ROBBIE FOWLER 25 YEARS SINCE GREATEST GAME
Our Anfield legend always hits the mark
IT’S 25 years since THAT game. You know, the one that has been voted the best in Premier League history.
Liverpool 4 Newcastle 3. A classic – and a pleasure to play in. It’s nice to be remembered for that game and great to have been part of something that has gone down in folklore.
It’s also pretty good to have scored a couple of decent goals in it, too – especially as it gets repeated so often!!
I have such incredible memories of that game. It was a ‘European Premier League night’, if you get my drift, a domestic game but with the noise and atmosphere of one of the legendary Euro occasions.
It was deafening, too. When Stan Collymore’s winner went in, it was pandemonium and the brain was scrambled, I swear. I do remember seeing Newcastle boss Kevin Keegan slumped over that advertising hoarding and our bench going crazy.
Roy Evans said that if all games were like that, then he wouldn’t last five years on Earth, never mind as Liverpool manager.
I’ve always had a
BIG MAC SPECIAL sense of it being a game that could have gone either way, but I’ve looked at the stats recently – and they tell a very different story.
We had far more shots, far more on target, far more possession and the stats say we were deserved winners. But it’s funny how the scoreline subtly changes history.
I’ve been asked plenty of times about the game and my best memory is the second goal, which started with keeper David James, went through Jason McAteer and Steve McManaman, and I smashed Macca’s pass into the net. It was the ultimate team goal.
You win a game like that and feel invincible, anything is possible. We both needed to win to stay in the title race and that night we truly believed we were right in it.
But then we lost at Coventry and that was it. After the adrenalin, the euphoria, the sheer epic scale of it, maybe a game three days later was always going to be difficult. We didn’t do quite enough to topple Manchester United.
But we’ll always have the small consolation of knowing on our day at least we were capable of producing the best game in Premier League history.
THE GOAL STANDARD Striker Collymore decides the match pulsating
at Anfield with his winner, leading
to pandemonium