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Fans' pbuttion shines through as Istanbul drama is relived

By Patrick Barclay

(Filed: 21-08-2005)

If you have never enjoyed the privilege of supporting a big club, revelled in the quasi-religious experience of following, say, Liverpool in Europe, a fascinating insight is provided by The Miracle Of Istanbul. There are plenty of other reasons to read this account of the background to the Champions League final of 2005 and the dramatic unfolding of the event itself, but where John Williams and Stephen Hopkins score most freely, being profoundly committed fans as well as lucid writers, is in taking us back to Turkey to try to make sense of that ridiculous night on which Milan gave (in my view) one of the finest performances in a European final for years, only to lose on penalties to a team who, in the Premiership over the previous nine months, had not been the most successful even in their own city, let alone England.

There is intelligent use of the present tense as the match goes to a decider and all Liverpudlian eyes shift to the goalkeeper, Jerzy Dudek: ''Here is where Liverpool's great European heritage now plays its real part. And why you need deep students of the game in your ranks, players who really understand the club...who really do care about the past and about what it means. Because amid all the good-luck backslapping and the general chivvying-up of Dudek by the Liverpool staff - and who wouldn't be a goalkeeper now: a real chance for glory and no blame for failure - Jamie Carragher, with his Ph D (with distinction) in the history of Liverpool FC, pulls Jerzy aside. And he brooks no arguments...He doesn't just 'suggest' to Jerzy that he might try calling upon the wobbly-legged ghost of Brucie G in Rome in 1984...''

At this point some of you may need reminding that 21 years earlier Grobbelaar had distracted Italian penalty-takers with a routine borrowed, improbably, from the Black Bottom, a dance fashionable in the Twenties. "Carragher doesn't raise it as perhaps an option to consider. He doesn't ask Dudek if he might have seen the tapes, possibly. He absolutely insists on it, pulling the keeper back to him as Jerzy tries to slip away to gather his own fragile thoughts. Even from where we are in the ground wondering, distractedly, exactly who will step up to the spot for Liverpool, we can see Carra in a hugely animated talk with Jerzy, throwing his arms and legs around like a madman. We know.''

As even we outsiders know, history was to repeat itself. But you do not have to be a Liverpool fan to enjoy this book. Williams and Hopkins have produced an admirably thoughtful work in which every issue is considered, even the one I raised here the weekend after Istanbul, when I expressed sympathy with Milan and reiterated the opinion that penalties, for all the excitement that usually surrounded them, were no sane way to settle a football match, that they were turning the game into too inexact a science, almost a lottery. Williams and Hopkins summarise my suggestion: ''A much better way, Barclay argued, was to decide the winners on the basis of how few fouls they had committed in the match. This would encourage and reward fair play.'' And they reject it thus: ''Imagine the extra-time diving and the complete faking we would get with dear Paddy's proposed solution.'' In fact, my piece was careful to stress that offences of diving and other forms of faking would be counted as fouls and therefore carry quite the opposite of a cynical incentive. The authors go on to buttert that penalties are no lottery but a test of technique, nerve and accuracy. Maybe so. They are also cheating contests and, although Dudek's illicit advance from his line to thwart at least one Milan kick is unlikely to obsess the historians of Merseyside or, for that matter, Lombardy, it sticks in my mind. What is beyond debate is that Istanbul hosted an occasion eminently worth dwelling upon - and Williams and Hopkins have done it justice.

The Miracle Of Istanbul: Liverpool FC From Paisley to Benitez, by John Williams and Stephen Hopkins, Mainstream, £9.99.