Two Tribes_Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink

by Tony Evans

  The Football League had originally planned a one-off final at Wembley for its new competition but the attendances quickly convinced the ruling body that it would be a mistake. As gates for league games climbed throughout the season, the Super Cup failed to capture the public’s imagination. The decision was made to make the final a two-leg affair.

  Still, events conspired to ensure that Kenny Dalglish and his team could not completely dismiss the match. Everton had advanced to the final in the other bracket. Even in a derided tournament like the Super Cup a double header of derbies would generate significant revenue for both clubs. It was a balancing act for Dalglish. He left himself, Alan Hansen, Jan Mølby and Ian Rush out against Norwich. They, at least, could be secure about their places at Wembley.

  Before the football, there was the celebration. The trophy for winning the title was presented before kick-off.

  The Football League appeared to have a conveyor belt of bad ideas at its Lytham St Annes headquarters. In the period between the Leicester and Chelsea games, the organization had been in touch with Anfield to suggest presenting the trophy at Wembley. It was a startling presumption and Peter Robinson shot it down immediately. He had also seen an opportunity to bolster the crowd against Norwich. The chief executive said, in an interview with the Echo:

  ‘We told them that if we did win the league – and it is far from settled yet – we would prefer the trophy to be handed over at the Super Cup tie at Anfield next Tuesday.

  ‘It will be a more personal occasion and would give the team a perfect Wembley send-off. However, I must stress again that nobody here is taking anything for granted.’

  The League’s thought process was surreal. When would the presentation at Wembley have taken place? Before the cup final? Or after – in which case, what if Everton won? It made more sense to do it at Anfield, even if it did not inspire anywhere near a full house. Fewer than 27,000 turned up to see the ceremony.

  The traditional League Championship trophy was in mothballs. Canon, the photography company, sponsored the competition and had their own prize – a futuristic 22-inch gold construction that the more dirty-minded likened to an erect penis. It was not as attractive as the ornate, intricately decorated trophy that had become a familiar resident at Anfield, and exuded no sense of history. It was the sort of prize worthy of a Sunday league team rather than the champions of England.

  Jack Dunnett, the League president, handed the trophy to Dalglish rather than Hansen, the captain. The player-manager raised it to the Kop and then passed it down a line of players. At the back of the queue, looking embarrassed and shuffling around, was Bob Paisley, the most successful Liverpool manager and Dalglish’s mentor during this first, tumultuous season. Paisley had won nothing in his inaugural campaign in charge and remembered well the lonely experience and the pressure. It was a touching moment when he was handed the trophy, and the nearest thing to sentimentality at Anfield.

  Norwich took advantage of the little lapse in cold-bloodedness and took the lead after two minutes. The Kop responded to the goal, and the relatively meaningless nature of the game, by supporting the East Anglian side throughout the first half, cheering their touches, chanting their name and jeering Liverpool players.

  By half-time they had bored of this pantomime and reverted to normal service, roaring on their team. Sanity was restored and the home team scored three in the second period.

  At the final whistle Dalglish was interviewed on the pitch by the BBC. He was asked about the possibility of winning the Double. He was typically awkward. ‘Well, we’re the only team in with a chance of doing it, aren’t we?’ When the reporter suggested that Liverpool teams had been to Wembley before and failed to achieve the feat – against Manchester United in 1977 – the player-manager was equally curt: ‘Not this season, we haven’t.’

  There were four days to the cup final. All the focus turned to Wembley.

  The next night, the European Cup final took place in Seville. It was a very different atmosphere from Heysel.

  Two of Europe’s biggest clubs had faced off in Brussels, each bringing massive support to the ramshackle stadium in the Belgian capital. A year on, it was a predominantly Catalonian affair. Barcelona were playing Steaua Bucharest in the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium, an arena that had undergone an overhaul for the 1982 World Cup.

  Few Romanians travelled to Spain. Andalusia’s biggest city was swamped by Barca fans. Most considered the result a foregone conclusion.

  The game could not pass without a nod to the memory of Heysel. Delegations from Liverpool and Juventus, including club officials and fans, gathered to pay their respects and pledge friendship at Seville City Hall.

  British interest in the final centred on Terry Venables and Steve Archibald, the Scottish striker that El Tel brought to the Nou Camp. They were upstaged by the unfancied Romanians.

  The game went to extra time and penalties. Venables’ team then proceeded to miss all four spot-kicks they attempted in the shootout. It was a crushing blow for Barcelona. Real Madrid, their greatest rivals, had won the competition six times. This was the Catalan team’s second final and they had lost both games.

  In contrast to the previous year, there were no arrests. The Seville authorities had their hands full, though: 17 Romanians defected and claimed political asylum.

  The result heaped more misery on Howard Kendall and his squad. ‘Watching two ordinary sides battle out a war of attrition brought home to me how much we had lost because of the Heysel disaster,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I would have backed us to beat either of these two teams.’

  This was the final they had imagined themselves winning a year earlier. Like Barcelona, Everton were completely overshadowed by their main rivals’ European Cup record. After winning the Cup-Winners’ Cup so easily, the next step to capturing the continent’s major trophy seemed a natural one.

  Would they have won it in 1986? It is a leap of faith to claim Everton would definitely have dominated the tournament. Although Steaua and Barca were poor in Seville, they were good teams. The Romanians had a relatively easy route to the final but it is wrong to think Steaua were a bad side. They scored 13 goals and conceded two on their way to Seville. They were no pushovers. Teams from behind the Iron Curtain often came from nowhere and surprised Western European clubs with seemingly greater pedigrees. Ask Liverpool, who were knocked out by Dinamo Tbilisi, CSKA Sofia and Widzew Lodz over the previous eight years.

  Barcelona had a much tougher time on their way to the final, edging past Sparta Prague and Porto on aggregate and beating Gothenburg on penalties in the semis. Venables’ team also beat Juventus in the quarters. Some of those teams would have presented robust opposition to Kendall’s men. Playing Juventus would have been unthinkable. If Everton had been allowed to enter the tournament, drawing the Turin side would have caused a multitude of problems.

  A year on from Heysel there was an element of forgiveness in the air. In the wake of the dull final, Francesco Morini, the Juventus director of sport, called for the immediate reinstatement of English teams in Continental competition. That included Liverpool.

  Graeme Sharp is realistic. ‘It was sad we couldn’t go in,’ he said. ‘But there were no guarantees we would have won it. There were more important issues at stake. I’m not bitter. We could have drawn Juventus in the first round.’

  This was Everton’s big chance, though. No wonder Kendall brooded on it for the rest of his life.

  23

  Preparation

  While Everton wondered about what might have been, Liverpool focused on the future. There was little interest in events in Seville. ‘It didn’t concern us,’ Steve Nicol said, his one-track mind firmly in a groove.

  ‘Everything we did was the same,’ the Scot said. ‘At the start of the week the staff were on us: “Don’t get caught up in all this cup final nonsense.”’

  This was where Ronnie Moran proved his worth. He enforced the Boot Room philosophy. ‘Bugsy would be all over you
,’ Nicol said. ‘We were programmed. It was drummed into you.’

  Even in the insulated worlds of Melwood and Bellefield it was impossible to escape the sense that something huge was happening in the city. No one could be immune to the madness of cup-final week. By Thursday, decorations were going up on houses across the region. Windows were adorned with scarves, banners and pictures of footballing heroes. Some households that were split down the middle had both sets of favours on display, often in the same window.

  In the block where we lived, the line of bollards were painted first as red men, then overnight daubed over to make them blue. By the morning of the final, there was a peace of sorts: two were red, two blue.

  The ticket allocation was 25,000 for each club. That was never going to be enough. Face value was £25 for the most expensive seats, £9 for the cheap benches down by the dog track and £6 on the terraces. There were tales of the least expensive tickets fetching more than £150. Prices spiralled as the days slipped by. It was hyper-inflation on a grand scale but for those of us who had them, the tickets were priceless. While Liverpool and Everton fans scrambled to find a way of paying for an expensive jaunt to London, the FA announced record gate receipts of £1.1 million.

  Liverpool released a cup-final song, a tradition that had evolved in the early 1970s. Like much of that era’s fashions it was decidedly tacky. It was a forgettable ditty called ‘Running Like The Wind’. The production sounded prehistoric. It must have cost next to nothing to record.

  Against a background of a tinny synthesizer, the team’s voices barely broke through a fog of reverb. When you heard the lyrics, you wished you hadn’t.

  We’re gonna run like the wind,

  We’re gonna fight and give everything.

  The city that spawned the Beatles should have hung its head in shame. Instead the chorus blasted out from jukeboxes in pubs across town.

  We are running fast and free,

  We’re gonna go down in history,

  And show them what we can win,

  Running like the wind.

  Gary Lineker and Ian Rush adorned the cover of the Radio Times. It was clear proof that this was bigger than the usual cup final.

  Dalglish and Kendall had to keep their men grounded amid all this craziness. They also had to deal with the awards season and the announcement of World Cup squads.

  Lineker was named the Football Writers’ Footballer of the Year and accepted the honour from Bobby Moore at the journalists’ annual dinner in London on the Thursday night. It was the Everton striker’s second personal trophy in the season. He had been voted Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year earlier in the campaign by his fellow pros. He did not miss too much preparation. The striker was notorious for spending more time in the bath than on the training pitch.

  Dalglish was honoured with the Bell’s Manager of the Year award. Feted and lionized, these men were preparing for the game of their lives.

  Others had their egos wounded. Alex Ferguson, who had taken over Scotland after Jock Stein’s death, omitted Alan Hansen from the Scottish squad while selecting Dalglish and Steve Nicol. It was a strange decision but Ferguson plumped for his Aberdeen centre-back pairing of Willie Miller and Alex McLeish. They were fine defenders but leaving Hansen out looked like an act of madness – or vindictiveness. The Liverpool defender had made a gruesome mistake against the Soviet Union at the 1982 World Cup in Spain and had never been forgiven for it.

  Kendall was also concerned about a central defender. Derek Mountfield was struggling with a knee injury that had required an operation earlier in the season. The moment of truth was close at hand.

  The exodus south started on Friday. The advance guard loaded on to trains at Lime Street and headed for London. The afternoon commuters at Euston were startled by hundreds of red and blue sun-hatted youths streaming up the platforms chanting ‘Merseyside, na, na, na’. Every penny was precious on this adventure. Some planned to sleep rough; others like me headed for King’s Cross. The dosshouse bed and breakfasts around Argyle Square charged £6 per head and crammed people in, sometimes six to a room. It was worth it.

  All across London, small mixed groups of Scousers wandered about. As the afternoon and night went on, the tales of high jinks became more exaggerated. A rumour from the early afternoon claimed that a number of Scousers had managed to get into the public viewing area of the House of Commons and unveil a hammer and sickle flag. Any act of resistance to Thatcherism, no matter how inconsequential, was considered a victory. The mood was not as overtly political as at the Milk Cup final two years earlier but at the local elections two days before Wembley the Conservative Party was virtually wiped out in Liverpool. The Tories were left with one councillor. It was clear that the Labour council would soon be thrown out of office and some expelled from the party but they still had plenty of support from the young bucks roaming around Britain’s centre of power.

  Others were putting Proudhon’s dictum into practice. If all property is theft, there were a lot of goods liberated by Scouse crews that night. Most, though, were well behaved if raucous. The trouble of the previous Saturday in Daley’s was largely forgotten and the sight of mixed groups of Evertonians and Liverpudlians clearly confounded some Londoners. The most common greeting throughout the long night was a simple plea: ‘Any spares, mate?’

  At Liverpool’s hotel, Mark Lawrenson was still nervous. Even though he had played in a back three at Chelsea he was concerned that his manager would revert to a flat four. Gary Gillespie’s displays during Lawrenson’s absence had made the Scot the apparent first choice.

  ‘I was worried I wouldn’t be in the side,’ Lawrenson said. ‘All players are selfish and want to play. Roy Evans said to me, “Don’t fret, you’ll play.” But Dizzy was in great form and I didn’t think we’d go three at the back. As it happened, Dizzy took ill on Friday night before the game, so I was playing anyway.’ With his long experience of big games, Lawrenson slept easily.

  Jan Mølby was more excited. ‘The cup was bigger than the league,’ he said. ‘It meant more. It was the two best teams in England – and probably Europe. I couldn’t wait.’

  Merseyside emptied on the morning of Saturday, 10 May. As well as the scheduled rail services, 19 football special trains left Lime Street. A convoy of 400 coaches clogged the motorways and thousands of cars, scarves streaming from their windows, dodged in and out of the traffic.

  Their destination was Wembley. The ‘home of football’ was about to be occupied by Scouse squatters.

  The old stadium was a strange place. It was situated on the fringes of London in an area with little to recommend it to fans. The grandiose twin towers gave a false impression. Even in 1986 it was beginning to crumble.

  It was not a great place to watch football. Like Stamford Bridge it had a wide dog track. At the back of the terrace behind the goal, supporters were a long way from the action. The far goal was nearly 200 yards distant. It did have a sense of theatre, though. It was used rarely enough to make a visit an event.

  Liverpool and Everton had been there so often in recent years that they claimed a proprietary right to the place. Local newspapers often referred to it as ‘Anfield South’ or ‘Goodison South’. The teams had only faced each other there twice before, both times in 1984 and never for an FA Cup final.

  The standing ends of the ground were sweeping arcs. The lower sections, closer to the track, were shallow terraces that quickly became crowded. The view was awful but people piled into them because they were nearer to the pitch.

  The upper terraces were the place to go. The camber was steeper and the steps higher. They gave a better depth of field. Clear sightlines made up for the long-distance view. And it was roomy at the back of the section. When Wembley was at its 100,000 capacity, there was space for, maybe, 20,000 more people. A full house was not the shoulder-to-shoulder jam experienced on the Kop or in the Street End. The bunkers knew this. Those without tickets were aware that there was lots of empty space fo
r them to occupy.

  The best way to get into Wembley without a ticket was straightforward: go up to a turnstile without a policeman or steward on the other side and slip the gateman a tenner. The premium for a really big game might force the price up to £20. This had to be timed correctly. Go too early when it was quiet and the police were less busy. They could survey and monitor more than one entry point. The busier the turnstiles the less chance there was of prying eyes observing the transaction.

  Getting into the ground was only half the problem for the ticketless. There was a second gate into each individual section. To pass, you needed the ticket stub. There were always lost souls wandering round the concrete bowels of Wembley pleading for spare stubs. If they were left on the concourses after kick-off, the police and stewards would pick them off and demand to see their stubs. If they could not produce one, they were ejected.

  The touts stayed away. Scousers made them nervous. They could cope with one Merseyside team with the help of a couple of hefty minders but two sides from the city made it a dangerous day for black-market operators. Ever since the Everton boys turned stripping touts of tickets and cash into a sport 20 years earlier, gangs of Scousers targeted the London spivs. The touts made sure most of their transactions were done in the days before the match. One was quoted in the press as saying: ‘I have only a handful of tickets left but there’s no way I’m going to Wembley with all those Scousers outside.’ For once, the stereotype was spot-on.

  There were forgeries knocking about but they were pallid imitations of the real thing. The gatemen could see them coming. They were only useful with a £10 note slid underneath, so it was pointless buying any.