able to reel off the names of this team, as I can still recite Lawrence, Lawler, Byrne, Strong, Yeats, Stevenson, Callaghan, Hunt, St John, Smith and Thompson. If so, they should start with the name of Jamie Carragher, even though Jerzy Dudek was the hero of the shoot-out.

Or maybe it will be another glorious trail that leads nowhere, like Houllier’s treble-winning season in 2001. Still, I wouldn’t trade that famous afternoon in Cardiff or one insane evening in Dortmund any more than all the Liverpool fans in Istanbul and around the world — which still includes Norwich, when I last checked — are ever likely forget last Wednesday night.

Bill Shankly’s famous aphorism, “Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that”, was made macabre by a shameful night in Belgium 20 years ago and utterly stripped of its almost innocent power to inspire by the terrible crimes surrounding the Hillsborough disaster. Some of those crimes were committed with words in newsprint and they should never be forgotten or forgiven.

Football may not be more important than life and death but this match unexpectedly proved that, despite the greed, vanity and vile bigotry that lurks within and sometimes overwhelms the game today, it can still be magical, confounding and create a dramatic scenario that would be rejected as too fantastic if written as sports fiction. For those two hours or so it was certainly more important than rock and roll and getting to bed early.

[Armin]

independent

James Lawton: It was not just on the pitch that Liverpool reacquainted themselves with greatness

28 May 2005

Nothing in life is quite perfect, as the Liverpool fans on a flight back to Manchester from Istanbul discovered this week. Not a single Mancunian customs officer demanded to know if they had anything to declare.

It was a little as if Mark Antony had sweated all that blood over his tribute to Julius Caesar, then found the Forum closed for the day. For four hours they had polished their responses for when they walked through the green channel. The common theme, as you may have guessed, was, "Yes. The European Cup, wack, and it's ours for keeps."

Plagiarists among them could have reasonably borrowed from Oscar Wilde, who declared, "Only my genius." They might have said that because in this age of fan culture, when it seems every minor celebrity has an irrepressible urge to identify himself with a football club, the Liverpool support had reannounced an old genius... a brilliant capacity to back its team with wit and passion and, also, a knowledge that the wonder of football, the reason why it has claimed every corner of the world, is that every so often it flies beyond the force of mere logic.

This is no doubt why one of the younger Liverpool fans peered at the screen of a laptop, as its owner misguidedly launched into a half-time obituary on a failed fantasy, and said, "Hey, mate, you're making a terrible mistake... we're going to win this game."

Whether he and his 35,000 companions truly believed it is now beside the point. As the Milanese celebrated in their dressing-room, the Liverpool fans sang throughout the break. They sang, what else could it be, "You'll Never Walk Alone" and as they did so only someone made of stone could have been unmoved by this peculiar force of emotion.

However, Liverpool were dead, and you had to consider the reasons for it. Rafael Benitez, the brilliant pragmatist, had gambled, unaccountably, shockingly, on Harry Kewell, and Kaka, the brilliant Kaka, had run free. But Benitez saw his mistake and he rectified it and he told his players that at the very least they had to score a goal. They had to do it for themselves and for that great army on the terraces singing in the face of humiliation.

Almost all the rest is instantly recorded and surely unforgettable football history. Except, perhaps, for the astonishing announcement made by the Istanbul police department on the morning after which came with a sense that reality was still in a state of suspense. The police said that there had not been a single arrest. A body of men, who in the past have shown the reflective powers of a pack of hungry and enraged wolverine, had had no cause to feel a single collar or red T-shirt. Twenty years after Heysel, and deep into the age of institutionalised English binge-drinking, this was not least of the miracles.

It is one that should not be allowed to pass without a certain awed comment, and perhaps least of all in this quarter, where on the eve of the game grave suspicions were raised.

The cynical may say that the post-game mood might have been different if Milan had maintained their vast first-half superiority, but the sense here - judged on that half-time demeanour, when the game in all rationality had been lost - is that sorrow rather than hate would have been the prevailing response. We will never know for sure but it is not unreasonable to believe that this week we had on the terraces and the old streets of Istanbul a closing of one of the darkest chapters in English football.

What happened at Heysel can never be forgotten, but we can say that the sins of the fathers should not be passed on to the sons.

Fathers and sons were much in evidence in Istanbul and this too provided a wonderful sense of a return to the best of the past. Fathers and sons exchanging jokes and bursting into the ditties of the Kop. Fathers and sons believing, in a good humoured way, that they shared ownership of the world.

Of course there are bad apples and it was not overly pessimistic to worry that some of them would reach Istanbul, but if they did the sheer force of a benign gravity kept their noses pinned to the bottom of the barrel.

That, surely, is one of the big reasons to celebrate Istanbul; that, and the re-emergence of the classic identity of the Liverpool fan, the supporter bred not just on winning football but a game of values, and with the gift of both humour and knowledge.

When Don Revie's Leeds United won their first League title in 1969, the triumph was confirmed, of all places, at Anfield. The reaction of the Kop is a memory treasured by all the Leeds players, and it is one undimmed by the fact that a brick flew through the window of the team bus as it pulled away from the ground. No one is perfect, and if that status was achieved in Istanbul there are no guarantees that it will be maintained. However, nowhere have we perhaps seen such a tour de force of passion and wit.

Give unto Caesar what is his, demanded a higher authority than Mark Antony, and today it is no hardship to do the same to the Liverpool fan. This week he deserved the highest praise - and at least one Manchester custom guard with enough basic decency to ask him precisely what he had to declare.

independent

[MichaelA]

Sunday May 29, 2005
The Observer

The miracle of Istanbul

It was a long and tortuous journey to their first European Cup final for two decades, but the Liverpool faithful finally found redemption on the road to Istanbul. Special report on the night they'll never forget by Paul Wilson, Brian Oliver and Kaz Mochlinski

All 11 of the goals scored in the 2005 Champions League final came at one end of the pitch. The net at the other end, thanks to heroics from Jerzy Dudek and Djimi Traoré, among others, remained unused all night. So did a huge pile of bricks in the city centre. The significance of both is immense, even if the occasion will rightly be remembered for one and not the other.
The real joy of the most remarkable European Cup final of all was a double happy ending for players and fans. On the road to Istanbul, the two travelled together and if anyone was in any doubt after the quarter-finals and semi-finals that a closer symbiosis exists between the team and the supporters in Liverpool than almost anywhere else in the world, the dramatic scenes at the end were a clincher. When Dudek saved Andriy Shevchenko's final penalty at 12.29am local time, some of the Liverpool players were noticeably quicker to hug members of the crowd than their team-mates.

There were two reasons for the uninhibited sense of release and only one of them was because this was the greatest comeback in the history of European finals. The other related to the events of 20 years ago, when Liverpool were last in the European Cup final against Juventus. The road to Istanbul really began in Brussels 20 years ago today, when Liverpool's domination of Europe came to such an abrupt and tragic end and all the club's supporters had to endure the lasting stigma of causing the death of 39 innocent fans at Heysel.

Overlooked in the rush to judgment during the five-year ban on English clubs in Europe that followed were two facts. One was that the vast majority of Liverpool supporters that night were uninvolved in any wrongdoing. The second was that the fans who were responsible for charging at a Juventus section to occupy an end were behaving in a way considered normal on the terraces at the time. It took another disaster, at Hillsbor ough four years later to bring about a culture change and by that stage Liverpool were carrying the can for the careless way in which we all used to watch football.

Cut to a street a few hundred yards from Istanbul's Blue Mosque in the early hours of Wednesday. This is the first European Cup final held in a Muslim city, but the relaxed, cosmopolitan form of Islam lite in Istanbul means the bars and cafés in the backpackers' area are still thronged with Liverpool drinkers even as the muezzin begins his dawn call to prayers. Apart from giant Fenerbahçe flags at roof level in honour of the club's recent league triumph, there are only red shirts and Liverpool drinkers in sight.

Maybe this part of town is not chic enough for Milan fans: as at the stadium later, the city seems dominated by Liverpool followers. Perhaps for this reason, the atmosphere, while boisterous, is unthreatening. Just as well because this particular street is being repaved.

A lorry load of sand was dumped at one end earlier in the day and all down the sides of the street, right next to the tables where supporters are drinking and in some cases dancing, are loose piles of fist-size cobblestones. Had any or all of these ended up through shop windows, or raining down on the heads of rival fans, Istanbul would have been described as poorly prepared, an accident waiting to happen, just like Brussels. The bricks stay untouched. It is not circumstances that cause problems, it is the way supporters behave.

That Liverpool fans would be on their best behaviour was clear from flight BA680 from Heathrow, which arrived at Atatürk airport shortly after 11pm on Tuesday. The beer ran out before Belgium and the wine lasted only until Bulgaria, but by the end of the flight half the cabin crew had successfully located spare tickets for the match and the chief stewardess thanked everyone on board. 'We were wondering what to expect, but you have been fantastic,' she announced over the Tannoy. 'Have a wonderful time in Istanbul.'

At the back of the plane a cartoon Ulsterman called Paddy addressed the fans and he did not need any amplification. An attempt to get the whole flight to sing the real words to 'Fields of Athenry' failed to get off the runway, so he switched to the direct approach. 'This isn't just about football,' he shouted. 'This is about support! It's about positive energy! The match starts now!' That was at 10.30pm. Almost exactly 24 hours after Paddy's exhortations, Liverpool were walking off the pitch at half-time in need of all the positive energy they could muster.

The real road to Istanbul - to the Atatürk Olympic Stadium, that is - is so new that the white lines were still being painted on the morning of the match and in their haste to complete the project the contractors have also managed to coat litter, rubble and parts of the grassy verge in white. There is nothing wrong with the Atatürk Stadium, or the new roads leading to it, except for their location miles out of the city, nowhere near a railway line or any other sign of civilisation.

Istanbul's new showpiece is already unloved and unwanted, so much so that Fenerbahçe fans have given it the thumbs-down after two seasons of playing there and Turkey players have refused to play a World Cup tie against Greece - their biggest game in qualifying - at the Atatürk next month.

There is a limited market for journalists' hard-luck stories, so the following examples will be brief. We had to go to the stadium twice on the same day, first to get accredited, then to the match. In the process we managed to abandon three taxis. The first, in the morning, actually abandoned us. The driver expressed his frustration with successive police roadblocks so forcibly that he got himself arrested; he was hauled out of his cab and fined. Even though we had been in his cab for almost an hour, we were miles from the ground and although we were lucky enough to hail a second taxi in an unpromising location, our problems were far from over.

After taking us to the stadium, our new driver tried several ways of returning to Istanbul, only to be defeated on each occasion by blocked roads or dead ends. He was eventually reduced to stopping to ask one of the few locals for directions to the road to Istanbul. The poor man had been a cabbie for 10 years and had never encountered anything like the venue for the 2005 Champions League final.

After that experience it was clear that the evening journey, with about 80,000 others going the same way, would be, as the taxi driver put it 'catastroph, catastroph'. Our first cab of the evening could not even get out of a gridlocked city centre and although the second managed to break out of the business district, the journey to the stadium was a painful two-hour crawl that eventually came to a grinding halt with the Atatürk a couple of miles distant. Uefa certainly know how to pick a venue.

One hour before kick-off the scene immediately around the stadium resembled something from a science fiction film. In mounting darkness, a queue of vehicles - mostly taxis and buses - disgorged their passengers as they stuttered, bumper to bumper, along the length of the two main approach roads to the stadium. Their passengers climbed out and walked - some as far as five miles - along verges or across fields of baked mud to the stadium, shining like a recently landed spaceship in the distance.

All those whose journeys involved overland travel from Bulgaria or £500 taxi rides from Turkey's holiday destinations deserved better than such Third-World chaos at the end of their road to Istanbul. One fan, who had travelled from Austria, screamed 'Ice age! Ice age!' in frustration at the facilities. Liverpool fans, advised to arrive early, had got through without any bother five hours before kick-off, only to find no food or drink - not even water - on sale at their end of the stadium and many could not even buy a match programme to pass the time. Apparently, someone stole most of them.

Even with this level of inconvenience, the mood was upbeat and spirits were remarkably high. At various points during the journey the road passed housing projects and what appeared to be detention camps. In both cases the occupants had taken to the streets to watch the procession of Liverpool fans. Early evening Turkish television cannot be up to much if people prefer to stand at the roadside or sit on the verge to watch the whole of Istanbul's taxi fleet inching by.

Many locals dodged cars, trying to sell cans of Efes beer to anyone who had room for more, while others held slogans backing Liverpool. 'Reds, club of the Labour class, welcome to Istanbul' read one placard held up in the remote suburb of Besakhseur. It was as if the resentment at Everton styling themselves the people's club on Merseyside had spread even to Turkey.

Some of the more enterprising Liverpool fans hired motorcycle couriers to beat the traffic. Local youths with two-wheeled transport were paid a few lire to take a pillion passenger to the match. One such Motorbike Man contributed enormously to the pre-match entertainment, standing on the pegs at the back of the bike wearing nothing but shorts, trainers and a selection of tattoos on his upper body. At the end of one outstretched arm was a can of beer, at the end of another a red shirt coiled like a scarf. There were speed bumps in the road, but the driver gamely flew over them without slowing down and his passenger, equally bravely, maintained his crucifixion position throughout, bouncing over the bumps and relaxing only occasionally to take a sip of beer or slap the raised palm of an amused roadside Turk.

At all other times he was singing the tune that Liverpool have adopted as their unofficial tour anthem, the first few bars of Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire'. No words, just the tune - the one you could hear Steve Gerrard singing when he went to the fans at the end of the game. 'De de de de de de der der.'

It does not mean much, but it carries the sort of righteous bravado that sounds perfect when you are speeding to a match bare-chested, standing on the back of a motorbike - bravado that increased over the final leg of the journey when Motorbike Man somehow encouraged another fan to join him and there were three on the bike.

It sounded good when Liverpool fans en masse sang it in the stadium, too. Most Liverpool songs sound good. As an Everton fan admitted through gritted teeth the night before the match, Liverpool not only pick good songs but they sing them with a passion.

As a preposterous opening ceremony reached a conclusion on the pitch, the two-thirds of the crowd dressed in red ran through stirring, but less-than-full-throttle, versions of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' and the present favourite, 'Fields of Anfield Road'. The latter, cleverly linking the city's Irish heritage with a good tune and some deft adaptations, is a good example of what Liverpool do best: 'All round the fields of Anfield Road,/Where once we watched the King Kenny play,/(And could he play!).'

They were still singing when Liverpool went a goal behind in 53 seconds, the unlikely figure of Paolo Maldini scoring without much opposition after coming up to support Milan's first attack. Liverpool supporters know what to do in these circumstances and bold statements of confidence were soon ringing around the ground. This was a football game, not a singing contest, though, and during the first half the confidence and the positive energy transferred wholly to the Italians.

Liverpool were unlucky when claims for a penalty against Alessandro Nesta were waved away and Milan went down the pitch to score a second goal while Milan Baros and a few others were protesting, but that moment of misfortune was balanced by the goal Shevchenko had chalked off through a borderline offside ruling.

Kaká was running the show for Milan, a point made forcibly to some of his team-mates by Vladimir Smicer when he came on in the 23rd minute for the injured Harry Kewell, and simultaneously running Liverpool ragged, as he showed when he sent Hernán Crespo clear to score Milan's third goal. 'They outclassed us,' Gerrard said later. 'They deserved to be 3-0 up.'

At this point even the most optimistic Liverpool fans were hoping only for the embarrassment to stop. The idea that 'Liverpool's name is on the trophy' had been mentioned frequently during the build-up, thanks to the close shave against Olympiakos in the group stage and the improbable results against Juventus and Chelsea by a team who had managed to lose at home to Grazer AK, of Austria. But there was no talk and seemingly no hope of anything so fanciful during the interval. A few punters in England scrambled to put money on a Liverpool victory at 359-1, but they were gamblers responding to attractive odds, not analysts acting on the evidence of the first 45 minutes.

In the queue for toilets in the West Stand a well-dressed Milan fan, alone among a line of Liverpool followers, gestured to them with a praying motion, a frown and a look that said: 'Please, don't blame me. I know my team has just humiliated your team, but it's not my fault.'

Some Liverpool fans behind the goal - perhaps as many as 40 - left the stadium after the third goal went in. What had promised to be an extraordinary celebration had become unwatchable, but at least they were allowed back in later.

A whole new generation of Liverpool supporters had invested a great deal in this match, anxious to emulate their forebears and follow the Reds to the ends of the earth if necessary. After 20 barren years, a European Cup final appearing unexpectedly on the horizon was too good a chance to miss. It was their shot at history, but history was playing a cruel joke. Liverpool fans had gone to extraordinary lengths to travel to the most grotesquely one-sided European Cup final of all time and the team and their fans were heading for ignominy and shame.

That was the situation facing Rafael Benítez and his players at the interval. There seemed no possible way back, only a stab at damage limitation, a point made to the Liverpool chairman, David Moores, at half-time by Michel Platini. The players knew they had performed poorly for 45 minutes. Men such as Traoré, Sami Hyypia and Luis García, for all their heroics in previous rounds, appeared to have reverted to type, as bottlers with no claim to be anywhere near European football's top stage.

Sensibly, Benítez's first action was to correct his initial mistake and reinforce the midfield with Dietmar Hamann, to prevent Kaká enjoying such free reign. That also had the effect of releasing Gerrard farther forward and the captain headed the goal that started the recovery. As Hamann made clear, though, that was pretty much the limit of Liverpool's half-time plan.

'My coach told me to warm up just before the break,' Hamann said. 'He told me I was going to take care of Kaká. I didn't think it was possible to turn things around, but in the dressing room at half-time Rafa Benítez was calm. He said, "We are Liverpool FC, we have so many fans, we are not going to be slaughtered. If we can score a goal quickly we can push on from there." '

Eyewitness accounts from the dressing room insist that most of the players were slumped and barely listening when Benítez began to speak - even Gerrard had his head down and everyone assumed it was all over - yet the manager successfully urged his team to go out and attack Milan to see what might happen.

Benítez suggested Milan might not have much left in their legs, that they may be psychologically brittle after losing the Serie A title late in the season to Juventus. Benítez was perhaps the biggest optimist in the stadium and maybe he was clutching at straws, but his prediction was uncannily accurate.

He had luck on his side, too. His original plan was to withdraw Traoré for Hamann, but he had to rethink when Steve Finnan was unable to take the field for the second half. Switched to the left side of a back three, Traoré rediscovered the inspired form that had deserted him in the first 45 minutes and even managed a goalline clearance to deny Shevchenko a likely winner.

Whatever Benítez said, he did not say anything about scoring three goals in six minutes. With Kaká shackled, Gerrard's goal rocked Milan and the captain exhorted his team-mates and the fans to raise their game. They all did.

Perhaps it was exhaustion after a long season, perhaps the memory of scraping through against PSV Eindhoven in the semi-finals or blowing a 4-1 lead against Deportivo La Coruña in the quarter-finals last year, but for a 10-minute period Milan were dead on their feet and directionless. 'I don't think one can explain what happened,' said stunned Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti later.

Liverpool punished them by scoring twice more in that time. For the briefest moment it appeared they could score a fourth and complete a remarkable comeback in normal time, but Milan reasserted their professionalism and discipline and in extra time Liverpool played for penalties, knowing that whatever happened they had rescued their reputation and done more than their supporters could have asked.

'Three goals in six minutes,' Hamann said. 'You are out there thinking, "This is not for real, you must be in a dream". And when Shevchenko missed that chance in the last minute I just knew we would win on penalties.'

Jamie Carragher said of Shevchenko's miss: 'I was waiting for the net to bulge. I couldn't believe it wasn't game over and that was the moment I felt our name was on the cup.' Even the Italians knew. Crespo said: 'I thought my goals had won it, but I knew that save was the moment we said bye-bye to the cup.'

Dudek unexpectedly emerged as the hero of the night, both for his saves and his barely legitimate tactics during the shootout, but the real achievement belonged to Benítez for altering the body language and changing the outlook of his players during the interval.

The manager continued to make changes. Gerrard became the third player to step in at right-back with a performance that suggested he might be the best of the lot. The positive energy was all with Liverpool now. Even if their bodies showed signs of exhaustion, even if they collapsed in agony with cramp, the fans were lifting them, the force was with them and the fans were singing the best song of the lot: 'We shall not be moved....'

'It all seemed done and dusted at half-time,' Dudek said. 'The talk was about avoiding humiliation, but the manager told us if we could score in the first 10 minutes after the break we had a chance. That is what we did and it took Milan by surprise. You could sense the mood changing. We could only be happy we took it to a shootout, while from Milan's position it must have been devastating.'

That point was reinforced by Ancelotti. 'Penalty shootouts are as much about psychology as they are about technique,' he said later. In other words, Milan just did not have the mental strength for the shootout, which was clear from Serginho's body language before he blasted Milan's first kick high and wide.

Liverpool had meticulously prepared for penalties, to the extent that Dudek knew which way every player was likely to shoot - except that in every case the homework was wrong. 'It shows Rafa Benítez is not infallible,' said Dudek, who dedicated his success to the late Pope and returned to Poland after the celebrations for his son's first communion, a long-planned event postponed from last Sunday because of Liverpool's unforeseen presence in Istanbul.

'When they took their shots they all went in the opposite direction to what we were expecting,' Dudek said. 'I took Jamie Carragher's advice and tried to repeat what Bruce Grobbelaar did in 1984.'

That was a shootout victory, too, against Roma, and Grobbelaar him self explained what happened. 'Joe Fagan told me to try and put them off,' he said yesterday. 'I bit the net and it looked like spaghetti so I decided to do the spaghetti legs routine. Why bite the net? Just to try and put them off - and it worked.'

Dudek said: 'I started to dance as well. I did not manage to disturb Jon Dahl Tomasson and it did not really affect Kaká, either, but with the others it worked. Jon mentioned after that standing forward of the line was not legal, but the referee did not stop it. People forget that Dida did the same thing when Milan won the final two years ago [in a shootout against Juventus]. All anyone remembers is who won.

'Penalties are such a huge test of nerve for a goalkeeper. I was so focused I did not even realise my save from Shevchenko meant we had won. It was only when I saw the rest of the boys running towards me that I knew. It means a lot to have contributed to such an achievement, not just in the shootout, but in the match itself. My brother rang me on Thursday and described the save from Shevchenko at the end of extra time as the Hand of God. The free-kick save from Shevchenko at the start of the second half was just as important in the end. I saw it late and just had time to stick out a hand. Had there been a fourth goal at that stage I don't think there would have been penalties.'

There would have been little debate about who was the real man of the match, either. The deserving Gerrard was not a bad choice, if predictable, but the impression that all Dudek's best work came in the final few minutes was wrong. Spare a thought, too, for the unlucky Shevchenko, who was denied four times by Dudek, once by Traoré and once by a referee's assistant. Try telling him that Liverpool's name was not on the cup all along.

Back in Istanbul, after a slightly quicker return journey than the one out to the stadium, it is doubtful whether a single Liverpool fan was in bed by the time the minaret dawn chorus began at 4.30am, especially because some of the supporters' buses took three hours to return to party central at Taksim Square.

Most of the supporters lucky enough to fly back to Heathrow on Thursday morning - plenty were still stranded in Turkey or adjoining countries by Friday - seemed to have saved sleep for the flight. The same pilot who successfully touted for a ticket on the way out apologised for being hoarse because he had supported Liverpool, then sensibly kept comments to a minimum. Until reaching Blighty and the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, when the voice from the cockpit offered an appraisal of the English weather.

'Look out the window and you'll see it's a beautiful day,' he informed passengers. 'As far as I can see there is only one small cloud, just hovering over Stamford Bridge.' Applause broke out at this early-morning wit.

A metaphorical nimbus was probably hovering over Old Trafford, too because not only have Liverpool got the trophy for keeps but they have a better comeback tale than United in 1999. The pilot, though, cannot see that far. Chelsea is quite far enough, when you have been on the road to Istanbul.

[MichaelA]

Magic and hypnotism of the rolling ball

Kevin Mitchell, chief sports writer
Sunday May 29, 2005
The Observer

What is it about football that inspires strangers to hug each other in pubs, Steven Gerrard to cry and a whole city to smile?

It's only a game, we are continually told. But what sort of game inspires strangers to hug each other in pubs, Steven Gerrard to cry and a whole city to smile? What is this strange power football has over us?
In a vaguely related context, the snooker player Terry Griffiths went some way to explaining it once. 'Walk up to a snooker table and I defy you not to roll one of the balls along the baize.

'It's the magic of the rolling ball. You can't resist it.'
And so it was in Istanbul last Wednesday night. And many other recent nights. Irresistible football. Millions of eyes tracking that ball, urging it towards the net of their choice, mesmerised by an object of such simple beauty. On the pitch are our ciphers, gliding over the grass in patterns that have an internal logic all their own as the players seek to control the often uncontrollable. And it is when one or other of the teams lose their rhythm, when the unexpected turns the game, that we edge forward, some times in disbelief as if this were dream or a play.

Layered over Wednesday's Champions League final was a patina of ever-twisting drama so intense you feared for anyone with a weak heart. 'Liverpool showed that miracles exist,' said Diego Maradona, who knew how fortunate he was to have been there to see it. 'They proved that football is the most beautiful sport of them all. No wonder so many people around the world want to play it and watch it.'

It was no miracle, though. It was a very human triumph. There have been more classical exhibitions, but none in living memory so imbued with courage, togetherness and a belief that nothing is impossible.

Some matches leave us minimally moved. The ugly utilitarianism of the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the hooligans, threatened to choke football to death. Then came the moral decline, from dressing room to board room. And still, the magic of the rolling ball defies all the obituary writers.

This was one of many great football matches this season. Everyone has their favourite, and for many, for exuberance and freedom, nothing matched the second half of the return leg in the same competition between Chelsea and Barcelona. Even that, though, fell short of the pulsating script of Liverpool's recovery from 3-0 down to defeat Milan.

There is something else, too, something more important than a mere match or result. It is pride. Not just in a team or a game, but in a city, a slandered city that has known a disproportionate amount of grief and tragedy in the past 20 years.

The hypnotism was so complete on Wednesday that, without knowing it, the entire nation turned Scouse for one wild night. Blues and Reds on Merseyside put aside their rivalry. People with little or no interest in the game yelled at television screens as if they had swallowed some hallucinatory drug.

None of which will have been the case in Milan - at least not after half-time. The elation here was matched there by an emptiness no sympathy could fill. That, too, describes the power of football.

Of the many inspired reflections on the 'miracle of Istanbul', as it will come to be known, the most eloquent came not from a professional writer, but a player. 'I'm enjoying this triumph like a child,' said Xabi Alonso, scorer of Liverpool's equaliser.

If there is a secret to the magic it might lie there. In our innocent past.

[I love that last bit.]

[MichaelA]

A triumph of passion but little else...

Liverpool's victory proves the Premiership is the best league in Europe. Or does it?

Richard Williams
Friday May 27, 2005
The Guardian

One day, perhaps, an English club will dominate the Champions League with football that sets new standards in technique and tactics. Until then we should be happy to take what we can get from the eternal ability of guts and passion to triumph, on a given night, over extreme sophistication and the assumption of superiority. Happy, in fact, with what Liverpool gave us on Wednesday night in Istanbul, in a match that will forever enjoy a place among the tournament's most dramatic finals.

Like Manchester United in 1999, Liverpool started the evening handicapped by a poor choice of formation. Where Alex Ferguson had dragged David Beckham and Ryan Giggs out of position, giving his team a narrow, congested and fumbling midfield, Rafael Benítez astonishingly decided to start this match, so vital to the club, with Harry Kewell, a player with a heart the size of a diamond ear-stud, just behind Milan Baros. To make room for the Australian dilettante he left out Dietmar Hamann, a player of enormous experience at this level, thereby removing the shield from his back four.
Ferguson was saved from the consequences of his own misjudgment by his substitutes, Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who produced the injury-time goals that consigned a rather more deserving Bayern Munich team to purgatory. United's win had been the result of nothing more than dogged persistence, but its timing banished all memories of the inadequate football that preceded the decisive goals. At least Liverpool's bad spell in the Ataturk Stadium lasted only 45 minutes.

Benítez's selection problems may have started almost a year ago, when he allowed Michael Owen to accept an offer from Real Madrid. From what we have seen of the English striker's performances during his limited opportunities in Spain, and from what we saw of Liverpool's current attackers on Wednesday, the turnaround against Milan might have been accomplished without the need for extra-time or a penalty shoot-out.

At least Kewell's early and unlamented injury gave Liverpool's manager a chance to start putting things right. Vladimir Smicer, coming on to make his last appearance for the club, improved their shape, but it was not until half-time that Benítez bit the bullet and sent on Hamann to occupy the space in which Kaka had been making merry in the first period.

For 45 minutes Milan's superiority had been embarrassing. Kaka, Andriy Shevchenko, Andrea Pirlo and Clarence Seedorf moved the ball around with a suaveness that made Liverpool look like yokels. These, it seemed, were players fit to join Gianni Rivera, Marco van Basten and Dejan Savicevic in the club's pantheon of European Cup heroes. One goal, scored by Paolo Maldini after 50 seconds, appeared to have secured the title for a team with such a vastly experienced defence. Two more, both from Hernán Crespo, merely gift-wrapped the trophy. Or so everyone thought.

But Benítez sent Steven Gerrard and his team-mates out to play for their pride in the second half, enabling us to learn a new lesson in what that commodity can achieve. Gerrard's headed goal turned the momentum around, and from that moment Milan were struggling to stave off defeat. Two more goals came as the Italian side progressively collapsed, and Jerzy Dudek's heart-stopping double save from Shevchenko near the end mimicked the last-minute agility with which Iker Casillas preserved Real Madrid's victory against Bayer Leverkusen in Glasgow three years ago.

And nothing exposed the extent of Liverpool's success so much as Milan's abject performance in the shoot-out. All their resolve had ebbed away as Serginho, Pirlo and Shevchenko failed with efforts that would have disgraced the similar endgame in the Millennium stadium four days earlier. Dudek's antics were displeasing to the eye of the purist, and some of them fell outside the present laws, but they certainly seemed to help in demolishing what remained of the Milanese equilibrium.

So there can no argument. The trophy that will now take up permanent residence at Anfield is there by right. In beating the new champions of England, the new and outgoing champions of Italy, Liverpool ensured their entitlement to be known for the next year as the champions of Europe. The fact that they finished fifth in this season's Premiership, 30-odd points behind Chelsea, is of no consequence and would be of even less if the tournament they won on Wednesday carried a more appropriate title, such as the European Super League.

When a commentator mentioned that Crespo was in line for "the first hat-trick in the history of the Champions League", the immediate response was to shout, "What about Di Stefano and Puskas?" But he was right. This is not the competition those majestic players won so gloriously in the 50s. It is, however, just as hard to win, and Benítez must be saluted for negotiating his team to victory while not quite being able to work out how to win at Selhurst Park or the Riverside.

Not much was said on Wednesday about Gérard Houllier, although it should be remembered that he assembled the collection of players his successor sent out in Istanbul, with the exceptions of the influential Xabi Alonso and the dynamic Luis García. No disrespect to the Spanish coach is contained in the suggestion that no one can say how far Houllier might have taken the club along the same path had a ruptured aorta not interrupted his progress.

Now, of course, there will be a clamour to allow Liverpool to defend the title, an argument made with the support of emotion and tradition, and not much else. The present regulations state every team must qualify through their performance in their domestic leagues, which must have seemed fairer to those who drew up the amendment. It may still seem so to those whose personal loyalties are not engaged in this argument, although the governing body has already undermined its own principle by granting an automatic entry to the winners of the Uefa Cup in order to raise the status of that lacklustre competition. And presumably Liverpool had read the rules before they entered the tournament.

Brazil, after all, are taking part in qualifying matches for the 2006 World Cup, after a similar change to the format. As five-times holders of the title and the current champions, they seem content to comply with regulations that put them on the same footing, and potentially in the same jeopardy, as everyone else.

Times change, and rules change with them. In the early days of Wimbledon, for example, the men's singles champion was given a bye to the next year's final; no one would suggest a return to that arrangement today.

Uefa's committee men may stick to their guns, or they may give in. Whatever the decision, it is unlikely to do much for the standing of a bunch of men who, with a continent's stadiums to choose from, ordered that this year's final be played in a facility that was clearly unready for the occasion. Not that Liverpool's euphoric hordes, who howled their team to victory against Chelsea at Anfield and got their reward in Istanbul, will be bothered about that now.

[Rushian]

What they said: ...and the world's post-match verdicts as well as five great games from this season's European Cup

Sunday May 29, 2005
The Observer

Kenny Dalglish 'There is no point pretending that tonight's final is going to be a feast of football. You won't see either side going for the jugular.'

Carlo Ancelotti 'I'll tell you what we should not do, and that is to worry about Liverpool. They are such a defensive team. We're not the kind of team that will calculate how to win: we believe in attacking properly, with clever ideas and concepts.'

Paolo Maldini 'It is only my children who keep me awake at night - there's no other reason why I'd lose sleep before this game. Liverpool don't know how to attack - caution is at the heart of their game. We play the game properly: our defence is the best in Europe, and therefore the world.'

Silvio Berlusconi, Milan Owner 'Liverpool are inferior to Milan. Milan are in their seventh European Cup final under my leadership. It is a record that makes me feel proud. We are the leading players in world football, the standard-bearers for good play. We are winners, we want to win games in a convincing fashion. This is an ongoing tradition - and one that will continue on Wednesday.'

Andriy Shevchenko 'Liverpool won't win. I said at the start of the season Liverpool couldn't win the European Cup and I still don't think they will. Milan will win.'

Steven Gerrard 'I will lift that trophy. I will be the one doing it, not Paolo Maldini. Imagine that, me with the trophy in the air. It will be the proudest moment of my life. I've seen those images, of Emlyn Hughes, Phil Thompson and Graeme Souness with that great big cup hoisted high above them, and the look on their faces. I want the same. I want that picture on my wall when I'm older. Me with the trophy above my head.'

Diego Maradona (Pictured - in Istanbul as a TV pundit): 'Liverpool showed that miracles exist. They proved that football is the most beautiful sport of them all. After this game, my English team is going to be Liverpool. I came across some of their fans beforehand and they told me they were going to win, but that they would be made to suffer. It's just the way it happened. Liverpool are the best team in the world for what they have done in this European Cup. They deserved the Cup.'

Franz Beckenbauer 'With fighting spirit and passion, Liverpool pushed themselves over the line for what it is possible to achieve. You have to give them a huge compliment for the way they fought their way back. You can't do it in any better way. They should be able to defend their trophy. They have simply deserved it.'

Gianluigi Buffon (below) Juventus goalkeeper 'I will have to do like Dudek the next time. Maybe if I had done that against Milan in 2003 we would have won. During penalties a goalkeeper has the chance to become a fool or a hero. You have to admire his performance: atypical but still useful. Football is often crazy'

Silvio Berlusconi 'Sack Ancelotti? No, poor man, I will never sack him.'

Luis Garcia (above) 'Not even in my wildest dreams did I dream Liverpool would achieve all that it has in this first year in England. So impressive.'

Xabi Alonso 'I'm enjoying this triumph like a child. The secret is that Liverpool is as strong as a pine cone. There is a great sense of camaraderie and an out-of-the-ordinary collective will to get through the tough patches.'

Dietmar Hamann 'Never has an evening started so badly and finished so beautifully. we seemed to play ourselves into a frenzy and turned the match completely on its head in a way that I have never seen.'

Michael Owen 'In Spain now everyone supports Liverpool'

Afton bladet (Sweden) 'Were Liverpool worthy champions? What do you mean? I see Xabi Alonso (below) dance, Steven Gerrard weep and 45,000 people sing You'll never walk alone . The question is not whether they were worthy. The question is whether we were worthy to watch this final.'

Marca (Spain) 'Liverpool have been pronounced brilliant winners... thanks to the overwhelming pride shown by Rafael Benitez's (above) team. Rafa touched the sky in Turkey.'

Gazzetta dello Sport (Italy) 'Incredible. Milan lose a trophy they had already won. And they lost it in a bad way. A really bad way. A really, really bad way.'

Bild (Germany) 'It was gigantic. It was sensational. It was out of this world. Thank you, Milan. Thank you, Liverpool. For the best European Cup final in history.'

El Pais (Spain) 'Benitez is The King of the Mersey. He may not have a statue yet at Anfield, but his name will always be associated with a moment that can only increase the legend of the Reds.'

AS (Spain) 'For two decades Liverpool have been an ordinary team and lacking in the greatness that characterised their history. Worse still they had become resigned to accepting that they were ordinary. But they have got where they have today because of the methodical work of their new coach and his assistants. These men showed everyone that a limited team can still end up being winners.'

Hurriyet (Turkey) 'A fantastic night. The most exciting European Cup final happened in Istanbul. Turkey shone with organising the final in a perfect manner.'

Sabah (Turkey) 'It was a fairy tale from Istanbul. The most beautiful city on earth supplied a wonderful European Cup final. Turkey won 3-0 and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan scored twice, the final one with a shot for Turkish tourism.'

Best ever European Cup season? Here are five great games from 2003/04's edititon...

Manchester United 6 Fenerbahce 2 28 September 2004 Wayne Rooney's brilliant debut for his new club andhis first game back after a broken metatarsal - sustained at Euro 2004 - that kept him out of action for three months. His final strike of his hat-trick was the best, technically the swooping free-kick was stunning, but it was the way the 18-year-old (right) dominated proceedings that made his £27m fee look money well spent.


Liverpool 3 Olympiakos 1 8 December 2004 The result that started it all for Liverpool. The final game in the group stage and one the Anfield side had to win by two clear goals. Trailing at half-time to a Rivaldo free-kick, the Reds, not for the last time this campaign, looked to be going out. Then, goals from Neil Mellor and Florent Sinama-Pongolle allowed the team and 42,045 spectators to dream. Up stepped Steven Gerrard with a 25-yard screamer four minutes from time to make it reality.


Chelsea 4 Barcelona 2 8 March 2005 After an ill-tempered first leg, this return tie had Stamford Bridge fizzing and was the match of the European Cup so far. Chelsea had raced to a 3-0 lead via Lampard (right), Gudjohnsen and Duff, but following twin Ronaldinho strikes - one a sublime 20-yard toe-punt - their European campaign looked to be over. Then on 76 minutes, John Terry took advantage of Ricardo Carvalho holding on to Victor Valdes, to head past the Barça keeper.


Liverpool 1 Chelsea 0 3 May 2005 This was all about atmosphere - the fans raising the roof with their pre-kick-off rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone . That Liverpool won through a disputed Luis García goal hardly mattered. Chelsea had failed to score in 180 minutes and Anfield old-timers were emphatic this was the European evening to beat all others. At the final whistle, the place was delirious.


Liverpool 3 Milan 3 25 May 2005 At half-time Liverpool were broken, 3-0 down and looking at damage limitation. Off went the injured Steve Finnan, on came Dietmar Hamann to strengthen the middle and suddenly the team had ball and momentum. Steven Gerrard led the fightback with a fine header, Vladimir Smicer made it two and Xabi Alonso's equaliser - all within six short minutes- completed it. Jerzy Dudek's last-minute save from Andriy Shevchenko, plus his penalty stop, sealed the ultimate comeback and the Cup is Liverpool's for keeps.

[Rushian]

So what if they didn't win the league? Hail champions with cheers, not jeers

A Champions League open to non-champions is vastly more difficult to win than old knockout cup - and critics should accept that, says Paul Wilson

Sunday May 29, 2005
The Observer

Purists and pedants alike are already busy revising the last few days of history. Liverpool might have thought they had just completed the greatest European Cup final comeback of all time, but even as the trophy goes into permanent residence at Anfield the achievement is being sniffed at because the new European Cup is not the old European Cup, the Champions League is no longer for champions and Rafael Benítez's players have yet to prove they are even the best team on Merseyside.

Some critics seem to want it both ways. The glaring fault of the old format was that although the competition was open only to champions, the champions of Spain, to pick an obvious example, would find it fairly straightforward to eliminate the champions of lesser leagues. To pine for that sort of elitism just because Liverpool could only reach fifth place in the Premiership this season seems ridiculous. In 1985, the last time Liverpool reached the final under the old system, they travelled to Brussels for their ill-fated meeting with Juventus by virtue of having disposed of Lech Poznan, Benfica, Austria Vienna and Panathinaikos. That was it. Four ties, eight legs, all against teams from lesser leagues, and Liverpool were in the final. No one carped at the time, yet now they are carping because Liverpool have managed to put out the champions of England and the top two teams in Serie A .

Nostalgia for the noble origins of the competition is permissible, just as memories of Alfredo di Stefano and Ferenc Puskás do not deserve to be dimmed just because television money and G14 greed have altered the original concept beyond all recognition. What needs to be acknowledged is that the European Cup as presently constructed is vastly more difficult to win than it used to be, precisely because it now contains all the leading teams from all the leading leagues in Europe. If you can stay the course and come out on top of that lot, especially if you happen to have turned round 3-0 down in the final, you ought to be greeted with cheers and not raspberries.

It is undeniable too, and this process has accelerated with the much-needed pruning of the second group stage within the last couple of years, that the competition has become more democratic. This is amazing considering the Champions League was specifically designed to preserve the status quo in Europe and to ensure the biggest clubs made the most money and enjoyed the best chance of success, but the trend established by Porto last season has now been followed by Liverpool in a competition that English clubs have played a major part in this season. Suddenly this is a competition any properly organised and ambitious team can win. With the greatest respect to Liverpool's history, this season they entered the contest as unfancied minnows, and finished it the most unlikely of giant-killers. This is the formula that makes the FA Cup so attractive, writ large across Europe.

In any sport, in any era, all a competitor can do is play by the the rules as they stand and beat the opponents presented. Liverpool did that, fair and square. In terms of determination, application and character their fifth European Cup is at least on a par with any of their previous four, and Benítez has proved an inspirational leader in a remarkably short time. End of story, except that by playing the rules as they presently stand Liverpool will find themselves excluded next season. Only an organisation as dim as Uefa could simultaneously invite non-champions into a Champions League while turning their back on real champions they have just travelled all the way to Istanbul to crown. Credibility has never been a Uefa strong point, but even by their standards it would be ludicrous to stand on ceremony now, just when their competition is more credible than ever.

[Rushian]

A thriller, but nothing to stand by Puskas and Eusebio

David Lacey, a viewer when Real Madrid won the first European Cup in 1955, puts the 50th final into perspective

Saturday May 28, 2005
The Guardian

Remember the FA Cup final? Only just. After what happened on Wednesday night in Istanbul, last Saturday's events in Cardiff have become a blur.

Yet both matches were decided on penalties, each was won by a team who had been outplayed for a large part of the preceding two hours, and in each case crucial saves were made by a goalkeeper not renowned for his reliability.

Both managers, moreover, approached the finals with team selections and tactics which went against their natural inclinations. And both Arsenal's Arsène Wenger and Liverpool's Rafael Benítez got away with it.

So, spot the difference. Of course the crucial distinction was the six minutes in the Ataturk Stadium during which Liverpool wiped out Milan's 3-0 half-time lead. Those six minutes transformed an embarrassingly one-sided Champions League final into an epic compared with which this season's scoreless FA Cup final was a B picture.

Amid the excitement an ITV caption assured viewers they would not miss Celebrity Love Island. This seemed about as relevant as Kenneth Wolstenholme's apology, during the all-time classic between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960, to those BBC viewers who were expecting to watch an illusionist, Al Koran, and instead had to put up with a mere magician, Alfredo di Stefano.

To find anything remotely similar to Wednesday evening it is necessary to go back to the 1962 final when Benfica were 2-0 down to Real after 23 minutes and 3-2 behind at half-time but still won 5-3. Not that the football in Istanbul, for all its drama, could be seriously compared to the game played by Eusebio and Mario Coluna, Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas.

Nevertheless it was proof that Europe's most prestigious club tournament can still provide a climax to be talked about for years to come, an antidote for all those anodyne one-goal affairs the competition has suffered since Benfica, Real Madrid and Barcelona were in their pomp.

Liverpool were involved a multi-goal thriller only four years ago when they won the Uefa Cup in Dortmund by beating Alavés, a modest Spanish side, 5-4 with a golden goal; or rather a golden own-goal, headed by the unfortunate Delfi Geli three minutes from the end of extra-time.

Yet exciting though it was, with Liverpool losing a 3-1 lead then going ahead 4-3 only for Jordi Cruyff to equalise in the 89th minute, that match was less a classic than a series of entertaining cock-ups.

Even in his moment of triumph the then Liverpool manager, Gérard Houllier, whose team had already won the League and FA Cups, admitted there was room for improvement. "We need to improve our passing, our movement and our patience," he said. "We are a bit too hurried and give the ball away too often."

This was an echo of Bob Paisley's reflection on the way Liverpool adapted their game for Europe after decisive defeats by Ajax (7-3 on aggregate) and Red Star Belgrade (4-2) under Bill Shankly's management.

Shankly had dismissed the skilful, imaginative Red Star side as "a bunch of fancy men" but Paisley realised that "our approach was a bit frantic; we treated every match like a war".

On Wednesday in Istanbul, as well as that six-minute fusillade, the most impressive aspect of Liverpool's performance was their disciplined reaction to drawing level. In that situation many a team would, like Prince Rupert's cavalry at Naseby, have charged headlong for victory only to discover that the opposition had regrouped to win the battle. The Roundhead instincts of Benítez's team prevented this from happening.

The goals scored by Steven Gerrard, Vladimir Smicer and Xabi Alonso did not so much set Liverpool up for a straightforward win as give them a second chance to win the final by means which had been widely predicted, namely penalties after forcing a draw. Nobody, however, could have foreseen the nature of that draw.

Benítez's decision to restore Dietmar Hamann to midfield was crucial in plugging the gaps through which Milan had poured before half-time. The Liverpool manager's positive but questionable gamble to employ Harry Kewell as an attacking support for Milan Baros would probably have misfired even if an injury had not forced Kewell off midway through the first half.

Plagued all season by problems of fitness and form, the Australian had wandered around blankly like Crocodile Dundee on his first day in Manhattan. Benítez does not give the impression of a man easily influenced by what he reads in the newspapers, but did Paolo Maldini's pre-match jibe about Liverpool being overcautious get under the manager's skin?

Either way it did not matter in the end. Penalties are no way to settle cup finals any more than golden or silver goals. Yet somehow the denouement on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning local time) was in kilter with the overall plot.

Jerzy Dudek's rubber-legged homage to Bruce Grobbelaar probably did distract the penalty-takers but the TV close-ups as each Milan player prepared to take his kick suggested a man on his way to the scaffold. They had lost a three-goal lead and suspected they were going to pay for it.

About that lead: experienced managers know that to be three up at half-time has its disadvantages because players are inclined to believe the game is as good as won, and midway through Wednesday's game few people would have given Milan an argument. Had Carlo Ancelotti's side led only 1-0 their concentration at the start of the second half would surely not have lapsed the way it did when Gerrard headed Liverpool's first goal and Smicer quickly added another. The rest was pure panic.

Two outstanding questions remain and the answers are interlinked. Gerrard is more likely to stay at Anfield if Liverpool are permitted to defend their Champions League title next season as holders, and since they have won the trophy outright Uefa should be able to allow for this without depriving Everton of their rightful place in the tournament.

Benítez's principal task, however, is to build a team capable of challenging in the Premiership - at the moment Liverpool are Champions League occasionals - and one of his priorities is to find a goalkeeper of a similar quality to Chelsea's Petr Cech.

Or to put it another way, Dudek's biggest wobbly for Liverpool may prove to be his last.

[Rushian]

Grit, spirit and the ultimate glory

Milan 3 - 3 Liverpool (aet; Liverpool won 3-2 on penalties)

Kevin McCarra in Istanbul
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian

The glory of Liverpool is reborn. They are champions of Europe after winning a shoot-out 3-2, with the decider struck by Vladimir Smicer and confirmed by Jerzy Dudek's save from Andriy Shevchenko. But it had taken a near miracle from them to send this match into extra-time. Even there, Dudek, with three minutes left, made a double save from Shevchenko that was all but inconceivable. Liverpool's exhilarating powers of recovery, after being 3-0 behind at the interval, inspired the greatest European Cup final of modern times.

Against all sense, their goals all came in a six-minute spell as they mangled a defence billed as the world's best. That had been beyond conception after Paolo Maldini's opener in the opening seconds and two more goals by Hernán Crespo.

The Argentinian, on loan from Chelsea, could never have guessed that he would be substituted not to enjoy a personal ovation, but because Steven Gerrard, Smicer and Xabi Alonso had put Liverpool on level terms. No one could have conceived of it, except for the Anfield players.

Liverpool were in a final they had scarcely expected to reach and felt for much of the evening that they did not belong there. The encouragement then lay not on the field but in the stands, where the great, undiscouraged believers in this club rallied in remarkable numbers. They had come so far to will their side to triumph but at first were forced to admire the technique and style of Carlo Ancelotti's side.

Milan's immediate breakthrough disrupted an acclimatisation process that had scarcely begun. The goal had something to do, as well, with stagefright in the English side that let their opponents strut the boards. The extraordinary comeback was beyond imagination then.

Djimi Traoré fouled Kaka in the first minute, but the position of the free-kick was not one that would normally make Liverpool quake. Rafael Benítez's men had been well marshalled to stifle Chelsea in the last four, but on this Istanbul evening there was a distracted quality to the marking.

Andrea Pirlo pulled his free-kick slightly behind the main group of attackers and the 36-year-old Maldini hit it hard enough with his right foot from 12 yards to ensure that it flew past Jerzy Dudek on the bounce.

The goalkeeper was beaten twice more before the interval but actually showed a level of aplomb that looked beyond conception for Liverpool. Xabi Alono and Steven Gerrard were left on the sidelines of a midfield full of marvellously articulated moves.

Liverpool were earnest and dogged but there was scant sophistication or cohesion. Minds left in a spin by Maldini's goal took time to steady.

Crespo met a corner in the 14th minute with a header that was blocked on the line by Luis García, well before he got on with scoring.

The first of his goals was traumatic for a Liverpool side already feeling victimised. García had shot wide and then, speculatively, claimed a penalty when he forced the ball against Alessandro Nesta, who had gone to ground, but Milan counter-attacked ruthlessly.

Clarence Seedorf found Kaka and his beautiful pass inside Traoré let Andriy Shevchenko set up Crespo to score at the far post. A minute before half-time, Kaka again split the Liverpool defence with a raking ball and Crespo was on the loose to dink it stylishly over Dudek.

Fans will normally warm to any hint of flamboyance, but there was, as it turned out, a justified ambivalence here about the selection of Harry Kewell. The Australian is at risk of being classified as one of those footballers who is too expensive to be off-loaded.

Naming an attacker whose form is so unpredictable was a cavalier gesture from the roundhead Benítez. Kewell lasted only 23 minutes before going off with a groin strain but his inclusion had its effect, too, on the rest of the team. In particular, it cost Dietmar Hamann his place in the starting line-up, even though it had taken Jamie Carragher to deny him the man-of-the-match award in the semi-final win over Chelsea at Anfield.

Maybe Milan became complacent or, more likely, Liverpool found an urgency inspired by desperation. Facing humiliation, they reacted with so much pride that they created one of the greatest periods in the extraordinarily rich history of this club.

It all started nine minutes after the interval when John Arne Riise crossed from the left and Gerrard climbed to head home. Milan's marking was as lax then as Liverpool's had been at the outset and the consequences were just as extreme. This time it was Ancelotti's turn to gaze in disbelief.

Milan had no chance to regain their poise. All the confidence was Liverpool's as they passed the ball along the edge of the penalty area four minutes later until Hamann put it into the path of his fellow substitute Vladimir Smicer. From 20 yards he drilled a low finish across and beyond Dida.

This was almost certainly the last match for Liverpool of a Czech international who has come to the end of his contract, but this game obliterated the past and the future. A rout had turned into a contest full of compulsive action.

The play roared towards a Liverpool equaliser. All the gaps were in the Milan side as Gerrard drove straight through the middle until Gennaro Gattuso brought him down for a penalty. Dida leapt to his right to save Alonso's kick but the Spaniard smashed in the rebound with his left foot.

The ball had run kindly to him, but all credit was due to Liverpool for making this game alter course and turn back in their favour.

· Fears that the Ataturk Olympic Stadium would prove unfit to stage the final appeared justified last night. The lack of public transport, adequate infrastructure and basic preparations left Uefa officials privately embarrassed at the choice of stadium. Chaotic traffic policing saw one access road closed, stretching journey times to three hours and technicians battled power cuts while struggling to connect telephone lines for reporters and broadcasters in time for kick-off.

Milan (4-3-1-2): Dida; Cafu, Nesta, Stam, Maldini; Gattuso (Rui Costa, 112), Pirlo, Seedorf (Serginho, 86); Kaka; Shevchenko, Crespo (Tomasson, 86). Subs not used: Abbiati, Kaladze, Costacurta, Dhorasoo.

Liverpool (4-4-1-1): Dudek; Finnan (Hamann, h-t), Carragher, Hyypia, Traoré; García, Alonso, Gerrard, Riise; Kewell (Smicer, 23); Baros (Cissé, 85). Subs not used: Carson, Josemi, Núñez, Biscan.

Booked: Carragher, Baros.

Referee: M E Mejuto González (Spain).

[Rushian]

Liverpool 3 - 3 AC Milan

After extra time: Liverpool win 3-2 on penalties

Barry Glendenning
Wednesday May 25, 2005

Preamble

So here we are. After the long and twisting road to the final there are only two teams left standing in the European Cup. Never mind that they're the second best team on Merseyside and in Italy - they've won it 10 times between them, so their pedigree is unquestionable.

It's a tough one to call: I can't see anyone scoring, but neither can I see Shevchenko or Crespo not scoring. My prediction is that a tired Milan side will play very badly and eventually win, because they usually do. The thousands of Liverpool fans who've been gathered outside the Ataturk stadium in Istanbul since early this afternoon would beg to differ, however. Their wildly optimistic predictions have been keeping the Sky news reporters in colourful quote all day.

AC Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti has paired Argentine striker Hernan Crespo with European Footballer of the Year Andriy Shevchenko for tonight's final. At the back, Jaap Stam will partner Alessandro Nesta, while captain Paolo Maldini, appearing in his seventh final, is moved out to left back at the expense of Georgian Kakha Kaladze.

For Liverpool, there's just one surprise: the under-achieving charlatan that is Harry Kewell has somehow managed to worm his way into the starting line-up and will play behind lone frontman Milan Baros. Didi Hamann and Djibril Cisse miss out and will be cooling their heels on the bench.

Meanwhile on ITV1, fledgling pundit Steve McManaman is hoping to see a few goals and a little bit of class tonight. God loves an optimist, but let's face it - it's not as if Macca would recognise either after the season he's just had.

The teams

AC Milan: 1-Dida; 2-Cafu, 31-Jaap Stam, 13-Alessandro Nesta, 3-Paolo Maldini; 8-Gennaro Gattuso, 21-Andrea Pirlo, 20-Clarence Seedorf; 22-Kaka; 11-Hernan Crespo, 7-Andriy Shevchenko.

Liverpool: 1-Jerzy Dudek; 3-Steve Finnan, 23-Jamie Carragher, 4-Sami Hyypia, 21-Djimi Traore; 10-Luis Garcia, 8-Steven Gerrard, 14-Xabi Alonso, 6-John Arne Riise; 7-Harry Kewell; 5-Milan Baros.

Referee: Manuel Enrique Mejuto Gonzalez (Spain).

Pre-match sniping

"Even before the kick-off the Italians are 1-0 up," writes Ben Fitzpatrick. "The Milan team arrive in Turkey immaculately dressed in designer suits, the Liverpool team arrive in suspiciously shiny tracksuits."

"I've never, ever understood this whole support-the-English-team-in-Europe rubbish. I sincerely, truly hope that Liverpool get absolutely stuffed tonight," writes Rob Smyth, once of this parish and a devotee of the MU Rowdies Soccerball Kickers. What would you expect from a pig only a grunt?

"Do you think the usual cry baby Liverpool fans will be on tonight or will they actually take the initative and actually go and watch the game," wonders Kevin Kennedy. "I think AC will win 3-1 but wish Liverpool lots of luck despite the moaners that follow them."

"Rafa knows what he's doing: Milan + Liverpool vs AC Milan = No contest, no?" writes Craig Cottrell, writing furiously on a blackboard covered in complicated looking sums.

Pre-match niceties

On ITV1, Andy Townsend gets the obligatory "they don't come any bigger than this" out of the way early doors, as 800 Turkish military cadets perform an opening ceremony that's so ripe for mockery it hurts. Unfortunately, there's no time for lampoonery as the teams and their mascots click-clack out of the tunnel and line up on either side of the match officials. Milan's players are wearing an all-white kit, while Liverpool wear their familiar red. The fancy Champions League music draws to a close and is drowned out by a rousing rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone, the Rogers & Hammerstein staple so beloved of Liverpool fans. Maldini and Gerrard exchange penants in the centre circle and after weeks of faffing around it's ...

GOAL: Milan 1 - 0 Liverpool: ... an unbelievable start! Almost immediately, a totally unmarked Paolo Maldini scores for AC Milan with a 12-yard volley through a sea of players. It came from a set-piece - a Pirlo free-kick taken from the right of the Liverpool box. A blinding start. Milan are one up after 50 seconds.

2 mins: Liverpool are stunned. Carlo Ancelotti predicted that his team would score inside three minutes and he was spot on - they only needed one. Corner for Liverpool, which Milan Baros wins off Jaap Stam.

3 mins: Great stuff from Liverpool. Steven Gerrard swung that corner out to the edge of the box, where John Arne Riise unleashed a pile-driver which looked to be fizzing goalwards until it hit Jaap Stam in the face. Milan cleared, the ball went out to Gerrard on the right wing and from the inevitable cross, Sami Hyypia brought a smart save out of Dida with a fine volley from the edge of the box.

6 mins: Andriy Shevchenko beats the Liverpool offside trap and pelts down the right wing with nobody near him. As he shapes to cross, with Liverpool looking in big trouble, Sami Hyypia appears out of nowhere to provide a crucial block. There are only six minutes gone and this match is shaping up to be a belter.

8 mins: Free-kick for Liverpool about 40 yards straight out from goal. Gerrard curls it towards the far post, where Harry Kewell attempts to get his head to it. Kaka leans into him and does enough to knock him off balance. The ball skims off Harry's alice band and goes wide.

11 mins: Andriy Shevchenko picks up the ball in the corner, deep in Liverpool territroy. Steve Finnan shepherds him towards the sideline, forcing him to play the ball back towards Maldini. The ball finally ends up with the terrier that is Milan Baros deep in Milan territory, but he's hopelessly outnumbered and loses possession.

13 mins: Milan go close again. Crespo won a corner which was sent into the near post by Pirlo. Crespo nicked half a yard on Steven Gerrard, who was asleep, and flicked it goalwards. It was left to Luis Garcia to chest the ball off the line as it looked set to creep in between player and post.

15 mins:John Arne Riise squanders possession with a feeble attempt to dribble around Gennaro Gattuso deep in Milan territroy. That kind of nifty footwork might work against Darren Purse in the Premiership, John, but it won't work here. Moments later, Steven Gerrard floats a cross into the Milan box, but it's a smidge too high for Harry Kewell.

18 mins: Andriy Shevchenko sneaks in behind Djimi Traore and is mere inches away from controlling a Pirlo purler from midfield, that would have seen him clear through on goal. For Liverpool, Harry Kewell is hobbling. The physio is trying to persuade Kewell to continue, but he doesn't want to. He's indicated to Rafa Benitez that something has snapped and he's in real pain. Either that or he's tired. You never really know with Harry.

21 mins: Vladimir Smicer is getting ready to come on. Apparently he didn't have his boots on - hence the delay. And to think some people say footballers are dumb. Liverpool substitution: Kewell off, Smicer on.

23 mins: Luis Garcia has moved into the space behind Baros previously occupied by Harry Kewell, while Vladimir Smicer has taken up a position on the right side of midfield. Meanwhile, your emails: "After a weekend in which one team showed how it was possible to totally outplay the opposition for 120 minutes and still end up losing, I guess anything's possible. But for the sake of sanity, I hope a classier, more gifted, AC Milan side wipes the deck with this shambles of a Liverpool outfit which just shouldn't be there," writes Reg Gorczynski, who I'm guessing might be a Manchester United fan.

26 mins: Their team may be a goal down, but Liverpool's supporters are still making lots of noise as they cheer them on. Gerrard picks out Finnan with a cross-field pass and he delivers the ball up the wing towards Baros. He wins a throw-in deep in Milan territory off Jaap Stam. Nothing comes of it.

28 mins: Shevchenko celebrates after side-footing a low ball past Dudek and into the Liverpool goal, but the linesman puts a stop to his gallop with a wave of his flag. Offside. Kaka had gone on a rampaging run through Liverpool's midfield and played a through ball to Shevchenko, which may have come as a result of a Carragher tackle. In that case it wouldn't have been offside. A let-off for Liverpool.

31 mins: Djimi Traore, who's having a bit of a shocker, plays Shevchenko onside. The Milan striker traps a long ball from Pirlo, but is muscled off the ball before he can poke it past the onrushing Dudek. Shevchenko appeals for a penalty but doesn't get one.

33 mins: Luis Garcia shanks a good knock-down over the bar from the edge of the Milan box. He had all the time in the world to tee that one up and should have done better. Feel Steve Osmond's pain: "Promising start - not for the moaning scallies, but for me cos I've got an accumulator worth £80,000 involving Maldini as the first scorer," he says, before adding the caveat: "It does however need Kewell to score too." Two bets on the same game in an accumulator, Steve? Methinks you're telling porkies.

36 mins: The Liverpool defence is split by Kaka and Crespo is released. Through on goal with only Dudek to beat, he's flagged for offside.

38 mins: Liverpool 0 - 2 Milan Hernan Crespo scores a tap-in from six yards mere seconds after Liverpool had a great shout for a penalty turned down in the wake of a Nesta hand-ball in the Milan box. Luis Garcia had been prevented from shooting by Nesta, who was on the floor in his own penalty area when the ball rolled against his hand.

Milan countered as Liverpool appealed for a spot-kic and the red defence was rent asunder by Andriy Shevchenko, who eschewed an opportunity to shoot from a narrow angle. Choosing instead to roll the ball across the edge of the six-yard box, he provided it on a platter for Crespo, whose job was an easy one.

Liverpool 0 - 3 AC Milan This is turning into a rout. A fine, fine goal from Chelsea's Hernan Crespo, who bags his second. Latching on to a long ball from midfield, he ducked the flat-footed Liverpool centre-halves and without breaking stride, contemptuously lifted the ball over the horribly exposed Jerzy Dudek. It was a sublime finish. If the Liverpool team was a dog, you'd shoot it at this stage.

Half-time

Half-time analysis

"I'm no footballing expert but it seems to me that the team in white are playing better than the team in red," writes Wayne Gillespie.

"Liverpool are predictable even on the biggest occasions. I mean, who'd have thought Harry Kewell would go off injured when they went a goal down? Eh? All we need now is Stephen Gerrard to ping lots of 50-yard passes straight into row Z and Jerzy Dudek to let the ball roll between his legs," guffaws Ben Fitzpatrick.

"How did you get chosen for this gig? The most senior, the most junior or the most unfortunate? Do you get to drink?" wonders Simon Thomas. The last thing I need at the moment is a drink, Simon. I might start typing my mind and nobody needs that.

"I figured it would be more fun to come back to the office and crunch numbers than watch any more of that garbage," writes Heath Binder. "Two observations: 1. Kewell looks like that kid from the TV show Third Rock from the Sun - he's an ineffective wisp of a player and they should rid themselves of his services next season. 2. Baros looks like a catfish. Whenever the camera flashes his way he looks like he's just swallowed a hook."

"Glad to hear our own little scouser, StevieG has been pinging the ball around to no great effect, as per usual. Am I alone in relishing thoughts of the obligatory tears and badge-kissing extravaganza planned for full time before he does one to Chelsea next week?" inquires Ste Fearnley.

"Is it to late to nominate Traore for the Fiver's Worst Player of the Year award? His performance recalls Gary Breen's effort for West Ham in the FA Cup when he was personally responsible for six (6) Man Utd goals," asks Micheal Casagranda.

"Who are they trying to kid in England about the standard of Football? Those Liverpool greats must be turning in their graves to see such a useless, lifeless performance. Sorry Bill, sorry Emlyn, sorry Tommy. Gerrard you can't even think of walking in their shadows. Harry go back to your Roos son, you are out of your class," writes Southampton fan Mike Snelling.

45 mins: The second half gets underway with Liverpool up to their necks in it. Didi Hamann has come on, with Steve Finnan making way. Liverpool are playing three across the back with four in midfield. Can they claw their way back? No chance, going on their dreadful first half performance, but stranger things have happened.

47 mins: Steven Gerrard shins a ball he should have controlled over the side-line, while the ITV1 commentators continue to blow sunshine up his nether regions. How badly does he have to play before his legions of cheerleaders in the media will put down their pom-poms and pass comment on it?

49 mins: Xabio Alonso sends a long-range effort narrowly wide of Dida's right-hand past from about 35 yards. Good effort- he had Dida beaten.

51 mins: Free-kick for Milan for a Hyypia foul on Kaka, just to the left of the D. Shevchenko sends a low screamer wide of the wall and Jerzy Dudek pushes it out for a corner with a strong left hand. Great strike, great save. Incidentally, it was more hapless defending from Djimi Traore that allowed Kaka through in the first place.

Liverpool 1 - 3 Milan At last! Steven Gerrard scores. The ball was crossed from the left and the Liverpool skipper looped it into the top right-hand corner with a fine header from the edge of the six-yard box. Good goal.

Liverpool 2 - 3 Milan Vladimir Smicer scores. Unbelievable! Vladimir Smicer picks up the ball just outside the Milan box and shoots. The ball bounced just in front of Dida and crept in at the right-hand post. The two quid I put on Liverpool to win this match at half-time at 188-1 is looking like a great bet. I need two more before the 90 minutes are up.

59 mins: This is astonishing. A penalty for Liverpool after Gerrard was pushed in the back by Gattuso. The Liverpool skipper has flicked a switch and grabbed this match by the scruff of the neck.

60 mins: Liverpool 3 - 3 Milan
More drama. Xabi Alonso's penalty is saved by Dida, before the Spaniard follows up and scores from the rebound from a tight angle.

62 mins: Smicer stings Dida's palms with a fine long-range effort. Milan are in tatters.

64 mins: Come on Liverpool! It's worth noting that Gennaro Gattuso wasn't sent off for bringing down Gerrard when he conceded that penalty. He should have been as the Liverpool skipper was clean through and bearing down on goal. Gerrard's been magnificent since I gave him that morale-boosting bollocking earlier, but you won't see me taking the credit when Liverpool win this match. I'm good like that - I'm only in this for the £378.

67 mins: Milan are gradually regaining composure after being rocked back on their heels by those three quick sucker-punches. Now Djimi Traore redeems himself, hacking a Shevchenko shot off the line after Dudek blunders. Jamie Carragher is screaming at his goalkeeper, who's been looking very jittery in this second half, albeit on the rare occasions the ball has come near him.

71 mins: Steven Gerrard sends a screamer blazing over the bar from a few yards outside the box.

72 mins: Clarence Seedorf concedes a free-kick wide on the right. Xabi Alonso plays the ball into Luis Garcia on the endline, who attempts to wriggle towards towards the near post before being penalised.

74 mins: "This match is a microcosm of Liverpool's season," writes Simon Vaughan in Toronto. "Rubbish followed by brilliance followed by ..."

75 mins: Jamie Carragher picks up a yellow card for high feet. Somewhat harshly, it could be argued.

77 mins: The match has quietened down a bit, at last. Liverpool's defenders stroke it around the back, before Jamie Carragher sends a long ball into the Milan penalty area. Milan Baros is penalised - I know not why - and Milan win a free-kick which enables them to play the ball out from the back.

79 mins: Jamie Carragher saves Liverpool's bacon with a brilliant tackle on Kaka, who was waiting to stroke home a cross from Crespo. Moments earlier in the Milan box, Luis Garcia had failed to control a long ball from Steven Gerrard. If he hadn't trapped it so far, he'd have been unmarked on the edge of the six-yard box with only Dida to beat.

81 mins: Rafa Benitez is giving it a lash. Good stuff. He's about to send on the new Lord of the Manor of Frodsham, otherwise known as Djibril Cisse. Before he can do so, Liverpool's players get their fans ole-ing as they (the players, not the fans) stroke the ball around between them. They look very relaxed.

84 mins: Liverpool substitution: Djibril Cisse replaces Milan Baros. Milan substitutions: Tomasson on, Crespo off. Seedorf off, Serginho on.

86 mins: Milan attack down the centre, courtesy of Tomasson and Gattuso. Riise dispossesses Gattuso and sets off into the Liverpool half. Milan win the ball back, go on the attack and just as Shevchenko shapes to shoot, Jamie Carragher dives in with another match-saving tackle. Corner.

88 mins: Milan go close from the corner. It was sent into the box and Jaap Stam's free header went towards Kaka at the far post. The Brazilian could only skim it wide off the top of his own bonce; if he'd had his wits about him, he'd almost certainly have scored.

90 mins: The game enters its death throes and extra time beckons. Milan are doing all the attacking at the moment. Pirlo loops the ball towards Kaka at the far post, but Hyypia hacks clear.

90 + 1mins: Peep! Peep! Peep! Extra time beckons and the greatest opportunity I'll ever have to trouser an easy £378 goes down the pan with it. I'm absolutely gutted.

ET 1: Liverpool get the first period of extra time started. There'll be no golden or silver goal buffoonery to worry about - it's two sides of 15 minutes, followed by penalties if necessary. "This match is also a microcosm of Milan's season," wriates Fyaz from Toronto. "Brilliance followed by rubbish followed by..."

ET 2: Liverpool are holding possession well, although no sooner do I type that than they gift possession to AC Milan. Nothing noteworthy happens and the ball ends up back at Jerzy Dudek's feet.

ET 6: Sorry, lost a chunk of commentary there, but you missed very little. Pirlo blazed one over the bar for Milan, before Djibril Cisse was penalised for being offside after missing a quarter-chance. Meanwhile, Ant in Sheffield has this to say: "Here's a bit of a cliched football thought for you: Liverpool probably won't win the European Cup tonight, but at least we won our pride back in the second half. There. Said it. I'm barely able to take my eyes off this match, so you'll forgive me if I don't extend this email any further." Churning out that syrupy gloop is all very well Ant, but it won't put £378 in my wallet.

ET 9: It's fairly pedestrian stuff compared to the frenzied pace of the first hour. Tomasson is the latest player to have a probing run cut to an aprupt halt by a very late linesman's flag.

ET 10: Jon Dahl Tomasson misses a great chance to put Milan ahead. A cross fell nicely for him at the far post, but he failed to make contact with his poorly-timed lunge and could only watch in despair as the ball bounced wide.

ET 12: Slowly but surely, Milan are begining to dominate. They're turning the screw on a very tired looking Liverpool side.

ET 15: Dudek gathers a high ball with Tomasson and Shevchenko waiting beneath him for the scraps. Their wait is in vain and the goalkeeper catches it cleanly. The ref blows for half-time in extra time. If the players' legs are feeling any way as cramped as my typing fingers, it could be a fairly lethargic last 15 minutes.

Half-time

ET 16: There's no fannying around as the teams switch ends and get straight back down to business.

ET 17 mins: Djibril Cisse takes on Gattuso and goes pelting down the right wing. His attempted cross is blocked and goes out for a corner. Vladimir Smicer swings it into the box, but his feeble delivery is cleared at the near post. Milan half-clear, only to see Liverpool win another corner. Gerrard sends it long towards Sami Hyypia, whose header is hacked clear by Paolo Maldini.

ET 19: Djibril Cisse tries a shot from distance, but it's overly ambitious and doesn't trouble Dida one jot. Jamie Carragher is suffering badly from cramp, but looks okay. For Milan, Rui Costa replaces Gennaro Gattuso.

ET 22: Rui Costa swings in a corner, conceded by Jamie Carragher, which curls across the face of goal and wide. For a moment it looked as if it might go in and Jerzy Dudek was nowhere to be seen.

ET 23: Serginho sends in a very dangerous cross, which Hyypia heads clear. Luis Garcia takes the ball out of defence, but loses it to Pirlo, who's brought down by Hyypia on the edge of the box. Milan win another corner, while Liverpool's players look dead on their feet.

ET 27: Jerzy Dudek pulls off the greatest double-save I've ever seen to deny Andriy Shevchenko from point-blank range twice in quick succession. How did he keep the ball out? Two reaction saves in a row - it was amazing goalkeeping. The first was a bullet-header from the edge of the six-yard box, while the second hit his hands and went over the bar. I'm not sure how much he knew about it, but it was an astonishing block.

ET 29: My heart is still thumping after those heroics from Dudek. The fans from both sides are whistling as Hamann breaks from midfield, only to lose possession at the edge of the Milan box. Seconds later, Liverpool win a free-kick a couple of yards outside the Milan box, just to the right of the D. Up steps Steven Gerrard ...

ET 30: Who tips it to Hamann, who rolls it back to Riise, who thumps it into the wall. What a waste! The referee blows for full time and it's time for a penalty shoot-out.

The penalty shoot-out

1. Serginho misses for Milan
2. Hamann scores for Liverpool
3. Pirlo misses for Milan
4. Cisse scores for Liverpool
5. Tomasson scores for Milan
6. Riise misses for Liverpool
7. Kaka scores for Milan
8. Smicer scores for Liverpool
9. Shevchenko misses for Milan
Liverpool win the Champions League!!!!

An unbelievable result after a wonderful game of football. Liverpool have come from 3-0 down at half-time to win the Champions League on penalties. During the shoot-out Dudek indulged in some Grobbelaar-esque wobbling which caused Serginho to sky his penalty, before diving off his line to save well from Pirlo and Shevchenko. Riise was the only Liverpool player to miss - his shot was saved by Dida.

The aftermath

The Liverpool players are, needless to say, quite pleased. So are their fans. The players are jumping up and down in a mass huddle, while assorted men in headphones drag them away to be interviewed by some ITV1 buffoon who thinks now would be a good time to ask Steven Gerrard about the excruciating minutiae of his future plans. He also keeps calling him "Stevie", as if to suggest they're great chums.

Now I'd love to stay and chat all night, but unfortunately I have to correct all the typos in this report, insert gags where appropriate and remove all the bits where I slagged off Steven Gerrard, who is about to lift the Champions League trophy for Liverpool. He was dreadful in the first half, but outstanding in the second. Two halves, two totally different performances - if only there were an appropriate entry in The Big Book Of Football Cliches to cover such a situation.

As the Liverpool players collect their medals, the Lord of the Manor of Frodshom, Djibril Cisse, does a most unregal, groin-thrusting boogie around the plinth on which the trophy stands. There's no need for that, Djibril. Before things get out of hand, the trophy is presented to Steven Gerrard, who hoists it skywards with a loud roar.

How can Liverpool win this and not beat Crystal Palace?

[Rushian]

How the players rated in Istanbul

Paul Kelso
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian

· Liverpool

Jerzy Dudek 9

Guaranteed legendary status at Anfield with brilliant double stop in extra-time and two saves in the shoout-out.

Steve Finnan 5

Unable to get forward, and with little cover ahead of him was exposed by Kaka and the overlapping Maldini.

Jamie Carragher 8

The soul of Benitez's side, Carragher spent 45 minutes chasing shadows and a further 75 moving mountains.

Sami Hyypia 6

Kaka and Shevchenko's interchanges left the Finn looking more statuesque than normal.

Djimi Traoré 6

A dreadful first half after the foul that set up Maldini's goal, redeemed by a last-ditch block from Shevchenko.

Luis Garcia 5

Liverpool's most potent European performer was neutered by a tendency to overelaborate. Though he linked well with midfield as the game progressed

Steven Gerrard 8

Gave his customary all, and after 45 minutes being comprehensively outmuscled dragged his side into the game with a goal.

Xabi Alonso 6

Initially struggled to contain Milan's midfield. Fortunate to have second chance with penalty.

John Arne Riise 7

Liverpool's most likely attacking force on the night, his crossing ability was a menace and he set up Gerrard's header.

Harry Kewell 3

Limped off after 22 minutes clutching his groin and with boos ringing in his ears. Very likely his last Liverpool act.

Milan Baros 5

His pace offered some hope but was unable to hold the ball up, and found Stam blocking his way every time.

Substitutes:

Vladimir Smicer for Kewell, 23: 6

Dietmar Hamann for Finnan, 45: 8

Djibril Cissé for Baros, 85: 5

· Milan

Dida 5

Could have done better with Liverpool's first two goals, though partially redeemed with save from Alonso's spot-kick.

Cafu 6

Not the dynamic wing-back of past years and increasingly troubled by Riise as the game wore on.

Jaap Stam 7

Stuck so close to Baros he probably popped the Czech in his kit-bag at the end. Almost scored with a header.

Alessandro Nesta 6

HIs usual immaculate self until Liverpool's revival left him looking increasingly bemused.

Paolo Maldini 6

Flawless performance until Liverpool's unlikely recovery saw even him unable to restore his side's serenity.

Andrea Pirlo 5

Milan's playmaer did not dictate as he usually can and to add insult to injury saw his penalty saved.

Clarence Seedorf 6

Spent the first half demonstrating why he had three winners' medals and the second wondering how he got them.

Kaka 9

A demonstration of old-fashioned No10 play, feeding Shevchenko and Crespo a constant diet of quality ball.

Gennaro Gattuso 5

Snarling performance from the man who does the ugly work that allows Milan to play but gave away the penalty that levelled the scores.

Hernan Crespo 8

Produced two marvellously taken goals that should persuade Milan to sign him permanently.

Andriy Shevchenko 8

As sharp and menacing as ever, he set up Crespo's first and created havoc with his running of spacebut he missed his penalty.

Substitutes:

Serginho for Seedorf, 86: 7

Tomasson for Crespo, 86: 5

Rui Costa for Gattuso, 112: 4

[Rushian]

Gerrard inspires Liverpool by sheer willpower

Captain uses his head and heart to set up epic victory

Dominic Fifield in Istanbul
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian

Steven Gerrard had gathered his Liverpool team-mates together in the dressing room deep in the bowels of this soulless stadium some 10 minutes before kick-off last night. As the expectant roar from the stands reverberated through the nervous hush of the huddle, he spoke urgently of "seizing the moment".

By the end of this bewildering evening he had seized the European Cup, even thoughLiverpool needed the drama of a penalty shoot-out. It everything about their captain, even though he was not called upon to adminster the coup de grace.

There was an unswerving belief about Gerrard that refused to ebb even when Liverpool were staring at abject humiliation at the interval. The captain had pounded back down the red carpet on to the turf to start the second half clearly intent on blotting out the aberration of a performance his side had conjured in slipping to a three-goal deficit.

If any of his team-mates, trooping at his back, harboured doubts, then the sight of their talisman driving them on was enough to fuel their conviction.

Gerrard was inspiration personified, a son of Liverpool possessed in stubborn pursuit of a trophy denied his club for 21 years. In the circumstances, Milan were never going to deny him his moment, even when reality appeared at its grimmest.

The comeback sparked so magnificently after the interval, with three goals pummelled in six breathless minutes, brought Liverpool back from the brink with their captain at his most brilliant.

That it should have come to that was apt. If Liverpool had grown livid at life in self-induced exile from Europe's elite for over two decades as they watched others plunder the trophy they used to hoist at will, then frustration of a more personal kind had long been eating away at Gerrard.

The 24-year-old's ferocious energy and vicious shot are as pivotal to this team's success as Jamie Carragher's rugged assurance at the back, or Xabi Alonso's ticking efficiency at the captain's side. Yet, for all that Gerrard has thrilled the Kop to distraction for six years, Huyton's favourite son has been all too aware that he had yet to prosper so explosively on the biggest occasions.

Realisation of this dilemma has played on his mind. Where he was expected to flourish with England at Euro 2004, the midfielder's tournament was cruelly wrecked by the under-hit back-pass deep into stoppage time against France. The intense trauma of watching helplessly as Zinedine Zidane converted the penalty in the aftermath anchored his form through the rest of the tournament.

The recovery in confidence which gathered pace over the first months of this season culminated in the blistering, lashed half-volley which ripped through Olympiakos to propel Liverpool from the group stage into the knockout phase of the competition back in December.

Yet the Carling Cup final, an occasion on which he craved to prosper so badly, was tarnished at the last by the inadvertent header which dribbled into his own net to cancel Liverpool's long-held lead and shift momentum inexorably towards Chelsea.

Those disappointments have taken their toll, with Istanbul offering the chance to exorcise the demons. By half-time, though, as his team's predicament at that point began to sink in, Gerrard might has recognised as folly what he had hoped would be the greatest night of his life.

The speech delivered before kick-off had been a reminder - a plea - to restore this club to the pinnacle.

"I will tell them: 'We want this so badly and Milan want to take it away from us - we can't let them'," he had explained on the eve of the game. "It is about stressing that we shouldn't come off at the end with regret - it is about seizing this moment."

Little did the midfielder know that those words would carry even greater weight af ter less than 60 seconds of the start, the insanely soft goal shipped to Paolo Maldini prompting Gerrard to turn and retreat to the halfway line shaking his head as much in dumbstruck denial as dismay.

In those opening exchanges the pre-match suspicion that Milan were leggy at the end of a draining domestic season -which had culminated in a flurry of conceded goals and the title handed to Juventus - had smacked of wishful thinking.

Maldini galloped up his flank with glee and Clarence Seedorf, Andrea Pirlo and Gennaro Gattuso utterly dictated possession in midfield. Gerrard and Alonso could offer only huff and puff in riposte as Liverpool were systematically cut to shreds.

Yet, while Milan's third goal was shipped after Gerrard had surrendered possession to Kaka, it was to their captain that Liverpool inevitably turned for inspiration. And he was swift to resond. The header he looped wide of Dida nine minutes into the second half was nothing if not timely, the arms pumping to crowd and team-mates alike, drawing an unbelievable response over the next frantic six minutes.

Vladimir Smicer's stinging drive maintained Merseyside momentum, although it was Gerrard's barnstorming charge through the centre, ending with Gattuso's clip which knocked belief from the Milanese.

[Rushian]

A triumph of the imagination

Michael Walker in Istanbul
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian

It took someone with the vision of HG Wells to construct this stadium out amid the pylons and rubble on the extreme margins of Istanbul. It would have required a storyteller with the equivalent imagination to foretell this night of football.

In the space of six minutes early in the second half a formality warped into an epic. It was as if an Andy Pandy tale had been twisted into the Godfather. And at the end of it and with the clock showing half past midnight, sure enough, we had a shoot-out.

These are tense at the best of times but in the context of Liverpool's recovery from 3-0 down at half-time, this is what Bill Shankly would surely have referred to as a matter of life after death.

Liverpool held their breath, held their nerve, and survived. Jerzy Dudek, a goalkeeper pilloried for his errors over four years at Anfield had just defied the great Andriy Shevchenko in the most elasticated fashion with three minutes of extra time remaining.

Now he faced the same predator again. Serginho had by then blasted the first spot-kick over the bar before Dudek denied Andrea Pirlo as Milan began their penalties in the opposite manner from how they started the night. Then the Italians had rolled into a three-goal lead in 44 minutes as Liverpool filled the minor role in a dads versus lads kickabout.

That did not seem inappropriate: Paolo Maldini, who scored Milan's opener on 53 seconds, is 37 next month. As Dudek made save after save two hours later, the ever-young Maldini may well have been feeling his age.

Liverpool's three substitutes, Dietmar Hamann, Djibril Cissé and Vladimir Smicer swept them into the lead for the first time in the evening, and Dudek was suddenly faced again by Shevchenko.

The European Footballer of the Year had won the Champions League for Milan in Manchester two years ago with a cool penalty against Juventus. But now, encouraged by Jamie Carragher who reminded his goalkeeper of the actions of Bruce Grobbelaar in 1984, Dudek read Shevchenko right, dived to his right and won Liverpool their fifth European Cup, just as Grobbelaar had secured the fourth.

Maldini had described that victory over Juventus in Manchester as a "flawless rendition", no one at Liverpool could describe last night in the same way, the first half was flawed indeed. But when Steven Gerrard lifted the famous cup in a blaze of red tinsel, Liverpool could say this was better than flawless.

Comebacks, whether personal or collective, always make for drama but in 50 years of European Cup finals no side had ever retrieved the situation Liverpool did here.

Theirs was a historic deficit and historic recovery. The scenes at the end in a stadium three-quarters full of Liverpool supporters were pure fantasy as Kaka wandered destructively between the Liverpool midfield and defence. When he spun away from a static Gerrard in the 44th minute with Dalglish-like impudence and then sent Carragher sprawling with the sort of 40-yard pass Ian Rush used to latch on to, it felt as though Liverpool had been beaten by one of their own.

Gerrard was no trophy-waving hero then and Rafael Benítez was a manager who had gambled and lost. Harry Kewell had been started by the Spaniard despite misgivings about the Australian's groin - and heart. Twenty minutes of non-delivery and Kewell limped off. Booed by his own fans, Liverpool's night was about to get worse.

As soon as that happened to Kewell, Benítez must have been wishing for the interval. When it came Liverpool were three down and what could a manager with limited English say to players feeling and looking inferior to a Milan side about to confirm its greatness?

Benítez spoke to a German, Hamann, and he responded with one of his more diligent performances. When Gerrard rose to evoke the memory of Tommy Smith, the argument as to whether Liverpool could defend the Champions League title really had legs.

It was Dudek's opposite number, Dida, at fault now. Slow and complacent in reacting to Gerrard's header, Dida's attitude summarised Milan's.

When Smicer then lashed in Liverpool's second, Milan may well have thought about that match at Deportivo La Coruña last season when a 4-1 lead from the first leg was overturned by a 4-0 defeat. Nine of Milan's starting XI last night played in that match.

They had been the holders of the European Cup then, which is how they must have felt at half-time. But the Milanese grip was loosening again.

It is some achievement for Benítez in his first season; he probably does not even consider this his team. But as the banner said: 'Rafa Is The Bosphorous'.

It takes imagination.

[Rushian]

Benítez's brave change of tack leaves Milan in reverse gear

Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian

Liverpool's players were magnificent but so was Rafa Benítez with the changes he made. His team would never have come back if he hadn't switched things at half-time.

Benítez was brave going to a 3-2-4-1 but it worked brilliantly. Liverpool could have played all night with the original system and they would not have recovered because Milan were completely in command like that.

Andrea Pirlo was getting on the ball and finding Kaka who was picking out the two strikers, especially Andriy Shevchenko, and Liverpool couldn't get a grip. But that changed when Benítez started playing with two inside forwards - Luis García and Steven Gerrard to begin with - and two wide midfielders.

I can see why Benítez started with Gerrard and Xabi Alonso in the middle. He probably wanted their energy against Kaka rather than using Didi Hamann. But because Milan were getting such easy possession Gennaro Gattuso and Pirlo were finding Kaka and he was wonderful in the first half.

Benítez's changes made it much harder for Pirlo and Kaka to get in the game. Gerrard and García were either side of Pirlo, so he had more men around him. Also he had to look after one and get Gattuso back to help with the other (see graphic).

That left no one on Alonso and forced Kaka to drop deeper and so he then didn't have the same space to play in. Nor was he getting the service because Pirlo was quickly under pressure and couldn't get the first pass away.

Another critical thing was that Gerrard started making runs off Pirlo which the Italian couldn't cope with because he is not the best defender. Gerrard got into the box to head the first goal and was brought down for the penalty.

Benítez also deserves credit for a switch he made after Milan brought on Serginho on to the left. Serginho was putting in a lot of crosses so the manager got Gerrard to switch with Smicer and play almost as a right wing-back. He knew Smicer could not cope one for one against Serginho whereas Gerrard played that role brilliantly and blocked a lot of crosses.

Did Benítez get it wrong to begin with? When you go 1-0 down so early your tactics can't get settled and the main thing is he reacted well. Milan should never have lost the game from 3-0 up and some of their defending was lackadaisical but Liverpool - and Benítez - deserve huge credit.

[Rushian]

How the Benitez Code worked wonders
Story unfolds of a piece of paper that made history in Istanbul. Nick Townsend hears a re-run of Rafa's team talk

Independent, 29 May 2005

As the exodus began, and the fez-clad Liverpool followers - looking more like Tommy Cooper than Tommy Smith - ceased their raucous occupancy of Istanbul on Thursday morning, Rafael Benitez sat in the team hotel and attempted to explain the previous 12 hours. He probably hadn't noticed that elsewhere in that residency, delegates were just arriving for The 23rd World Congress of Pathology. Had he done so, it would have confirmed to him that, but for his own half-time intervention with the introduction of Dietmar Hamann, and that of goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek, who twice thwarted Andrei Shevchenko at the conclusion of extra time, most of the media may have been present to dissect the body Liverpool and his management of it, not to glorify them.

All Benitez could do was attempt to explain the science behind everything that had taken place, and without request he produced a folded piece of A4 paper from the pocket of his tracksuit. It was rather like a child revealing an exam crib sheet. You sensed he wasn't entirely certain he should be revealing such a document to a bunch of cynical journalists, and when he was asked for a copy so that it could be reproduced for the benefit of readers of this newspaper, he politely declined.

You cannot blame him. This was his decidedly private aide memoire, a kind of Road Map to progress, containing notes of his planned exhortations to his players during the three main intervals. Everything that passed through that fertile mind on Wednesday night at the Ataturk Stadium is detailed on it, from his perspective of Milan's first goal after 52 seconds to the schedule of penalty-takers for the shoot-out.

What that document, which appeared as impenetrable as the Da Vinci Code, and the owner's explanation of those scribbles confirm is the magnitude of Liverpool's achievement under his steward- ship. Not only has Benitez fashioned a Champions' League-winning side from one who have been injury-stricken and, many would suggest, deficient in the overall class that the leading clubs in Europe boast, but he has done so handicapped by tenuous communication processes.

Listen to the Spaniard, and life at Mellwood training ground sounds more suited to Mind Your Language (for the uninitiated, a feeble old TV sitcom which essentially ridiculed foreigners' misuse of English) than providing material for Match Of The Day.

"Five minutes before half-time, I was thinking about tactics and making changes," he explains. "Then walking to the changing room I was thinking about what to say and how to say it. I needed to select the right words, and that is difficult when I have players who speak different languages."

He provides, with smiling self-depracation, an example of the problem, recalling the moment when he was first at the club and saw a player in a training session about to take a free-kick. "I said to him 'Be careful with the wine'. The player said [Benitez mimics the player's expression of incredulity] 'what do you mean?' I said: 'Sorry, no, I mean 'be careful with the wind'. If you change one letter, the whole thing is different. If you want to express all the things that you want to, it's very difficult."

The essence of his message as his men returned to that half-time dressing room with heads bowed, partly in prayer that three Milan goals would not become four or five, was that he would be replacing - many would suggest belatedly - Steve Finnan with Hamann. The German would be deployed primarily to negate the threat of a defence-destroying Kaka. "But it wasn't just tactics I wanted to change," Benitez reports. "I wanted to communicate to the players that they needed to have confidence and believe in the possibility that they could score one goal. In football, one goal, maybe one corner, one free-kick, can mean all the difference."

Benitez runs his finger down his notes. "This is in English; this is in Spanish. Here, [I talk about] Luis Garcia and what I want from him against [Andrea] Pirlo. Things like that. Here, before extra-time I say we need to use up time and play long balls, looking for the second ball, because we are so tired."

It's difficult to conceive of Mr. Ferguson or Arsène Wenger discussing so intimately the complexities of their strategy. But, as yet, Benitez appears untouched by the cynicism of his profession. Viewing the Spaniard is reminiscent of an innocent tourist who wanders through a shadowy and myserious Eastern bazaar but somehow emerges not only without a blade between his shoulder-blades, but in possession of a relatively inexpensively-purchased rare artefact: Liverpool's fifth European Cup, their first in 15 years.

Benitez studied French at school in Madrid, and also began to learn English 10 years ago. His efforts to improve the latter have been enhanced, he says, by listening to the lyrics of Beatles tracks in his car. I asked him which were his favourites. "Michelle," he says, and after a pause, "Help!" Whether said in jest or in all seriousness, the latter offering could hardly have been more appropriate.

Help, I need somebody, not just anybody. Won't somebody please, please help me. It could have been his half-time plea.

The answer came principally in the introduction of Hamann, without whom, well, one can only conject on the outcome. Yet, the German substitute, together with any of a further five - Dudek, Traoré, Kewell, Baros and substitute Vladimir Smicer - of the 14 who ultimately emerged so remarkably as victors, could well discover that theirs was also a valedictory performance.

Such a triumph will not, and was never likely to deflect Benitez from his long-term mission of Premiership distinction. Benitez is aware that the wrangle over their Champions' League "defence" next season has served obligingly to plaster over the fissures in his domestic record.

His uncomfortable task has already begun before he takes a brief holiday with his parents in Madrid, followed by a few days away with his wife Montse - "because if I don't go, she will kill me", he says, ruefully - and children. Benitez stresses: "In football, if you only think about the memories you cannot win the next game."

Clearly, there were those playing who were acutely aware that Wednesday night would be their last? He nods. "It is really difficult to play, knowing that, when you finish your contract, you may not be in the squad. But we talk before about these things and we say 'OK, this is The Final'. I say 'if we win, you will be part of history, you will be legends, and that is the most important thing'. Because then you can talk with other clubs and be proud and say 'I am a Champions' League winner' and your value will be different. It will be better for you, for sure."

One performer definitely absent from the list of cast-offs will be his compatriot, the hugely influential Xabi Alonso, to whose lengthy absence Benitez attributes, in part, Liverpool's failure to secure fourth position in the Premiership.

Curiously, the manager's most vivid memory of Wednesday night concerns that same player and his penalty miss, a failure which Alonso rectified immediately by converting the rebound from goalkeeper Dida. Benitez laughs. "Before he took it, I was thinking 'Dida's really tall, with long arms'. In my mind, I could see Xabi shooting and the shot being saved. That was the image in my head. I was also afraid because once, when I was 20 years old, I shot a penalty in a shoot-out against Milan in a tournament and the goalkeeper saved it. Fortunately, my team still won!"

Which perhaps helps to explain why, apart from an injury-enforced retirement, he would always prosper rather more as a coach than a player. But nobody could have prophesised quite how propitious that change of career would be as he set out on this magical history tour.

[Rushian]

Steve Tongue: Dudek's future as wobbly as his legs
Game of their lives: But how many of the conquering heroes will be at Anfield next season?

29 May 2005, Independent

The mixed zone - or "Mick's zone" as the Japanese authorities called it when Mick McCarthy's Republic of Ireland team played a friendly there before the 2002 World Cup - is an area where journalists wait after matches on one side of a barrier for footballers who do not want to talk to them and will use more wiles than most display on the pitch to avoid doing so.

One favourite tactic is to emerge from the nearby dressing room with mobile clamped firmly to the ear; the game occasionally being given away when it rings in mid-"conversation". Another is to start munching a sandwich and gesture apologetically how rude it would be to stop for social intercourse with mouth full.

But in the bowels of the sporting folly that is Istanbul's Ataturk Stadium, long after Wednesday evening had become Thursday morning, ecstatic Liverpool players were suddenly every media man's best friends, their particular catharsis taking the form of a torrent of words to anyone who would listen.

The temptation was to wonder not so much how many of them would be stopping come the first setback next season, but how many would still be at the club. For this is not the Liverpool of Bill Shankly, who when asked for his line-up liked to declare: "Same team as last season."

Rafael Benitez knows he must improve his options for the next Premiership challenge and that in order to do so, some of the 37 players currently in possession of a squad number must have it taken away before August.

Might the man who was proudly sporting the No 1 on his back last Wednesday be among them? It seems so. Jerzy Dudek emerged as one of the night's heroes with his astonishing double-save from Andrei Shevchenko and then his distracting antics on the line (or in front of it) during the penalty shoot-out; yet even if not guilty for any of Milan's three goals, he also displayed some of the familiar handling lapses that tend to undermine the confidence of defenders and coaches, and are stored long in the memory-bank of managers as cerebral as Benitez.

The young goalkeeper Scott Carson has already been entrusted with a Champions' League tie against Juventus, and is this weekend in the United States with England, all at the age of 19; if and when Benitez signs one of his favourite Spanish keepers, Jose Reina, who has helped keep unfashionable Villarreal in the top three of La Liga most of the season, there would be no need to hold on to Dudek.

Naturally the Pole did not see it that way in Wednesday's mixed zone, adrenalin still coursing through his veins, when it was put to him that he had suffered a little criticism of his overall performance this season. "Not just a little! Everyone is talking about a new goalkeeper, but it doesn't matter to me. I never think about that. When I came here, everyone was talking about Chris Kirkland. I have to be confident all the time, or it is difficult to be focused. When I don't feel pressure, I can feel best in the world. I have enough experience to deal with this." The question, of course, is whether Benitez feels the same way.

And what of another hero, Dietmar Hamann, whose belated appearance for the second half enabled Liverpool to adopt the tactics they should have been employing from the start? At once, there was a genuine defensive holding man to clamp down on the brilliant Brazilian Kaka, such as is always required against a team employing a midfield diamond; consequently Steven Gerrard was released to take the game to Milan, which for a while he did in a single-handed manner reminiscent of David Beckham's finest hour for England against Greece four years ago.

Hamann is said to lack pace, but does Claude Makelele, his opposite number at Chelsea, possess it in abundance? Or, more relevantly, Owen Hargreaves, the replacement said to be lined up if Bolton Wanderers, Everton or anyone else can afford the German's wages?

In the meantime, he is taking an admirably pragmatic approach to his future: "I hope it's not my last game [for Liverpool], but that will be decided within the next few days or weeks. I'm just enjoying the moment. You don't get to play a Champions' League final every year, and the manager showed in recent weeks that he's not scared to play players who are out of contract at the end of the season. He brought Vladimir [Smicer] on with 20 minutes gone and he's not certain what he does next season. That's not been a problem. We've all been professional, that's what you've got to do. You get paid until 30 June and until then you've got to put your best foot forward."

The eastern Europeans Smicer and Igor Biscan knew there would be no new contract even before the latter played his part in the epic semi-final victory over Chelsea and the former scored two crucial goals - one of them his team's final penalty - last Wednesday. Smicer, who had his day as an underdog with the lightly regarded Czech Republic team at Euro '96, only to fall at the final hurdle, accepted his rejection graciously, and even took to the streets of Istanbul to share the joy of the club's magnificent travelling support. His compatriot, Milan Baros, has managed only one goal every four games in his two seasons with the club, and did nothing to justify his unexpected place in the final. His chances of a reprieve - with Valencia interested - may depend as much as anything on how successful Benitez is in pursuit of another striker this summer.

There would at least be a queue for him, which could not be said of Harry Kewell, whose selection must have convinced every Championship Manager addict in the land that even the best of the real professionals get it wrong occasionally - not only in playing Kewell to the exclusion of Hamann, but in bringing on Smicer as substitute when his groin gave out again. So there will be another summer of frustration for the Australian, who should have been trying to find some form and confidence for his country at next month's Confederations' Cup in Germany.

"It's been like that for the last six months, rehab, treatment and all that," he said. "But if you'd have told me six months ago I'd be playing in the final but pulled my groin, and still been a winner, I couldn't have believed you. Tonight has been the highlight of my career, and it's been the worst nightmare of my career. It's disappointing, but at the end of the day it's a team game and we won. It's one of the worst games I've experienced, and yet it's also been the perfect ending to the season."

As to the sort of replacements Benitez will seek for those shown the door, he would do well to avoid last summer's understandable mistake in surrounding himself with fellow countrymen who - with the glorious exception of Xabi Alonso - took far too long to adapt to the tempo and physical aspects of English football. Anyone coming in must also embrace wholeheartedly the British refusal not to accept they are beaten, typified on Wednesday by Gerrard, now destined to stay, and Jamie Carragher, who was so emotional amid the celebrations on the pitch that he briefly blacked out.

Irrepressible as ever, Carragher wins the award for best mixed-zone performances of the season and therefore deserves the last words about one amazing night in Istanbul: "When Jerzy made the save from Shevchenko I thought we'd win it. I thought 'these things happen for a reason'. There were probably 40,000 Liverpool fans in the stadium yet the exact place I ran to at the end was where all my mates and my family were stood. Unbelievable."

[Rushian]

The Incredibles continue to confound
By Clive Tyldesley, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

In pictures: Liverpool stun Milan

I can't remember chuckling quite so much after a game of football. What else was there to do? This Champions League final was never meant to be a barrel of laughs but how many times can you be wrong about something in one night?

It was supposed to be a subtle, slow-burning suspense story, but turned out to be a gripping, ripping romp. It had the makings of a horror film but became a tear-jerking musical. The psychological thriller that had been billed in the morning papers was replaced by an action movie with a big finish. Football continues to confound and confuse, putting smiles on millions of faces.

In an Istanbul hotel bar, the great and the good of ITV football reviewed the drama into the early hours - Venables, McManaman, Townsend, McCoist, Fowler and company. But instead of hard-headed analysis, they talked with boyish wonder of what they had just witnessed. No glasses were moved tactically round the tables, no explanations were offered for Liverpool's success. Instead, magic moments were recalled with gasps and guffaws. Gerrard's header, Kaká's pass, Cisse's hair. It was a night with so much to remember it by.

At the hazy end of the night there were more questions than answers, going beyond Gerrard's future or Liverpool's chances of defending their title. Instead, it was a case of: How many of the Incredibles will be shown the Anfield door before the new season? Was Jerzy Dudek wonderful or woeful? Where did the Liverpool fans get their other 20,000 tickets? Who was the blonde carrying the medals? What was Salif Diao celebrating? Why didn't Vladimir Smicer have his boots on? Is Carlo Ancelotti really Lanny Wadkins?

Then there were the decisions: Did Nesta deliberately handle it? Did Gerrard dive? How many times was Baros offside for the second goal? Was Shevchenko offside when he scored? Should Gattuso have been the first man ever to be sent off in a European Cup final? Why was Dudek standing a yard from Pirlo when he took his penalty? Where was Hamann in the first half? Who would have taken Liverpool's fifth penalty? Why Harry Kewell?

Most answers will escape into legend and thank goodness for that. It was as much the bewildering, befuddling aspects of the occasion that made it one of the truly great matches as it was Crespo's sublime second goal or Dudek's subliminal save from Shevchenko. It was the contradictions and confusions of a classic football drama that made it so intoxicating. Somewhere during the 119 minutes and more that followed Maldini's historic opening goal, the hearts of the participants overtook their heads. The red-blooded commitment of Gerrard and Carragher returned the European Cup to their native Merseyside.

Rafa Benitez's reputation as a tactical master survived the gambles on Kewell and Smicer. A couple of those professional analysts tell me that Kaká thought he had died and gone to Heaven as the Milan midfield overran Plans A and B during the first half, but somewhere during the half-time interval a daring antidote was found to drag Liverpool off their death-bed and point them towards resurrection.

A team of two Englishmen - the least number of home nationals ever fielded in a European Cup final side - started to play like English bulldogs. Some made a paltry contribution, some made a Herculean contribution, but they remained a team to the end of last night's open-topped bus tour of Liverpool. Benitez will now break them up, but forever and a day their names will grace the record books together.

Funny game, football.

[Rushian]

How Liverpool defied belief
By Henry Winter, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

In pictures: Liverpool stun Milan

It was half-time in one of the most epic European Cup finals and Liverpool's chairman, David Moores, was distrait at seeing his beloved side being turned inside out by AC Milan. As he wandered the VIP area, mulling over the painful 3-0 scoreline, Moores was approached by a familiar-looking figure who hardly offered much succour.

"It was Michel Platini," recalled Moores yesterday, "and he put his hand on my shoulder and said: 'It looks like a damage-limitation exercise in the second half'."

Few in the Ataturk Stadium would have disputed Platini's gloomy prognosis. Moores's team were poor, technically and tactically inferior to Kaka, Andrea Pirlo and the other knights in white satin from Lombardy.

A few good men dared to contest the widely held belief that Liverpool were out, their dream of a fifth European Cup shredded by the passing moves of Milan, whose first touch and thoughts were far sharper than Moores's players. A few good men had the courage to defy the odds which, by half-time, had lengthened to 100-1 against them.

The few good men were Liverpool's manager Rafa Benitez, and players like Steven Gerrard, Xabi Alonso, Didi Hamann, Jamie Carragher, and Jerzy Dudek, the unlikely heroes of the European season. They proved that a 3-0 interval scoreline may mean game over in Serie A but not in the Premiership. Gerrard and Carragher don't "do" damage limitation. They had not come all this way just to give up.

Benitez's tactical rejigging, inserting Hamann to free up Gerrard, was important. Gerrard covered every blade of grass. So did Alonso. Carragher must have impressed all those Italian dignitaries raised on thou-shalt-not-pass defending. Dudek produced some exceptional saves, not least a double stop from Andrei Shevchenko. The dedication of these good men contrasted with the insipid input of Harry Kewell, who limped off and should now be consigned to Liverpool history with the minimum of ceremony.

Inspired by real men prepared to question Milanese dominance, Liverpool fought back, giving a world-wide television audience a breathtaking reminder of why football still has the power to captivate. Modern football may be scarred by greed, diving, and rampant selfishness but rollercoaster rides like this, truly sporting affairs between two sides showing real respect for each other, are what Pelé envisaged when he talked of the Beautiful Game.

Beautiful, unpredictable, and utterly gripping. Outside Italy, television executives across the globe must have been doing cartwheels as 3-0 became 3-3 followed by a Liverpool win on penalties. "Platini came to me at the end of the game and said: 'I had no idea that would happen'," added Moores.

The Ataturk Stadium may be a concrete wind tunnel masquerading as a football arena but it staged an unscripted drama of the highest order here. Old Constantinople became East meets West End for the night.

Yesterday morning, at another venue named after the mighty Ataturk, Istanbul airport, Liverpool fans gathered around televisions to gasp at re-runs of the match, shaking groggy heads in glee-filled disbelief. All present in Istanbul these last few precious days know they had witnessed something special.

Back in the pubs around Anfield, in the Flat Iron and The Sandon, if tap-room talk ever stalls in the future, someone need only mention two words, "Remember Istanbul", to trigger a flood of merry recollections.

So for all the debate about this being a boring season, 2004-2005 will be remembered for all manner of uplifting reasons. Chelsea broke up the established order of Manchester United and Arsenal in the Premiership, and now Liverpool are back at the summit of European football.

Liverpool and Chelsea should switch priorities next season. Having secured the title rights, Chelsea should now focus on going from semi-finalists to winning the Champions League. Whether Liverpool can find the consistency to challenge in the Premiership remains to be seen but the increased transfer kitty now available to Benitez means they should be better equipped.

It all comes down to concentration and belief, and Liverpool proved in Istanbul that they have such qualities. Although Moores's club will find every opponent more determined to defeat the champions of Europe, whenever Liverpool are struggling next season, they can just bring to mind an enchanted evening in Istanbul.

[Rushian]

 Benitez fits bill of manager with a point to prove
By Paul Hayward, Telegraph
(Filed: 28/05/2005)

In pictures: Liverpool stun Milan

Insecurity has its uses. It might have made Rafael Benitez, Jose Mourinho, Arsène Wenger, Sven-Goran Eriksson and arguably Mr. Ferguson the managers they are today. When the old dressing-room cry goes up - "Put your medals on the table!" - these aristocrats of English football pull only fluff and coins from their pockets.

The point about Ferguson being a journeyman player is sometimes overstated, because no lumbering artisan was ever invited to play for Rangers, as Ferguson was in the late Sixties.

But we're safe in saying that an uncannily high proportion of our best managers are driven by some extra urge to "prove themselves". In Istanbul, Benitez joined that gang of workaholics who are proving that success as a player is not obligatory when it comes to squeezing every drop of productivity from men with superior talent.

Liverpool's affable Spanish manager had already established his credentials by winning La Liga and the UEFA Cup at Valencia. At a club called Parla, in his playing days, he left no lasting imprint on the history of the Spanish game. The same is true, of course, of Mourinho in Portugal, Wenger in France and Eriksson in Sweden, where I once set eyes on the first prize the England manager won as a modestly gifted full-back in the minor leagues: a large tin of coffee.

What we saw in Turkey on Wednesday night was a seminar in the art of management. By now it should be obvious that the knack of winning football trophies is to make the right decisions during, and not just before, the game. The decision to pick Harry Kewell ahead of Dietmar Hamann blew a hole in the team's dam. It had just about nothing to commend it, and was a major factor in

Liverpool falling 3-0 behind. But faced with the consequences of that gamble, Benitez switched to a 3-5-2 formation and rushed Hamann into midfield to assist Xabi Alonso.

Not rocket science, admittedly, but this swift response to a crisis was part of a pattern of successful interventions that helped Liverpool to beat Juventus and Chelsea before they impaled Milan. One of the talents Mourinho brought to the Chelsea bench was the capacity to change formations and personnel: notably in the Carling Cup final, in which they overcame Liverpool 3-2.

There is a myth that managers are hapless spectators in their own films: that the coach hands his fate to the 11 men whose names he pins on the wall. Plainly, he can't legislate for the needless sending-off or the broken leg, but he can always shape the team and choose the players in his own image. Just as a music critic can write about orchestras without having played with Nigel Kennedy, so a football manager who was a mediocre athlete can impose his intellect and character on a match.

Benitez, Mourinho and Wenger have more to prove to their players than a Johan Cruyff or a Marco van Basten. They have no cabinet of honours to guarantee instant respect. They may also be acting out their frustrations on their new vocations. If circumstances or biology denied them a 10-year playing career with Liverpool or Real Madrid, they can at least achieve the success they crave by telling others what to do.

A kind word needs to be said here about Gérard Houllier, Benitez's predecessor, who either bought or nurtured 12 of the 14 players who helped to win Liverpool's first European Cup for 20 years. Houllier was another undistinguished player, but he can take the credit for giving Liverpool a modern purpose and structure. The other thing you notice about these men is that they have a better sense of perspective than many stars. Asked whether winning the Champions League was the greatest accomplishment of his life, Benitez replied: "In football, yes. But I have two daughters and a wife."

Enjoy it while it lasts

It's too early for these Liverpool players to start wondering how their lives will look six years from now, but a glance at Manchester United's Champions League-winning team from 1999 shows how randomly fate deals its cards.

Here they are, with current occupations: Peter Schmeichel, media pundit; Gary Neville, still playing, still inspiring; Ronny Johnsen, career ravaged by injury; Jaap Stam, beaten finalist with Milan on Wednesday night; Dennis Irwin, last seen walking down kebab alley in Cardiff in the rain, pre-FA Cup final; Ryan Giggs, still playing but sub in the FA Cup final; Nicky Butt, career petering out at Newcastle; David Beckham, trophy-less but thriving at Real Madrid; Jesper Blomqvist, fought long battle against injury; Andy Cole, knocking them in at Fulham; Dwight Yorke, career went south, all the way to Australia.

Of the subs on that tumultuous night in Barcelona, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is just coming back from serious long-term injury and Teddy Sheringham will contribute for West Ham in Monday's Championship play-off final at 39. Roy Keane and Paul Scholes, who were both suspended, remain fine players but are on the down-slope of Mount Olympus.

Moral for Benitez's team: enjoy the ambrosia that the gods dispensed this week, because one day it might be snatched away.

The 'linear' champions

Among the few questions not yet asked about Liverpool's triumph is: how good does that make Burnley?

On Jan 18 at Turf Moor, the Clarets knocked the new European champions out of the FA Cup. Etched in the memories of Liverpool fans that night was Djimi Traore taking a wild swipe at the ball on his goal line as Burnley went 1-0 up before

registering a famous third-round victory. The same Traore spent Wednesday night measuring himself against Milan's Andrei Shevchenko.

This must have excited any Burnley fans among the 15 million who watched Liverpool conquer Milan on television. In boxing, a promoter might even call Burnley the 'linear' European champions, since they defeated Liverpool this season the only time they met.

Then again, there are more pressing issues in the claret and blue corner of Lancashire. Burnley fans have just been asked to choose which kind of pies should be on sale at Turf Moor for the next two years. If any result proves that the FA Cup connects all levels of our national game, it's Burnley 1, Liverpool 0.

[Rushian]

The Sporting Week: Benitez knows he has a long way to go to match the Liverpool of the past
By Jim White, Telegraph
(Filed: 28/05/2005)

In pictures: Liverpool stun Milan

Phil Thompson, in a condition way beyond excitement in Sky's pundits' box, identified on Wednesday night one of the practical implications of Liverpool's fifth European Cup victory.

"Now lads like Robbie Fowler, who used to hold up four fingers whenever they were taunted by certain parties, will be able to hold up the full set of five," he enthused.

Never mind that Fowler now plays for Manchester City, never mind that he was not directly involved in any of those European triumphs, never mind that he was born and brought up an Ever-tonian, according to Thompson, every time Fowler is accused by Manchester United fans of being a Merseysider of uncertain parentage he is absolutely entitled to celebrate Liverpool's historic nap hand of Euro trophies and thrust up all his digits.

Fowler is, Thompson's logic suggests, part of a wider collective. True, he played for Liverpool during its most dilettante, least productive period of modern times. But the very fact the erstwhile spice boy once pulled on a red shirt entitles him to membership of an exclusive band: the brotherhood of five.

Everywhere you looked in the aftermath of Wednesday's victory, someone was linking it to the past. Graham Taylor, interviewed on the radio, said the qualities demonstrated to win were a perfect blend of Liverpool's historic refusal to accept defeat with sophisticated, modern, European tactics.

Despite the fact there were only two Englishmen on the pitch and the manager was Spanish, Taylor suggested this was therefore a great night for English football. Certainly those two Englishmen, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard, have long been made fully aware of where they stood in the pantheon of Anfield.

Both players mentioned in their after-match interviews how their upbringing had been awash with stories of the past. From an early age, dads, uncles, kit men and laundry ladies fed them a diet of yarns of glory and domination, of Shanks and Paisley and the arcane secrets of the boot room.

Far from being crushed by the weight of responsibility thrust upon them, far from being bored and distracted by the repetition, they seemed driven by a yearning to inject some history of their own into the collective mythology.

But there was more to it than that. Gerrard and Carragher's extraordinary demonstration of will in that second half was not simply because they remembered what they had been told. They shared something else with the giants of the past. Somehow, as they drove forward with an utter determination not to be humiliated, they exhibited a common thread, the DNA of LFC. It was there in every run, every tackle, every passionate exhortation to the crowd: these were the true heirs of Anfield.

The idea that sporting institutions possess a genetic identity which is handed down through the generations is a compelling one. It might not be polite at this juncture to inquire too deeply

into the exact make-up of Bangladesh's cricket DNA, but the Australian cricket team certainly possess one. It is passed on through the medium of the baggy green cap, preferably one with a moth-eaten peak. The moment a new bunch of blokes pull on that item of headgear they become Aussie cricketers, with all that that entails: the self-confidence, the belligerence, the need above all things to triumph over the Poms.

Whatever generation they come from - be they Bradman, Benaud, Lillee, Chappell, Border, Taylor, Waugh or Warne - they all exhibit the same body language, exude the same will to win, all acknowledge the primacy of the cause.

It doesn't always work like that. Just wearing a claret and blue shirt does not mean that during Monday's play-off final in Cardiff the modern West Ham team will pass the ball in the manner of Brooking, Moore, Peters or even Cole. Equally, there was not much evidence of a collective historical ethos at the City Ground during this most miserable of seasons, when the only genetic inheritance the current Nottingham Forest side picked up from their forebears was a fondness for a drink.

Nor does it necessarily manifest itself in every individual within a team. Though Jerzy Dudek does do a pretty handy impression of Bruce Grobbelaar, no one would be moved to suggest that the spirit of Souness, Dalglish, Hughes and St John runs through the veins of Harry Kewell or that Djimi Traore is the equivalent of Joey Jones and Alan Kennedy. Jimmy Krankie more like.

Which is something Rafael Benitez clearly recognises about his squad. He may have just won the biggest club trophy of all, but the Spaniard knows he has a long way to go fully to match the achievements of the Liverpool of the past. Already, it seems, he has decided that Wednesday will be the last time at least half the present team are seen in a red shirt.

Meanwhile at Stamford Bridge, Liverpool's vanquished Champions League semi-final opponents are in the midst of preparations for their centenary next season. One hundred years of club history is to be marked by a new set of names for the suites in the stadium's west stand. Ted Drake, Bobby Tambling, Ron Harris, Peter Bonetti, John Hollins and Steve Clarke are all to be honoured by rooms named after them.

Drake was the only man other than Jose Mourinho to manage a League Championship-winning Chelsea team; Tambling remains the club's leading scorer; while Harris tops the Chelsea all-time appearance table, followed by Bonetti, Hollins and Clarke. Appropriate, then, that they should all be thus remembered.

But romantics and lovers of eccentricity will mourn the passing of the quite bizarre set of characters they have replaced in the west stand. Once the Drake suite was called the Hilaire Belloc suite, Sylvia Pankhurst previously inspired the room now named after Tambling and the William Wilberforce suite was the former incarnation of the Bonetti room. What glorious images those names must once have conjured up among the matchday faithful.

How many visitors to the Captain Scott suite, for instance, would joke, after needing relief from copious intake of liquid hospitality, that they were just popping out and may be some time? A gag made entirely redundant now that the room has been renamed The Hollins Suite. And how many fans used to enter the Augustus John Suite, have no idea who the great Edwardian artist was and conclude that he must have once been Chelsea's left-back?

A confusion no longer likely to occur following its renaming in honour of the current assistant manager, Steve Clarke. As for the Charles Kingsley suite, did anyone at the club entirely think through the implications of a room once dedicated to the effete and delicate soul behind The Water Babies now being named after Ron 'Chopper' Harris?

[Rushian]

 Sky's perfect pitch ensured that we, the viewers, never had to walk alone
By Jim White, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

John Humphrys was in particularly hurrumphing mood at the end of yesterday's Today programme. There had been emailed complaints, he said, about the amount of the show that had been dedicated to the previous evening's Champions League final.
   
The coverage had included not only the normal sports bulletin, with its clips from Radio Five Live's commentary in which Alan Green had reached such a pitch of excitement that he was in danger of inflicting on himself the sort of groin strain that inhibited Jamie Carragher in the match's latter stages. But also reports from bars in Liverpool, from bars in Istanbul, from the arrivals terminal at Liverpool airport, where, we can safely assume, the bars would have been cheerily patronised. It was enough to provoke a froth of emailing fury.

"Some of the emails are rude," spluttered Humphrys. "Very rude, actually."

Listeners are always complaining that the balance of the Today programme is wrong - too much American politics, too much election coverage, too much Humphrys - but it seemed to me that this was one story about which the editors were absolutely right. Such was the epic, heroic, astonishing, valiant, agonising - I need Clive Tyldesley here to help me with a few more adjectives - quality of the evening, personally I couldn't get enough of it. Which was why I was glad I decided to watch the game on Sky and not ITV.

Like many, I had been infuriated by ITV's coverage of the Liverpool v Chelsea semi-final, annoyed by the way the post-match interviews had been cut off and coverage of the wild celebrations curtailed to accommodate commercials about car insurance. Although I couldn't be bothered to dispatch a rude email, when offered a choice I was sufficiently moved to take it.

True, this decision meant missing out on Tyldesley, the John Gielgud of commentary whose fruity grandiloquence was perfectly attuned to an evening of such theatricality (so hyperbolic was he, when I flicked over at one point, I'm sure I heard him suggest that Jamie Carragher had "pulled both his groins"). But it did mean I enjoyed a moment of sheer joy during the post-presentation celebrations.

Across the Ataturk Stadium's public address system came the strains of a song those of us from elsewhere in the North West (not the time even to mention Manchester) are inoculated against at birth. As Gerry Marsden sang his treacly guff about the sweet song of the lark, Sky's director instructed his commentary team to keep quiet. For five minutes Rob Hawthorne, Andy Gray, Richard Keys and the rest were absent from the soundtrack. All we heard was the delirious Liverpool thousands joining in with their anthem. It was tuneless, rhythm-free, monotonal and utterly magnificent; a great example of the sort of shared communal values best expressed through sport. On ITV, meanwhile, they went to an advert break.

Goodness knows what hearing that singing would have done to Phil Thompson's emotions. The former Liverpool captain was another reason to stick with Sky. In ITV's analysts' box they had Steve McManaman. Apart from reassuring Manchester City fans that they need not, after all, alert the Missing Persons helpline, there seemed to be little point in his presence.

Thompson, on the other hand, perfectly mirrored what every Liverpool fan from Penzance to Penrith must have been feeling. Transplanted directly from Fanzone, he was undoubtedly the most biased analyst ever to occupy a chair on Sky's expert panel. Morose at half-time, his main contribution to the discussion about Milan's total domination was to suggest that when Alessandro Nesta elbowed the ball away from Luis Garcia, "Stevie Wonder could have seen it was a penalty."

At full time, rather than letting him dig himself deeper into Big Ron territory, the director simply showed Thompson's reactions to each of Liverpool's second-half goals. When Steven Gerrard scored the first, he was up, banging on the commentary box window as if hoping to draw the attention of the goal scorer. By the time Xabi Alonso scored the equaliser, he appeared to be trying to demolish the box entirely in a bid to get down to pitch level.

Shame we didn't see his reactions during the penalty shoot-out. In our house, it was the behaviour of Jerzy Dudek that provoked the most discussion. The keeper's Grobbelaar-style shenanigans were deemed by the less cynical members of the household to be ungentlemanly and unnecessary.

For the rest of us, the unusual camera angle from directly behind the penalty-taker made you realise what a shrewd tactic his flapping about was: how small the target looks when it is mostly filled by a mad Pole indulging in such urgent semaphore that you half expected the Milan team jet to taxi into the centre circle. It was truly great viewing. "Football, bloody hell", as Tyldesley put it on ITV. What an apt aphorism to quote at such a time. And in the moment of Liverpudlian triumphalism, it would be wholly inappropriate to mention who it was that first coined it.

[Rushian]

Revival can sow seeds of ambition
By Paul Hayward, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

In pictures: Liverpool stun Milan

Sport's only real point is to help people find out about themselves, and to show how good life can be when human potential is fulfilled. This is how it was in Istanbul for Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, for thousands of delirious Liverpool fans and for a city where countless groggy kids probably went to school yesterday inspired to achieve great things in their own lives.

If one Liverpool boy or girl sees a higher destiny as a consequence of what Rafa Benitez's team did to AC Milan, the sweat expended by the new champions of Europe will have watered the soil on Merseyside. A special category is reserved for sporting events that have the power to change lives. As Benitez strives to raise the continent's top team from fifth place in the Premiership, the squad are heading for the breaker's yard. But the mark they left in Liverpool's history is the stamp of immortality.

How on earth did it happen? The answer is not much clearer today. Spirit, courage, defiance are invisible, though we can monitor their effects. In a match of 120 minutes, Liverpool 'won' perhaps 10. Six of those 120 were taken up by the three goals that demolished the myth of Milan's impregnability.

Gerrard, Vladimir Smicer, Xabi Alonso. From 0-3 to 3-3 in six minutes. On BBC radio, John Toshack was heard to say: "The horse had bolted - and then it went back in." This Aintree of the emotions surpassed even Manchester United's unlikely triumph over Bayern Munich in Barcelona in 1999.

Six years ago the theatre was distilled into the couple of minutes it took Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to turn the world upside down. The defining image that night was Bayern's Sami Kuffour hammering the ground with his fist. By that criterion, Milan's marquee names should have butted the posts and kicked their shins black and red. For Italian aristocrats to surrender a 3-0 lead and then miss three of their five penalties is pure heresy.

The echoes of 1999 were many. For a start, both Mr. Ferguson and Benitez escaped jail on team selection and flawed tactical experiments. Ryan Giggs on the right and Jesper Blomqvist down the left was the rabbit Ferguson pulled from his hat. This time Benitez dropped the redoubtable Didi Hamann in favour of Harry Kewell, a paper lion, and so opened the central midfield area to Kaka's zestful runs. Kewell's first-half injury was a gift from the gods. In fairness to Benitez, his decision to unleash Hamann and switch to a three-man defence after the break corrected the earlier mistake.

This necessary but still shrewd intervention was true to the Liverpool manager's strategic brilliance in the games against Juventus and Chelsea. Yes, to repeat: the team below Everton in the Premiership have disposed of the English champions and the top two clubs in Serie A. This after Gerrard had led his dishevelled troops into the dressing room at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium fearing the ignominy of a 5-0 defeat. At half-time, Gerrard confessed, Liverpool's only aim was to make the scoreline "respectable for the fans".

A modest ambition, but one which mutated into a glorious pageant of giant-killing. Something broke inside Milan when they failed to recover from that flurry of Liverpool goals and when Jerzy Dudek became an impenetrable wall even to Andrei Shevchenko, who missed the last Milan penalty: a neat emblem of David overcoming Goliath. You could see the cracks in their spirit in Serginho's wild spot-kick and then Andrea Pirlo's tame attempt to find the corner of Dudek's net. Twice in five days, a showcase event was settled by men being asked to perform a simple task under intolerable pressure.

Arsenal won the FA Cup this way and now Liverpool have five European Cups in the Anfield trophy room. For a long time some of the players who took the club back up the mountain had been figures of fun on Merseyside. The phone-in culture has not been kind to Djimi Traore, Dudek, Milan Baros, Smicer and Igor Biscan, all of whom played their part in this European campaign.

They roused themselves in the face of a Spanish armada, who have yet to fully settle in our leagues. Alonso, who was powerless against the marauding Kaka in Wednesday's first half but recovered his poise once Hamann came on, was an instant hit, while Luis Garcia has made dramatic progress since Christmas and Fernando Morientes ought to strike gold next year. People forget: most imports need at least half a season to adapt to the pace, intensity and high error count of the Premiership.

The word on the street is that the new Gerrard, Carragher and Michael Owen are not easy to spot at the Liverpool academy, and Benitez hinted yesterday that a brutal cull of the first-team squad is about to commence. So it should. Even allowing for first-season syndrome and the mid-season injuries to Alonso and Djibril Cisse, a

37-point shortfall in relation to Chelsea tells its own tale. Most clubs win their domestic league and then chase European treasure, as Jose Mourinho's Chelsea will. Liverpool are conquering in reverse. With the Champions League trophy in their grasp, they now double back in search of a first English league title for 16 years.

Leading that quest will be Gerrard, who came of age as a world-class player in Istanbul. Not in the first half, when Liverpool's four-man midfield were overrun, but after the break, with a header that broke his team's duck and then a charge into the Milan penalty area which produced Alonso's equalising penalty. This was the night Gerrard became a natural leader, not just in the scouse cauldron of Anfield but on the most testing stage, alongside Kaka, Paolo Maldini, Andrei Shevchenko and Gennaro Gattuso, who ought to have been sent off for his costly foul on the Liverpool captain.

Still in his boots and full kit in the press conference room, Gerrard asked: "How can I leave after a night like this?" In a starting XI of two Englishmen, that statement of fidelity to a club who have been a second family to him since he was eight is a landmark for the English game. Money tried to lure him, success made him stay: success that he did much to create.

In a recent interview, Benitez said he shared with Mourinho a belief in "the collective" ahead of the cult of the individual. "In the past Liverpool's teams hunted like a pack. They were a true team, the team was the star," Benitez mused. "I believe it is a mentality that all great teams of any era have possessed. There is now a lot of money in this business, and the spirit of all for one and one for all is very hard to recover."

This is the spirit Gérard Houllier, Benitez's predecessor, also tried to instil, but for Houllier there was no comparable European conquest to offset the positional paralysis in the domestic league. Without wishing to turn a football match into a homily, it must say something about life's possibilities to a worldwide audience when a supposedly humdrum team fight back from 3-0 down and then prevail in a penalty shoot-out against Milanese nobility. It must say plenty to Liverpool's young.

[Rushian]

 Greatest revival sport has ever seen
By Alan Hansen, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

It was not just the best comeback in a European Cup final, it was not just the best comeback I have seen in football, it was the best comeback I have seen in sport anywhere in the world.

For any Italian defence to have thrown away a three-goal lead inside six minutes would have been remarkable. But for the defence of AC Milan to have done so - the back four of Paolo Maldini, Cafu, Alessandro Nesta and Jaap Stam - is unimaginable. You could not begin to believe that this kind of defence, experienced and immaculate, could have cracked that completely.
    
In the opening 45 minutes, Liverpool were absolutely overrun. The way in which Milan controlled the ball, in which everything flowed through Kaká, and in which Liverpool struggled for possession was a replica of Milan's performance at Old Trafford against Manchester United when they looked European champions in the making.

Had it carried on it might have been 5-0. At one point I thought Liverpool could conceivably have conceded seven. All that mattered at half-time was to avoid humiliation.

They were saved by three factors: the tactical acumen of Rafael Benitez, the sheer grit and will to fight that had seen them through to the final in Istanbul, and the brilliance of Steven Gerrard.

As a performance from a captain of Liverpool it is hard to see how Gerrard's second half could have been bettered. He dragged Liverpool back into the match with the same self-belief shown when they scored three times after the interval to overcome Olympiakos.

Sometimes this season his form has dipped, and sometimes, as he did after the Carling Cup final defeat to Chelsea, he has received undeserved criticism. Those who questioned his commitment to Anfield should have seen him dropping deep to fill in at right-back as Milan regained their composure in the later stages of the match.

The Liverpool manager naturally and deservedly will take much of the credit. Unusually in this Champions League campaign he did get his tactics badly wrong in the first half of the final. There is no need to analyse whether Dietmar Hamann would have done a better job than Harry Kewell - the fact Liverpool went into the interval three goals down means no analysis is required. With that scoreline no tactic, however well thought out, can be said to have worked.

There are many differences between a good and bad manager and one of them is an ability to admit you were wrong. Allied to that was a bold and difficult decision - to remove Steve Finnan during the break and to move to a three-man defence and bring on Hamann. The result was a period of football that will go down in the annals of Liverpool football club.

He has been at Liverpool less than a year but there have been three distinct phases to Benitez's management. The first, early in the season, has been the return of entertainment to Anfield, followed by the dark times of the defeats at Burnley and Birmingham, and now the incredible series of games that saw them take the European Cup.

The greatest change will have to come in the summer. It seems strange to say it but the team who have just won the European Cup, the team who have produced perhaps Liverpool's greatest performance, will have to be broken up. Liverpool fans have been starved of success in the biggest competitions for 15 years and now expectations will start to rise dramatically.

By February, Liverpool supporters will expect their side to be in the top three, but, realistically, I cannot see them as genuine championship contenders. To make up a deficit of 10 points is hard, but to close the 37-point chasm that separated them from Chelsea looks insurmountable at the moment.

Things may change and what Wednesday night in Istanbul has done is buy Benitez plenty of time. When Jerzy Dudek saved Andrei Shevchenko's penalty it laid the bogey of the past to rest. It is hard enough to manage in the present without all that history behind you. Soon five years without major successes turn into 10, which turn into 12 and by the time it reaches 20, what the club stand for is only a memory.

Benitez has five years before that memory of Istanbul fades. The players who woke up in their hotel rooms with European Cup winners' medals by their beds yesterday morning experienced a feeling that is very difficult to describe. You feel unbeatable, totally in command, and deep down there is also the knowledge you will probably never in your life feel like this again.

[Rushian]

We played for penalties, says Gerrard
By Tim Rich, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

It is something to achieve your boyhood dreams, it is quite another to wonder quite how you did it. Even on the morning after the penalty shoot-out, Steven Gerrard, who became the latest in a line of Liverpool captains to lift the European Cup, was marvelling at the quality of much of AC Milan's play and admitting that during extra time Liverpool's only goal was to force penalties.

"When we got into the dressing room at half-time my head was in my hands," he said. "I honestly thought it was over. Even in extra time a lot of the lads were running on empty with 10 to 12 minutes left. We were playing for penalties if I am honest."

Gerrard had seldom experienced football of the quality Milan unveiled in the opening 45 minutes that ought to have paved the way for the heaviest defeat in a European Cup final. "Some of the football they played was unbelievable," he said. "Kaka is a world-class player. When Shevchenko forced that double save from Jerzy Dudek just before extra time, my mind said 'goal' and when Serginho shot the first penalty over I knew it would be our night."

It was strange that in the shoot-out Xabi Alonso, who had taken a penalty in normal time, was not on the list. Gerrard was told by his manager, Rafael Benitez, that he was due to take the fifth and final one. "I replied 'thanks a lot'."

Dudek, and his impersonation of the wobbly-legged Bruce Grobbelaar in the 1984 European Cup final, made Gerrard's participation unnecessary.

Grobbelaar yesterday added his own praise of Dudek, saying he "looked like a starfish with jelly legs" in the penalty shoot-out. He added: "Someone said that Carragher went up to Dudek before the game and said to him: 'Listen, Bruce Grobbelaar did it in '84, see what you can do.' And I think he did a much better job than I did.

"He modernised it because now the rules have changed, and you can go latterly across the line, which he did and he put people off.

"The double save against Andrei Shevchenko was the best and I think that was the turning point. I don't think the guys had a look in after that."

Grobbelaar said the introduction of Didi Hamaan at half time changed the game and sparked "what must be one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the game. It is a better achievement than when we won it. I'm still a fan and it makes me proud to be associated with the club".

For Gerrard, whose previous final, the Carling Cup defeat to Chelsea in February, was marked by a lost lead and an own goal that sparked a wave of derision from certain sections of the Liverpool public, this was a sweet moment.

He is now expected to remain on Merseyside but he confessed that the constant speculation that he was moving to Stamford Bridge had undermined his form at the turn of the year.

"I didn't play well enough, there was a time when whatever I did it seemed to be connected to my future," he said. "I decided to wait until the end of the season before settling it and to get my head sorted. I think I did. All we need to do now is sort out a contract."

[Rushian]

'My white-knuckle ride on the red rollercoaster'
By Stewart Jackson, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

There is a cliche that is oft-used to try to do justice to the ecstatic highs and despondent lows of great sporting drama: the emotional rollercoaster.

Apologies but I can think of no better phrase to describe what I went through as a Liverpool fan in the Ataturk Stadium on Wednesday.

Hope, disbelief, anger, despair, resolve, joy, pride and the most unbearable gut-wrenching tension I have ever known. Then Jerzy Dudek overheard me say something about having his children and it was sheer delirium. Behind the goal at the north end of the ground we went wild. It was far from straightforward - but who wants straightforward when you can do it like this?

Before the match we were in buoyant mood, positive we would win. Liverpool fans had been making their way to Istanbul with an air of confidence. But at half-time it looked like we were going to get a battering. Anyone who lost their faith will not make the mistake of doing so again.

Rafa Benitez's growing air of infallibility had started to cloud when, in the party atmosphere outside the ground, news came through from England via text message that Harry Kewell was starting at the expense of Dietmar Hamann. After a journey from the centre of Istanbul, which had taken almost three hours, the night was starting on a bad note: the talk was all queues and Kewell.

The loud PA system in an otherwise impressive stadium killed a lot of the fervour we had experienced outside the ground. The noise levels just weren't what you're used to as a Liverpool fan. It was a worry and, as the first half unfolded, things went flat.

By half-time those looking for positives in Benitez's team selection had to admit he'd got it wrong. Milan were running us ragged. We had no control in midfield, no platform for Stevie Gerrard and Xabi Alonso to get their foot on the ball. As for the defending...

All that changed very quickly in the second half, of course, and once we were level there were long periods of biting nails and looking for Jamie Carragher to pop up whenever another white wave crashed into our defence.

The knowledge of what was at stake multiplied the tension by a thousand. Having got back to 3-3, blowing it would have been unthinkable, but chances kept coming for Milan. Only when Andrei Shevchenko missed that absolute sitter did I know we were going to win.

I turned to Fat Steve and the Jolly brothers and said: "We're gonna do it!" Steve had his head in his hands, some of his fingers bleeding he'd chewed them so much.

My phone started bleeping as extra-time was drawing to a close, friends and family texting to tell me we'd been on TV - "looking nervous as hell". If the cameras had sought us out as Stevie Gerrard lifted the most beautiful piece of silverware in the world, it would have found us all in tears, screaming and singing and dancing for all we were worth.

It doesn't get any better than this. My voice is gone but my heart is still singing and will be forever when I recall this night. I was there.

[Rushian]

Dudek joins all-time greats
By Bob Wilson, Telegraph
(Filed: 27/05/2005)

On one of football's biggest stages - the European Cup final - the analogy I would draw was of Liverpool like a troupe of circus performers facing AC Milan on Wednesday night.

For me, Jamie Carragher was the lion-tamer, Steven Gerrard the ringmaster and Jerzy Dudek the trapeze artist. Never has a goalkeeper walked the tightrope with such danger - and no safety net. If you wanted an example of the precarious business of being in goal, this was it.

Dudek has had endless stick and ridicule in the press for his performances in his time at Anfield, even to the point of being called 'Calamity J', and some of it has been of his own doing through mindless errors. It is often unwarranted, but it is the job a goalkeeper chooses - risking being humbled and humiliated.

However, if I were sitting down with Jerzy to analyse his performance in the final I would be telling him that he almost single-handedly won the match for Liverpool, in spite of looking shaky early in the game and totally misjudging the flight of one corner kick. Jerzy is the reason why Liverpool are the champions of Europe today. No question.

The double save he made off Andrei Shevchenko with the scores tied at 3-3, when the legs of all the Liverpool players had plainly gone, will go down in history. It ranks alongside Gordon Banks against Pele in the 1970 World Cup finals, Jim Montgomery for Sunderland against Leeds in the 1973 FA Cup final from Peter Lorimer's close-range shot and David Seaman against Paul Peschisolido in the FA Cup semi-final against Sheffield United for Arsenal in 2003.

Jerzy did well to keep out Shevchenko's first effort. Had the striker scored, I'll bet my bottom dollar that Jerzy would have had the blame heaped on him. Instead, he did what goalkeepers do every day in training, honing their instincts to use a combination of incredible reflexes and the system of getting a barrier in the way to avert the ball at whatever cost. In short, improvisation - but practised time and time again in training.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that second stab at the ball from Shevchenko would have ended up in the back of the net. It was an instinctive movement. Shevchenko did nothing wrong. The ball simply hit an effective stopping part of Jerzy's hand, and went over the bar. Part miracle, part luck and a lot of skill.

Then, in the penalty shoot-out, his two saves, I must say, were illegal. He was way beyond where the laws allow a goalkeeper to be, at least two to three yards off his line. But one of the clever things - and I'm sure Carragher reminded him of this - was to remember Bruce Grobbelaar and his wobbly legs.

The history of Liverpool and Grobbelaar would not have been unknown to Jerzy, either. Cleverly, he had the presence of mind to use gamesmanship right until the last.

That walk of 65 yards to take the dreaded penalty he used to his advantage, picking up the ball and giving it to the AC Milan players one by one, reminding them that he was in front of them, looking into their eyes, almost seemingly wishing them good luck. His actions, though, seemed only to shred the nerves of the Milan players.

What is amazing, too, is that this could still be the last game Jerzy will play for Liverpool. We hear that Rafa Benitez has earmarked a Spanish goalkeeper to replace him.

The name of Jerzy Dudek will now join the legends of Liverpool. He will sit alongside Bill Shankly, Kenny Dalglish, Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes as one of the greats. He needed bundles and bundles of good luck on Wednesday night to get there - but get there he did.

[Rushian]

Benitez spared gamble blushes
By Alan Smith, Telegraph
(Filed: 26/05/2005)

Sometimes, as a manager, you need a little help; for your team to come to the rescue to cover up an embarrassing mistake. And Rafael Benitez got more than he could ever have hoped for last night in a Champions League final that will live long in the memory.

As far as gambles go, it was like the Las Vegas punter who put all his chips on red and the ball landed on black. Unlike roulette, however, Benitez's decision to play Harry Kewell from the start in Istanbul didn't, on the face of it, appear a 50-50 chance. More like 90-10 with someone on whom it is very hard to rely upon these days.

It was so unlike the Spanish coach, normally so cautious, to go for broke with a man who hadn't completed 90 minutes since before Christmas. Even more surprising given Benitez had admitted going into this game that Kewell was only 80 per cent fit. So what was behind it?

Perhaps it was to allow Steven Gerrard to play his usual game, not so advanced in support of Milan Baros. Perhaps Benitez had seen the way AC Milan imploded when PSV Eindhoven went for the jugular in the semi-final. Perhaps he had decided that the same forthright approach might do the trick. Cruelly and embarrassingly, it didn't come off in the first half.

Kewell picked up a knock soon after the first goal and you could see what was coming next since he never really looked as if he wanted to run it off.

Continual grimaces in the direction of the Liverpool bench eventually led to the No 7 coming off. Tens of thousands behind the goal started booing their player. Kewell, not knowing, applauded in kind.

From that moment on Liverpool were struggling. A rejigged formation with Luis Garcia moving inside to take the Australian's place was getting pulled from pillar to post as the Rossoneri set about dismantling their opponents. The discipline so inherent in Liverpool's marvellous journey, when everyone knew their job and stuck to it religiously, was melting sadly away in the Ataturk Olympic Stadium.

And it was here where Dietmar Hamman's absence, due to Kewell's inclusion, was costing Liverpool dear. Milan's midfield was being given free reign.

Andrea Pirlo was starting it from deep, dictating the tempo, and the elusive Kaka made the very most of his lot, ingeniously supplying his strikers with a succession of chances.

Neither Gerrard nor Xabi Alonso could get anywhere near in order to disrupt the incessant onslaught. How they were missing the canny German's presence in front of the back four, intercepting danger before it had a chance to flourish.

Benitez had clearly seen enough and reverted to type for the second half. Hamman came on, Liverpool tightened up and somehow found the heart and inspiration to mount a thrilling fightback.

Crucially for Benitez, though, one half of his original strike-force didn't let him down. Baros, ploughing a lone furrow up front, played superbly well.

His prodigious work ethic was being complemented effectively by an intelligence that, in fairness, isn't always present. It certainly kept Jaap Stam and Allesandro Nesta right on their toes.

The little striker's busy runs into space, his ability to hold up the ball was giving teammates valuable time to get up and support.

It was a heroic performance from the Czech Republic player, probably his last in a Liverpool shirt.

He thoroughly deserved the emphatic ovation that came his way when Djibril Cisse came on in his place with five minutes remaining of the 90 minutes.

From all of his players, the relieved Benitez could not have honestly asked for anything more.

[Rushian]

Player by player guide
By Tim Rich, Telegraph
(Filed: 26/05/2005)

LIVERPOOL

JERZY DUDEK

Clarence Seedorf had boasted to Polish television that Milan knew exactly how to beat Dudek and he was right. Dudek never inspires confidence but just before the fightback he made an absolutely crucial save.

STEVE FINNAN

Substituted at half time as Benitez countered a three-goal deficit by bringing on a defensive midfielder in Hamann. Strange thinking but obviously inspired. Finnan was probably relieved.

SAMI HYYPIA

Great header that almost cancelled out Maldini's opener but like the rest of his defence he was left over-exposed by the collapse of Liverpool's midfield. Naturally, demonstrated more composure after the break.

JAMIE CARRAGHER

A marvellous campaign in the Champions League but not, alas, a marvellous final. He was the final defender for Milan's second and third goals but made amends with a fine interception to deny Shevchenko in the 80th minute.

DJIMI TRAORE

Many of his family had come to Istanbul and they would have winced collectively during a disastrous first half performance, although he made a crucial clearance off the line from Shevchenko after the break.

STEVEN GERRARD

Just when you thought Liverpool were utterly beyond their captain's rescue comes this. It was his header than began the undermining of Milan and his run that won Alonso's penalty.

JOHN ARNE RIISE

Fabulous volley to meet an imaginatively-taken corner from Gerrard and always appeared appeared menacing with a shot from distance.

MILAN BAROS

Not by any means the most popular member of the home dressing room at Anfield - he resembles a Czech Craig Bellamy - Baros nonetheless performed well holding the ball up especially in the first half.

LUIS GARCIA

Was perfectly placed to head Hernan Crespo's near-post flick off the line but was also well placed to equalise Maldini's opener. Switched positions as Liverpool staged their comeback.

XABI ALONSO

Looked far more comfortable when alongside Dietmar Hamann than when trying to supply Kewell. Did not take a good penalty but was fortunate Dida's save came straight back towards him.

HARRY KEWELL

Benitez is not by nature a gambler but to have taken a punt on Kewell whose appetite and work-rate are as questionable was strange. Hardly impressed before being taken off in the 23rd minute.

SUBSTITUTES

Smicer for Kewell (23) Hamann for Finnan (ht). Benitez's growing legend on Merseyside will be burnished by what he achieved at half time. Smicer scored the second, Hamann was relentless. Cisse for Baros (84) was a theatrical introduction.

AC MILAN

DIDA

Made a couple of fine saves as Liverpool attacked following Maldini's goal and was hardly at fault for any of their goals in the second half. Gerrard and Smicer's strikes were perfectly placed and he palmed Alonso's penalty away.

JAAP STAM

During the first half when his positioning and relative speed made you wonder why Mr. Ferguson ever sold him but somewhat exposed in the second. Had a great chance to settle matters with a free header at the end.

ALESSANDRO NESTA

Like all the Milan defence the question is why were they were so easily shocked into a catatonic state by a Gerrard goal that appeared only a pinprick. The question should be aimed at Nesta more than any.

CAFU

Like all of Milan's defenders, he looked completely comfortable during the commanding first half and looked utterly at sea during the five minutes that shook the football world.

PAOLO MALDINI

To score the fastest goal in the history of the European Cup finals, of which he has now played seven, was remarkable. None was more extraordinary than this. Was probably not guilty of conceding a penalty for handball.

GENNARO GATTUSO

Maybe he should have been sent off for bringing down Gerrard and had he been, Ancelotti would have been denied a holding midfielder of the highest quality.

CLARENCE SEEDORF

A fine performance overall but it is easy to see why many think his reputation is slightly overstated. As the match wore on, events appeared to pass him by.

ANDREA PIRLO

Lovely passing and a fine touch showed why both Gerrard and Alonso mentioned him as Milan's great unsung hero before the match.

KAKA

Superb, glittering display that marks him out as perhaps the best young player in Europe. The way he drew in his marker for Shevchenko's disallowed goal was superb and was replicated for Crespo's second.

ANDREI SHEVCHENKO

Looked at first out of touch but as the match wore on his influence grew, especially in the second half when Milan desperately needed him. That he missed the decisive penalty was cruel indeed.

HERNAN CRESPO

Ancelotti will make the greatest effort to keep the Argentine at the San Siro and after this performance, which brought two beautifully-taken goals, you wonder why Chelsea thought him surplus to requirements.

SUBSTITUTES

Tomasson for Crespo and Sergihno for Seedorf (85). They were brought on with an eye on extra time and both performed well, although Serginho's first penalty miss was decisive. Rui Costa, on for Gattuso (112), also failed from the spot.

[Rushian]

Bold Liverpool rise from the ashes
By Paul Hayward, Telegraph
(Filed: 26/05/2005)

The phoenix should be Liverpool's new emblem. After conceding the fastest goal in the history of European Cup finals, the club who dominated football on the continent in the late 1970s and early 1980s rose and took flight with victory after one of the most spectacular comebacks ever to grace this great competition.
    
The line Rafa Benitez's men walked here last night was between humiliation and resurrection. Three second-half goals inside five minutes are sufficient for us to conclude that the Anfield tradition has been saved from the grave. It's one thing to plot and scuff your way to a final before being subjugated by a superior opponent. But Liverpool's refusal to yield to the Milan of Paolo Maldini, Andrei Shevchenko and Kaka came from the heart. It will be the base on which Benitez builds a new Liverpool next season. A Liverpool who surely ought to be capable of roughing up Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United.

Like the FA Cup final, this was a game of brutal tension. The surest evidence that reality had invaded the pitch seemed to come when some Liverpool supporters began weeping through the half-time interval. Those crimson tears were washing away the ink on a new page in the club's illustrious history. Those who shed them have learned a lesson for life: never despair.

Milan were already 3-0 up by the time Benitez's men found sanctuary in the dressing room, so maybe the pessimism was understandable. It was time, though, to remember that the Premiership's fifth best team had already knocked out the champions of Italy and England en route to this final. They are masters of the improbable.

When Liverpool crept past Chelsea to reach their first European Cup final for 20 years, Anfield regulars imagined an exotic destination bathed in hot Turkish sun. Instead, they encountered thick cloud and biting wind at a white elephant of a ground that sits in a lunar landscape, surrounded by impoverished neighbourhoods. Nothing on this crazy, tumultuous night followed a script.

Down town, the T-shirts spoke of the club's renewed self-confidence. 'Rafa's Red Revolution', boasted one. On another, Jamie Carragher's face stared out beneath the headline: 'Carradona'. Even Carragher, the classic local hero, would have been surprised to see himself being compared to the great Maradona. But every Liverpool fan you spoke to was full of the old opiate of European success. Not even the long journey and choking traffic could dampen their spirits as they shivered and waited for the battle to commence.

Cunning, defensive solidity and the odd lightning raid had taken them past Chelsea and Juventus. Now, though, a tactical dilemma confronted Benitez. Excessive caution might prove fatal against a Milan team who can beat most opponents at chess. PSV Eindhoven's audacious attempt to overturn a 2-0 first-leg deficit in their semi-final had almost come off. Back home the Dutch had unleashed a whirlwind against Milan's ageing defence and had taken the game 3-1. The Italians needed Marco Ambrosini's away goal to see them through.

Was this the magic formula for Liverpool to win their fifth European Cup? Benitez thought so, if the surprising inclusion of Harry Kewell at the expense of Dietmar Hamann was any guide. That bold attacking policy was undone inside 20 minutes when Kewell, the antithesis of the Aussie hard man, began limping theatrically and was booed off the pitch by Liverpool's followers. As Vladimir Smicer took his place, Kaka began ripping through the Liverpool midfield with the ball at his feet and Shevchenko and Crespo pulled left and right to stretch the Anfield club's previously impervious defence.

While Kaka tormented Xabi Alonso, who was over-run in the midfield anchor position, Shevchenko went to work on the left-back, Djimi Traore, who found out why this Ukrainian marksman is arguably the world's best centre-forward. Shevchenko was a phantom ghosting behind Traore and drilling the ball in from the inside-right position. With Crespo cutting in from the other flank, the authority established by Carragher and Sami Hyypia against Juventus and Chelsea was smashed.

By half-time, Kaka slicing through the middle to supply the two Milan strikers was proving a lethal formula. As the tears rolled, there was the temptation to look away in sympathy and embarrassment. The post-mortems would say that Liverpool had no business being in a Champions League final when they have travelled for 15 years without winning their domestic league. No business, when they're not even the leading team in Liverpool. It was going to be hindsight time. Told-you-all-along time.

Except that Liverpool summoned from way down inside the spirit that has stopped Anfield sliding into the Mersey these past 15 years. This sudden, defiant urge may have stemmed from the fear of humiliation. They were like a bloodied prize-fighter who fears the indignity of being taken apart in front of his family and friends. First one, then two, then three counter-punches put the Italian bully on the floor. Delirium swept through the red hordes, who had annexed at least half of this distant, soul-less stadium.

Emotion was only part of it. The tactical key to Liverpool's revival was the arrival of Hamann, that wily, gritty German, who plugged the gaps around Alonso and provided fresh composure and confidence.

With six minutes left, the Liverpool fans were chanting 'ole, ole' as their heroes stroked the ball around. Baros gave way to Djibril Cisse as You'll Never Walk Alone rang round the ground.

[Rushian]

Gerrard leads glorious fightback, Telegraph
By Henry Winter in Istanbul
(Filed: 26/05/2005)

Liverpool (0) 3 AC Milan (3) 3
Liverpool win 3-2 on pens after extra time

Liverpool An extraordinary Champions League final was won on penalties last night, inspired by an extraordinary footballer, Steven Gerrard. With Liverpool facing the deepest of embarrassments at half-time, being completely out-passed and outclassed by Milan, Gerrard decided to attempt what everyone else believed was a mission impossible.
    
Steven Gerrard
Captain's role: Steven Gerrard inspired the fightback

Making light of those goals from Paolo Maldini and a brace from Hernan Crespo, Gerrard tore into the Italians from the first whistle of the second half, scoring, creating the space for Vladimir Smicer to add a second and then winning the penalty for Xabi Alonso to eventually drive Liverpool level. It was Gerrard's determination, his refusal to countenance defeat even when it rose like a giant shadow, that kept his team alive, propelling them into the additional half-hour.

An extraordinary, switch-back evening had begun badly for Liverpool, seeing them three behind at the break, when their fans were chanting: "We're gonna win 4-3." Such defiance was soon coursing through their players, who fought back to 3-3 to set up the most compelling of finales.

If Gerrard dominated the second half, released forward by Didi Hamann's timely arrival, the marvellous Kaka had graced the opening period. Within seconds, the young Brazilian drew a foul from Djimi Traore. Andrea Pirlo bent in the free kick, no one reacted to Maldini's delayed run and the distinguished Italian beat Jerzy Dudek with a right-footed half-volley.

For 45 minutes, Liverpool simply could not handle Milan's midfield. With Pirlo sitting deep and dictating the tempo, Gennaro Gattuso and Clarence Seedorf shuttled back and forth, repossessing the ball, redistributing, always keeping things ticking over while Kaka played the magician in the middle, a central feeding station towards Crespo and Shevchenko. No wonder Benitez elected to introduce Hamann at the interval to stiffen the midfield.

For 45 minutes Gerrard's natural instincts had been tempered. Benitez's gamble had failed, particularly as Harry Kewell soon limped from the fray.

Smicer darted on and was involved in the half's most contentious moment, his pass catching Alessandro Nesta's elbow. As Liverpool screamed for handball Milan went through the gears, working the ball from Maldini forward towards Seedorf, Pirlo and, inevitably, Kaka. The Brazilian's through pass was perfect, directed past Traore for Shevchenko to chase. The Ukrainian's cross was turned in arrogantly by Crespo.

Liverpool were on the rack and there was still time for Crespo, the Argentine hit-man watched by Diego Maradona and Mario Kempes, to poach a second before the turnaround. Again Kaka proved the catalyst, dashing through the middle, before releasing Crespo, who beat Dudek with the most clinical of dinked finishes.

Humiliation was engulfing Liverpool. Here was a time for them to show their character, to respond to Benitez's dressing-room exhortations, to remember their club's proud traditions and take the game to Milan and their mocking fans.

Running into the Fossa Dei Leoni, the Lions' Den, Liverpool delivered one of the most famous 15-minute spells of football imaginable.

This was football from the Gods, all guts and glory, bringing the faithful hordes to their feet, and songs flowing ceaselessly from Liverpool lips.

Gerrard, inevitably, led the charge, meeting John Arne Riise's cross with a strong and well-directed header that flew past Dida. Liverpool's captain was unmarked but he still had to rise high to meet the ball, still needed to twist his body to inject the requisite power. Dida stood no chance. Not with Gerrard in this mood, the adrenalin pumping.

Liverpool's resistance movement was up and running. The great escape looked possible two minutes later when Liverpool struck again, memorably so. Hamann's presence was immediately being felt, not simply in allowing Gerrard to roam forward, but in providing simple passes to team-mates. One such lay-off invited Smicer to let fly from range, the ball deceiving Dida and crashing in. Amazing.

As the Kop's celebrated anthem swirled around the ground, their idols in red were more than walking on with hope in their hearts. They were running, chasing every loose ball, every lost cause. Gerrard was everywhere; this most passionate of footballing performers so loves the Champions League that he was not going to be shoved unceremoniously off the greatest stage of all.

And so, as the clock showed the hour mark, Gerrard sprinted into the box, pursuing Baros's clever touch, racing through on goal until brought down by Gattuso. Clear penalty. Milan complained, pleaded with the Spanish referee to reconsider but the linesman had already taken his station ready for the penalty. Alonso stepped up confidently, hit the ball well enough with that trusty right foot but Dida had guessed correctly and parried well. Alonso, though, was following up and, as Nesta dived in, rammed the ball left-footed into the roof of the net.

Parity felt like paradise for Liverpool, their fans hugging each other with delight and doubtless disbelief. Milan were stunned, rocked by this 15-minute whirlwind.

Liverpool had the initiative now, although Traore still needed to be alert to clear a Shevchenko rocket off the line.

Milan still threatened on the counter, and here Carragher confirmed what an immense season he is having. Three times, the Merseysider dived into rescue situations that appeared lost, embodying his team's never-say-die commitment and so helping the inimitable Gerrard send this remarkable game into extra time.

Match details

AC Milan (4-1-2-1-2): Difa; Cafu, Nesta, Stam, Maldini; Pirlo; Gattuso, Seedorf (Serginho 85); Kaka; Shevchenko, Crespo (Tomasson 85).
Subs: Abbiati (g), Kaladze, Costacurta, Rui Costa, Dhorasoo.
Liverpool (4-4-1-1): Dudek; Finnan (Hamann h-t), Carragher, Hyypia, Traore; Luis Garcia, Gerrard, Xabi Alonso, Riise; Kewell (Smicer 23); Baros (Cisse 85).
Subs: Carson (g), Josemi, Nunez, Biscan.
Booked: Carragher, Baros.
Referee: M Mejuto Gonzalez (Spain).

[Rushian]

Fantastic - we're on top of the world
By Tim Rich, Telegraph
(Filed: 25/05/2005)

Steven Gerrard declared himself "on top of the world" and hinted he would be staying with Liverpool after the club became European champions last night.
    
The Liverpool captain's future has been in doubt, with Chelsea and Real Madrid reportedly interested in signing him. But after the triumph in Istanbul Gerrard said: "I'll be having talks very shortly - and it's looking good." Liverpool had been torn apart in the first half and Gerrard added: "At 3-0 down at half-time I thought I was going to be in tears after the final whistle. But the manager said keep our chins up and try and score early - and we did."

Gerrard gave a further indication that his future could be at Liverpool next season.

"I'm going to talk very soon with the chairman and the manager but it's looking good," he said.

Manager Rafael Benitez, whose greatest triumph has come in his first year as Liverpool manager after leaving Valencia last summer, was as buoyant as his players. "Fantastic," he said. After losing 3-0 [at half-time] losing players and with injury problems at the end, it's fantastic."

Benitez praised his captain, particularly with regard to his goal in the Liverpool comeback. He said: "It's good for us. When the captain scores all the team play the same."

For goalkeeper Dudek, who saved two penalties in the shoot-out, the match represented a personal triumph. "I was waiting for this moment," he said. "I had difficult moments in this game but this is fantastic."

Asked about his saves from Shevchenko, Dudek added: "I don't know how I did it.

"It was fortunate for myself that I did it. Fantastic for me."

And Dudek revealed Bruce Grobbelaar's antics in the 1984 final, where his wobbly-legged dance confused Roma's penalty takers, had been an inspiration for the shoot-out.

"Of course I watched it. That was my inspiration," he said.. You wouldn't have given a lot for our chances at half-time but the boys were absolutely magnificent."

Parry believes tonight's win increases the club's chances of defending their trophy, even though they finished outside the top four in the Barclays Premiership. The Football Association are hoping that the momentum created by Liverpool's victory, and the fervour and enthusiasm demonstrated by their fans, will force the UEFA executive committee at their meeting in Manchester next month to grant the Merseysiders a wild card place in next season's Champions League.

The FA, who have been canvassing on this issue since January, have lobbied sponsors, who are sympathetic, and hope the broadcasters will also lend their weight. The FA are well aware that any rule change to bring in Liverpool will be fiercely resisted by the UEFA administration led by chief executive Lars-Christer Olssen. But they are banking on the executive committee seeing the injustice of the rules that prevent Liverpool from defending their trophy.

Liverpool's victory last night took their total earnings from this year's competition to more than £20 million, an invaluable amount as the club try to keep their dream of a new stadium alive. Costs are already understood to be running at more than £130 million.

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

Fans celebrate in style on their day that was 'meant to be'
By Carol Midgley

Our correspondent joins the party as the people of Liverpool let their hair down

THE official Liverpool FC shop was closed for business yesterday. If it seems odd that a merchandising store would shut its doors on its biggest trading day for 20 years, then you seriously misunderstand the mood here.

Celebrating this victory was far more important than money. To paraphrase the late Bill Shankly, it was more important than anything. This included turning up for work. The “sickie” rate on Merseyside was said to have soared as thousands woke up with crushing hangovers and others did not make it to bed at all.

The manager of the Liverpool FC shop in Williamson Square had avoided any such problem by pulling down his red shutters and taking his entire staff to Istanbul to watch the match. Supporters who turned up hoping to buy yet more flags in which to wrap themselves were impressed. “What a guy,” Niall O’Carroll, from Dublin, said. “Talk about getting your priorities right.”

This was not a day for work but a day for tooting car horns, tying scarves around your head and singing You’ll Never Walk Alone out of tune in public bars. Barely a child or a dog escaped without being draped with something red (20,000 commemorative flags and hats were sold in the past week).

Barely a minute seemed to pass without some radio station or pub jukebox playing Three Lions. You saw children with Liverpool shirts beneath their school uniforms, you saw the odd businessman with a red shirt beneath his grey suit. One passer-by had painted a red VW Golf for sale on a garage forecourt with the No 8 and the word “Gerrard”.

About 750,000 people lined the sunlit city streets from Queen’s Drive to Anfield and into the city centre to watch the victory parade in an open-top bus. Thousands had gathered at Lime Street station at 8.30pm to glimpse their returning heroes, only still to be waiting 1¼ hours later. For many, it was too long and they went home disappointed.

Some parents were tearful with pride that their children would witness such an historic moment for the club. Though the returning heroes did not touch down at John Lennon airport until 4.20pm, many bleary-eyed fans had begun gathering outside Anfield from early morning because they did not want to go home. By noon there were hour-long queues to buy new £6 victory T-shirts from street traders. There was particular satisfaction that the shirts had been printed at 3am in a Manchester factory not far from Old Trafford.

One man said he had been so “merry” that he fell asleep in the pub and woke up unable to remember whether Liverpool had won or not. He would only believe it when he saw the replays on TV. Another confided that at half-time he had promised to marry his girlfriend if Liverpool lifted the European Cup. Now he was rather regretting his rashness.

There were two objects of Liverpool’s love yesterday — Steven Gerrard and Rafael Benítez. Gerrard had slept with his medal round his neck, the women said, and wasn’t he gorgeous? The midfield player was delighted by the reception. “These fans have inspired us, so it is great to bring the cup back for them,” Gerrard said. “They were fantastic in Turkey, and they really lifted us to victory after that first half when we were 3-0 down.”

Benítez also emphasised the importance of the supporters. “They have been magnificent all season, they have been our twelfth man and behaved perfectly in Istanbul,” the manager said. “I have always said our fans are the best in England. Now I know they are the best in Europe too.”

Some supporters said they wanted to go to the airport and kiss the ground when the team arrived. The last time the city saw passion such as this was in 1964 when the Beatles returned from America. More than 100,000 fans lined the streets to welcome them and medics treated more than 200 fainting cases in the first 15 minutes.

The only passing-out that looked likely yesterday was the type that comes from drinking too much alcohol. One supporter who was still celebrating in a town centre pub at 2pm asked not to have his name printed as he had told his boss that he had diarrhoea.

Many fans had travelled from other parts of the country just for the experience of watching the match in Liverpool. Louise Summers, 22, a nursery nurse from Nottingham, had taken a week off work and checked into a hotel in Bootle with her boyfriend. “I couldn’t afford to go to Turkey so coming to Liverpool was the next best thing,” she said. “There’s nowhere else you want to be on a day like this.”

Even Everton fans phoned local radio phone-ins to offer congratulations and many magnanimously said that Liverpool should be allowed into next season’s Champions League.

Some Liverpudlians interpreted the team’s underdog comeback as a romantic metaphor for the regeneration of the city. Others, and they admitted they were overemotional, talked of this being the greatest football match ever. “I knew we would win, even at half-time,” Alex Owen, who runs a tile shop in Warrington, said. “It was meant to be.”

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

Benítez plotting revival of Anfield's fab force

By Matt Dickinson, Chief Football Correspondent

THE European Cup spent the early hours of yesterday morning in Steven Gerrard’s hotel room in Istanbul, where the Liverpool captain woke up with his medal still around his neck. It flew home in seat 8E, nestled between Jerzy Dudek and Igor Biscan, before it was paraded on a bus around the streets of Merseyside. This morning it will be placed in the Anfield trophy cabinet, Liverpool’s to keep for ever.

A new trophy will have to be cast by Uefa for next season and, after one of the most dramatic of the 50 European Cup finals, the prospect of the holders not competing for it seems unthinkable. “It would be absolutely diabolical if we weren’t allowed to defend it,” David Moores, the Liverpool chairman, said. “The whole world will want us to play now,” Rick Parry, the chief executive, added.

The European governing body continued to make officious noises about rules and regulations, but it is expected that the executive committee will cave in to pressure at its meeting on June 18 and 19, if not before. “It would be unbelievable for us to play the World Club Championship and not be in the Champions League,” Rafael Benítez, the victorious manager, said. “They must listen to the people and use their common sense.”

Uefa bureaucrats aside, it is hard to think that there is a soul who does not believe that Liverpool should be in the draw in August — TNS, the Welsh Premier League champions, even offered to play Benítez’s team in a one-off match that would make them millions but cost them their own place in the competition, until the plan was scuppered by the FA of Wales. It should be just one of the rewards for a comeback that defied belief on Wednesday night as they recovered from 3-0 down at half-time to beat AC Milan on penalties.

Most of the Liverpool players were still wearing their medals as they flew home yesterday, but, for some of them, there was the knowledge that they had played their last game for the club. Benítez had decided to purge the squad long before the final and his judgment was not about to be clouded by sentiment. “In terms of individuals, we had a clear idea already,” he said. “We won’t change that.”

Dudek was one of the heroes of Istanbul, but Benítez has already lined up his successor, José Reina, from Villarreal. Dudek spoke defiantly about fighting for his place — “I have two more years left on my contract and I am not afraid of anyone,” the Poland goalkeeper said — but he will be surplus to requirements as Benítez moves ruthlessly in an attempt to challenge Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea.

Among others likely to be leaving are Dietmar Hamann, probably to Bolton Wanderers, Milan Baros, who is wanted by Valencia, and Vladimir Smicer, who came off the bench to score his team’s second goal. As many as six new players could be arriving, with Benítez expected to have around £25 million to spend this summer. Owen Hargreaves, the England and Bayern Munich midfield player, is one possibility.

“The European Cup is the most important trophy, but it is not enough,” Benítez said. “To win the Premiership is a challenge. The team will be better next season.”

The imminent end to the season-long saga about Gerrard’s future was also cited by Benítez as a reason for optimism. “I think it had an effect,” he said. “People were talking about him all season, speculating about Chelsea and Real Madrid. It is difficult when you are young and when you feel for your club to go into all the games with the right mentality. But for sure he will play next season and maybe ten more.”

Indeed, Struan Marshall, Gerrard’s agent, held meetings with Parry even as Liverpool prepared for the final, to pave the way for a new two-year deal that could be worth as much as £10 million to the captain. “I just need time to sort out the contract,” Gerrard said.

The jubilant Liverpool players were joined in the dressing-room in Istanbul by Gérard Houllier, their former manager, but Benítez is building his own side at Anfield. Competing for the Premiership title still seems a distant goal, but, in December, they will be flying to Japan to play in the World Club Championship as the European representatives in the six-team tournament. It may be 15 years since they won their last domestic title, but they have the chance to sit on top of the world.

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

For Istanbul, read Headingley

By Simon Barnes

The night when the impossible happened again, 24 years on
THEY WERE OFFERING 360-1 AGAINST A Liverpool victory at half-time. I am still wondering about the fools who took it, even though I know how it came out. Because it shouldn’t have turned out the way it did. Backing Liverpool was an act of folly, false logic, sentimentality, lunatic partisanship, and it involved a total misunderstanding of the way sport works. A much better half-time bet was AC Milan at 100-1 on.

All right, Liverpool won. They won the European Cup final on Wednesday night, beating Milan on penalties. I accept that without reservation. But betting on Liverpool to win was an act of faith in the miraculous. It was a bet against nature. Certainly, it was not the bet a professional punter would have made. A person who made such a bet would be certain to have a serious interest in crop circles, Elvis’s second coming, flying pigs, a flat earth, extraterrestrial landings and the innate goodness of humankind.

It was not just that Liverpool were three goals down at half-time. That is the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. It was also the fact that Liverpool were playing quite dreadfully. They looked outclassed, second-raters, country bumpkins against city slickers. The only thing worth betting on was how many more goals they would concede.

Then, in six minutes of the second half, the match spun on its own axis. In that extraordinary passage of time, Liverpool scored three goals and looked like champions. What is more, far more, they picked up a momentum that they never relinquished, despite a few alarms on the way.

Those of us who had not bet — nor, for that matter, gone for the win double of the flight of Gloucester Old Spots landing on the moon — were left scratching our heads at this affront to reason, this appalling assault on reality. In so far as a sport can be called reality, of course. Sport does have a strange ability to destroy logic and to laugh in the face of grown-up thought. It doesn’t do it often, though, not often enough to make a career betting on such things, anyway. So let us consider: why did it happen?

A student of football tactics would say something about Dietmar Hamann coming on at half-time for Steve Finnan, freeing Steven Gerrard to wreak a bit of havoc farther up the field. A student of psychology might then go on and say something about Gerrard’s will and the way he imposed himself on Milan, not so much as a footballer but as a relentless, unstoppable force. A footballing romantic might like to speculate on the half-time address given to his men by the manager, Rafael Benítez. Certainly, Benítez cobbled together one of the greatest plan Bs in history; the more so since his plan A was so spectacular a failure. But all these things seem to imply that Liverpool were in some way in control of what happened.

The fact was that Milan were in control. They had controlled the first half in exactly the way they would have wished to, with sleek, sophisticated passing and swift, incisive finishing. And, in a sense, they also controlled the destiny of the match during those insane and crucial six minutes of the second half.

It can happen that a strange vulnerability overwhelms the dominant side, the dominant player, in a sporting encounter. There is a moment when an athlete reflects: how awful, how truly awful it would be to lose from here. Normally, we know this as choking, as the fear of victory. Milan felt fear on Wednesday night, but it was not precisely a choke.

Certainly, their fear of a momentum shift was one of the factors that brought it about. But choking must be defined as an occasion when the leader’s fear initiates the collapse. In this instance, it was Liverpool who created the fear and then worked on it. It was not a failure of individuals playing for Milan. Nor was it the achievement of individuals playing for Liverpool. It was a shared thing; shared between all the members of both teams, somehow conspiring to create this impossible spectacle.

The crowd was a factor, of course. Milan had been utterly out-sung by Liverpool before kick-off, but things got a bit quieter as the first half brought such misery. But then the singing began again, affectionate and encouraging, as if Liverpool were a well-loved old labrador who needed a little encouragement if he was to fetch the stick in the way he did in years gone by.

The singing helped the second-half revival and the second-half revival helped the singing: a closed feedback loop. It was the singing of people who gradually convinced themselves that they could sing the impossible into actuality. The crowd intensity was an especially powerful factor during the penalty shoot-out, the really rather shocking malevolence shown to the Milan penalty-takers contributing to their three shocking failures.

But putting this turnaround down to any one thing is to miss the point. It is the crazy, inspired mixture of things that matters. Wednesday night can be compared to the most famous turnaround in recent sporting history: Headingley 1981. That one is always put down to Ian Botham alone, but there was more to it than that. Graham Dilley was the prime mover, Terry Alderman was exhausted, Bob Willis bowled like a demon, the fielding was extra ordinary, the Australians began to doubt and even the crazy odds — England 500-1 — played a part.

Ultimately such impossible moments in sport are beyond analysis. They happen because the alchemy of circumstance is right — and because sport retains the ability to provide something that, for convenience, we generally call magic. We know that coming back from such a first-half hiding is impossible. But in sport, it is not impossible to suspend our disbelief. And when that happens to players as well as spectators, strange things can occur. Reality can begin to warp at the edges and a great momentum shift can take place.

There is a phrase from Exodus that has always haunted me. It comes from the Red Sea crossing: “And the angel of the Lord changed station.” For a start, I like the way the angel of the Lord is considered a completely unremarkable part of a retreating army and therefore fully capable of doing a mundane think like changing station, almost as it were going from Liverpool Street to Waterloo. But I especially love that matter-of-fact acceptance of a miraculous shift in momentum, a decisive change of events that none of the participants can control.

Ultimately, the miracle of Istanbul had no cause, has no explanation, has no real logic. It happened because the many and various forces of sport — nothing angelic about them, but powerful spirits nonetheless — changed station.

And that is one of the reasons why we turn to sport. Because sport can, as a matter of routine, bring us things so far beyond common experience that it leave us gasping. Sport has the ability to leave its logic behind on the ground. On Wednesday, sport took wing.

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

No envy, just joy for my old mates

By Michael Owen

Istanbul triumph is particularly special for local lads after rollercoaster season
I AM SURE SOME people will think I am envious of my old mates of Liverpool. My sister was in Istanbul for the European Cup final and she texted me at one point saying: “You should be here”. Of course I would have loved to have played in such a big match for my old club but you can’t keep looking back and second-guessing decisions like my move to Real Madrid last summer.

Who knows if they would have got to the final if I had been leading the attack or if I would have done things differently from Milan Baros? People will say my timing for leaving Anfield was suspect but how was I, or anyone else, to know that Liverpool were about to go on the most incredible run to the final?

A few months ago, when they had been knocked out of the FA Cup at Burnley, had lost the Carling Cup final and were struggling outside the Champions League places, people were speculating that it might be a disastrous season for Liverpool. There are so many little turning points but, now that they have come good, I am thrilled for some of my old colleagues such as Stevie Gerrard, Didi Hamann and Jamie Carragher.

It is really special for the local lads because they can often bear the brunt of the fans’ frustration when things are going wrong. That is why it is so good that Frank Lampard and John Terry have done well at Chelsea and now Stevie and Carra at Liverpool. Carra has known what it is like to be on the receiving end but he can die a happy man now. He lives for football.

I was feeling for him as he went down with cramp in extra time. I know from painful experience how bad that can be. You just can’t move as your muscle seizes up and it is sod’s law that, when it happens, the ball keeps coming back at you. Carra had to make about five big tackles straightaway and I can’t believe how he got through it, especially with a man like Andriy Shevchenko to cope with. Some players might have let their heads drop after the first half but Carra kept at it and he will deserve all the praise coming his way.

It was one of those freak games that you might be lucky to see twice in your lifetime. I have to say I was surprised by the starting line-up. I was watching the game at home with my girlfriend and I had thought that the manager would go for Hamann in the formation that had worked so well in the previous rounds.

For the manager to leave him out was a big call but you can say that he made an equally big call at half-time to turn the game around. AC Milan had started unbelievably well and, like most people, I was just praying at half-time that the lads would be able to hold their heads up high at the end of it all. I was hoping they wouldn’t lose by six.

Then Rafael Benítez changed things around, went for three at the back and everything looked so much better, although no one could have anticipated that kind of turnaround. Once Liverpool had equalised, I thought only they could win it but Milan came back at them again. It was incredible to watch, so I can only guess what it was like to play in. I have left messages for a few of the lads.

I can only imagine what the Milan players are thinking. I have been in a team that threw away a three-goal lead when we played Southampton. Like Hernán Crespo, I scored two goals but we still didn’t win — and that was not in a game of the magnitude of Wednesday night.

I hope it does kick-start a great new era for Liverpool. I won four trophies there but the fans have always craved one of the big ones. I suspect that they would love the championship most of all but, with the rich European tradition that we all know about, beating Milan to win the European Cup will lead to the biggest party in years on Merseyside.

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

Worthy champions by large majority

By Michael Howard

Carragher gets my vote after heroic performance in defence
WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAS unbelievable, fabulous. To be so depressed at half-time and to come back like that was fantastic. Of the five European Cup final victories, it was the best. Much earlier in the season I heard someone say on BBC Radio 5 Live that this could be a vintage season for English clubs in the Champions League. He said that any one of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United could win it, but that Liverpool weren’t good enough. On Wednesday they showed that they were.

It was inspirational to watch for anyone, but especially for anyone involved in politics. At one stage during the election campaign I compared the Conservative Party to a team that was 2-0 down at half-time, but last night shows that you can be 3-0 down and still win. In fact, I heard Rafael Benítez himself say in the run-up to the final that what you have to do is fight hard and believe to the end, which is good advice in any walk of life.

Does it make up for losing the general election? Not quite. The result of a football match and any political successes or failures you might have are in separate compartments of your life, but it was very cheering. I’m down if they lose and elated when they win. For example, the people in the Conservative Party office were worried when I went to the first leg of the semi-final against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, which was played during the election campaign. They were terrified that Liverpool would lose and that I would be miserable during the next day’s campaigning. But of course they didn’t lose.

If you are a fan, as I am, you become totally absorbed. Although I can’t get to as many actual matches as I would like, I watch all the games on television and read about them and regard it as an important part of my life. Sandra, my wife, had got herself committed to something before we knew that Liverpool would be in the final, so I ended up watching at home alone, but that didn’t diminish my relish for the occasion or the result.

Steven Gerrard was rightly man of the match and Jerzy Dudek was immense, as was Jamie Carragher. I was interviewed on a radio programme on a Saturday morning just before the European Championship and I was talking about the England defence. I said that Jamie was an unsung hero, and that his best position was centre half. At that point he wasn’t even playing in the centre of the Liverpool defence. He’s played on the right, in midfield, in both full back positions, you name it. He’s such a good guy that he’s been content to be played out of position and has rarely got an extended run there until recently. But we saw him at his best on Wednesday night.

I saw him gesticulating in an animated way to Dudek before the penalty shoot-out and wondered what he could be saying to someone in those circumstances, and of course it turned out that he was telling him to remember Bruce Grobbelaar’s performance in the 1984 final against AS Roma. And he did. That was just one of so many amazing things about the match. It was sensational. Just magic.

[Rushian]

May 27, 2005, Times

Secrets of 15 minutes that shook the world

By Matt Dickinson

How Rafael Benítez used a blackboard to work his half-time magic
EIGHTY-EIGHT MINUTES OF THE 1999 European Cup final had elapsed when Lennart Johansson, the president of Uefa, started to make his way down from the VIP seats for the trophy presentation. Filing past Sir Bobby Charlton, he muttered commiserations on Manchester United’s defeat to Bayern Munich. By the time he had reached pitch-side, the game had been turned on its head.

It seemed that there could never be a more dramatic reversal of fortunes in the final of Europe’s top club competition, but Wednesday night was at least its equal. When Michel Platini saw David Moores at half-time in Istanbul, he suggested to the Liverpool chairman that “I think this might be a damage-limitation exercise”. The next time they bumped into each other, Moores had a smile as wide as the Bosphorus. “I must apologise, ” Platini said.

The Frenchman was in good company. No one, including the shell-shocked players in the Liverpool dressing-room, believed that they could save themselves from defeat as they trailed AC Milan, the six-times champions, by three goals. “I was not thinking about winning,” Rafael Benítez, the Liverpool manager, said. “I was only thinking about scoring one goal.” Outclassed by Kaká and Andriy Shevchenko, avoiding embarrassment was the maximum ambition for his players.

“We’re gonna win 4-3”, the fans sang as their side trudged off at the interval, but it was strictly in mockery. One supporter was seen ripping off his red scarf and heading for the exit, unable to bear any more torture after 45 minutes in which the Liverpool defence had been ripped to shreds. So how was certain defeat transformed into one of the most uplifting and unlikely victories in English football history ? Not, it appears, with the admonishing words that Mr. Ferguson used to address his players as they trailed Bayern 1-0 at half-time six years ago. He had urged them to think of the terrible fate that awaited them on the podium. “You will be a few feet from the trophy and you won’t be able to touch it,” the United manager said. United clawed their way back with willpower, but Benítez needed to do something far more drastic. He denied that he had made a mistake in his strange decision to select Harry Kewell at the expense of Dietmar Hamann, but he knew that he needed to make serious alterations to the way his team was playing.

“As I was walking through the tunnel, I was thinking about what to say and what to change,” he said. “First I wanted to change the system because we needed to be more aggressive. Then I had to give confidence to the players. It was very difficult to be in the dressing-room and see the players so down, but you can’t think, ‘This is a final’. You have to just think, ‘ This is another game’. If you start to feel something different, to feel the emotion, you won’t be able to control it. The supporters can give the players the emotion, but you have to give them solutions.”

The scale of Benítez’s task was evident in the despair that had gripped his players, including Steven Gerrard. “I couldn’t concentrate,” the captain said. “I had my head in my hands. I thought it was over, to be honest. But then the manager calmed us down. He got out his pen and the blackboard and started making changes.”

Carlo Ancelotti, the Milan coach, would claim later that Liverpool’s comeback defied explanation — “Six minutes of madness,” he said — but there was method in the way that Benítez set about righting the mistakes of the first half. “You never see Rafa nervous because when you are nervous you can’t think clearly,” Pako Ayestaran, the assistant manager, said. “To change the system was the key. Rafa is someone who thinks very, very quickly, but it is difficult to think quickly and to think right.”

An injury to Steve Finnan helped to make up Benítez’s mind. He could take off the full back and throw on Hamann, who most people thought should have been in the starting XI. Switching to a five-man midfield would give more freedom to Gerrard and help his team to cut the supply lines to Kaká. With extra bodies farther up the field, Liverpool could press with the aggression that Benítez had hoped for from kick-off.

“We hadn’t been doing the things we had been talking about in preparation,” he said. “We had conceded the early goal and then lost an important player like Harry, and so everything had changed. I told the players to get their heads up because we had a lot of supporters out there and we couldn’t concede any more goals for them, we couldn’t lose by four or five. I told them to get the one goal and I thought the other team would be afraid.”

His job of motivation had been made easier by the behaviour of the Italian side, who had reacted to their third goal as if the game was over. Djimi Traoré, the left back, revealed that, as they headed to their dressing-room for half-time, the Liverpool players had heard their rivals celebrating. So they came back out to perform one of the great comebacks in European football history.

“I was running on empty with ten minutes left of the 90,” Gerrard said. “I never once thought we were going to win the game. We were just trying to get the three goals back. In extra time we were just playing for penalties because six or seven of us had nothing left.”

The captain was spared the ordeal of taking a spot-kick when Jerzy Dudek saved from Shevchenko. “The manager had asked me if I wanted to take one and I said, ‘Yes’,” Gerrard said. “Then he said I would be taking the fifth and I thought, ‘Thanks a lot’. I had never felt so scared.” Benítez was probably the only man to keep his cool on a night when plenty of others lost their heads.

Gerrard leads the party

About a hundred fans and family members of the Liverpool side gathered in their hotel lobby to celebrate with the players on Wednesday night. The team had a late dinner in a private room adjacent to the lobby, but players came and went freely to sign autographs and pose for pictures. Steven Gerrard, clad in a light-colored top sported a fixed expression throughout, a blend of contentment, relief and sheer fatigue. He bounced young girls on his knee and lifted a boy of about five or six as he posed for pictures. Nobody was turned away and he tirelessly gave himself over to the adoring Liverpool supporters. At around 3.30am, he went into the private room and some thought he was finally going to get some rest. Instead, he emerged five minutes later with a slice of cake, which he wolfed down quickly and then returned to talking to the supporters.

GABRIELE MARCOTTI

[Rushian]

Humble Benítez keen to deflect praise, Times

By Owen Slot

Glory has not changed the manager

THE MORNING AFTER. Can anyone really believe it? Vladimir Smicer was so intent on hanging on to the miracle that became reality on Wednesday night that he did not even let his head hit the pillow. “A few big cigars, pictures with the trophy” was the understatement he used to describe the hours after the match. Steven Gerrard was reacquainted with the glorious truth when he awoke after his few scraps of stolen sleep: the cold of metal on his chest, his winner’s medal.

While this sense of unreality was still pervasive as the bleary-eyed victors became acquainted with their first full day as champions of Europe, the contrast was provided, as ever, by their manager: Rafael Benítez, calm, sober, proud, measured and generous in victory. It is a stellar achievement to steer Liverpool to the pinnacle of European football in his first season in charge, but there was no hint of self-aggrandisement for this self-confessed boffin of the game.

Likewise in the Ataturk Stadium in the midst of the celebrations the night before, Benítez seemed quiet, removed, a father figure pleased to see his kids enjoying their moment. A Latin man is expected to celebrate in a very operatic way, he was informed. “Maybe I am a little bit English,” he replied. “I am really proud. My problem is to express it all in English because I do not have the words.”

For a man so in control of his emotions, he had served up the most emotional of matches, being the architect of both Liverpool’s apparent downfall and their dramatic victory. Yet when slung a question that might have pricked vainer egos — “Did you get it wrong in the first half?” — he was happy to debate the issue.

His answer, in short, was “no”. But if this was a rare tactical shortcoming for a man who had already plotted a path past Juventus and Chelsea, then credit must go to the way he transformed them at half-time. Benítez says he was calm, specific and tactical in the dressing-room, but even if he had delivered a rousing Shakespearean call to arms, he would never look for praise.

“Was victory predestined?” he was asked, a typical question reporters ask in search of a dewy-eyed response. “You can talk about destiny,” he replied thoughtfully, “but I don’t know. I think it’s the belief of the players and their confidence that did the job.”

There are managers who would, on Wednesday night, have been breakdancing with delight. Benítez, however, never stops to worship the image he sees in the mirror, and thus the ironic question: “When do we have to call you the Special One?” And the unerring answer: “Never. As a manager you are important sometimes, but the most important thing is the staff and the players.”

Where to place an achievement like his? The hewing of European championship-winning performances from diamonds so rough they can finish no higher than fifth in England ranks right up there with José Mourinho and a first-season Premiership.

Benítez talked last week of attempting to emulate the achievements of Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan, who first guided Liverpool to the European summit, and said how far beyond him theirs were. Was he not up there with them now? “We need to do a lot of things to be at the same level as the other managers,” he replied. “OK, we are going the right way.” And then he gesticulated, showing one hand much lower than the other. “If we were here,” he then raised the lower hand minutely, “we are now here. One step higher.” Which suggested there was still a very long way to go.

Such modesty becomes Benítez well. He has been placed at the helm of a faded old institution and the responsibility is not light. And if this victory does help to keep Gerrard at the club, and if it does genuinely inspire long-term regeneration at Anfield, then English football is the richer for it. All season we have been spellbound by the magic of Mourinho; Benítez, surely, is a Special One too.