The night Anfield spoke volumes

Sideline Cut: Had Eidur Gudjohnsen scored with that breath-stealing opportunity 95 minutes into the drama at Anfield on Wednesday night, how different the English football landscape would look this weekend. The Icelandic player had English soccer history poised before him in that brief second.

Along with the Sunday newspapers being brimful of photographs of a chastened Tony Blair accepting a third term in office would come paeans of admiration for Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho. Gudjohnsen would probably nail that chance 90 times out of 100 and with Mourinho at least managing to preserve an affectation of coolness as the minutes drained away, the goal would have gone down in folklore as just another chapter in the audacious master plan.

The intimations of invincibility Mourinho instilled into his team would have wired an even stronger fusion for the Champions League final against AC Milan, who have loudly been complaining of fatigue this week. The high of Chelsea's historic Premiership success would have carried them along to the exotic unknown of Istanbul. Had Chelsea completed the domestic and continental sweep in Mourinho's first season, and set about reinforcing their squad with the untold Russian money at the club's disposal, more than the English squads would have quaked at the thought of the years ahead.

And the effect up in Liverpool would have been calamitous. As if there were not sufficient atmosphere around the city on Wednesday night, one of those classic Merseyside mists, according to a friend, lay about the riverfront and Victorian streets for the duration of the evening. And between seven and 10 o'clock, the city centre was bereft of souls, the way cities and towns in this country used to be in our first flush of soccer innocence.

A few months ago, this column had the pleasure of wandering around the beaten-up streets of Anfield for a feature on Liverpool FC's last vestiges of grandeur. A week or so after the article appeared in this newspaper, someone posted a clipping back bearing the inscription: "This Is Maudlin, Irrelevant S***e. Get A Life." The sender unfortunately declined to send a name and address. And the first presumption was that it was just one of those kindly notes of encouragement passed on by the editor or other work colleagues every now and then. But there was no way any of them would have splashed out on the stamp. It was definitely someone who, as PG Wodehouse put it, "if not exactly disgruntled was very far from being gruntled".

Maudlin, certainly, and s***e, quite possibly, but not irrelevant. Like all drinking, sporting towns, Liverpool is a fond old lush with a messy affection for the past. Without lionising the achievements of local inhabitants, from Gladstone to Bill Shankly to John Lennon, the place is acutely conscious of its former status and prides itself on being somewhere quite separate from the rest of the mainland in spirit, culture and humour.

Those forces were at work at Anfield on Wednesday night when the Premiership champions ran from the dressingroom into a wall of sound that surrounded them for the next two hours in a primal exhibition of pure will. The thing about old grounds like Anfield (and Clones during July derbies, or Thurles when the viscounts meet, or the still-mourned old Boston Garden) is that the people in the stands truly believe they can will a result into being. All the chants and songs and jeers - the collective noise is primeval, like the warding off of spirits or bad omens. It is about empowerment and belonging, a sense of sharing and vicariously participating in what is happening on the field. Too often, modern sports organisations do not trust their followers to rouse their own emotions as past generations did and so they try to transform their grounds into daytime disco parks and employ a guy to drum up the crowd like a ringmaster appealing to children at the circus. And the response is often forced and phoney.

At places like Liverpool, where the only real concession is to wheel out a recording of the Gerry and the Pacemakers classic, there was never a need for that. And because of that, the noisy ardour and the adrenaline that seemed to filter out through television screens felt at once like something fresh and also something long forgotten.

It was the opposite to everything Sky television brought to football, needing no action replays or flashy sound devices or the urgent intonations of Andy Gray (Anfield is one of the few grounds left in England where the Sky commentators have to scale an old-fashioned ladder in order to get to their commentary box high in the gantry).

So for many of the generation that were still children in the years before the Heysel disaster, the sights and sounds generated by that Liverpool victory were like a portal back to a period when a red, fake-leather, Liverpool satchel could be counted at every second school desk.

And it did not matter the style of the victory was nothing as imperious or majestic as the previous occasions when Liverpool strode to the summit of European football as if it were a birthright. The important - and astonishing - thing was that the old-fashioned combination of sentimentality and energy could still sound so true. It must have made a lot of people pine for the time before soccer was transformed into a pub-culture product, an omnipresent accompaniment like salted nuts in a bowl, featuring games that rarely seemed to be of any great consequence.

Had Gudjohnsen turned his body to square up to the goal, had he struck with his left instead of shooting on instinct with his right across the face of the goal, he would almost certainly have scored from that close range. And, instantaneously, we would have heard a pin drop in Anfield.

The nature of the goal and the timing of it would not just have broken the collective voice of the home supporters, it would also have make a mockery of them all. It would have been a final and irrefutable proof that the strongest and richest must always win, that progress is remorseless and that the fantasy in soccer died along with the Roy of the Rovers comic. Whatever it is that makes Anfield more charming and noisy than, and therefore different from, most other soccer grounds would have perished there and then.

But Gudjohnsen missed, and 60 seconds later bedlam reigned. It was a night the ex-professionals struggled to rationalise in the air-conditioned studios because every so often sport defies analysis and what should logically happen, and instead obeys some weird and gripping tangential impulse of its own. As big-time sport becomes more smoothly managed and choreographed and generic, those off-kilter, nerve-racking ghosts in the machinery find it harder and harder to escape and come alive.

Anfield was one such instance, though, and whatever happens in Istanbul will do well to match it.