To be honest there can’t be many people who haven’t heard of Liverpool Football Club; even non sports fans, like me, can spot their distinctive colours.

Liverpool’s Greatest Ever Goals (1 hr, 29 min, 10 sec) is a compendium of some of the greatest televised goals from that celebrated team, as well as some of their best known players including Rush, Dalglish, Fowler, Owen, Torres, McDermott, Souness, Keegan, Hunt, Toshack as well as many others.

As soon as I popped the disc in I didn’t like the options presented. You can watch all one and a half hours of goals, presented one after another, the only commentary available being the original televised one, so there is no real discussion on what makes a good or great goal, or why particular players were more skilled. There are some text facts overlaid at the bottom of the screen, but these tend to be infrequent and just add a few titbits of information.

If, for some bizarre reason, you don’t want to sit through the whole hour and a half, there is an option to choose goals alphabetically, sort of. Now that sounds good until you see your chapter options, many of which have titles like ‘After Dark’ and ‘Continental Cream’, some do go under players names, ‘Rushie’, but then you discover that there is more of Rush hidden in the more obscure chapters and even more bizarrely you get Dalglish scoring a goal under Rush’s chapter. The whole menu system almost guarantees that you will be hard pressed to find a specific goal to relive.

As an hour and a half of Liverpool goals, the disc presents a nice collection of modern and historical footage, it’s just a shame that the menu system let the whole thing down. The disc is presented in stereo, and given the age and range of the sourced film the quality can be variable.

5

Charles Packer