reading

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Tony Evans has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

‘Footie Poem’ is taken from You Tell Me by Roger McGough and Michael Rosen published in a revised form by Frances Lincoln Ltd, copyright © 2015. Originally published in 1979 by Kestrel Books. Reproduced by permission of Frances Lincoln Ltd, an imprint of The Quarto Group.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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.’

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 Bert 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:

This is much, much deeper than that. People who have plenty of money to go abroad and have plenty of drink, I do not think you can put it down to unemployment. Indeed if I might say so I think it’s rather a slur on those who are unemployed to put it down to that.

This sort of straightforward directness was often used as evidence of Thatcher’s clarity of thought. In reality it merely illustrated the so-called Iron Lady’s instinct to distil complex problems down to simple black-and-white scenarios. In this limited world view, football in general and Liverpool in particular were part of her ‘enemy within’.

Whatever the Prime Minister believed, it was becoming clear that English clubs would not be competing in Europe in the foreseeable future. UEFA followed the FA’s example two days later with an indefinite ban on English clubs and FIFA endorsed the sanctions. The Belgian government also banned all English teams. Common sense was thrown out, too: a team of 13-year-olds from Sheffield planning to participate in a three-day tournament in Zaventem had their invitation withdrawn.

Paranoia and fear were running wild. A bomb was left outside a Marks & Spencer department store in Brussels. The government warned British tourists in Italy to be careful. Europe was in uproar.

Liverpool Football Club reacted to the withdrawal and ban in the only way they could have. ‘I think it’s a very statesmanlike decision,’ John Smith, the chairman, said. Representatives of Everton, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Southampton and Norwich City were less enamoured with the decision. These clubs had qualified for Europe. Along with the Professional Footballers’ Association, they took their challenge to the High Court, arguing that the FA should nominate the five teams for entry to European competition, that UEFA should accept them and that FIFA should lift the English suspension. They lost. There was no other course of action. The president of the Football League, Jack Dunnett, labelled the ban ‘unjust’.

At Goodison, there was resentment but it was not directed towards Liverpool. Everton, the champions, were not allowed to participate in the next season’s European Cup. ‘It’s difficult watching something unfold and easy to blame the wrong people,’ Neville Southall, the goalkeeper, said. ‘Thatcher wanted us out of Europe. She didn’t want working-class people causing problems abroad. There was another agenda going on that we weren’t party to. I’m convinced if she hadn’t stepped in we’d have still been in Europe.’

Football hooliganism had long been labelled ‘the English disease’ by the British media. It was an outrageous simplification. Violence occurred across the Continent. ‘Hooliganism was a problem but it wasn’t just English fans causing trouble,’ Southall said.

‘Everyone always wanted to blame our fans. When trouble happened abroad and the locals were responsible, you’d hardly hear about it. We had all the windows in the coach smashed on a preseason game against Galatasaray in Turkey. There was no mention of that. There were double standards against our supporters. With Britain, it was a one-way street.’

That was true but the record of English clubs and the national side abroad was sullied by repeated examples of violence. British media always focused on the misdemeanours of UK passport holders.

There are too many incidents to detail, but the worst of them made headlines across Europe. Leeds United supporters ripped up the Parc des Princes after their team was beaten by Bayern Munich in the 1975 European Cup final. Manchester United were expelled and then reinstated in the Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1977 after trouble away at Saint-Etienne. England fans were tear-gassed in Turin after fighting interrupted a European Championships game against Belgium in 1980 and a year later there were ugly scenes in Basel during and after a defeat by Switzerland. In 1983, there were more pitched battles in Luxembourg. The national side’s supporters exported their Little Englander attitudes to Europe and simplistic, right-wing politics and jingoism underpinned much of the aggression. Ironically, most of the troublemakers who followed England and caused anarchy abroad were among Thatcher’s most fervent supporters.

The club game continued to have its issues, too. Tottenham, twice, were involved in unpleasant situations. A rivalry with Feyenoord that went back almost a decade erupted in Rotterdam in 1983. The tabloids labelled Spurs ‘the shame of Britain’. A year later a supporter of the north London club was shot dead in Brussels. Football had become a national embarrassment for many Britons.

The Merseyside teams had earned a good reputation in Europe. Liverpool had an unbroken run of 21 successive years in Continental competition that stretched back to the mid 1960s. By the late 1970s, young Scousers were travelling in significant numbers to away games across the Channel. They had little patience with right-wing politics – they tended to be left-leaning – and fighting got in the way of their main interests: shoplifting and drinking.

When Liverpool supporters were involved in trouble, it was mostly on the receiving end. UEFA scheduled the 1984 European Cup final to be played in Rome despite the presence of AS Roma in the competition. When the Italian side duly reached the showpiece game, they were matched against the Merseyside club. Before and after the match, Roma fans stabbed, slashed and brutalized the away supporters on a mass scale. It was barely reported in the British press in comparison with the coverage of riotous behaviour by English fans. The festering resentment towards Italian Ultras played a significant role in the build-up to Heysel.

Everton had fewer expeditions abroad but when they played in Europe things passed off peacefully. Two weeks before Heysel, they faced Rapid Vienna in Rotterdam in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final. In a city that had a reputation as one of the Continent’s hooligan hotbeds, Everton’s 3–1 victory passed off peacefully. The enduring memory for most Blues was a massive football match involving the Dutch police in one of the main squares before the game. ‘We had such a good time when we went away,’ Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council and an Evertonian, said. ‘That’s why we were appalled at the way we were punished, too.

‘We finally won the league and had a chance at the European Cup and then it was taken away from us. There was some resentment: “That’s the only way those red bastards can stop us.” It was the sort of thing you’d say to your mates, banter almost. It was disappointing to be banned, though.’

The authorities acted quickly, as if they knew the answers to why things had gone wrong in such a deadly fashion in Brussels. In reality they did not even know the right questions to ask. They groped around in the most foolish manner to try to explain what happened.

Smith, the Liverpool chairman, suggested that the National Front were responsible for the violence on the terraces that caused the crush, pointing the finger at Chelsea fans in particular. It was palpable nonsense. The presence of fascist infiltrators would have been noticed by Liverpool’s hard-core support; the right-wingers would have been dealt with long before they reached the stadium. Peter Hooton, the lead singer of The Farm and one of the founders of The End, the seminal football, music and fashion fanzine, was adamant from the start that Scousers were at the forefront of the trouble. ‘As soon as the police released pictures of the charge, it was clear and undeniable,’ Hooton said. ‘It was Liverpool. There was no doubt about it. It was ludicrous to say anything else.’

At the other end of the political scale, Cold War paranoia crept in. David Miller of the Sunday Times was at an International Olympic Committee meeting in East Berlin less than a week after the catastrophe in Belgium. He wrote: ‘The facts are as yet imprecise, but there is grounding for belief that the quite clearly organized assault by alleged Liverpool supporters in the Heysel Stadium had financial and ideological backing from left-wing agencies outside Britain.’

The only thing this analysis had going for it was the recognition that match-going Scousers tended to left-leaning politics.

Crank theories about what had happened were everywhere. In the febrile, furious atmosphere, the madness was not confined to the terraces. The one thing everyone agreed on was that football’s future was bleak.

The people’s game

Football was never the ‘beautiful game’. At least not in Britain. It was earthy, its rhythms determined by wind and mud. There, it was the ‘people’s game’, a sport that energized the working class and drew huge crowds as it grew with stunning rapidity in the late nineteenth century. It quickly developed from a social pastime to a lucrative form of mass entertainment.

The seeds of the game germinated on the playing fields of England’s public schools and then branched off into various codes. Association Football, soccer, became the most popular. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and set out a series of rules for this arm of the sport. The new ruling body was largely controlled by wealthy businessmen and aristocrats.

Something else was happening, though. At the Newton Heath depot of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the employees formed a team to play other departments for recreational purposes. At St Domingo’s in Liverpool, the muscular Christianity of the Methodist congregation was expressed by church members on the football field. Munitions workers in south-east London got together to create a side. Across Britain, the wealth of the late Victorian age allowed workers and churchgoers more free time than they had ever experienced before. They embraced the chance to play sports, especially football. Their co-workers and co-worshippers enjoyed watching their more athletic friends and colleagues compete against other teams. Soon, people from around the district started to take an interest. Newton Heath would become Manchester United, St Domingo’s developed into Everton and the group of Woolwich ammunition makers created Arsenal. Similar teams were formed in canteens and churches across the nation. Flat-capped hordes flocked to watch matches as the leagues grew and rivalries blossomed.

Rugby union, another code, had a more exulted social status. Like cricket, it was perceived to be a ‘gentleman’s’ sport. Football grew bigger though, tapping into local pride and a mass market. Its audiences were rowdier and poorer. By the early years of the twentieth century, a snobbery was developing. Football was the game of the great unwashed. By 1985, it was considered to be a downmarket and dangerous activity. It was the sporting equivalent of ‘slumming it’. Hooliganism was rife and, in the highest echelons of power in Whitehall, it was judged to be a magnet for British society’s most disruptive elements. Heysel was the final proof. It confirmed two Establishment biases: the city of Liverpool and football were both toxic environments that, when mixed, proved explosive and deadly. The game and the region were in their violent death throes in the view of the Conservative government. Heysel offered final, lethal proof.

There was no need to circle the wagons on Merseyside. They had been arranged in a defensive position for some time. In 1985, the city of Liverpool was completely out of step with mainstream life in Britain.

In the 1980s, many people wanted the barriers between Scousers and the rest of the world to be less metaphorical. ‘They should build a fence around [Liverpool] and charge admission. For sadly it has become a “showcase” of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities,’ the Daily Mirror opined in 1982. This was a region that had fallen on hard times and the events in Brussels reinforced the preconceptions of those who despised the area and its people. Yet the shock and horror of the Heysel Stadium disaster hit home more keenly on the banks of the Mersey than in most places.

Derek Hatton was as appalled as anyone by events. ‘I was watching on TV at home,’ he said. ‘It was shocking, especially as we’d been in Rotterdam with Everton two weeks before and there’d been no trouble. We weren’t expecting anything in Brussels, either.’

Once the initial jarring numbness wore off, it became clear that the tragedy in Belgium would have political consequences.

‘Margaret Thatcher knew she was on a collision course with the city,’ Hatton said. ‘The Conservative government were using anything they could to blacken the name of Liverpool. Heysel was used for that, too.’

Peter Reid, who had played in Rotterdam and has a fierce civic pride, agreed. The assault on Merseyside was about much more than football, the Everton midfielder said: ‘The Tories were trying to decimate one of the world’s great cities. They wanted to destroy us.’

His teammate Neville Southall believes it was a wider attack on an entire section of society. ‘It wasn’t about football to the Tories,’ the Everton goalkeeper said. ‘It was an assault against working-class people and their culture.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the port of Liverpool was one of the world’s most important seafaring centres and considered ‘the second city of the Empire’. Its wealth had been built in the slave trade in the 1700s but after this traffic in human beings was abolished in 1807 the burgeoning United States economy ensured that the docklands on this part of the Lancashire coast continued to boom.

Under the surface of prosperity lurked serious social issues. The potato famine of 1846–47 caused the area to be swamped by refugees from Ireland. More than a million desperate, starving Irish came into Liverpool and while most used it as a staging post en route to America or the colonies, enough stayed to change the character of the city’s identity. Their poverty brought a new level of squalor to Victorian life. The strong anti-Irishness in England made it easy to dismiss the problems within Liverpool’s poorest communities as symptoms of inherent barbarism. Punch illustrated the mood of the English with its cartoons depicting the Irish as apes. One of its satires from 1862 said:

A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers.

It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo.

When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.

In London, the immigrants were subsumed into the larger population of the capital. Beside the Mersey they formed new communities, particularly in the North End, an area that ran a mile or so from the city centre to Boundary Street and another mile inland to Great Homer Street. Its main thoroughfare was Scotland Road, which was soon to become a byword for debauchery and anarchy.

Incidents in Liverpool made national headlines where similar crimes elsewhere went unreported. In 1874, on Tithebarn Street where the North End meets the city centre, a man was kicked to death while scores of bystanders watched. The Daily Telegraph reacted with horror: ‘In all the pages of Dr Livingstone’s experiences among the negroes of Africa, there is no single instance approaching this Liverpool story, in savagery of mind and body, in bestiality of heart and act.’

A gang from the streets around Scotland Road, the High Rippers, caused national outrage. Salford’s Scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders were no less dangerous or disruptive but the whiff of Celtic violence in Liverpool made it more sinister to the general public.

Alcohol played a significant role in establishing the city’s reputation as a semi-civilized no man’s land. In the same year as the aforementioned murder, 10 per cent of all drunks detained in Britain were apprehended in Liverpool. Dinah Mulock, a Victorian writer, provided a standard view of the place. ‘Liverpool is an awful town for drinking,’ she wrote. ‘Other towns may be as bad; statistics prove it; but I know of no other place where intoxication is so open and shameless.’

Despite what the cold hard facts said, Liverpool was perceived as worse than elsewhere. Biases like this persisted long into the twentieth century and still linger today.

They were fed by the religious divide in the city. Sectarian rioting was a fact of life in Liverpool in the years before the First World War. Catholics and Protestants did come together to fight for workers’ rights but that made things worse. During the 1911 Transport Workers’ strike, the government sent troops on to the streets and had gunboats on the Mersey ready to shell the city. Soldiers fired into a rioting crowd and killed two men. Viewed from Whitehall and Middle England, it looked like this was a war zone.

Even its politics were alien. The poorest area of the city, the North End, returned an Irish nationalist MP, T. P. O’Connor, to Westminster from 1885 to 1929. It was in this constituency, in the dense tenement slums around Scotland Road, that the Scouse identity was formed.

Until after the First World War, most of the people in the dockside areas of north Liverpool would have described themselves as Irish. There had been other nicknames for people from the city but they had not stuck. The obsession with dressing and acting like Americans was reflected in the term ‘Dicky Sam’, dicky meaning fake and Sam from Uncle Sam, the symbol of the United States. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. Wack, or Wacker, was sometimes used but rarely in Liverpool. Perhaps it comes from the children’s song ‘Nick, nack, Paddy-Wack.’ After all, the ‘old man’ who ‘goes rolling home’ is drunk in this anti-Irish ditty.

At this point, scouse was a type of seaman’s stew – a corruption of the Scandinavian word ‘lobscouse’ – made of the cheapest ingredients. Carts in the Scotland Road area sold the inexpensive gruel to workmen, who were sneeringly nicknamed ‘Scousers’ by wealthier citizens. The term spread to mockingly describe the residents of this poverty-stricken area but before long the people of north Liverpool were adopting the tag with a sense of pride. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s it spread across the city and jumped the religious divide. The Oxford English Dictionary claims the first usage of the word Scouse was in 1945. They were 25 years or more behind the times.

Liverpool’s status as an outsider in England did not change. Even in the 1980s, parts of the media referred to Merseyside sourly as ‘the capital of Ireland’. The relationship between the city and the rest of the country was shaped and defined by this idea of an alien group of people within the body politic of England.

Even before the arrival of the twentieth century, Merseyside’s reputation as a violent, drunken place was well established. Then, in the 1960s, against all expectation, Liverpool became the centre of the world, at least for teenagers and devotees of pop culture.

The Beatles took the planet by storm. Their music had a phenomenal effect but it was only part of their appeal. Their irreverent attitude – cheeky, faintly hostile, rebellious – was as quintessentially Scouse as their accents and suddenly everyone wanted to talk with this nasal cocktail of Irish, Lancastrian and Welsh tones. Briefly, Liverpool was the most fashionable place to be. Of course, the Beatles left for London as soon as their bank balance could justify it.

A decade on, things had changed significantly for the worse. Britain’s trading outlook switched from the Commonwealth and Americas towards Europe. The docks began to contract and industry relocated. Between 1966 and 1977, 350 factories closed or moved away from Merseyside. More than forty thousand jobs disappeared in the 15 years before 1985. In the year of the Heysel disaster, Liverpool’s unemployment rate reached 27 per cent. Nearly half the young men aged between 16 and 24 – the age group that comprised the football clubs’ most fervent fans – were on the dole. This did not go unnoticed. The undercurrents of class war were evident in the coverage of events in Belgium. ‘Unlike Juventus, the majority of Liverpool fans who travelled to Brussels were recognizably and overwhelmingly working class,’ the Sunday Times said. ‘Even without their team favours, many would be instantly recognizable in their ragged jeans, training shoes and do-it-yourself haircuts.’

Refugees from the potato famine would be more identifiable from this description than the sharply dressed Scallies who followed Liverpool around Europe. Ragged? I set off for Brussels wearing a pair of expensive suede boots from London’s Jermyn Street, Levi 501s bought on New York’s Sixth Avenue, shrunk to fit in the bath at home and bleached pale in the same tub, a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a John Smedley crewneck sweater. As for the haircut, that was the cheapest bit: £6 in Torbo’s on Scotland Road. It was not a high-end barbers but it looked presentable enough. The sweeping generalizations had less to do with dress sense than snobbish assumptions. Wilful misunderstanding dominated most of the discourse about Liverpool and football.

If the unemployed were to be sneered at, those who were in work earned little more respect. When they fought for their jobs and refused to accept the terms offered by management and government, they were looked upon as troublemakers. Liverpool’s dockers were prominent when the port workers faced down the Conservative regime in 1972. Ford’s factory in Halewood became a byword for industrial action. Genuine grievances were dismissed as pointless militancy and laziness by outsiders.

By the early 1980s, poverty was growing and an outburst of social disorder cemented Liverpool’s reputation as a grim and forbidding place with a populace of shirkers. In July 1981, longstanding tensions between a heavy-handed police force and the predominantly black community of Liverpool 8 erupted into violence. CS gas was used by the authorities against rioters – the first time it had been deployed in the United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland – even though gas had not been used in Brixton during arguably more severe rioting earlier in the year.

The Conservative government’s reaction was to discuss whether Merseyside should be cut loose and left to wither. Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed running down the area as government policy:

I fear Merseyside is going to be much the hardest nut to crack. We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East.

It would be even more regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on the relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey.

I cannot help but feel that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.

It would take 30 years for the public records office release of documents to confirm this but many residents of Liverpool knew they were considered worthless by those at the highest level of politics. They fought back at the ballot box, voting for a left-wing Labour council that immediately set itself on a collision course with Whitehall.

‘It was seen as a rogue area because it was resisting the Thatcher government,’ Peter Hooton said. ‘Every other area complied with the free-market zealotry.’

‘In a city cast as an outsider in its own land, battered by the deliberate economic downturns and clear-outs of the early 1980s, Liverpool Football Club was an enduring source of pride, a magnet for the energies and emotions of a public hungry for success,’ wrote David Goldblatt in The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football.

Everton had emerged as the other most significant team in the English game in the mid 1980s. The clubs were flagbearers for the city. The players recognized it. ‘We all understood the situation,’ Graeme Sharp, the Everton striker, said. ‘Unemployment was high and you knew the hardship the fans were going through. You’d see all the away fans and think, “How did they manage that?” It made you realize how important football was. We were well aware what people were sacrificing. It gave you great respect for the fans.’

Everton and Liverpool’s success lifted spirits in a depressed region and gave people who had little to boast about bragging rights over the rest of the country. The horrible deadly night in Brussels had undermined this.

In among the shame, anger, mourning and confusion, it felt like something special had been ruined. Little wonder Grobbelaar considered walking away from the sport.

The story of the Blues

The unholy story of professional football in Liverpool started in a church. In the era of physical protestantism, St Domingo’s Methodist Sunday school encouraged its boys to join in the sort of healthy pursuits that would prepare young men to be servants of the Empire. Football was not just recreation but a pastime with a purpose. It taught teamwork and was held to build moral fibre.

The team became popular. Very quickly, non-parishioners wanted to join the fun and in 1879 the club was re-christened Everton. They held matches in Stanley Park until the league demanded that they play in an enclosed area. Everton moved to a pitch off Priory Road.

Football was the mass-participation sensation of the Victorian era. Crowds flooded to see the games and Everton once again found themselves too big for their home. The land’s owner didn’t like swarms of people on his property, and the club were on the move. Their next home would become famous: Anfield.

Everton were happy at their new ground. They won the League Championship for the first time in 1891 while residents of the growing stadium. The future on Walton Breck Road looked bright. Then, a year later, a boardroom row threatened the future of the club.

Like so much that was controversial in the city, drink was the cause. John Houlding, a local MP and brewer, was one of Everton’s powerbrokers but when he attempted to buy the ground, his enemies on the board opposed him. Houlding wanted to be able to sell his beer to the burgeoning crowds. He got the property but lost the club.

Everton found a new home at Goodison Park less than a mile away and Houlding was left with a football ground, no team and no thirsty customers. The brewer decided to form his own club. He held a meeting in his Sandon Hotel, just yards from what would become the Kop, and created a new entity. Liverpool Football Club played their first game in 1892. The rivalry began immediately.

Everton were the senior partners. They had a glamour that their neighbours lacked, even though each club had won the title five times by the beginning of the 1960s. They were owned by the Moores family, who had become rich running football pools and had built a huge retail empire. Everton were known as the ‘Mersey Millionaires’. They spent only four years of their history outside the top flight of English football and have been continuously in the highest division since 1954. As Liverpool became successful in the 1970s, though, Everton struggled.

In 1981, they appointed Howard Kendall, one of their great former players, as manager. He returned to Goodison the same month that Liverpool won their third European Cup. The gloom would deepen before things got better for fans on the Gwladys Street End terraces. For the first time in Merseyside history, a generation of Evertonians had grown up as second-class citizens.

At an Anfield derby in November 1983, the former residents of the ground capitulated meekly to the upstarts who succeeded them. The 3–0 Liverpool victory looked to hasten the end of the Kendall era. The Kop sang: ‘Howard Kendall, Howard Kendall, there’s a taxi at the gate!’

It was bad enough to have twenty thousand Kopites howling abuse at you but football is a profession that you cannot leave at the office. It comes home with you. Kendall’s worst moment was when his garage door was daubed with the words ‘Kendall Out’.

Kendall was on the brink but the same month as the humiliation at Anfield, the Everton manager signed Andy Gray for £250,000 from Wolverhampton Wanderers. It was a masterstroke.

Four years earlier, the Scottish striker had moved to Wolves from Aston Villa for a British record fee of close to £1.5 million. At 27, he had problems with his knees – hence the knockdown price. He was just the man Everton needed to provide an extra dash of know-how to help transform a squad of callow youngsters into serious contenders. ‘Andy had passion, desire and drive,’ Graeme Sharp said. ‘He gave a group of young players experience. He had unbelievable passion on and off the field.’

Still, Everton lived on the brink. The side lurched through the winter and spring, barely surviving a number of crises. Each time Kendall was ‘one game from the sack’, the team would eke out a result. The various turning points became part of Everton folklore.

At Stoke City in the third round of the FA Cup, the manager opened the dressing-room windows for the players to hear the noise of four thousand travelling fans. ‘He just said, “Listen to that. Are you going to let them down?”’ Sharp recalled. Everton won 2–0.

Sometimes they needed more than the fans’ help. Against Oxford United, a team from two divisions below, Kendall’s team were trailing 1–0 and on the verge of a damaging League Cup defeat. Kevin Brock, an Oxford defender, mishit a straightforward back pass and Adrian Heath kept Everton in the competition. They won the replay.

In the FA Cup, Gillingham – who were in the same division as Oxford – had a last-minute chance to knock the top-flight team out in the waning moments of a replay. Tony Cascarino missed the opportunity and Everton progressed after another rematch.

It did not feel like it, but Kendall’s team were growing more confident by the week. They reached the League Cup final – against Liverpool, of all people – in March and matched their neighbours in a 0–0 draw at Wembley before being outfought in the replay at Maine Road as Liverpool won 1–0. In the FA Cup, they were unstoppable.

In May 1984, Kendall brought Goodison its first trophy since 1970 when Everton beat Watford 2–0 at Wembley.

It was just the start. The close season of 1984 did little to halt the momentum. In 1984–85, Everton emerged as one of Europe’s best sides. In October, they went to Anfield and put down a marker. Sharp scored a spectacular 25-yard strike in a 1–0 victory and the nature of the relationship between Liverpool and Everton changed again. ‘We grew up going to Anfield and getting nothing,’ Sharp said. ‘We were underdogs. We had an inferiority complex.’

‘We could sense it coming together as a team,’ Sharp said. ‘The goal at Anfield gave us massive belief. We could challenge Liverpool. We could beat them.’

They stormed to the first division title, leaving second-placed Liverpool 13 points in their wake. They captured the Cup-Winners’ Cup, their first European trophy, in Rotterdam in May and were unlucky to miss out on a treble when Manchester United beat them 1–0 in the FA Cup final. There was a growing swagger about Everton. Perhaps with a little less of it, they might have won the cup.

‘I’ve got a picture of me with the Cup-Winners’ Cup, filled with champagne on the plane back from Rotterdam,’ recalled Derek

Also by Tony Evans

TWO TRIBES

Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink

Tony Evans