sport news GRAEME SOUNESS: Keeping Champions League final low-key will help Man City ... trends now

We arrive at the occasion which many people will view as the pinnacle of this football season, though in years to come we may remember this Champions League final for the dominance of one team. There is a real possibility Manchester City will have the game won by half-time.

I see the match against Inter in Istanbul being potentially an easier one for City than last Saturday’s FA Cup final against Manchester United, which was not exactly a struggle for them. 

I envisage City creating most of the chances and having the vast majority of possession. I said several weeks ago in these pages that I feel winning this trophy is City’s destiny. Nothing has happened since to dissuade me of that.

My own experience in finals like this with Liverpool tells me that maintaining as much of a sense of normality as possible will help City. 

We won three European Cups in my six years, and my first final was against Bruges at Wembley in May 1978, four months after I arrived at Liverpool. I was lucky to have joined a team of serial winners, the current European champions, whose approach that night was: ‘It’s just another game. Of course, we’re going to win it.’

There was no, ‘Let’s go down to London early. Let’s eat different food. Let’s stay in a different hotel, sleep in a different bed with strange pillows.’

The Liverpool coaching team kept it all extremely low-key and it was very much like us playing any other league game at Spurs, Arsenal or West Ham. We travelled on the Friday: a train from Liverpool Lime Street to Euston, where a bus awaited us. 

We stayed at the Hertfordshire hotel we often used, Sopwell House. It was only when we walked out at Wembley that this became something more than just another game of football. Of course, Wembley was a far more special occasion back then. A place reserved just for finals.

There was the same air of normality when we played AS Roma in their own city, six years later. We flew from Speke Airport on the Tuesday morning, on an Aer Lingus jet as always, and arrived to find they’d planned a press conference at Rome Airport. Joe Fagan, our manager, ignored that and we went straight to our hotel.

In the dressing room, half an hour before kick-off in Rome, Alan Hansen was telling one of his stories and had us doubled up, as usual. Big Al could tell you a story today, tell you the same one tomorrow with a few different details and still have you in stitches. He was the memory man and had an incredible recall of detail. I remember Fagan coming over and telling us, ‘By the way, you do know we’re playing a f*****g game in half an hour?’

Joe had done his talking — such as it was — that lunchtime at our hotel, an hour’s drive from the stadium. We were having lunch when he stood up, tapped a glass and asked the hotel staff to leave us. We were all wondering what he was going to say, as he gazed at the ceiling and searched for some words. ‘Big game tonight,’ he eventually said, looking for some back-up from Ronnie Moran.