Red Watch: Unforgettable night at Anfield

Apr 10 2008 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

Unforgettable night at Anfield

THEY just keep on coming. Whatever it is that ties Liverpool so closely with the premier European club competition, there’s no sign that its magic is waning, as Anfield was witness to yet another night of delirious excitement, leaving shredded nerves and strained larynxes as its legacy.

For all the glorious nights that have preceded it, this one for me will stand out as possibly the greatest of them all, simply because it was one of the best matches I’ve ever seen, anywhere, any time.

Fantastic football, highs and lows, drama and controversy, heroes and villains (sometimes embodied in the same player), it had them all. And of course, the atmosphere generated inside the ground once again stole the show: on nights like this you really do feel that there are 42,000 of us playing the game; it’s just that only 11 are allowed on the pitch. I can’t remember the whole ground standing up for the last 10 minutes of a game before; such was the tension that attempting to resume your seat might have resulted in a damaging hamstring strain, making you doubtful for the semi-final.

The surprise selection of Peter Crouch set the tone for the evening, and especially for the first 30 minutes of the match.

Not that Crouch did anything wrong, far from it, but the abandonment of the successful formation of recent weeks and the baffling positioning of Gerrard on the left wing left us vulnerable in midfield, and how Arsenal exploited it in that torrid opening period. Whether Rafa wished to upset Wenger’s planning, or had just been encouraged by Crouch’s recent displays against Arsenal, the reduction in numbers in the middle of the field was potentially catastrophic.

Only Flamini’s injury, and of course Hyypia’s splendid header, took the wind from Arsenal’s sails when they threatened to take the game away from us. Sami of course was celebrating his new one-year contract; they could add a nought to that as far as I’m concerned, and we’d still be in his debt. The tide was turned, the Kop turned up the volume, game on.

I’m not going to dwell on Torres’s wonderful strike, as I’m afraid I’ll start crying. So fast forward to those raucous last 10 minutes, when that marvellous run by Walcott set up Adebayor for what looked at the time to be the winning goal.

The sense of loss when conceding any goal is exacerbated when the away goal rule comes into play, the switch from anticipated glory to potential defeat more sudden and shocking than in a normal match play. Which is a fancy way of explaining why it felt as if your heart was in your boots at this precise moment. But salvation was only moments away.

Ryan Babel, who has been so timid in recent weeks, emerged from the bench wearing David Fairclough’s magic cape, first driving into the box to panic Toure into too robust a challenge; then tearing away from the half-way line to drive past Almunia and write himself into Anfield folklore.

And in between these events, the magnificent composure of ‘The Doctor’ Steven Gerrard, as he rose to the challenge once again to score a critical goal in a critical situation.

If this, as he claimed, was his worst performance in a Liverpool shirt, it serves to remind us of the impossibly high standards he maintains.

The week had begun with Peter Crouch publicly querying whether he could afford to stay at Liverpool for too much longer if he wasn’t getting a regular start; surely it ended with him wondering how he could ever leave nights like this behind.