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Liverpool squad sing the Kolo Toure song in Dubai

It’s impossible not to love Kolo Toure.

Yet the defender wasn’t even present for arguably the most memorable moment of his Liverpool career in May 2015.

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Toure, who celebrates his 44th birthday today, came on as a half-time substitute in the Reds’ infamous 6-1 defeat to Stoke City, which was Steven Gerrard’s final game for the club.



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Hours after the final whistle, the majority of the Liverpool squad were off on a post-season holiday to Dubai as a celebratory send-off for their legendary skipper.

It was during this trip where a video of the Reds squad singing the famous Kolo and Yaya Toure chant, to the tune of ‘No Limit’, went viral, with Gerrard uncharacteristically jumping up and down at the front as he led his team-mates in song.

Yet Kolo Toure was nowhere in sight, having been forced to miss the trip.

But while he was absent in Dubai, he was in part still responsible for the impromptu chanting following a phone call to his captain as the Liverpool squad headed on a night out.

“We went off in a big stretch Hummer,” Gerrard recalled in his autobiography published in 2015.

I got into it big time.

“Whenever we chanted ‘Kolo… Kolo, Kolo… Kolo, Kolo Toure!’ the boys all went low, ducking down to near floor level.

And then we went up, climbing high, reaching to the sky as we chanted ‘Yaya… Yaya, Yaya… Yaya, Yaya Toure!’ And then I led them down low again for the next ‘Kolo… Kolo, Kolo… Kolo, Kolo Toure!’

“A security guard grabbed my phone off Sakho.

And then we had a full set as Sakho joined in and we chanted ‘Kolo… Kolo, Kolo… Kolo, Kolo Toure!’ and ‘Yaya… Yaya, Yaya… Yaya, Yaya Toure!’ The security guard filmed us on a hot, sticky and happy night in the United Arab Emirates.

“How else, but through football, my underlying passion, could I have ended up here, feeling so blissfully crazy, singing in Dubai about two brothers from the Ivory Coast, one a team-mate and the other an old rival from Manchester City?”

Gerrard continued: “When we got to the restaurant, we had a group chat on WhatsApp and I put the video up so everyone could see it.

Away from the pressure and the worry, the responsibility and the striving, the ambition and the heartache, I could also dance and chant: ‘Kolo… Kolo, Kolo… Kolo, Kolo Toure!’”

Looking back, it seems most surreal that such a night took place barely 24 hours after Liverpool had been thrashed at Stoke.
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