by Amy Lawrence
CONTENTS
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
PROLOGUE
Feelings
FOREWORD
Cannon on the Shirt
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Naked Ape
CHAPTER TWO
Gorgeous George
CHAPTER THREE
Desire
CHAPTER FOUR
The Team of the 80s
CHAPTER FIVE
Sign of the Times
CHAPTER SIX
Oh What Fun It Is to See The Arsenal Win Away
CHAPTER SEVEN
96
CHAPTER EIGHT
Football Focus
CHAPTER NINE
This Is the Day Your Life Will Surely Change
CHAPTER TEN
A Night of Chilling Simplicity
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fandom
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Goal that Changed Everything
AFTERWORD
Oh Rocky Rocky
ILLUSTRATIONS
DEDICATION and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
About the Author
Amy Lawrence has been writing about football ever since she faced the dilemma of going to the 1994 World C up or forsaking the trip to take her first job on the editorial team of Four Four Two magazine. She has mostly covered the beautiful game for the Guardian and the Observer, and broadcasts for BBC on Radio 5 Live and Match of the Day 2 Extra. Her books include three works on Arsenal, whose beat she has followed for many years – Proud To Say That Name, Invincible, and The Wenger Revolution. She has ghostwritten autobiographies for David Ginola (From St Tropez to St James’s) and Ray Parlour (The Romford Pele), and composed the text for the photographic work David Beckham VII. Amy was voted the FSA Football Writer of the Year in 2014, and the Words By Women Sports Journalist of the Year and Women In Football Journalist of the Year in 2016.
For Luca and Nico
If you just go for a run, as Michael Thomas put it, you might end up somewhere miraculous.
Photograph Credits
1. Tony West.
2. Tony West.
3. Peter Antonioni.
4. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
5. ITV broadcast, 26 May 1989.
6. ITV broadcast, 26 May 1989.
7. Tony West.
8. Tony West.
9. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
10. Bob Thomas Sports Photography/Getty Images.
11. Tony West.
12. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
13. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
14. Action Images.
15. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
16. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
17. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
18. Action Images.
19. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
20. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
21. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
22. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
23. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
24. Popperfoto via Getty Images.
25. Mark Leech, Offside Sports Photography.
26. Allsport/Getty Images.
27. Eugene Harper.
28. Eugene Harper.
29. Eugene Harper.
30. Eugene Harper.
31. Eugene Harper.
32. Tony Paraschou.
33. Tony Paraschou.
34. Tony Paraschou.
35. Tony Paraschou.
36. Tony Paraschou.
37. Doug Poole/Darren Epstein.
PROLOGUE
Feelings
I HAVE BEEN an Arsenal supporter since 1953 when I was eight years old. A season ticket holder from 16. A tiny shareholder since I was 18. In 1971 I never missed a single game. I was at White Hart Lane when we’d last won the league. My support for The Arsenal has survived two marriages.
In 1985 I started to miss games. I was developing an addiction to cocaine and heroin that ruined my life and those around me. By 1988 I was virtually homeless and no longer wanted to live. I somehow ended up in rehab in the West Country. I was lucky and came out of the rehab clean a week or so before the Liverpool game. I went into a tiny flat nearby.
I had lost interest in virtually everything, including my beloved Arsenal. I knew the game was on TV. In fact I had declined a ticket to the game a week or so earlier. I was too ashamed to meet up with my old Arsenal pals. Although I was clean I was not sure I wanted to live. I did not even want to watch the game on TV. Scared of all the feelings and emotions it would bring up. The good news about giving up drugs is that you get your feelings back. The bad news is that you get your feelings back.
I stared at my TV for an hour before kick-off. I imagined all my friends at Anfield, a ground I had been to many times. Eventually I plucked up courage. I watched the game. I cried, laughed and cried and laughed some more. In that moment Michael Thomas scored, I suddenly knew I wanted to live. I wanted to return to London, see my children and get back to a decent life. I also wanted to be at Highbury again. Watching the game gave me the greatest gift ever. A gift drugs could not give me and money could not buy. HOPE!
I have stayed clean ever since. I have truly had a life beyond my wildest dreams. But that’s another story.
Anonymous
FOREWORD
CANNON ON THE SHIRT
by Thierry Henry
The values carried by the Arsenal players from 1989 who I got to know changed something in me massively. I arrived with my socks above my knees. Some of the guys were looking at me. Why are you going with that? Are you a ballet dancer? But that was me. I took everything that was needed to be taken in order to play at Arsenal even though I also wanted to be me.
I always say they kicked me into understanding what Arsenal Football Club was. It’s a heavy shirt. Once you know your shoulders are OK to wear it then you can go on to do some amazing stuff. Tony Adams, Lee Dixon, Martin Keown, Nigel Winterburn, David Seaman, Ray Parlour – all of those guys told me what it was to play for Arsenal Football Club. That was very important because they know the history of the club, because they genuinely loved Arsenal. I remember when I arrived they knew the names of everybody at the training ground, at Highbury, and the name of the fans sometimes. I was like, ‘What? You know that guy?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ they said. ‘He used to travel all the time and is always there.’ So, it was a family club, but being a family club didn’t mean less competitive. It was about winning and only about winning, and they were letting you know.
They had been part of something special. You can never say never but to be able to reproduce what happened that night in 1989 is virtually impossible. Everybody’s watching that game. To have two teams going for a title. First versus second. The only game on TV. No one else is playing. You have to win 2–0 away at Anfield – something that wasn’t happening at the time. Even then you would only win the league because of the amount of goals you scored over the whole season. You thought you blew it. You come back to take it to the last day of the season. It’s you against them. Nothing else. I don’t care what people are saying, that’s the best ending ever of any league I’ve ever seen. Period.
When you watch the game you can clearly see that Arsenal thought that they could do it and that Liverpool were more thinking, let’s not lose it. It’s weird because you would like to think that the Liverpool side would know how to close the game out, especially at home. Anfield. Sometimes the fear of winning is bigger than the fear of losing. Anyone can get trapped in it.
People do forget that Alan Smith scored in that game. People remember Michael Thomas at the end, obviously, but to be able to score that crucial second goal you need to score the first one. When Michael Thoma
s goes through in stoppage time, with a situation of that intensity, the best thing is not to think about what’s at stake. There was a ricochet and then he goes through. He’s in front of the goalkeeper. When you don’t think sometimes it’s way better.
When I arrived at Arsenal I was always playing against these guys in training and at first I didn’t understand what the boss was trying to do. I thought, is he trying to expose my weaknesses here? What is he doing? But then I soon understood that he wanted me to play against the best to get better. Those guys are not going to greet you with ‘Oh hello, you won things before. Welcome. Do you want a cup of tea?’ No. Now we’re going to try to see who you are. Can you play here? We saw that you can play somewhere. Here is different. I remember some games where I wasn’t putting my foot into challenges the way some of the senior players wanted me to. If I was in France it would have been all right but in England then it was not the right way to go into a challenge and so they were letting me know. At half-time. After the game. Pretty much in your face.
In training I had those guys playing against me and I said to myself, if you can deal with those guys you can deal with everybody. I took it as a challenge every day in training to be able to beat those guys and that was like a competition. They used to kick me. I used to look at them as if to say, you can kick me but it doesn’t matter. Go on, you won’t stop me.
The point is them playing at their best made me the player that I became. When I was waking up I knew I’m going to face Lee, Martin, Tony, Nigel and you can add Sol Campbell a bit after that. You have to be ready. You have to wake up early and be ready for that one. I took it as a challenge. They were testing you. Can you play with us? Can you wear the Arsenal shirt? You find yourself in a situation where that’s the only way you can find out. I think you always have to train in extreme conditions to be able to survive in the game and they were giving me every morning extreme conditions. Can you take an elbow in your face and are you going to moan about it or are you going to play? I’m going to leave something on your ankle, or on your knee. That’s the way it is. Get up and fight and play.
The cannon on the shirt means everything. First and foremost when you go into a club you need to understand everything in order to be able to feel something. If you don’t, you’re not meant to be in that dressing room and that’s what those guys taught me.
INTRODUCTION
by Amy Lawrence
Three decades down the line, two yellowing sheets of lined A4, handwritten in the spring of 1989, reacquaint me with my 17-year-old self. Dismal haircut, rolled-up jeans and baggy tops, Walkman and carefully collated mixtapes, traipsing up and down the country to watch football, last year of school, head full of big ideas. I was never a regular diarist but when something felt unmistakably important I would grab a biro and everything spilled out. The first sheet is dated 23 April. The second is dated 26 May. The two dates are inextricably linked. On both occasions I visited Anfield and traversed a rite of passage. There is of course a third date that is necessary to understand any of this – 15 April – but I did not feel capable of finding any words, least of all the right ones, back then.
On 23 April I was supposed to be revising for A levels, but found it impossible not to be drawn to the small red rectangle of card then in my possession. It was my ticket to the match between Liverpool and Arsenal. Away terrace, £3.50. The ticket would go on to represent something seismic. But that day it evoked only a profound sadness.
The game had been postponed. Football was in mourning for the brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers who had been killed at the Hillsborough disaster the previous weekend. Although it was Liverpool’s tragedy, with the cities of Sheffield and Nottingham also entwined, everybody who cared for English football felt connected to this devastation.
I had never been to Liverpool and wasn’t sure how to articulate my sympathy, how best to show my empathy, but I knew I wanted to go to Anfield that day. I had planned to be there for the match and felt compelled to go anyway, drawn by the sense that the least we could do as fellow football fans was to metaphorically link arms and wrap the bereaved with support. It was a Sunday morning. I phoned Liverpool Clubcall to hear the recorded announcement that Anfield would be open all day to the public and headed to Euston to catch a train to Lime Street.
At the ticket office I met Kevin, a Liverpudlian working in London who was going home for a few days to make his own pilgrimage to Anfield and to attend a friend’s funeral. We sat together on the journey. I noticed how he became more nervous and subdued the closer we came to the train’s destination. Three of his friends, Peter, Ted and Jimmy, met him at the station and they insisted on taking me to Anfield with them. They took me under their wing and looked after me all day. A couple of them went to get fish and chips and came back with some for me, which they wouldn’t let me pay for. Later that evening they phoned my house to make sure I had got home safely.
We spent almost four hours queuing for a couple of miles in the streets outside Anfield. It was the most thoughtful and respectful queue I have ever seen. I would later describe it, and note down every club I saw represented, in my diary entry. ‘There was an incredible sense of unity and strength of spirit. Fans of what must have been every league club spanning the whole of Britain intermingled and waited together, clutching flowers, scarves, messages and personal mementos they were going to give in honour of those who died. The walls were covered with messages and many had written poems and stuck them up. It was totally overwhelming. People had laid down treasures, given up in memory of their friends and relatives, and many messages of reassurance that Shankly will look after those in heaven.’
So that was how I found myself at Anfield on the afternoon of 23 April 1989. At the exact time that I should have been watching a football match, I stood on the visitors’ terrace looking at a field of flowers that stretched over the halfway line in front of the Kop. At the exact time that I should have been immersed in those tribal instincts as an away supporter entering opposition territory, I lay down my Arsenal scarf on the Liverpool turf in a small act of solidarity. It all felt unbearably poignant. I took a taxi back to Lime Street and the driver, an Evertonian, refused to take my fare.
Little did I know, or even much care at the time, that the ticket would still be valid for the rearranged game that would take place on 26 May, still bearing its original date. I returned to Liverpool to take up position in the away terrace, feeling incredibly lucky to be at the match and still mindful of those who weren’t. That particular day has gone down in football folklore as, in the words of commentator Brian Moore at the time, ‘maybe the most dramatic finish in the history of the Football League’. That ‘maybe’ was a good hedged bet with a few seconds to go but there remains no doubt.
The genesis of this book had been brewing for many years but began to take this particular shape during the creation of the documentary, 89. This was a film that deconstructed an iconic football moment, built around testimony from players and central figures, mixed with rare archive footage. I was part of the production team, and it became obvious in the editing process, when so much golden material hit the cutting room floor, that it would be a waste to leave so many fascinating memories hidden, so many powerful thoughts unspoken. That prompted the idea not just to salvage them but also to search out even more voices, enabling this book to expand and bring extra layers to the story.
The other aspect that was so striking during the interview process was how vivid, how crystal clear, the memories were. Talking about that time, particularly with George Graham and the players involved, there were often moments when it felt like nobody dared to breathe, so caught up were we all in the clarity of the recall. It was strange, like watching the protagonists go back in time in their own minds and appear to be there. Details. Conversations. Feelings. Things that were nearly 30 years old catapulted forwards into the present as if they had been perfectly preserved in a time capsule.
An oral history felt like the
best way to portray that energy, that sense of people talking intensely about memories that stayed so intact because they meant such a lot. While the book focuses on the inside track, the desire for the ripples of this moment in time to also be felt encouraged me to seek recollections from anyone and everyone who felt moved by it, who remembered their exact circumstances. Where were you? Who were you with? What did you do? The hundreds of people who took time to tell their own versions of events, from pitchside to far flung places, emphasised the powerful effect that can be distilled into one event – in this case one goal.
The snapshots build a collage of the time. How David O’Leary wished his son happy birthday on the morning of the game. How Nigel Winterburn’s wife’s sister-in-law kept phoning up with a sixth sense about what was about to happen. How the staff back at Highbury rolled up the banner that had been ordered for the open-top bus and hid it under a desk ready to throw away on Monday morning. How the players had to fight for their places on the team bus because so many bigwigs suddenly wanted to take official transport to Anfield. How the physio told George Graham that Michael Thomas’s knee tweak meant he could start the game but probably wouldn’t finish it. How the referee needed a nod from the TV reporter to be able to relax about his decision on Alan Smith’s goal come the end of the match. How the photographer behind the goal worried he would run out of film in stoppage time. How Lee Dixon ended up in a Liverpool chippy with his club suit on.
It soon became apparent, seeking stories from way beyond the people on the pitch, that this event somehow reverberated with people as a kind of footballing JFK moment. Outside of monumental international news, or personal milestones like the birth of a child, it is not often something hits you with such force you can conjure up all the tiniest details for years to come. The more stories came in, the more the fascination grew. I heard from a new British Army recruit who drove through the night in East Germany to pick up a VHS, an ex-pat in Oman searched for the BBC World Service broadcast in 38-degree heat, a faraway fan eventually found a newspaper days after the event in Tasmania, Australia, a boy peered through the net curtains of a stranger’s window in Guernsey to catch the TV pictures … Closer to home, some quit their jobs or abandoned exams to go, others tried to bunk in, or smuggled portable TVs into work, kissed strangers, heard from old friends, fell in love, fell out of love – in all cases they scaled the extremes of emotions and that is why they remember exactly what they were doing when Mickey Thomas scored in the final seconds of the season.