The Kop by Stephen F Kelly

Author:Stephen F Kelly [Stephen F Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2008-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

GEOFFREY GREEN

Sportswriter

EUROPEAN CUP, QUARTER FINAL, SECOND LEG, 3 MARCH 1965

Liverpool v Cologne

(The first, away, leg of this European Cup quarter-final had ended in a goalless draw. The Anfield leg had to be postponed shortly before the kick-off because of snow. After the postponed game, the second leg was finally played a fortnight later. This, too, ended 0-0. The replay in Rotterdam was also drawn, and Liverpool eventually went through to the semi-final on the toss of a coin.)

It was the mid-1960s. Liverpool were due to play Cologne on Merseyside in the second leg of a European Cup quarter-final. For hours the city was wrapped in the white arms of a blizzard. The snow lay deep everywhere, but for some unaccountable reason the gates of Anfield were opened some half an hour before the night kick-off to let in a shivering 45,000 crowd.

The Cologne players duly came out stripped for a warm-up before the start, kicking about a white polka-dot ball on a frosty white surface. All you could distinguish of the ball itself were those moving dots, as if it were a dice being rolled on the icing of a Christmas cake. The conditions, of course, were impossible, and the referee called it off before the start, without Liverpool even bothering to take the field.

At some grounds there might well have been trouble, and that Anfield crowd had queued for hours in the snow to get in. Their money had been taken, virtually under false pretences. Yet there is nothing, anywhere, quite to measure up to the Kop at Liverpool. It may contain some villains within a family ranged – some 22,000 strong – behind one goal. But it bursts with original, unpredictable wit and generosity, and when it sings its own adopted battle hymn ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, there is about it all the fervour and moving quality of a vast cathedral choir, as it sways and countersways to the music. It sends an endless tingle up the spine.

But in spite of that blank night and the disappointment, there was no explosion. Instead, as the snow still fell in a thick, feathery cloud, there suddenly appeared a dozen or so characters out on the pitch imitating the gyrations of international ice stars one sees on television. And there, too, in the background was one wry wag lampooning the official markings of skating judges, as he held aloft the numbered figure plates usually used to convey the half-time scores at other matches. It was a brilliant piece of inspired mime and, but for that, the night would have long since passed as a frozen waste into the limbo of forgotten things.

To me, that was another small but ‘great’ moment of football, stemming from unexpected, unexplored depths of the human spirit that makes light of adversity.

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