I used to watch old cowboy films with John Wayne in and he used to always say, let’s get in there, do the business and then get the hell out of there.
We went up there the day of the game. You know, that’s a bit weird. You’re playing Friday evening, the biggest game for Arsenal in the last 18 years, since they played at White Hart Lane and won the league. To go up there the day of the game was just phenomenal. I think George was like, if we go up the day of the game, the players haven’t got time to think and get nervous.
I was into coaching big time and I started to get a lot of books from America. Coaches of American football. Basketball. I started to learn from people who had been successful in the States, reading up to see if it would help me. It’s really about being in charge of other people. In charge of a bunch of players. How do you handle them? There are a lot of ways to do it. I just thought it was fascinating.
Somebody recommended The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and it was about territory. It was about why, in the animal kingdom, if it’s somebody else’s territory you would be fought off. Get out of here. This is my territory. Get out. I tried to relate that to football and footballers.
I always remember previously when I was a player going to Anfield and you would go up the day before the game and get into the hotel and all the people working at the hotel would say, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing up here? This is Liverpool. You should get back to London where you belong.’ When you’ve got a group of players, there’s a number that are very confident of their own ability and there’s some that are not so comfortable. When you go into a situation where you need warriors, you’d like the whole 11 players to be warriors but it doesn’t work out that way. You usually have two or three really strong characters who carry the rest of the boys. When you go away from home you need your leaders who love the challenge, the battle. There are people who are much stronger mentally within a group of players. When I was a player I was not strong mentally. Not as strong as I maybe should have been. Frank McLintock was the equivalent of three people. We used to think, cor! With Frank and another couple of others, how can we lose?
I knew we had a lot of warriors in that team. It’s not a secret who we had. Nigel is like that. He’s no meat on him at all and Nigel would kick anybody. Bouldy, Tony, even Lee, who was a gentleman – he didn’t like kicking people but occasionally he would. David Rocastle had it. We had a strong back bone to us and sometimes you think nowadays some teams lack that. If you’ve got too many who are mentally not as strong then you go to some grounds and it’s more difficult to win matches. Liverpudlians are very, very passionate about their own city. They’re very, very intense about their game and their team especially. Nothing against Liverpool or the people up there but I didn’t want to be staying in a hotel for a couple of days with negative vibes. That’s why having read that book, The Naked Ape, I suddenly thought we’ll go up the morning of the match. Have a light lunch. Off to bed to have a rest and then the game in the evening. The Desmond Morris idea definitely convinced me I wanted to take the team up there as late as possible near the game. Then play the game and get out of there as quickly as possible, obviously with the right result. I’m glad I did that.
Surprisingly as a group we were all very calm. I don’t know whether that’s because we didn’t have too many expectations, or we actually believed George’s story. He told it like it was a Western. Get in and get out of town quick with the rewards. He used to quote that kind of thing regularly.
Did I wake up thinking this is the day we win the league? I’ll be honest with you; not really. I didn’t sit there going this is it. I wasn’t pumped up like that that early. Because there was still all that stuff going on around Hillsborough for me. Even during the prep in the dressing room, it was like another game but there was still that feeling of, you know, should we really be here?
It was my son’s birthday. I went away that day thinking it would be nice to bring him back a medal, wouldn’t it? I wished him a happy birthday. He was six at the time. Later on he was too tired to stay awake for the game and went to bed.
It’s a good job I got there early because there were no seats on the bus. Everybody and his brother was on that bus going up to Anfield. Even people I didn’t know were on the bus. It was packed.
The first team coach is sacrosanct. No one goes on it unless you’re in the squad. No one travels. I remember getting on the coach and it was full of VIPs and I thought half of them actually were barely alive, aged about 70 or 80, cobwebs coming off them with their old blazers. But the thing is they sat in our seats and broke an unwritten rule. When you’re a regular in the first team you always sit in the same seat. It’s a rite of passage. You have to earn your right. Some officials from the club were sat on our table so we’re like, what are you doing? I said, ‘Sorry, chaps, you’ve got to move’ and they went, ‘You can sit down there.’ We said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. You have to move. That’s where we sit. Every single away game that is my seat. That’s where Bouldy sits. That’s where Alan Smith sits. I tell you what, if we get beat tonight or we don’t win the title it’s your fault. If you don’t move we’ve got no chance.’ Because footballers are very superstitious. Very superstitious. In the end we got them out of our seats.
I remember playing cards on the coach like we always used to do. We used to play hearts at the back of the coach and it was really relaxed.
There was a bed at the back of the coach. It all started because Charlie Nicholas got badly injured in Nottingham on my first game as first team physio in September 1986. We had nowhere to lay him after the game on the way home. I went to the coach company to ask if one of the tables could drop down on springs to make a bed. They adapted it and it was designed for when players were injured, the table would convert and we put a mattress on top. But of course people like Mickey and Rocky used to go for a sleep all the time.
Travelling up that day we were all in a good mood. Good spirits. Get on the coach, a summer’s morning, I was thinking, oh yeah, this should be a nice little journey. I used to be at the back all the time. On the bed. Ha ha ha. Horizontal. We used to fight for it. It was me, Rocky and Tony Adams. I could sleep anywhere. Obviously I woke up a few times. Merse, Nigel, Dicko and Bouldy were playing cards and joking. It was great. Then reading all the press. Lambs to the slaughter. Graeme Souness from his hospital bed and you think, oh here we go. Everybody writing us off. We thought, OK. Obviously no one thinks we were going to win. We’ll just show them.
The press did us an enormous favour really by saying we were written off. A lot of players made a mental note that day.
Well that’s just life, isn’t it? You look at the situation and you say what’s the best way to handle it? And whether you liked it or not the build-up to that game was unbelievable because everything, in every paper, was all about how Arsenal were going to lose. Liverpool are going to win it. Blah blah. So the players were going to go through it anyway in the media. I just thought, let’s have a relaxed attitude to the whole situation. I knew they’d perform because of the way we worked midweek. I was always confident we would do well. Whether I was confident enough to win two-nothing is a different matter.
We saw the now infamous Graeme Souness interview and he’d obviously come down on the side of his former team. He said they were the much better team, play the much better football and the headline was ‘Men Against Boys’. So, one of the lads said, look what Souness has written here. Up on the noticeboard. Everyone has a good read. Somebody brought it up on the coach with us. We were really chirpy on the way up. It was a good atmosphere. Lots of chat and looking forward to it. We had the card school at the back, which I was never part of. I hated cards. Bouldy, Merse, Rodders would be there. I was kind of in the middle, with some of the boys like David O’Leary and Grovesy and we’d just have a chat.
David O’Leary was my room-mate at the time. We got to the Atlantic Tower hotel where we were due to stay for lunch and a kip and a pre-match meal, which is right on the water down by Albert Dock. We had our lunch and we all went to our rooms. That was the strange thing because quite often with a night match you go to your rooms and you can’t really go to sleep. You’re obviously thinking about the match. Tossing and turning. But that day me and Paddy were out like a light. We had a good couple of hours’ kip.
Me and the kit man, Donners, went to the ground to put the kit out around 3 o’clock. I usually went for a run around the pitch. Partly superstition and partly just to get some nervous energy out. I did it everywhere. In those days you would go into an empty ground and get a buzz. Anfield had that. We stayed in a hotel shaped like a boat. We got back and I did the alarm calls at 4 o’clock, calling the rooms, and if they didn’t answer the phone I would go and bang on the door. Pre-match meal wasn’t a buffet like they have now. On a Thursday I would go round to every player: ‘What do you want for your lunch?’ It would be steak, chicken or fish. ‘What do you want for your pre-match meal?’ It would be omelette, beans on toast, scrambled eggs on toast. I would stand at the entrance to the dining room with a list to hand out the right meal. As they came in, ‘That’s for Steve Bould, that’s for Paul Merson …’ We didn’t have a travel manager so that was my job.
Woke up. ‘Cor that was nice, wasn’t it?’ We got down for our tea at 4. Everyone was saying, ‘Sleep well?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, slept like a log.’ Everyone had a really good sleep. There was something about it. People were relaxed, felt energised. The old flip-chart was out after tea and toast and the gaffer’s going through the set-pieces and he did everything as he always did. Gives us a little pep talk.
Right, lads, gather round. The tactical side of it was about the importance of not conceding a goal, stressing that if we concede then we’ve got to score three, which would be impossible. As long as you keep a clean sheet you’re always in with a shout. Then it’s going through who’s marking who at set-pieces. Smudge, I want you to mark Gary Ablett. You stand at the near post. Make sure you stay with your markers. Do your jobs properly. At the end of that he gets to the Churchillian stuff, just setting the night in context. The importance of not wasting the opportunity. The importance of not leaving anything out there. Giving it your all. Having no regrets.
The team meeting was the interesting thing. Obviously because George had changed the formation his team-talk was quite enlightening. Once he’d named the team, he outlined his plans for the evening, which revolved around keeping a clean sheet until half-time and then early on in the second half play a little bit freer, hopefully score a goal which will put Liverpool on edge and then towards the end of the game we’ll get the winner. Pretty straightforward stuff really.
It made sense for me. Two of the biggest teams in the country, away from home, you’re going to go and play five at the back and it was a good option. George kept us normal. It’s just another game. Just perfect. As I remember it he called every shot right.
I started working at Arsenal in 1987 and I worked in the box office and that’s where I was in 1989. There were 25 Travel Club coaches for the fans; and me and Jo, we were giving out raffle tickets. Charlie George came down and he drew the raffle ticket and it was so ironic that he picked number 18 and the person that won it was on coach 18 and it was 18 years since we last won the league and everyone was thinking, oh my God, is this an omen. It lifted our spirits, didn’t it?
We stood there and waved everybody off and then went back to work for a couple of hours. After work we went up to the old Cocktail Lounge in the East Stand where a few staff would watch the game together. I didn’t stay though. I went and sat in a tiny flat in Finsbury Park with six guys and some peanuts that had been put on the table.
The club was a big family. The whole system has changed now but in those days the players like Dave Rocastle, Mickey Thomas, Martin Hayes, Paul Merson all came through what was called then the apprenticeship system and part of their apprenticeship was that one afternoon a week they actually did work experience in the offices. As an example in the box office you’d have Kevin Campbell and Paul Merson opening envelopes and selling tickets, which is quite ironic when you see how the young players are treated now. It was a real camaraderie because we all grew up with the players. Now it’s totally different because the players are at the training ground and you don’t often see them. But these lads from the age of 16 actually spent quite a bit of their lives here at the club because they trained a bit at the club at Highbury and did work experience here.
It was a family for us. We had families at home but this was a real tight-knit family with this group of people. We all grew up at the same time with all the people around the club. The tea ladies were so special. Midweek you’d be bored, you’d finish training, why go home? Go to the ticket office and help out with the tickets or answering the phones. We knew everybody. We’d go for lunch with them, go across to Highbury Corner and get something to eat or just meet up because that’s how it was.
They’d sit on desks for hours after training. I remember George would come in and say, have you not got homes to go to? They literally didn’t go. They just sat and chatted and it was like your friends.
Mickey would come in for the biscuits. I remember him actually hiding under a desk when George come along.
We just thought that it would be great to spend that last night of the season together. Celebrate the season. Didn’t think we’d do it but nevertheless we were going to make a night of it. I would guess there was about 20 staff and it was a complete range. It was everyone from the groundsman, the plumber, the electrician, box office staff. We went out for a meal on Blackstock Road and all came back into one of the rooms at Highbury. There was a regular TV in what was then called the Ladies Lounge but it was probably 20 inches and we thought, well there’s 20 of us, so we phoned up a local retailer and hired in for the night something we thought was very swish. It must have been about a 36/38-inch TV. We hired some drinks in.
We had ordered a big plastic banner that was due to go on the front of the open-top bus just in case and it said ‘Arsenal FC League Champions 1989’ and it had been delivered during the day. I just rolled it up and put it behind my desk and I thought, I’ll throw it away on Monday morning and just get rid of it.
Alan got up in the morning and off he went. I was in work for 8.30 at a beauty therapists. In those days it was no computers, the appointment book was written, so I’d put in fake appointments for the afternoon, moving ones that I could get done in the morning to the afternoon so the takings were all in the till regardless. My friend was manager of the salon and she had done the same so we were hoping to leave for Liverpool at lunchtime with her boyfriend. Just as we were about to go upstairs to get changed out of our uniform, our boss turned up. Oh my God. He’d come to collect the takings and was chatting away and we were desperate for him to go. We had to hide my friend’s boyfriend in one of the treatment rooms because he shouldn’t have been there anyway. Eventually off we went in his beige Ford Escort estate. The aerial had been snapped off, and he’d put a coat hanger in to make an aerial. Because we were late and got stuck in all that traffic, trying to pick up what was happening on the radio with a wire coat hanger as an aerial was quite difficult. It was very crackly.
I had a ticket but I was so nervous I couldn’t go. I was so uptight and worried about it I gave my ticket away to Lee’s uncle Albert, who was over from Australia. That’s the way it goes when you are a parent. I decided to watch it on television by myself in the house.
I was in charge of team, directors, reserves and supporter travel. We had 26 coaches going up in convoy and we were all late. I was on coach number 1 with Roberto, the coach driver, who took us up the hard shoulder to try to get us there. It became obvious the M6 was completely jammed. I was very worried. We had borrowed a phone for the journey as there were no everyday mobiles then. I put a call in to Ken Friar, Arsenal’s managing director. I then go through to Peter Robinson, the secretary of Liverpool, and to put this politely he said, 26 coaches or not we are not delaying the game. In the end there was a ten-minute delay but it wasn’t enough.
We were supposed to meet at 1 o’clock at Toddington Services and were a bit late. We had to average about 40mph, said that would be a breeze and I think we were around Walsall at half past five with my friend and fellow photographer Andy Cowie driving his Peugeot 405. He was due to go to Hampden Park the next day for the Scotland v England game. Having to get back to London to catch the flight the next day he kept wondering if it was worth continuing or better to head back. Every ten miles we thought, we’re not going to make it. We’re not going to make it. Then the traffic moved for about three minutes and we’d say we’ve cracked it and then it would grind to a halt.
Well it was probably one of five times we said, look shall we just watch it in a pub?
Andy had been covering Liverpool all through the late 70s and 80s and I remember him saying to me, ‘Well it’s just Liverpool picking up another trophy shot. I think we’ve done this enough times. Do we need another one?’ And I digested this for two whole seconds. It made sense and then I seemed to grab him by the lapels. ‘Young man, we’re going to photograph a team in yellow. Drive!’ Some of the fans must have been in Stoke-on-Trent at kick-off.
I’m always a supreme optimist so I thought we had a chance. I didn’t think we were going to do it but we’ve seen enough football in our lives to know that anything can happen. Going to Anfield that day I remember we hired a private jet, the board and a couple of friends. We didn’t want to chance driving up and getting involved in congestion on the motorway or a problem with a train that doesn’t run to schedule and then we’re going to miss the game. We wanted to make sure we were there on time. We got there and the Liverpool board were very nice, always very social and accommodating, and I think they felt inwardly confident that the league was theirs for the taking.
I was the first one there. The first thing I did in this case was to go and see Peter Robinson, the Liverpool secretary, to tell him he’s got a referee and then ask him if my colleagues are there. They eventually arrived. I had to get to know them and form some rapport with them. It’s the first time I’ve worked with them as far as I can remember. So, it’s a question of me weighing them up and seeing who’s nervous and who’s not. The last thing we talked about probably was the match. About an hour and a half before the game I say, ‘Right. OK, we’ve got work to do now.’ I always went out on the pitch with my two linesmen and I wanted to walk around the pitch and give them instructions about certain situations rather than do it in the dressing room, because it’s a funny thing at football grounds but everybody wants to come and knock on the referee’s door and have a word with him. If I’m out on the pitch then the only person who’s likely to come out is the one that says there’s a cup of tea for you in the dressing room. So, we went out on the pitch and we walked round and we stopped off, deliberately stopped off in this case, in front of the Kop. Even an hour and a half before, it was filling up quite full. It’s a question of getting the lads used to the atmosphere. We walked further round and stopped here and stopped there to emphasise certain points. Walk them through the position they should take for a goal-kick and for penalty kicks and stuff like that. It used to take about 45 minutes.
They know how to signal a throw-in and so on but it’s getting the teamwork correct. It was very difficult. You’ve got three things to consider as a linesman. Is the ball in or out of play if it’s coming from your left-hand side? Is there an offside situation? Or is there any foul play going on in that quadrant just in front of me? As a referee, I don’t want too much flag but I do want help. So the way I used to describe that was to say if a foul is just in front of you that if you were a referee you would blow the whistle for, please don’t flag automatically. Just count: one-two, and whilst you’re counting one-two make eye contact with me and you’ll see one of three things. I shall either be saying nothing, letting play on, and if you’ve put your flag up and I’m saying play on, I’ve got to knock you down in front of 45,000 people, which is not good for teamwork or for your morale and it gets me worried about you as well. The second thing is I’ll be saying play on, advantage. Not so bad if you have put your flag up because I can take the brunt of that one. The third possibility is that I’ll be looking at you and my eyes will be wide open and written across them in red block capital letters, six foot high, is the word HELP. That’s when I want the flag.
When you’re on the coach to the ground you talk about the game, what’s going to happen, when you’re in a group together. Players today can’t talk about the game and what’s coming up because they’ve all got headphones on. How can you then talk about situations you might find yourself in? We’d have Lee Dixon talking to Tony Adams about the distances they’re going to play for each other if the winger gets it. If John Barnes gets it, Dicko’s going to close him down and then they’ll shuffle across and he’ll try and bring Barnes inside. Kevin Richardson’s saying to Michael Thomas, if you go forwards you’ve got to make sure you get yourself back in. Merse and Smudge talk about when the ball comes forward and they are going to split. There are conversations with everybody that’s going to be around you. I don’t see how that happens today because of the headphones.
There were a lot of us in the changing room because everybody was up there for this game. Myself, Niall Quinn and Brian Marwood weren’t playing. We were all in our club suits so it came to a point where we knew we were going to need to leave the changing room and let the boys get on with it but we were waiting around for our tickets. Where were we going to sit?
There was no room on the bench. It was a sunken bench so you couldn’t just put chairs behind it because you would be blocking people’s view. There were no seats in the grandstand behind the dugout. There was a bit of confusion. It was suggested the safest place to go was in the section where the Arsenal fans were segregated from the Liverpool fans. Footballers weren’t as fussy then. We just followed orders.
The boys were getting ready now about an hour before kick-off. We wished them all well, said our goodbyes and good luck, went out of the ground and walked outside to the entrance for the away fans and came back into the ground. So we were behind the goal in amongst the Arsenal fans. They couldn’t believe that we were there.
The official visitors were the team managers. So, anything you wanted to say or get across you said then. Experience tells me that you might just as well talk to a brick wall because they’re as emotionally tied up in the game as I am and once that game starts anything that you’ve said is most likely not going to be taken care of. But they were both experienced managers in this case. George Graham and Kenny Dalglish. There appeared to be lots of respect between the two of them. That’s great. I got the impression that they were trying to make me feel comfortable, which helps. It’s a bit like the boxing referee. Give me a good clean fight and get on with it.
I should think it was one of the biggest certs in the season to most people in terms of Liverpool being favourites but that doesn’t come into our thinking as match officials. That’s the last thing. I was aware of the maths.
I wasn’t nervous. I was conscious of the responsibility that I’d got as the match official. I desperately wanted it to go without any controversy and that meant I’d got to be on top of my game. It was the only game being played in the Football League that night and everybody who was a football fan was either at the match or watching it live on television. So there was a very special atmosphere and you could feel it and of course it was an emotional situation too. We’re all aware of the background to the game and the reason why it had been postponed, so all those factors add to the atmosphere.
I can tell you about arriving at Anfield because the last time that I’d been there the whole pitch was covered in flowers on the back of the Hillsborough disaster and that was a very, very emotional time for everybody. I can remember particularly Kenny Dalglish during that time. The way he’d conducted himself and the inspiration and the help he gave to so many people. He was a phenomenal figure during that immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy. The image of the flowers all over the pitch was very hard to get out of your mind.
It was the first time in a hundred years I believe – and it’ll probably be the first time in the next hundred years – that two teams played each other on the last day of the season and the title was at stake so of course it was unusual. Did we build it up in the way that we would have built it up now? We didn’t. It wasn’t that sort of era. I remember doing the interviews beforehand and I can remember George being really calm. Kenny was tense. I think one of the reasons was I don’t think they quite knew how to play the game – where you can lose 1–0 and you’re going to be champions.
I would have loved to have been there at the ground. I was sitting glued to the television. I was doing every bit of superstition that I thought possible. Anything really. I always have certain things close to me that link me to the club. It’s the old motto Victoria Concordia Crescit; victory through harmony. In recent times it’s as simple as a key ring with the Arsenal badge on it. It will be hidden somewhere on part of my body. It might be in a shirt close to the heart. It might be in a shoe. It might be wound round my finger. I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s a little key ring with the Arsenal badge on it and if we’re in trouble I sort of press this thing and it doesn’t always work but I’m trying everything to turn the tide, you know. My wife gets upset anyway when I start to lose the plot, shouting at the television, giving instructions. So she went out to meet some friends at a restaurant and I stayed at home and would meet them later.
This was the time of the explosion of television. Suddenly people were beginning to realise there is a mega audience out there and it’s something then that creates that piece of history. The difference between reading it in the newspaper the next day, like when we went to Tottenham in 1971 and won the title on the last game of the season, was significant. Obviously it has grown and grown but I think it was one of those early iconic moments in television.
Anyone under the age of 40 would be astounded with the way television is now compared to the way it was then. In 1988–89 it was the first year of live football on television, apart from the FA Cup final and the odd England match, and that season we covered 21 league matches. There were people in football that said this is going to kill the game. They just thought no one’s going to turn up. They’ll just watch it on TV. Now you can probably watch 21 matches in a week. So, it was a completely different landscape. We were getting audiences of 7, 8, 9 million on a regular basis on a Sunday afternoon. The average rating these days for a live Premiership game is probably 1.5 million.
We had a pundit booked for the night and we only had one pundit because there’s no point having a couple of people if you’ve only got three or four minutes to talk. They pulled out last minute and I knew Bobby Robson, who was the England manager, was going to be at the game and I cornered Bobby in the directors’ entrance at Anfield and said, ‘Look, Bob, we’ve got a real problem here. We haven’t got a pundit for the game.’ He just wanted to watch the game and I said, ‘Please just watch it with us.’ He was a lovely bloke and said, ‘Of course I will.’
I went up on the day and met up with Brian Moore, who was the most fastidious, genuine, nicest man you could imagine. Although it was such a big game and we all knew it was going out on terrestrial, he was very good at relaxing people. I remember going up the stairs. At Liverpool you had to clamber along these planks to the gantry position, along the rafters with your head ducked down. There were only a couple of camera crews. The commentary position was good but there wasn’t a lot of room.
The estate where I lived in Brockley, where David Rocastle grew up, locked down. I moved the television and had six cans of Foster’s. We all knew Arsenal were going to Liverpool that night and it was live on the telly. Everyone was talking about it. All of a sudden the cars stop driving down the road. There is nobody milling around. Everybody is inside. Come kick-off there is not a soul out there. It was amazing to think David off the estate was playing in one of Arsenal’s biggest games in their history. You could hear people in other flats jumping and screaming. That’s how exciting it was. I cannot emphasise enough how proud we were that we had somebody from the estate playing in one of the biggest games in English football.
In the dressing room George was philosophical. He was determined that he wanted to go out to win it. He talked about the game, how he wanted the game to go. He didn’t normally do that, spelling out each part of the game. So, I think he had a vision in his head about the best way to try and beat Liverpool 2–0 at Anfield.
If they score a goal first, in the first half, which they normally do, then we had to score three goals at Anfield. It’s never been heard of. Especially with that team at that time. So, I said to the boys we’ve got to keep it 0–0. We mustn’t go out there thinking we’ve got to attack. Because the papers were full of it. Arsenal’s got to win 2–0. They’ve got to go out there and have a go at Liverpool. Hello! I don’t think so.
Managers always look at your own team, your own structure, the way you play and the way the opposition play. You know, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? You try to exploit their weaknesses and try and force your strengths on to them and that’s the way most coaches sort the game out before kick-off. I had it all organised to play Liverpool and even though they won 5–1 in their previous game and were clear favourites, I still thought it was the right way to play.
Do you know it was 16/1 on the last day to win 2–0? There’s one for you. It was 16/1 to win the league in pre-season and we were 16/1 to win 2–0 at Anfield 37 games later. Ha ha ha.
I just couldn’t see it. I remember his team-talk. I remember sitting there like, what? I was thinking, as long as we don’t start getting beat 3s and 4s, that’s all right. I was thinking, he’s on what I’m on, isn’t he?
The mood in the dressing room would have a pattern. George was centre stage. Theo Foley, his right-hand man, would do his bit individually, going around making sure we were OK. Feeling all right. Feeling confident. Tony would do what Tony did, the shouting bit and in those five or ten minutes he’d be getting louder and louder as kick-off approached. I think it’s as much to get himself wound up as anybody. Everybody has different methods before a match. I’d quite often disappear to the toilet and read the programme. People are banging on the door. Smudge, are you finished yet?
Playing with the back five was a major risk. We had done it before as a sort of one-game special. But in those circumstances, having to win 2–0 away against such a great Liverpool team, it was brave. Had it gone wrong, there’d have been major questions asked.
In the minutes leading up to kick-off it was a fantastic team-talk from George. I think he freed your mind. Concentrate on your individual jobs. You might never be in this situation again. Don’t waste it. Just go out there and do it. You’ve worked so hard this season. Do it for yourselves. Do it for your families. Don’t pass up the opportunity. After the speech he had given us in the hotel this was a bit more ramped up, with more passion. It was one of those where we went, ‘Phew, that was good.’ He shook all our hands on the way out, which he never did. He was stood by the door. ‘All the best.’ We got our bouquets of flowers each.
Ken Friar [the Arsenal secretary] told me, ‘George, we’re going to get the players to walk out with a bouquet of flowers each and take them into the Kop and the Liverpool supporters and give them to the crowd.’ I thought it was a fantastic gesture by the club.
I had already been up to Anfield on a pre-visit to make arrangements about the new date for the game and had laid flowers down on behalf of the club. I got a phone call from Ken Friar saying we had to make a gesture at the game and he suggested flowers for the players to take out to the Liverpool fans. I ended up arranging 20-odd bouquets with a local florist. I think they thought it was a wind-up but we arranged it and it seemed to go down very well.
It was a great idea and it was the way Arsenal used to do things in those days. I think we had our finger on the pulse with compassion and with empathy and we knew how to respect other people as well as ourselves. Given the pain that the Liverpool people had gone through it was important.
Obviously, we’d been watching the Liverpool lads and Kenny Dalglish attending funerals. It was very emotional and you could feel that in the ground.
It’s the football fraternity. Liverpool obviously suffered more than anybody else but I think all football suffered and we just wanted to show compassion. I think gestures sometimes do fall by the wayside but I think that one hit home with a lot of people. By the time all the lads had run off the only spot that wasn’t catered for was down at the Kop end and I had to run all the way down to the Kop and run all the way back up again and that’s the furthest I’d ever run in my life so I was knackered by the time I got back. That moves the moment on into the game and the reason that you’re there and what you have to do on the night. It’s the flick of the switch.
Talk about emotions. In the pit of your stomach knowing that you probably should have won the league title two or three games before is pretty annoying and everybody is writing you off and saying it’s a fitting end to the season that with the Hillsborough disaster Liverpool are going to do the Double. You realise that if you can pull it off you’re going to upset a lot of people. The flowers still stick in my mind. I knew exactly where I was going when I went out on that pitch before the game. I was going to take those flowers down behind the goal. Then you’ve got to switch that off. You’ve got a game of football to play in. It’s difficult.
I’ve always had that feeling about the Kop being a really special place. As a kid I was a Man City fan and my friend was a big Liverpool fan and his dad took us to Anfield. City were playing Liverpool at Anfield and we went and stood on the Kop and I had a blue and white City scarf on, a bobble hat. All the Liverpool fans were taking the mickey out of this little cocky Mancunian with his bobble hat on and putting me on to their shoulders. Passing me down the front. Like the old stories. It was brilliant. It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had at a football ground. So when we were taking the flowers out I really wanted to give my flowers to someone on the Kop.
My superstition was always to go out on the pitch third behind the captain Tony Adams, the goalkeeper John Lukic, and then me. Arsenal’s tradition was to line up on the halfway line and salute the away fans before we went and did our warm-up. So we were all lined up with these flowers and when we’d done our wave I remember sprinting off to the Kop end. There was a lady near the corner flag and I ran over and gave them to her. I remember the emotion of actually passing the flowers over. The minute I let go of the flowers it was like I had this flood of ‘Right!’ My game face came on immediately. I sprinted back to my position before kick-off and I was full of energy. Ready to go. It was almost like a handing over of emotion. It was: right, we’ve done that. Now we’ll go and play the game and that was the first time I can remember thinking, we can win this. We’re going to win this.