HATED RIVALS
The fans loathe each other but this picture shows there is another side to the bitterness
BRYAN ROBSON still recalls the afternoon he ushered teenage Liverpool fans towards the visitors’ dressing- room sink at Anfield, to wash ammonia out of their eyes. It had been aimed at him and his Manchester United teammates as they descended the team bus that day.
The United captain, still in his club suit as his team’s changing space became a first-aid room, had avoided the worst of the chemicals but Clayton Blackmore was less fortunate. The Welshman remembers manoeuvring himself ahead of Norman Whiteside to leave the bus, ‘because the Liverpool fans hated him’, as he puts it. But this meant he bore the brunt when the chemicals were released.
‘My eyes were wide open and I got hammered,’ Blackmore says. ‘I couldn’t see.’
It was February 1986 and a mutual loathing which manager Ron Atkinson always said made trips to Anfield like being in the Vietnam War was beginning to take hold between supporters of the clubs who meet again on Merseyside today.
A rock was hurled at Mark Hughes and Blackmore as they sat across from each other in the table window seats of United’s coach the previous year.
‘It crashed against the window,’ says Blackmore. ‘ The police lobbed the fan back into the crowd, rather than arrest him.’
YET a remarkable image from that time reveals the less appreciated fact about the relationship between these two old foes: they actually got along well together for years.
It captures a beaming 67-yearold Bob Paisley, sitting with Robson on the United team bus which arrived at Anfield 10 months after the ammonia attack.
It was decided that positioning Paisley at the front of the coach — in plain sight — would neutralise tensions. So United stopped on the outskirts of Liverpool to pick up the six-times title-winning manager who had made them look a very ordinary team for years.
It is an understatement to say Paisley was not one of life’s great conversationalists but he and Robson talked away as the bus rolled through Liverpool’s streets. Alex Ferguson — who was present at the unveiling of Anfield’s new Kenny Dalglish stand yesterday — joined them to talk.
Paisley was a willing participant because he never understood the Manchester hate. The mutual appreciation between him and Sir Matt Busby — one of his few close friends in football — saw the two driven around the Wembley perimeter together in an open-top vehicle after the 1983 Charity Shield between United and Liverpool. It was football’s farewell to Paisley.
The roots of this friendship lay in hospitality. Paisley never forgot the welcome Liverpool captain Busby had extended when he arrived at Anfield from County Durham 38 years earlier. It was an improbable bond between warm, avuncular Busby and gauche, taciturn, occasionally comic Paisley.
But they shared a love of horse racing and Army service in the Second World War and each, in his own way, was steeped in Liverpool.
Liverpool have Busby to thank for the manager who made them great. It was he who persuaded Bill Shankly, Paisley’s predecessor, not to quit Anfield when things were rough in the early 1960s. ‘There was something he didn’t like there and he wanted to go. It was as simple as that,’ Busby wrote in his book Soccer at the Top. ‘I told him he had to stay.’
It was also Busby who tipped off Liverpool about 16-year-old Billy Liddell — the striker who would become arguably their greatest player — as he dithered over joining Hamilton Academicals in 1938.
The ties that bind these clubs are more intricate than that. Liverpool offered United the services of some players to tide them over, a month after the Munich disaster in 1958. They gave United the use of Anfield in August 1971, when United supporters’ hooliganism had caused them a two-game ban from Old Trafford. United beat Arsenal 3-1 in their only Anfield ‘home’ game. Paisley also never forgot how United’s fans sang ‘Liverpool, Liverpool’ in a gesture of magnanimity when the beaten side slumped past on their lap of honour after the 1977 FA Cup final.
The open warfare began soon afterwards, with 1985’s running street battles and two stabbings after the sides’ FA Cup semi-final at Goodison Park a turning point.
Blackmore has always wondered where all the Liverpool hate came from, given that their own side had been in the ascendancy for years by then. ‘We seemed to have something over them in that we were still the bigger club — yes, a more talked- about club,’ he says. ‘ Perhaps that came from Sir Matt, what he did in Europe and how the club came back after Munich.’
The numbers bear this theory out. Even in the 1983-84 season — a Liverpool treble-winning year — United’s average home attendance was 42,534 to the Anfield club’s 35,793. It was Liverpool’s football supremacy in those days that fed United hate.
The Heysel disaster, six weeks after the incendiary Goodison FA Cup semi-final, began the process of fans using human tragedy as something to sing about. There is circumstantial evidence that Liverpool fans’ Munich chanting had already started by the time of the Hillsborough disaster, which has been sung about for so long.
The disseminators of such despicable noise knew nothing of some of Robson’s less appreciated Liverpool experiences. Now 60, he tells how Phil Thompson, Emlyn Hughes and others in the Mersey contingent were among the most generous to him when he arrived in the England set-up, uncertain and relatively unknown, in 1980. ‘They looked after me,’ he says. ‘It didn’t matter where I was from.’
Sir Alex Ferguson certainly contributed to the rivalry. He never forgot the Liverpool swagger, as he saw it, in the early years of his United reign, when Dalglish’s club got the better of him. He also felt that Liverpool envied United’s grandeur. Writing in 1992, he said he’d grown accustomed to the loathing felt for his club from the team 34 miles down the M62.
‘I won’t be as shocked (in future) if I hear a repeat of the Liverpool player who shouted from the dressing room “f*** you”,’ he reflected in his early autobiography, Six Years at United. ‘I learned something that day.’
FERGUSON was also desperate when Liverpool beat him to John Barnes’ signature in 1987. He blamed the indecision of his then chief scout, Tony Collins, and always felt this cost United the 1987-88 title. ‘We lost John Barnes to Liverpool and we have paid for it more than once,’ he wrote.
Ferguson has displayed a quiet dignity behind the scenes. He was one of the first on the phone to Dalglish after the events of April 15, 1989. He also approached Liverpool to ask to view Anfield’s Hillsborough floral tributes privately and without publicity.
It is a struggle for mutual respect to be heard when these titans collide, though. Blackmore understood that when, still struggling to see after the ammonia attack, he had to watch the 1-1 draw in February 1986 from the directors’ box.
‘Every time we got a foul, our directors got hammered,’ he says. ‘I wondered why they bothered taking those seats.’