EXACTLY 20 years ago to the day Arsenal achieved a seemingly impossible result at Anfield to give their season a silver lining. This evening Liverpool Youth team will look to do the same and turn the tables on their London visitors in the second leg of the FA Youth Cup final.
Few Liverpool supporters will want reminding that on May 26 two decades ago Michael Thomas grabbed the title for the Gunners in the most dramatic of conclusions to a league championship race.
Trailing 4-1 from last Friday’s first leg at Emirates, and with no away goals rule in the Youth Cup, Hugh McAuley’s young Liverpool side must defeat their Arsenal counterparts by twice as much as George Graham’s team landed the title.
Following Arsenal’s stunning display in the opening match, it would appear an impossible dream that Liverpool can overturn the deficit to land a third FA Youth Cup triumph in the past four seasons.
Goals from Giles Sunu, Jack Wilshere (pen), Sanchez Watt and Jay-Emmanuel Thomas have put the Gunners in the driving seat, with Alex Kacaniklic’s stunning volley the only crumb of comfort that Liverpool could take from the Emirates.
But echoes of one of the most infamous evenings in both clubs’ histories will abound at Anfield tonight. Arsenal will come to Merseyside sporting a near identical yellow and blue strip to that of their predecessors with Steve Bould – a member of Graham’s title-winning side on that fateful night – now coaching the latest crop of talented youngsters.
None of the players on either side were born in 1989, but McAuley is hoping his side start well and make an early breakthrough to keep another trophy ‘up for grabs’ at Anfield. Despite their three-goal deficit, McAuley and his players remain confident.
The Liverpool coach said: "We have got to hope that we can get a good start, get at them and make things happen. We will try and get an early goal and give it our best shot. We have to stay positive and believe that we can get a result. That is the talk we will have with the boys.
"Our football club has shown that you can pull games back if the attitude is right, the commitment is right and you get the breaks at the right time."
"You look at plenty of games down the years in football in which teams have come back in. We have seen that as much as any club. With our first team there is Istanbul and even against Chelsea a few weeks back when they pulled back a 3-1 deficit by half-time. Football is a funny game. Every 90 minutes are different and every set of circumstances are different.
"I go back to the semi-final against Birmingham when we were leading 3-1 from the first leg. I was convinced that wouldn’t be an easy game back at Anfield, because there are no easy games. Okay in that game we got the early goal and killed the game. But it is delicate situation."
