Champions' League preview: Brilliant Bootle boy reaches fine century
Liverpool lynchpin prefers Euro mind games to League brawn
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Your support makes all the difference.Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United have all won the Premier League recently enough to regard becoming champions of Europe this season as their greatest aspiration. For Liverpool, the reverse might be expected, and their captain, Steven Gerrard, has made publichis despondency that once again it is not going to happen.
Yet his great friend and comrade Jamie Carragher, steeped as he is in the history of the sport and Liverpool's place therein, manages to take a cheerier view. When the Kop regularly strikes up "In Istanbul/We won it five times", the mind likes to imagine James Lee Duncan Carragher down on the pitch, singing along with his pals and family clan in the stands.
There has been no bigger game for him this season than Tuesday's visit to Milan for the second leg of the Champions' League last-16 tie against Internazionale, about which he talks with Bootle-boyish enthusiasm. That would have been the case even if his beloved Liverpool did not hold a 2-0 lead from the home leg and if the occasion were not an immensely proud personal milestone: Carragher will become the first player in the club's history to make 100 European appearances.
"It's a nice thing for me because of Liverpool's tradition in Europe," he says of that singular honour. "Liverpool is such a big club, it's hard to make history or do something nobody else has done before. That's why Istanbul was special, because people will still talk about that in 50 years. It is only when you look back at games like that, you realise what you've achieved. And by that time, it's gone."
That 2005 final will only be gone for Carragher if his recording on Sky+ ever wears out through overuse. He needs no excuse to watch it or talk about a truly extraordinary night. "No matter what I do from now on, there'll always be Istanbul. I think it's got to be – without being biased – one of the greatest games of all time, up there with Real Madrid v Eintracht Frankfurt, Brazil in the 1970 World Cup final. There's probably four or five games in history that everybody remembers, and we played in one of them.
"I was going through the Milan team the other day – Cafu, Maldini, Kaka, Shevchenko – it dawned on me what an achievement it was to beat them, however we'd done it. If we had won 1-0, let alone come back from 3-0 down, it would have been incredible. I'm desperate to win the League, but for me the European Cup is bigger, it really is. You know that if you win the European Cup you've had an unbelievable season."
It is an assessment that Rafa Benitez relies on, together with last season's losing final and one FA Cup win, to underpin his reputation and popularity. Why the disparity, though, between achievement in Europe and in the Premier League? "The manager's great tactically at setting us up for one-off, knockout games," Carragher says. "And being honest, we're probably more suited as a team to European football.
"I think the Premiership is more about power and pace, and we don't have huge pace in the team. It's something we can improve on. What we do have is a lot of good thinkers in the team, players who know the game. And because it's a bit slower in Europe, it suits us. Also if you want to win the European Cup, you've got to be good at the back, and the manager drills that into us every day. If you have a bad 15 or 20 minutes defensively, and concede a couple of goals, you're out."
The last point is a relevant insight, after neighbours Everton did just that in their Uefa Cup tie with Fiorentina and may now pay the penalty. The same should apply to Inter, who thought they had withstood Liverpool at Anfield even after Marco Materazzi was sent off, but conceded to Dirk Kuyt and, crucially, Gerrard in the final few minutes.
Carragher would still like an away goal to make sure. "I didn't think they played badly in the first leg. They defended brill-iantly until we scored. We didn'treally open them up or create that many chances. So if they thought they were poor, God knows what they will be like next week." Completing his century with a first visit to the San Siro, he is about to find out.
Watch Internazionale host Liverpool at the San Siro on Tuesday, Sky Sports 2, 7.45pm kick-off
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