Jamie Carragher has called former team-mate Djibril Cisse a “f*****g spaceman” when revealing how he was right at the centre of the chaos in the Liverpool dressing room at half-time during their 2005 Champions League final win over AC Milan.
The Reds were infamously trailing 3-0 at the break and had already been forced into making one substitution, with Vladimir Smicer coming on for the injured Harry Kewell.
Rafa Benitez brought on Didi Hamann at the interval for the injured Steve Finnan, having initially told Djimi Traore he was coming off for the German.
However, the confusion didn’t stop there with Cisse thinking he was also coming on, leading to Liverpool temporarily preparing to take on Milan with 12 men for the second half before the error was spotted.
“What Benitez did, and it was his great strength, was changing things in the game and not getting too emotional,” Carragher recalled to The Overlap Live . “That was his big strength.
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“He made substitutions and changed the formation. He told Djimi Traore to go and get in the shower. His English wasn’t great so he just came in and said, ‘Traore, shower.’
“But Steve Finnan was in with the physio and the physio said he couldn’t continue. And we’d already made one sub in the first half.
“So he asked Traore to get out the shower and he had to put a new kit on. Finnan is fuming because he thinks he can carry on.
“But in Rafa’s head he’s thinking, ‘If I leave Finnan on, I’ll have to bring him off after 20 minutes, and then all my subs are gone.’
“When I think back to how he thought then, in a really high-pressure moment, that’s what his great strength was a manager.”
He continued: “But for whatever reason, Djibril Cisse thought he was coming on. He was a f*****g spaceman, he was!
“He’s got his gear off and he’s in his kit, so Rafa, despite the fact I’m saying how cool and calm he was, has done the three-at-the-back, he’s put Hamman on and, out of the corner of his eye, he must have seen Cisse.
“Before you know it, you’re thinking,’ 3-0 down against AC Milan but we’ve got Benitez, great manager’, and you look at the set-up and the tactic and you think, ‘You know what, we’ve got half a chance here.’
“And then you count the men and we’ve got 12 on the f*****g board! He had put Djibril on the right-wing.”
Cisse would eventually join the action in the 85th minute, having seen Liverpool miraculously fight back to be drawing 3-3, and scored the Reds’ second penalty in their shootout win in Istanbul.
And while Carragher got his hands on the European Cup that night in 2005, he admits Liverpool were very lucky to end up on the winning side.
“You take six minutes out of 120 minutes (of the final), so for 114 minutes AC Milan gave one of the best performances you’ll ever see in a European Cup final,” he said.
“I’m just very lucky that I’ve got that medal and that I played in that famous game, because some of the players that haven’t got that medal are some of the greatest to have ever played the game.
“You need a bit of luck, to be in the right place at the right time, and I was that night. I’m a very lucky boy.”
