Book serialisation: Far Foreign Land, Chapter 2
The trip to Istanbul continues through London with memories of 1978 and Bruges. Plus some thoughts about Chelsea, who, back in 2005, were changing the nature of football
They all laugh at us, they all mock us
IT HAD NOT BEEN a good start. To go 1-0 down so early was a shock. But the worst moment of the night came after 39 minutes. Alessandro Nesta, turned by Luis Garcia for once, slipped and, seeing he was beaten, the Milan defender knocked the ball away with his arm. Penalty. I was right on line and saw Nesta’s shift of the shoulder and guilty, surprised look when the referee played on. I was still frozen, pointing to the position of the foul, when Hernan Crespo made it 2-0 atthe other end.
The sound of the crowd when the opposition scores is strange. It is disembodied, as if played back through a static-ridden radio. It does not interfere with the shock and silence around you. There, in this cocoon of stunned disappointment, I continued standing in the same position for a full minute, arm aimed at the spot of Nesta’s offence like a linesman who had suffered a stroke, repeating: ‘Penalty, penalty, penalty,’ in increasingly hysterical tones. Then, an even more depressing thought struck: Crespo, on loan at Milan, was still a Chelsea player. How would you like that raw wound, Sir? With salt on it?
* * *
As a city, Liverpool has placed too much of its identity in its football teams. Individuals, too. For the first part of the trip, alone until Vienna, there was plenty of time to reflect on this.
I remember reading Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s book, where he talks about the first match he attended, how he came in from the back of the terraces and saw the crowd and the pitch and was captivated. ‘Entryist,’ I snarled and threw the book down.
It is perhaps an exaggeration – but only slight – but I always claim I knew I was a Liverpool fan before I knew my name. First game? No idea. Too young.
It is impossible to imagine football not being part of your life. There are people who contend that the state of obsession that many of us exist with is an affectation, a lifestyle choice. It’s not. Right from the beginning, from the first moment that my consciousness registered as a memory, I’ve known that it is part of my being. And it can skew the way you look at life.
It was once suggested to a friend, whose marriage was sliding downhill, that perhaps it would be prudent if he put some of the time, money and effort spent attending away games into his relationship. ‘I had
Liverpool before I knew her,’ he said. ‘And when I no longer know her, they’ll still be there.’
Some women take this attitude as a challenge and believe that they can turn you – straighten you out. They can only lose in an unequal battle.
I’ve known men whose heads have been turned by girlfriends, fans who have carped at the expense of travel and tickets in a strangely robotic, unconvincing voice and taken up more acceptable pursuits at weekends that involve their new love. But sooner or later the sight of men in shorts will stir their emotions.
The stroking of a ball 40 yards into space for a man to run on to will set their pulses racing out of control and they will be pulled back towards their natural bent.
Back in the 1980s, we were discussing a friend who had not turned up at Lime Street for an away trip.
‘What’s he doing today?’
‘He’s taking a girl out,’ the answer came, dripping with scorn.
‘What a queer,’ someone said.
The football teams in Liverpool filled a huge cultural void in a city that was uncertain about its identity for much of the twentieth century. Many citizens are ambivalent about England, a zeitgeist captured in the 1960s by Johnny Speight, who had Alf Garnett rebuke Mike, his son-in-law, for being a ‘traitorious Scouse git’. In a town that has such an Irish heritage and similar – but milder – religious divisions to Belfast and Glasgow, there’s not much of a sense of Englishness.
And it works both ways. You don’t exactly get the warmest of welcomes in the rest of England. Scousers are labelled thieves and considered workshy and militant. And the accent seems to short-circuit some people’s brains.
In the late 1990s I worked for Chelsea when the ground was undergoing extensive renovations. Leaving Stamford Bridge on a winter afternoon, I hailed a taxi. ‘You’re a long way from home, Scouse,’ the driver said. It was a rebuke. The conversation continued: ‘What are you doing at the Bridge? Not a Chelsea fan, surely?’
‘No, work there.’
‘I don’t envy you on the building in this weather. What are you, a brickie?’
I was wearing a Versace suit. He just didn’t see it. The accent vibrated on his eardrums and immediately scrambled all his other senses. He took an unfeasibly long time examining the £20 note I offered before handing me any change. No tip there, then.
The journey to Istanbul took me back to Chelsea. They were the opponents in the semi-final and although the London club are the epitome of nouveau riche – bags of Russian money but only two titles in 100 years – they expected Liverpool to doff a cap and provide a red carpet on their way to Turkey. The bitterness and rage when we didn’t play their game was palpable… Thieving Scouse gits indeed.
Chelsea and their fans learnt a harsh lesson over the two legs: you can sell your soul, but even all those roubles can’t buy divine right.
The trip from Lime Street to London is very familiar. Aside from the away matches, so many of us have taken the route to find employment.
There’s a moment of epiphany that marks the end of childhood: Napoleon said it was when he realised he would die; for those of us who grew up in Liverpool in the 70s and 80s, it was when we understood that we would have to leave home and family to find work. The ticket to Euston was predestined for many of us.
Yet London has fine memories. The first landmark on the journey from Lime Street to Istanbul was unfamiliar – the new Wembley arch.
Back in 1978, Liverpool won the European Cup under the old twin towers, beating Bruges 1-0. The team was so good and the performance so disappointing that many of us didn’t realise what an achievement it was.
The game has changed since 1978. Then, Chelsea had no money, players with names like Ray, Tommy and Micky and fans with names like, well, Ray, Tommy and Micky. Stamford Bridge was a hostile place to go. More than any club, Chelsea illustrate how football has developed and how it has moved away from its traditional constituency.
By the Champions League semi-final of 2005, Chelsea had acquired a billionaire owner in Roman Abramovich. The club had spent big on players with names like Claude, Ricardo and Didier and were cheered on by fans with names like Giles.
In London for the first leg of the semi-final, the crowd were quite restrained – apart from in the Liverpool section. It’s hard to imagine how Stamford Bridge was granted a safety certificate. The entrance to the away section was under the main stand in April 2005, effectively creating a subway area that can be entered without a ticket.
Into this confined space came hundreds of Liverpool fans intent on seeing the match but lacking the precious rectangle of paper that would set the turnstile clicking. So, as the police lost control, the gates were stormed. It was every man for himself and plenty of people were crushed.
Although it was a minor case of push and shove, the potential for a serious incident was clear.
Inside, the stands of the Taylor Report were turned into terraces with more people crammed in than could be seated. The plastic back supports of the seats became shin-high tripwires as spectators at the rear craned forward to see, pushing down on the backs of those in front. No one, least of all the Liverpool supporters, had learnt the lessons of the past. The desire to see the game over-rode all other considerations for some.
The emotional intensity of the away fans that night passed largely unnoticed as the press wondered why Giles and the chaps hadn’t managed the right level of rah-rah to disturb the unwashed northerners during the 0-0 draw. Two weeks later, that craving – ‘the dense and the driven passion’ – came to the fore as Anfield exhibited a collective will that seemed to transmit itself to the players on a night that entered football legend.
The ferocity of purpose from the stands communicated itself to the players and even created the illusion that Chelsea had conceded a goal. The fourth-minute winner will be debated for years as no one can say for certain whether Luis Garcia’s shot was blocked by William Gallas before it entered the net but the goal was given anyway and Liverpool were on their way to Istanbul.
I hope it never crossed the line.
The anguish in west London was tangible. It was their cup, they thought. They forgot to remember that we had already won it four times, in the days when you could only enter as a result of real achievement – either winning the domestic title or defending the trophy. And the Wembley arch brought thoughts of our successful defence of the European Cup in 1978.
Graeme Souness angled a ball through the Bruges defence, Kenny Dalglish chipped over the goalkeeper and the big cup stayed in the Anfield trophy cabinet. I was up at the opposite end, the Bruges end – no ticket that day, either; some things never change - and only the silence told me that we’d scored. I’d picked the previous night to get paralytic for the first time (on rum and black, for God’s sake) and was still in need of hospital treatment and unable to focus when Dalglish struck.
That was two European Cups by 1978. At that time, no Chelsea supporter could have imagined that their team would ever be within a game of playing for the trophy. They might even have struggled to believe their team would win the League, having only won it once, in 1955.
Fifty years on, they won their second title but seemed to take little joy in it after the defeat by Liverpool. Around the Kings Road, they seemed to resent being knocked out by a ‘smaller’ club.
Where did they get such an inflated idea about their status? The ability to outbid any other club in the planet is part of it but there is also a wider issue. When the money-grubbers at Uefa diluted the competition for the European Cup by allowing as many as four sides from a single country to play in the Champions League, it let teams like Chelsea compete with the Continent’s best without having any real record of success.
You can finish runners-up, third or even fourth in the league and live under the illusion that it is acceptable to mention the club in the same breath as Real Madrid, AC Milan and Liverpool, whose trophy cabinets are brimming with domestic titles as well as European Cups.
At Stamford Bridge, their memory is about as extensive as their achievements. Arrogance so often comes without self-awareness and, when you reinvent yourself, it is easy to pretend the past did not happen.
Huge spending power does not automatically turn a club into the biggest in the world. There is still a different sort of accounting in football – and Chelsea need much more silverware in the bank to support their delusions of grandeur.
Tomorrow, Chapter 3: Sent him off to a far foreign land
Order Far Foreign Land here: Cost £10 UK, £15 Europe, £18 Rest Of World. All including postage
For those interested in the culture of Merseyside, try my non-football novel. Good Guys Lost, an epic of Liverpool life set from the 1960s to the 2010s