Ayre: 95,000 could make LFC history

Click our adds --> help us buy the domain thanks lfc fans YNWAA !! Ian Ayre has spoken of his pride that the club will play in front of its biggest ever touring crowd when they take on Melbourne Victory on Wednesday night.

The Reds are more than 10,000 miles from Anfield but 95,000 fans are expected at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch the likes of Steven Gerrard and Luis Suarez.

As well as playing on Australian soil for the first time, Liverpool will hope to leave behind a charitable legacy after forming a partnership with the Reagan Milstein Foundation.

Our managing director said: "The club has been around for more than 100 years now and it's taken us a long time to come to these shores.

"Hopefully we'll make some history this week when we play in front of what we think will be the biggest crowd Liverpool Football Club has played in front of [on tour].

"With any pre-season tour, a big part of what we try to achieve is to engage with the fans as much as possible, and a big part of our presence over here is our Foundation team - our own charity.

"We'll be working with the Reagan Milstein Foundation, we're also doing some visits to the local hospital. The open training session tomorrow night - we've made tickets available for that and all that money is to go to these individual partners we're working with."

At a press conference staged inside the team hotel on Monday morning, Ayre was asked why the club decided to come to Australia this summer.

"Commercially it hits our top five in almost every metric - our online figures to our website, our retail figures," he explained.

The general commercial profile only sits behind the US and the UK in terms of markets, particularly more recently.

"It's a very important market to us.

"It's testament to Brendan and the team that we're down here finally. That's always been a challenge when you're preparing for the season and it's such a distance, but it's right and proper that we bring the team here."

Despite a hectic schedule during the tour, Ayre also revealed that work was continuing on recruiting players for the 2013-14 season.

"We said at the start of the tour that I'd try to operate largely on European time," he said.

"We have a big team back in Liverpool that also works on this stuff with me and we've carried on the dialogue in exactly the same way we would have done if we were back in Europe.

"We've even had one of our scouting team arrive here last night to give Brendan and I an update on where we are in certain areas.

"If anything major developed that needed us to be back in Europe it's an overnight flight and we get on with it.

"The work is going on in earnest with all of the team, and Brendan and I are in regular dialogue on where we're at. Nothing changes in regards to being out here."