Manchester United vs Liverpool – 14/03/2009

English Premier league leaders Manchester United took on their arch rivals Liverpool on Saturday afternoon with the opportunity to go 10 points clear at the top of the table with a game in hand, having been 10 points behind the leaders at Christmas time with the naysayers already having written them off. After Ronaldo scored a penalty early on in the first half, Liverpool then came back and gave United a veritable thrashing. A bitter pill for United fans to swallow, with the only upside being that if United can get back on track again, they will equal Liverpool’s record of domestic trophies, and as Sir Alex Ferguson so eloquently put it several years ago, “knock them off their fucking perch”!.
The police presence for this game was so over the top, it was quite unbelievable. One of the officers himself said that he had “never seen so many yellow jackets before”. A few arrests were made, but by and large the game passed without incident.

This was my first attempt at trying to shoot a news story in the space of an afternoon, get them processed and uploaded all in the same day. I decided not to take my laptop with me as I felt that this would just have hindered me in the crowds – my backpack was already hindering me enough as it was and the last thing I needed to do was to have taken an even larger one. Knowing the area and the layout, I knew where the fans would congregate and I knew how congested these areas can get. I took a bunch of different lenses not really knowing how I was going to shoot this, but once I’d started with the 18-200IS, I realised that it was staying right on the front of my camera. I really didn’t fancy trying to change lenses in the midst of all these crowds, and there really wasn’t much point. I could maybe have used the 30mm F1.4 a little, but another body was what I should have mounted this to as that would have made things a lot easier, although wading through crowds with 2 cameras around my neck may not have been particularly wise.

I’m still yet to find my niche as a photographer, but I feel its important to try as many different things as you can to pin down where my strengths lie and where I want to focus (excuse the pun). I do have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this – the fast pace, always on the move, never knowing where the action was coming from next, always trying to get that little bit closer, and always in the back of my mind that I didn’t want to be giving the wife a call a few hours later saying “Darling, I’ve been arrested….”

All in all, it was a successful day’s shooting, if not a successful day’s football. I managed to get the images processed basically and uploaded to the Demotix wire service by around 9pm – a little later than I had hoped, but not bad for a first attempt. See the entire story here – http://www.demotix.com/news/manchester-united-vs-liverpool

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 5:53 am. It is filed under Football, Photographs, Photography and tagged with fans, Liverpool, Manchester United, supporters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.