Diego Simeone said it was “on the roundabout next to the stadium” that Atletico Madrid seized control of their Champions League last-16 tie. Liverpool will hope the comeback starts the moment the Spaniards’ bus snakes past the King Harry pub onto Anfield Road.
Having felt the force of the Wanda Metropolitano three weeks ago, the time has come for the Reds to respond. Atletico can expect to feel the Power of Anfield™ on Wednesday night.
Few stadiums in world football can do what this one does. Its list of victims is long and illustrious, added to year upon year. Inter, Saint-Etienne, Olympiacos, Juventus, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Manchester City, Roma, Barcelona; they all came to Merseyside with stars and class and hopes and dreams.
They all left with nothing. Only aching limbs, ringing ears and damaged pride.
It does strange things to teams, Anfield. It can turn legs to jelly and minds to mush. It can distract and annoy and frighten and deflate even the most confident, well-drilled of sides.
“A bugger of a ground,” Pep Guardiola once called it on Catalan radio, and he should know. The Manchester City manager has been to Anfield five times and not won once. There have been four defeats, the last of which, a 3-1 loss back in November, ended with him losing his cool with the match officials, screaming his rage towards the heavens as his team’s grip on the Premier League title loosened.
“The motto ‘This is Anfield’ is no marketing spin,” Guardiola said last year. “There’s something about it that you will find in no other stadium in the world.
“They score a goal and over the next five minutes you feel that you’ll receive another four. You feel small and the rival players seem to be all over you.” Guardiola believes Anfield to be “the toughest stadium in Europe to go to”, and his feelings are echoed across the game.
Arsene Wenger told BeIn Sports that it is “the only place you don’t want to go” for a return fixture while Arjen Robben, who lost two Champions League semi-finals there with Chelsea, unsurprisingly described it as his “worst stadium.”
Those semi-finals, in 2005 and 2007, have gone down in Anfield folklore, the nights when Liverpool really could call upon their mythical 12th man. The ground was packed more than an hour before kick-off, with Reds fans ready to drag Rafa Benitez's team over the line.
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“We fed off the crowd,” says former Reds defender John Arne Riise. “That was the only way I could keep running and running. You think you’re done and then they lift you again. One more run, one more tackle. It’s amazing.”
“I felt the power of Anfield. It was magnificent,” said Jose Mourinho to BeIn Sports regarding the 2005 defeat. John Terry, the Chelsea captain for both games, says it is the best atmosphere he ever experienced in his 20-year playing career. “I walked out into that cauldron and heard that singing and saw that passion,” Terry wrote in his autobiography. “The hairs on my arms were standing up. To see a spectacle like that is inspiring to anyone.
“I just kept looking around, trying to take it all in. I wasn’t daunted by it, but it was amazing. I wish more crowds were like that.
“Apart from the volume, it looked spectacular, too. In the seconds before the referee blew his whistle for the start of the match, the whole stadium let out this great long roar as if they were going to power Liverpool to victory.”
We will hear that roar on Wednesday, for sure. Trailing 1-0 from the first leg, Liverpool will need their crowd on top form if they are to scrap their way past one of Europe’s most robust, organised sides.
"Our people will be ready, I know that," said Jurgen Klopp last month. "Welcome to Anfield - it's not over yet!" Expect a fast, frenetic start. Those are an Anfield speciality.
The great Gianluigi Buffon remembers visiting with a star-studded Juventus side in 2005 and being driven to distraction by the ferocity of the opening stages. “Definitely Anfield,” Buffon told his fans on Instagram when asked about his favourite atmosphere.
“That was one of the few stadiums – along with Rangers in Glasgow and Fenerbahce in Istanbul – where there was such commotion for the first 15-20 minutes that I had trouble concentrating.”
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Fabio Capello was Juventus manager that night and described the atmosphere as being “like an electric shock for Liverpool’s players”, who led 2-0 inside 25 minutes. The home side started, Capello added, “at an astonishing tempo – they seemed unstoppable.”
That was certainly the case last May, when Barcelona arrived protecting a 3-0 first-leg lead in their Champions League semi-final, but had no answer to what Liverpool and their supporters threw at them. May 7, 2019 will go down as perhaps Anfield’s greatest ever night.
“We’ve all gone through what happened to Barca,” reflected Guardiola after the Catalans’ 4-0 loss. “They were laughing at me when we were losing 3-0 after the first 15, 20 minutes of the [2018] quarter-final. They’re an exceptional team and the stadium makes an influence.”
Mourinho, very much a Liverpool-sceptic in the past, was equally gushing after that game. Anfield, he said, is “one of the places to make the impossible possible.” Alan Shearer, commentating for BBC Radio 5 Live, remarked: “I don’t think I’ll see or hear an atmosphere like this again…it took my breath away.”
These are not empty comments. These are some of the biggest names in the game, talking about noise and chanting and booing and roaring, and how it can genuinely affect an elite football match. If it lifts the home players – “you think you’re tired but then you run and chase the ball and make a tackle and the place goes mad,” said former Reds defender Mark Lawrenson on 5 Live, “and you think ‘how good is this?’ and you want some more!” – then what does it to do the opposition? It takes courage and intelligence, as much as talent, to thrive as a visiting player in such an atmosphere.
Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, recalled to Marca a harrowing visit with the Gunners in 2014. “It was the only ground where in which I had the feeling of 'pájara', of being stuck,” Arteta said. “You say: 'I do not know what's going on, stop the game, please, because I do not know where I am'.
"It's hard to explain, but it never happened to me anywhere other than Anfield. At Anfield you can concede five without knowing.” Gary Neville, the former Manchester United captain, admits it took him “years” to get used to playing at Anfield, while Wayne Rooney, his former team-mate at Old Trafford, said on Sky Sports' Monday Night Football visiting teams can “play into Liverpool’s hands” with their tactics.
“They want you to go and get the ball and play out from the back,” Rooney said. “If you do that, the crowd get up and it can be one of the most horrible first 30 minutes you could have. [At United] we would train, take no chances, get the ball into the channels, turn them and feel your way into the game. If you start trying to play football at Anfield and Liverpool are up for it, then you’re in trouble.”
Atletico, of course, will arrive prepared. Simeone is nobody’s fool, and will know what awaits his side, on and off the field. It is expected that the Spaniards will come and look to play to their strengths, to spoil and to disrupt, to make it an attritional contest; physical, bitty, frustrating. That’s the plan, but whether it will work is another matter.
Because at Anfield, even the best laid plans can fall apart pretty quickly.
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