The beautiful and the damned

Liam Mackey

Indeed, you could argue that Gerrard's comeback was even more unlikely than his team's second-half and extra-time performance against AC Milan. After all, in Istanbul Liverpool had merely to come back from the dead. Gerrard had further to travel he had to come back from the damned.

The sight of Liverpool fans burning the player's shirt gave rise to the excellent conspiracy theory that the whole saga was designed by the Liverpool marketing department to sell more replica kits. But, for a red-blooded Scouser who had spent his entire career at Anfield, the notion of going from hero to villain in the space of six weeks was clearly too painful to contemplate.