SECRETS OF MY SPAGHETTI LEGS AND HOW CHRIS REA HELPED US TOPPLE ROMA
‘Graziani fancies a rematch? So he wants to miss all over again?’
‘WHAT? A re-match? So he wants to miss all over again?!’
Bruce Grobbelaar is responding to Francesco Graziani’s proposition, published in these pages yesterday, that he and the Italian re-stage the iconic penalty which propelled the pair of them into European cup history and helped clinch the trophy for Liverpool at Roma’s expense 34 years ago.
The smile playing across his face broadens into a grin when it dawns on him that there’s a very good time and a place for such an encounter. ‘Anfield, half-time on Tuesday,’ he says with the conviction of man proposing some kind of duel. ‘What kind of half-time entertainment would that be?’
The world has turned since Grobbelaar’s ‘spaghetti legs’ routine contributed to Graziani and Bruno conti missing their spot- kicks in the 1984 final, with catastrophic consequences for a Roma side playing in their own stadium.
Yet it is still very clear why he would have been an extremely good individual in such a crisis.
The personality radiates, just like it always did, as he peers back down through the years.
he has spoken relatively little about the shootout. Interviews with Grobbelaar are comparatively rare. And so, at a roof-top bar on the transformed Mersey riverfront, he has a significant disclosure to make about the genesis of his high jinks that night.
It was, he declares, none other than Joe Fagan, the avuncular, unassuming and supremely modest Liverpool manager, who planted the germ of the idea, moments before the shootout.
‘he put his arm around me and quietly had a word,’ Grobbelaar explains. ‘he told me, “Look son, you’ve had a great game. I and the coaches and the chairman and the directors, the captain and the team and the 10,000 Liverpool fans are not going to blame you now if you don’t stop the ball from 12 yards…” It was as I walked away, feeling much better, that he called after me, “…but make sure you try to put them off”.’
Those best acquainted with that Liverpool era will not be surprised to learn that the man they all called ‘Smokin’ Joe’ made the suggestion. Behind the mild-mannered, selfeffacing exterior, the occupants of Liverpool’s Boot Room were hard as nails — no quarter given — when there was the remotest risk of defeat.
Lawrie McMenemy says he once had to call a police officer to the dugouts when Southampton were enjoying a rare good day at Anfield.
of course, it took Grobbelaar’s typically florid imagination to put Fagan’s vague instructions into effect against the Giallorossi and he insists there was also substantial provocation on the Italians’ part.
‘The two players I chose to do what I had to do against were tested Italian internationals, not ordinary players,’ he says. ‘Bruno conti picked the ball up and started dancing down the line (of Roma players) and that got to me.
‘he was all bouncy. I just stood on the line and did the legs. he stopped dancing. he put the ball down on the penalty spot. And I did the legs again. he put it straight over the top. That’s when I thought, “hmm, this might work”.’
Several kicks later, Graziani strolled down from the centre circle, deep in conversation with Swedish referee Erik Fredriksson.
‘he chatted to him all the 20 yards towards me,’ Grobbelaar continues. ‘Talking! You can’t put your arm around the referee! That’s ungentlemanly conduct.
‘So I went in and bit the netting at the back of goal and when he got to the spot I came over all wobbly again. he crossed himself twice. he scooped the ball and hit the bar and it went over.’
Grobbelaar barely saw the ensuing Alan Kennedy spot-kick with which Liverpool clinched the trophy.
his jubilation at Graziani’s miss had transported him half way round the pitch. he had made football history without actually saving a penalty and yet he also ascribes that outcome to an act of subterfuge he has never discussed before. Two days before the final, Grobbelaar hid in the stadium to watch the Italians practise penalties after Liverpool’s training session had finished. ‘Yes, if you come through the back entrance of the stadium, there’s a place you can squeeze through,’ he explains. ‘You can then stand at the top of the stadium and see…’
It is fair to say Liverpool needed every available weapon as they journeyed into a furnace of Italian hostility that May. It began at Fiumicino airport, where their bags were late to emerge and a coach drivers’ strike saw them travelling by a phalanx of police buses.
It continued at their allocated training base where the pitch was a sprained ankle waiting to happen. ‘Joe said, “Forget it, let’s go for a jog instead”,’ Grobbelaar recalls.
And then came a match night straight out of hell. Buses delivering players and wives were pelted with rocks and bottles. Self-assured Roma fans swanned around in ‘campeones 1984’ European cup merchandise.
And Liverpool’s players encountered a battery of missiles when — denied the chance to warm up on the pitch — they were led round its perimeter by captain Graeme Souness, in 75 degree heat.
They laughed in the face of it all. The squad’s impromptu rendition of chris Rea’s cheesy I Don’t Know
What It Is But I Love It would become legendary. This started as it had played on forward David hodgson’s cassette player in the dressing room and continued when Roma kept Liverpool kicking their heels in the tunnel.
‘I banged on their dressing room door and the captain came out,’ says Grobbelaar. ‘Graeme said, “Just look them in the eye and keep on singing it”.’
It was Kennedy who best encapsulated the Roma players’ astonishment. ‘They must have thought we were lunatics,’ he said years later. ‘As we got on the pitch we were still singing it and we were getting even louder. All these cool international footballers of theirs — and now they all looked scared s***less. First blood to Liverpool.’
IT was typical of the Liverpool team’s self-regulating philosophy in that extraordinary era that they initiated such a simple act of psychological warfare on the spot. ‘They didn’t manage us,’ says Grobbelaar. ‘They just picked the team, gave us a few pointers and let us express ourselves,’
While Roma manager Nils Liedholm had taken his team to a secluded spot high in the Roman hills ahead of the final, Fagan’s Liverpool headed to Israel —
‘I raced Jan Molby at backstroke with bottles of beer in our mouths. You had to finish the beer before you reached the other side’
ostensibly to play the national team but fundamentally to enjoy themselves. Grobbelaar’s most vivid memory of the trip was a swimming race with Jan Molby: backstroke, with bottles of beers in their mouths.
‘It was one length and you’ve got to finish the bottle before you get to the other side,’ he relates.
They played a drinking game called ‘buzz’, watched Everton beat Watford in the FA Cup final and somehow became involved in an altercation, after a particularly heavy drinking session in Tel Aviv’s sun-baked main square.
A shocked Italian press corps breathlessly reported all of this — heightening the self-confidence of a Roma side who would have been encouraged to know that Liverpool’s subsequent preparations for penalties, back at Melwood, went very badly indeed.
The first team went up against the youth team and reserves in a shootout competition which finished 5-1 to the latter, with reserve team keeper Bob Boulder considerably outperforming Grobbelaar. Liverpool’s coaching staff were suspicious of practising any dead-ball situation. They preferred to trust such moments to the intuitive decision-makers they had so meticulously assembled.
That perhaps explains the chaos when the shootout actually arrived. Steve Nicol grabbed the ball to take the first kick, because penalty expert Phil Neal was tying up his laces, and subsequently missed.
Grobbelaar says Fagan asked Kenny Dalglish to take a kick and had to be reminded that he had substituted the Scot, whose ’84 final was not his greatest night. None of the players gave Kennedy a prayer of converting the last kick.
‘The chaos broke the ice a bit,’ Grobbelaar says. ‘It was just off the cuff. We were all warriors that night. It was us small guys against them.
‘I’ve been to the Colosseum and you knew after that what the gladiators had to achieve to get their life back as a warrior. That’s what it was like.’
The victory was Liverpool’s last great night in their era of continental dominance.
A year later, Fagan returned from the Heysel final against Juventus a broken man — devastated by the tragedy in Brussels which claimed 39 lives — though Grobbelaar sees a pattern in the way the club have maintained their extraordinary success in the competition. He believes Anfield is the reason.
‘On the European nights, the corporate fans from overseas can’t get tickets,’ he says. ‘It’s mainly local fans. That’s why the atmosphere is so great and the passion is so strong. Just like it’s always been.
‘For Premier League games, you get people coming from all over, paying big money to get into the games as part of a weekend away.’
He is 60 now — one of the few players from that team who have remained within the game, coaching in South Africa and, until recently, at Ottawa Fury in Canada’s elite United Soccer League.
He left Liverpool in 1994 to play for Southampton and later Plymouth Argyle, though it was the match-fixing allegations which surfaced months after his departure which kept him in the spotlight.
He was charged with conspiracy to corrupt, acquitted after two trials and he later sued for libel, though still feels he has not had his say.
An autobiography, written with the respected Liverpool writer Ragnhild Lund Ansnes, to be published by De Coubertin this autumn, covers that and more in detail.
‘I knew I had done nothing wrong,’ he says of the allegations. ‘It was just one person’s word. I had nothing to hide. I went through the process and came out the other side. There’s plenty to say and I’ll look to put the record straight.’
Some new-found signs of Liverpool’s old defensive security give him confidence that Jurgen Klopp’s players will prevail at Anfield tonight and next Wednesday in Rome.
‘Klopp has started to pick a more settled defence — like we did in 1983-84,’ he says. ‘Things have improved defensively since Virgil van Dijk came in and Loris Karius has been the better goalkeeper for me from the start.
‘But keeping a clean sheet at Anfield is going to be crucial. If you look at Barcelona, they conceded at home and that gave Roma hope that they could still do something. Conceding at home in a tie like this is a disaster.’
Liverpool did not concede a single goal at home in the 1983-84 Euro campaign though the dynamics are a little different, 34 years on. They are favourites this time. Back then the Romans were 8/13.
Regrettably, Graziani won’t be taking up Grobbelaar’s offer to meet him on the pitch at half-time. Word came back from Italy yesterday that professional commitments prevent him from making the trip at short notice.
The last word and last laugh belong to Grobbelaar. It always seemed to be so.