Summary
Untold UK: Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul adroitly captures the magic of the beautiful game at its most dramatic and unpredictable, even if it occasionally succumbs to sentimentality.
In 2005, Liverpool won the UEFA Champions League. This, alone, is a fairly robust achievement for an English club, but the fact that Liverpool entered the dressing room 3-0 down at half time to a fantastic AC Milan side, only to pull off a comeback for the ages in the remaining 45 minutes, is a big enough deal to be the focus of the latest Untold UK documentary, Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul.
Aptly titled, the documentary has a slightly more complex mandate than the first in this subseries, which focused on the career of Jamie Vardy. That one kind of spoke for itself. Vardy’s eccentric personality provided a chugging narrative engine, and while he wasn’t the only component of a history-making underdog Leicester City side, he was very much the centrepiece. Liverpool’s victory in Istanbul was more of a team effort. The struggles of bringing it about were more internalised, confined to the inside of a dressing room and the minds of players in the microcosm of a moment. Vardy’s career played out across several seasons, culminating in a big payoff in 2015. This Liverpool side, firmly under the cosh, made history in less than an hour.
That’s the great triumph of this documentary. It gets that. It understands that recounting what happened – even showing what happened – in surface-level terms isn’t enough. We have to understand what was going on in the minds of the players who, after 45 minutes, had been utterly embarrassed and dismantled by what was, at least on paper, a superior footballing side. It has to communicate the gravity not only of what happened, but also of what might have happened if things were slightly different – what all of the available evidence suggested was going to happen.
In football, 3-0 isn’t an unassailable scoreline. But it’s a big enough one to feel out of reach, especially given the gulf in quality that seemed to have emerged between the teams by half-time. What’s beautiful about football is, in many ways, what is tapped into here, a vague, almost intangible quality, a resilience and a determination and a togetherness that forms as belief begins to creep back in. Each goal – Gerrard, Smicer, Alonso – injects new hope and energy. Each is a private, personal battle being fought on the world stage.
I’ve always maintained that live, high-level sport is the best storytelling medium in the world, and it’s documentaries like Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul, or at least the story it’s telling, that vindicate me. There really is nothing quite like it. The inherent drama of a deciding penalty shootout is, even twenty years later, even more riveting than ever, given the additional emotional context provided by both sides.
And that’s another thing. While calling on Liverpool legends who were there and lived that moment, the documentary also shares the insights of the Milan players who were there and had to watch it happen against their will. We return, inevitably, to that intangible quality, to the idea that even the “better” team, already firmly in control, can find hope slipping out of their reach just when victory seemed so certain. These are ideas that are fundamental to the very essence of what it means to be human; to be an athlete, a fan, a winner, a loser, and a spectator.
If I’m putting a bit grandiose a point on it, so too does the film, which sometimes gives in to the usual cheap and sentimental parlour tricks that a story like this doesn’t need. It’s prone to overlooking the storytelling power of the sport itself, inclined to distrust the significance of the moment. The fear is perhaps of not living up to the title of Untold, but that has never been applied especially precisely anyway. Most of the stories and scandals the series has covered have been told time and again. What matters is not what happened, per se, but how and why it happened, and what was going through the minds of those who were there when it did.
Football is often described as being bigger than just a sport, which is invariably true for most of the people who love it. But for Liverpool fans, what happened in Istanbul was the beautiful game writ large, proof that the seemingly impossible could be brought about by sheer force of will. After this season, that’s the kind of reminder Liverpool fans could make use of. But the value of the victory itself remains endlessly relevant to all.
