The most surprising headline the day after Liverpool won the title did not concern Dalglish’s team. The future of Everton’s superstar striker was the subject for discussion.
The story was in all the papers and the Sunday Express’s version was about as succinct and representative as any: ‘Barcelona will have to offer a massive £3 million to persuade Everton to part with English shooting star Gary Lineker.’
The price was huge but the message from Goodison was clear. The man who had scored 37 goals so far in his first season on Merseyside was on the trading block. It was all a matter of price. It needed to be exorbitant because Leicester were due a third of any profit.
Lineker was not the only one pondering what life would be like in Catalonia. Kendall had already been approached about taking over the reins at the Nou Camp.
Terry Venables was widely believed to be leaving Barcelona. The Englishman suggested the Everton boss as his successor. Barca representatives approached the Goodison board and asked for permission to speak to their manager. Kendall met the Catalan delegation in a London hotel during the run-in and verbally agreed a deal to step into his fellow Englishman’s shoes.
Unexpectedly, Venables signed a new contract to stay in Spain. He had, after all, taken Barcelona to the European Cup final. This was the big stage Kendall had expected to be on when Everton won the title a year earlier. Heysel had ended that dream. Venables’ extended contract blocked another avenue for the Everton manager.
While the Liverpool players continued with their party, Everton had another game to prepare for. West Ham United were at Goodison on the Monday of cup-final week in a play-off for second place in the table. It was the match nobody wanted.
For the Hammers, it was their fifth game in ten days. They were exhausted. Everton won 3–1 and Lineker got another two goals. After scoring only once in 11 league games when his team were neck and neck with Liverpool on the run-in, he notched five in the two final league matches, all of them after Kenny Dalglish had effectively brought the title to Anfield with his goal at Stamford Bridge.
West Ham kept up the pressure right to the end, winning six of their final seven matches before the defeat at Goodison. It was the highest position the East End club had achieved in the league.
‘If we could have won the title, we would have beat Everton that last day,’ Cottee said.
His strike partner agrees. ‘If Liverpool had lost at Chelsea, we’d have certainly won the league,’ McAvennie said. ‘No one wanted to play at Goodison that day. Second or third made no difference to me. I wanted to be first. Nothing else mattered. We should have beat them for the fans but it was hard to get motivated.’
The Scot believes West Ham’s mistake was chasing the FA Cup as well as the title. ‘We should have concentrated on the league. We played seven FA Cup ties getting to the quarter finals. It was just too many games.’
McAvennie’s brilliant season was over. He never quite recaptured his pre-Christmas form but his final haul was still impressive. He finished with 26 goals in the league. Cottee was not far behind with 20.
‘For one season we competed,’ Cottee said. ‘We genuinely had a chance of winning the top prize. Two West Ham players got more than 20 goals each. It’s pretty rare to get one player who does that in a team.’
Their overall total was even more eye-catching: 54, with Cottee knocking in six of the extra eight. He gives the credit to his partner. ‘People don’t talk as much about Frank as they should,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame. He was exceptional. A hard worker, great instinct and an unbelievable eye for goal.’
McAvennie would be spoken about a lot but increasingly for the wrong reasons. He began to cause more carnage in his personal life than in penalty areas. On the pitch at least, this was the time of his life.
Manchester United finished fourth and ended the campaign with Bryan Robson sidelined with injury. He was in a race to be fit for the World Cup. The ten-game winning start seemed an age ago. The impression was beginning to form that Ron Atkinson’s forward motion had stalled and United were a club in reverse. A joke spread round Merseyside, based on the constant speculation about first division managers being poached by Spanish clubs. ‘See Big Ron’s off to Spain,’ it went. ‘Last week in July, first week in August.’ A package holiday seemed the likeliest route to Iberia for the United manager.
At the bottom, Oxford and Leicester survived. On the final day of the season, Oxford beat Arsenal 3–0 to ensure safety. The six points Leicester took off Everton made all the difference for the East Midlands side.
Liverpool had a game left, too, although they were not taking it wholly seriously. Three days after winning the title, they were at home to Norwich City in the second leg of the ScreenSport Super Cup semi-final. The first leg was a distant memory. It had been played at Carrow Road back in February before the big freeze disrupted the fixtures. It ended in a 1–1 draw. The return was shoehorned in to get it out of the way before the season ended.
The Football League had originally planned a one-off final at Wembley for its new competition but the attendances quickly convinced the ruling body that it would be a mistake. As gates for league games climbed throughout the season, the Super Cup failed to capture the public’s imagination. The decision was made to make the final a two-leg affair.
Still, events conspired to ensure that Kenny Dalglish and his team could not completely dismiss the match. Everton had advanced to the final in the other bracket. Even in a derided tournament like the Super Cup a double header of derbies would generate significant revenue for both clubs. It was a balancing act for Dalglish. He left himself, Alan Hansen, Jan Mølby and Ian Rush out against Norwich. They, at least, could be secure about their places at Wembley.
Before the football, there was the celebration. The trophy for winning the title was presented before kick-off.
The Football League appeared to have a conveyor belt of bad ideas at its Lytham St Annes headquarters. In the period between the Leicester and Chelsea games, the organization had been in touch with Anfield to suggest presenting the trophy at Wembley. It was a startling presumption and Peter Robinson shot it down immediately. He had also seen an opportunity to bolster the crowd against Norwich. The chief executive said, in an interview with the Echo:
‘We told them that if we did win the league – and it is far from settled yet – we would prefer the trophy to be handed over at the Super Cup tie at Anfield next Tuesday.
‘It will be a more personal occasion and would give the team a perfect Wembley send-off. However, I must stress again that nobody here is taking anything for granted.’
The League’s thought process was surreal. When would the presentation at Wembley have taken place? Before the cup final? Or after – in which case, what if Everton won? It made more sense to do it at Anfield, even if it did not inspire anywhere near a full house. Fewer than 27,000 turned up to see the ceremony.
The traditional League Championship trophy was in mothballs. Canon, the photography company, sponsored the competition and had their own prize – a futuristic 22-inch gold construction that the more dirty-minded likened to an erect penis. It was not as attractive as the ornate, intricately decorated trophy that had become a familiar resident at Anfield, and exuded no sense of history. It was the sort of prize worthy of a Sunday league team rather than the champions of England.
Jack Dunnett, the League president, handed the trophy to Dalglish rather than Hansen, the captain. The player-manager raised it to the Kop and then passed it down a line of players. At the back of the queue, looking embarrassed and shuffling around, was Bob Paisley, the most successful Liverpool manager and Dalglish’s mentor during this first, tumultuous season. Paisley had won nothing in his inaugural campaign in charge and remembered well the lonely experience and the pressure. It was a touching moment when he was handed the trophy, and the nearest thing to sentimentality at Anfield.
Norwich took advantage of the little lapse in cold-bloodedness and took the lead after two minutes. The Kop responded to the goal, and the relatively meaningless nature of the game, by supporting the East Anglian side throughout the first half, cheering their touches, chanting their name and jeering Liverpool players.
By half-time they had bored of this pantomime and reverted to normal service, roaring on their team. Sanity was restored and the home team scored three in the second period.
At the final whistle Dalglish was interviewed on the pitch by the BBC. He was asked about the possibility of winning the Double. He was typically awkward. ‘Well, we’re the only team in with a chance of doing it, aren’t we?’ When the reporter suggested that Liverpool teams had been to Wembley before and failed to achieve the feat – against Manchester United in 1977 – the player-manager was equally curt: ‘Not this season, we haven’t.’
There were four days to the cup final. All the focus turned to Wembley.
The next night, the European Cup final took place in Seville. It was a very different atmosphere from Heysel.
Two of Europe’s biggest clubs had faced off in Brussels, each bringing massive support to the ramshackle stadium in the Belgian capital. A year on, it was a predominantly Catalonian affair. Barcelona were playing Steaua Bucharest in the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium, an arena that had undergone an overhaul for the 1982 World Cup.
Few Romanians travelled to Spain. Andalusia’s biggest city was swamped by Barca fans. Most considered the result a foregone conclusion.
The game could not pass without a nod to the memory of Heysel. Delegations from Liverpool and Juventus, including club officials and fans, gathered to pay their respects and pledge friendship at Seville City Hall.
British interest in the final centred on Terry Venables and Steve Archibald, the Scottish striker that El Tel brought to the Nou Camp. They were upstaged by the unfancied Romanians.
The game went to extra time and penalties. Venables’ team then proceeded to miss all four spot-kicks they attempted in the shootout. It was a crushing blow for Barcelona. Real Madrid, their greatest rivals, had won the competition six times. This was the Catalan team’s second final and they had lost both games.
In contrast to the previous year, there were no arrests. The Seville authorities had their hands full, though: 17 Romanians defected and claimed political asylum.
The result heaped more misery on Howard Kendall and his squad. ‘Watching two ordinary sides battle out a war of attrition brought home to me how much we had lost because of the Heysel disaster,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I would have backed us to beat either of these two teams.’
This was the final they had imagined themselves winning a year earlier. Like Barcelona, Everton were completely overshadowed by their main rivals’ European Cup record. After winning the Cup-Winners’ Cup so easily, the next step to capturing the continent’s major trophy seemed a natural one.
Would they have won it in 1986? It is a leap of faith to claim Everton would definitely have dominated the tournament. Although Steaua and Barca were poor in Seville, they were good teams. The Romanians had a relatively easy route to the final but it is wrong to think Steaua were a bad side. They scored 13 goals and conceded two on their way to Seville. They were no pushovers. Teams from behind the Iron Curtain often came from nowhere and surprised Western European clubs with seemingly greater pedigrees. Ask Liverpool, who were knocked out by Dinamo Tbilisi, CSKA Sofia and Widzew Lodz over the previous eight years.
Barcelona had a much tougher time on their way to the final, edging past Sparta Prague and Porto on aggregate and beating Gothenburg on penalties in the semis. Venables’ team also beat Juventus in the quarters. Some of those teams would have presented robust opposition to Kendall’s men. Playing Juventus would have been unthinkable. If Everton had been allowed to enter the tournament, drawing the Turin side would have caused a multitude of problems.
A year on from Heysel there was an element of forgiveness in the air. In the wake of the dull final, Francesco Morini, the Juventus director of sport, called for the immediate reinstatement of English teams in Continental competition. That included Liverpool.
Graeme Sharp is realistic. ‘It was sad we couldn’t go in,’ he said. ‘But there were no guarantees we would have won it. There were more important issues at stake. I’m not bitter. We could have drawn Juventus in the first round.’
This was Everton’s big chance, though. No wonder Kendall brooded on it for the rest of his life.