Carlo Ancelotti has been singing the praises of the supporters of Liverpool in the lead-up to Wednesday’s visit by his Real Madrid.
By the manager’s reckoning, nobody sings praise better than the partisans of Anfield. As a visitor there, he told the British newspaper The Sun, he was always struck by the place’s powerful ambience.
As opponents, Liverpool have often been Ancelotti's nemesis, most famously on a May night in Istanbul 10 seasons ago. But it goes beyond that.
English football’s most successful European Cup club have more than once presented a pitfall in the career record of the man with more Uefa Champions League titles, three, than any other coach.
As a Roma player in 1984, Ancelotti missed his first shot at a European Cup final with a knee problem. Insult was added to injury when, just ahead of the final, he was told to ready himself for treatment the day after the match.
He suffered a long, nervous, deflating night before entering surgery. Liverpool won, at Rome’s home arena, on penalty kicks.
Ancelotti’s knees were never fully healed, but he did come back to win the European Cup as a player, with AC Milan, and was authoritative in their midfield in the victorious finals of 1989 and 1990.
Ancelotti was thus a member of the last club to have retained the trophy, one May to the next. His task now is to coach the first club to do so in nearly 25 years.
Meeting Liverpool in the group phase means removing the possibility of Ancelotti facing his regular nemesis in the last-16 phase.
Victories for Madrid in the next two weeks over Liverpool could also put the English side’s very participation in the knock-out phase in severe doubt.
Sideline Liverpool, and it would be interpreted as sweet payback for Ancelotti for the most crushing loss of his managerial career, when he was in charge of Milan, who rushed to a three-goal lead by half time of a Champions League final.
Levelled at 3-3 between the 54th and 60th minutes, they lost the 2005 final on penalties.
“A six-minute blackout,” as Ancelotti described it in his autobiography, The Beautiful Game of an Ordinary Genius. “The light had gone out and there was no time to change the bulb.” Ancelotti has never watched a replay of that game.
“I never will,” he says. “The process of psychological recovery was a long one.”
The steps of the treatment were often quite vivid. He remembers gathering his Milan players together at their Milanello base to watch Liverpool play Chelsea in the semi-final of the 2006/07 Champions League.
Together, “blood-thirsty”, they roared on Liverpool. Milan were involved in the other semi, and desperately wanted their nemeses to meet them in the final.
“For all practical purposes,” Ancelotti said, “the Kop of Anfield had been moved to Carnago, in the province of Varese, the heart of the rossoneri world. Liverpool team hats and toy trumpets were pulled out at one point. Liverpool made it. We all looked one another in the face and thought the same thing: ‘We’ve already won the final’.”
That confidence sprung from two years of pent-up determination to put right the collapse in Turkey. Sure enough, Milan beat Liverpool in the second of their shared finals.
If Ancelotti has lived a personal Liverpool odyssey, Real Madrid sense they may have an unhappy jinx with the Merseysiders. Madrid suffered one of their rare defeats in a European Cup final, in 1981, to Liverpool.
Five years ago, they were knocked out of the competition, 5-0 on aggregate, with Steven Gerrard scoring twice.
Madrid were at low ebb at that stage, very different from the current team. Though Ancelotti’s European champions will be without the world’s most expensive player, Gareth Bale, and vice captain Sergio Ramos, both injured, the XI he fields on Wednesday appear well inoculated against any effects of the Anfield ambience.
Madrid have won their past five Primera Liga matches, and scored 25 goals in that span.
Their defence of their European title so far reads: two wins out of two, with seven goals scored. And Cristiano Ronaldo, whose time with Manchester United put him through a crash course in the Anfield experience, is in the form of his life.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow us on Twitter at @SprtNationalUAE
