John Nicholson

Does an English club succeeding in Europe mean anything to you at all if you're not a fan of any of the clubs involved?

Would you rather see them beaten so that you can gloat, laugh, slag off and mock them? You hate Ronaldo so you want Man Utd to be beaten by Roma. Avram Grant is a miserable potato-man so you want Chelsea to lose; Arsene Wenger is a constipated, myopic whiner, so you want Arsenal to fail, Benitez is a boiled egg with a felt-tipped beard so you want them to fall flat on their arses. It's all about having a pop. It's all about making yourself feel good on the back of someone else's discomfort. Schadenfreude is King in 2008.

But it wasn't always so and if that's how you feel, you are starving yourself of the joy of big European nights. And no-one does big European nights like Liverpool Football Club.

You have to be of a certain age - which is just a euphemism for saying old - to remember when Liverpool were the dominant club, not just in England but in the world. During the '70s and '80s they were utterly imperious and in an era when you were more likely to see men walking on the moon than see overseas football, Liverpool were a global club attracting fans in the Far East and Scandinavia in large numbers like no other club. They cruised to eight league titles in 11 seasons and if they didn't win it, they almost always came second. At a time when the league was much tighter, sides more evenly matched and money mattered less than talent, they were almost unbeatable.

Their European nights are an important part of the history and culture of English football. On the pitch they were a ruthless football machine; aggressive, physical, cutting and always prepared to close a game down once they were a goal up. In the 1978/79 season they let in just 16 goals in 42 games in the league.

On the European stage they swept all before them in a flurry of fluffy perms, facial hair and fabulous football, winning four European Cups in seven seasons.

In those days, by and large, we all saw an English club's success in Europe as a success for the country as well. If Liverpool were playing Borussia Monchengladbach it was also England v West Germany, so their success was by extension a success for the country, even though the Liverpool side was often comprised of a lot of Scots, Irish and complimented by the occasional Welshy.

Liverpool's massive success on a European stage made us feel good about English football. Add to that the fact that when they didn't win a European Cup of some sort, Forest, Villa, Ipswich, Chelsea, City or Spurs did and you can see why England ruled European football for years. From the 1967/68 season when Manchester United beat Benfica at Wembley, with Best in all his hairiest rock 'n' roll glory, until Heysel 17 seasons later, there was only a couple of years when an English club didn't make the final of at least one of the European trophies. And more often than not once in the final, they won it. It was bloody great. It made us feel proud as a nation, though incidentally a by-product of this was to delude England fans that the international side should also sweep all before them - which it's taken decades of crapulous England performances to dislodge.

It may be annoying if you're 18 to see all the old ex-players and managers and commentators all stroking their chins and purring with excitement about 'big European nights at Anfield' but back when football was truly raw and exciting and not an exercise in large-scale corporate whoring, back when the club wasn't the plaything of capitalist attack dogs; back when 27,000 people stood on the Kop and ebbed and flowed like the sea up and down New Brighton beach; back when the flame-haired David Fairclough would come off the bench, tear down the right wing and put a game to bed, Liverpool defined what a big European night meant, the excitement, the romance, the tension and ultimately the success.

That all lives on in football's collective folk memory and it's why if you're of a certain age, even if you're not a Liverpool fan the rest of the season, there's a good chance you still feel well disposed towards them on such nights as we're about to witness on Tuesday.

Liverpool winning a big European game with the crowd singing at 130 decibels and the yellow glow of the floodlights illuminating an ink-black, rain-strewn, north-western sky, means all's right with the world, somehow. It's comforting to us old geezers. Everything is in its natural order. So big and profound were those nights in the 70s and 80s that everyone who witnessed them either in person or on TV, aches for football to be like that again. It went soul deep; wild and intense with the stink of life in our nostrils - even watching it on a Draylon settee in the front room of a cramped house in the chemical paradise of Stockton-on-Tees I could smell it and feel it in my bones.

Without doubt today's football fans are far less likely to support a club in Europe just because they're English. Indeed, sadly, it seems the vast majority want the English clubs to lose, just so they can rub their fans' noses in it. There is no altruism any more. Today, the dominant emotion is an urge to humiliate, mock and jeer other clubs' fans and players on whatever stage they play. Maybe emotions are confused by clubs being staffed with people from beyond these shores. Maybe the patriotism that English clubs' success engendered in that era is now too closely associated with the negative side of nationalism, or maybe fans don't any longer see clubs as having any local or indeed English flavour. Perhaps in this era of faux celebrity and uber materialism, such a nebulous notion as pride in the success of English clubs on a European stage is just out-moded and irrelevant. If so, that seems a shame. It was a great feeling.

I still want a British team to win in Europe no matter what I would usually feel about them in the league. It was hugely entertaining to see Colin Kazim-Richards beating Chelsea but that doesn't mean that I want Chelsea to lose the return game. United's calm dominance in Rome put me in mind of many of Liverpool's away games in Europe in their heyday when they walked out knowing how good they were and exactly how to win across two legs. If Arsenal were not playing an English side I would want them to win just as I did back in 1971/72 when the double-winning side were beaten 2-1 and 1-0 over two legs in the quarter-finals of the European Cup by the brilliant eventual winners Ajax, who had the genius Johann Cruyff playing for them.

But as good as the atmosphere might be at Old Trafford this week as they take on Roma, it will still be Anfield that the neutrals will look to for the essence of a big European night's football and I won't be alone in wanting Liverpool to win. A big Liverpool win in Europe is like spinning a golden oldie for my generation; like putting Radar Love by Golden Earring on a jukebox, it makes you feel good all over again, and it still rocks. As a child of the 60s, who grew up in the 70s and early 80s, Liverpool in Europe is synonymous with feeling good and the feel-good 1970s still reverberate around the terraces of Anfield deeply and profoundly in a way which their shambling, almost childish owners could never understand, and even though I'm in Amsterdam this week, I shall still feel it all over again. Liverpool's Big European Nights - and the capital letters are deliberate there - are part of the very DNA of English football.

Let's all enjoy these moments - enjoy which ever English clubs progress. Celebrate it. Don't let inter-club rivalries, bitterness and downright bigotry get in the way of a good time this week. There are enough weeks in the year to indulge in all that. This is European football, it's different, so embrace it, enjoy it. Come on baby, let the good times roll.