Tens of thousands of Liverpool fans turn Paris red

Liverpool supporters, most without tickets, thronged Paris on Saturday, turning avenues and cafe terraces red in their team's colours ahead of the Champions League final against Real Madrid. With each club allocated space for just 20,000 supporters in the Stade de France, tens of thousands of the travelling fans were without tickets. The ticketless red-shirted Liverpool supporters packed into a fanzone set up in the east of the city where the match will be shown on giant screens later.

They jumped up and down, chanting: "Allez, Allez, we've conquered all of Europe, from Paris down to Turkey." They were greeted to an appearance on stage by club legend Kenny Dalglish, who scored the winning goal in the 1978 final. "What a wonderful way to finish the season, lifting the European Cup," Dalglish told the crowd which stretched back along a tree-lined avenue. Many of the supporters had travelled to France on Thursday.

"Look by yourself, we've taken over all of Paris!" Rohan Sood, 22, from London, told AFP. He wasn't going to let the absence of a ticket spoil his day. "It's a crazy atmosphere everywhere we go we see Reds.

Even without tickets it's worth it so much." "Sun, cold beers, all our friends, a nice big screen, what else do we need? Thank you Paris for the warm welcome," said Henry Coyle, 52, a Liverpool fan from Belfast in Northern Ireland. There were tough decisions to be made for the Carter family, as only their eldest son had managed to obtain a ticket for the match. His mother Lucy, a 47-year-old doctor, said her other child and her husband had come along anyway.

"For me the warm-up, all the songs is definitely the best part. I find the game too nervy for me!", she said. Richie Stuart from Liverpool and his friends