"After 20 years off the major European football stage, Liverpool FC, under new Spanish manager Rafael Benitez, faced utter humiliation at half-time in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul. Three goals down to the brutally efficient and talented AC Milan, the inexperienced new Liverpool - an uneasy mix of local heroes, young Spaniards and soon-to-be-outcasts - was staring down the barrel of a possible record European Cup final defeat in front of 40,000 of its own fans and a global TV audience of hundreds of millions. That is until six extraordinary minutes of second-half carnage, allied to Red courage and resolve, changed the very course of European football history and mapped a new direction for the future of a club with a magnificent European past.The Miracle of Istanbul offers an insight into the many foreign highs and domestic lows of the amazing 2004-05 Liverpool season, as well as mapping out key connections between the great Liverpool European legacy of the 1970s and '80s and the new Benitez era - via a detour of the ultimately doomed Gerard Houllier period of initial Continental Liverpool management. It also looks at some of the key players of the recent successful Eu