[lfc-news] Echoes of the past in new Liverpool era - Telegraph

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Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2005
Echoes of the past in new Liverpool era
By Paul Hayward

In Istanbul you can start the evening with an aperitif in Europe, then
cross the Bosphorus by boat to dine in Asia. Liverpool are trying to
connect two other continents tonight: the present and the past.

Against the time line of Paolo Maldini's illustrious career with AC
Milan, Liverpool's last European Cup final appearance seems less like
some distant shore. In 1985, Maldini made his first-team debut for the
Rossoneri and Liverpool contested the last of their five finals from
1977. But the subsequent 20 years must feel like an epoch to the 20,000
or so Liverpool fans who will converge on the remote Ataturk Olympic
Stadium, which sits on a moonscape of rubble and half-built roads a
45-minute ride from Istanbul.

Finally, the most successful club in England - 18 league titles and four
European Cups eclipse even Manchester United - are no longer facing
backwards. The Nostalgia Society will have to find a new HQ. At the
pre-match inquisitions yesterday, Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez was
asked how he felt about performing a "miracle" in bringing his new
employers this far. It was no exaggeration. The fifth-best team in the
Premiership have beaten the champions of England (Chelsea) and Italy
(Juventus) en route to tonight's final, where their mission is to
overcome the runners-up in Serie A.

A fifth European conquest, in the city where east really does meet west,
will shred what is left of the continental form book, send the red half
of Merseyside into raptures, confirm Benitez as a master tactician and
land UEFA with a problem: namely, how to find a side door into next
season's competition. If Liverpool win the battle of the defences
against Milan's rock of ages, they will be recognised as the best team
in Europe and the second-best side in Liverpool. Everton, not their red
neighbours, claimed the fourth Champions League qualifying spot, so UEFA
would come under huge pressure to create an extra place.

After the Porto-Monaco final last year, we get Milan against a
Premiership also-ran - which at least goes to show that the Champions
League has not become a six-club elite. Liverpool's presence in the
biggest game in club football is a triumph of mind over matter. It
suggests that some clubs are blessed with a central core of knowledge,
experience, spirit, that can survive long spells in the wilderness.

And Liverpool's exile has been long, even allowing for the League Cup,
FA Cup and UEFA Cup treble of 2001 which was the high point of the
Gerard Houllier, post-Spice Boy years. The club's last appearance on
tonight's great stage came in the season of England's 8-0 win over
Turkey, Oxford joining the top flight, Norwich winning the Milk Cup,
Everton seizing the now defunct European Cup-Winners' Cup, and the
calamities of the Bradford City fire and Heysel, which so disfigured the
epic story of Liverpool in Europe.

There is no escaping the grim end of that eight-season adventure, which
began in Rome with a 3-1 win over Borussia Monchengladbach (1977) and
incorporated victories over Brugge (1978), Real Madrid (1981) and AS
Roma (1984) before the darkness of Heysel fell. Tonight's starting XI
have found the footprints of the beaten 1985 team: Grobbelaar; Neal,
Hansen, Lawrenson, Beglin; Nicol, Dalglish, Wark, Whelan; Walsh and Rush.

Not even the most fervent admirers of Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher
- the only two of today's generation who would merit consideration for
the Milan team - would try to persuade themselves that the class of 2005
compare with the 1985 brigade, yet after 15 seasons without an English
league title, the Kop hit the road to Istanbul believing that the Liver
bird has changed into a phoenix.

The flourishes of the Houllier years were never quite sufficient to
convince either a wider audience or Liverpool fans themselves that the
rebirth was under way. This was a club who had walked through the shame
of Heysel and the agonies of Hillsborough - and then slipped into the
decadence of the Spice Boy years, which may have been a reaction to
those tragedies; a letting-off of steam, a subconscious attempt to
restore the old Liverpudlian sense of fun.

"When I joined the club in the early Nineties, they used to say that if
you couldn't drink you couldn't play for Liverpool," Neil Ruddock
confessed recently. The white-suited Liverpool sides of the Roy Evans
period were lavishly entertaining but lacked the ruthless devotion to
duty displayed 30 miles away by Manchester United. Then came the
hyper-professionalism, the sobriety, of the Houllier regime, at the end
of which Liverpool were an efficient fighting force but no closer to
breaking the United-Arsenal duopoly.

This potted history of Anfield brings us to the point where Benitez
abandoned Valencia after winning Spain's Primera Liga and the UEFA Cup
to take on Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and Jose Mourinho with a
fraction of the ammunition. Less than 12 months later, Benitez is 90
minutes away from surpassing those three heavyweights of the English
game. Though Liverpool's individual talent count was higher 25 years
ago, there is at least an echo in today's method of winning tight
European matches through defensive solidity and by a single goal (often
1-0).

At the Ataturk Stadium yesterday I asked the Milan coach, Carlo
Ancelotti, whether he saw any parallels between the Liverpool of today
and 20-30 years ago. "I believe that the present team reflects the ideas
of the coach," he said. "His aim is to make the players carry out their
tasks with precision. I do think that when this Liverpool team come on
the pitch, they are very clear in their ideas."

By which he means that Benitez has contrived his way past Juventus and
Chelsea by defending for most of the game and attacking in short,
planned bursts. Juve were ram-raided in the first half at Anfield and
smothered in the Stadio Delle Alpi. Chelsea were held 0-0 at Stamford
Bridge and then shaded by a single, disputed goal on Merseyside.

The divergence between Liverpool's poor domestic form and their potency
in Europe was neatly explained by their Finnish centre-half, Sami
Hyypia, who said: "In the Premier League the pace is always high and
it's end-to-end stuff. In Europe many teams we play against employ a
different style. It's slower. They start from the back and try to build
the play up gradually." This appears to suit the club's latest wave of
foreign recruits, mainly from Spain.

An experience common to hired guns and home-grown heroes was the
roof-raising racket created by the Anfield congregation for the
semi-final against Chelsea. As Alan Hansen remarked, a craving that had
been pent up for 15 and 20 years domestically and in Europe burst out of
the club's soul that night.

If Milan obliterate them in Turkey, and the UEFA Cup is the only refuge
next year, we may have to downgrade these optimistic noises about
Liverpool's escape from the shadowlands. But as dawn breaks over
Istanbul, the past is no longer a burden to Liverpool Football Club and
has returned to being an inspiration. The future is just over the
Bosphorus: a close and glinting shore.

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