Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  ‘You must understand that after the trials my mother said, “Right – now is the time to get a proper job.” She didn’t believe that I would go halfway across the world just to play football. But I was helped by my now stepfather, who worked on the railways. He managed to invent a new job for me as a refrigerator mechanic – checking whether all fridges on the rolling stock were working. I did that for a week then a phone call came. I was told to pick up my tickets from the Canadian embassy and fly straight out of there.’

  The plane carrying Grobbelaar touched down in Vancouver on a Saturday. After almost 24 hours of travelling, he was asked to make his debut that very evening. He played in the same team as Alan Ball, Johnny Giles and Dutch captain Ruud Krol. Yet his arrival in western Canada coincided with the end of the league season, so before he had even settled, he travelled back to the UK for a holiday with a new girlfriend.

  ‘Her dad owned a small place up near Oban in Scotland. He gave me a job as a jack-of-all-trades. I was a barman by night and a chambermaid by day. I worked there for two months. In the end, the girl didn’t become a fiancée or anything like that. I became quite wary of relationships after what happened with the previous woman …’

  Back in Canada, Grobbelaar acted as a back-up to Phil Parkes during his first season, playing only one game. During the winter break, he was allowed to go on loan to Crewe Alexandra to maintain fitness. It was only when Parkes left Vancouver for Chicago Sting in the summer of 1980 that Grobbelaar, aged 22, became an undisputed number 1 at a professional club for the first time.

  ‘The manager, Tony Waiters [who had a job on Liverpool’s coaching staff in the early ’70s], wanted players like myself and Carl Valentine [a former Oldham full-back] to stay out there and become naturalised Canadians to try to qualify for some major tournaments. It was as if he could see into the future, because in 1984 he took Canada to the Olympic Games, then two years later they played at the World Cup in Mexico. Maybe if I’d stayed in Canada I would have played in a World Cup, because we never really had a genuine chance with Zimbabwe – one of the biggest regrets in my playing career.’

  Six weeks after the end of his loan spell in England, Grobbelaar was back in Canada, resuming the NASL season.

  ‘I was in the bath after a game and Tony popped his head around the door. “Come and join me in my office,” he said. “There are two people who have come to see you.”

  ‘“Let me guess,” I said. “Bob Paisley and Tom Saunders from Liverpool? It’s taken them a long time to find me …”’

  Grobbelaar became aware of Liverpool’s interest during his time at Crewe.

  ‘We played a game at Portsmouth and somebody said that I was the man they wanted to see. The next weekend we were at Gresty Road and I was told that two people from Liverpool had come to watch me and left after the warm-up. To me, that indicated they thought I was shite, but as it turned out it was quite the opposite.’

  Paisley, so impressed by Grobbelaar’s warm-up where he not only saved but also caught every cross and shot that was fired at him, decided there and then to sign him. Instead of telling secretary Peter Robinson to fax an offer straight away, however, he dispatched a special agent from his scouting politburo to follow the goalkeeper’s movements.

  ‘For six weeks they sent a guy called Peter Dee to watch me. He was everywhere I went. I was staying at the Royal Hotel and he checked in. I’d go for a pint in the Station Pub and he’d be sitting there with his flat cap watching what I drank. Then I’d go for sausage and egg at a cafe and he’d be there again, sipping tea with his eyes raised over a newspaper. He wanted to see what I ate. Then, on a night before games, whenever I opened my door, he was in the corridor waiting to go out. Sometimes he’d even follow me into a nightclub and start dancing with some of the older ladies just to blend in. It was only after a number of weeks that I realised it was more than a coincidence that this fella seemed to be everywhere I went. Then, before I could do anything about it, because he was worrying me, he’d vanished.’

  Paisley made his offer bluntly.

  ‘Bob asked me whether I’d like to play for Liverpool. I said yes and with that he and Tom Saunders walked out of the door, straight to the airport and flew back. It was the shortest but probably the most significant conversation I’ve ever had.’

  Six weeks passed before Grobbelaar was able to fly to England.

  ‘That wasn’t the end of the bloody story,’ Grobbelaar laughs. ‘When I arrived at Heathrow, I grabbed a trolley and looked for a chauffeur holding my name up. Nobody was there. So I called the club and explained the situation. “There must be some mistake.” Mr Paisley answered the phone and just said, “Do you know where Manchester Victoria is?” Then he put the phone down. So I got the train from Euston and arrived there. Again, nobody was waiting for me. So I went through the same routine and this time the secretary at Anfield finished with the words, “Do you know where Liverpool is?” So I hired a car and drove. By the time I arrived in Liverpool, I had figured out that nobody was going to be there waiting. I had no idea where Anfield was, so I decided to ask a taxi driver. “Do I know where Anfield is?” he responded. “Of course I do, dickhead. Hop in.” I explained that I had a car, so I followed him. By the time we got to Anfield, the gates were shut and everybody had gone home. “That’ll be 10 nicker that,” the taxi driver shouted. I couldn’t say no, could I? I figured that he would be going straight back into town for his next fare, so I followed him again before finding the nearest pub, hoping I could find accommodation for the night. It happened to be the Beehive [on Paradise Street]. They were full up, so the landlord asked me, “Why don’t you try Colditz?” He was referring to the Adelphi. So I went there but again the reception told me they were full. I turned round and there was Bob Paisley handing over a pound to Tom Saunders, uttering the words, “I never thought he’d get here.”’

  When Grobbelaar arrived at Anfield in April 1981, his contract was worth £450 a week, ‘pittance by today’s standards but decent then’, and a signing-on fee of £10,000. Paisley told him that for the remainder of the season he would play in the reserves. He shared duties over the six games with Steve Ogrizovic, who was selected in the three home games. As a test, Grobbelaar was pitched into the away fixtures.

  ‘I made my debut at Goodison Park. We won 1–0. Then in the second game we played at Bolton, and Brian Kidd was their captain. I knew him from my days in Canada, so I started shouting at him, winding him up. “Eh, Kiddy, you’re getting too old for this.” He was trying like a bear. We won 1–0 again.’

  After keeping two clean sheets, Grobbelaar finished the season with a mistake in his third game – a 1–1 draw at Leeds United.

  ‘I didn’t panic, though,’ he recalls. ‘I booked a summer holiday to Hawaii with the lawyer who brokered the deal from Vancouver to Liverpool. It had been a hectic year, so I needed a break – to recharge my batteries and prepare myself for what I thought would be another season in the reserves.’

  Grobbelaar was playing golf when his lawyer received a phone call from the UK.

  ‘We were staying in some condominiums right by a golf course and the beach. He [the lawyer] went off to answer the phone, and when he came back he told me that Ray Clemence had been sold to Spurs. I teed off and put the ball in the sea before falling over. I put on a lot of weight that holiday – eating burgers and grilled fish – because I had a bit of money after signing for Liverpool and I was living the good life. It tasted sweeter knowing that I’d have a chance of becoming the club’s first choice.’

  Grobbelaar’s first six months in the first team, however, were especially desperate.

  ‘When I first played, I thought I was invincible. If I’m honest now, the responsibility of being Liverpool’s first-choice keeper went to my head and I started to do things that no other keeper in the history of football had dared to try. I sat on the crossbar twice during a game then started walking around the 18-yard box on my hands. I had this misty-eyed idea of Liverpool supporter
s getting behind you, because they were known as the best supporters in the world – the kind that gave players and managers time to succeed. With me, they didn’t.’

  Grobbelaar was blamed for Liverpool’s early exit from the European Cup in two successive seasons following gaffes against CSKA Sofia and Widzew Lodz.

  ‘I had been at the club barely six months when I started to receive letters through the post. One man wrote to me saying he had been watching top-class football for more than 30 years and that if Tommy Smith were still Liverpool captain, he would have already broken my legs three times for the errors I made. That was one of the pleasant ones. When I arrived at Anfield every morning, there would be dozens of envelopes for me to open. One day there was a blank white piece of paper with a black hole through it. To me, that was an assassination threat.’

  Grobbelaar admits that he became paranoid about the negative media comment he was receiving, particularly from the local press.

  ‘The Liverpool Echo and Daily Post really had it in for me,’ he says. ‘No matter how many saves I made, they’d constantly refer to Ray Clemence and how my predecessor was much better. I became convinced that the Merseyside press didn’t like me because I wasn’t English.’

  Two people he confided in were Phil Neal and Harry Gregg – the former Manchester United goalkeeper and his former manager during that loan spell at Crewe.

  ‘Phil had taken a lot of criticism through playing for England during a time when results were particularly shit in the late ’70s. He had won everything for Liverpool, but the press barracked him for the national team – they argued his form wasn’t quite the same. Phil advised me not to read the back pages until Thursday afternoons, when the column inches were taken up by league tables and fixtures for the weekend. It got to the stage where I was buying every single newspaper to find out which journalists liked me and which didn’t.’

  While Neal tried to help Grobbelaar, other players in the squad distanced themselves from him.

  ‘Souness, Hansen and Dalglish were very harsh. They’d be your best friend if you were playing well and winning. But if you made a mistake, they never spoke to you. I don’t think it was a personal thing; it was just a device by the older players to sort out the stronger-minded players from the weaker ones. If you were weak, you didn’t last long. It meant that for newcomers, if they didn’t start well, Melwood became a lonely place. Until I got married, there was nobody to talk to about it, so I found myself confiding in strangers while drinking at the pub. Maybe I did that too much.’

  Matters reached a head after the 3–1 home defeat to Manchester City on Boxing Day.

  ‘I blamed Phil Thompson for the first. It was my mistake for the second, which went in off the post, but I didn’t know who to blame for the third. Bob dragged me in and asked me how I felt about my first few months as a Liverpool player. “It could have been better,” I said. Then Bob pointed at me and replied, “Yerp y’right. And if y’don’t get better, you’ll find y’self back at Crewe Alexandra.”’

  Paisley kept faith in his goalkeeper when others probably wouldn’t have.

  ‘Bob could look at a player while he was running and tell what part of his body was injured. It meant that during games, he’d tell our wingers to take on their marker in a certain way. “The right back has a sore left leg. Take him on the outside and come in on the inside – you’ll kill him.” Nine times out of ten, he was right. He was a genius. The only problem with him was that nobody could understand what he said. He wasn’t the clearest when it came to instructions. But I loved the man so much. Had another manager signed me, I probably would have been packed off back to where I came from after my first few months.’

  Joe Fagan was different, but another person who helped Grobbelaar through the hard times.

  ‘We called him “Smoking Joe” – he’d make everything clear. With the team around both Bob and, later, Joe, they had quite an equilibrium. Roy Evans was the peacemaker; Ronnie Moran was the tough bastard – the barking dog. You didn’t want to get involved in an argument with a Rottweiler.’

  Form aside, Grobbelaar was suffering from a series of personal travails. He received another letter through the post, this time from Wormwood Scrubs, the prison in London.

  ‘It was from a fella asking me to pay his bail,’ he recalls. ‘He used to work on the local radio in Rhodesia and had fallen on hard times before being caught smuggling cannabis into the UK. Customs and the drug squad had vetted the letter and figured that I was Mr Big, so my house phones were tapped. They were made more suspicious when I got a call off a friend who’d moved to England from South Africa. He called and said, “Bruce, I’m not going to be over to pay my subs at the golf club – could you pay them for me?”

  ‘I asked him which golf club. “Don’t be daft, Bruce, we played at the same golf club together.” So I went down to the club and there was a message to call him from there. My friend had found out that there was a police investigation and I was a part of it. “Next time you answer the phone, listen for the pause when you pick it up.”

  ‘So I did that, and as I looked out of the window I could see a suspicious-looking van waiting just down the road. I went and knocked on the window and there were two coppers sitting there.

  ‘I went over and said to them, “If you want to listen to my phone conversations, come into my house and I’ll make you a cup of tea.” I had nothing to hide, and with that it all stopped. The whole experience was an eye opener towards becoming a professional at a top club.’

  Life didn’t get any easier. In December 1981, he was on the losing side in a 3–0 defeat to Flamengo in the Intercontinental Cup while playing for Liverpool when he found out his father, Hendrick, had died.

  ‘I’d literally just walked off the pitch when Bob told me. He’d passed away a few days earlier, but my mother insisted that the club not tell me until after the match – it was an important match. It was very thoughtful of her. The club said that I should try to relax because they had made all of the arrangements for me to return to Africa for the funeral. Again, it was typical of the club’s kind nature – they tried to help one of its people when he was down. I didn’t, however, realise they were going to take the airfare out of my wages the next month.’

  Grobbelaar travelled with the team as far as Paris.

  ‘I had a lot on my mind, so I thought the best thing to do would be to take a couple of sleeping pills to send me on my way. Half an hour in, an Indian bloke shook me and asked me to move. Maybe I was blocking his view of the TV or snoring? But he wouldn’t tell me why, so I told him to fuck off. An hour later, a Japanese air stewardess woke me up again and told me there had been a complaint and asked me to move. I became very angry and walked to the back of the plane cursing the Indian gentleman because I thought he’d grassed on me. Terry Mc [Dermott] was there and he’d had a few to drink. I told him my story and he was all for going back to sort the Indian fella out.’

  The Indian ‘fella’ then turned up at the back of the plane.

  ‘He was very apologetic and explained that he was upset because of the way I was lying – with my feet pointing at a locker above his seat which contained the figure of a Buddha. Terry didn’t see his point and again he wanted to throw the fella and his Buddha off the plane and over Alaska.’

  Despite experiencing so many problems during his first season, Grobbelaar finished the campaign with a set of League Cup and First Division winners’ medals.

  ‘For a long time, the defence and myself just weren’t bonding on or off the pitch. There was a settled back four of Neal, Kennedy, Hansen and Lawrenson – they knew each other’s job inside out. But I was the black sheep and felt responsible pretty much every time a goal went in. Eventually, our understanding together improved naturally – it wasn’t forced by management or anything like that. They just gave it time.’

  The title was secured ahead of Liverpool’s final game of the season at Middlesbrough.

  ‘We travelled up to Ayresome Park on
a high. Terry Mc knew somebody in Middlesbrough who owned a wine bar. Bob said, “Listen, lads, have a few drinks, but be professional about it.” One drink turned into five or six, and a few hours later all the lads were bouncing about on a raised floor. Unfortunately, the floor fell in and Terry tumbled through it, injuring himself. Bob wasn’t too annoyed, though. He was on the bench during the game with a tot of whisky. It wasn’t even that cold. It was May.’

  The summer afforded Grobbelaar time to look for a new home.

  ‘Before I signed for Liverpool, my captain from Crewe, Bob Scott, gave me some invaluable advice. He said that if I went into digs or bought a house in Liverpool’s city centre, I’d end up drinking more than George Best. He probably would have been right. So, instead, I bought a little cottage just outside Wrexham, overlooking the Minera Mountain. I installed a jacuzzi. It meant that at the start of my Liverpool career I could restrain myself if we were having a few beers because I knew that I had to drive home.’

  On more than one occasion, the decision nearly backfired.

  ‘We were due to travel abroad. There was heavy snowfall across the north-west of England and Wales. Naturally, living miles away from urban civilisation meant that I was snowed in – because people always shit themselves whenever it snows in the UK. Everything stops. I was lucky that I had a Suzuki Jeep and managed to make it to Speke Airport. By the time I got there, the weather was so bad that everywhere shut and the flight was rescheduled to go from Manchester instead. I was lucky, because just as I arrived in the car park, the Liverpool team bus was pulling away without me. Bob Paisley asked where I lived and when I told me, he said, “Get y’self a place in near the training ground. If that happens again, you’re out.” Liverpool were big on punctuality.’

  Grobbelaar bought a house in West Derby village. Later, he moved over to Heswall.