Football Daily | Liverpool get another chance to unfreeze against their Klopptonite

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! You can sum up Jürgen Klopp’s Big Cup story at Liverpool in one word. It’s not “heavy”, or “metal”; it’s not even “heavy-metal” when it’s used as an adjective. It’s “Madrid”. Liverpool beat Spurs at the Estadio Metropolitano, aka the House of Simeone, in 2019 to win their sixth title. In the other four seasons, from 2018-22, they were eliminated by Madrid’s finest: Real three times, including two finals, and Atlético in a just-before-Covid night that gets weirder with every recall. So it was no great surprise when Liverpool, who had a one-in-four chance of drawing Real Madrid in the last 16, drew Real Madrid in the last 16. Does anyone else’s memory drift back to 1978 and a short BBC2 series called The Pickersgill People? Episode one (if I remember correctly) featured ‘the Sheik of Pickersgill’, who would hold his red and white shemagh while chanting ‘United, United’. Of course, this would never happen in reality” – Peter Storch. Postings regarding sightings of famous players off the pitch (Football Daily letters passim) reminded me of many not really seen at all. In the 1990s, when hope was still part of the repertoire of Evertonians, on a once-important news discussion group, there were regular claims of sightings. Many of these were along the lines of ‘my auntie’s window-cleaner knows a bloke who lives next door to a woman whose cousin is on the ground staff of [insert any team]’, followed by a ‘revelation’ about a player from said team who was said to be desperate to join Everton’s ‘Dogs of War’. My most cherished memory of those days goes back to the outpouring of euphoric debate that ensued when one of our number claimed to have witnessed Fabrizio Ravanelli coming out of the Goodison Road Supper Bar with a very big portion of chips wrapped in the (now defunct) Football Echo” – Paul Preston. This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Continue reading...