Forum Klix.ba

For Ronny Rosenthal, it all happened so quickly. One moment, he was out of favour at Standard Liege. Then, he was on trial at Hibernian and Luton Town. Then, out of nowhere, came a call from his agent, telling him Liverpool — the mighty Liverpool — wanted a look at him.

He was viewed with suspicion at first, “coming from third-world football in Israel and Belgium to Liverpool, a club of stars”, but throughout a 10-day trial, he made enough of an impression to persuade Kenny Dalglish to take a punt. If they were going to overhaul Aston Villa in the title race, they needed fresh impetus. A deal was concluded on transfer deadline day. Rosenthal was, to his amazement, a Liverpool player.

Liverpool had just lost at Tottenham Hotspur and were trailing at home to Southampton with 20 minutes to go when Dalglish released his secret weapon. Square-shouldered with a direct running style, Rosenthal immediately got the Kop on his side as he helped to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win. His first start a fortnight later brought a spectacular hat-trick at Charlton Athletic. Then came goals against Nottingham Forest and Chelsea and a cameo at Arsenal as Liverpool rescued a precious point in the 86th minute.

By the time Queens Park Rangers came to Anfield on April 28, Liverpool were nearly there. Two wins from their final three games would be enough. But QPR took an early lead and, in keeping with much of the previous eight months, the anticipated procession was becoming an arduous slog until goals from Ian Rush and John Barnes, a penalty, took them to the brink. Then, relayed by supporters clutching transistor radios to their ears, came the news Norwich City had scored a late equaliser at Villa Park. Liverpool were champions of England for the 18th time, and the 10th time in 15 seasons.

Dalglish grinned from ear to ear as he embraced his assistants, Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans, on the touchline, but Rosenthal, who arrived so late in the season he did not qualify for a winner’s medal, is not alone in feeling the celebrations lacked a certain fervour. “We walked around the pitch and waved to the supporters and we had fun in the dressing room with some champagne but I would call it a controlled celebration,” he tells The Athletic. “The fans and the other players were quite used to winning. They were happy but they weren’t going totally mad.”

Steve Nicol, who had just won his fourth league title in seven seasons, agrees. But he puts it down to something far deeper than familiarity or complacency. “There was a cloud hanging over us all season,” the former Scotland defender says. “I think that comes down to everything that had happened 12 months earlier.”

Nicol isn’t talking about the heartbreak of losing the title in the dramatic final seconds of the 1988-89 season. He’s talking about what happened six weeks before that in Sheffield, where 96 Liverpool fans lost their lives in a terrible crush. Five traumatic weeks after Hillsborough, Nicol and his team-mates were running around Wembley with the FA Cup. Six days after that, they sank to their knees in despair after being pipped at the post by Arsenal. For a time, football proved a distraction from the grief. It was the following season that Nicol, like Dalglish, began to struggle.

“I honestly don’t think my focus was ever the same again after Hillsborough,” Nicol says. “For as long as I had been at Liverpool, the only thing that mattered to the whole club was what the first team did at three o’clock on a Saturday. That changed after Hillsborough. The whole place felt different. There was definitely a cloud in the sky. There were still games where we were fantastic but there were others where we just struggled. I don’t know how we won it that year, to be honest. It must have just come down to the talent we had. Mentally, we were kind of not there.”

Nicol and Rosenthal remember the scenes in the dressing room, where the champagne and beer flowed and Dalglish, fully clothed, was chucked into the communal bath. They recall Moran, the embodiment of the club’s “Boot Room” values, keeping a lid on the celebrations and telling the players to start thinking about next season. They had a few drinks that night but it was no different to any other Saturday in that respect.

“If we had known it would be the last for 30 years, maybe we would have celebrated more,” Rosenthal says.

For the first three months of their title defence, Liverpool’s crown looked as secure as ever. They won 12 of their first 13 league matches and drew the other one. The highlight was a 4-0 Anfield thrashing of Manchester United, featuring a Peter Beardsley hat-trick. Alex Ferguson looked beleaguered as Liverpool fans taunted him with chants of “Fergie, Fergie, on the dole”.

As the season went on though, cracks started to appear. A resounding 3-0 defeat at Arsenal in early December changed the complexion of the title race. Dalglish’s team selections became increasingly cautious, reflecting concerns about a creaking defence. Eyebrows were raised at the January signings of David Speedie from Coventry City and Jimmy Carter of Millwall. Beardsley fell out of favour. Some of the old certainties were suddenly being questioned.

Dalglish was struggling. He had told the board the previous summer he felt exhausted and might need a break. The day-to-day pressures, combined with the trauma of Hillsborough and its numbing aftermath, had taken a heavy toll on him. He began to question his judgement. A chaotic 4-4 draw at Everton in an FA Cup fifth-round replay confirmed what he had already decided. He felt like his head was going to explode. “I could either keep my job or my sanity,” he said later.

When the players arrived at Anfield on Friday, February 22, Dalglish told them he had resigned. Every previous instinct would have told them this was a wind-up but no — he looked gaunt, a shadow of himself. “It was a big, big shock,” Rosenthal says. “All the players were speechless.”

That sense of shock proved hard to overcome. They were top of the league and still in the FA Cup when Dalglish resigned. Nine days and three defeats later, they were out of the FA Cup and three points adrift of Arsenal in the title race under caretaker manager Moran. All of a sudden, there was a fin-de-regime feel about Liverpool.

“Observers of Liverpool Football Club,” Stuart Jones wrote in The Times, “have been looking for cracks in the Anfield fortress since it was built by Bill Shankly more than 20 years ago. Now there is mounting evidence that it may be genuinely crumbling, perhaps irreparably.”

Jones pointed to the drop in performance throughout the season and to the fact 10 of their established players were the wrong side of 29. “Apart from Gary Ablett, David Burrows, Mike Hooper, Steve Staunton and Barry Venison, the club’s long-term future lies in the inexperienced hands of Jimmy Carter, Mike Marsh, Steve McManaman and the 17-year-old Jamie Redknapp. Opponents who have trembled at the prospect of competing against Liverpool would scarcely be frightened of any of them.”

Clive White, of the same newspaper, sounded an even more chilling note.

“It is probably the most inopportune moment for anyone to take over the management of Liverpool since Bill Shankly picked up the reins 32 years ago,” he wrote. “Not since Shankly retired (in 1974) has the choice of manager been so critical.”

The consensus among the board, led by new chairman Noel White, was that they needed to find someone who knew the club and understood the “Boot Room” philosophy: if not Moran, who was finding life difficult as caretaker, then a former player such as John Toshack or Graeme Souness.

Or Alan Hansen. The long-serving club captain had not kicked a ball since that title-clinching victory over QPR the previous April and it was no secret that, at 35, he was close to retirement. Perhaps this was the perfect solution.

A week after Dalglish’s resignation, Hansen walked into the dressing room and told Nicol to follow him to the office. “So I’m thinking, ‘Office? What’s this? What office? What’s going on?’ and we walk down the corridor, past Sheila, the manager’s secretary, and into the manager’s office,” Nicol says. “Big Al sits down and says to me, ‘I’ve got the job.’ I say, ‘What? Are you serious?’. He says, ‘I’m going to make you captain. We’re going to have a meeting, so round up all the lads’ and I’m thinking, ‘This has to be a wind-up’ but at the same time, my head is spinning and I don’t know what to think.

“I get the lads. Ten minutes later, Big Al comes in, shuts the door. ‘Right, I’ve got some news. I’m taking over’. Brucie (Grobbelaar) starts clapping… but he was the only one, so he clapped three times and stopped. Silence. Al says, ‘Things are going to have to change. You boys in Southport are going to stop going to The Crown. Those days are over. Barnesy, no more takeaways. From now on, we’re going to come in on Sundays mornings and do video sessions. We’ve got to get this club back to where it was. Oh, and I’m going to make Stevie Nicol captain. Has anyone got anything to say? Right, I’ll see you at training’.

“Al walks out and there’s absolute silence. I’m thinking, ‘This has to be a wind-up’ but now everyone’s head is spinning. We all just looked at each other. Rushie says, ‘Who the fuck does he think he is, telling us whether we can have a drink or not?’ A couple of minutes later, Big Al popped his around the door and said, ‘Only kidding. I’m retiring. Good luck…’”

That fleeting sense of relief gave way to the realisation that another significant link with the past had gone. In the space of 12 months, the club had lost John Smith, the long-serving chairman, Dalglish and now Hansen.

After years of stability, Liverpool were in turmoil.

Graeme Souness was warned. On the day he resigned from his job at Rangers to start a five-year contract as Liverpool manager, David Murray, the Scottish club’s chairman, told reporters, “He’s making the biggest mistake of his life.” Looking back, with nearly three decades’ hindsight, Souness probably agrees.

Hansen’s wind-up of a few weeks earlier? It wasn’t far from the reality of life under Souness.

“Champagne Charlie” Souness had been part of the good old days at Liverpool but what he found on his return after seven years in April 1991 was a club and a team stuck in its ways. The number of familiar faces was reassuring in one sense but alarming in another. Of his former team-mates, Grobbelaar was 33 and Gillespie 30, an age Nicol, Rush and Ronnie Whelan would all reach before the year was out. Of the rest, Speedie and Glenn Hysen were 31, Beardsley 30 and Steve McMahon and Ray Houghton 29.

The new manager needed to shake things up. Out went the old routines, such as assembling and getting changed at Anfield every morning before getting a bus to Melwood, their training ground. Souness decreed the players should drive straight to training and drive home afterwards — far more efficient, and far more in keeping with an emerging interest in training methods — rather than get back on a bus wearing dirty kit. Many of the senior players disapproved, feeling such efficiency would come at a cost of what had previously been precious bonding time.

Souness had been through this already at Ibrox, trying to change habits and introduce a more modern, professional attitude. At Rangers, who were in the doldrums before his arrival as player-manager in 1986, they embraced his methods. At Liverpool, the dominant force in English football for so long, there was serious resistance. Stopping for fish and chips on the way home from away games was deemed sacrosanct, as was the right to at least a couple of post-match cans of lager on the bus. Souness wanted his players to change their habits and change their diets – chicken, fish, pasta, salads, mineral water. No more pre-match steak. No more egg and chips. “But we won the double eating steak,” came the reply.

The changes went down terribly. So did the changes in personnel, with Gillespie, Speedie, Steve Staunton and, shockingly, Beardsley the first victims of a cull that would extend to McMahon, Hysen, Houghton, Venison and Ablett by the summer of 1992. In came Mark Wright, Dean Saunders, Mark Walters and Michael Thomas, at considerable expense. Some of the new signings were earning more money than the old campaigners. It added to the hostility towards Souness, who was given the unenviable responsibility of negotiating his players’ contracts. That, he would say later, was “a monster mistake”.

Saunders, who arrived from Derby County in a British record £2.9 million deal in the July, scored a flurry of goals in the cups but he and the rest of a new-look Liverpool team found it much harder in the league. “Graeme was trying to change the team and move on some of the older players, putting some younger legs in the team,” Saunders says. “That was difficult but what hindered Graeme more than anything was injuries. So many different players had achilles injuries. No one could work out why. I didn’t play with John Barnes until January.”

Only once in the previous 19 seasons had Liverpool finished outside the top two (and on that occasion, 1980-81, they won the European Cup and League Cup). In Souness’s first full season in charge they finished sixth, winning just three out of 21 away games. Beating Sunderland in the FA Cup final papered over some big cracks. The mood in the dressing room was terrible.

Souness admits he made mistakes. Perhaps the most damaging of all came in April 1992, when he was admitted to hospital for a triple heart bypass operation. He broke the news in an exclusive interview with The Sun, a newspaper reviled on Merseyside since its sickening and wildly inaccurate coverage of the Hillsborough disaster three years earlier. Though Souness returned to the bench for the FA Cup final, the board’s backing for him to continue came with a public censure and a warning about his future conduct.

Already, two years on from that last title triumph under Dalglish, Liverpool felt like a different club.

“The club that has prospered through gradualism has appointed a revolutionary,” wrote Simon Barnes in The Times after the FA Cup final. “He seeks not the cosy succession of the Boot Room, but the higher and lonelier klix of personal triumph. Greater risk; greater glory or greater failure. Souness wants to be a man apart. Souness is, above all, a man who wants to walk alone. You’re not supposed to do that at Liverpool.”

Throughout their glory days, Liverpool’s record in the transfer market was spectacularly good. In the early 1990s, they spent money like never before — extravagantly, haphazardly.

Paul Stewart’s name would be prominent on any supporter’s list of transfer flops. He arrived from Tottenham for £2.3 million in July 1992, seen as the man to bring some muscle and bite to a midfield that had become a soft touch. He sums up his forgettable Liverpool career as “a few games, a lot of rows with Souness and spending the rest of the time drinking and taking drugs. Not great.”

To put it mildly, Stewart was not a Souness fan. But he blames himself for the way his career unravelled at Liverpool. He is brutally honest about the way his life spiralled out of control. There was a drinking culture at Liverpool — “much to the manager’s displeasure” — but his cocaine binges were a different matter. “That was purely down to me,” he says.

At the same time, Stewart wonders how, in the space of two years since winning the title, Liverpool’s famous sense of togetherness had gone so sour. “Liverpool had always won things in the past on the back of having a great team spirit but the whole ethos had changed by the time I got there,” he says. “Players were starting to look after themselves and thinking, ‘The walls are closing in and starting to crumble, so I’d better look after myself’. People passed the buck. It was an, ‘I’m alright, Jack’ scenario — no real unity. They brought in so many different players, including myself, and nothing seemed to work. It was just a mess, with no real direction.”

It is hard to pick out the lowest point of a wretched 1992-93 season: a 5-1 thrashing at Coventry, having two players sent off over the course of a 6-2 aggregate defeat by Spartak Moscow in the old European Cup Winners’ Cup, losing 2-0 at home to Bolton in the FA Cup or trailing 3-0 at home to fourth-tier Chesterfield in a League Cup tie before scraping a 4-4 draw. Saunders, sold by Souness a year after his record-breaking transfer, had a new lease of life alongside Staunton and Houghton down at Villa. Beardsley was enjoying himself across Stanley Park at Everton. None of this reflected well on the man in charge of Liverpool.

The only bright spots came from emerging players such as McManaman, Redknapp, Marsh, Rob Jones and Don Hutchison, but these were far from the ideal circumstances to blood young talent at a big club. “We were all in the side and doing alright at times but, as young players, you don’t know your arse from your elbow,” Hutchison says.

Hutchison says some of the players who came in were “nowhere near the standard of Liverpool players”. Those who spring to mind include Danish defender Torben Piechnik and Hungarian midfielder Istvan Kozma. “This was a time when clubs were starting to look to more foreign players but in my opinion, the choice of players at Liverpool was not good,” Rosenthal says.

Appraisals of Liverpool’s recruitment in that era have not been improved over the years by Souness’s subsequent admission he passed up invitations to sign two players who were, at the time, largely unknown in England: Peter Schmeichel of Denmark’s Brondby and Eric Cantona, then at Nimes in France. Souness knew Cantona’s reputation and felt that “the last thing I needed was another problem player”. Liverpool’s loss proved to be Leeds United’s and, ultimately, Manchester United’s enormous gain.

In March 1993, Manchester United won 2-1 at Anfield, a significant victory in their pursuit of a first title in 26 years. It left Liverpool just three points clear of the relegation zone. They rallied to finish sixth, but were still just 10 points above the bottom three. Meanwhile, Manchester United were crowned the inaugural Premier League champions, and Ferguson was determined to establish them as the dominant force in English football. Knocking Liverpool off their perch? Liverpool had done a pretty good job of that themselves.

The board considered a change of manager at the end of that season — sounding out Dalglish, who told them he would happily “come home” from Blackburn Rovers if the invitation was there — but, after a week of intense speculation and boardroom leaks, which new chairman David Moores said had done “immeasurable damage to the club’s reputation”, Souness narrowly survived a vote of confidence. Moores said the Scot would stay in charge “for the three years of his contract — and I hope for much longer than that”.

The new season brought the signings of Neil Ruddock and Julian Dicks, which seemed at odds with the previous emphasis on fitness and conditioning, and Nigel Clough. Optimism came with the emergence of a homegrown goalscoring prodigy in Robbie Fowler — but every defeat pushed Souness further towards the brink. He resigned in January 1994 after Liverpool were knocked out of the FA Cup by second-tier Bristol City. “I took this job believing that I could return the club to its former glory,” he said, “but this has proved to be more difficult than I anticipated.”

Souness admits he made mistakes. He particularly regrets his dealings with The Sun. But he maintains that, in terms of dressing room culture as well as personnel, big changes were needed. One way or another, the 1989-90 team was in decline when he arrived. “Let’s be honest, Graeme walked into a no-win situation,” Nicol says. “Some of us were getting on. We’d been through a lot.”

Even Nicol, who was renowned for his love of junk food, admits Souness had a point where changes in diet were concerned. “A lot of it was common sense,” he says. “He was asking us to eat properly and not to drink. It’s not like he was asking us to swim in a tank full of sharks.”

“All I know is that when I arrived, the team wasn’t good enough and neither was the squad,” Souness says in Men In White Suits, Simon Hughes’s book about the club in the 1990s, “There was a need for urgent reconstruction. The ability wasn’t there and the attitude was bad. We were too soft.

“I appreciate that I was too hard with everyone. I wasn’t cute enough sometimes, or political enough. In management, I expected my players to feel the same as me but the world was changing.”

Some wondered whether Roy Evans, having risen quietly through the “Boot Room” ranks over 20 years, was too nice for a job as demanding as that of Liverpool manager. Certainly, he wanted to take a softer approach than Souness but he was not afraid of making ruthless decisions. Several of Souness’s less successful signings, such as Dicks, Piechnik and Stewart, were quickly discarded, but so too were Grobbelaar, Whelan, Nicol and Jan Molby. Soon, only Barnes and Rush remained from the club’s last title-winning squad.

Among some Liverpool fans, particularly those who were growing up in the 1990s, the team that emerged under Evans is remembered fondly. They played free-flowing football with skill and verve, with Redknapp, McManaman, Fowler and, later, Stan Collymore. They beat Bolton to win the League Cup in April 1995, thanks to two goals from an klix McManaman, and were a serious force in the Premier League over the two seasons that followed.

“It was a phenomenally talented group,” says John Scales, who arrived from Wimbledon in September 1994. “In goal, we had David James. At the back, we would have three from Mark Wright, Neil Ruddock, Phil Babb, Dom Matteo and myself. We had Jason McAteer and Rob Jones bombing forward in the wing-back positions, John Barnes, Jamie Redknapp and Michael Thomas in midfield. Stan Collymore, when he arrived, was a phenomenal talent. Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman were incredible players. Shaggy (McManaman) was on fire at the time. Robbie was on a different level, one of the most gifted players I’ve ever played with or against.”

By the end of Fowler’s fourth season at first-team level, having just turned 22, he had 116 goals in 188 first-team appearances — at a time when the scoring rate in the Premier League was lower than now. The numbers are mightily impressive but, even more striking was his precocious quality: outrageous pieces of skill and exquisite finishes, whether inside or outside the penalty area. He was both a great goalscorer and a scorer of great goals.

Things were looking up.



The acquisition of Collymore from Nottingham Forest in the summer of 1995, for a British-record £8.5 million transfer fee, was a powerful statement of intent. Liverpool had a solid defence, a classy midfield, a top-class creative talent in McManaman and a natural goalscorer in Fowler. Collymore was regarded — as so many Liverpool signings would be over the years — as the last piece of the jigsaw.

He got the winner on his debut against Sheffield Wednesday. Optimism soared.

Disillusionment set in very quickly, though. Three months into the season, in an interview with FourFourTwo magazine, Collymore expressed exasperation with his new club. “I don’t know of any other industry that would lay out £8.5 million on anything and not have some plan from day one on how they’re going to use it,” he said.

There were other outspoken criticisms. “My ideas on big clubs have changed,” he said. “You think you’re going to something superior in many ways. You go there thinking they’re going to be centres of excellence and they’re far from it.”

A quarter of a century on, Collymore stands by every word.

“At Forest, I would pick the ball up, run from deep, take on defenders and score goals,” he tells The Athletic. “That’s what got me the move to Liverpool, so I presumed that when a club scouted and bought a player who had scored 45 goals in two seasons at Nottingham Forest, they would be looking for me to do the things that had got me the move in the first place.

“I scored on my debut but I barely touched the ball the whole game. We had players like John Barnes, Jamie Redknapp and Michael Thomas, who liked to play one-touch, two-touch — classic Liverpool pass-and-move stuff — which they were very good at but it was a very rigid, dogmatic playing style. I remember the great Ronnie Moran, who I respected greatly, saying in team meetings that Macca (McManaman) was the only one who should run with the ball. And I remember in the first four or five weeks thinking, ‘This is bollocks. They’ve broken the British transfer record to sign me without any plan of how to to use me properly’.”

Collymore’s other criticisms were, in some ways, more searing. That line about “centres of excellence”? “We had an incredible guy at Forest called Peter Edwards who set out everything, looking after our diets etc,” he says. “This was years before Arsene Wenger transformed things at Arsenal. At Forest, I was getting to the end of 90 minutes and I felt I could have played another game of football.

“I then got to Liverpool and there was a guy in the canteen doling out thick slices of toast, putting on butter with a spatula. Razor (Ruddock) would have a couple of slices with bacon. ‘Do you want a fried egg with that, Razor?’. The fitness training was non-existent. I would rate Forest’s preparation for Premier League football at that time at 9.9 out of 10. Liverpool was a five. At Liverpool, I was as unfit as I’d been for two or three years.”

Collymore and Fowler clashed during their first appearance together in a pre-season friendly. “Robbie and I were very different people,” he says. “We get on well now but at the time, we didn’t get on at all off the pitch. There wasn’t any specific beef, and it wasn’t quite Sheringham-Cole proportions, but there was certainly tension. I was pissed off because I had to change my entire game. But as a partnership, we made it work. It didn’t affect us on the pitch in terms of our output, goals, assists etc. Robbie gave an interview recently where he said that I was the best strike partner he ever had, which was very nice of him.”

Between them, Collymore and Fowler scored 55 goals in all competitions in that first season. A frustrating run of five games without a win in November and early December ultimately left them with too little margin for error in the Premier League title race but they finished a creditable third behind Manchester United and Newcastle United. Making the FA Cup final offered the prospect of another silver lining.

When interviewing Sir Alex Ferguson in 2015, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson flashed up a series of images for him to discuss.

One of them was of Liverpool’s players laughing and joking as they strolled about the Wembley pitch before the 1996 FA Cup final. They were wearing cream-coloured suits, supplied by Armani.

“God almighty,” the former Manchester United manager said. “Why did they do that? I said to Brian Kidd (his assistant at the time), ‘1-0’ because of that (the suits). Arrogance? Overconfidence? I don’t know what you would call it but it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”

United did indeed win that final 1-0, with a late goal from Cantona. Scales is right when he says nobody would ever talk about those suits if a disappointing match had swung the other way but at the same time, he admits, “you don’t help yourselves, as a group of players, by wearing cream suits. You’re setting yourselves up as a target, what with everything else that was already going on”.

By “everything else”, Scales means their reputation as a group of players who were distracted by some of the trappings that came with the increased wages and exposure that the Premier League brought. The “Spice Boys” label did not attach itself until towards the end of the following 1996-97 campaign, as their title challenge disintegrated with one win in the final five games but there was already a perception that some of Liverpool’s players were too busy enjoying themselves — the modelling contracts, the celebrity girlfriends, the hedonistic end-of-season holidays, the Saturday-evening rush from Anfield to fly down to London to frequent their favourite West End nightclubs — to make the most of their talent.

Lee Sharpe, the former Manchester United winger, tells a story of a night out when he and his team-mates came across their Liverpool counterparts at a bar in the Cheshire town of Alderley Edge. Sharpe claims team-mate Roy Keane launched into a fierce tirade, tearing into the Liverpool players one by one (“You, Babb, fuck off back to Coventry. Redknapp, what the fuck have you ever done in the game? You, Scales, you’re fucking rubbish, with your England B cap”).

It has often sounded like one of those stories that has been embellished to fit a certain narrative but Scales confirms it happened. “We were out,” he says, “and, surprise surprise, we bumped into Roy. We were immediately thinking, ‘OK, here we go…’. Sure enough, Roy unleashed this tirade. There was steam practically coming out of his ears.

“The thing is, if we’re talking about lifestyle — nightclubs, klix celebrities, whatever — our patterns of behaviour weren’t very different to theirs. Yes, we went out but I don’t think we were doing anything that other teams, United included, weren’t doing that time. We would see their players when we were out.”

Collymore agrees. “That’s why I get sick of talking about the ‘Spice Boys’ thing,” he says. “And if you compared the two squads at the time, I don’t think there was a big difference. It’s different if you’re looking in hindsight and you’re saying, ‘Well, Ryan Giggs won 13 Premier Leagues and Steve McManaman didn’t win any’ but, talent-wise, the two squads were very even.”

He remembers being struck, on England duty, by the difference between the Liverpool contingent on one table (“laughing and joking”) and the United group (“all incredibly serious”) on another. One afternoon, walking out to training at Melwood, he saw Fowler putting Evans in a headlock and ruffling his hair. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s mad! That’s the manager’!” Collymore says. “Could you imagine any Manchester United player going up to Sir Alex Ferguson and doing that?”

Neither could you imagine a United player confessing, as James did after an erratic performance in a 4-3 victory over Newcastle in March 1997, that he had got “carried away playing (video games) Tekken II and Tomb Raider for hours on end” the night before — another of those disclosures that left fans wondering whether this group of players really understood what was at stake.

There has long been rumour of a match when Liverpool’s players passed a coin between themselves on the pitch: if you were given it, you had to take it — the idea being the player who was left with it at the final whistle had to buy the post-match drinks. It sounds too absurd to be true but Scales again confirms that it happened. “And it wasn’t exclusive to one game,” he says. “After a couple of games, it was knocked on the head. The lads realised that was taking it too far.”

“There were certainly very different personalities in the Liverpool group,” Collymore says. “But I think the crucial difference was the manager. That will sound hyper-critical of Roy Evans but all I’m saying is that he wasn’t Sir Alex Ferguson. Let’s be honest, not many managers are. Roy was a good coach, whose methodology was about consensus, a soft approach — the nice uncle that he comes across as — whereas Sir Alex Ferguson was a ruthless dictator that eked out every last drop.

“Was I unprofessional at times? Or Neil Ruddock or Jamie Redknapp or Fowler or McManaman? Yes, 100 per cent. But it comes down to the environment you’re in. If you go to an organisation that’s ultra-professional, that’s going to rub off on you. If you go to an organisation that does things the wrong way, likewise. The dressing room at Liverpool was very easy-going and banter-laden, but I think that the fundamental outlook of the club was, ‘As long as we play pass-and-move football, we’ll get success’. There was never any introspection or any serious look at the way Liverpool Football Club could and should have evolved through that period.”

Individually, there were some high achievers — Rush and Barnes had done it all at club level, McManaman went on to win the Champions League and La Liga twice each with Real Madrid, Fowler’s potential looked boundless until injuries struck and Redknapp, often seen as the face of the Spice Boys, was regarded as the perfect professional — but collectively, something was missing.

“We lacked that ruthless streak, that relentless pursuit of excellence week in, week out,” Scales says. “We lacked that leadership. In terms of intensity, I would suggest that Alex Ferguson was a lot more ruthless and instilled much greater discipline in the dressing room than Roy Evans did.”

That sounds quite damning of Evans. “I don’t want it to sound like that,” Scales says. “I held Roy in very high regard as a manager and as a person, and I still do. If I step back and look at the positives and the negatives, there were a huge number of positives with Roy.

“I don’t think for one moment that Roy and Ronnie Moran wanted us to be that way — their frustration was palpable at times — but the club, at that time, was reliant on a more old-school approach, more like self-regulation. In the 1970s and 80s, they had an incredible group of players. Perhaps in the 90s, as a club in transition, we needed stronger leadership.”

Again it seems harsh on Evans. whose softer approach proved far more successful than his predecessor’s authoritarian regime. Liverpool were a far slicker, quicker team under him and the McManaman-Collymore-Fowler axis became, for a time, as potent and thrilling as anything in the Premier League. Individually, players thrived under Evans. Collectively, though, they fell short.

“I wanted players to be free to make their own decisions,” Evans said in Men In White Suits. “There was trust. Maybe I gave a bit too much. If it goes wrong, the buck stops with the manager. But you can’t coach winning. Before my team went on the pitch, I’d finish the team talk with a simple message: ‘Enjoy yourself’. After that, they were away. I trusted them to do the business.”

On March 24, 1997, Liverpool won 2-1 at Arsenal to move within three points of Premier League leaders Manchester United with seven games remaining. Ferguson’s team then lost at home to Derby County in their next game. Liverpool had their klix in their own hands. They could go joint-top by beating Coventry at Anfield the following day.

Instead, from 1-0 up with 25 minutes left, they lost 2-1, conceding both goals from corners. “How do you explain that?” asked an exasperated Evans afterwards.

From a distance, a home match against United on April 19 had looked like a potential title-decider: a chance for Liverpool to return to supremacy after a seven-year hiatus. By the time that game came around, it felt like Liverpool’s last chance to salvage their title challenge. They blew it. Gary Pallister took advantage of more slack defending to score two headers from corners in the first half. Andy Cole made it 3-1 just after the hour when James, whose form had disintegrated, made a terrible misjudgement on Gary Neville’s looping cross. From such a strong position in late March, Liverpool ended up finishing fourth, seven points behind United.

“It was frustrating,” says Scales, who left for Tottenham midway through the season. “That team should have won the league at least once. You can be so close but sometimes, as a player, you get the feeling that you’re actually miles away. Sometimes, fans can’t see it but as a player, as part of the group, you can.

“Looking back, I just feel Liverpool, as a club, wasn’t ready for the change when the Premier League came along with all the elements that came with it,” Scales says. “In my time there, the whole club was still clinging to the methods that had worked so well for them in the 70s and 80s. I think there was still a feeling at Liverpool that it was a matter of when — not if — they got back to winning titles. That period of domination in the 70s and 80s was still so fresh in everyone’s mind. But so much had happened in the years since 1990.”

Evans shook things up that summer, releasing Barnes, the last survivor from the 1989-90 team, on a free transfer and replacing him with the former Manchester United midfielder Paul Ince, who was immediately made captain. As with so many of Liverpool’s other big signings through the 1990s and 2000s, there was a hope Ince would prove to be “the last piece of the jigsaw”.

Those defensive shortcomings were not addressed, though. That 1997-98 campaign was a strange one. Liverpool had their moments, usually inspired by McManaman or Michael Owen, who, at 17, took to the Premier League stage just as confidently and assuredly as Fowler four years earlier. But Fowler’s injury problems had become a worry.

For Liverpool in the 1990s, every silver lining had a cloud. They finished third, but, amid meek exits from the cup competitions and Europe, there was a growing sense of drift. Something was going to have to change.

If Evans’s appointment was intended to underline the timelessness of the “Boot Room” philosophy, summer 1998 brought a highly reluctant acknowledgement of just how much had changed within the English game in the eight years since Liverpool last won the title.

Manchester United, timing their resurgence perfectly, had been able to ride the Premier League wave, ushering in a new era under Ferguson. Arsenal were emerging as a formidable team under Arsene Wenger, a French coach who not only helped them exploit new markets but also modified their approach in terms of diet, fitness and conditioning, training techniques and more. At Liverpool, by contrast, it was all still off the cuff. “Do you want a fried egg with that, Razor?”

With Moran retiring, the Liverpool board decided it was time to embrace a more cosmopolitan approach and find a Wenger of their own. But Moores, unashamedly loyal and sentimental, was determined that this should mean either someone to work above Evans, as director of football, or alongside him rather than replace him. Like seven years earlier, they spoke to Toshack, who was managing the Turkish club Besiktas. Again, Toshack reluctantly said no, sensing such an arrangement would not work.

Ultimately, they turned to Gerard Houllier, the former France national team coach who had been technical director when his homeland won the World Cup that summer. He was close to taking over at Sheffield Wednesday when Liverpool chief executive Peter Robinson asked him whether he might like to discuss a position at Anfield. Houllier, who had spent time teaching in the city almost three decades earlier, jumped at the opportunity. And somehow, he and Evans ended up agreeing to be joint-managers of Liverpool.

After four games, Liverpool were top of the Premier League table. It was a false dawn.

Tensions over minor issues, such as travel arrangements, simmered rather than boiled over but they were symptomatic of two very different approaches. The players still addressed Evans as “boss” but his authority was diminishing by the day. There was a disagreement over team selection before the fifth Premier League game, at West Ham United, where Evans wanted to name an unchanged line-up but Houllier insisted on fielding an extra defender, Steve Harkness, in place of Karl-Heinz Riedle. Defeat at Upton Park that day was the start of a nine-game run that yielded just one win and six points.

“It was very unsettling,” David Thompson, who had just broken into the first-team squad, says. “Nobody knew who was in charge or what was going on. I think it came down to the chairman not having the heart to tell Roy he wasn’t going to be in charge anymore.”

Danny Murphy, who had arrived from Crewe Alexandra a year earlier, found it similarly confusing. “It was awkward,” he says. “Gerard, being the humble guy he is, wasn’t particularly forceful with his opinions or beliefs when he came in but there was always going to be a clash somewhere down the line because Roy was the old-school Boot Room type and Gerard was a completely different animal. It was a bit ‘Too many cooks’, if you like. Not that we saw much of it in front of our eyes but you could sense there was an inevitability about Roy going.”

Evans resigned on November 12, with Liverpool already out of the League Cup and 11th in the Premier League.

Fighting back the tears at a press conference, he said there were no hard feelings towards Houllier. Moores had pleaded with him to stay — if not as joint-manager, then in another role — but, after 35 years at Anfield as apprentice, player, coach and manager, Evans, felt that “to give Gerard and his team a chance, you have to walk away. I didn’t want to end as a ghost on the wall”.

Upon taking sole charge, Houllier sought to impose his authority on a group of players who he, had swiftly concluded, needed discipline.

That conclusion was reinforced a few weeks later by front-page stories about a Christmas party that got out of hand (strippers, whipped cream — all very Loaded-era). There were stricter rules about the dress code and what — and when — the players ate and drank. Mobile phones were banned within the corridors and dressing rooms at the training ground. Phil Thompson, the club’s former captain, returned as Houllier’s assistant, with a mandate to crack the whip.

Some felt the mood became a lot more professional. Others felt it became an awful lot less enjoyable.

“Gerard was quite ruthless,” Murphy says. “He got rid of a lot of the senior players who weren’t going to be on the same page as him. The discipline around the place changed quite dramatically, with dress code and timekeeping but also training. It was a lot more intense, a lot more structured. Not that the old way was bad but it was more like the way Arsenal were training under Arsene Wenger.”

The Houllier way was not to all tastes. Harkness and McAteer were quickly moved on but even among some of those who remained, there was scepticism towards the new manager. “Some of the principles he brought in were fantastic — especially with the discipline, because we needed that,” David Thompson says. “But in terms of the football side, he brought in this team-block culture, which I thought was a bit primitive. I don’t think you could say he revolutionised it the way Arsene Wenger did at Arsenal.”

His first signing was Jean-Michel Ferri, a plodding French midfielder who appeared for just 47 minutes before being sold to Sochaux six months later. The rumour in the dressing room was that he had been recruited to be the manager’s “eyes and ears”. A succession of triallists with unfamiliar names and accents came and went without making an impression. Meanwhile, McManaman, who had reached the final months of his contract, agreed to join Real Madrid on a free transfer when his contract expired. “That was catastrophic,” David Thompson says. “Letting his contract run down and messing him about in negotiations was one of Liverpool’s biggest mistakes.”

Even with McManaman on his way out, Houllier kept emphasising the importance of local talent. Early in his tenure, they beat Southampton 7-1, with all seven goals scored by homegrown players: Fowler (three), Dominic Matteo, Jamie Carragher, Owen and David Thompson, but they won just two of their next 12 games in all competitions after that. On April 21, Liverpool, featuring the lesser-spotted Sean Dundee, fell to a limp 1-0 defeat at home to Leicester while Manchester United were coming from 2-0 down to beat Juventus 3-2 in Turin to reach the Champions League final.

The season ended with Liverpool seventh in the table, 21 points off third-placed Chelsea, while Manchester United followed up a fifth league title in seven seasons by also winning the FA Cup and Champions League finals.

It had been a long, painful decade at Anfield. And it was threatening to get worse.

Houllier always liked to talk in terms of evolution rather than revolution but the summer of 1999 was one of upheaval.

In place of such recognisable names as James, Ince and McManaman came Sander Westerveld from Vitesse Arnhem, Sami Hyypia from Willem II, Vladimir Smicer from Lens, Erik Meijer from Bayer Leverkusen and Titi Camara from Marseille. One newspaper called it “less a Who’s Who of European football — more a ‘Who’s He?'”

Two more familiar names were Swiss defender Stephane Henchoz from Blackburn and German midfielder Dietmar Hamann from Newcastle but the whole intake was viewed with suspicion.

“I didn’t think about this at the time but Gerard was probably taking a bit of a chance by signing six or seven foreigners,” Hamann says. “He already had some good young English talent, especially Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard, but he wanted to change the structure of the side. Some of the signings were top-class. Sami and Stephane were probably the best defensive partnership in the Premier League for the next three or four years.”

For four consecutive seasons, Liverpool’s points total had dropped: from 74 in 1994-95 to 54 in 1998-99. The next season, under Houllier, they achieved a far more respectable 67 and, after the defensive troubles over the previous few years, they conceded just 30 Premier League goals, the least in the division. That Henchoz-Hyypia partnership was a revelation.

The difficulty was combining that new-found defensive security with the right balance going forward. If Owen’s emergence had mirrored Fowler’s, so too, regrettably, did his injury problems. Between them, Fowler and Owen started just 30 Premier League games in 1999-2000. For long periods, Liverpool’s attacking threat was carried by Patrik Berger, of the ferocious left boot, and the unpredictable Camara. Meijer’s endeavour was appreciated but he lacked finesse.

Emile Heskey arrived from Leicester City in a club-record £11 million deal in the March but, with Owen injured and Fowler struggling to regain fitness and favour, the goals dried up on the run-in. From being second in the table with five games to go, firmly on course to qualify for the money-spinning Champions League for the first time under the new format, they drew two and lost three of their final five games, failing to score a single goal in the process. They ended up fourth — “a sad way to end the season,” Houllier said — but the progress was clear, not least in the promise of young Steven Gerrard.

Since that last league championship in 1990, Liverpool had won just two trophies. In the space of three glorious months in early 2001, they won the League Cup, the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup.

The summer additions of Markus Babbel and Gary McAllister, both on free transfers, had brought more experience, more know-how and more quality as Liverpool enjoyed one of the most dramatic and certainly one of the most gruelling campaigns in their history.

“It was brilliant,” Hamann says. “From February onwards, it was one big game after another: quarter-finals, semi-finals, finals, that huge win at Everton (where McAllister scored a stoppage-time 3-2 winner). We had such a togetherness and a belief in ourselves and each other that at times, without being arrogant about it, we felt invincible.”

All three finals were nail-biters. Liverpool beat second-tier Birmingham on penalties in the League Cup, came from 1-0 down with eight minutes left to beat Arsenal with two late goals from Owen in the FA Cup and then, contrary to Houllier’s reputation for cautious tactics, beat Spain’s Alaves 5-4 after extra time in a chaotic UEFA Cup final in Dortmund.

“We could have lost all three of those finals,” Hamann says. “We definitely could have lost to Birmingham. But it’s like people say when someone wins their first Grand Slam title or their first Major; the first one is so important. That gave us tremendous strength because, once you’ve won a trophy, you know you can still get through when the going gets tough.”

October 13, 2001. Half-time at Anfield, where Liverpool were 1-0 down to Leeds. Inside the home dressing room, Houllier had just addressed his players when he felt pains in his chest. Cautiously, he informed Mark Waller, the club doctor. Dr Waller took his blood pressure and, alarmed by the reading, called an ambulance. Houllier was rushed to Broadgreen Hospital, where he was diagnosed with an aortic dissection and prepared for life-saving surgery. He has been told that, had it been full-time, with so much congestion in the streets around the stadium, he would not have made it to hospital alive.

“I had picked up a hamstring injury and was on one of the treatment tables, waiting to be seen by the physio and the doctor,” Heskey says. “The manager came in and he didn’t look right. I went to get up. He wanted me to stay there, but I said, ‘No, no. You don’t look well’. I didn’t know at the time how serious it was.”

“It was a shock when that happened,” Hamann says. “Gerard was very fortunate to survive. He wasn’t there for five months. We did well under Thommo (Phil Thompson). It also showed the standing that Gerard had because we probably wanted to do it even more for him than for ourselves. We knew that every win helped his mood and his recovery.”

Houllier returned to the touchline in March for a decisive Champions League group game. Amid an outpouring of affection for the returning manager, Liverpool beat AS Roma 2-0 to reach the quarter-finals. Five days later, Heskey crossed for Smicer to volley a stoppage-time winner against Chelsea. Liverpool were top of the Premier League table, ahead of Manchester United on goal difference, with five games remaining. Arsenal were still favourites, with two games in hand, but briefly, tantalisingly, it seemed to Liverpool’s players like the 12-year wait could nearly be over.

Heskey describes Houllier as “our talisman, our leader”. His legend had grown during his time away and his status was never higher than in those weeks after his return, when anything felt possible for his Liverpool team. Houllier, looking at five more games in the Premier League and potentially another five in the Champions League, suggested they could be “10 games from greatness”.

With 18 years’ hindsight, a watershed can be easily identified. Liverpool were drawing 1-1 away to Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League quarter-final second leg, 2-1 up on aggregate but losing their grip on the game, when Houllier replaced Hamann, a defensive midfielder, with the more attack-minded Smicer. They were overrun. Within seven minutes, Leverkusen scored twice and Liverpool were on the way out. “I was astonished when I saw my number come up,” Hamann says. “That still haunts me.”

They finished ahead of United for the first time in the Premier League era but Arsenal proved too strong. “Unfortunately, we were competing against two unbelievably talented teams,” Murphy says. “We can forgive ourselves for not surpassing them but we were really close at that time. The progression was very very good. We were nearly there.”

Thoughts turned to the transfer market. Liverpool were expected to complete a permanent deal for Nicolas Anelka, who had impressed on loan from Real Madrid, but negotiations broke down over personal terms, so Houllier turned instead to El-Hadji Diouf, the Senegal forward. Diouf made little impact on the pitch and proved deeply unpopular in the dressing room. Bruno Cheyrou, whom Houllier likened to Zinedine Zidane, and Salif Diao were nondescript. “I wouldn’t single out Dioufy as much as others would,” Murphy says, “but there were a few fall-outs. His personality wasn’t conducive to harmony.”

Liverpool were four points clear at the top of the Premier League after 12 games of the next season but then came a run of 11 games without a win. Jerzy Dudek, who had previously looked like the solution to a persistent goalkeeping problem, suffered a serious loss of form. So did Heskey and others. They won the League Cup, beating Manchester United in the final, but the “invincible” feeling of the previous two seasons had given way to self-doubt.

Dudek, in his autobiography, said Houllier rounded on his players at one stage, saying that they were “waiting for me to be sacked”. The impression gained at the time, reporting on Liverpool, was of a manager who was becoming paranoid. “That’s probably a good word,” Murphy says. “Maybe it was more of a frustration with some of the criticism. We had come so far so quickly. Then, all of a sudden, we fell below that and it was difficult for everyone, especially for him.”

Liverpool finished a distant fourth in the Premier League in 2003-04. It was enough to secure Champions League qualification but the sense of regression was unmistakable. Two years after that outpouring of love, there was graffiti on the walls of Melwood, saying “Houllier out”. The final weeks of that season were difficult but he made a dignified exit while highlighting the trophies he had won and the work he had done to “take Liverpool into the 21st century”.

Even the avowed Houllier-philes, such as Carragher, Gerrard, Murphy and Owen, recognised a change was needed. “I always like to talk about the positives with Gerard because he was great for my career and he had a great impact on my life,” Murphy says. “I’m sure Stevie (Gerrard), Michael and others would say the same, given what he did for their careers. But he wasn’t the same after his illness. His sharpness of mind wasn’t the same. Something was different. When you consider what he went through, it wasn’t surprising.”

March 9, 2004, was the day Jose Mourinho announced himself to an English football audience by charging down the touchline at Old Trafford to celebrate Porto’s decisive last-minute goal in a Champions League tie. It was also the day that one of his agents, Jorge Baidek, informed the Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry of his client’s desire to succeed Houllier.

During a meeting at Anfield that afternoon, Baidek outlined Mourinho’s suitability as a coach, a manager and a figurehead. Parry was impressed but he was also slightly troubled by the 41-year-old’s antics that evening. “Seeing Mourinho celebrate like that reinforced my initial belief,” Parry said in Ring of Fire. “Of course, I’m sure he would have been a great manager for Liverpool — there’s no doubting his qualities — but was he really a Liverpool manager? Did he characterise the club’s values?”

Mourinho admitted his interest publicly, saying “Liverpool are a team that interests everyone” whereas Chelsea, rebuilding with the wealth of Roman Abramovich, was an “uncertain project”. The conversations continued as Houllier’s regime lurched towards its sad denouement. He was certainly still in the board’s thoughts when he led Porto to victory in the Champions League final two days after Houllier was sacked. Alan Curbishley, the Charlton Athletic manager, was also under consideration.

Ultimately, Moores and Parry followed with their first instinct. Rafael Benitez did not have Mourinho’s aura or charisma but his record with Valencia — two La Liga titles and the UEFA Cup in just three years — was seriously impressive. In any case, Mourinho had been offered the Chelsea job: bigger salary, bigger budget, better squad, better prospects. Everyone was happy.

Carragher raves about Benitez’s influence on the training pitch, particularly on the defence. It was everything he had hoped for from a coach who had intrigued him since his Valencia team beat Liverpool comprehensively, home and away, during the Champions League group stage in 2002. Gerrard said that Benitez’s Valencia side were the most difficult opponents he had ever faced, such was their organisation and tactical discipline.

Upon meeting the pair of them, plus Owen, at England’s team hotel in Lisbon during Euro 2004, though, Benitez left a mixed impression. Carragher was encouraged that the new manager had done his homework, at one point name-dropping reserve left-back Stephen Warnock, and spoke in detail about which players could adapt to which systems. By contrast, Gerrard and Owen felt a certain coldness from him.

“Gerard Houllier was a man-manager,” Hamann says. “It was always, ‘How are you? How is the wife? How are the kids?’ He was warm. Rafa was the opposite. The only thing he would ever ask you was whether you watched a game the night before. You just had to do the work asked of you. If you did, you would have a future with him. He wasn’t too bothered about anything else.

“But his training sessions were so good. He took me to another level in terms of knowledge of the game. He would go into depth about systems and different ways of playing and he would make you think about the game differently. He came up with things you had never thought of before. Defensively he was so good. We were so well organised.”

Benitez wanted Liverpool to defend higher up the pitch. He also wanted more tactical intelligence and more variation, an ability to switch between different systems even if the basic shape rarely veered from 4-2-3-1.

As well as sanctioning the controversial sale of Owen to Real Madrid, he publicly questioned whether Gerrard had the tactical discipline to operate as one of the two midfielders in that system. Xabi Alonso made a positive impression from the moment he arrived from Real Sociedad but Benitez’s first six months in the job were difficult. January 2005 featured an embarrassing FA Cup exit at Burnley and a miserable defeat at Southampton, which Hansen called the worst performance since his retirement (That was saying something). “We’re certainly not a relic yet but we’re nearer to it now than we were 15 years ago,” the former captain said, “and that’s the danger to me”.

Among the supporters, though, a quasi-religious fervour was building around Benitez. Before Liverpool played Chelsea in the League Cup final at the Millennium Stadium a few weeks later, a gold-framed portrait of him was carried around the streets of Cardiff and venerated. Mourinho’s Chelsea won that day — the match decided by an own goal from Gerrard against the club who were desperate to sign him — but the Rafalution, after a slow start, was about to gather pace.

What happened next is the stuff of legend. Liverpool, having scraped through the Champions League group stage thanks to a Gerrard-inspired comeback against Olympiakos, swept past Leverkusen and Juventus before facing Chelsea in the semi-final. This time, Benitez won the tactical battle and, while Mourinho insists to this day that Luis Garcia’s “ghost goal” did not cross the line at the Kop end, victory was reward for Liverpool’s measured performance against a team who had just won the Premier League title in record-breaking style. The atmosphere for that second leg at Anfield had to be experienced to be believed.

Gravity seemed to catch up with Liverpool during the first half of the final in Istanbul, as the aristocrats of AC Milan rushed into a 3-0 lead, but Benitez’s half-time reshuffle, switching to a three-man central defence, brought an astonishing turnaround; within 15 minutes of the, restart the scores were level at 3-3. For the rest of the night, his team enjoyed a charmed existence, hanging on for a penalty shoot-out, where Dudek emerged as the hero.

“At 3-0 down, we were dead and buried,” Hamann says, modestly underplaying his role as the substitute who changed the game. “But a lot of matches come down to small details and Rafa was so good at managing them. He was going to take Djimi Traore off but then Steve Finnan came in with an injury. The way Rafa responded, changing his plans in a split-second, was unbelievable. I’m not sure many managers would have responded that quickly and with such a clear mind in that situation. Some people say Rafa was a lucky manager but if he hadn’t made that switch, we wouldn’t have won the European Cup.

“Looking back now, it’s an amazing story. If I think back to the different teams we had during my years at Liverpool, there were teams I would have fancied a lot more than that one. We had a solid defence, we knew how to control games, we had Stevie breaking forward and Luis Garcia scoring some important goals, and I think we found a way to compete in the cup competitions over two legs, but we had just finished fifth in the Premier League, 37 points behind Chelsea. We were nowhere challenging for the league. To win the Champions League was amazing.”

The “miracle of Istanbul” was revisited in great depth on this site recently. If anything, it occupies a strange place in the story of Liverpool’s 30-year journey back to the summit of English football. It came at precisely the halfway point between 1990 and 2020. Perhaps, with another 15 years’ hindsight, it can be seen as an extraordinary, improbable diversion from the wider odyssey.

At the time, though, it was everything — not least to Gerrard, a local lad and lifelong fan who had become Liverpool’s captain at the age of 23 and, over the difficult previous two years, had sometimes felt as if he alone was carrying the heavy burdens of expectations and disappointment felt by the red half of the city.

He had been contemplating his future, wondering if his career might be at better served at Chelsea than at a club in apparent need of a long-term rebuild. And now, against all odds, his dreams had come true: euphoria, utopia, total bliss. As he said that night, still in a state of disbelief, “how can I leave after this?”

The streets of Liverpool were crammed for the victory parade back the following evening. People climbed trees and scaled lamp posts to get a glimpse of their unlikely heroes, who were waving back at them from their open-top bus, holding that giant trophy up for them to see.

Gerrard describes that week as the best of his life: a blur of celebrations and parties. It felt like the high would go on all summer. After all that agonising over his future, amid persistent interest from Chelsea, he had never felt happier or more ready to commit his future to the club.

Within a few weeks, Gerrard’s euphoria had given way to anger. He felt as if the club had turned the tables on him. He had to wait two weeks for an offer and when it came, it fell far short of his expectations. A meeting with Benitez increased a sense of suspicion on both sides. Gerrard felt the manager had never rated him and wanted to sell him to raise funds to rebuild the squad. Benitez denied this and, with money proving a sticking point, he asked his captain whether he was really as committed as he kept claiming.

This was becoming a theme for Liverpool. In the 15 years since their last league title success, they produced a succession of top-class players from their academy — and lost them. It began with McManaman’s move to Real Madrid in 1999. Yes, McManaman was determined to test himself abroad when his contract expired but that desire was fuelled by the club’s willingness to sell him to Barcelona in 1997 (only for the deal to collapse) and the team’s stagnation over the two years that followed. Fowler was out of favour and feeling unwanted, with little progress towards a new contract, when he left for Leeds United in 2001. Owen’s contract drifted into his final year before Benitez, in one of his first acts as manager, decided to sell him to Real. Money was a factor but all three players in question felt a lack of real commitment, warmth and ambition from the club.

And so it was with Gerrard. Exasperated, he submitted a transfer request. The club indicated they would sell if Chelsea met their £35 million valuation. “It looks pretty final,” Parry said glumly.

That night, Gerrard turned on the television news and saw a replica shirt bearing his name being burnt outside the training ground. He saw fans who were furious that, just weeks after writing his name in Liverpool folklore, he was about to betray them by leaving for Chelsea. Friends and family members messaged, begging him to stay. Did he really want to be a pariah in his own city? Had he really thought it through? His head was spinning. He called Dr Waller and described what sounded and felt like anxiety attacks. Every time he thought of leaving, they intensified. When he considered the alternative, a calmness took hold. Over the course of a traumatic evening, that made his decision for him.

Gerrard told the club he wanted to stay and sign a new contract after all. The proposal had previously included an escape clause that would allow him to leave for a certain fee if Liverpool failed to qualify for the Champions League. Gerrard asked for that clause to be removed. He didn’t want to move. He wanted to be the captain that led Liverpool to the trophy they craved more than any other: the Premier League.

On the packed flight home from Istanbul, while his players carried on celebrating or caught up with much-needed sleep, Benitez was drawing up plans, plotting the next phase of the Rafalution. Yes, they were champions of Europe, but he needed a squad that could compete in the Premier League. Dudek, the match-winning hero the night before, was going to be replaced in goal by Pepe Reina. Smicer and Milan Baros, who had made important contributions in the final, would be moved on. Emotion was not going to cloud Benitez’s judgement. It never did.

“What a lot of people don’t appreciate is that, realistically, we probably weren’t even in the top 15 or 20 teams in Europe in 2005,” Carragher says. “Yes, we won the Champions League, which was the greatest thing that ever happened to us, but Rafa knew and we all knew that things needed to improve the next season. And 2005-06 was a massive jump in that we got 82 points, finished third and won the FA Cup.

“We improved a lot after 2005. The problem was that it was probably the best era there has been in the Premier League. You had Wenger, Mourinho, Ferguson and Benitez managing the top four teams. The competition was just so good and we didn’t really have the money to get beyond where Man United and Chelsea were. We spent quite a lot of money, but we needed more to be able to strengthen because we were rebuilding from a lower base, whereas those teams were already built and ready to compete.”

A higher class of player started to arrive — Reina, Daniel Agger, Mohamed Sissoko, Dirk Kuyt — but even these were hardly top-of-the-market signings and Benitez was still having to gamble on free transfers (Fabio Aurelio, Bolo Zenden, Andriy Voronin) and lower-end signings (Alvaro Arbeloa, Gabriel Paletta, Mark Gonzalez) with varying degrees of success. “A lot of the players who came in struggled simply because of the size of the club and the expectation on their shoulders,” Warnock says. “If you’re playing for Liverpool, you feel that expectation at every turn.”

A strong third-placed finish in Premier League in 2006, along with a Gerrard-inspired triumph in the FA Cup final, was followed in 2007 by another run to the Champions League final, where Milan got their revenge. It was a stronger Liverpool line-up than in Istanbul, but, with Jermaine Pennant on one wing and Zenden on the other, it still had a makeshift look. It sometimes felt that a shortfall in match-winning quality left them over-reliant on both Benitez’s tactical acumen and Gerrard’s dynamism.

“Rafa is a genius, the way he works,” Hamann says. “We were so good in the Champions League matches. But if you ask me for my honest opinion, I would say we were still six, seven, eight players short of a squad that could win the league. We believed we could do it because we had players like Pepe, Carra, Sami, Xabi, Stevie, but we were a bit short in other areas. Looking back, it was a bit of a long shot to think we would win the league.”

Benitez often used to linger after press conferences, once the cameras and tape recorders were off, and lament the numerous others he could have signed if only the club had been quicker and more decisive in following his recommendations: Dani Alves, Nemanja Vidic, a young Gareth Bale, a young Sergio Aguero and so on. They were competing against all the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs in the Champions League but they were rarely operating in the same areas of the transfer market.

Liverpool didn’t have a multi-billionaire sugar daddy like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea. Their match-day revenue paled in comparison to that at Manchester United, who had an extra 31,000 seats and far more corporate facilities at Old Trafford. The board had been talking for years about building a new stadium on Stanley Park to generate more revenue in the longer term but they didn’t have the money to do that without severely reducing their investment in the team. Something was going to have to change.

On a cold afternoon in February 2007, the wind of change blew through the corridors of Anfield as Liverpool rolled out the welcome mat to their new co-owners: George Gillett Jr, owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey franchise, and Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars.

This was the culmination of a process that dated back to 2003, when the chairman David Moores first indicated he might have to sell the club to allow it to move on. Those showing serious interest included: Liverpool fan and property tycoon Steve Morgan, who later bought Wolverhampton Wanderers; Thaksin Shinawatra, the Prime Minister of Thailand, whose offer was rejected amid confusion over his strategy for the club and concerns about adverse publicity; Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and New England Revolution; Dubai International Capital (DIC), the emirate’s private equity investment fund. Moores was desperate not to get it wrong. As Parry acknowledged on several occasions, “You can only sell the family silver once.”

Kraft was their preferred suitor but a firm bid never materialised. They were impressed by DIC, whose £450 million bid Moores provisionally accepted in early December 2006, but the sale process dragged on due to differences over the finer points of the sale and the planned construction of a new stadium. In late January 2007, Gillett, having previously conceded that his pockets were not deep enough, signalled he was ready to make a new bid, this time with the backing of Hicks, one of America’s richest men. This proposal contained significant pledges about the stadium, player investment and, crucially, respecting the club’s heritage without putting it at financial risk.


Selling his 51.6 per cent stake in Liverpool made Moores, a very rich man, even richer. In a statement, he urging the rest of the shareholders to follow his example, calling it “a great step forward” for the club and its supporters. For a truer reflection of Moores’ feelings at the time, it might be better to consult Parry, who called it the worst day of the former chairman’s life.

Gillett and Hicks made a lot of the right noises: no, they would not put any debt on the club, unlike the Glazers at Manchester United; yes, construction would start on Stanley Park within 60 days; yes, Benitez would be supported in the transfer market without interference; yes, they would communicate with the fans; they were motivated by “winning, passion, respect”, not profiteering; they wanted to add to the club’s lustre, “not detract from it”.

There was the odd disconcerting noise, too. If fans could excuse Hicks for referring to Liverpool’s great rivals “Man Ham”, it was certainly strange that Gillett, when asked how they were going to finance the construction of the new stadium, just shrugged, laughed and said: “We don’t know yet”.

Still, he laughed, though, didn’t he? So it was probably just a joke. Yes, almost certainly a joke.

It was the morning after another Champions League final. This time, in Athens, the mood at the Liverpool hotel was far removed from that in Istanbul two years earlier. They had played well against Milan — a much more controlled, mature performance than in 2005 — but this time, their luck was out.

Benitez was exasperated and, for once, it was not because of something he had spotted while watching the game. He had spent much of the night trudging through the streets of Athens, brooding not just over the result but over his concerns over the summer ahead. He felt Gillett and Hicks, for all their bluster, didn’t really understand what was at stake in the transfer market or, critically, how to operate. “I want things to happen now,” he told reporters that morning. “I’m tired of talking. I want things to be done.”

They backed Benitez that summer. They missed out on Florent Malouda, who chose Chelsea instead, but they did sign Yossi Benayoun, Ryan Babel and, most excitingly of all, Fernando Torres in a club-record deal costing an initial £20.2 million. Their total transfer outlay that summer was around £46 million and, even with around half of that amount recouped in sales, it was Liverpool’s biggest ever investment.

The new season began well. Torres was a spectacular success, transforming their attack as Liverpool went unbeaten in the Premier League until mid-December. But behind the scenes. cracks were appearing and important relationships were seriously strained: between Benitez and Parry, between Benitez and the owners, between Hicks and Parry, even — and not least — between Gillett and Hicks. That folksy charm had given way to sniping in every direction. Benitez, after sending one transfer-related email too many, was rebuked by Hicks, telling him to “focus on training and coaching the team”. Benitez, in a witheringly sarcastic tone, used that phrase 15 times in his next press conference.

Shortly after that, it emerged that the owners had lined up the California-based former Bayern Munich coach Jurgen Klinsmann to replace Benitez — “an insurance policy,” Hicks later insisted. Liverpool’s supporters were horrified. Why would the owners, by their own admission lacking in football knowledge, undermine a Champions League-winning coach like that?

There was no still no shovel in the ground on Stanley Park. The owners released a new set of drawings and plans from another architect, the Dallas-based HKS. All glass and steel, it looked spectacular, with a planned capacity of 76,000. But it had already begun to look like a pipe dream under Gillett and Hicks. And where was the money going to come from?

Then came another bombshell as the owners’ £350 million refinancing deal saw a heavy debt burden placed on the club. By the end of the 2007-08 season, when they reached another Champions League semi-final and finished fourth in the Premier League, Liverpool’s net debt had soared to £299.5 million. All of this coincided with the credit crunch, which hit Gillett and Hicks hard. It also plunged Liverpool into serious financial trouble at a time when the club was already in the early stages of something like a civil war.

Jamie Carragher is looking back: not with anger but certainly with frustration and a few regrets as he remembers the best Liverpool team he played in. It had a machine-like quality — unyielding in defence and dominant in midfield through Alonso and Javier Mascherano — but it also produced some beautiful flourishes in attack when Gerrard, in a more advanced role, combined with Torres.

Liverpool won 25, drew 11 and lost just two of their 38 Premier League games in 2008-09. They even won 4-1 at Old Trafford a few days after hammering Real Madrid 4-0 at Anfield in the Champions League. Then came Yossi Benayoun’s stoppage-time winner at Fulham, which took Liverpool two points clear of Manchester United at the top of the table, albeit having played two more games. The celebrations at the final whistle represented a real sense of belief. “There was a real feeling that it could happen,” Carragher says.

That feeling grew the following day when Manchester United trailed 2-1 at home to Aston Villa. But then Cristiano Ronaldo equalised with 10 minutes remaining and Federico Macheda, a little-known teenager, came off the bench to score a stoppage-time winner. Anything Liverpool could do, Manchester United could do better. The title went to Old Trafford, their 18th overall, equalling Liverpool’s record. If anyone had proposed such a scenario in 1990, when Liverpool had 18 titles to their rivals’ seven, it would have seemed implausible.

“I think, around that time, we were in the best five or six teams in the world,” Carragher says. “There were five or six teams who could realistically win the Champions League. Four of them were in the Premier League. There were three seasons on the bounce (2006-07 to 2008-09) where the Premier League had three of the four semi-finalists. That was the problem and I don’t think we could go the extra mile financially to get beyond Man United and Chelsea.

“People might say, ‘Yeah, but you signed Torres’ but the thing with Torres is that Chelsea and Man United looked at him for a long time and didn’t think he was right for the Premier League. Even for our Spanish lads, it was a big surprise how well he did for us straight away. That was an amazing signing that helped us bridge that gap and very nearly get there. The spine of that team could manage everything but if you look at the rest of the squad, it was hard to compete with what Chelsea and Man United had. Even if we were spending £50 million, we had to spread that out on three or four players because we were still building.”

Benitez agrees. “We were getting closer all the time and we were improving,” he says. “When you don’t have the same money as your rivals, you have to be successful with almost every signing. We were very close in 2009 but that last step is the most difficult.”

Many recollections of that campaign revolve around Benitez’s infamous press conference in January 2009 when he embarked on a monologue listing a series of “facts”, alleging that Ferguson and his team received favourable treatment from match officials and the FA. Gerrard is among those who have suggested that his manager’s “ramble” backfired.

Benitez feels it is a red herring. “People talk about the press conference I gave but it’s not true,” he says. “In our final 11 games in the Premier League, we won 10 and drew one. We were as close as we could be at this time. Why? Because United were doing better. They had a very strong team. Also, I think they were a little bit lucky in some games, like when Macheda scored a late goal against Aston Villa and things like that. Were we close? Yes but United were stronger than us at this time.”

Carragher broadly agrees. “I don’t blame the manager or say it was his fault we didn’t win the league,” he says. “If I look back on that era, I wish we could have won more trophies because those were the best years of my career. I think we underachieved in the cups — we should have won a League Cup or another FA Cup — but I don’t think we could have done much more in the league. You could actually argue we overachieved. I think what we did that season was probably about the maximum could have done without reinforcing.”

At the start of the 2009-10 season, Ferguson chuck one of his verbal hand grenades towards Anfield. “Liverpool have just had their best season for nearly 20 years, finished up with 86 points and still finished four points adrift,” the United manager said. “It will be hard to match that, let alone improve. Other teams will read Liverpool better this season.”

Oh, they will, will they?

Yes, they did. Depleted by the summer sale of Alonso to Real Madrid, Liverpool lost two of their first three Premier League matches, five of their first 11. They were knocked out of the Champions League in the group stage. The entire miserable season played out to a backdrop of tension at boardroom level (not least towards an increasingly disillusioned and outspoken Benitez) and serious concerns about how the club were going to meet the interest payments on their debt if, as transpired, they missed out on Champions League qualification.

There were frequent pre-match and post-match protests against Hicks and Gillett. Those who worked for the club spoke of bitter divisions in the boardroom, among the office staff and the players. “Inside the club, it was toxic,” one source says. “People who had worked for the club for 30 years were being asked, ‘Which side are you on?’. It was horrible.”

Benitez was in the middle of it. “I used to get a bit frustrated with Rafa when he said things in the press about the owners,” Carragher says. “Obviously, the players don’t work with the owners and the manager does, and I know he was very frustrated with a lot of different things, but it felt like the whole situation took over from the football. There was something every week.

“Maybe I’m giving the owners an easier ride than I should; what they did financially, and the way the ended up running the club, was a disgrace. They did back Rafa when they first came in but problems came after that: the credit crunch, the recession, not caring one bit about Liverpool. I’m just saying that I hate it when it feels like teams think they’ve almost got an excuse when things aren’t going well. Man United had the Glazers, didn’t they? For me, playing for Liverpool, it was always, ‘Let’s put all our energies and focus into winning and try to ignore the other things’.

“But we needed the owners to go again in the transfer market that summer. They didn’t go again. We lost Xabi, which had a big impact. We bought (Alberto) Aquilani, who wasn’t fit, and Glen Johnson. Pre-season wasn’t great — you could sense the friction — and before you knew it, we had lost two of our first three games and it was just… a mess, sadly.”

Liverpool finished seventh in the Premier League. Mascherano, Gerrard and Torres were left to wonder whether to stick around if, as it appeared, things were going to get worse. Benitez was not given the choice. His contract was terminated — officially by mutual consent, though mutual contempt might be a better description where his relationship with the board was concerned — and the mood on Merseyside grew even darker. It had been 20 years since the last title and, amid escalating concern about the owners and the finances, a deepening mediocrity beckoned.

Early in the 2010-11 season, Charlie Adam helped his unfancied Blackpool team win 2-1 win at Anfield, leaving Liverpool in the relegation zone after a dreadful start to life under Roy Hodgson. In the grim final minutes, the Kop started chanting loudly — and pointedly — in honour of Kenny Dalglish.

It was the post-match scenes, though, that struck Adam. “There was a huge protest, with their fans chanting against the owners,” the former Blackpool midfielder, who joined Liverpool the following year, says. “There was so much unrest. Even as an opposition player, you couldn’t miss it.”

Warnock, who by now was at Villa, could sense it too. “It just didn’t feel anything like the same whenever I came back around that time,” he says. “Behind the scenes, it felt totally different. The club massively lost its way for a few years.”

The squad that had run Manchester United close barely a year earlier had crumbled. Alonso and Mascherano had left for Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively, Agger, Gerrard and Torres were all struggling for fitness and, amid a worsening financial predicament, and Hodgson’s various low-priced signings (Christian Poulsen and Paul Konchesky) and free transfers (Joe Cole and Milan Jovanovic) flopped. Cole, eager to impress as he sought to prove his injuries were behind him, was sent off on his debut and didn’t recover. “Liverpool was the right club at the wrong time,” he says.

Hodgson might feel the same: that under different conditions he would have lasted more than half a season on Merseyside. After all, he was hardly the first Liverpool manager to favour safety-first football.

But it is hard to imagine Houllier or Benitez would ever have had a team record just 36 per cent of the possession while losing to Tony Pulis’s Stoke City. Under Hodgson, Liverpool were genuinely at risk of relegation. There was also a humiliating League Cup defeat by Northampton Town. Beyond that, Hodgson and the fans struggled to relate to each other on any level, hence the clamour for Dalglish. A wide range of characters have managed Liverpool but Hodgson still appeared incongruous.

“Roy Hodgson was the first manager where I can really say he wasn’t the right fit,” Carragher says. “He’s a good manager but at Liverpool, he seemed to go into games fearing the worst. At a really top club, you can’t have that outlook.

“Also, for Liverpool fans, every word the manager says is picked up and magnified, so you’ve got to make sure those words are right. With Roy, you were sometimes thinking, ‘I wish he hadn’t said that’. He probably wasn’t streetwise enough like that. And because he was English and didn’t have any real… mystique around him.

“Hodgson and the owners always got the blame for everything but we were terrible at the start of that season. How could Liverpool, with the players we had, lose at home to Blackpool? That wasn’t down to the manager. We were awful that day. And I don’t think the application from some of the players was great under Roy Hodgson. They knew they could get away with it because the manager and the owners were always going to get the blame, no matter what.

“I actually felt sorry for Roy Hodgson. If people are taking the piss out of him, they need to remember he’s managed all over the world — he’s managed Inter Milan, he took Fulham to a Europa League final before he came to Liverpool. He did a brilliant job at Fulham, really good job at West Brom and Crystal Palace. He just wasn’t the right manager for Liverpool.”

In August 2010, Joe Januszewski, a senior vice-president of the Fenway Sports Group (FSG), was at home bottle-feeding his baby boy, with more than half an eye on the Boston Red Sox’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays, when he took the call that went some way towards changing the klix of his beloved Liverpool Football Club.

FSG, which owns the Red Sox, had been approached by a third party about the possibility of buying Liverpool. As the “token soccer geek in the offices”, Januszewski was invited to advise the group’s chairman John W. Henry whether or not he thought it would be a good idea.

His impassioned response could barely be heard above the noise from the crowd in Toronto, so he was told to put his thoughts in an email. He rattled out a response that almost amounted to a plea. He explained that Liverpool were one of the biggest clubs in the football world and the opportunity to buy them, potentially for a knock-down price, was too good to miss, particularly with American interest in football surging after the 2010 World Cup. Liverpool were ailing under the Gillett-Hicks regime, in desperate need of salvation. If they got it right, the upside — both on the pitch and, crucially, on the financial side — would be enormous.

Sixty-six days later, FSG became the new owners of Liverpool. Their $476 million offer was rejected by Gillett and Hicks but accepted by Martin Broughton, who had been appointed as the club’s independent chairman with a mandate from the banks to find a buyer as a matter of urgency. Gillett and Hicks tried to have the sale blocked at the High Court in London but on October 13, just 48 hours before the deadline to repay the club’s £237 million debt to the Royal Bank of Scotland, Mr Justice Floyd ruled against them, saying that they had “absolutely no right to veto a sale”.

FSG inherited a club that was in desperate need of repair. The first game under their ownership was a Merseyside derby at Goodison Park. Everton won 2-0, leaving Hodgson’s Liverpool in the relegation zone. One Everton fan shouted to Henry, in the directors’ box, “John, you bought the wrong club.” Nearly 10 years on, it remains Liverpool’s last defeat by their local rivals.

They bought Liverpool as an investment, rather than a plaything or an act of philanthropy but from day one, they recognised what the fans wanted more than anything.

Just as the Boston Red Sox had finally lifted the 86-year “Curse of the Bambino” under FSG’s ownership, so Liverpool’s fans hoped and expected their own hoodoo to be broken. “Fenway Sports Group have a unique skill set for what we call in the US breaking curses,” Henry said not long after the Liverpool takeover.

There was no magic wand effect on Merseyside. FSG were making their tentative first steps in a very different sports industry, learning on the job. One parallel with the Red Sox experience, though, came when they decided that, as with Fenway Park, the best option would be to redevelop a historic stadium rather than demolish it and rebuild a new one. That proved a popular decision with Liverpool’s supporters. The new Main Stand opened in 2016 and the expansion of the Anfield Road end, which will take the ground’s capacity to 61,000, is expected by 2023.

FSG hoped to be able to bide their time before making changes on the football side too, but that luxury was not available. Whereas Gillett and Hicks bought a club that had won the Champions League less than two years earlier, with an improving team under stable management, FSG bought a club in a state of disarray. Before they could even think about moving forward, they needed to try to stop the rot.

When taking charge of Liverpool for the second time, more than quarter of a century on from the first, Dalglish said he felt he was grateful for the opportunity to repay his debt to the club.

He was widely recognised as the greatest player in Liverpool’s history. In five full seasons as manager, he led them to three league titles and two FA Cups. He also emerged as the city’s spiritual leader in the dark, harrowing days after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. All of those responsibilities and pressures took a heavy toll on him, contributing to the stress that led to his resignation in February 1991. In the two decades since then, his legacy had been squandered. And still he felt he owed the club a debt.

They were only four points clear of the relegation zone when he was placed in temporary charge following Hodgson’s dismissal in January 2011. The first challenge, he knew, was to rebuild confidence among a group of players who looked bereft. Torres did not wait around long enough to bare witness to the Dalglish effect — he joined Chelsea in a £50 million move, saying he felt “betrayed” by the Liverpool hierarchy’s broken promises over the previous 18 months — but others felt happier immediately. Kuyt looked back to his old self, while recent signings Raul Meireles and Maxi Rodriguez were more settled. Youngsters such as Martin Kelly, Jon Flanagan and Jay Spearing showed promise. A mid-season signing called Luis Suarez made a significant impact.

One afternoon in March, they beat Manchester United 3-1, with Kuyt scoring a hat-trick, as the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Dalglish. On the pitch and in the stands, Anfield was a happy place again.

“Kenny united the fanbase straight away,” Carragher says. “King Kenny, Mr Liverpool, a god to the supporters. He had a huge galvanising effect and we had a great a run. It wasn’t so much Kenny coming and changing things on the training pitch. It was more that he was a figurehead — someone the players could look up to, not hide behind if things weren’t going well.”

Liverpool ended up sixth and it was no surprise that FSG made his appointment permanent. The following season, they beat Cardiff City on penalties to win the League Cup, their first trophy in six years, and reached the FA Cup final, where they were beaten by Chelsea.

But the Premier League was a struggle. They started encouragingly, despite a few too many draws at home to modest opposition, but lost 11 out of 19 matches in the second half of the season, ending up eighth. Dalglish was summoned to Boston, where he was sacked.

Adam, who had arrived Blackpool, was “gobsmacked” by the decision. “I thought he did a really good job,” the former Scotland midfielder, now at Reading, says. “He came in and stabilised the club when there were so many issues. It was tough at that time to compete with the clubs who were all spending big money but we won a trophy and got to another final. The league was disappointing but the performances were good a lot of the time. I thought Kenny would stay. I think most of us did.”

Carragher was less surprised. “They gave him the job but that was probably because he was doing so well that it was almost impossible not to appoint him,” he says. “I’m not sure the owners ever really saw him as the manager long-term. It felt like it wasn’t going to take much for the owners to move on from Kenny. But I feel it was harsh to get rid of him, I really do.”

So did many of the supporters, particularly those older ones who idolised Dalglish. There was only one trophy in his second spell but he had brought something else important: stability and, for the owners’, some much-needed breathing space as they tried to get their bearings in English football. Oh, and he also left the fans another idol in the No 7 shirt to cherish.

Luis Suarez signed for Liverpool in a £22.7 million on deadline day in January 2011 — the same day the club signed a bewildered Andy Carroll from Newcastle United for £35 million and sold a disillusioned Fernando Torres to Chelsea for £50 million.

Two of those deals are looked back on with buyer’s remorse. The other, Suarez, is recalled at Anfield with a range of emotions. It was a riotous relationship, a whirlwind romance. It was never going to last, of course, and there were times when he seemed to treat the club and the game with the contempt he usually reserved for opponents. But for three and a half turbulent years, Suarez thrilled Liverpool and their supporters so much that they looked beyond his faults and forgave anything.

He was banned for 10 matches by the FA for biting Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic (the second of three such bans in his career). He was also banned for eight games for racially abusing Manchester United’s Patrice Evra in October 2011. Liverpool’s players, clinging to a belief in their team-mate’s innocence, wore T-shirts in solidarity with him, while the club continued to back his version of events until, on his return to action, he snubbed Evra in a pre-match handshake at Old Trafford. Suarez, Dalglish and the club apologised the next day but the damage to Liverpool’s reputation — and, crucially, to Evra and the game’s anti-racism movement — was extensive.

Suarez also tried to engineer a transfer to Arsenal in the summer of 2013, saying that he needed to be playing in the Champions League (something Liverpool had not done since December 2009). But, after Gerrard and Rodgers persuaded him to knuckle down, he went on to enjoy an annus mirabilis. It wasn’t just the stunning quality and quantity of his goals — 31 of them in 33 Premier League appearances. It was the incessant, insatiable, unplayable nature of his performances, helping to propel the team to heights they had never imagined.

“He was unbelievable,” Jose Enrique, who arrived from Newcastle in 2011, says. “He could win games on his own. We could play a shitty game and we knew that with one long ball behind the defence, he would score. Even with this great team now, I believe Luis Suarez is the best player I’ve seen in a Liverpool shirt. Steven Gerrard was different class but I didn’t see Stevie at his peak.”

Gerrard feared he would never come back from the groin and ankle injuries that restricted him to just five appearances in nine months in 2011. All those years of superhuman endeavour had taken a toll on his body. That, in turn, took its toll on an introspective mind. Mentally, as well as physically, Gerrard wondered how much more he had left to give.

With the help of a surgeon, a psychiatrist, a physio and his family and friends, he made it back to the Liverpool team. But things weren’t the same anymore. They won the League Cup in 2012 but they were no longer a top-four team, a Champions League team. New signings were no longer welcomed as “the last piece of the jigsaw”. They won the League Cup in 2012, their first trophy in six years, but higher objectives seemed a long way away. In September 2012, now 32, he admitted that he had to be “realistic” and acknowledge that the chance to win the Premier League might have gone.

Brendan Rodgers, only seven years Gerrard’s senior, succeeded Dalglish as manager. He had earned an impressive reputation as a coach at Swansea City but FSG made that appointment with a long-term rebuild in mind. Rodgers impressed the owners with his evangelical zeal as he preached about bringing a more modern playing philosophy to Liverpool but he was not promising a quick fix. An optimistic view, after they won just two of their first 11 Premier League matches under Rodgers, was that this was going to take time.

After that disconcertingly slow start, though, Rodgers and Liverpool found a way forward. Suarez’s devilish flair was at the heart of every attack but Philippe Coutinho and Daniel Sturridge, signed from Inter Milan and Chelsea respectively for a combined £20.5 million, were thriving too. So was Raheem Sterling, whom Rodgers dared to make a first-team regular at 17. And so was Gerrard, adapting to the demands of a deeper role, with Jordan Henderson doing some of his legwork.

They finished a distant seventh in the Premier League in 2012-13 but the improvement during the second half of that season gave just a hint of what was to come. “The training under Brendan was the best training I had in my life,” Enrique says. “The intensity was so high, always with the ball. Every session was different. We were improving all the time.”

“In some ways, the Liverpool job probably came a bit too early in Brendan’s career in terms of knowledge and maturity as a manager but he was a brilliant coach,” Carragher, who retired at the end of the 2012-13 season, says. “I think he’s treated a bit unfairly by some Liverpool fans. I don’t think people appreciate how good his coaching was and how well he managed the situation when Luis Suarez wanted to leave. Brendan made him train with the reserves. For a young coach at a big club, that was brave.”

With Suarez back on board, the 2013-14 campaign was a blur of goals and wins: 4-1, 4-0, 5-1, 4-1, 5-0, 5-3, 4-0, 5-1, 3-2, 4-3, 6-3, 4-0. A 4-0 win over Tottenham at the end of March had Anfield shaking to its foundations. Then came a tense afternoon at West Ham, where Gerrard kept his nerve to score convert two penalties. With five games left, with Chelsea and Manchester City stumbling, Liverpool had taken control of their klix.

Manchester City came to Merseyside two days before the 25th anniversary of Hillsborough. The atmosphere that day was charged with emotion, not least for Gerrard, whose cousin Jon-Paul Gilhooley was, at 10, the youngest of the disaster’s 96 victims. By the end of a tumultuous afternoon, Liverpool, who won 3-2 thanks to Coutinho’s late strike, were just four wins away. Gerrard gathered his team-mates in a huddle on the pitch and, yelling to make himself heard above the din, told them, “This. Does. Not. Slip”.

They went to Norwich City and won 3-2 again. It was another rollercoaster ride but by now, Liverpool had won 11 on the run. They just needed seven points from their final three games, the first of them at home to Mourinho’s Chelsea.

And… it slipped. Gerrard slipped. In the third minute of stoppage time, at the end of a frustrating first half, a harmless-looking ball ran away from him in midfield and he slipped. Demba Ba raced clear to score, putting Chelsea 1-0 up.

Carragher was in the crowd. When it happened, he was making his way down to the players’ lounge, trying to beat the half-time rush. “I got there and they were showing the replays,” he says. “That was the first I saw it. I was just devastated for him.”

In that single moment, the wave of euphoric self-belief that had been carrying Gerrard and his team-mates for months came crashing to the ground. Chelsea added a second goal right at the end of a second half which seemed less like a sporting contest than a psychological event. As Gerrard says in his autobiography, “I was flailing away, desperate to atone for my error.”

He had been a nine-year-old boy at Liverpool’s centre of excellence the last time they won the league. It had been 24 years. He had been a first-team player for 15 of them. There had been highs, there had been lows and, for the local lad who had carried the hopes of half a city on his shoulders, it had all seemed to be building towards the final weeks of that season. He broke down in tears on his way home that night. There were still two games to go, six points to fight for, but he knew deep down it was over. Manchester City would finish the job. They did.

“I was devastated for him,” Carragher says. “Not just because he’s my mate but because of everything he had done for the club over the years. The finals in Cardiff and Istanbul; we wouldn’t have won any of them without Stevie. He was a massive part of everything we won. If that had to happen to someone, I wish it could have been anyone other than Stevie.”

“I still feel sad for him now,” Enrique says. “I would loved for us to have won the Premier League that season but I would have been even happier for Stevie because you could see how much it meant to him. It was the only trophy he hadn’t won for Liverpool. But we didn’t lose the league because of Stevie. I hope he knows that.”

Now manager of Rangers, Gerrard said recently that he thinks about the slip “most days”. “I have to live with my regrets, if you like,” he told The Athletic. “And I don’t think they’ll ever go away.”

There are a couple of common threads that link Liverpool’s surges in the Premier League in 2002 and 2009. In both cases, they were followed by a steep drop-off in performance the next season. Under Houllier, they went from second place (80 points) in 2002 to fifth (64 points) in 2003. Under Benitez, they went from third (82 points) in 2006 to third (68 points) in 2007 and from second (86 points) in 2009 to seventh (63 points) the next year.

Poor recruitment was a factor (Diouf, Diao and Cheyrou in 2002, Aquilani in 2009) but so too, it seemed, was something in the Anfield psyche. It was as if, after going so close and falling just short, they were left with a severe hangover. It was a familiar pattern under a succession of managers: boom and then bust. Houllier didn’t recover after 2002. Benitez did after 2006 but not after 2009. It was boom and then bust.

That was certainly the case after Rodgers’ team came so close in 2013-14. Suarez left for Barcelona, leaving a hole that would not be filled — to put it mildly — by the contrasting talents of Fabio Borini, Lazar Markovic, Rickie Lambert and Mario Balotelli, who scored a combined total of six Premier League goals in 2014-15. Sturridge managed four in an injury-hit campaign. It was a bleak season as they fell from second (84 points) to sixth (62 points). It ended at rock-bottom with a humiliating 6-1 defeat at Stoke City, a sad ending for Gerrard before he moved on to LA Galaxy.

It was a surprise that Rodgers survived that summer. He had clashed with the club’s hierarchy over recruitment strategy, given the mish-mash of players signed by committee when Suarez left the previous year: Javier Manquillo (on loan), Alberto Moreno, Dejan Lovren, Emre Can, Adam Lallana, Markovic, Lambert, Balotelli and Divock Origi. The 2015 intake included three inspired acquisitions in Joe Gomez, James Milner and Roberto Firmino, but it also brought, on Rodgers’ insistence, the £32.5 million signing of Christian Benteke, who didn’t seem compatible with the manager’s philosophy or indeed the rest of the squad.

They no longer looked like a Rodgers team. His press conferences, previously enlightening, became tense, terse affairs. The manager, so ebullient when he arrived from Swansea, looked beaten. Eight Premier League games into the season, after a flat 1-1 draw at Everton, he was sacked. Fresh ideas were needed. Fresh inspiration too. There was only one man for the job.

Jurgen Klopp had them from the moment he flashed his first toothy grin in his introductory press conference in October 2015. Tanned and refreshed, having had five months off since a tearful farewell from Borussia Dortmund, he radiated charm, charisma and, somehow, humility. He didn’t trumpet a highly impressive record, as some managers might, but neither did he seek to play down expectations. He described himself as “a normal guy from the Black Forest” but insisted Liverpool’s predicament was “not so difficult as all the people in this room feel”.

He repeatedly called Liverpool a “special” club but he had diagnosed problems from afar. Twenty-five years had now passed since the last title triumph and a familiar angst had taken hold of the place. “I watch from outside,” he said. “They (the supporters and the players) seem to be a little bit nervous. The atmosphere in the stadium is good but nobody is really enjoying themselves. That’s what I mean when I say we have to make a restart. We have to turn doubters into believers.”

What a line. They believed in Klopp from day one — the supporters, the players and all the staff. “He changed everything,” Enrique says.

On the training pitch, he worked the players like dogs. Milner recalls it being “so physically intense, with so much sprinting and high-intensity running that one of the young lads was sick at the side of the pitch.”

Milner also remembers, almost from day one, the very precise work Klopp and his coaching staff did from a technical/tactical perspective to turn them into an effective pressing unit. Klopp has described his teams’ playing style as “heavy metal football” but the tactical details, according to Milner, “are more complicated than people might imagine. People might imagine it’s off the cuff — ‘just go and press like crazy’ — but it really isn’t like that. I don’t know if other teams work as hard in training as we do. Fair play to them if they do.”

It was a squad that, in places, looked ill-suited to Klopp’s high-pressing game, but there were some highly impressive wins in the first couple of months: 3-1 at Chelsea, 4-1 at Manchester City, 6-1 at Southampton in the League Cup. There was also a notable anxiety in their performances at Anfield. Klopp was shocked to see many fans stream towards the exits after the team fell 2-1 down to Crystal Palace in the closing stage. “At that moment,” he said afterwards, “I feel pretty alone.”

Gradually, throughout that season, the atmosphere changed. There was an uplifting run to the Europa League final, featuring stirring victories over Manchester United, Dortmund and Villarreal, even if defeat by Sevilla in the final (having also lost on penalties to Manchester City in the League final) was deflating. There were some long faces at their post-match party in Basel but Klopp called the players into a huddle on the dancefloor and told them there would be more finals in future. With that, he started chanting, “We are Liverpool” — and the players, naturally, joined in.

A little over two years later, Liverpool were preparing for another final: the Champions League final against Real Madrid in Kiev. Their trajectory over those two seasons had been steep — a story of top-class recruitment by the once-maligned transfer committee, which delivered, among others, Georginio Wijnaldum, Sadio Mane, Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, and inspired management which has fostered a powerful team spirit and taken so many of their players to levels far beyond previous expectations.

Even so, that run to the Champions League final had come as a surprise to many. For the first half of that 2017-18 campaign, the defence leaked goals at a terrifying rate. A case in point came in the group stage away to Sevilla, where they charged into a 3-0 lead and then crumbled to a 3-3 draw. They lacked resilience, an ability to ride out the tougher periods into games. Then, halfway through that season, Van Dijk arrived from Southampton and suddenly, Liverpool could overwhelm opponents — notably in those breathless victories over Manchester City and AS Roma at Anfield in the Champions League knockout stages — without the constant fear of a defensive collapse.

They fell short in Kiev, beaten 3-1, but they were entitled to wonder whether things might have gone differently if Salah had not been injured early on and if they had a more reliable goalkeeper than Loris Karius, who was severely at fault for two of Real’s goals. Much like Benitez in Istanbul 13 years earlier, Klopp and the transfer committee had already identified the need for further upgrades whatever the result. Naby Keita was already on his way from RB Leipzig, Fabinho’s £40 million from Monaco was confirmed within 48 hours of the final, Xherdan Shaqiri joined from Stoke City and, most significantly at all, Alisson arrived from Roma, the commanding goalkeeping presence Liverpool had needed for years.

It was by far the most expensive transfer outlay in Liverpool’s history. Many thought they had overspent on Alisson in particular, but, like Van Dijk, he brought stability and composure. At last, Liverpool had a team and a squad that might be capable of challenging for the Premier League title, if only they could find a way past Pep Guardiola’s record-breaking Manchester City side.

In 2018-19, Liverpool posted the third-highest points tally of the Premier League era: 30 wins, seven draws and just one defeat. Unlike in 2013-14 they carried that momentum right to the end of the campaign. The mental fragility that undermined previous title challenges was nowhere to be seen. Their fraught, rousing victories at Southampton and Newcastle were celebrated with a fervour that underlined the belief that this was their time, their klix.

The problem was that Manchester City kept winning too. On the final day of the season, as Liverpool strolled to victory over Wolves, they needed Guardiola’s team to stumble at Brighton and Hove Albion. They did — briefly falling 1-0 down. For 21 minutes of that final day, Liverpool, 1-0 up at Anfield, were on course. There were frenzied scenes in the stands. Was the long wait nearly over?

No, Manchester City fought back to win 4-1 at Brighton and clinch their second consecutive title. Liverpool, having given everything, had fallen agonisingly short again. How short? For a sense of just how short, perhaps consider that their only defeat in that campaign came away to Manchester City, a pulsating, high-class encounter in which Mane seemed to have put Liverpool 1-0 up in the 18th minute, only for John Stones to clear the ball when, according to the Hawk-Eye system, it was just 11.7 millimetres from having crossed the line.

A consolation — the biggest consolation imaginable — beckoned in another Champions League final after an incredible semi-final comeback against Lionel Messi’s Barcelona. This time, against Tottenham in Madrid, they were firm favourites. But that created more pressure. For all their irrefutable progress in three and a half years under Klopp, they still hadn’t won a trophy.

“We didn’t allow ourselves to think like this at the time but sitting down and looking back now, I can say there was a huge amount of pressure on us to win that final. Huge,” Milner said later. “What would it have done to the team, to the confidence, to the manager and to all of us as individuals if we had got to another final and not won it? It was my fourth final at Liverpool and we had lost the first three, so that brings an additional pressure. We were relaxed and confident beforehand but there was a hell of a lot riding on that final.”

They beat Tottenham 2-0 in Madrid and, if the game itself was anticlimax until Origi’s late clincher, the celebrations were not. They had reached the pinnacle of European football once more and, from there, unlike 14 years earlier, there was a visible pathway to the summit of English football and to the prize that had become the club’s Holy Grail. “This is just the start,” Salah said. “Next season, we will go for the Premier League.”

And how. They have gone for it with a relentless ferocity that has blown the rest of the Premier League out of the water, Manchester City included. They won their first eight games, drew the ninth away to Manchester United, and won the next 18. Time and again they found a way to win matches that were threatening to slip away from them. Sometimes the difference came from a Trent Alexander-Arnold cross or a Firmino flick or a Salah dribble or a piece of brilliance from Mane but above all, Klopp’s team have to come to be defined by the winning mentality that proved elusive for so long. If it is embodied by anyone, it is Henderson, whose Liverpool’s career, like the club’s decade, was such a slow burner.

And then, there is Klopp, of course. For years, under some very good managers, Liverpool were defined by a culture of boom and bust, struggling to overcome disappointment. They went too easily from doubters to believers. Under Klopp, they have gone from strength to strength to strength. Those near-misses have made them stronger, not weaker. In the 1990s, their rivals looked fitter, leaner, hungrier, more professional. Not now. Their recruitment from recent seasons has been exceptional but it is under Klopp that players such as Robertson, Wijnaldum, Salah, Mane and even the few top-of-the-market signings, such as Alisson and Van Dijk, have scaled new heights.

On a blustery Sunday in January, with his team 1-0 up against Manchester United, Alisson released Salah deep in stoppage time. The man from Nagrig raced clear before stroking the ball past David de Gea to confirm yet another victory. That was the moment when soaring optimism was replaced by certainty. All season long, Liverpool’s supporters had resisted the urge to tempt fate, mindful of the anguish they felt after expectations were soared in 2009, 2014 and 2019, but Salah’s goal and euphoric shirt-twirling celebration put an end to all that. All around the ground, the words were chanted with defiance: “Now you’re gonna believe us, we’re gonna win the league.”

They were finally beaten at Watford on the last day of February but by the time they defeated Bournemouth on March 7, they were 25 points clear of Manchester City, having taken 82 points from a possible 87. With nine games remaining, they had already racked up more wins than Arsenal’s Invincibles did in 2003-04. Not only were Liverpool going to end their 30-year wait. They were going to do it in unprecedented, record-breaking style, perhaps even clinching the deal before the end of March.

And then? We all know what happened next. The coronavirus pandemic brought football and much of the world to a standstill. There was talk of voiding the season. Could they still, after all this, be thwarted, destined to be stuck on 18 league titles for eternity? Might Grobbelaar, their eccentric title-winning goalkeeper back in 1990, have been telling the truth when he claimed a witch-doctor had put a curse on Anfield at the Zimbabwean’s testimonial match in 1992?

“I became worried when people started talking about null and void,” Klopp said last week. “It was like, ‘Wow… .’ I really felt it physically. That would have been really, really, really hard.”

On Saturday, May 9, the day when Henderson would have performed his now-familiar shuffle before hoisting the trophy towards the skies above a packed Anfield, the city was eerily quiet.

The season has now resumed, of course, meaning that the nightmare scenario of an abandonment has been averted, as has the unappealing prospect of that long-elusive title being won on a points-per-game calculation and announced in a Premier League press release. Rightly, it will be won on the pitch, but the triumph will not now be accompanied by the kind of dewy-eyed occasion — a packed stadium, emotional scenes, with legends like Dalglish, Hansen, Rush, Barnes and Gerrard looking down gleefully from the directors’ box — that had long been dreamed of. Those fans, many of them having been there throughout that 30-year odyssey, wondering if they would ever see it happen again, must watch from afar.

“Obviously, it’s a shame but you can’t really use words like ‘disappointed’ when the world is in this situation,” Carragher says. “To be honest, as Liverpool supporters, we’ve probably all worried at some point over the past few months that the season was going to be cancelled. No, it’s not ideal, but Liverpool fans will find a way to celebrate. You can be sure of that.”

That includes Murphy, who was a 13-year-old fan sitting in the Anfield Road end with his dad when Barnes stroked that title-winning penalty past David Seaman 30 years ago. “We were spoilt in those days,” the former Liverpool midfielder says. “It just felt normal then. We were used to winning the league. It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, amazing’. I would never have imagined it would take 30 years before it happened again.”

“Thirty years,” Nicol says from his home in Connecticut, letting out a sigh. “It would never have crossed my mind in 1990. There were times after that when I thought, ‘OK, we’re not in the best shape here. This is going to take a little bit longer than I thought’ but before you knew it, it was five years, 10 years, 20 years’. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets. Oh God, it’s been torture, but we’re very nearly there now. Finally.”