by Tony Evans
In a flat game, United took the lead. The newly acquired Colin Gibson opened the scoring after Bruce Grobbelaar spilt a shot at the Kop end. John Wark equalized for Liverpool. The 1–1 draw meant Everton stayed top but little of the talk afterwards concerned football.
Martin Edwards, the United chairman, was scathing about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters as the team bus arrived. ‘I have never known such abuse,’ Edwards said. ‘It was frightening. A brick was thrown at the coach but luckily it hit a stanchion, otherwise it would have hit Mark Hughes. If you think about it, he could have been killed.’
Peter Robinson, Liverpool’s chief executive, was normally sure-footed in public but he made a serious misstep when he tried to deflect some of the blame towards Norman Whiteside. The United forward had inherited the captain’s armband from the injured Robson and had given a pre-match interview where he spoke about refusing to be cowed by Anfield’s hostile environment. Robinson alluded to the article. ‘It certainly doesn’t help when the United captain gives an interview the day before the game in which he talks about refusing to be intimidated.’
As blame-throwing goes, it was nowhere near as bad as Liverpool chairman John Smith’s attempts to pin the problems of Heysel on Chelsea fans. Yet it did suggest an unpleasant myopia and naivety in the Anfield boardroom. Any fan could have told Robinson how poisonous this rivalry had become. A letter to the next Saturday’s Football Echo spelt it out for the Liverpool hierarchy.
A correspondent who signed off as ‘Worried Red’ wrote: ‘On Sunday, the abuse directed at Manchester United officials in the Main Stand was very frightening and the venom and hatred was unbelievable. The guilty ones were not teenage thugs, but older people, many middle-aged or retired.’
Atkinson remains bemused by the hatred in the stands and terraces. Behind the scenes, the relationship between the clubs was good. ‘We always had a great rapport,’ he said. ‘After the match, it was back to my office for a drink or the Boot Room for a beer.’
The United manager and his team were not averse to drinking on enemy territory, either. ‘My first Christmas party at United was held at a pub owned by Ian Callaghan and Geoff Strong [former players], who were Liverpool through and through. The players got on great, too.’
Atkinson enjoyed the company of his rivals whenever he got the chance. ‘I remember going to Israel and Liverpool were on a trip there. We went to Eilat. Hansen, Rush and all the Liverpool boys were there. We went for a kickabout in the local park and the parkie chased us off. He pointed to a sign that said “No ball games”, so we went for a beer. We had a great time.’
Big Ron was a convivial character and good company. On the terraces and in the stands at Anfield he was despised and lampooned. There were a number of banners made for him. The esoteric ‘Atkinson’s Long Leather’, mocking his dress sense, is memorable. Less witty was the obnoxious and pathetic, ‘Atkinson’s tart is a slut’. More than anyone, Big Ron became the lightning rod for hate directed towards United from the Kop.
The next time United came to Anfield, ten months later on Boxing Day, Bob Paisley, Liverpool’s most successful manager, would travel on the front seat of the visiting team’s coach as a show of solidarity and to forestall any attacks on the bus. Atkinson would no longer be United manager by then. A Scot called Alex Ferguson would be in charge at Old Trafford. The clubs would never be quite so friendly again after Ferguson’s appointment.
15
The gap
Everton were on a roll. Their last defeat had come in December and they were beginning to look unstoppable. Peter Reid returned from his long-term injury against Tottenham in the league on the last day of January and scored the only goal. They warmed up for the second derby of the season with a 4–0 victory over Manchester City. Gary Lineker bagged another three, taking his total to 29 goals in all competitions. They went to Anfield in good heart, five points clear of Liverpool.
Everton had still not been on live television. Their FA Cup tie against Spurs was scheduled to be broadcast but had been called off twice. The postponements gave the Blues an unexpected 11-day break. Dalglish’s side had a more rigorous schedule. They played Queens Park Rangers in the first leg of the Milk Cup semi-final and a fifth-round FA Cup tie and replay against York City during the same period.
The derby was Liverpool’s first all-ticket sell-out of the season. Most Everton fans were crowded into the Anfield Road End but a substantial number of Blues – perhaps three or four thousand – always congregated on the Main Stand side of the Kop. It made for a rowdy atmosphere but one that did not have the venom of the United game.
When Dalglish accepted his Manager of the Month award for January before the game – a gallon bottle of Bell’s Whisky – the majority of people on the Kop groaned. The Scot walked out to collect his prize wearing a suit. Kick-off was a mere 15 minutes away. Liverpool’s talisman was injured and with Paul Walsh sidelined with ligament problems the home team were short-handed up front.
There were difficulties on the Kop, too. Before the match, people started scrambling through the gates in the fences as the crowd surged forward. They sat down alongside the pitch to watch the game and the police took a while to regain control of the situation. They began to funnel the pitchside supporters back on to the Kop in the less crowded areas near the Kemlyn Road. Anfield was working itself up into a frenzy.
The game was completely different to the Goodison derby, where the scoring started early and the chances flowed. At Anfield, most of the action was in midfield, where the tackling verged on maniacal. Reid and Steve McMahon tore into each other, two Scousers with an axe to grind. It was compelling: football as a blood sport.
There were casualties. Jan Mølby limped off at half-time with a gash in his shin and Kevin MacDonald joined the fray. There was no space for the league’s premier goalscorers. Ian Rush and Gary Lineker barely got a sniff.
It became increasingly clear that a mistake would decide the game. Cue Bruce Grobbelaar.
With little more than a quarter of an hour left, Kevin Ratcliffe got the ball 30 yards out. Liverpool were slow to close him down. They were happy to let a centre half shoot from that distance. The notion appeared justified when the Everton captain scuffed his left-foot shot and the ball bobbled goalwards. It took a slight deflection off Lineker and wobbled on its way to Grobbelaar. The goalkeeper was behind the ball and everyone in the ground expected a routine save. Instead, the shot squirmed through the Zimbabwean and crept into the net. Jim Beglin looked on in astonishment. No one was more stunned than Ratcliffe, who turned to his teammates with a shocked and delighted grin. Large sections of the Kop erupted in celebration. ‘Brucie, Brucie, you’re a clown,’ rang out around Anfield. Even some Kopites joined in.
Liverpool pressed for the equalizer and Neville Southall was forced to make a scrambling clearance at Rush’s feet for a corner. The Welsh striker then rounded the goalkeeper and shot from an angle but Pat Van Den Hauwe cleared off the line.
The home side were always likely to be caught on the break and Lineker was the perfect man for the situation. He looked suspiciously offside when he latched on to a long clearance but the ease with which he clipped the ball past the onrushing goalkeeper showed his class. Evertonians – always serial pitch invaders – poured out of the left side of the Kop to join the huddle of celebrations. It was a killer blow.
In the dressing room, Liverpool tried to put a brave face on things. ‘I came off at half-time,’ Mølby said. ‘The last 15 minutes were awful. It was a bad result. Afterwards, we said, “Twelve games left. All we can do is get 36 points and see what happens.” We didn’t get those 36.’
Grobbelaar was always an accident waiting to happen. The Zimbabwean was prodigiously athletic and talented but prone to mistakes.
He was a character, a showman, in a way few goalkeepers have ever been. His circuitous journey to Anfield took in three continents.
He was born in South Africa but grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There, he s
erved a two-year period of national service in the army during the Zimbabwe war of liberation. He liked to style himself as a ‘freedom fighter’ in that bush war, despite belonging to the armed forces that were propping up the racist regime of Ian Smith.
In the right-on left-wing atmosphere of 1980s Merseyside, he was happy to let the media and public misunderstand the politics of southern Africa and his role in the struggle. He made his stance clear in a 1986 autobiography. ‘Footballers are supposed to be apolitical,’ he wrote. ‘But you just have to live in Liverpool to feel the atmosphere and realize how the city has declined. Even my mother sensed it. She was appalled that, having risked life and limb in the fight against Marxism, I was now living in a city seemingly controlled by it.’ The goalkeeper’s world view was madder than Thatcher’s.
After leaving the army, he had trials in England for the Vancouver Whitecaps of the North American Soccer League and his ability, agility and confidence earned him a contract in Canada. He was loaned to Crewe Alexandra in the off season and Bob Paisley noticed him.
‘I will never forget going to see Bruce Grobbelaar play for the first time,’ Paisley said later. ‘Before the game, he had three of his teammates lined up on the edge of the penalty area firing in shots at him. Bruce was dancing about like a cartoon character, stopping every attempt. I turned to Tom Saunders, who was sitting next to me, and said, “We can go, I’ve seen enough.”’
Ray Clemence was Liverpool’s goalkeeper and Paisley thought Grobbelaar would have years to develop as an understudy. Within 12 months, that changed. Clemence left unexpectedly and the Zimbabwean was No. 1.
Grobbelaar courted the crowd. He warmed up by walking on his hands or swinging from the bar. He bantered with fans, whether it was the friendly faces on the Kop or the snarling inhabitants of the Stretford End. He would make saves that drew comparisons with the very best goalkeepers and then, minutes later, let an innocuous shot slip between his hands into the net.
It is dangerous when a goalkeeper trusts his own ability too much. Grobbelaar would chase crosses through a forest of players in an attempt to claim a catch. When it worked, it was brilliant. When it went wrong, disaster loomed. His nickname became ‘the clown’. It was a role he performed off the pitch, too. He was often the butt of vicious dressing-room humour because he was a walking faux pas. ‘Bruce couldn’t help himself with the ricks,’ Craig Johnston, his room-mate, said. ‘But he was happy to make himself look stupid for the benefit of others. He sacrificed his own integrity for team spirit.’
Across the league, Grobbelaar was perceived as one of Liverpool’s weak links. Alan Brazil, the Manchester United forward, summed him up. ‘Great talent and agility,’ he said. ‘But Bruce always gave you a chance. Put in a deep cross, get off a shot, and there was always a feeling he might get it wrong.’
On the pitch and in the dressing room, Grobbelaar had a thick skin. Off it, he was stung by criticism. A regular correspondent to the Football Echo’s letters page slated the goalkeeper repeatedly. The anonymous writer signed off his address as ‘the Yankee Bar’.
The pub on Lime Street was rough. Liverpool’s away support departed and regrouped there. When trouble broke out – relatively rarely – the staff retreated behind a door at the end of the bar and set off a deafening air-raid siren that paralysed the combatants. A support column in the middle of the narrow bar area was greased heavily to prevent customers climbing up it. They stripped down to their underpants to keep their clothes from being stained and climbed it anyway.
Grobbelaar came in on a number of occasions looking for the anonymous letter writer. He was invariably drunk and unsteady on his feet. It was not a place where the patrons were star-struck. It was not a place to take liberties.
Liverpool’s goalkeeper would go from group to group of drinkers demanding, ‘Did you write to the Echo about me?’ He was met mostly with cold indifference or, if he had made a gaffe in recent weeks, raw hostility. But the boys from the Yankee respected him for coming down to try and front up to his antagonist.
Dalglish absolved him for the mistake in the derby by admitting that Grobbelaar had been injured going into the game and should not have played. No one bought it. The goalkeeper had the good sense not to show his face in the American Bar that night. The mood on that part of Lime Street was angry. Less than a hundred yards down the road in the Crown, Evertonians were bouncing. Outside the Yankee you could hear the singing: ‘We’re gonna win the league, AGAIN!’
There was no Scouse unity in town that night. The Black Marias were loading up outside the Yates Wine Lodge on Great Charlotte Street by 10 p.m. The Bridewell always filled up rapidly after the ‘friendly’ derby.
Many of the young men who followed Liverpool and Everton were interested in politics. The standard image of football hooligans was of right-wing racists. The National Front had seen the game as a recruitment opportunity and had started canvassing outside grounds in the late 1970s. They achieved some success across the country. Clubs like Chelsea had mobs that gloried in racist attitudes. In Liverpool, the right-wingers were discouraged from operating outside Anfield and Goodison in the most brutal manner.
A good proportion of Liverpool and Everton’s more aggressive supporters were left wing – although it did not mean that black players got an easier time of it from Merseyside crowds. Overt racism was not as obvious as at Chelsea and some other clubs but jeers and monkey noises could still be heard either side of Stanley Park.
Some Everton and Liverpool fans were vehemently political but even those with the loosest convictions generally associated themselves with socialism. This was obvious during the industrial action in Warrington in 1983, when Eddie Shah sacked workers at the Messenger newspaper group using the Thatcher government’s anti-union legislation.
Young football fans from both clubs joined the mass picket lines every Monday night and fought with police support groups in full riot gear. They later lent their support to miners across the north of England, as well as turning out in massive numbers to back Liverpool City Council marches and rallies.
The Eddie Shah dispute was a forerunner of a bigger media crisis. In Warrington, Shah had used workforce deregulation to bring in non-unionized labour. ‘It was a testing ground for Wapping,’ Peter Hooton said.
In east London, Rupert Murdoch was planning to change the nature of British newspapers. The print unions were strong and tied to antiquated and expensive practices. With the government’s support, Murdoch came up with a plan to break the unions.
When the printers refused a Murdoch proposal that would have put 90 per cent of typesetters out of work and called a strike, the Australian proprietor moved his newspapers from Fleet Street to a new plant in Wapping and a year-long dispute began.
Newspapers, and the print trade in particular, needed an overhaul. Technology was transforming the business and the unions jealously protected methods that were becoming increasingly anachronistic. But the switch to Wapping was conducted with ideological nastiness.
In February 1986, the first big confrontation took place outside News International’s new complex half a mile east of the Tower of London. More than five thousand pickets crowded the Highway, one of the main routes to the docklands, and 58 people were arrested. Eight policemen were injured.
A year of confrontation had begun. The last major trouble in this area had been the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, some 400 yards away, when East Enders galvanized to keep Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts out of their district. It was a victory for decency and community, driven by the people who had grown up in the area.
Fifty years later, there was anarchy on the streets on a nightly basis as Murdoch fought off the pickets to keep the plant – known as ‘the Fortress’ – pumping out his newspapers. There was very little local about this dispute. The strike-breakers were bused in under police escort. The media was changing out of all recognition. What did this have to do with football? Nothing for the moment but Murdoch’s empire was on the march. The wind of
change in Wapping was blowing football’s way, even if no one knew it.
Most people in the game still saw television as a destructive force. When Queens Park Rangers played Liverpool in the first leg of the Milk Cup semi-final, the London club’s programme notes detailed their opposition to the small screen:
Rangers welcome the BBC here this evening. The Milk Cup semi-final will be televised live to the whole country.
We have mixed feelings about our selection for this honour. On the one hand, it is a pleasure for us to know that our good-looking stadium will be the stage for such a magnificent occasion and will be seen by millions of viewers who will never be here in the flesh.
The objections came next.
While we could have expected a capacity crowd for this fixture, we shall now be lucky if we see 20,000 persons in the ground. We are not grumbling about the financial aspect of the situation – the Football League Compensation Committee give us a very fair reimbursement in such circumstances. But the volume of noise and spectator vocal support will not be as great as it should be and that may detract just a little from the glamour of the occasion.
A mere 15,051 people turned up to see Rangers’ 1–0 victory. It seemed to prove the point.
QPR were a middling club, nervous of their future in a world where the Big Five were throwing their weight about. The same week as Rangers beat Liverpool, Martin Edwards of Manchester United sent a warning to the less affluent teams.
The Football League Annual General Meeting was looming in April. Edwards delivered a stark threat and his language was instructive. ‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘The big bang will happen unless the rest of the league give us their backing.’
The phrase ‘big bang’ consciously referred to the deregulation of the City and the financial markets. Edwards inferred that the age of collectivism and mutual support in football was over. The old, established bodies like the FA and Football League would be circumvented if it suited the highest earners. It was now survival of the biggest and the rest would have to live off the scraps left to them by the wealthiest clubs.
