By Chris Rowland.

No season had ever started in circumstances like this one. For any club.

For the first season since Liverpool’s debut in 1964/5, there was no European football, as 21 consecutive seasons of involvement came to an end following the post-Heysel ban.

For the first time in the club’s history, a player-manager was taking the reins. He’d never managed before.

But most of all, the club was wrestling with the fall-out of a cataclysmic disaster less than three months before the new season began.

The shadow of Heysel darkened not only Liverpool. Its shadow spread across the entire game, in England and abroad, its consequences yet to be calculated.

Inauspicious scarcely does it justice. That the season culminated in Liverpool achieving something that even this illustrious high-achiever had never done before or since mow looks all the remarkable in the sharp relief of hindsight.

That’s without even mentioning the first ever Merseyside FA Cup Final.

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