unrealistic optimism could best be described as an

'Shut your mouth' - Steven Gerrard dressing room incident made Liverpool star 'melt' after dream Anfield return.

‘Rafa is a Scouser’ - The night Liverpool fans showed their true colours as Anfield civil war raged.

That November Benitez, after being dismissively slapped down by Hicks over his wish to sign AC Milan’s Kahka Kaladze, gave a surreal press conference before the Reds’ trip to Newcastle in which when he repeated the phrase 'I am focused on training and coaching my team' 15 times and before the end of the month, Liverpool fans were marching in protest against the new owners over the public undermining of the manager they adored with speculation growing the owners wanted to replace him with Jurgen Klinsmann.

The cracks soon started to appear however as it emerged it hadn’t been capital from the Americans’ own pockets which had funded the spending sprees. Within three months, they were being feted by Reds fans as they walked around the pitch in Athens before Liverpool appeared in another Champions League final and, while AC Milan would exact revenge for Istanbul in the Greek capital, manager Rafa Benitez’s plea for the club to make a statement in the transfer market was heeded with close to £50m being splashed on the likes of Fernando Torres, Ryan Babel and Yossi Benayoun with another £23m forked out for Martin Skrtel and Javier Mascherano early the following year. The deal included a £215m pledge to build the new stadium on Stanley Park Liverpool had been talking about but struggling to get off the ground for years, with the new owners infamously promising to have a ‘spade in the ground within sixty days’, and crucially - less than two years after the Glazer family’s contentious takeover of Manchester United - a promise not to load the debt from the cost of their takeover on to the club as had happened at Old Trafford. Despite fleeting periods of success every half decade or so, the Reds lacked Old Trafford’s financial muscle to compete for the top prizes on a regular basis and when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in the summer of 2003, Liverpool owner David Moores was forced to reluctantly accept the club’s rivals were now operating in an economic stratosphere beyond his capabilities and he would have to sell.Īfter discussions over a possible sale to Redrow Homes owner Steve Morgan, Thai businessman Thaksin Sinawatra and then the Dubai International Capital investment group, a deal said to be in the region of £219m was struck in February 2007 for Hicks and Gillett - both of whom had experience running sporting franchises across the Atlantic - to take over. The advent of the Premier League era had seen Liverpool increasingly left behind as Manchester United in particular embraced and were well-positioned to take advantage of the game’s new commercial imperatives, rapidly becoming English football’s dominant force. The arrival of the new American owners had been met with significant if cautious optimism a little over three and a half years earlier. The catastrophic ownership of Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett had taken Liverpool to the brink of bankruptcy before Fenway Sports Group’s takeover helped lift the gloom and revitalise fortunes off and on the pitch, and this weekend marks the anniversary of one of the very lowest points before the Liver Bird began to rise again, phoenix-like, from the rubble. READ MORE: Liverpool player ratings as Roberto Firmino mixed bag and Alexander-Arnold awful

READ MORE: Trent Alexander-Arnold must face another threat after week gets worse for Liverpool right-back Yet in between those two agonising near-misses to end the club’s long wait for the holy grail of a 19th league championship, mercifully brought to a close after thirty long years by Jurgen Klopp and his men in 2020, Anfield suffered one of the most harrowing periods in the club’s long history during which its very existence was in real peril as the team hovered around the relegation placings. The most credible title challenge since the Reds’ 1990 triumph followed four years after that and in 2014 Liverpool went even closer to getting their hands on the Premier League trophy for the first time only for Brendan Rodgers’s side to fall heartbreakingly just short. As Ferris Bueller once pondered, life sometimes moves pretty fast and that has rarely been truer than during Anfield’s rollercoaster opening decade and a half of the twenty-first century.Īfter the underwhelming and under-achieving 1990s, Liverpool began the new era by winning an unprecedented cup Treble in 2001 before four years later lifting the club’s fifth European Cup in extraordinary circumstances after a miraculous fightback from three goals down against Italian giants AC Milan in Istanbul.

Unrealistic optimism could best be described as an