Two Tribes_Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Cup final day, 1986, and the eyes of the world are on Liverpool and Everton as they walk out on to Wembley’s lush green turf. Pumped with pride and passion, the two best teams in Europe are about to engage in a gladiatorial battle in front of 100,000 fanatical supporters. But this is not just another match, another cup final. On this warm day in May, the future of English football – and a city’s reputation – is on the line.

  A year before this momentous cup final, Liverpool fans had been involved in the Heysel disaster. Thirty-nine people had died in the decaying stadium – a tragedy which cast a long, dark shadow over the sport. English clubs were banned from Continental competition, and football reached its lowest point.

  Tony Evans’s Two Tribes recalls the tumultuous 1985–86 season and the titanic struggle for supremacy between the two great Merseyside clubs. Set against a backdrop of social and political turmoil, it reveals the full impact of Thatcher’s policies, the vibrant north-west music scene and the burgeoning anti-establishment vibe on the streets and on the terraces.

  Giving voice to players, managers, politicians and musicians, Two Tribes follows the remarkable twists and turns of an exceptional season and how Scousers took over London for one unforgettable day with deafening chants of ‘Merseyside! Merseyside!’ ringing around Wembley Stadium.

  Ultimately, this is the story of Liverpool’s renaissance and Everton’s private agony, masked by a show of solidarity and communal spirit on the day, and how a season which began in shame ended in pride.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue The big turn-off

  Chapter 1 The end of the world as we know it

  Chapter 2 The people’s game

  Chapter 3 The story of the Blues

  Chapter 4 Summer of discontent

  Chapter 5 Reaching out

  Chapter 6 The trouble with football

  Chapter 7 No vision

  Chapter 8 Kick-off

  Chapter 9 Black September

  Chapter 10 Blond ambition

  Chapter 11 Power play

  Chapter 12 London calling

  Chapter 13 Holding out for a hero

  Chapter 14 With Love From Manchester

  Chapter 15 The gap

  Chapter 16 Clowning around

  Chapter 17 Cold comfort

  Chapter 18 Up for the cup

  Chapter 19 Fighting talk

  Chapter 20 Showdown

  Chapter 21 Bridge of sighs

  Chapter 22 Echoes of Europe

  Chapter 23 Preparation

  Chapter 24 The clash

  Chapter 25 Homecoming

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Tony Evans

  Copyright

  TWO TRIBES

  Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink

  Tony Evans

  To Alisa and Grace.

  Words can’t explain what they mean to me.

  Acknowledgements

  This book started off as a much narrower idea, focused on football. Just writing about sport did not do justice to the events of the time. What happened in the mid 1980s still has ramifications today. Thanks to Giles Elliott for encouraging the wider view and allowing me to junk the original idea and take on a more ambitious project. He also persuaded me to include some of my personal experiences to give a sense of what it was like to be a travelling fan during the era.

  Many people were generous with their time. I’m grateful for the wit and insight of Peter Reid, Neville Southall, Graeme Sharp, Steve Nicol, Jan Mølby, Mark Lawrenson, Craig Johnston, Kenny Dalglish, John Barnes, Tony Cottee, Frank McAvennie, Mark Bright, Ron Atkinson, James Brown, Peter Hooton and Derek Hatton.

  Finally, my thanks to Brenda Kimber, who has seen the project through to completion and helped to sharpen the finished product.

  Prologue

  The big turn-off

  10 May 1986

  The seconds were ticking away. As 3 p.m. neared, panic began to set in. The time to take risks was arriving.

  Some three hundred people – mostly young men – were gathered around gate C and a crush was building. They were the wrong side of the wall and hope was fading. Half a dozen of them climbed on to the small roof attached to the tower, not to flee the growing scrum but to attempt to sneak through the bank of three windows thirty feet above the stairs. It was impossible. The openings were blocked and a policeman stood on the other side. A similar set of apertures ten feet higher was unguarded, though. Teenagers hung out of these upper windows, gesturing to those below to come and join them.

  There was only one route upwards: a set of high, spiked railings, eight feet away and at a right angle to the windows. The imploring hands of the youths were surely out of reach.

  Then a figure wearing a Union flag around his shoulders hauled himself up to the top of the fence, 40 feet above the surging, baying mob. He looked across to where safety lay: the three small windows that were agonizingly out of reach. Three boys leant out of the thin rectangular openings, gesturing for him to jump. He hesitated. The drop was too far to risk.

  Then, the youth on the fence reached out. The boy in the nearest window wore a blue ski hat. He edged forward, his centre of gravity dangerously near tipping point, and offered his hand. The boy clinging to the railings placed his outstretched foot against the wall under the window in a desperate attempt to gain some traction. The teenager in the blue hat placed both hands close to the grasping fingers of his friend. They touched and suddenly their hands gripped: they were committed. It was all or nothing.

  The youth with the flag swung. It seemed impossible that the desperate grip could hold but the boy with the green sun hat in the middle window darted forward and grabbed a handful of cloth. It was enough. The lad in the third window moved across to help, his red woollen cap disappearing from view. A huge cheer went up from the crowd as the dangling man was dragged to safety.

  Below, four others who were attempting the same route as the boy with the Union flag turned back. There had to be another way.

  As the minutes ebbed towards 3 p.m., an increasing mood of hysteria swept across a small area of north-west London. Thousands of young men attempted to scale walls, break down gates and overwhelm security. The police force struggled to maintain its tenuous control over the crowds.

  These hordes were not attempting to escape captivity. They were not breaking free of bonds imposed by a restrictive political regime. No, they were trying to force their way into a stadium to watch a football match. What made so many people risk life, limb and arrest to watch 22 players kick a ball around?

  ‘You had to be there,’ says Peter Hooton, the lead singer of The Farm. Hooton had a ticket but understands the craving. ‘It was unthinkable to miss it. Liverpool v. Everton in the FA Cup final? It was the biggest game ever.’

  Less than two hours later, Peter Reid walked across the Wembley turf wearing a blue-and-white cap and a weak, rueful smile. The stadium remained full and chants of ‘Merseyside’ and ‘Are you watching, Manchester?’ rained down from both ends of the ground. Reid would rather have been anywhere else. ‘I just wanted to get out of there,’ he said.

  Kenny Dalglish and his team were on a separate lap of honour and milking the acclaim but they were stunned by the show of solidarity on the terraces. ‘Evertonians stayed and applauded,’ the Liverpool player-manager
said. ‘The city came together and stayed together. It was awe-inspiring, especially considering the year we’d just had.’

  This was sport at its best. A tense, see-sawing match, an unlikely comeback and a remarkable show of sportsmanship from both fans and players. Just 12 months earlier, football had sunk to its lowest point. Now the game was showing its sunniest face. Liverpool had won but Everton conducted themselves with absolute grace. At least that’s what the watching nation saw.

  ‘It was horrible,’ Reid said. ‘Gruesome. We were all good mates but it was the worst feeling in football.’

  1

  The end of the world as we know it

  29 May 1985

  Liverpool had lost a football match. The players were numb and bewildered as they sat on the coach taking them away from Heysel Stadium. There was usually silence on the journey home after a defeat but this was a different sort of hush. People had been killed on the terraces before the game.

  The players knew before the match that there had been significant trouble. The sound of the wall collapsing had penetrated the dressing room. In the long delay before they took to the pitch – the kick-off was almost two hours late – rumour and counterrumour added to the confusion. Then the Brussels chief of police told the players that people had been killed. They needed to play to prevent an escalation of the trouble. Juventus, they were told, had agreed to participate.

  Some of the team did not want to go out and perform in these circumstances. Even their half-hearted involvement would haunt and embarrass some of them for years.

  ‘We didn’t want to play,’ Craig Johnston, who was on the bench, said. ‘We weren’t really given a choice.’

  Afterwards, the mood was not that of a defeated team. It was the shell-shocked gloom of a group of men who had been unwilling extras in a tragedy. A charge by their supporters had caused panic in a supposedly neutral section that was predominantly filled by Juventus fans. As the crowd backed away, the brickwork disintegrated and hundreds of people were rushed. The death toll would reach 39.

  Mark Lawrenson was not with his teammates. The centre half started the match but his fitness was always in doubt. He had dislocated his shoulder two weeks earlier and only played because this important match was the last of the season. Within three minutes, he aggravated the injury and was rushed to hospital.

  ‘Normally, you’d be disappointed if you were injured in a big game,’ he said. ‘I was just glad to be off the pitch. I didn’t want to play. None of us did.’

  Lawrenson was taken to hospital along with the dead and dying. He awoke after an operation to find the corridors full of angry Italians and an armed policeman protecting his bed. ‘When I was leaving the next day with Roy Evans, people were spitting and shouting at us,’ he said. ‘It was horrible. For the next week, we were just walking around in a daze.’

  Bruce Grobbelaar, the goalkeeper, considered giving up his career. ‘I said to myself, “I don’t want to be part of a club that caused death and destruction in a game.” If it would have been any other game than the last one of the season, I would have stopped. As it was, I had the summer to think it over and decided if I knocked it on the head the idiots would have won. I wasn’t going to let the thugs destroy me.’

  Michel Platini, who scored the winning penalty for Juventus, went on to be president of UEFA. The Frenchman joined his teammates on the lap of honour after the game and celebrated gleefully with the trophy. Asked whether they would have pranced about had they won, the Liverpool players who were there that night invariably respond with a grimace and a shake of the head.

  News that Joe Fagan was retiring as manager had broken on the morning of the game. He was to be replaced by Dalglish, the team’s best player. The 34-year-old found himself in charge of a club with its reputation in tatters.

  The ramifications of the dreadful night of 29 May in Brussels would extend much further than football. The credibility of an entire nation was on the line.

  Liverpool and the club’s fans were the focus of the initial contempt and anger in the immediate aftermath of Heysel, but soon the whole of English football would have to share the guilt and punishment. The knee-jerk response by the Conservative government was to act in a draconian manner before they had even begun to explore the causes of the disaster. Under pressure from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the FA withdrew English clubs from European competition within 48 hours of the game’s finish.

  Thatcher reacted to the disaster immediately. The day after Heysel, she summoned football journalists who had been at the game to 10 Downing Street to get their views about what was wrong with the sport.

  Peter Jones from the BBC, the Daily Mail’s Jeff Powell, Charlie Burgess of the Guardian, the Express’s Merseyside man John Keith, Mike Ellis from the Sun, the Press Association’s Peter Went and the Sunday Times’s Brian Glanville are mentioned in Cabinet papers as attending the slightly surreal summit.

  ‘Yes, I was one of the “insignificant seven”,’ Glanville said with wry humour.

  ‘I was supposed to be flying to Mexico for an England tour but stayed behind to meet the Prime Minister.’

  Glanville remembers cycling from his home in Holland Park to Whitehall in a pair of football shorts. At Downing Street, he was told by police to park his bike where Quintin Hogg, the Lord Chancellor, used to leave his bicycle. He then quickly changed into trousers, a jacket and an Old Carthusian tie. He might have looked like another old-school Tory but appearances were misleading. Glanville may have been a former public schoolboy but his views were certainly not those of the Establishment.

  ‘It was a strange experience,’ he said. ‘Mrs Thatcher talked about getting “ordinary, decent fans” to stop any trouble. I imagined a grandfather saying to a young hooligan “Stop kicking him” and decided she had no idea about the reality of the situation.

  ‘I told her that the troublemakers felt alienated. “I wouldn’t use that word,” she said.’ Glanville is a fine impressionist. He quotes Thatcher in the patronizing, schoolmistress manner that she adopted when talking down to those who did not agree with her stance.

  The Prime Minister was reluctant to accept that the troubled economic situation had any impact on hooliganism but, as the Cabinet papers show, the seven journalists made sure they hammered home the point. The notes of the meeting make their views unambiguous, clearly stating that it was ‘a social phenomenon rather than a football phenomenon’.

  Thatcher’s idea that crowds should self-police was rooted in another social struggle, which she misinterpreted as badly as the violence at football matches. The views of ‘expert’ observers were never going to change the Prime Minister’s opinion. Contrary to Glanville’s memories, the Cabinet papers suggest the journalists supported the notion that supporters should confront violent offenders. Thatcher would not be the first, nor last, government leader to hear only what suited them and turn the false impression into documented history. ‘They endorsed the Prime Minister’s attempts to persuade ordinary spectators to make a stand against the hooligans,’ the notes say. ‘The Prime Minister thought this might prove possible: the example of the recent miners’ strike showed that ordinary people were often prepared to stand up and be counted in the face of appalling violence and intimidation.’

  That analysis of the miners’ dispute is hopelessly one-eyed. Thatcher’s biases were all on view at the Downing Street meeting.

  Michael Calvin, the columnist and author, is not mentioned in the official documents but was also present. ‘I was an insignificant junior reporter at the Telegraph then,’ he said. ‘She had eyes like an owl. She was accompanied by Leon Brittan [the Home Secretary] and Neil Macfarlane [the sports minister]. She was not listening to anyone. She had made up her mind. Brittan tried to steer her in a certain direction but she shut him down quickly. What struck me was how scared of her they were.’

  The lady was not for turning. She again made it clear that the FA needed to withdraw from Europe and did the same in a meeting with Ber
t Millichip, the chairman of the organization. English football’s ruling body quickly acquiesced to the Prime Minister.

  The decision left those within the game stunned. ‘I didn’t understand it,’ said Ron Atkinson, then manager of Manchester United. ‘They pulled the clubs out of Europe and then let the England team play in a tournament in Brazil? I didn’t understand. It was a bit hasty, a knee-jerk reaction.’ The national team were exempt from the national shame.

  There was little logic at work. It seemed clear where responsibility lay for events at Heysel Stadium. ‘Most of us thought Liverpool and maybe Juventus should be banned,’ Atkinson said. ‘No one else.’

  UEFA’s sanctions against the Italian club were ludicrously light, given their supporters fought with police even before the trouble began at the opposite end of the ground. After the wall collapsed, Juventus fans charged around the running track to attack the Liverpool section. A man stepped from the main Juve terracing brandishing a gun. It turned out to be a starting pistol but it caused panic and fear.

  The Turin club were ordered to play their first two European ties behind closed doors. European football’s ruling body disbarred Belgium from staging a UEFA final for ten years.

  Across the Channel, the British Prime Minister could not wait to spread the blame across English football. Thatcher was on the offensive. She shot down Neil Kinnock’s suggestion that unemployment was a factor in hooliganism. The Labour Party leader had spoken earlier in the day and said:

  The problem of football crowd violence is deep-rooted and it has many causes of which one of the most important is long-term unemployment, especially among the young. We cannot hope to tackle this problem so long as we have a government which gives no priority whatsoever to tackling unemployment. And even believes that a certain degree of unemployment is necessary in order to reduce costs and keep [wages] down.

  The Prime Minister’s response was robust. She stood on the steps of Number 10 and declaimed: