Go to any big game in any city and the closer you get to the ground, you’ll hear a muffled shout of: ‘Any spares?’ Well, from the moment we arrived in Madrid, the question me and Jacob were asking ourselves was: ‘Any Spurs?’ It was just red shirts, red scarves, Liverpool flags hanging from hotel windows, Liverpool songs in the air as you inched your way through the city centre. Jacob had done his bit, going out with his mum to get a sheet of red material and making his own banner: MADRED. I could see the pride on his face as he unfurled it next to all the other flags – his own little part of the story.
I did the interview with Sadio Mané – thanked him once again for being so kind as to shatter my fastest-ever hat-trick record – then we went on a little tour of the Wanda Metropolitano, Atlético’s spanking new stadium where the final was to be held, then wandered the streets near our hotel, just taking in the atmosphere. A gang of lads we knew were all having a kickabout in the square and one of my most cherished memories is the way they railroaded me into a game of ‘Bin Ball Challenge’.
We lined up in two rows of five, heading the ball from one to another without once letting it drop. Number One headed it across to Number Two, Two headed it on to Three, nice cushioned headers. The last two links of the chain were Fowler & Fowler – no pressure there then. Jacob nodded his up beautifully for me to finish the job and head it down into the bin – GOAL! One of my finest ever, without any doubt at all. We did a quick lap of honour and wandered off into the night, chuckling about Bin Ball and marvelling at the sheer numbers of Reds out and about.
There’s an ever-shifting, never-ending debate about which is the biggest club in the world. You can make a big case for Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for me, it has always been a rotating balance of power between Liverpool and Manchester United. I’ve played and worked all over the world and, even since retiring, I’ve clocked up the air miles. That’s where you really get a sense of the global reach football has. Nelson Mandela asking you to sign his Liverpool shirt. Kids in Thailand running around the backstreets in Liverpool kits. And then 95,000 Liverpool fans packed into the Melbourne Cricket Ground giving as great a rendition of our anthem as you’ll ever hear, anywhere.
Being completely honest about it, there was a long period when all you’d see was Man United shirts, everywhere. You used to see a lot more Arsenal shirts than Liverpool ones in Africa, too. But, since Istanbul and obviously, in more recent times, since Liverpool began reaching European finals on a regular basis again, and Mo Salah, Bobby Firmino and Sadio Mané started weaving their magic (I’m a striker, okay? I’m biased!), I’ve got no doubt that Liverpool are the biggest club in the world right now.
If Madrid was anything to go by over the weekend of the 2019 Champions League final, Liverpool were about ten times bigger than Tottenham Hotspur. It was phenomenal – oceans of red, all over the city, wherever you looked. One thing that Liverpool supporters do brilliantly is fan culture. Banners, flags, songs, parties, pyro … our fans are innovators and originators. For starters, there are a whole load of brilliant little independent retailers and manufacturers like Transalpino and Hat Scarf Or A Badge who come up with the best T-shirts and matchday merchandise. In the run-up to Madrid, there were so many great designs – a personal favourite would have to be one that Transalpino released, based on Jacob’s ‘MADRED’ flag (okay, it’s a fair cop – I helped design it!).
The songs and banners are legendary and going back to the days of Brendan Rodgers’ side, the way the fans started turning out in their thousands to greet the team bus was brand new for the Premier League back then – clouds of smoke from their flares and pyro turning the Anfield sky crimson. Best of all for me, though, is the way the club itself recognises the huge role the Liverpool fans play in making LFC special. They’ve always listened to the fans and co-operated with different groups, like Spion Kop 1906, who co-ordinate the flags and banners on The Kop, and Spirit of Shankly, who speak to the club regularly about ticketing policy, policing, stewarding and so on.
One of the lesser-known figures behind the scenes at Anfield is a guy called Tom Cassidy, who is in charge of the LFC stadium tours and marketing. Tom’s brief has also, by default, taken on what is effectively Liverpool’s party planning responsibilities. We’ll talk about the sheer joy of the homecoming bus parade in a minute but one of the great things that Tom has identified is the way a younger generation of fans has been celebrating the club. There’s The Anfield Wrap, probably the best footy fan podcast out there. Then there’s Redmen TV, up there with the very best subscription TV channels. And there’s Boss Night – the exuberant, grassroots Liverpool fan parties that grew from the popular (and sadly, now, no more) Boss Mag street fanzine. Boss Night is a heads-down, no-nonsense celebration of LFC fan culture – basically, a massed ranks, boozy singalong with Liverpool bands and singers leading the Kop karaoke.
A quick observation here – if the dozens and hundreds of bands that have poured out of this city are anything to go by, from The Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, Pete Wylie and The Lightning Seeds to The Las, The Farm and The Zutons, then Liverpool is about 90 per cent Red! Boss Night cottoned on to a new breed of Liverpool performers, like Jamie Webster and Kieran Molyneux, and started running party nights after big games or Christmas fixtures. I remember our Jacob showing me a YouTube clip of hundreds of them celebrating the win against Man United just before Christmas and saying how he wished he was old enough to go to one of those nights. Tom Cassidy and Tony Barrett, LFC’s fan liaison officer, had joined up with Boss Night to put on a fantastic party in Shevchenko Park, ahead of the previous year’s Champions League final in Kiev. (Another quick observation – look at the way I just said ‘Last year’s Champions League final’ as though it’s an occasion that Liverpool just pop in the diary and turn up for, year on year. I’m not being smug at all, but what did I say to Jacob in that square in Barcelona? ‘How good is it, being a Liverpool fan right now?’) in 2019, for Madrid, the LFC/Boss Night union wanted to go one better.
From breakfast time, the square began to fill up with happy, noisy Liverpool fans. Plaza de Felipe II will go down in Kop folklore for time ever more, but at first glance, it was an odd choice of venue for a Liverpool fan zone. It’s a long, narrow, inner-city plaza – more of an oblong than a square, with a strange kind of Stonehenge obelisk structure at one end. Maybe the Madrid authorities thought the allocation of 16,500 tickets for each team would mean that Liverpool and Spurs would have perhaps 10,000–15,000 supporters congregating in their designated fan parks, maximum.
We ambled down to take a look and soak up the pre-match atmosphere. By the time the compère Ben Burke started warming up the crowd at 10:30, there must have been 30,000 Liverpool fans there already. And by the time the DJ whipped them into a mad, joyous, tumult of red, bouncing along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, there were well over 50,000 (some estimates said 80,000) packed in. Speaking of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, one thing I’ll never quite be able to get my head around is the mad array of old-time classics the Liverpool fans seem to love. ‘A Horse With No Name’, ‘Ring Of Fire’, ‘Sweet Caroline’, ‘American Pie’ … and that’s before you get into all the old Floyd, Genesis and Frank Zappa stuff they seem to buzz off. ‘Solsbury Hill’? Oh, okay then! It’s one of those where you just smile to yourself, shake your head and get right on it. The highlight of these parties is always Jamie Webster’s set, where he gets the entire crowd singing along to all the players’ songs and club anthems. I think Tom Cassidy, the Boss Night team and everyone else involved thought they’d never top Shevchenko Park, but the sight of all those tens of thousands of Liverpool fans going nuts in that square is an absolute lifetime highlight for both Jacob and myself.
Even though the stadium reflected what we’d seen in the city centre over the past couple of days, you’ve got to give the Spurs fans their due. Heavily outnumbered, they didn’t half make a racket in that end away! I’ve always thought of Tottenham as being a ‘proper’ football club, steeped in their own north London community, their history and their traditions. One of those traditions that I love is the way they sing that slowed-down version of ‘When The Spurs Go Marching In’. The whole build-up to the final and the day itself was a real celebration – two great old clubs going toe-to-toe, with the greatest prize in club football at stake. The game itself wasn’t a classic, but who cares? I think that both Tottenham and Liverpool had enough credit in the bank after those incredible semi-finals to justify an element of After the Lord Mayor’s Show when it came to the big one. And, as I’ve made pretty abundantly clear, it’s the Cups that you count; your medals are your memories. The history books record the result, you sit at home long after you’ve packed in playing the game and you look at your medals.
So, when the final turned into an edgy game of cat and mouse after Mo Salah banged that penalty in, it didn’t bother me one little bit. I was all for a cagey, boring 1–0 win – so long as we ended up lifting that beautiful big cup! For once, I was supremely confident. Knowing how badly it hurts, losing in a big, big game like this, I was sure that the lads would use the bitter experience of that Kiev final last year to see them through this one – and going ahead so early only made me even more certain. My poor lad was living every stray pass, every missed chance, every Spurs attack, but I kept saying, ‘We’ve got this, pal! We’ll be fine.’
But I’ve got to say, when Divock Origi wrote himself into the LFC history books for all time with that winner, the relief that gushed from us both was something else! I don’t think I’ve hugged Jacob so much since he was born.
What a moment! What an occasion! What a feeling!
If I could crystallise an all-time high as a supporter, it would have to be that – the moment my lad and I knew for sure that Liverpool were six-times European Cup Winners (how good does that sound?). I think the joy, the relief and the sheer emotion of Origi’s goal wiped Jacob out. As Jordan Henderson went up for the Cup and the team started going through their celebration ‘rain dance’ on the podium, Jacob just stood there, wide-eyed, absolutely spellbound. Captain Henderson cavorted in front of the team for a moment, prolonging the climax for as long as he could before lifting that beautiful cup sky-high. The stadium erupted – and so did the biggest smile on my lad’s face. A day, a night and a moment in time that neither of us will ever forget.
And if it was a joy to be there in Madrid to see the Reds lift the Big One, it was a total privilege to be on the bus for the celebratory homecoming parade on the Sunday. How we made it back to Liverpool in time is a mystery, because the party back at the team hotel was something to behold! I’ve got to say, if Jürgen Klopp should ever become bored of the repetition of winning cups and leagues with Liverpool, he has a very promising future on Strictly Come Dancing! What a mover! He was gliding around that hotel bar like he was on coasters.
I’m not averse to a modest celebration when the occasion demands it, but those players – the whole entourage, in fact – let rip with mighty abandon. The last cameo I witnessed before we toddled up to our room was Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain leading the entire room in a gloriously off-key version of the Virgil Van Dijk song. Talk about cats’ chorus! Yet there they all were, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, posing on the plane with Big Ears, already looking forward to the homecoming parade. The team of players, club officials, staff and extended LFC family is so sizeable now, they had to lay on two fully re-decorated ‘Liver Bus’ double-deckers to accommodate everybody.
The last time I was on the bus like this for the great LFC homecoming party was after the treble-winning 2000–01 season. It’s funny when you look back on times gone by – you remember what you were thinking and how you were feeling just as clearly (sometimes even more so) as you remember the games and the cups themselves. As Jacob and I sat there waiting for the parade to start, I found myself looking back on that 2001 homecoming with fondness, and a little bit of regret. That season was spectacular, but it came back to me that, on the open-top bus last time around, among all the smiles and cheers, I was very worried about my future.
I didn’t start the FA Cup final and I’d come on against Deportivo Alavés as a substitute. I scored the goals that helped us win the League Cup; got us to the FA Cup final; kept us in the UEFA Cup final and qualified us for the Champions League. Yet it was becoming clear to me, even then, that I was no longer an automatic pick for Gérard Houllier. A day of joyous celebration was tinged with anxiety.
Sitting on the bus all these years later, with my son next to me and new challenges just around the corner, I found myself just profoundly grateful for the incredible career I’ve had – and grateful to still be a part of this fantastic club, if only for a few days longer. But what a way to go out! I knew, by then, that this would be one of my final duties (though ‘duty’ is hardly the word for such an honour) as an official LFC ambassador and I was determined to make the most of the day. The players and the boss went ahead on the first bus, with club officials, guests and ambassadors following on in the second Liver Bus. In every way imaginable, it was emotional. With Jacob alongside me, I had a sense of déjà vu – I, too, was viewing the whole thing through a young boy’s eyes.
This was where the journey started out for me – watching triumphant teams coming back home, parading the cups they’d won. I’d gone on to experience those highs myself as a player, and now here I was, a dad and a Liverpool Legend, living the whole thing one more glorious time and lapping it up like never before. As the tour started off in the outskirts, the streets were jam-packed with flag-waving fanatics and their families. There’s a funny, long-running burn that the Evertonians like to cling to, that all Liverpool’s support comes from Scandinavia and beyond. If that’s the case, there must have been a good few thousand planes landing in Liverpool overnight, because there was something like a million fans lining the streets on 2nd June 2019 – not to mention the 100,000 still in Madrid! Seriously, if John Henry, Tom Werner and the rest of the team at FSG still harboured any doubts about the size of LFC and the potential to go ballistic, the homecoming parade would have blown their minds! Every now and then I would catch sight of John Henry shaking his head and nudging his wife, Linda, as though to say: ‘This is insane!’ I wanted to lean over and whisper, ‘About that new Anfield Road stand … we might want to make it a little bigger …’
There was one brilliant moment where a fella stripped naked to attract the team’s attention, stood on a rooftop wearing just his socks, clinging to a chimney pot! It was mental – a moment so off its head that Jürgen Klopp almost fell off the bus, he was laughing and pointing so much. This was all in and around the suburbs, by the way. When we got to the periphery of town – oh my word, it was like you’d imagine VE Day to have been like, added to the Millennium New Year’s Eve, added to a free-festival reunion of The Beatles – just the biggest outpouring of love, joy and red smoke the city has ever seen.
The fact that I lived that entire unbelievable weekend with my son by my side will remain a lifetime joy.