February 5th. Monday night. Anfield.
The bus turned onto Anfield Road at six-fifteen and the noise found us before the stadium did. Not the organised, rehearsed noise of a matchday crowd filing through turnstiles.
The noise of a city that had been waiting for this fixture since the draw was made, the noise of forty-three thousand Liverpool supporters who remembered what Danny Walsh had done to them the last time he visited, and who had spent nine months planning the response.
I sat in the front seat and looked through the windscreen and saw the floodlights first. The four pylons, rising above the rooftops of the terraced houses, the light spilling into the February darkness, the glow turning the low clouds orange.
Then the stadium itself. The new Main Stand, expanded, enormous, the red brick and the glass and the steel, the ground that Bill Shankly built and that Jürgen Klopp had turned into the most hostile venue in European football.
