The Force was with Liverpool

It’s always easy to say this in hindsight but Liverpool had to win: There were just too many supporting them. In the stands the Liverpo...

It’s always easy to say this in hindsight but Liverpool had to win: There were just too many supporting them. In the stands the Liverpool fans easily shouted down the Milan tifosi; on the streets, in the pubs, in front of the television sets, everywhere, the Force was with the team in red.

This is a club where the supporters come first, last and every time. And in complete synergy, the team’s work ethic has always been musketeerish: all for one. Even the club anthem doesn’t extol footballing skills, a nutmeg or a through pass; it’s all about the power of unity. They don’t call them the Reds for nothing.

It’s been 21 years since the club last won the Champions League, 15 years since it was champion of England. That’s a long, long time for a side that dominated country and continent in the 1970s and 1980s. Liverpool were not the Man United of the 70s or the Arsenal of the 80s; they were Liverpool.

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Such was their aura that the sign ‘This is Anfield’, up in the players’ tunnel, would make visiting teams quake as they walked out to the pitch. Once there, they would be petrified by the ‘Anfield Roar’, a wall of sound Phil Spector would be proud of. And then there was the team to contend with.

For 20 years that wall has been empty, the sustained chanting little more than white noise. In 20 years, they’ve been through first Heysel, which got them a six-year ban from European competition; then, four years later, Hillsborough, where 96 fans were crushed to death in a stampede before an FA Cup match.

On the field, Liverpool swayed from the Spice Boy ostentation of the 1990s to the Houllier-programmed austerity of the early 2000s. There were too many false starts, every trophy won seen as the first step back to greatness — often as greatness itself. When opposing fans taunted them with jibes about the severe unemployment and rising crime (‘You’ve only one job between you’, sung to the tune of Guantanamera), they could only point to their past.

No longer. Liverpool are the present; Premiership success may still be some distance away but with $35 million in the kitty from Wednesday’s success, and a wise man in charge, things can only get better.

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One final thought. The Independent posted a reporter in a Liverpool pub for the match; midway through, one fan told him he’d just visited the Anfield memorial to the Hillsborough victims (where an eternal flame burns). ‘‘I told them: ‘We’re here for you every day of the week and now we need you to be here for us.’ So now we’ve got 96 of them, running on the pitch for us.’’

Up against this faith, Milan didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.