10 days before the match.

Apparently no hope of getting tickets anywhere; emails arriving every day from all over the world from people trying to buy them.

8 days to go.Tickets go on sale at Anfield to people who have already attended 8 (!) CL games and the day after for those who've been to 6 and promptly sell out. We make a couple of bids on ebay but our limit is being left out of sight with people paying €400 and more. The limp-wristed Milanese send 7000 of their contingent back but they are snapped up too. Despair.

Six days

Out of the blue, a Chelsea fan calls and offers two tickets at face value! He's bought them through UEFA on the (mistaken) assumption that Chelsea would beat us in the semi and doesn't want to go. The only condition he makes is that we don't resell them - so we bite his hand off. Public thanks to you, mate. So now all we have to do now is book flights and rooms.

5 days.

We're lucky the demand for flights from Germany isn't great and manage to get a reasonable flight out for the Wednesday but no chance of coming back Thursday; the best we can find is Business Class on Friday. Oh well, it'll have to do.

Now for the hotel. Istanbul is a huge city and we have internet access so no problems there, eh? Just book it. Easy. Several hours and dozens of attempts later it looks like every room in the Middle East has gone. Mary and Joseph job.

Sleeping on the street is not a charming prospect so we decide to go for the radical solution and phone a couple of hotels direct. First attempt - bingo! Yes sir, of course sir, pleasure to be of service sir, 240 euros sir. Oh well, it'll have to do. Hope those tickets arrive on Monday.

2 days to go.

They arrive, we're off!

Match day - getting there.

Up at sparrow-fart and on the road at six. Arrive at Stuttgart. Drink is taken.The flight is uneventfull.More drink is taken. Arrive in Istanbul. Milan's supporters are directed to the left, Liverpool's to the right – the Turkish authorities are taking crowd control very seriously and keeping the rival fans on separate continents – a trick you can only do in Istanbul.

We know the hotel is miles from the airport and we're not going to get diddled by those wily oriental taxi drivers so we decide to take the train. Coppers are everywhere, they don't speak English but are very friendly and helpful and signal "stay on until the terminus." We bottle out twice and get out and ask again and get told the same again.

So we get to the city centre and show our bit of paper to a taxi driver, forget to haggle when he says 10 Lire and the journey begins in earnest.Traffic lanes mean absolutely nothing; if there's room for five abreast with a millimetre clearance then they go for it. As fast as possible and with much sounding of horns. Ali drives us round in a circle for 15 minutes and then drops us on a corner about a mile from where we started. “It's just down there” he gesticulates. Funnily enough, he's right.

We plough into the hotel. The manager's a nice bloke, says our twin room isn't ready yet but we can can have a double room to chill out in and they'll move our stuff later. Fair enough. We shower, drink is taken. About 4 o'clock the phone rings; it's the manager. If we want to see the match we should get a move on - free buses are leaving Taksim Square now. It's nearly six hours to kick off but we think “what the hell?” Taksi to Taxim. Another honking nightmare. Taksim looks the part though, thousands of scousers. We pile on one of the buses for the Ataturk Olympic Stadium, the Pride of Istanbul.

To be accurate, it's the pride of twenty miles outside the outskirts of Istanbul, joined to the city by a twenty-mile traffic jam. After a couple of hours of wondering why the other lane, like a supermarket queue, always moves faster than yours, it's getting seriously close to kick-off time, so we get out and join the throng of pedestrians that's easily outpacing the buses. It's a long walk but we make it. The programmes are sold out, there's nothing to eat or drink but we're there, boys and girls.

We're f****ing well there!

The match

We won't attempt to describe the game - you've seen it. Seventy thousand fans. Two thirds Liverpool, a quarter neutral and a sprinkling of hapless Italians. Istanpool! Three hours of despair, ecstasy, disappointment, hope and anxiety later and Stevie

lifts the cup. Not a dry eye in the house and not a vocal chord in

working order. But we manage to raise the roof one more time. As a memorable banner says: "normal service has been resumed".

The night

The journey back is just as bad as the journey out; it's about four thirty by the time the thousand or so buses arrive back in Istanbul, twelve hours after our last beer. So the collective thirst that descends on the bars is of awe-inspiring proportions. Fair do's to the city's gastronomy though, they're not in the least bit fazed and start serving pints double-time. Our hotel kitchen is closed but the waiters just nip up the street and fetch kebabs from the one next door. We're just getting stuck into the second or third pint (the first one doesn't touch the sides going down) when the bloke in the tower starts yodelling into his microphone - the muezzim calling the faithful to the day's first prayers. It's culture shock; we continue to drink in respectful silence. It does remind us that we've been at it for about twenty-six hours though and we call for the bill.

And that's when we realize the pick-pockets have been at work: it's a sinking feeling to put your hand in your back pocket and find no wallet there. Oh well, it could be worse - we haven't been arrested or beaten up. With the eternal optimism of the happily drunk we agree to sleep for two hours and catch the end of breakfast.

Day three

Well, we narrowly miss breakfast by about five hours and have a leisurely late lunch in the Casbah. Not many Italians to be seen at all and those few brave souls who do show their faces have to put up with a fair bit of verbal but the mood is very mellow and there's no bother. The day continues with a leisurely stroll around town avoiding the famous blue mosque. All the locals know at least one word of English: 'Liverpool' - although how they knew we're Brits is a mystery. Perhaps it's because Dave has a Liverpool top on, a Mohican haircut and 'LFC' painted on his temples.

Unhurried drinking continues and later on we have a Döner kebab to remind us of home. After that we fancy a change and switch to canned beer in the room.