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Liverpool have enjoyed the services of players from the great continent of Africa for longer than you might realise.

Aside from current stars Mohamed Salah (Egypt), Sadio Mane (Senegal), Naby Keita (Guinea) and Joel Matip (Cameroon), you don't have to be too long in the tooth to remember the likes of Guinea's Titi Camara and Cameroon's Rigobert Song helping Gerard Houllier lay down the foundations of his red revolution as the twentieth century ticked into the twenty-first.

Bruce Grobbelaar, famed for his wacky antics and unconventional yet brilliant goalkeeping through the 1980s and early 90s, was born in South Africa and raised in Rhodesia - which is today Zimbabwe - before arriving at Liverpool as Ray Clemence's replacement via the unconventional route of Vancouver Whitecaps and Crewe Alexandra.

And those Reds who know their history will have heard of Berry Nieuwenhuys - the beloved 'Nivvy' - who followed his fellow South African, goalkeeper Arthur Riley, to Anfield in the early 1930s and enjoyed a 14-year, World War II-interrupted career which finished in style as he helped Billy Liddell, Bob Paisley, Albert Stubbins and co make the club the first post-war champions in 1946/47.

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So there was already a reasonably well-trod path from the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent to Anfield when in May 2002 Liverpool