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Crystanbul was nothing new; Liverpool are past masters of the three-goal comeback. Whether provocateurs or patsies, they’ve been involved in some of the great turnarounds of the modern age, a narrative device revisited to the point where it’s something of a cliché. The entire dramatic seam has been mined. May’s meltdown at the tail end of last season’s title race quickly became, thanks to some grade-A punning, the perfect companion piece to the miracle of Istanbul back in 2005. No need to tell either story again. Polar opposites, beautifully crafted bookends, take your pick, there’s something there for everyone.
Liverpool’s first great three-goal comeback of the modern era was performed in January 1994, against Manchester United at Anfield. United needed only 23 minutes to storm into a three-goal lead, Steve Bruce, Ryan Giggs and Denis Irwin the scorers. Liverpool took another 15 minutes to claw their way right back into it, Nigel Clough twice threading home from exploratory range. Neil Ruddock nutted the equaliser with 11 minutes to go, wheeling away in pain rather than celebration, clutching his big, brave, confused face. After the match, a livid Alex Ferguson sacked Peter Schmeichel after a full and frank exchange of views during which the keeper was blamed for the capitulation, on account of his goal kicks repeatedly flying straight to Ruddock. Fergie eventually simmered down, perhaps upon realising his team were still 21 points ahead of Liverpool in the league, heading inexorably for another title.
Pyrrhic for Liverpool, who suddenly realised their new underdog role in the scheme of things, but at least they had a little fun. There wasn’t so much to be found when they hauled back Basel in the 2002/03 Champions League. Gerard Houllier’s side needed a victory to make it through the groups, but capitulated woefully in the first half, falling 3-0 behind within 29 minutes. A young Steven Gerrard was hooked at half time, and Liverpool mounted a staunch comeback. Quickfire goals from Danny Murphy and Vladimir Smicer gave them hope, but despite Michael Owen’s 84th-minute equaliser, Liverpool were out. Basel went through instead.
Shipping three-goal leads, then, need not be totally injurious to one’s health. So here’s Liverpool at the Dell in the third game of the 2000-01 season, three goals to the good against Southampton after an hour, with Owen in his youthful pomp. Enter ageing Saints genius and morning McDonald’s customer Matt Le Tissier, who made up for a muffin-muncher’s mobility with good old-fashioned speed of thought. His teasing crosses and corners were too much for Liverpool’s supposedly parsimonious defence, Jamie Carragher all over the shop at left back. “Latvia’s Michael Owen”, the diminutive Marian Pahars, scored an easy header on 73 minutes, Tahar El Khalej added a second with a clever back header on 85, and Pahars forced home the equaliser in injury time. Houllier was “very angry”, though refrained from sacking Sander Westerveld on the spot, Fergie style. That move was another 12 months down the line.
But you could argue the collapse did Liverpool a favour in the long run. They were only three games into the new season, but very fragile of mind after a decade of misery in the league, so there was already a sense that they’d made a fatal error in gifting early, vital ground to Arsenal, Manchester United and Leeds. Oh well, perhaps it’ll be best to put most effort into the cups.
Ah hold on, here’s another Liverpool match featuring a three-goal comeback: the second, less-famous, 4-3 with Newcastle United, in March 1997. Newcastle came to Anfield looking to avenge their painful loss there in April 1996, the to-and-fro classic which had gone a long way to costing them a first title in nearly 70 years. But they made a proper pig’s lug of it. In a staggeringly one-sided first half, Jamie Redknapp ran the show in arguably his best-ever performance for Liverpool, his exquisite through ball sending Robbie Fowler away to make it 3-0 just before half time. An irate young Newcastle fan sauntered up to the visitors dug-out and whistled his black-and-white shirt into manager Kenny Dalglish’s mush. No way to treat a king.
For the second half, Dalglish flung on David Ginola, and Newcastle threw caution to the wind. Much good it did them, mind, as they continued to sputter along without causing Liverpool too much bother. But David James was never really on his game during his years on Merseyside, and so there was always hope for the opposition. He fumbled a weak Keith Gillespie speculator into the net with 19 minutes to go, then with four minutes left Faustino Asprilla lobbed him. Two more minutes had elapsed when Warren Barton rammed home after James had half-parried an Asprilla snapsnot. The majority of the Anfield crowd, stunned, cursed their presumption, as did the kid who had earlier thrown away his top.
But once again Newcastle hearts would be broken in injury time at the Kop end, Stig Inge Bjornebye crossing from the left for Robbie Fowler to head home. This time the celebrations, which had been joyfully manic in 1996 when Stan Collymore lashed home, were mainly the product of relief. “To have to score in the last minute after the way we played was ridiculous,” sighed Roy Evans. The visitors were just as downhearted. “The best that can be said about Newcastle,” observed our man, the legendary David Lacey, “is that having threatened for most of the evening to lose in the passive mood adopted by Dalglish, they ended up going down more in the cavalier spirit of Kevin Keegan.”
A proper study in futility, that one. But we can’t be picking on Liverpool’s habit of shipping three-goal leads yet again, so here’s another example of the futile three-goal comeback. It’s the best second-tier play-off final in history, the easy-on-the-eye 1993 affair between Glenn Hoddle’s Swindon Town and Brian Little’s Leicester City. It was one of those wonderful occasions where both teams went at it with a great passion; listen to co-commentator David Pleat’s excitable giggle when Nicky Summerbee nearly reduced all the Wembley hoardings to splinters, a common-or-garden tap into touch restyled as a nuclear missile launch, only with added force and provocation. Lovely! This was on from the off.
The first 45 minutes were fun but relatively subdued. Close to half time, Leicester could have taken the lead through David Oldfield, shooting on the turn towards the bottom left corner. Swindon flooded upfield and actually did, Craig Maskell guiding a clever backheel into his manager’s path, Hoddle blootering home from the edge of the box. And then after the break, all manner of lunacy. Maskell got one himself with an unstoppable lash across Kevin Poole, then Shaun Taylor headed home on 53 minutes amid confusion in the Leicester box. Swindon were surely in the Premier League.
Not yet, not quite yet. With just over an hour to go, Steve Walsh planted a header on the right-hand post, and Julian Joachim thrashed the rebound home. It suddenly felt back on, with Swindon visibly starting to panic. Which raises the question: why do three-goal comebacks not happen more often? What initially looks like a consolation goal at 3-1 can so easily, to borrow a phrase from 2005 Champions League final commentator Clive Tyldesley, put a grain of doubt in the back of the opposition’s mind. It only then takes another for the alarm bells to ring and the knees to rattle.
So to borrow another Tyldesleyism from that night in Istanbul: hello, hello, here we go. On 68 minutes, Walsh headed past a flapping Fraser Digby. Swindon lost the collective noggin. A mere 60 seconds later, Mike Whitlow drove into a cavernous gap down the inside-left channel and slipped the ball inside for Steve Thompson, who took a calm touch to sashay into the box before flicking an insouciant effort into the bottom right! A picturebook goal to celebrate one of the great comebacks in English football history, all completed within 12 breathless minutes.
But it was all for naught. Kevin Poole tapped Steve White on the shoulder with six minutes to go, allowing David Elleray to award the softest of penalties. Paul Bodin calmly slotted away the penalty – this was six months before his career-defining miss from 12 yards for Wales against Romania in the World Cup qualifiers – and Swindon were up, after all. Well done, Paul! At this point, Leicester still hadn’t won a game at Wembley in six attempts, counting four FA Cup finals and the previous year’s play-off final. However, they’d only need another 12 months to break that particular duck, third time lucky in a play-off triptych. Wales, meanwhile, are still waiting for their second World Cup appearance. Oh Paul!
3) Burkina Faso 4-4 DR CONGO (Africa Cup of Nations, third-place final, 1998)
So what constitutes a three-goal comeback? Coming back from three goals down to earn a draw, obviously. Ask Luis. But what about winning after giving someone that 0-3 head start? You need four goals for that. But you’re coming back from “three” down. The number three’s doing an awful lot of work there. Similar logic could be applied to a turnaround from 0-2 for a 3-2 win, of course, three goals required and all, but that’s opening up a whole new can of worms. And while the only thing we’re sure about is that there’s huge gaps in our thinking, the bottom line is, our gaff, our rules. So here it is: you fall three goals behind, then you either win, draw or lose. You can like that definition, or bury your head in your shirt and sob uncontrollably. Up to you.
So four-goal comebacks – such as Charlton Athletic’s against Huddersfield Town in 1957, or QPR’s against Newcastle United in 1984 – don’t fall within our remit today, though you can at least read about them here. (What do you mean, we’re running out of ideas?) That four-goal rule does for Mali as well, who went into the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations as one of the hipsters’ choices, played appallingly in their opening match for 79 minutes against hosts Angola to go 4-0 down, and then staged a wholly improbable comeback to grab a 4-4 draw. It’s worth reading our man Tom Lutz’s typically pitch-perfect MBM of that one. (88 min: 4-2. “Too late? Yep.” 90+3 min: 4-3: “Too late? Yep-ish.” 90+4 min: 4-4: “Eh?”)
But perhaps that’s not as good as the 1998 third-place play-off anyway. This one saw gun-for-hire coach Phillipe Troussier’s luck run out in spectacular style. At the start of the decade, he’d earned himself the nickname The White Witchdoctor while managing ASEC Mimosas of Ivory Coast, having made a double substitution in a game while trailing 2-0 with two minutes to go; ASEC won 3-2 and then embarked on a winning run which culminated in the club’s first title for 10 years. He nearly took Ivory Coast to the 1994 World Cup, and helped Nigeria to qualify for France 98, before walking out over money. He then agreed to coach South Africa in France, but while waiting for the Coupe du Monde, a football itch needed to be scratched. So he took over tiny Burkina Faso, who were hosting the 1998 Africa Cup of Nations.
Bingo! Amid delirious scenes, he rode the Stallions to the semi-finals, by far their best performance in the competition at the time. They finished in a highly respectable fourth place – yet it should have been so much better. They were 3-0 up in the third-place play-off against DR Congo with 14 minutes to go. The Congolese pulled one back, but the hosts restored their three-goal advantage with four minutes left. A done deal at 4-1, surely? Sure enough, Congo rattled in three goals in the remaining time, then ended up winning on penalties by the symbolically sickening score of, yes, 4-1. So much for Troussier’s witch-doctor skillset, though he did go on to lead South Africa to semi-respectability in France, and Japan to the second round at their own World Cup four years later.
4 MIDDLESBROUGH 4-1 Basel (Uefa Cup semi-final, second leg, 2006) And 5) MIDDLESBROUGH 4-2 Steaua Bucharest (Uefa Cup semi-final, second leg, 2006)
Steve McClaren won the Dutch league in 2010 with Twente Enschede, and right now looks like taking Derby County back to the Premier League. Hats off! Yet he’s still defined in this country by his failure to lead his countrymen to Euro 2008. Brollies up! Hardly a surprise, given the size, profile and nature of the England job, though the pelters he still receives from some quarters is unfairly disproportionate. That was Twente’s only title in nearly half a century of trying, after all. He also presented Middlesbrough with their first major trophy, the 2004 League Cup. And few outside Manchester now reference how he was Fergie’s right-hand man when United landed their famous 1999 treble. That’s not a half-bad CV, huh? And fair’s fair, Croatia and Russia were decent enough in 2007.
Also rarely remembered these days is one of the greatest European runs in English football history: Middlesbrough’s giddy romp to the 2006 Uefa Cup final. This involved not one, but two comebacks from three down, both performed within 21 days of each other. (So yes, they needed four goals on both occasions, thanks to the away goals rule, but we refer you again to our wholly arbitrary rules and regulations. Think of these as deluxe three-goal comebacks.)
The first came in the quarter-final against Basel, with Boro having lost the first leg at St Jakob-Park 2-0 and shipped a tap-in during the opening exchanges of the return. Three goals down, they set about the Swiss with three world-class strikes: a romp down the left channel by Mark Viduka followed by a shot into the top right; a delicate circumvention of goalkeeper Pascal Zuberbühler down the same channel by the same player; and a long-range whip into the top left past a flat-footed Zuberbühler by Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. The winner was the least spectacular of the lot, Fábio Rochemback’s low fizzer parried by Zuberbühler, who then failed to stop Massimo Maccarone driving the rebound into the bottom right. Some top-notch talent there; the Uefa Cup wasn’t always the second-rate shambles it is today.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice, they say, but of course we all know it does. The semi-final against erstwhile European champions Steaua Bucharest looked all over when the Romanians, following up their 1-0 home leg victory, scored twice within the first 24 minutes of the return at the Riverside. Boro were three adrift again. And once more, they overhauled the deficit, Maccarone again the last-minute hero, planting home a header from Stewart Downing’s left-wing cross. You couldn’t script it. Well, you could, but you’d have trouble selling your work to a production company.
Lightning doesn’t strike three times, they’re right about that. Boro fell three behind again in the final, against Sevilla, and that one ended 4-0. Another futile effort, perhaps, though this one gave Boro fans some story to tell the grandkids. And it also earned McClaren the England job, which in terms of cause and effect led him to that Dutch title, best look at it that way.
6) WEST BROMWICH ALBION 5-5 Manchester United (Premier League, 2013)
Alex Ferguson only started winning league titles at Manchester United after his team embarked on a famous three-goal comeback. They were 3-0 down at Sheffield Wednesday on Boxing Day 1992, despite having dominated the match in terms of chances. With only 23 minutes left on the clock, Brian McClair converted a Lee Sharpe cross. On 80 minutes, Choccy repeated the trick, Sharpe performing a wonderful Cruyff Turn. On 83 minutes, Peter Schmeichel denied David Hirst, who had been put clean through by Chris Waddle. And a minute later, Eric Cantona scrambled another Sharpe cross home.
“We rode our luck,” admitted Wednesday manager Trevor Francis. “United were creating so many chances and not putting them away, it seemed they might never score. Once the first went in, it was obvious they would be back for more.” (The wonder, again, that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.) United had displayed a new-found grit and tenacity – this was one of the first famous Fergie comebacks – as well as sheer quality – it was Cantona’s third game for his new club, and the first real sign that United had finally cracked the league-winning code. Their title credentials proven and belief bolstered, United would overhaul leaders Norwich City in the new year. That famous 26-year wait was over.
So it’s with a pleasing symmetry that Fergie’s valedictory match at the Hawthorns, 21 years later, ended with United shipping a three-goal lead. United, the new champions of England, were 5-2 up and coasting with nine minutes left to play. Five minutes later, Romelu Lukaku and Youssouf Mulumbu had shared three goals to haul the Baggies level. Ferguson had been denied what seemed certain victory in his 1,500th and final game in charge of United. A true genius, and yet the sport he had dominated for four decades insisted on having the last laugh, the final word. Hey, it happens to the best of them. The nearest football has ever got to DG Bradman, b Hollies, 0.
• Thanks to Paul Doyle and Rob Smyth
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