Two Tribes

by Tony Evans

  ‘He got the better of Jocky,’ Lawrenson said. ‘At least Hansen couldn’t blame me.’

  Everton fans went wild. In the horrified silence of the other end, the noise sounded disembodied, as if heard through a radio fogged by static. A few Blues jumped around near us and shouted with joy among the mass of mute Reds.

  Reid sprinted upfield with an ecstatic look on his face to join the celebrations. Lineker’s name cascaded from the terraces. Everton were on top on and off the pitch. Suddenly, the rigours of the past few weeks seemed to have caught up with Dalglish and his men. They looked tired and were hanging on for the half-time whistle.

  At the break, they had to troop down the tunnel surrounded by Evertonians. Blue shirts were met with applause and encouragement and red jerseys with sneers and triumphant abuse. ‘At half-time going down the tunnel the Liverpool lads couldn’t believe it was only 1–0,’ Sharp said.

  In the dressing room, Dalglish’s team slumped in their seats and awaited the inevitable tongue-lashing. ‘Ronnie Moran went mad,’ Lawrenson said. ‘I’d never seen him so angry and Ronnie was tough. He went ballistic. We just hadn’t played. He told us it looked like we’d been on the piss all week. And we had.’

  At times like this there was no point in arguing back. ‘Bugsy was the most rational man in the world,’ Nicol said. It was never merely raw anger from the Boot Room veteran. ‘He could dissect any argument and destroy anyone who thought they were clever. It was best to shut up and listen.’

  They did not need to be told how poor they had been. They also knew they were still in the game. ‘We were terrible,’ Nicol agreed. ‘But they weren’t great, either. We were worse. Big Al still crucifies himself about the goal.’

  Dalglish was calmer than Moran. He reminded the team how they had come from behind in the title race and told them that the next 45 minutes could turn a good season into an historic one.

  ‘It’s not like we’d been played off the park by a bad team,’ Mølby said. ‘They were a great side. When they’re beating you, you can understand it. All you can do is knuckle down, stay in the match and wait for your chance. Don’t let them run away with it. At half-time we were saying, “Don’t go 2–0 down. Stay close.”’

  In the Everton dressing room Kendall was telling his players to keep on doing what they had done in the first half. ‘Don’t give those Red bastards an inch,’ he demanded. ‘Howard wasn’t a very vocal manager,’ Ratcliffe said. ‘He didn’t need to be. Everybody knew their jobs.’

  Everton began the second half by executing their plan perfectly. Dalglish’s team were in disarray. Kevin Sheedy went close to scoring twice, once with a free kick that swerved just wide and then with a shot that Grobbelaar pushed out for a corner. The goalkeeper was under siege.

  From high up on the terraces it looked like Liverpool were a beaten team. We were desperately trying to generate noise, imploring them to get back into the game, but all the sound was coming from the tunnel end. Everton were in the ascendancy. Liverpool were about to hit rock bottom.

  Grobbelaar misjudged a cross from Sheedy and, although no damage was done, it clearly affected the Zimbabwean. The attack petered out when the ball ran to the edge of the area where Jim Beglin was waiting. Grobbelaar signalled to the left back to leave it so that the goalkeeper could collect it but the young Irishman touched the ball by mistake, knocking it away from his teammate. Steven was lurking and Grobbelaar had to scramble to get the ball in his grasp. He was outraged. He screamed at Beglin. That was not unusual. What he did next was shocking: he squared up to the full back and pushed him in the chest.

  Liverpool teams did not lose their discipline like this. While the Everton sections laughed and mocked ‘the clown’, there was a gasp of disbelief at the other end.

  It appeared there was no way back for Liverpool. Disgusted, I made to leave. A friend grabbed hold of me and bear-hugged me until calm was restored. ‘It’s still only 1–0,’ he said. It was almost too much to bear: losing the biggest game in the city’s history and the team fighting among themselves.

  What effect did it have on the players? ‘The pushing match between Jim and Bruce helped us, I think,’ Lawrenson said. ‘After all, we couldn’t sink any lower.’

  Mølby agrees. ‘I can imagine people thinking we were crumbling under pressure,’ the Dane said. ‘If you were part of it, you’d understand. We’d seen things like that lots of times and knew it wouldn’t affect them. Jim would get his mind back on the game; Bruce would put it out of his thoughts. These things happen in teams. It didn’t make any difference to us.’

  Nicol had a much more simple take on the incident. ‘Bruce’s not right in the head,’ he said. ‘We all knew that and shrugged it off after two seconds. If Hansen would have done it, we would have been thinking, “Holy fuck!”’

  Grobbelaar did not shrug it off so quickly. Moments later he caught a long throw from Stevens but sent his clearance out of touch to give Everton the ball back. He was struggling to keep his composure and Dalglish’s frustration was palpable.

  Nearly an hour had gone and Kendall’s team were by far the superior side. The margins between these two sides were small, though. A single mistake could turn the game. Stevens made it.

  The Everton full back was in his own half when he misplaced a pass and Whelan grabbed possession. The Irishman looked inside and found Mølby in space. The Dane moved towards Mountfield and played the ball through the centre back’s legs. On the other side was Rush, stealthily moving through the Everton defence unmarked. The ball rolled beautifully into the Welshman’s path.

  Bobby Mimms came out but even Neville Southall would have been helpless in this situation. Rush touched the ball around the goalkeeper with his right foot and shot with his left. Johnston came haring through and slid in, attempting to steal the goal from the striker, but the ball was already over the line when the Australian made contact. For all their dominance, Everton were back level. Their nemesis had emerged from the stupor of the first 57 minutes to break blue hearts again.

  ‘We caught them for that first goal,’ Mølby said. ‘They were going forward and made a mistake and gave the ball away.’ In their quest to attack, the Everton midfield lost track of the Dane. ‘It was the first time in the match I was on the wrong side of Paul Bracewell and Reidy, and I had time and space on the ball.’

  The mood of the entire stadium changed in an instant. ‘I knew the moment I scored we would win,’ Rush said. He was not the only one.

  ‘We’d never lost when he’d scored,’ Nicol said. ‘We weren’t going to start now.’

  Suddenly, Liverpool looked more composed but the game could easily have turned again minutes later. Steven played a long ball into the opposition box and Hansen, with Lineker close by, sliced his clearance across goal. The ball dropped to Sharp 20 yards out. Grobbelaar was left stranded out of his ground by Hansen’s mistake. The Everton striker looped a header over the despairing goalkeeper and it dropped towards the net. It looked a certain goal. Wembley held its breath as the ball arced goalwards. Grobbelaar went into reverse but his position looked hopeless. As the ball dropped below the bar, the Zimbabwean leapt, arched his back and flicked it over the bar milliseconds before it crossed the line. No one could believe it, particularly the Everton striker. ‘I thought I’d scored,’ Sharp said. ‘That was Bruce all over. Everybody knew what he was like. People slated him but then he’d pull off a save like that.’

  The goalkeeper had made the journey from erratic to extraordinary in a matter of minutes. Suddenly, Everton looked like a beaten team.

  ‘The big turning point was the incident between Bruce and Jim Beglin,’ Ratcliffe said. ‘It seemed to make a massive change to the game. That and Bruce’s save from Graeme Sharp were the turning points. Liverpool seemed to raise their game and surpass us, and our chance had gone.’

  The Liverpool end was bouncing now to ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and the team were suddenly a living expression of the song. Mølby was controlling the game.
Liverpool’s midfield runners were pouring forward. Beglin found Rush on the left with a long ball and the striker fed Mølby inside him. The Dane controlled the ball quickly, spotted Johnston at the far post and sent in a firm, low cross which the Australian side-footed into the net. Johnston did not need to steal a goal. He had his own now. The game had turned on its head.

  Kendall now had to take a chance. He replaced Stevens with Adrian Heath in an attempt to get his side back into contention. It made things worse.

  Heath was supposed to get up front and support Lineker and Sharp. The switch had another effect. It forced Everton to go to three at the back and unbalanced the side.

  ‘For 60-odd minutes we were running the show,’ Reid said. ‘Then Howard took Gary Stevens off because he made a mistake with a pass for the goal and we lost our shape.’

  Mølby agreed. ‘They had to change the way they were playing,’ he said. The chances started to come quickly. ‘Things opened up for us. I should have scored. I was clean through.’

  Lawrenson thought back to Paisley’s advice about not running with the ball at Wembley. ‘They gave us a chasing at first but Bob knew his stuff. They ran out of steam.’

  The big Dane was now at his imperious best. He found Whelan, who was storming into the vacant area where Stevens might have been. The Irishman advanced to the edge of the area, took stock of the situation and then lobbed the ball over the heads of Pat Van Den Hauwe and Ratcliffe to the back post where Rush was arriving unaccompanied. The striker hammered the final nail in Everton’s coffin, taking one touch before powering the ball into the far corner.

  ‘Something happens when you keep on doing the right thing,’ Nicol said. ‘Even when it wasn’t working, we carried on playing our way. It told in the end. It was like someone squashed the life out of them.’

  With seven minutes left Liverpool were in full control. Rush had one more chance when he tried to lob Mimms but a third cup-final goal was not to be. ‘Rushie should have got his hat-trick,’ Mølby said. ‘He chipped the ball into Mimms’s hands. It was more like a back pass.’ A fourth goal would have been cruel, though.

  The final whistle sounded and Everton players slumped to the floor, beaten 3–1. Liverpool’s team hugged and celebrated. They had done the Double, a feat only achieved in the twentieth century by Tottenham Hotspur in 1961 and Arsenal in 1971. In his first year as a manager, Dalglish had made history.

  This was the point where the supporters of the defeated side normally began to leave. Usually some would remain to see the presentation of the trophy and clap their team but the majority would start to make their way home. Very few Everton supporters left their places. Wembley was still close to full when Hansen led the winners up the steps to the Royal Box to receive the cup from the Duchess of Kent. The Liverpool captain turned, faced the end where the majority of his side’s supporters were, and pumped the trophy into the air.

  Behind them came Everton. Their climb up the 39 steps appeared to be significantly more difficult. They were dragging exhausted, defeated bodies up the stairs.

  Liverpool had started their lap of honour when Ratcliffe and his teammates came back down the stairs. Sheedy and Sharp had reached the end of their tether. They headed straight for the tunnel and the dressing room where they could hide from prying eyes. The rest of Kendall’s team took a slow walk around the stadium, acknowledging the supporters who had backed them all the way. Reid wore a rueful, agonized smile. It was almost a grimace.

  Then something unprecedented happened. The chant of ‘Merseyside, Merseyside’ began again and rang around the ground. Evertonians joined in and sang as lustily as their victorious rivals. It was a massive show of unity. Despite the defeat, the Everton supporters recognized that something bigger than the game was happening.

  ‘It was an unusual atmosphere,’ Lawrenson said. ‘We’d won, beaten our neighbours, our mates, and we did the Royal Box thing and all that. Normally, half the crowd leaves but everyone stayed and were singing. Remarkable.’

  When the city needed to present its best face, the Everton fans were there for it. In football terms, the club had been hurt more than any other by Heysel. If Evertonians had left en masse or the neighbourly rivalry had spilt into viciousness, then it would have confirmed all the preconceptions about Merseyside. Instead, the two sets of fans stood together and made a statement of unity.

  ‘There were bigger things at stake,’ Derek Hatton said. The politician and strident Evertonian felt sick about the defeat but understood the importance of not souring the occasion. ‘A lot of people say the game didn’t matter. You almost felt guilty about the banter beforehand and feeling miserable afterwards. You couldn’t really have a go at Reds like we did on other occasions.’

  Reid, like many of Everton’s players and fans, was awed by the experience but endured it through gritted teeth. ‘We saw kids together at the final, one with a red scarf, one with a blue. They were all mixed in. In that way, it doesn’t get any better for a Scouser. ’

  The competitor in him had different emotions. Losing the final left him feeling hollow. ‘It was horrible,’ he said.

  Mølby, a recent arrival in the city, was impressed with how the Everton players behaved. ‘It must have been hard for them but they deserved to be part of it,’ he said. ‘They deserved some of the acclaim. They’d been a big part of a great season. It was the perfect antidote to the year before. They’d helped bring a feel-good factor back to the sport. English football had lost sight of what it was supposed to be about. It found itself again that season.’

  Neville Southall had to watch from the sidelines and shared his teammates’ disappointment. Yet the injured goalkeeper knew implicitly why the Everton fans stayed on the terraces and joined in the applause and chanting afterwards. ‘It reflected the city,’ he said. ‘What happens in the city affects everyone. They cared about each other. If people didn’t care, there wouldn’t be football clubs. It was a reflection of community.’

  25

  Homecoming

  Not everyone was concerned with the bigger issues. Nicol was verbally sparring with Hansen about the summer. ‘The World Cup was coming,’ he said. ‘Big Al had just been told he wasn’t going to Mexico. I was. I was knackered and he was laughing at me and saying, “I’m off on holiday and you’re going to Mexico. Unlucky.” We were taking the piss out of each other.’

  Johnston was at the other end of the emotional scale. It was the greatest moment of his career. It was the culmination of a long journey for the midfielder. He had come to England at the age of 15 to follow his ambition to become a footballer. A trial at Middlesbrough had ended on the first day when Jack Charlton, the manager, told him to ‘fuck off back to Australia’ and that he was the worst player he had ever seen. Humiliated, and with a return ticket that was not valid until three months later, Johnston hung around the training ground, hiding from Charlton and trying to improve his game. He had given everything for Liverpool but, until this season, had struggled to hold down a regular place. Now he had scored the goal that put the cup in Liverpool’s hands.

  ‘I was very emotional,’ he said. ‘I wanted to fit in, be seen as a great player like all the people around me. To have done the Double, to have achieved something Liverpool had never done before, and to have scored, was moving. I was on a high.’

  Using a huge, bricklike early version of the mobile phone, the man nicknamed Skippy phoned New South Wales from the dressing room. He spoke to his parents, who had mortgaged their house to send him to Middlesbrough all those years ago, and had difficulty making himself understood to his mother. When he finally spoke to his father, Johnston asked, ‘Had you worried today?’ He had come a long way in so many senses.

  The winning dressing room was in chaotic uproar. The players and staff tucked into champagne and beer and cameramen milled around. Yet the old Liverpool mindset was already kicking in. ‘No one said “Well done” or “Congratulations”,’ Lawrenson recalled. ‘We just had a drink. It didn’t sink in that
we’d done the Double, not for a couple of years.’

  There were some unexpected occupants who did understand the level of the achievement. ‘Sammy Lee had some mates who were real Scallies,’ Lawrenson said. ‘You’d give them two lounge passes for the game and 14 of them would end up in there. They were just like that.’

  The team knew they were in the stadium but not their whereabouts. They could not have predicted where they would find Lee’s mates.

  ‘Someone said we should get washed and changed and get ready to go into town,’ Lawrenson said. ‘We stripped off and went to the bath. At the old Wembley, it was about 5 feet deep. We got there and there were three of Sammy’s mates there, fully clothed and soaked through, saying, “Come on in, the water’s great.” It was surreal. That’s how happy everyone was.’

  Well, not everyone. Out of the public eye some of the Everton players had suffered enough. They went back to the pre-planned banquet at a West End hotel and ate and drank in a very muted atmosphere. Lineker was interviewed for television and expressed the view that ‘there was no need to feel down’. The striker was always good in front of the cameras. Reid gave a very different impression: the man from Huyton looked haunted and called Everton’s season a ‘failure’.

  The next morning the two teams were due to fly back to Merseyside on the same plane. It had been arranged before the final without any thought about how the losers might feel. There was no chance that Reid would be on the flight or involved in the open-top bus tour of the city that would follow it. ‘I had a drink with the boys and got off,’ he said. ‘I got my mate to pick me up. I fucked off and didn’t do the bus parade. Howard said he’d fine me two weeks’ wages. I said, “That’ll do me” and pissed off. I watched the parade from a pub in Bolton.’