Forest left Anfield in chastened mood with Chettle having learned his lesson. Cloughie never said anything. On hearing the verdict of the great Tom Finney, my pride deepened. ‘It was the finest exhibition I’ve seen in the whole time I’ve played and watched the game,’ was Finney’s reaction. ‘You couldn’t see it bettered anywhere – not even in Brazil. I’ve never seen skill at that pace.’
In the dressing room, I dished out the compliments. ‘Different class, brilliant,’ I kept repeating. At magical moments like that, I knew that unfettered praise was the correct response. If I’d picked out a mistake, I’d have risked losing the players. It was a time for acclaim, but for all the tributes, I knew the players wouldn’t get carried away.
The title was soon ours and the only question was who would be voted the No. 1 player of the year by the Professional Footballers’ Association and Football Writers’ Association. We feared the vote might be split because there were so many Liverpool players to choose from! Aldo top-scored with 29 goals in all competitions, Beardo got 18 and Digger 17, while Macca had been a driving force in midfield. In the end, Barnes’s irresistible attacking from the opening minute of the season earned him the PFA and FWA prizes. As we celebrated those titles and assorted individual honours, Digger offered Beardsley a swig of bubbly.
‘Come on, Pedro, get some Champagne down you. This is Liverpool. This is what you came here for.’ Beardo refused.
‘Try a bar of chocolate,’ I whispered to Digger. Pedro adored chocolate.
The hope now building in my heart was that Liverpool could land a second Double in three years, which would be an unbelievable achievement. We’d been in great form in the FA Cup, knocking aside Stoke, Villa, Everton, Manchester City and then Forest in the semi, when Chettle’s ill-judged ‘Barnes On Toast’ remark indicated to me just how terrified he was of Digger. Now Wimbledon stood in the way, but a series of unfortunate incidents troubled us up Wembley Way. A reporter whom Bob knew went round to his house to do a piece on his years at Liverpool. Bob thought the interview was over, Jessie fetched the tea and biscuits, and Bob maybe said a few things about players he didn’t expect to be printed. On reading these, Aldo retaliated, defending himself. I was furious that Bob had got strapped up by a newspaper, and I saw how this incident seriously affected his health and confidence. Bob Paisley was the least controversial manager. He thought he was talking to a friend. Bob deserved more respect, and I didn’t want distractions on the eve of the Cup final. Eventually, Aldo and Bob posed for a picture, shaking hands, and an embarrassing episode for the club ended.
On the Tuesday night before the Cup final, our self-inflicted wounds intensified when Gary Gillespie and Nigel Spackman clashed heads in the hurly-burly of a game against Luton. Liverpool’s medical men patched up the pair but it was hardly ideal preparation for the aerial onslaught promised by Wimbledon’s John Fashanu.
Another problem invaded the Liverpool camp, causing a particularly difficult challenge to my management skills. After his sister Faye suffered an horrendous accident, Craig’s mood darkened almost to the point of depression. He had been becoming disillusioned with football anyway, and Faye’s woes simply accelerated him towards the exit. On 12 May, two days before the Cup final, Craig revealed in an exclusive article in a tabloid newspaper that he was leaving: ‘I hate being a footballer – I quit.’ On reading the piece, I hit all points of the emotional compass. I was livid at the timing of the story and the very real possibility of it being an issue in the dressing room. Craig compromised Liverpool’s Cup final preparations. Of course, his plight provoked sympathy. Faye needed her brother and he responded selflessly. Privately, what deeply annoyed me was that I’d contacted all the Fleet Street editors, requesting they avoid running stories about Faye’s accident, but now I had to contend with his outburst splashed everywhere. A temptation presented itself to rid Liverpool of this problem immediately by sending Craig Johnston packing. Wembley was daunting enough for the fully focused and I felt that his attention clearly wasn’t on the game. However, determined to avoid a rash decision, I concentrated on the cold, calculated argument of what was best for the team. Craig was never going to wear a shirt numbered from 2 to 11. The bench was always the limit of his ambition and I was weighing up between Craig’s energy and the variety of options Vitch gave me in midfield.
‘If this is going to be Craig’s last game, he could come on and bang one in,’ I said to Old Tom. Growing in my mind was the image of the fairy-tale ending, of Craig coming off the bench, and scoring the winner for Faye. That reaction was unprofessional, weak in management terms, but for once I found myself looking at the FA Cup through a romantic prism. ‘And Vitch is struggling in training,’ I reminded Tom. I’d come to a decision but, unfortunately, it proved to be the wrong one. I should have had Ronnie Whelan in reserve, not Craig. Apologising is not my style but I’ve since acknowledged to Vitch the error of my ways. Omitting him was cruel. He’d had a poor week in training, and was still hunting form after injury, but I overlooked that Ronnie was also the man for the big occasion. Vitch enjoyed scoring goals at Wembley. When I told Ronnie he wasn’t even on the bench, his mature, restrained reaction simply reminded me that he was the ultimate professional. A lot of footballers would have chosen the moment to begin launching toys from the pram. Not Vitch.
The one sustained light note heard on the eve of Wembley was our Cup final song, ‘The Anfield Rap’, written largely by Craig and recorded in a studio in Bootle. As Mersey beats go, Liverpool’s effort was never going to embellish the special legacy handed down by the Beatles, but ‘The Anfield Rap’ did contain some memorable lines –‘I come from Jamaica, my name is John Barn-es; when I do my thing the crowd go bananas.’ Digger was good at rapping but otherwise the musical merits of the squad were limited. Macca fancied himself as Bobby Darin, launching into ‘Things’ at every opportunity, but the rest of us couldn’t hold a note. We all loved a singsong at the Christmas party or on a day out at Aintree, but the musical world never promised a second career. ‘The Anfield Rap’ was fun, though. Making a record is part of the unique nature of the FA Cup, an event that is so much more than a game. Wembley imposed many demands – do the song, get tickets for family and friends, measure up for the suits, get the shirt and tie, polish the shoes and, by the way, as a thousand phone-calls made clear, don’t forget tickets for family and friends. Everybody loves a day out at Wembley.
Many myths attach themselves to FA Cup finals and none more so than the climax of the 1988 competition. To my eternal frustration, it has become accepted wisdom in footballing circles that Liverpool, despite our imperious form in the League, lost the Cup final in the tunnel because we couldn’t handle the intimidation handed out by Vinnie Jones, John Fashanu and the rest of the self-styled Crazy Gang. All the shouting and posturing done by the Wimbledon players before kick-off was solely for their own benefit, to psyche themselves up, not to threaten Liverpool. On stepping from the dressing room and witnessing what can only be described as a war-dance, my instant reaction was that Bobby Gould’s players were terrified. No one genuinely calm and collected would shout and bawl like that. Wimbledon’s antics were utterly predictable as we’d played them before. We weren’t naïve and we knew the script.
Wimbledon operated differently from Liverpool. Their players were incentivised for individual achievements while I always refused players goal bonuses in their contracts. Why would I pay somebody a bonus when that might make him decide to try for goal himself when a team-mate was better placed? Wimbledon’s direct, uncompromising style did not fit into my vision of how football should be played, and I wouldn’t watch them on television, but I admired their dogged attitude. The embodiment of Wimbledon’s philosophy was Vinnie, a muscular, tattooed ball-winner who occasionally crossed the line. When Wimbledon visited Anfield that March, the ball broke between Vinnie and me in the middle of the pitch. I knew instantly this was the type of situation where bones were broken and seasons ended. Vinnie would never pull out, so as he went in for the ball, I angled my challenge to protect myself, catching him on the leg. Vinnie was poleaxed, for once a victim and a furious one. Climbing to his feet, Vinnie stared me in the eyes and snarled, ‘If you’d broken my leg, I’d have stabbed you.’
‘Do yourself a favour,’ I retorted, ‘get lost.’ This was the rhetoric and behaviour of the schoolyard, almost guaranteeing that bad blood continued to flow. A minute later, Vinnie and I found ourselves in a similar position, contesting a bouncing ball near the halfway line. With the temperature having risen following our previous altercation, I sensed an appointment with Vinnie’s elbow. Before he could make contact, I nudged his elbow, knocking him off-balance and leaving his elbow swishing through thin air rather than my nasal passages. To my great private delight, the referee penalised Vinnie for a foul, increasing my amusement by bringing out a yellow card and waving it in his face.
‘Don’t you worry,’ the ref said to me, ‘I’ll look after you.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ I replied, ‘I can look after myself!’
The only retaliation Vinnie managed was via the headlines on the following Monday, and words were never going to hurt me as much as elbows. One piece had Vinnie promising ‘to rip off Dalglish’s ear and spit in the hole’. Charming. Such statements can return to haunt people, as Vinnie learned to his embarrassment one evening in the piano bar in La Manga. Walking into the room, Marina and I spotted Vinnie sitting at a table with his wife, Tanya, enjoying a quiet drink. Vinnie came over.
‘I think he’s got lovely ears,’ Marina said to Vinnie. ‘Kenny’s ears are nice. Why would you want to twist them off and spit in the hole?’ Vinnie froze, not knowing how to react.
‘Marina, Marina, I didn’t say that,’ he stuttered, trying to change the subject by asking, ‘Have you met my wife?’ Marina and I laughed.
We were only winding Vinnie up and shared a few drinks with him and his family. No animosity coloured my thinking towards Wimbledon’s old enforcer in La Manga, nor during the 1988 Cup final. The simple, frustrating truth about that game is that Liverpool played beneath the high standards that characterised our thrilling League campaign. Similarly galling was the fabrication that Wimbledon outwitted us. Don Howe, Gould’s assistant and a coach steeped in the game, had the foresight to move Dennis Wise across to help Clive Goodyear combat Digger, but doubling up on John Barnes was hardly a new concept in a season when many teams tried every trick in the tactics book to deal with the Footballer of the Year, usually unsuccessfully. Just as it was unadulterated fiction that Liverpool were terrorised in the tunnel, it was an even greater fallacy that Wimbledon’s tactics were in any way original.
The Cup final story line could have been so different if the referee, Brian Hill, had shown more common-sense, applying the advantage rule when Peter rounded Dave Beasant, Wimbledon’s keeper. To groans from everybody associated with Liverpool, Hill instead brought the play back for a free-kick to us. Compounding that error, Hill then awarded Wimbledon a free-kick when Stevie Nicol challenged Terry Phelan fairly. Our defending was still poor, allowing Lawrie Sanchez to steal in, reach Wise’s ball and flick it past Bruce. All my annoyance that Hill had made a wrong decision was forgotten in my anger about our failure to defend. Gary and Nigel had to take on the big Wimbledon guys. Anyone donning the Liverpool shirt was immediately made aware of the requirements that go with the strip. A major trophy was up for grabs and a minor head wound was no excuse.
We were thrown a lifeline when Aldo was brought down by Goodyear. As Aldo addressed the penalty, the reassuring memory of his 11 previous successful conversions that season calmed my nerves. Even when Wise engaged in some very obvious sledging before the kick, my money was still on Aldo sticking the ball past Beasant. Aldo was no stranger to opponents attempting to ruin his concentration, such was his feared reputation from 12 yards. When Aldo’s kick was saved by Beasant, no blame could be laid at the door of Liverpool’s distraught No. 8, whose goals and commitment helped get us to Wembley, nor any credibility given to the effect of Wise’s bad-mouthing. Sometimes I just had to note the brilliance of a keeper and Beasant had done his homework. Wimbledon’s keeper reckoned that if Aldo checked during his run-up, he would put the ball to his right. If he flowed without pause towards the ball, Aldo would place the kick to his left. Aldo actually took a decent penalty, which was prevented from reaching its destination by a great save from a well-prepared keeper.
Our conquerors showed great dignity in victory, Vinnie and Fash moving among the fallen, wishing us good luck for next season. The Press slaughtered Wimbledon for their physical style, but Liverpool always had a great relationship with Vinnie and Fash. They respected Liverpool because we respected Wimbledon. We never felt superior to them. Football’s big enough to accommodate contrasting philosophies.
Up in the Wembley gantry, the BBC’s John Motson was concluding excitedly that ‘the Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club’. That line has gone down in commentary folkore and it was impossible to argue with Motty’s
bon mot
. Wimbledon loved being called the Crazy Gang and Liverpool were a cultured club, although Boy George might not be too happy. Anyway, I couldn’t care how Liverpool’s demise was described – defeat prompted only sorrow, however eloquent the commentator. After all the beauty of our football throughout the season, after all the garlands draped around the necks of my players, Wembley was an unmitigated disaster and it hurt badly.
My mood began to lift later that summer, during a trip to La Coruna for the Herrera tournament against Atletico Madrid and Real Sociedad. Just after landing in Spain, PBR pulled me to one side.
‘Kenny, would you like Rushie back?’ he asked.