Liverpool’s captain has sparked a late-season Anfield revival and now the midfielder has Wednesday’s visitors running scared

John Terry is not normally scared of anything, with the possible exception of his mother making any more shopping trips, so it is a mark of his respect for Steven Gerrard and Liverpool when he acknowledges that Wednesday’s Champions League visit to Anfield is a daunting prospect.

“Gerrard is definitely one of the best players in the world, that’s for sure, and he’s in great form at the minute,” the Chelsea and England captain said. “To be honest I’m dreading going there to play him because he is different class. Liverpool have got a great backbone with [José] Reina, [Jamie] Carragher, Stevie G and [Fernando] Torres. What a spine that is, but Stevie is the heartbeat of the team, similar to the way Frank Lampard is with Chelsea. It’s going to be a big clash but we’re thoroughly looking forward to it.”

This is a fixture becoming as much of a Champions League tradition as the familiarly naff theme music or Sir Alex Ferguson moaning about the way the following weekend’s games never do Manchester United any favours, yet it is a meeting between fierce rivals that has altered subtly in the past season or two. More people are looking forward to it now, there is less talk of anti-football or malodorous matter on the end of a stick. Chelsea’s renewed confidence under Guus Hiddink has something to do with that but Terry is right to suggest the Liverpool revival, with Gerrard at its heart, has been the one that has made everyone re-evaluate their assumptions about where the season’s prizes will end up.

Liverpool have stopped grinding out results and started being both entertaining and devastatingly effective, scoring four goals to blow away Real Madrid and Manchester United and coming off the field after a 5-0 victory over Aston Villa to find their manager disappointed they had not scored more. Gerrard has emerged from nowhere to take over the running as player of the year and is increasingly being mentioned in high places as the world’s best footballer. Zinedine Zidane is one person who thinks so, even if Rafa Benítez, as he congratulated himself on following his own contract extension with one tying his captain to the club for the foreseeable future, was more circumspect. Just because Liverpool are playing with new abandon does not mean Benítez is about to throw caution to the wind.

“He is one of the best players in the world, that’s all you can say,” the Liverpool manager argued. “There are different teams and different positions and you should never say one man is the best, but Stevie is happy at the moment because the team is balanced and he is playing in a position he enjoys, and I am happy because we wanted to be sure we could keep him as captain for a long time. I think we might have found his most effective position, but that’s not to say he will always play there. Because he’s such a good player we can use him somewhere else if we ever need to.”

Benítez would say that, wouldn’t he? When you find the Chelsea manager singing from almost exactly the same hymn sheet, though, you begin to realise that Gerrard is not just a Liverpool phenomenon but a player of global renown. In his capacity as coach of Russia Hiddink was asked to evaluate players he had encountered in the European Championship and he put Gerrard at the top of the list, despite England’s non-qualification. “I’m not saying Cristiano Ronaldo is not good, he has his efficiency and his style of play which is very attractive, but I had to make a choice at that moment and chose Gerrard,” the part-time Chelsea manager said. “Gerrard is a team player and on top of that he is very determined and decisive. It’s not just him though. Liverpool now have a very balanced team and Gerrard has some skilful players around him. Gerrard is one of a few players – I could name John Terry and Frank Lampard too – who are becoming legends while they are still playing. Most only become legends when they stop but those three are terrific examples for English football.”

At this rate the only thing that will prevent Gerrard scooping all the individual awards, enlarging his medal collection and stopping more traffic than President Obama might be praise going to his head and causing him to overbalance. That might be why the Liverpool captain has already evolved his own coping strategy. He simply diverts most of the credit towards Torres.

A few seasons ago, when Gerrard wondered whether Liverpool were the club to fulfil his ambitions, the midfielder frequently said he wanted to be playing along side other world-class footballers. His wish would appear to have been granted. “The key to our team, and the reason why we have suddenly come back to form again, is the fitness of Fernando Torres,” he said. “He gives a big lift to everyone in the team. He runs in behind and stretches opponents and you can see the confidence rise in other players in the side when he’s fit. If we can keep him right to the end of the season it’s going to be an exciting finish. We’ve got nothing to lose. Manchester United are the favourites in both competitions but we believe we can win something. We’ve got to believe that after our recent results.”

Gerrard is honest enough to confess he was surprised at how quickly Liverpool came back into contention in the title race. “We were surprised at United losing two games on the spin,” he said with a suggestion of false modesty, given that Liverpool were responsible for the first and United were clearly still traumatised when they travelled to Fulham.

“You don’t expect that, with the quality they’ve got and the unbeaten run they were on. But we’ve got a final chance now and we all want to take it. Confidence is very high at the club and it’s important to keep that momentum going, especially as it has come at just the right time for the Champions League. Chelsea know that they are in for two tough games, but so do Liverpool. They are two very strong teams and the games tend to be decided by very small details. It seems for us to win a cup we always have to knock Chelsea out, but we can do that if we perform to our maximum levels.

“I wasn’t exactly disappointed to draw Chelsea again. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t hoping to get someone else but you get what you’re given. To win this tournament you have to knock the best teams out, and Chelsea count as one of those. When we won it we had to knock top teams out on the way, that’s the nature of the competition. We feel we have made progress this season, and in the league especially it has been a long time coming. There have been seasons when we have been miles behind Chelsea and United, and that’s not good enough for Liverpool. Now we are here, it is important to keep up the pressure until the end.”

Liverpool were undone in the first leg last season by a late own-goal that made their task at Stamford Bridge more difficult and had the effect of deflating the players. “We were much the better team but conceding so late cost us,” Benítez said. “Clearly we will be trying not to concede this time, but it is just as important to be offensive in the first leg. That is how we have been winning our recent games.” He can say that again. Torres and Gerrard may have taken a while to gel this season, but at their best they are close to unplayable. Terry and the Chelsea defence have been watching: they know exactly what is coming their way.

The irony of Ramón Calderón’s presidency will be complete if Cristiano Ronaldo signs for Real Madrid

And so Ramón Calderón finally gets his man. What a shame he is no longer president of Real Madrid. In all probability it will now be his nemesis, Florentino Pérez, plotting a return in June’s presidential elections, who enjoys the fruits of his labour. If, that is, Sir Alex Ferguson agrees to the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo. The supreme irony of Calderón’s presidency is confirmed once more; the man for whom he felt most fear and loathing is the man he has most served.

Calderón’s 2½-year spell at the Bernabéu has been packed with comedy moments, from his detention in New York after officials at JFK mistook him for a Mexican bandit called Ramos Calderón to the night he invited Nicolas Cage to meet the players only to discover it wasn’t Nicolas Cage at all. And like all great comedy, so much of it is about timing. The former president may not see the funny side, but others are giggling up their sleeves.

Calderón was forced out in January after allegations he had rigged the members’ assembly. The sting was masterfully handled by the newspaper Marca, fresh evidence emerging each day, Calderón’s next move always brilliantly anticipated. Sacrificial heads rolled but it was not enough to rescue the president. “Only cowards and the guilty resign,” Calderón announced. Less than 24 hours later, he resigned.

The sting pushed him over the edge but he had stood at the precipice from the start. With postal votes suspended because of suspicions of fraud, Calderón won the 2006 election with only 10,000 votes in an electorate of over 80,000. He won them on the back of promising to sign Cesc Fábregas, Kaka and Arjen Robben. The promise, like so many he made, was broken. Only Robben arrived – and he pitched up a year late.

By then, Calderón was publicly chasing Ronaldo. It could hardly have been less dignified if he had done so in fast-forward to the theme from Benny Hill. Two summers passed. At the end of the first, Ronaldo signed an Old Trafford contract extension; at the end of the second, Ferguson blocked his exit. Out-manoeuvred, Calderón’s failure made him look like a liar or just plain incompetent. Or both.

Calderón never got the credibility and gravitas he craved. The signing of Ronaldo would have provided it but it is too late now. Just as Pérez, the architect of the galácticos project, was defined by the players he signed, so Calderón became defined by the players he did not. “My tombstone will read: here lies the man who did not sign Kaka,” he said. When Klaas-Jan Huntelaar was unveiled in January, fans chanted: “Where is Ronaldo?” Already signed and sealed, it now seems. But by the time he arrives, if he does, Calderón will be long gone. Even if he stands this summer, as he has threatened to do, he will not win.

When he was forced to resign Calderón demonstrated the paranoia that gripped him from the start by declaring it “a victory for evilness”. The “evil” in question was Pérez, the man who, despite his discreet silence, supporters are now begging to return, the disastrous end to his reign forgotten.

Pérez won nothing in three years and deserted a sinking ship but he has been accidentally rehabilitated by the man who followed him – the president who did not deliver Kaka, Faábregas or Ronaldo. At least not until it was too late for him. Calderón has handed him back the presidency on a plate. With great timing, he may well have handed him his first galáctico too.

Twenty years ago, Arsenal travelled to Liverpool - six weeks after Hillsborough - for a title decider that few thought they could win. Ninety impossibly dramatic minutes later, they had repaired the reputation of football

The 1988-89 season was the Football League’s centenary, but there was little to celebrate. The Hillsborough disaster, when 96 people were crushed to death on the stadium’s terraces during the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989, was the final act in a decade of misfortune for the English game. It was the last in a chain of calamities and woes that included Heysel, where 39 Juventus fans died and many hundreds more were injured during the Italian club’s 1985 European Cup final against Liverpool, and the Bradford fire, also in 1985, when a blaze that started during a third division match between Bradford City and Lincoln City devastated the home side’s 77-year-old wooden main stand and killed 56 people.

I was on the terraces on the afternoon of 15 April, on the North Bank at Highbury, and on the morning after Hillsborough, after I’d read the newspaper reports, studied the front-page photographs of those crushed against the fences - the sad, sickening, bloated faces of the dying - and watched and listened to the various news reports on TV and radio, I felt the need to speak to my father, who had introduced me to football many years before and who, in recent times, had inspired my reconnection with the game. The trouble was that I didn’t know how to reach him in Hong Kong, where he was on business. In the event, he called me; it was evening in Hong Kong and he wanted to know the mood in England. He and my mother had been at a dinner party in Kowloon, he said; the game had been on in another room. During the party, someone had gone to check the score, and there it was: the tragedy of Hillsborough unfolding on screen. Everyone left the table and gathered around the television. They watched the injured and dying being carried away on the advertising hoardings that were being used as emergency stretchers; watched people trying to scale the security fences to reach the safety of the pitch only to be beaten back by police who didn’t fully understand what was happening; watched the stunned, aghast faces of those people trapped behind the fences.

“How can the season continue after this?” I asked. “It obviously can’t,” my father said. “It’s over.”

“What?” I said, unsure if I’d heard him properly, since there was the inevitable, irritating delay on the line.

“It’s over,” he said again.

“What happened up there,” he continued, “could’ve happened to any of us, anywhere, at any time. The whole infrastructure of the game is corrupt.”

Then he said: “I’m finished with football.”

It was announced the next day that the season would be suspended to allow for a period of mourning and for the government and other authorities to prepare their appalled and urgent responses.

Six weeks later

At around nine o’clock on the morning of Friday 26 May 1989, the Arsenal players began gathering at their London Colney training ground, just off junction 22 of the M25 in the monotonous flatlands of this part of Hertfordshire. Arsenal had, nine days earlier, drawn at home to Wimbledon, a failure that was widely accepted to have led to their relinquishing a chance to win a title that not long before had seemed theirs to win as and when they chose. Since then, the Arsenal players had spent their time in an antechamber of uncertainty. For every club other than Arsenal and Liverpool, the season was over. The FA Cup final had been and gone, won the previous Saturday by Liverpool. Yet there was still one more game to play. Arsenal’s visit to Anfield was originally scheduled for Sunday 23 April but, after Hillsborough and the suspension of the season, was rescheduled most unusually for the evening of 26 May, which that year fell on a Friday. Arsenal were going into the last game three points behind Liverpool and with an inferior goal difference, having been top of the table for most of the second half of the season and overhauled by a resurgent Liverpool only at the last. To be champions, they had to win at Anfield by two goals against a team unbeaten since 2 January.

The Arsenal coach set off from London Colney just before 10am. The players, as they settled down in their usual groupings, observed how many more unfamiliar faces there were on the coach. It was as if as many of those connected to the club as possible had negotiated a ride north: fringe and injured players, boardroomers and their guests, backroom bureaucrats. “The coach was packed with players, directors and vice-presidents,” said Perry Groves, who was manager George Graham’s first signing in 1986 and one of two substitutes that night at Anfield. “We were all pretty jovial. It was almost like a day out, as no one was expecting us to win. There were plenty of cars with Arsenal scarves as we drove up the motorway and lots of the fans gave us the thumbs-up.”

The feeling among the players was that they had lost the title. At the turn of the year, Arsenal’s lead over Liverpool had been 15 points. Since then they’d faltered just as Liverpool began to improve, strengthened by the return of their goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who had missed much of the season because of illness. Since 2 January Liverpool had won 21 of their 24 games, scoring 60 and conceding 15. Arsenal had won just 10 of their previous 20 games, with four defeats. There was now a frenetic, jittery quality to their play, as long balls were hit more in hope than expectation and the defence became brittle.

Once settled at their hotel, the Atlantic Tower, the Arsenal players had lunch before being instructed to return to their rooms to rest. “I was sharing a room with David O’Leary,” Alan Smith, Arsenal’s central striker, told me. “We drew the curtains and had a good few hours’ sleep. I didn’t always sleep well on match day, but we both woke up that afternoon and said we’d slept well. It was the same when we went down to meet the others. Everyone said they’d slept well.” George Graham, Arsenal’s authoritarian manager, received his players at the five o’clock team meeting dressed in club blazer, white shirt, and a red and white tie. The players were served tea with toast and honey, and then Graham asked the waiters to clear the tables and close the door.

Graham confirmed what the team would be and that they would play with five at the back, with O’Leary as sweeper. This was his great gamble - to bolster the defence in a game he needed to win by two goals! Using a flip chart as an aid, he discussed tactics and explained who would be marking whom at set plays. He then told the players exactly what he expected of them: that they should “keep it tight”, frustrate Liverpool so as to subdue the crowd, and that, above all, they shouldn’t concede a goal. They shouldn’t worry or panic if the score was still 0-0 at half-time, he said. In the second half they should “open up a bit”, and seek to score an early goal. The greater pressure would then be on Liverpool: they had the title to lose; they would “fall apart under the pressure”.

Nobody expected Arsenal to win.

Arsenal emerge up the steps from the narrow tunnel wearing their away kit of yellow shirts with navy-blue short sleeves, and tight blue shorts; it’s a wonder that they’re not blown back or frozen by the force of the high-decibel roar into which they run, by the tremendous, reverberating power of it. Each player wears a white memorial armband; white, rather than the more conventional black as worn by the Liverpool players, because black would not have shown up against their dark shirt sleeves. Liverpool wear their traditional all-red kit, and on this warm evening, so late in the season, so early in the summer, they too are in short-sleeves. The Arsenal players are holding bouquets of flowers. After lining up briefly inside the centre circle to wave to and applaud the crowd, they spin off in different directions, as if in choreographed formation, carrying the flowers to all parts of the ground, where they are then passed into the crowd. The home fans respond to this gesture with harmonious applause. The mood is one of tolerance and mutual respect; Hillsborough has cooled the fans’ hatreds without diminishing their ardour.

Liverpool and Arsenal, north and south: just for now, just before the game, there’s a sense of unity and reconciliation. “The flowers were a good idea,” says Theo Foley, Arsenal’s assistant manager and Graham’s confidant. “We walked out and were respectful - that was important.”

Liverpool are to kick off, attacking the Anfield Road End. Arsenal line up in a 5-4-1 formation: John Lukic; Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, David O’Leary, Steve Bould, Nigel Winterburn; David Rocastle, Kevin Richardson, Michael Thomas, Paul Merson; Alan Smith. Liverpool are 4-4-2: Bruce Grobbelaar; Steve Nicol, Alan Hansen, Gary Ablett, Steve Staunton; Ray Houghton, Ronnie Whelan, Steve McMahon, John Barnes; Ian Rush, John Aldridge.

In this last minute before the match begins, the players are in formation, with Barnes and Rocastle facing each other, separated only by the chalky thickness of the halfway line. They embrace and shake hands, these two black athletes who through their excellence and example have done so much to alter terrace attitudes to racial difference. The whistle blows; the match begins.

In this early phase of the game, Arsenal’s tackling has a premeditated ferocity. It’s easy now to forget how subtle changes in the laws, such as the banning of the tackle from behind or the preventing of goalkeepers from picking up back-passes, have since refined the game, quickened it, made it more fluid. Graham’s Arsenal were adept at using the tackle from behind not only to thwart but also to intimidate. Bould, who is lean with dark-brown receding hair swept back from a high forehead, is the master cruncher, eager to let both Rush and Aldridge know from the beginning that he’s insistently there, right behind them, always behind them. So the game is being interrupted by ankle-wounding tackles and free kicks; neither side is able to build momentum or establish a coherent pattern of play.

The first chance of the match falls to Arsenal, when, improbably, Bould arrives from deep to head a cross towards goal; the ball beats Grobbelaar, only to be headed up and over the bar by a retreating defender. Arsenal may be playing Graham’s version of the sweeper system, with three central defenders, but their game tonight has fluidity and no little surprise: the full-backs as well as Bould keep pushing up whenever they can, but never carelessly. Above all, you must be patient, Graham had said.

The game is opening up, with Merson now on a wounded rhino’s run down the left; there’s something gloriously uninhibited in the way he runs, in his uncomplicated method, the way he charges head-down, broad shoulders lowered, with a surging, loping stride, his long, layered, bleached, unkempt hair flowing raggedly behind.

Merson is still running and, with Thomas arriving late from midfield, he sends over a cross, but it’s headed out. Thomas’s long run from deep has been in vain but he will keep on trying to make these late runs, keep on going, as if each failure is motivation enough to try again, to try better, even if it means failing again, failing better.

A former captain of England schoolboys, Michael Thomas first came into the side as a teenager under Graham at right-back, but, because of his stamina and physique, his excellent technique and desire to attack, it was soon apparent that he would be best positioned in central midfield. When I first saw him play I called him “the Brazilian”: he looked like a new kind of English footballer to me, a full-back with the muscularity and power of a defender but with the skill and speed of a forward. For Graham, Thomas can be too inconsistent, too much of the would-be Brazilian: one game imposing, the next wasteful and inefficient. His team-mates speak of how “laid-back” he is, of how easy the game can seem to him. Does he care enough? Graham has asked. Does he want it enough?

The referee blows for half-time.

Around the country, those watching on TV begin to stir as the commercial breaks come on. ITV will report that there was a national television audience of eight million at the start of the match but many hundreds of thousands more will switch on in the second half. Regular live League football is a recent introduction to British television - the first live League game for more than 20 years was broadcast in October 1983. Before that, the Football League refused to allow games to be shown live because it was believed it would adversely affect attendances. Throughout the 70s and 80s, only highlights were permitted to be shown on ITV and the BBC.

Earlier in the day it has been reported that the launch of BSkyB, the Rupert Murdoch satellite channel that will soon change for ever the way football is sold, marketed and watched in the country, has been delayed by technical problems. Within a few years, however, Sky will have won an auction for exclusive rights to the new Premier League in a deal worth £304m to the clubs, and fans who want to watch live football on television will be paying subscription fees for what was, in the 80s, free to view. It would be this match at Anfield that would convince many in and around the game of the huge untapped revenue-generating potential of live football on television.

Meanwhile, down in the dressing rooms, Graham and Liverpool’s manager, Kenny Dalglish, are addressing their players for the last time before sending them out. Graham is telling his players that before the game he kept reading that

Arsenal’s trip to Anfield would be a wasted journey. “Does this feel like a wasted journey?” he asks. He is extraordinarily calm. He does not raise his voice; there’s no shouting. He simply wants to reassure the players that everything is going to plan. Everything’s going to plan, he keeps saying. We’ve kept a clean sheet. Just start to get forward more now, he says, be more positive on the ball. The pressure is on them, he says. The pressure is on them. “He wasn’t swearing or shouting, nothing like that,” says Alan Smith. “He just wanted to get his message across very calmly, to make some small adjustments to the game plan and to make sure we didn’t start to panic because we hadn’t scored. He sent us back out on to the pitch feeling enormously confident.”

Liverpool start the half by seeking to establish sustained passing movements and to dictate play. During the break, Dalglish has urged them to do so, has implored them to assert their own game. But, no matter what they try in these early phases of the half, their attacks continue to break up against the hard, high wall of Arsenal’s three-man central defence. The Kop are chanting, “Champions, Champions”.

Six minutes into the half the referee blows for a foul on Rocastle - high feet against Whelan. Rocastle senses an opportunity; his eyes are ablaze, he punches his right fist into an open left palm, his teeth are gritted. It’s an indirect free-kick, to be taken from the right-hand side of the penalty box, about 30 yards out.

There is a long pause before Winterburn, with his left foot, curls the ball in precisely towards the far side of the box. Adams breaks between Nicol and Staunton but stumbles and goes down in front of the keeper, around about the penalty spot. Just behind him, Smith has found space and he’s there, alone, with his marker distracted by Adams, about six yards out; with the lightest of touches he glances the ball into the far right-hand corner of the net, with Grobbelaar beaten before he has had the chance even to dive. The Arsenal fans, clustered at the Anfield Road End, just to the right-hand side of the goal, are celebrating; a few of them spill from the terraces on to the cinder track that separates the pitch from the crowd. Just a few, but there’s a moment of mayhem as a lone copper, wearing a traditional British bobby’s helmet, scrambles to round them up. So animated are his movements that it’s as if he, too, is celebrating the goal.

The Liverpool players have reacted to the goal with indignance and incredulity; they descend upon the referee, enclosing him in a ring of fire. The most vehement protester is the captain, Whelan, who conceded the free-kick. Close behind him are Nicol, Ablett, Houghton, McMahon, Aldridge, Barnes: a terrifying army of disgusts. The referee, Dave Hutchinson, hurries over to his linesman and rests a reassuring hand on his left shoulder, addressing him as a policeman might an errant youth: Now, tell me calmly exactly what happened. The linesman has wiry, thinning hair and a neat moustache; his faced is harrowed by anxiety.

“The only way to deal with it was not to threaten to book them but to say, ‘Right, I’ll go and talk with my linesman,’” Hutchinson says now. “I went over to my linesman and said: ‘A couple of quickies. Did I have my hand up for the indirect free-kick?’ He said yes. ‘Was there a touch by Smithy in the middle?’ He said: ‘In my view, yes.’ I said: ‘Was there any possibility of offside?’ He said no. I said: ‘Foul?’ He said no. So I said: ‘Then it’s a goal.’” Then it’s a goal. Whelan has heard this before his players, certainly before the crowd know what’s been decided, and his face carries the pallid look of disappointment as he turns away. 1-0 to Arsenal.

Liverpool are becoming distracted. In the dug-out just below pitch-level, Dalglish, sitting with coaches Roy Evans and Ronnie Moran, looks on, troubled, as Grobbelaar rages at Ablett, at his own man, after confusion between them results in the goalkeeper dropping the ball. With his receding hair cropped razor-short, his thick, dark moustache and tufts of chest hair, Grobbelaar has the look of an angry Soho leather-boy.

Liverpool must reassert their control, keep the ball, start passing out of defence - but Arsenal will not allow them to settle. They push up, compress, hustle, press. The balls they hit into the box in open play are often random and improvised, but they are also persistent.

We are entering the 87th minute. Youth team coach Pat Rice and Theo Foley are standing up in the Arsenal dug-out, urging their team forward - and forward they go, with Adams supplementing the attack whenever he can. Barnes and Aldridge are on the counter-attack now, exchanging neat passes, making up ground, with Richardson in pursuit. It’s then that Richardson goes down, exhausted, cramp-stricken. The game is stopped as he receives treatment. We’re so close to the end. The crowd knows this - the Liverpool supporters have been whistling incessantly for many minutes, imploring the referee to blow for time. McMahon knows this - he raises his right index finger, but as a warning rather than in complacent celebration. He paces the pitch, his finger still raised, the muscular thickness of his pale thighs exaggerated by his tight red shorts. He spits repeatedly, thin jet streams of anxiety. His blue eyes burn. It’s obvious what he’s telling his team-mates: that there’s one minute to go. You can see him saying this, again and again: one minute, only one minute.

“I was just trying to get the team to concentrate, to concentrate hard, and then we’d have another double,” McMahon says. “Even today people come up to me and mention that one-minute-to-go moment. I try to laugh it off, but it still hurts. The whole evening had such a weird atmosphere - because of Hillsborough, because we’d already played the Cup final, because we didn’t have to win the game to be champions.”

The clock is running down - beyond 90 minutes now.

Game on: Adams has the ball and, against his natural style, seeks to carry it with him out of defence and into midfield. He is swiftly dispossessed by Barnes, who, with Adams scampering back after him, dribbles towards the Arsenal box, rather than heading towards the corner flag, where he would have had the chance to hold up play, to run down the clock. There’s something aimless about Barnes’s run, an absence of conviction, like much of his play tonight, and the ball is taken away from him by a recovered Richardson, who slips it neatly to his goalkeeper. From the touchline Theo Foley is screaming at Lukic, urging him to release it. He wants the goalkeeper to kick it long, to punt it up high into the night sky and deep into the Liverpool half. He’s cursing Lukic. Why now the delay, when there’s so little fucking time. For fuck’s sake hit it, fucking hit it. “I was calling him every name under the son,” Foley says. “I couldn’t believe he wanted to throw it out to Dixon.”

Just hit it, man. Even if he can hear Foley raging at him from the touchline, Lukic knows what he must not do - and that’s punt it speculatively upfield. Instead, he throws the ball out to his right-back, Dixon.

Dixon plays the ball long, accurately, and it’s collected by Smith. “I didn’t really want the ball,” Dixon says. “I was running up the pitch, and the next minute the ball comes whizzing out to me. I’m thinking, ‘Why has he done that?’ My first instinct was just to whack it as far as I could up the pitch. But when I looked up Alan Smith had pulled into the hole, and I thought, ‘Well, we can’t score from there but there’s nobody else up front,’ so I had to hit the ball into him.”

Smith receives the pass and, with his usual unostentatious economy of movement, turns to play the ball through to Thomas, rushing forward from midfield, as he has, tirelessly and without reward, throughout the match. “At Anfield there was no clock,” says Smith. “You had no idea of the time, except the whistles of the crowd and George waving us forward. We knew it was getting close. I gathered the ball well from Dixon - it was one of those nights when all my touches came off. I didn’t want to hold it up, so turned at the same time and helped it on to Michael, who was coming through. I jogged after him, and watched what happened next.”

Unmarked and sprinting deep into Liverpool territory, Thomas miscontrols Smith’s pass; the ball spins away, bounces against Nicol before, improbably, falling for Thomas. “How do you explain that?” says Nicol. “The ball is played up, Thomas is running through on it, he miscontrols it, it bounces straight off me and back to him. You try to coach that. When the ball bounced off me it could have gone anywhere, but it just fell perfectly for him. How do you explain that? You can’t, except to say that things happen.”

Sensing danger, Grobbelaar moves towards Thomas just as he reaches the edge of the penalty box. Red-shirted Liverpool defenders are pursuing Thomas. As many as 42,000 spectators are watching inside the ground suspended at a point of heightened crisis. It’s all happening so fast, yet there’s also something curiously hallucinatory about what’s unfolding, as if time itself is being slowed.

Here he comes, Thomas, free, lost to the moment, as he would later describe it. He must know that the defenders are closing on him, must feel the hot rush and strain of their exertion. He has the ball and is moving towards the penalty spot. The goalkeeper is coming towards him. Thomas has the ball. He is waiting for the goalkeeper to commit, just waiting; his momentum carries him forward as he lifts the ball with his right boot up and over Grobbelaar and - look, watch it now, follow it as it goes up and over the goalkeeper and continues on its way into the net. 2-0.

Thomas continues running - how can he stop? - and does a somersault in wild celebration, and begins to writhe and thrash around on the ground, like a huge marlin hooked on a flyline.

Looking down from the directors’ box, Liverpool’s chief executive, Peter Robinson, is in the process of making a phone call. “Barclays, the League sponsors, had provided champagne for the winners,” he says. “The champagne was being chilled in the kitchen of the Main Stand, two floors up from the dressing room. Barclays had stipulated that they wanted the champagne to be in the winners’ dressing-room at the final whistle. When Arsenal scored I rang the kitchen to find out what was happening to the champagne. I panicked when I was told it was already on its way to our dressing room. ‘For God’s sake, get it back,’ I said. ‘Arsenal have just scored again.’ We managed to intercept the champagne and redirect it to the Arsenal dressing room.”

At the final whistle, no one attempts to invade the pitch, nor are the Liverpool fans leaving the ground. They are staying on in their tens of thousands to applaud the new champions. There is no booing. There is only resounding applause. “I looked out and saw the whole crowd clapping,” says Robinson. “I think the Arsenal players and their fans were stunned by that.”

“The goal which won the League championship for Arsenal last season,” wrote David Lacey in the Guardian at the start of the following season, “with the final shot of the first division programme, did more than provide a unique moment in a sport which was beginning to think it had seen everything. The speed and audacity of a movement that took the Kop’s breath away and left Kenny Dalglish standing open-mouthed in disbelief by the Liverpool bench epitomised the healthier qualities of English football as the game approaches the 90s.”

It was August, only a few months after the end of the season, and Arsenal’s title-clinching winner was already being referred to as that goal.

It was already legendary.

For me, there was something cathartic about the whole evening. After all the grief, rage, anger and suffering that had preceded it, here was a game that brought palpable release for nearly all football fans who watched it, with the obvious exception of those who supported Liverpool - and perhaps even for some of them there was release, too - at the fact of the match having taken place, of the season having been completed rather than abandoned. If the home fans had reacted differently to defeat, if they had rioted or raged, or even skulked off in fury at the end of the game instead of staying on to applaud, no one would now remember that night at Anfield as the point at which the fortunes of English football seemed to turn. The fans did not riot. They stayed on to witness Arsenal being presented with the championship trophy, to witness a conquering army sinking the flag of victory into the Anfield turf at the worst possible moment for the home team. The Liverpool fans applauded. It was as if they understood that we were at the start of something new; that there would be no returning to the ways of old. Six weeks after Hillsborough, those fans demonstrated that they understood the real meaning of sporting glory.

The interim report into the Hillsborough disaster by Chief Justice Taylor was published in August (the full report came out in 1990). Its recommendation for all-seater stadiums and its enlightened liberalism changed English football for ever - to the extent that, at a distance of 20 years, one can now speak of the game of football in England as it was before and after Hillsborough, in the same way as one speaks of cinema before and after the advent of sound, as the transition between two epochs, as a moment of profound and irreversible cultural shift. Also in 1989, on 5 February, Murdoch’s Sky Television held a press conference to launch its British service. It was obvious that we were ready for a new contract to be signed between football and society, and in the years ahead it would be Sky’s role to dictate many of the terms and clauses of that new contract, as football began its move from the margins to the centre of the culture.

The last season of the 80s began in August 1988, towards the end of the “Second Summer of Love”, and extended to the following summer. A more benign, less drunken and more druggy and laid-back form of fandom flowed out of the pay parties and nightclubs of the rave scene and on to the terraces, and this found fuller expression at the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy. Italia ‘90 is not remembered for the quality of its football but as a great tournament all the same because, against so many expectations, England excelled. Having reached the semi-finals, where they lost a penalty shoot-out to the eventual winners, Germany, they returned home not as world champions but still with honour. Because the England fans had, on the whole, behaved well in Italy, the ban on English clubs playing in Europe was soon lifted. This was a new start for the national game - it could even be called a renaissance - and it began at Anfield on the evening of 26 May 1989.

• This is an edited extract from Jason Cowley’s book The Last Game: Love, Death and Football, published on 6 April

• Keane has five goals in seven matches under Trapattoni
• Win over Bulgaria would be big step to qualification

Writers of outlandish fiction might have struggled to envisage the lows that Robbie Keane has suffered at club level this season when he has variously seen boyhood dreams shattered, been cast as a political pawn and suffered the cruellest of cuts. His one constant, though, has been his country and as he savoured the feeling of being back on home turf, ahead of Ireland’s crucial World Cup qualifier against Bulgaria, he outlined plans to usher in a more uplifting chapter.

Three points at Croke Park this evening would not remove the disappointment of his disastrous sojourn at Liverpool, which he ended in January with a transfer back to Tottenham Hotspur, where he could once again enjoy the embrace of a manager in Harry Redknapp who considered him a central figure. But it would go a long way in moving Ireland towards the World Cup finals in South Africa next summer and helping him to end a trying campaign on a high.

“This is probably our best opportunity for a long time [to qualify for a major tournament],” Keane said, catching the mood of building anticipation in Dublin.

“After beating Georgia here in our last tie, we need to carry on. If we want to qualify, these are the games that we need to be winning. It would be a bit far for Bulgaria to catch us in the group if we could win.”

If Ireland were to triumph against a ­Bulgaria team that was highly rated but is now missing a clutch of star players, most notably Dimitar Berbatov and ­Martin Petrov, and reeling from off-the-field turmoil, it would represent their first victory over a top-two seeded group opponent since 2001.

Back then, Holland were dispatched by Jason McAteer’s goal at Lansdowne Road and Ireland went on to qualify for the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, their last appearance at a major finals. Tonight’s tie is set up for them to turn a similar corner and, despite what Keane described as the “massive blow” of Damien Duff’s withdrawal through injury, there is ­a ­burgeoning confidence within the camp .

“We conceded an early goal against Georgia but we had virtually the 90 minutes to go and win the game,” said Keane, reflecting on the 2-1 victory last month, which gave the team 10 points from an available 12. “That’s what gives us belief. No matter what the situation we are in, we can come back and win games.”

Keane scored both goals against Georgia to make it five in seven matches under the manager Giovanni Trapattoni, and take his record international tally to 37 from 86 appearances.

Keane’s domestic fortunes have picked up since his return as captain to White Hart Lane – Tottenham are unbeaten in the Premier League with him in the side, winning four and drawing two.

But as he toiled under Rafael Benítez at Liverpool, the club he supported as a boy, international duty might have seemed like a release. Keane has long thrived on the surge of patriotism that he feels when he dons the green jersey and with Irish rugby and boxing enjoying heady days, he has yet greater incentive for success.

“What the rugby team did in winning the grand slam was brilliant – and for the nation, what with them and Bernard Dunne [winning the WBA super- bantamweight world title], it’s been a great period,” said Keane. “It’s up to us now to continue that.

“Playing for your country is the highest honour. It was always my dream as a boy to play for Ireland. It’s the same with all the players and I think that Irish players are maybe a bit more patriotic than others. You go away to England at a young age and you miss your home and the people here. You become even more patriotic.”

A stirring occasion is in prospect, in the first of three tests that will define whether Irish hopes of qualification are realistic.

They travel to Bari next Wednesday to take on the world champions Italy, with whom they currently share the lead in Group Eight, while they face the return fixture against Bulgaria in Sofia in early June.

Trapattoni warned that Bulgaria still had players to hurt Ireland, referring specifically to the attackers Blagoy Georgiev and Ivelin Popov. He also stressed that they were a different team under Stanimir Stoilov, who replaced Plamen Markov as manager last December.

“When you change coach, there is always a reaction,” he remarked.

Conviction, however, bubbles within Trapattoni. He repeated his belief that Ireland could top the table and, as ever, the ends will justify the means. “We have to do everything possible to win,” he said. “How is not important. It is the result that matters.”

• Liverpool manager tries to minimise European distraction
• Players focus on beating Villa and maintaining title challenge

Liverpool’s always hazardous road towards a Premier League and Champions League double now appears beset with booby traps. The first lies in wait this afternoon, at Anfield, where a pacey, sometimes disturbingly direct, Aston Villa will be determined to revive their challenge for fourth place in the table. A win for the home side, though, will leave them one point behind leaders Manchester United, although they will have played a game more than the champions.

Negotiate that one successfully and Rafael Benítez’s team will find a tricky European hairpin bend looming on the horizon. Liverpool’s manager ­acknowledges a psychologically draining Champions League quarter final against Chelsea could play into United’s hands.

Indeed, Benítez’s stunning bettering of Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford last weekend could be rendered almost irrelevant should Liverpool and Chelsea allow themselves to be diverted by the inevitable hype that will accompany their latest European rematch. “Us playing Chelsea in Europe makes it easier for United in the Premier League,” he said. “Everyone wants to talk about us and Chelsea, but we know, if we want to stay close to United, we need to concentrate on Aston Villa. If we want to remain in the title race, we have to beat Villa.

“Our side of the Champions League draw is clearly more difficult,” adds a man well aware that failing to overcome Aston Villa would deflate much of the optimism engendered by thrashing Manchester United 4-1 away, United’s defeat at Fulham and his signing a new five-year contract.

Benítez does not always find it so easy to play his beloved tactical chess against an essentially old-fashioned English side, such as Villa, whose trademark counter-attacks involve propelling the ball into their opponent’s box with real alacrity. “A few Premier League teams play long ball, so we’re used to it,” he demurs. “We have to maybe change two or three movements of certain players, that’s all,” stressed a manager suddenly rather less enamoured with perpetual change than he used to be.

Regular rest and frequent rotation remain very much part of Benítez’s managerial mantra, but there are exceptions to every rule and no one expects to see Steven Gerrard or Fernando Torres sitting on the bench this spring.

“It is very important for us to have those two on the pitch,” Benítez stresses. “The team have more confidence when they are playing. If they are fit, they have to play every game. Their fitness will be crucial for us because they are scoring a lot of goals.”

Instinctively reluctant to indulge “stars”, Benítez is still much more about selecting players to fit his systems than creating a bespoke formation for big names to flourish in. But he accepts Gerrard and Torres are no mere cogs in an ever-adaptable machine.

Tellingly, on Friday, he took the almost unprecedented step of pragmatically compromising long-held principles about the team being bigger than any ­individual and no one being indispensable by ­delaying training for an hour to accommodate ­Gerrard’s latest court appearance.

Benítez does not like being so dependent on a single player and duly trusts Rick Parry’s imminent departure as chief executive and the assurances he believes are contained in his new contract will create competition for even Gerrard and Torres. “The Premier League will be our priority next season,” he declares. “But we need to improve the squad, so we’re going to have to spend a bit more money.”

While Liverpool’s American owners retain ultimate power of veto on ­transfers, Benítez appears confident the new arrangement will give him enhanced transfer-market scope, particularly in valuations and opening negotiations, in which he viewed Parry’s role as a ­meddlesome hindrance. “I’m talking about having the same responsibility as other managers, such as Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and David Moyes,” he says. “They identify the player, talk to him and, afterwards, the chief executive has to do the deal. The manager knows the right price for players. We know the market.”

Do not bet against Villa’s Gareth Barry wearing a Liverpool shirt next season.

Today’s lies kept it dusty

So Joaquin Phoenix has had a right-old tear-up with a heckler. But you have to wonder whether Phoenix is actually on the greatest wind-up in history – one deliberately designed to satirise Hollywood and make us reconsider our attitudes towards eccentric behaviour, beards, hip-hop, beards and beards – or whether he’s actually having a genuine meltdown that isn’t very funny. After all, he has grown a beard so ridiculous that even Ed Reardon would find it unclean, and his behaviour has become so odd that the only thing left for him to do is announce that Marlon Harewood is the second coming.

Mick McCarthy isn’t quite of that opinion, and unlike Phoenix he doesn’t have a sniffable beard, but he does want to pay Aston Villa £2m for Harewood. That’s the same Harewood who, and you’ll like this, has started one league game for Villa since joining them for £4m in the summer of 2007. It’s also the same Harewood who, and you’ll like this, too, was apparently an injury away from being in England’s last World Cup squad. If Neil Ashton says so, it must be true.

In other news, Huus Giddink will stay at Chelsea next season. We know this, because The Mirror knows this, because Hiddink was seen talking to Scott Sinclair. And that means he’ll stay? Eh? How do we know they weren’t just discussing the ending of The Shield?

Manchester United’s 84-man squad will share total bonuses of £9m if they win the quintuple, with a big chunk determined in accordance with each player’s contribution to the season. John O’Shea stands to make at least 42p.

Zinedine Zidane says that Steven Gerrard is the best midfielder in the world, a eulogy only ever so slightly tarnished by Zidane then comparing Gerrard’s role to that of Patrick Vieira and Claude Makelele, a role he last played in about 2002.

That is basically the long and the short of a preposterously thin day’s rumours, so we’re off to watch our beard grow.

• ‘United shirts seemed to be everywhere’
• To take part in the fans’ verdict, email fans@observer.co.uk

Richard Allen, CravenCottageNewsround.wordpress.com

When you’re playing one of the best teams in Europe you can’t expect much really, although we were quite optimistic before the game. We had a couple of chances early on and against United you’ve got to take them or they will punish you, which they did. They put a good side out and were very impressive. We’re not really a physical side so we couldn’t really impose ourselves and once they went ahead that was it really. John Pantsil never gave up and Clint Dempsey certainly gave it some. He was always trying to make something happen but United shirts seemed to be everywhere. We’re not down, though, when you compare where we are to last season; we’re 10th in the league now and safe from the drop.

Schwarzer 6; Pantsil 7, Hangeland 5, Hughes 5, Konchesky 5; Davies 5, Etuhu 5, Murphy 5, (Dacourt 57 4), Dempsey 7; Zamora 5 (Gera 68 5); Johnson 5 (Kamara 60 5)

I was a bit apprehensive before the match as Fulham have got a good home record so to beat them 4-0 was a great result. It was an excellent atmosphere with 5,000 United fans making a lot of noise. They were brilliant. So was Carlos Tevez, who had an absolutely superb match. We seem to be saving all our goals for the cup this year – we scored four at Derby and three at Southampton – and we’re looking unbeatable. I fancy Chelsea next up because it would be a great game, Fergie’s never lost an FA Cup semi-final and there’s no one in the country can touch us at the moment.

Van der Sar 7; O’Shea 7 (Eckersley 5), Ferdinand 8 (Evans 6), Vidic 8, Evra 7; Fletcher 7, Carrick 8; Anderson 8; Rooney 9 (Welbeck 6), Tevez 10, Park 9

• ‘The draw felt like a defeat but was probably a fair result’
• To take part in the fans’ verdict, email fans@observer.co.uk

Phil Wilson, Observer reader

Having gone ahead so early and led for almost the entire game, the draw felt like a defeat, but it was probably a fair result. Spurs always looked liable to get an equaliser and we just couldn’t hold out. Keane’s goal really came as a kick in the teeth, especially as our midfield had looked strong and the defence coped well without Anton Ferdinand. The play of our front two in general was frustrating, though – Cissé and Jones are both good players, but they don’t seem to gel together. Maybe it’s time to give David Healy a decent run.

Player ratings Fulop 7; Bardsley 6, Ben-Haim 7, Collins 7, McCartney 6; Malbranque 7, Whitehead 7, Richardson 8 (Leadbitter n/a), Reid 7 (Edwards 6); Cissé 5 (Murphy 6), Jones 6

Dave Mason, Observer reader

The Sunderland fans moaned that we were lucky to equalise so late on, but I’m amazed anyone can say we didn’t deserve the draw. In the second half, we completely dominated possession and Darren Bent could’ve won the match on his own if he’d worn his shooting boots. Harry Redknapp deserves credit for some bold substitutions, which seemed to make a difference, particularly the introduction of Tom Huddlestone. We’ve been critical of him in the past for lacking commitment, he was the one driving us forward late on.

Player ratings Gomes 6; Corluka 6 (Pavlyuchenko 6), King 7, Woodgate 6, Chimbonda 5; Lennon 6, Jenas 5 (Huddlestone 8), Palacios 5 (Bentley 6), Modric 7; Keane 6; Bent 5

• Ferguson’s men in lead for average of 36½ minutes per game
• Teams of similar ability are level for average of 46 minutes

On an FA Cup weekend in which all four ties have a firm favourite, it might be helpful to know how little time in matches even the very best teams spend in front. The reason football fans so often seem disgruntled might be that most of the time they are not seeing what they want or expect to see.

Every supporter wants to watch his team winning. Let us start at the top, as high as you can possibly get. Imagine you support Manchester United, the most successful English club of the modern era. And imagine that during the past 10 seasons you have followed them home and away to watch every match they played in the Premier League. In those matches, Manchester United were leading for an average of just 36½ minutes.

You were watching the best team in the country and they were leading for less than half of the time they spent on the pitch – an average of just 31 minutes away and 42 minutes at home.

The knowledge of how long a team are likely to be ahead or behind during a match is useful when betting in the spread markets (called leading minutes) and fixed-odds markets on what the state of play will be at different times during a match – usually 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes.

The figures which follow are from Premier League games played during the past 10 seasons, 1998-99 through to 2007-08. In games between teams of similar ability – those who finished in adjacent positions in the final table – home teams were leading for an average of 29 minutes, scores were level for an average of 46 minutes and away teams were leading for an average of 15 minutes.

If the home team were stronger than the away team, they were likely to be leading for longer, and vice versa. When the visiting team, for example, during a season in which they finished between one and seven places below the home team at its end, the hosts led for an average of only 33 minutes.

It was only in games featuring a home team who finished 14 or more places above the away team that the hosts were likely to be leading the visitors for more than half of the 90 minutes – on average, for 47 minutes. In any match, the better team are the most likely winners, but it can take longer than you might think for them to establish their superiority.Kevin Pullein is football tipster for the Racing Post

• United’s title odds are cut to 1–33
• Fears over quadruple raise the stakes

Plenty of football fans long to revel in Manchester United’s misfortune and the latest recruits to the ABU (Anyone But United) crowd are Britain’s bookmakers. With the Carling Cup won and United’s title odds cut to as short as 1–33 following their 2–1 win over Newcastle on Wednesday night, the layers will be praying they fail to progress in the FA Cup this weekend.

It is a United quadruple the firms fear more than a domestic treble but if the champions, who are 7–4 (general) to win the Cup, are knocked out by Fulham tomorrow it will prevent further sleepless nights for the bookies.

The layers’ mood is grim judging by their press releases following United’s win at Wembley last Sunday. “Watching them lift the Carling Cup felt like the first nail in the bookmakers’ coffin,” said Ladbrokes spokesman, Robin Hutchison, while William Hill’s Graham Sharpe reckons a clean sweep for United will cost the industry £25m.

Fulham, who were subject to a £500 bet at 80–1 with Extrabet to win the Cup, are 11–4 (Boylesports) to knock United out and 7–2 (general) to do so this weekend. Before their 1–0 home defeat byHull City you could have made a case for Roy Hodgson’s team, who are now a best-priced 25–1 (Victor Chandler) to win the Cup, making the semi-finals for the first time since 1975. Instead the 10–11 (general) on offer about United winning on Saturday will attract plenty of interest. Rarely do you see the league leaders at that sort of price to win a match at Craven Cottage. In United’s last three visits they were available at 8–13, 4–9 and 2–5. On each occasion they justified those short odds, winning 3–2, 2–1 and 3–0 respectively.

Fulham are in their best form for years this season and some punters might be cautious about backing United as Sir Alex Ferguson will undoubtedly rotate his squad. But if United’s recent 3–0 win over Fulham is anything to go by, the gulf in class between the two last month should be reinforced.

The quarter-final draw has kept the remaining members of the Premier League’s big four left in the competition apart, although Arsenal, available at 4–1 (general) in the outright market, still have a fifth-round tie against Burnley to overcome. Should the Gunners progress they will play Hull at the Emirates at the last-eight stage. It gives Arsenal a terrific opportunity to make the semi-finals and with the chance of the currently injured quintet of Cesc Fábregas, Tomas Rosicky, Emmanuel Adebayor, Eduardo and Theo Walcott all available from the start of April, Arsène Wenger’s team cannot be overlooked as potential Cup winners.

Those looking to side with Arsenal are advised to either back them at 11–8 with Extrabet to make the final or buy them at 59 on Sporting Index’s win index, which awards points as follows: 100 (winners), 70 (runners-up), 50 (losing semi-finalists), 33 (losing quarter-finalists) and 20 (last 16 exit). If they defeat Burnley and Hull – which they are odds-on to do so – spread bettors will have an opportunity to close out their position for a profit.

Chelsea are second favourites to win the Cup at 16-5 (Boylesports) and they should have little problem defeating Coventry tomorrow lunchtime. Guus Hiddink’s side are 4-7 (general) to beat the Sky Blues at the Ricoh Arena and 5-2 (general) to win by a single goal – the winning margin of all four of his games in charge of the Blues.

But the best bet in that matchmight be to back Nicolas Anelka to score at any time at 13–8 (Extrabet). The Frenchman is the joint top scorer in the Cup – all scored away from home against lower-league opposition – and is 5–2 (Sky Bet) to be the tournament’s Golden Boot winner.

The other last-eight tie sees Everton (13–2 with Extrabet to win the trophy) face Middlesbrough (22–1, general). Should either end up winning it in May the bookies will be relieved. Chelsea and Arsenal, as well as United, have been popular with punters and Paddy Power are offering just 1-5 a big-four club lift the trophy.