Why May 25 Will Always Be A Holy Day For Liverpool Fans

TWO OF THE greatest days in the history of Liverpool Football Club occurred on May 25. The first was in 1977, when Bob Paisley’s team brought the European Cup back to Anfield for the first time.

The second was in 2005, when Rafa Benitez’s side made the club champions of Europe for the fifth time by winning the rebranded Champions League. These two epic moments bookended a period when European finals were very different from those of today. When Arsenal play Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest on Saturday, the stadium will be jam-packed. The Killers will perform in the Puskas Arena before the match and corporate guests will feast in the hospitality suites. All while many loyal supporters watch in bars around the Hungarian capital.

It has become commonplace to see thousands of fans travel to finals merely to soak up the atmosphere in a foreign city before watching the game on television. Madrid in 2019 was awash with Liverpool supporters who enjoyed the day without entertaining a hope of getting into the ground.

Back in 1977, things were very different. Before the age of the easyjet ultra, mass travel was expensive and sometimes uncomfortable. For many of the Liverpool supporters who made the journey to see their team play Borussia Mönchengladbach on the day Star Wars was released, Rome felt like it was in a galaxy far, far away.

I’ve written about how football defined my relationship with my father – and not in a positive way – but it also affected my relationship with my mother. As soon as Liverpool sealed their place in the final, the planning of the journey to Italy began in our house. And it was established early on that I wasn’t going.

The game fell in the middle of the exam season. At 16, I was about to take O Levels. The day after the match, I was scheduled to sit a Commerce paper.

For that reason, I was ruled out of the trip.

I wonder in retrospect whether that was the real problem. The train cost £84 – game ticket included – and a family friend paid for my younger brother to go. Today, that would be the equivalent of shelling out more than £500 per person. That’s before food and drink costs. But being a selfish and resentful teenager, I didn’t consider money might have been a factor.

So I watched on television at home, delighted the team won 3-1 but remained tearfully angry for, well, years because I’d missed the experience in Rome.

And what an experience. The special trains – ancient and uncomfortable rolling stock – left Lime Street on Monday morning. By the time they reached Dover, the toilets were blocked up and running water had, er, run out.

On the Continent, the supporters were piled on to similar, decrepit trains which finally arrived in Rome on Wednesday, mere hours before kick off. They barely spent half a day in the Eternal City before beginning the arduous journey home.

The last train returned home at 2am on Saturday morning. It had broken down for 12 hours in Switzerland. Waiting for my mother and brother, I wondered whether they’d think the effort was worth it; whether the four days of discomfort on the railroad had broken their spirit and they and their fellow passengers regretted ever boarding the train on Monday.

Nope.

They bounced onto the platform singing and smiling, stained and smelly but triumphant. That was, everyone agreed, the greatest week of their lives. Nothing could ever top it.

I hated every one of the bastards.

So how would a mother handle this situation? Surely they’d be sympathetic? Maybe be gentle on the feelings of her eldest child?

Nope again. She loved rubbing it in that she was there and I wasn’t. By the millennium, she still delighted in telling people that she’d been to more European Cup finals than me – six, including Heysel. I’d only been to five.

Estimates of how many Liverpool supporters went to Rome vary between 25,000 and 30,000. There were vast stretches of empty terraces and seats in the Stadio Olimpico. No one had to watch the match in a bar. Everyone who went was able to get a ticket for the game.

When Liverpool beat Chelsea 1-0 to qualify for the Champions League final in 2005, the sports editor at The Times remembered my story about missing 1977 and the family’s adventures on the special. He suggested I take the train to Istanbul. It was the journey of a lifetime.

My mother desperately wanted to go but we were in a different age. The media bombarded fans with warnings not to travel without a ticket. I didn’t have one either but was confident there would be a few knocking around. Mum made the fateful decision not to travel. Afterwards, it was my turn to rub it in – she’d broken her run and missed the most epic of European finals.

Yet something else was happening beyond our little family drama. The sport was at a tipping point. Istanbul would be the last final where almost every Liverpool fan who made their way to the host city attended the game. The impact of the 3-3 draw with Milan and the drama of the penalties elevated the status of finals in the corporate world as well as the football world. Change was in the air.

We were given a harbinger of the future when Celtic played Porto in Seville in 2003. Scots and Irish supporters arrived in Andalusia in unprecedented numbers, many in the knowledge that getting a ticket was an impossibility. The ‘event’ was growing much bigger than the 90 minutes inside the ground.

Only a privileged few will be present in the Puskas Arena on Saturday but many thousands more will be in Budapest to enjoy a wider party.

Istanbul was the last flicker of the ‘people’s game’ in European competition. By the time the rematch came round two years later in Greece, everything had changed. Athens was Istanbul’s evil twin.

The number of Liverpool fans in the Greek capital was mindboggling. The experienced European travellers were outnumbered by supporters going on their first Continental trip, some of whom had never seen the team in person before. The urge to get into the Olympic Stadium among ticketless fans turned into a furious assault on the perimeter. Tear gas was fired by the police and angry exchanges ensued. The stands were dangerously overcrowded. The massive party turned ugly.

Interestingly, too, for the clubs, the corporatisation of the game turned a corner in Athens. Before Istanbul, Liverpool and Milan were offered first choice of the hotels that had been block booked by Uefa. In Greece, the main corporate sponsors were given the chance to select their accommodation before the finalists. Uefa, of course, kept the very best hotels for themselves in Athens.

Things have changed so much that it is an accepted part of a big European final that supporters go to these events without any expectation of seeing the game in person. It is not something I’d be keen to do but so many people enjoy it.

In Madrid seven years ago, though, I felt a huge amount of sadness heading to the stadium while many of my mates went to find a bar. I can’t imagine we’ll all get into the ground for a final ever again and the last time we did was Istanbul.

Still, May 25 will always be a holy day of obligation for Liverpool fans. And it was the day I got my own back on my mother.

Did I gloat? A little, maybe. But mainly I was sad she missed such an epic occasion. I guess she felt the same way deep down about me and 1977.

Or maybe not, knowing her.