Liverpool were the Barcelona of the day. Winning everything, so renowned, they passed the ball so well they kept it. At Anfield most teams were beaten before you even went up there. I remember going up with the England team when I was 20 for Alan Hansen’s testimonial. They absolutely destroyed us because the England team wasn’t a team. Liverpool would just destroy you, make you feel very lonely and Anfield was an enormous place.
Liverpool were the epitome of a brilliant, brilliant team. Every department of their team was special, with iconic players. They had the history to go with it. They had this aura about them that you don’t get very often in football. I always felt that you were half a goal down against Liverpool before you even kicked off. Especially at Anfield. Alan Hansen was the one that stands out for me because I’m a defender. I used to look at him and think, his game is so easy. I want to play like that. I want to be him.
It was a conveyer belt of players in the Liverpool way. Central defenders. Goalkeepers. Right midfields. Right-backs. They went on and on producing players and recruiting brilliantly. John Toshack, Kevin Keegan, then Ian Rush.
You just have to go back and look through the scrapbooks. Look at the history. Liverpool were the team to beat. They had already won the league six times in the 80s by the start of the 88–89 season. They won the European Cup four times by then. It’s the ultimate test, isn’t it? Playing against the team that’s so dominant. So powerful. Looking at the team-sheet. Looking at the players’ names. What they’ve achieved in the past and then you’re pitting yourself against them in real life. Real time. You want to try and make a statement. They’re saying to you: show us what you’ve got. That’s what we were trying to do. We were trying to beat the best. Liverpool were the best.
Going to Anfield was a big deal because hardly anybody got out of there alive. When I was with Leicester we were their bogey team. Once there was quite a lot of interest in me and the papers were going it’s Ian Rush versus Alan Smith, it’s a showdown. We lost 3–2, which isn’t a bad result. I got two, Rushy got a hat-trick and they went, ‘Rush wins the showdown.’ I thought, that’s a bit strong, I got two goals at Anfield.
Liverpool always won the league and they always came to our ground and beat us and the thing about Liverpool was they played a different brand of football to anybody else. I remember them coming to our ground in the mid-80s and they won 2–0. Dalglish ran the game. I went to Anfield a couple of times. That really was an extraordinary experience. That was a heaving, packed ground and they were crammed in and the noise of the place shook. Whenever a Liverpool player had the ball Dalglish would appear and get it to his feet, and it was very unusual for a team to play into feet like that. They could because they had Dalglish. He was that good. He was the Messi of his day. He was better than anybody else and they were a formidable outfit. They were hard as nails. Jimmy Case was the most frightening footballer there ever was. Dalglish was nasty.
Liverpool won the league most of the time from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. Then they had a bit of a wobble and found themselves caught up by Everton, who had an outstanding team. So they went out and spent a fortune and they bought the two best players in the country, which was Peter Beardsley and John Barnes. In 87–88 they played the best football that anyone had ever seen in England. The best. No one played football like that at that time. The ball was on the floor all the time. It was fast. There was no one better than Beardsley. Barnes was fantastic. He was footballer of the year. He was unstoppable. They only lost two games. They should have won the Double but they somehow contrived to lose to Wimbledon in the FA Cup final. They couldn’t play in the European Cup for reasons that are well known but they would have won it. They were amazing. They were winning every week. They were scoring three, four, five goals. They were the best team that anyone had ever seen.
It’s a bit like that Gary Lineker line about the Germans. It was true of Liverpool. Football is a game where 22 men kick a ball around and then Liverpool win at the end. They won everything. A home defeat used to get on the news. Every now and again somebody would challenge them but the rest of the decade belonged to Liverpool and it felt like they were unbeatable. As a football fan it felt that you were in a parallel universe. How do you get to this place where teams like Liverpool win the league? It felt like Arsenal would never be able to cross the tracks. It wasn’t like you ever thought, oh, it will happen one day.
Arsenal never got anywhere near the title. Nowhere near it. We were runners-up in 73. The highest position we ever had when I was going there as a kid was third in 1981, which was a freaky season when the title was duked out between Ipswich and Aston Villa. But there was something, there was a feeling that maybe we could do it in the 88–89 season. We really did have a side and we were top for quite a long time. We felt like we could do it. We had a League Cup tie against them at Anfield and we got a 1–1 draw and we felt like actually we’re as good as they are now. We’ve got to this level. So it was all a matter of can you get it over the line?
We played Liverpool a few times in the first half of the 88–89 season. Those games not only validated us as a team to ourselves but also to Liverpool. I think they realised we were a top team to play against. It gave us that confidence that all young players need.
We had five games against them during a ten-week period before Christmas as we had a couple of replays in the League Cup and a tournament to celebrate the centenary of the Football League as well as the league game at Highbury. There was one that felt particularly important. We drew with Liverpool at Anfield in the Littlewoods Cup. Rocky scored a great goal. You know that you can compete with the big boys and actually play them off the pitch. It gives you enormous confidence. They’re not that terrifying all of a sudden. The psychological barrier has been broken.
Liverpool were the greatest team we had ever seen but George gave us this feeling that if we played against them we could beat them. When we beat them in the Mercantile Trophy, which was for the centenary, we had no fear of them.
They did give us a real hiding, though, in the second replay in the League Cup at Villa Park. I scored early in that game and then we got ripped to shreds and I mean seriously ripped. I was embarrassed.
Then they came to Highbury in the league and we drew 1–1 and I scrambled in our goal. Everybody knew about Liverpool’s ball-playing skills but they could mix it as well if they wanted to. There was always a few things said in the tunnel beforehand. Them shouting. Steve McMahon would shout one or two things. He called us bottlers at one stage after a match and you’ll always remember that. Don’t forget what he said. Let’s show them this time. They were always great tussles. We were trying to reach their level so we were going to try and win the scrap. It was important to try and make a statement that we’re not going to roll over.
If you’re assembling a new team and you talk about going places, the teams you really want to test yourself against or get nearest to are the teams that you’re trying to emulate. Liverpool were the ones that we all respected. But our team were not afraid. I’d look at them in the dressing room before the game and think, these lads want to go out there and play on the big stage against this team and not be in awe of them and believe that yeah, we can take this team on. I think we always felt we were getting nearer to them all the time.
Winning feels so much better and every time we lost it was a reminder. We had won the Littlewoods Cup against Liverpool in 1987 but losing the final against Luton in 88? You can learn so much by those experiences. Feel the pain. We don’t want this next time.