Alan Kennedy European Cup final exclusive
He was the goal hero who downed Real Madrid in the European Cup final, but Alan Kennedy is destined to be known as... Souness called for a pass, but it never came. ‘I couldn’t see you,’ Kennedy said. Souness wound back an arm and punched him in the face.
The most remarkable aspect of what came to pass on that balmy spring evening in Paris is that Alan Kennedy was struggling with the same existential doubts which haunted him through all the years he played for Liverpool. he simply didn’t feel he was good enough to be out there, facing Real Madrid, in the 1981 european Cup final.
‘I was slightly different to the normal Liverpool player,’ he says now, gazing out across the Anfield stadium which delivered the best days of his life. ‘I don’t even know why they bought me. I always found it difficult to play that little tippy-tappy ball.’
Kennedy is talking about the Liverpool pass-and-move philosophy which the team’s players lived, breathed and slept in the early eighties and to which many doubted he would ever learn to conform. The defender’s unconvincing first half on debut against Queens Park Rangers in 1978 led manager Bob Paisley to suggest that ‘ they shot the wrong Kennedy’, while Graeme Souness remembers calling three times for a short pass from this individual during one training session.
‘I couldn’t see you, Graeme,’ Kennedy said. Souness wound back an arm and punched him flat in the face. ‘Can you see me now?’ he asked.
‘ I was always fighting the thought that Graeme didn’t rate me,’ Kennedy reflects. ‘The 10yard pass? To me that wasn’t natural.’
Ronnie Moran — the drill sergeant of the coaching staff — shared the frustrations, yet what this left back lacked in sophistication he made up for in blue-collar qualities. The biggest percentage of his goals for the club came in the last 15 minutes of games. he was one who ran to the last.
It’s why the 26-year-old’s selection was never in doubt when Liverpool — ravaged by injury, mocked by the imperious Spaniards as an aged team and very much the underdogs — shipped up in south-west Paris on May 27 that year. he’d broken his wrist in the semi-final first leg against Bayern Munich but a thick bandage was pushed in his direction. ‘I think they just wanted security,’ he says. ‘You have to remember there were always problems with this game. There were issues.’
The pitch — possibly the worst Liverpool played on through all their dominant european years of 1977 to 1984 — was the main difficulty. ‘honestly, diabolical,’ says Kennedy. ‘The grass wasn’t cut.’
When the players looked at it before kick- off, captain Phil Thompson also found it had been marked up in lime, a substance ce now banned because of the burning rnit. caused by contact with it. ‘The bounce off lime was unpredictable reys. too,’ Kennedy says. ‘That was the worry.’
There were kit problems. Officious fiat adidas staff insisted that the company’s three stripes on n Liverpool players’ boots must t be prominent. ‘ So Ronnie had d to go around making sure of f that by painting them,’ ’ Kennedy recalls.
Yet UeFA insisted that Liverpool’s Umbro kit logo must be obscured for the TV audience, so in the febrile minutes before kick-off, Moran was also frantically issuing white masking tape which players had to apply to their shirts and shorts. ‘ We weren’t happy,’ Kennedy recalls. ‘It was a distraction. Bob and Ronnie were cursing.’
There even seemed something inauspicious about the team’s Aer Lingus charter flight out from Liverpool’s Speke Airport to Paris Orly, on which Kennedy played three- card brag around a table with Alan hansen, David Johnson and Terry McDermott. ‘It was bumpy,’ he relates. ‘I was just glad to get down and get my feet on solid ground.’
Laurie Cunningham, the 25-year-old englishman signed by the Spaniards from West Brom two years earlier, was perhaps Kennedy’s prime preoccupation, though. ‘I always used to hate being against him when he played at West Brom because he was a jinky player who can take you outside and inside’ Kennedy says. ‘But when he’d gone over to Spain he’d moved out on to the left wing, coming in on his right foot. I was hoping he might start on Phil Neal’s side, not mine.
‘I remember diving in on him a couple of times,’ Kennedy recalls with a shudder. ‘Ronnie Moran must have been 100 yards away but I could still hear him, “Don’t dive in. Don’t dive in”.
The englishman was Real’s main early outlet in a first half during which Liverpool seemed uncharacteristically disposed to playing the ball long. The best attempt on goal was from range, too — a 30- yard shot from Kennedy’s right foot which 21-year- old goalkeeper Agustin Rodriguez Santiago touched around his right post. ‘I liked to try a tester, in terms of finding my range,’ Kennedy explains, as we watch it back back. ‘It’s giving me con- confidence that I can hit the target. I always said to myself that this could be my last game, my last pass. I could leave the club. So I’d try to make things happen.’
There would be three more of Kennedy’s ‘testers’ by the 80minute mark. With a little of that inferiority complex, Kennedy was anxious as he walked in at halftime, with the score 0-0. Paisley had also told him to keep on his feet against Cunningham. he feared a reaction to being left on his backside.
Yet Paisley said Liverpool were not pushing up enough, which meant too much space was forming between the defence and midfield. ‘It’s funny that, you know — they sometimes contradicted themselves,’ Kennedy says.
hansen told Kennedy why he was offering fewer short passes out of defence than usual. usual ‘I can’t trust the pitch. I have to get rid of the ball.’
The Spaniards’ own left back, Jose Antonio Camacho, missed the night’s best chance and diminutive forward Juanito emerged as the final’s creative force. So the outlook did not seem overwhelmingly good for Liverpool as Ray Kennedy weighed up where to direct a throw-in, level with the penalty spot, nine minutes from time.
Alan Kennedy, jogging past hungarian referee Karoly Palotai to get within receiving range, had been finding the Madrid midfielder Vicente del Bosque an increasingly challenging obstacle, so he didn’t call for the ball. ‘I wasn’t shouting because I was secretly hoping that no one would pick me up,’ he says. ‘I’d timed it well, to coincide with Ray picking the ball up and he threw it so per-
fectly, I couldn’t fail to bring it down on my chest.’
It worked well because the chest trap took Kennedy into the lefthand side of Real’s penalty area with the ball bouncing at an agreeable height, two players removed from the picture and only defender Rafael Garcia Cortes covering.
Cortes wound back his boot in a way which briefly threatened to put the ball — and Kennedy — out of the stadium. Years later, he would tell Kennedy: ‘I could have taken you out but didn’t.’ The Liverpool man was not so convinced.
‘I felt him brush me on the side,’ Kennedy says. ‘He’s kicked me. But Bob (Paisley) was always clear about penalties. “Stay on your feet”, he’d say. “You’re weak if you go down. You’re weak”.’
So he advanced, a second touch with his thigh taking him in on Santiago and leaving him with a decision to make.
‘Out of the corner of my eye I could see David Johnson edging towards the six-yard box. He was shouting for it but he wasn’t quite there.’ And (Kenny) Dalglish, who you always give it to, was out of the picture. It just so happened that he wasn’t fit that night.
‘I just felt, come on, give it a go and if it happens fine; if it doesn’t happen then I’ll get the rollocking like I always do. The goalkeeper showed me a little bit of space to his right. He was covering his angles and he showed me just enough. I’d had four shots in the game, remember, more than any other player. I knew that if could hit it true . . . ’
Of course a fog of uncertainty lingered, even after he had dispatched the ball, firm and true. ‘I didn’t think it would clear the near post,’ he says. ‘I was surprised that he gave me the chance to hit the target. I was surprised that I hit the target. On that pitch you had to watch the ball to the final millisecond.’
As he ran away behind the goal, pursued by team-mates, another nagging doubt. ‘I heard a whistle,’ he says. ‘Except, I didn’t hear a whistle. It was just my imagination, running away with me.’
It was when red shirts chased him that he could be certain and the exhilaration propelled him fully 20 yards, on one of the club’s most iconic celebrations. ‘I got to a point where I couldn’t go any further because there was a huge moat around the pitch,’ he says.
‘Terry McDermott arrives and he’s pushing me and if I go any further, I’m in it. Terry nearly put me in.’
The words BBC TV match commentator Barry Davies chose would remain with Kennedy down the years, lighting up his eyes even now as we watch the goal which has come to define him.
‘Alan Kennedy,’ the inimitable Davies proclaims. ‘The unlikely man again.’ It was a reference to Kennedy having also scored Liverpool’s extra-time goal in that year’s League Cup final, against West Ham, though the player in question interpreted it differently. ‘I think it’s something to do with the Likely Lads because of me and the North East,’ he says. ‘I loved that.’
The goal, securing Liverpool’s third European Cup in five years, did not bring fabulous riches to Kennedy, who is now 63.
He is flying out to Kiev for Saturday’s final, though will be paying out £140 to do so, leaving early morning and getting back to his home near Ormskirk, north of Liverpool, at 3am on Sunday. The cost of his ticket and seat on a charter flight will be reduced because he’ll be sharing memories of the 1981 final and those great European years.
It does seem surprising that a man who has contributed such a huge part in the fabled history of Liverpool in Europe will not be going at the club’s own expense, though he has no complaints.
There is no mistaking his place in the hearts of those who follow the club. A walk with Kennedy round the stadium — where he is often to be seen working in the hospitality boxes before games — reveals that much. Supporters repeatedly stop him to ask for photographs and he happily accedes each time.
‘The stadium’s changed but the memories never dim and they’re what I’ll always have,’ he reflects. ‘That goal in Paris is the one I’m always asked about. It all happened in the blink of an eye and I don’t think I quite realised at the time what it would always mean.
‘What a night that was. It’s something I’ll always have. It’s something incredible to take through life with you.’