Yokohama v Al Ain: Kewell, Crespo and the ghosts of Istanbul ahead of ACL final

It’s been almost 20 years, but there’s still a consensus across football that no final, matching club versus club on the international stage, has quite had the drama and suspense of the so-called Miracle of Istanbul. It finished Liverpool 3, AC Milan 3, with the English team seizing victory in the Uefa Champions League showpiece on penalties at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium. Liverpool had trailed 3-0 at half time.

To have been there, in late May 2005, as a reporter feels a privilege. To have been part of the winning side is evidently a useful endorsement for a young manager seeking to cajole and inspire belief in his players that no cause is ever lost.

When Harry Kewell, barely two months into his stint as head coach of Yokohama F Marinos, made studied reference to his own experience in the winning Liverpool side in Istanbul, in order to lift the spirits of his Marinos players after they lost the first leg of their Asian Champions League semi-final to Ulsan, it may have had some effect, although the Marinos comeback he oversaw evoked that famous night in Turkey rather too closely for his comfort.

Like Liverpool in Istanbul, his Marinos scored three goals to launch a comeback in last month’s semi-final second leg. Just as in the 2005 Champions League final, the pendulum was swinging wildly. The semi finished 3-3 on aggregate, the Japanese club squeezing past their Korean rivals only via shoot-out and booking their date with Al Ain in the final.

"I was part of a special team,” Kewell said of Liverpool’s high-wire, comeback kings of 19 years ago. “It is a team that, on that night, was able to come back from a scenario where a lot of people thought it was dead and buried."

Kewell’s own role in Istanbul was, in fact, marginal