I am mostly bandwagonning on Cline’s fandom when it comes to Premier League teams as before Austin FC my main soccer knowledge was from the US National teams and the World Cup every 4 years. Since moving to Austin though I found that they had a Liverpool supporters group and i joined it early on to try and meet some people and learn more about Liverpool. I’ve gone to a few events with them but honestly hadn’t been greatly involved. About the time we had decided we couldn’t do this trip over Christmas I got an email from the Liverpool supporters groups listing games they had a chance to get tickets for and to register our interest. I let them know that the May 20th game against Aston Villa would work for us and we decided to plan our Scotland trip around that date if we were lucky enough to get them. A bit later they let us know we had gotten the tickets and we started planning this trip in earnest. Well today was the day that we would get to visit the legendary Anfield football stadium!

We got up and got ready and had breakfast at a little cafe next door to the hotel then proceeded to catch the bus over to Anfield. First thing on the agenda was a stadium tour we had booked so we got over there and wandered around a bit until time for our tour. The tour was fun. We got to see the players entrance to the building and the walkway onto the pitch. They then took us out pitch side and we got to walk along the sidelines and see the dugouts and the whole stadium from field level. They then took us over to the Kop stands (the main supporters stand).

The tour finished in the museum where we got to have a green screen picture with the premier league trophy. By the time we were done with the tour it was after noon so I went and bought a program and some souvenirs for a friend. Becky and I them headed over to the Hillsborough memorial and saw the crowd waiting for the player bus.

After realizing it would be about an hour waiting on the bus we decided to just find our entrance to the stadium and our seats. This was a little confusing due to imminent construction on the Anfield Road stand which we were in so we had to make a bit of a detour through a park and then found our entrance. I won’t go into a ton of detail on the game which ended in a 1 – 1 draw. We were seated right along the border with the huge Aston Villa away supporters section which was a little wild at times.

Definitely learned several new words and gestures which I assume were just polite British ways of saying hello. There was a bit of a moment after the match where a Liverpool fan ducked under the barrier and got into it with a couple of Villa supporters who ended up having to be dragged out by multiple security guards. One really cool thing is it was the final home game for several Liverpool players the most popular was Robert Firmino and he came in to much fanfare in the second half and secured the draw with a goal in the 89th minute! After the match they gave the departing players some gifts and all the players paraded around the whole stadium while kids played soccer on the pitch.

We headed out and trusted Google on the bus situation but I believe it didn’t know about rerouting due to the match and that left us waiting for way too long at two different bus stops and never seeing a bus. After a little over an hour and me getting too frustrated and letting it show I broke down and called and Uber and got us back to the hotel both of us tired, dehydrated and hungry. We freshened up and headed to a pub across the street for dinner which hit the spot and then back to the hotel to start packing for tomorrow mornings train to Edinburgh.