Thompson: Sweet Music To Be Back At Liverpool

LIVERPOOL are blessed to have the most emotional, inspiring anthem there is in modern football and we saw the powers of it again last weekend. Whether it was a plan to show our new American owners what Anfield can be like or whether it was to pull everyone together, we 'll never know but the idea to have Gerry Marsden singing before hand was absolutely inspired. Given the opposition we faced, I 've never heard 'You'll Never Walk Alone' sung with such gusto – if you excuse the pun, it hit the right notes. Happily, it proved inspirational because few would argue that Liverpool 's performance against Blackburn was the best of the season so far. It would be easy to say that Blackburn were poor but the intensity with which Liverpool started put them on the back foot; there was more urgency, better movement and we looked so much better from front to back. One slick passage of play summed that up – Fernando Torres played Maxi Rodriguez in, his cut back was met by Joe Cole and then Raul Meireles was on hand to try and turn in the follow up. During the opening weeks of the campaign, we haven 't had enough players getting into the box but maybe this is a sign of things to come as so many players looked like they are close to recapturing their form. Lucas, in particular, deserved a special mention; he hasn 't always been a crowd favourite but he was outstanding against Blackburn and dominated the game. Inevitably, Melwood will have had a much better feel to it in the last few days and I can remember a similar experience when I was at the club with Gerard Houllier and we found results desperately hard to come by. The vultures had been circling but we ended an 11-game sequence without a win by beating Southampton 1-0 in January 2003 and in the training sessions that followed, you could see the buzz around the place once again. I'm sure it is the same now – a weight had been lifted from everyone 's shoulders and all we can hope is that they can maintain the standards they set on Sunday.