Two years ago, Niamh Charles was making her own way to a Champions League final, happy to have a precious ticket in her hands and booking flights to see her beloved Liverpool play Tottenham in Madrid’s Metropolitano Stadium.
‘Getting a ticket was the main thing and I just went as a fan, everyone did their own thing,’ she relates. ‘It was because I’d had 2005 that I knew what the Champions League was. I just wanted to be there.’
Her story of watching Steven Gerrard and the miracle of Istanbul is something else entirely. Charles was a five-year-old, allowed to stay up to watch the game with her family, gathered around the TV set in their home on the Wirral peninsula, as Rafael Benitez’s side turned the game round.