“Football always seems like the most important of the least important things.” Jürgen Klopp
When asked to consider what Liverpool winning the Premier League would mean, I thought back over 30 years of watching games: the good, the bad and the catastrophic. At first, it was to try and explain why it has taken so bloody long since the last title back in 1990.
But I soon realised the matches and moments that really stood out, that had the greatest significance, that provide evidence of a sometimes irrational commitment to a cause – but also why football matters so much on Merseyside – often had nothing to do with what happened on the pitch...
Our first win at Old Trafford for eight years. Five weeks later, Liverpool would become league champions for the 18th time. We were going to dominate the 1990s, just like we dominated the 1970s and 1980s. What could possibly go wrong?
Since then, United have won the title 13 times to Liverpool’s zero. You can watch highlights of that game on YouTube. It features an exquisite own goal by Liverpool midfielder Ronnie Whelan. However, I must warn you, the editing is so extraordinarily awful it looks like a sketch from Benny Hill. The morning after, I cut out the Daily Mirror’s match report, Sellotaped it to the school locker of a United fan who I’m still friends with to this day, attached with a note that read, “You’ve never seen your team win the title and you never will.”
We all do things as teenagers we later regret.
I was in seat 157, row eleven in what is now the Kenny Dalglish Stand Lower as Liverpool became champions again with two games to spare. On the train journey home somebody shouted, “Cheer up lads! We’ve just won the fucking league!” Ronny Rosenthal, the Israeli striker who joined the club that season, later observed, “I felt it was a celebration of habit.” After losing the title in the final seconds of the previous season to Arsenal, this was back to the old normal.
The other game from that season that sticks in the memory was played the day before the first anniversary of Hillsborough, Britain’s worst sporting disaster. Our opponents were Nottingham Forest, just as they were for that fateful FA Cup semifinal. At half-time, 95 red balloons were released in tribute to those who died – the 96th victim, Tony Bland, was eventually taken off life support in 1993. The Kop bellowed out a stirring, impassioned rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. All around me grown men and women either cried, fought back the tears or stared into the middle distance.
It turned out that for virtually all the years that followed, the pursuit of the title became a fleeting interest, while the pursuit of justice became the one constant. That was because of something that happened even before the last win in 1990.
I missed my intended train because I went to Euston instead of Kings Cross. I was 17, bought a child return ticket and lied about my age. Four lads passed around a copy of Razzle as the train pulled into Sheffield. I got into the ground at around 2.20pm. I wanted the “best spec” standing around six steps from the back of the Leppings Lane terrace. By 2.40pm my section was full. Uncomfortably full. Worryingly full. At 3pm people were still coming into that section. I had to do whatever I could to stand my ground and not get forced forward into or beyond the crash barrier four steps in front of me. The police told us to move back. There was nowhere to go. Just after 3.20pm, I got hauled up into the seats above. I looked down as a young man was being given CPR. From a distance, he looked roughly the same age as me. He lay motionless on the edge of the penalty area. He went to a football match and never came home.
While this living nightmare was unfolding, my brother was sat in the North Stand. It’s his ticket stub you can see. The 15 April 1989 is the day that defines our relationship. For no obvious reason, we never talked about what we individually experienced in any great detail until about four years ago on a trip to Paris to watch the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe.
He got me the ticket for the game. He could see what was happening and was powerless to stop it. No mobile phones. No texting. No way of knowing if I was OK. He went to the school gym that had become a makeshift mortuary to check my name wasn’t on the list of the deceased.
The Taylor Report, published in August 1989, stated that, “Although there were other causes, the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.” This led one to assume justice would be served at a public inquiry that, in 1991, shockingly recorded a verdict of “accidental death”.
Being a criminal lawyer, my brother also explained that even though the 2016 independent inquiry exonerated Liverpool fans – the single most significant off-the-pitch moment of the past 30 years – recorded a verdict of unlawful killing, revealed that witness statements were altered and presented undeniable proof of cover-up, the defence would rest on the idea that no individual could be held responsible for everything that went wrong. Nobody has ever done time for Hillsborough, at least not physically.
In some ways, winning the title in 1990 masked the toll Hillsborough had taken on the club and especially Kenny Dalglish who resigned as manager in February 1991. Nobody could begrudge his decision to walk away. As a fan he survived the Ibrox disaster of 1971; as a footballer, he had to play through the Heysel disaster of 1985; as a manager, he attended countless funerals for those who died at Hillsborough.
When Dalglish left, the ruthless professionalism that had been a feature of the team’s dominance departed with him. You could have built a new hospital with the amount the club spent on average players, agent’s fees and plans for a stadium in Stanley Park that never was. Finishing runners-up in 1991, 2002, 2009 and 2014 was invariably followed by disastrous summers in the transfer market. In 2010, Liverpool came within minutes of going into administration.
But it has been punctuated with some of the greatest games in modern football. Liverpool won the best European Cup final (2005), the best FA Cup final (2006), the best Uefa Cup final (2001) and the best Premier League match of the past 30 years (4-3 against Newcastle in 1996).
To mark the 15th anniversary of winning the Champions League after coming back from 3-0 down at half-time to beat Milan, I reminded the Evertonian, who I’ve known since 1990, that he sent a text message during half-time to a group of us who were at the Ataturk Stadium. It said, “If you leave now you’ll beat the traffic.”
Even the lows have been nothing if not memorable.
I was a sports reporter for the Fulham Chronicle and was involved in a car crash on the way home after they had won promotion at Mansfield. I discharged myself from Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire so that I could travel to Paris for the pleasure of seeing one of Liverpool’s worst away performances in Europe.
Still, at least there would be Champions League football to look forward to the following season. Or so we thought. Back then, there were only two English seats available at Europe’s top table. Liverpool were odds on to finish second in the Premier League and bottled it. We were taunted for “finishing fourth in a two-horse race”.
Teargassed and initially refused entry with a valid ticket to the Champions League final in Athens, I eventually got in through another entrance by pretending to be Italian. I gesticulated to Greek police officers in the way the Azzurri always do when they surround the ref while saying, “Milano! Grazie!”
If Istanbul was a party, Athens was the hangover. Thousands had blagged their way into the ground either by showing forged tickets or waving scraps of paper or by overrunning the chaotic, woefully disorganised stewarding and policing. The atmosphere inside the ground was like a night in a grim club where everyone seems to be on bad drugs. Everyone was wide-eyed and tense. It was a joyless experience.
Ruthless professionalism is back in vogue at Anfield. Speaking to people who work at the club at the last league game before lockdown they talk about the culture change that instantly came with Jurgen Klopp’s arrival in 2016. Managers can be distant, aloof, unapproachable figures, even with their own players. But Klopp makes it clear that everyone has an important role to play in this never-ending soap opera.
Yet, to win the Premier League by such a wide margin is, perhaps, the only way Liverpool could win it. To paraphrase Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, the anxiety that can grip Anfield when the match is scoreless and heading into the final 20 minutes, “goes up to eleven”. The victory against Bournemouth was often nervy and unconvincing on the back of a defeat to Watford.
Throughout last season, the Evertonian would sporadically send a WhatsApp group made up of his Liverpool supporting friends a picture of Devon Loch, the Queen’s horse who bellyflopped just 40 yards from victory in the 1956 Grand National and lost the race.
Devon Loch has been conspicuously absent this year. And the inevitability of winning the title, at least until the outbreak of Covid-19, gave those who despise the club – and view the supporters as self-righteous, with a superiority complex – plenty of time to come to terms with it.
Then came that horrible moment when the idea was touted that the season could be scrapped. Some rival fans took to social media with glee. Never mind the rising death toll, or the fact you could lose your job and be forced by the DWP to “Pick for Britain”, Liverpool won’t win the title. That’s the main thing.
But if it seems to an outsider that Liverpool constantly feels the need to shout louder than anybody else, then it’s not just a product of Hillsborough. It’s born out of the 1980s, a decade when the city had to contend with mass unemployment, the Toxteth riots and the shame of Heysel. A time when senior government figures considered starving the city of funding so it could die a slow, painful death.
For everything that was going wrong, the city had the two best football teams in the country. For Liverpool and Everton, every trophy was a two-fingered salute to the rest of England, as was the refusal to sing the national anthem during cup finals.
The resilience required to get through those times lived on through the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and demonstrated that football supporters can be a formidable union.
The club’s current owners, FSG, have, for the most part, got most things right since they took over ten years ago. But when they decided to hike season ticket prices in 2016, on the train up to the game opinions were divided on whether the protest would be successful and whether you should walk out on your team. It seemed to affect the players as 10,000 fans got up and left while Liverpool were winning 2-0. But it forced the owners to back down. The fact that away tickets in the Premier League cost no more than £30 can be directly linked to that protest. If you don’t stand up for something, you’ll fall for anything.
In April, FSG announced it would be putting its non-playing staff on furlough. The club’s marketing slogan of “This Means More” was ripe for ridicule. “This Costs Less” was the retort.
Again, following pressure from the fans, the owners performed another volte-face. Spurs and Bournemouth subsequently also reversed decisions to furlough staff.
Even a relatively easy title win has turned out to be anything but straightforward. Back in those simpler, more innocent times of last month, the possibility of Liverpool fans going out on the streets to celebrate was singled out by the authorities as a potential public order and health issue. That was before actual football hooligans rocked up in London.
Everything and nothing has changed about football since 1990. It is still our release, a magnificent distraction. Right now it feels an escape from the seemingly unrelenting horror of the world around us. It retains your undivided loyalty to the point where you will tell a group of doctors there is nothing wrong with you while you’re nursing six stitches in your head just so you can travel to another country and see David James have a shocker against PSG. The most important of the least important things.
Now it's finally happened I'll go to my brother’s house, with his wife and children who have had put with years of him writhing around like a cat with a hernia, just after he has accused another referee of a being a crook. Apparently, that’s what happens when you spend so much of your life in the company of criminals.
The overwhelming emotion is one of relief. We’ll raise a glass and I’ll look forward to a text from that United fan to tell me that it “will be 30 years before you win it again”. Walk on? Dream on.
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