Liverpool has been and gone. On Wednesday night I went to the MCG to see the club play Melbourne Victory with a group of friends. Most of us are ignorant of the game's subtleties but were drawn to the match by a sense of theatre, and an idea that if we turned our backs on the Liverpool stars we'd be missing the biggest show in town.


We were all of a generation whose interest in big football grew not from playing soccer, but from the proliferation of pay TV, which in recent years has heightened our exposure to the glamour and skill of soccer's stars.


So we walked from Richmond station open-minded, and went anti-clockwise towards the Members Stand to better take in the scene. I extended a $20 note to a vendor and received a souvenir program and $5 in return. The match had drawn opportunists onto the street, and a man dressed as Nintendo's Mario stepped across our path playing the video game jingle on his guitar - even the buskers understood that this was a day for big brands.


We had to give way for almost a minute outside gate three, and stood like rocks in a red river that washed around us chanting and singing. The members entry resembled a station platform in wartime, with men and women standing with craned necks, scanning the crowd for lost faces. It was possible to imagine that others were there, as we were, to see what the fuss was about. But as the game approached it was clear that most were impassioned Liverpool people, and we wondered if somewhere in town there has been a giant curtain drawn on the soccer scene. Only English soccer seems capable of eliciting this kind of distant intimacy.


While we queued we conjured our best memories of watching SBS's Premier League highlights and the thrill of sitting up at night to watch the Brazilian players humiliate their defenders in the 1998 World Cup. And particularly through the sound of the wonderful EPL commentator Martin Tyler, English soccer had coloured the mosaic of our sporting lives. It had been there it seemed, without ever being here, and with this thought we entered feeling glad about things.


The sense of an individual tends to be intensified when they're paid incredible sums of money, and the presence of Steven Gerrard, the famous England midfielder, was outmatched only by that of Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez, whose genius sets him in a golden cage of his own. Suarez, looking bored, was notably distant and played only briefly, but Gerrard, probably aware of his role in the occasion, was more active and interesting.


There was a great hum and throb in the stadium before the Liverpool players were announced, and an electro beat was pulsing out of the PA, which seemed to elevate with its bass line a sense of impending cool and class from the Liverpool men.


Some in the crowd booed Victory when it trotted out. It was a strange thing to see a home team reduced to a prop for the English club, but Liverpool fans seemed to project themselves as the occupants of an imaginary Anfield, and the effect was tremendous.


We'd underestimated the power and reach of Liverpool's rituals. Clearly, it's a marketer's dream, pure red in uniform and brand ethos. It has capitalised on an era of strength, and created a feeling a unity in voice and fashion. Flashing on the screens were bizarre and persistent references to bygone eras when the great club dominated. It felt as if the club was still trying to sell success through players long retired - perhaps there's something to it.


In the Southern Stand there was a giant black-and-white portrait of Liverpool's famed manager Bill Shankly, the former miner who dragged the club from division two in England into its international golden years. ''Some people treat football as a matter of life and death,'' he once said. ''That's disappointing to me, because it's much, much more important than that.''


And perhaps more anticipated than the match itself was the opportunity to sing You'll Never Walk Alone, the old show tune adopted by Liverpool in the '60s when Gerry and the Pacemakers had a cover that went to No. 1 in England. The song has a kind of antithetical sway to a football match. It's slow and easy in the beginning and the melody conjures well-remembered summers, or hammocks swaying in the breeze: ''At the end of the storm there's a golden sky, and the sweet silver song a of a lark.''


But by mid-song the octave rises, and the refrain, ''You'll never walk alone'', begins to widen, and a great nostalgic gap opens between the lines. You sense a host of Liverpool's historic moments pouring into those spaces, and its singers, buoyed by this mass moment of uniform, reach up and out for its crescendo. The choir was 95,000 strong, and the sound was intimidating, a startling reminder of soccer's atmosphere and sense of occasion.


The match I was largely indifferent to. But when Gerrard ghosted over a ball in midfield and opened a space for himself to receive the through ball, the MCG was a briefly clenched fist while it waited for his shot to wave the back net and fulfil some measure of its expectation. Gerrard, not averse to a sense of theatre, and in spite of the dull nature of large portions of the match, blew a kiss to his adoring Melbourne crowd, and punched the sky. It seemed to make them happy.