At Liverpool’s magnificent Anfield Road stadium, the 2000 fans from Marseilles held the 40,000 English supporters at bay. A beautiful moment.
It really grabs you by the scruff of the neck. Hearing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, Liverpool’s anthem, is an experience every football fan should have. A few minutes of emotion with red and white scarves flying – but also present in every stand were the famous blue and white colours of OM – that ended with a thunderclap of applause.
Such a poignant moment that the Champions League anthem, which was played directly afterwards, seemed almost prosaic. In short, the shivers predicted the night before by Eric Gerets were the order of the day.
Once the whistle was blown, and after the Liverpool fans had gone through several rousing choruses, the first calls to arms rose from the throats of the OM supporters just 5 minutes into the match – one of the peculiarities of the English fans being that their chants come in waves, interspersed with long passages of silence. Silences that the OM fans made the most of to impose their war cries with no lack of vigour. So the first half shaped up as an impressive vocal ping-pong between 40,000 Britons and 2,000 Frenchmen. And at the half hour mark, seeing Djibril Cissé, a former Anfield man, warming up on the sidelines brought forth a new wave of hearty applause.
In the second half, it was astonishing to see that the visitors were drowning out the locals, whose cheers became more and more intermittent. But their shouts were as powerful as they were brief. But they died out when Mathieu Valbuena unleashed his masterful strike just under Reina’s crossbar in the 77th minute. The OM section of Anfield went into a trance and redoubled its efforts until you could hear nothing else. At the final whistle, the chant of “If you’re not jumping, you’re not from Marseille” resounded throughout the stadium as the Olympiens came to the foot of the stand to join in the festivities with their fans – a magical moment for the 2,000 lucky OM fans lingering long at the scene of their historic victory.
