by Amy Lawrence
I am very grateful to everyone who wanted to contribute, particularly those from the Liverpool perspective who looked back on a period of great pain. If the voices are predominantly one-sided that is out of respect for those lost at Hillsborough and their families who fought so long for justice. There are definitive accounts about the tragedy I would urge anyone to read. It did not feel appropriate to go into depth with those from Liverpool about the final game without the context of that season, so the choice was made to recall events from a different perspective, from outside the city looking in.
As for me, that time remains a touchstone. It feels extraordinary that the two most extreme football-related emotions I have felt in over 40 years absorbed by the game took place within a six-week timeframe. Every reminder of Hillsborough to this day remains heartbreaking, and there we were, so soon afterwards, acclaiming a footballing miracle. I am old enough that I ought to know better now but I distinctly remember the serene feeling on 26 May 1989 that life would never get any better. That seemed strange and impossible and yet it was fine.
ARSENAL SQUAD 1988–89 Division One appearances (and sub appearances)
John Lukic ‘Lukey’ 38
Lee Dixon ‘Dicko’ 31 (2)
Nigel Winterburn ‘Nige’ 38
Tony Adams ‘Rodders’ 36
Steve Bould ‘Bouldy’ 26 (4)
David O’Leary ‘Paddy’ 26
Gus Caesar ‘Gus’ 2
David Rocastle ‘Rocky’ 38
Michael Thomas ‘Mickey’ 33 (4)
Paul Davis ‘Davo’ 11 (1)
Kevin Richardson ‘Richo’ 32 (2)
Brian Marwood ‘Brian’ 31
Alan Smith ‘Smudger’ 36
Paul Merson ‘Merse’ 29 (8)
Perry Groves ‘Grovesey’ 6 (15)
Niall Quinn ‘Quinny’ 2 (1)
Martin Hayes ‘Hayesey’ 3 (14)
Manager: George Graham
ONE
Naked Ape
GEORGE GRAHAM (MANAGER):
I used to watch old cowboy films with John Wayne in and he used to always say, let’s get in there, do the business and then get the hell out of there.
PAUL MERSON (FORWARD):
We went up there the day of the game. You know, that’s a bit weird. You’re playing Friday evening, the biggest game for Arsenal in the last 18 years, since they played at White Hart Lane and won the league. To go up there the day of the game was just phenomenal. I think George was like, if we go up the day of the game, the players haven’t got time to think and get nervous.
GEORGE GRAHAM:
I was into coaching big time and I started to get a lot of books from America. Coaches of American football. Basketball. I started to learn from people who had been successful in the States, reading up to see if it would help me. It’s really about being in charge of other people. In charge of a bunch of players. How do you handle them? There are a lot of ways to do it. I just thought it was fascinating.
Somebody recommended The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and it was about territory. It was about why, in the animal kingdom, if it’s somebody else’s territory you would be fought off. Get out of here. This is my territory. Get out. I tried to relate that to football and footballers.
I always remember previously when I was a player going to Anfield and you would go up the day before the game and get into the hotel and all the people working at the hotel would say, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing up here? This is Liverpool. You should get back to London where you belong.’ When you’ve got a group of players, there’s a number that are very confident of their own ability and there’s some that are not so comfortable. When you go into a situation where you need warriors, you’d like the whole 11 players to be warriors but it doesn’t work out that way. You usually have two or three really strong characters who carry the rest of the boys. When you go away from home you need your leaders who love the challenge, the battle. There are people who are much stronger mentally within a group of players. When I was a player I was not strong mentally. Not as strong as I maybe should have been. Frank McLintock was the equivalent of three people. We used to think, cor! With Frank and another couple of others, how can we lose?
I knew we had a lot of warriors in that team. It’s not a secret who we had. Nigel is like that. He’s no meat on him at all and Nigel would kick anybody. Bouldy, Tony, even Lee, who was a gentleman – he didn’t like kicking people but occasionally he would. David Rocastle had it. We had a strong back bone to us and sometimes you think nowadays some teams lack that. If you’ve got too many who are mentally not as strong then you go to some grounds and it’s more difficult to win matches. Liverpudlians are very, very passionate about their own city. They’re very, very intense about their game and their team especially. Nothing against Liverpool or the people up there but I didn’t want to be staying in a hotel for a couple of days with negative vibes. That’s why having read that book, The Naked Ape, I suddenly thought we’ll go up the morning of the match. Have a light lunch. Off to bed to have a rest and then the game in the evening. The Desmond Morris idea definitely convinced me I wanted to take the team up there as late as possible near the game. Then play the game and get out of there as quickly as possible, obviously with the right result. I’m glad I did that.
STEVE BOULD (DEFENDER):
Surprisingly as a group we were all very calm. I don’t know whether that’s because we didn’t have too many expectations, or we actually believed George’s story. He told it like it was a Western. Get in and get out of town quick with the rewards. He used to quote that kind of thing regularly.
LEE DIXON (DEFENDER):
Did I wake up thinking this is the day we win the league? I’ll be honest with you; not really. I didn’t sit there going this is it. I wasn’t pumped up like that that early. Because there was still all that stuff going on around Hillsborough for me. Even during the prep in the dressing room, it was like another game but there was still that feeling of, you know, should we really be here?
DAVID O’LEARY (DEFENDER):
It was my son’s birthday. I went away that day thinking it would be nice to bring him back a medal, wouldn’t it? I wished him a happy birthday. He was six at the time. Later on he was too tired to stay awake for the game and went to bed.
JOHN LUKIC (GOALKEEPER):
It’s a good job I got there early because there were no seats on the bus. Everybody and his brother was on that bus going up to Anfield. Even people I didn’t know were on the bus. It was packed.
PERRY GROVES (FORWARD):
The first team coach is sacrosanct. No one goes on it unless you’re in the squad. No one travels. I remember getting on the coach and it was full of VIPs and I thought half of them actually were barely alive, aged about 70 or 80, cobwebs coming off them with their old blazers. But the thing is they sat in our seats and broke an unwritten rule. When you’re a regular in the first team you always sit in the same seat. It’s a rite of passage. You have to earn your right. Some officials from the club were sat on our table so we’re like, what are you doing? I said, ‘Sorry, chaps, you’ve got to move’ and they went, ‘You can sit down there.’ We said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. You have to move. That’s where we sit. Every single away game that is my seat. That’s where Bouldy sits. That’s where Alan Smith sits. I tell you what, if we get beat tonight or we don’t win the title it’s your fault. If you don’t move we’ve got no chance.’ Because footballers are very superstitious. Very superstitious. In the end we got them out of our seats.
LEE DIXON:
I remember playing cards on the coach like we always used to do. We used to play hearts at the back of the coach and it was really relaxed.
GARY LEWIN (PHYSIO):
There was a bed at the back of the coach. It all started because Charlie Nicholas got badly injured in Nottingham on my first game as first team physio in September 1986. We had nowhere to lay him after the game on the way home. I went to the coach company to ask if one of the tabl
es could drop down on springs to make a bed. They adapted it and it was designed for when players were injured, the table would convert and we put a mattress on top. But of course people like Mickey and Rocky used to go for a sleep all the time.
MICHAEL THOMAS (MIDFIELDER):
Travelling up that day we were all in a good mood. Good spirits. Get on the coach, a summer’s morning, I was thinking, oh yeah, this should be a nice little journey. I used to be at the back all the time. On the bed. Ha ha ha. Horizontal. We used to fight for it. It was me, Rocky and Tony Adams. I could sleep anywhere. Obviously I woke up a few times. Merse, Nigel, Dicko and Bouldy were playing cards and joking. It was great. Then reading all the press. Lambs to the slaughter. Graeme Souness from his hospital bed and you think, oh here we go. Everybody writing us off. We thought, OK. Obviously no one thinks we were going to win. We’ll just show them.
JOHN LUKIC:
The press did us an enormous favour really by saying we were written off. A lot of players made a mental note that day.
GEORGE GRAHAM:
Well that’s just life, isn’t it? You look at the situation and you say what’s the best way to handle it? And whether you liked it or not the build-up to that game was unbelievable because everything, in every paper, was all about how Arsenal were going to lose. Liverpool are going to win it. Blah blah. So the players were going to go through it anyway in the media. I just thought, let’s have a relaxed attitude to the whole situation. I knew they’d perform because of the way we worked midweek. I was always confident we would do well. Whether I was confident enough to win two-nothing is a different matter.
ALAN SMITH (FORWARD):
We saw the now infamous Graeme Souness interview and he’d obviously come down on the side of his former team. He said they were the much better team, play the much better football and the headline was ‘Men Against Boys’. So, one of the lads said, look what Souness has written here. Up on the noticeboard. Everyone has a good read. Somebody brought it up on the coach with us. We were really chirpy on the way up. It was a good atmosphere. Lots of chat and looking forward to it. We had the card school at the back, which I was never part of. I hated cards. Bouldy, Merse, Rodders would be there. I was kind of in the middle, with some of the boys like David O’Leary and Grovesy and we’d just have a chat.
David O’Leary was my room-mate at the time. We got to the Atlantic Tower hotel where we were due to stay for lunch and a kip and a pre-match meal, which is right on the water down by Albert Dock. We had our lunch and we all went to our rooms. That was the strange thing because quite often with a night match you go to your rooms and you can’t really go to sleep. You’re obviously thinking about the match. Tossing and turning. But that day me and Paddy were out like a light. We had a good couple of hours’ kip.
GARY LEWIN:
Me and the kit man, Donners, went to the ground to put the kit out around 3 o’clock. I usually went for a run around the pitch. Partly superstition and partly just to get some nervous energy out. I did it everywhere. In those days you would go into an empty ground and get a buzz. Anfield had that. We stayed in a hotel shaped like a boat. We got back and I did the alarm calls at 4 o’clock, calling the rooms, and if they didn’t answer the phone I would go and bang on the door. Pre-match meal wasn’t a buffet like they have now. On a Thursday I would go round to every player: ‘What do you want for your lunch?’ It would be steak, chicken or fish. ‘What do you want for your pre-match meal?’ It would be omelette, beans on toast, scrambled eggs on toast. I would stand at the entrance to the dining room with a list to hand out the right meal. As they came in, ‘That’s for Steve Bould, that’s for Paul Merson …’ We didn’t have a travel manager so that was my job.
ALAN SMITH:
Woke up. ‘Cor that was nice, wasn’t it?’ We got down for our tea at 4. Everyone was saying, ‘Sleep well?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, slept like a log.’ Everyone had a really good sleep. There was something about it. People were relaxed, felt energised. The old flip-chart was out after tea and toast and the gaffer’s going through the set-pieces and he did everything as he always did. Gives us a little pep talk.
Right, lads, gather round. The tactical side of it was about the importance of not conceding a goal, stressing that if we concede then we’ve got to score three, which would be impossible. As long as you keep a clean sheet you’re always in with a shout. Then it’s going through who’s marking who at set-pieces. Smudge, I want you to mark Gary Ablett. You stand at the near post. Make sure you stay with your markers. Do your jobs properly. At the end of that he gets to the Churchillian stuff, just setting the night in context. The importance of not wasting the opportunity. The importance of not leaving anything out there. Giving it your all. Having no regrets.
JOHN LUKIC:
The team meeting was the interesting thing. Obviously because George had changed the formation his team-talk was quite enlightening. Once he’d named the team, he outlined his plans for the evening, which revolved around keeping a clean sheet until half-time and then early on in the second half play a little bit freer, hopefully score a goal which will put Liverpool on edge and then towards the end of the game we’ll get the winner. Pretty straightforward stuff really.
TONY ADAMS (DEFENDER AND CAPTAIN):
It made sense for me. Two of the biggest teams in the country, away from home, you’re going to go and play five at the back and it was a good option. George kept us normal. It’s just another game. Just perfect. As I remember it he called every shot right.
LYNNE CHANEY (ARSENAL BOX OFFICE IN 1989 – PRESENT DAY MEDIA ASSISTANT):
I started working at Arsenal in 1987 and I worked in the box office and that’s where I was in 1989. There were 25 Travel Club coaches for the fans; and me and Jo, we were giving out raffle tickets. Charlie George came down and he drew the raffle ticket and it was so ironic that he picked number 18 and the person that won it was on coach 18 and it was 18 years since we last won the league and everyone was thinking, oh my God, is this an omen. It lifted our spirits, didn’t it?
JO HARNEY (ARSENAL TELEPHONIST IN 1989 – PRESENT DAY OFFICE MANAGER):
We stood there and waved everybody off and then went back to work for a couple of hours. After work we went up to the old Cocktail Lounge in the East Stand where a few staff would watch the game together. I didn’t stay though. I went and sat in a tiny flat in Finsbury Park with six guys and some peanuts that had been put on the table.
DAVID MILES (ARSENAL ASSISTANT CLUB SECRETARY IN 1989 – PRESENT DAY CLUB SECRETARY):
The club was a big family. The whole system has changed now but in those days the players like Dave Rocastle, Mickey Thomas, Martin Hayes, Paul Merson all came through what was called then the apprenticeship system and part of their apprenticeship was that one afternoon a week they actually did work experience in the offices. As an example in the box office you’d have Kevin Campbell and Paul Merson opening envelopes and selling tickets, which is quite ironic when you see how the young players are treated now. It was a real camaraderie because we all grew up with the players. Now it’s totally different because the players are at the training ground and you don’t often see them. But these lads from the age of 16 actually spent quite a bit of their lives here at the club because they trained a bit at the club at Highbury and did work experience here.
MICHAEL THOMAS:
It was a family for us. We had families at home but this was a real tight-knit family with this group of people. We all grew up at the same time with all the people around the club. The tea ladies were so special. Midweek you’d be bored, you’d finish training, why go home? Go to the ticket office and help out with the tickets or answering the phones. We knew everybody. We’d go for lunch with them, go across to Highbury Corner and get something to eat or just meet up because that’s how it was.
JO HARNEY:
They’d sit on desks for hours after training. I remember George would come in and say, have you not got homes to go to? They literally didn’t go. They ju
st sat and chatted and it was like your friends.
LYNNE CHANEY:
Mickey would come in for the biscuits. I remember him actually hiding under a desk when George come along.
DAVID MILES:
We just thought that it would be great to spend that last night of the season together. Celebrate the season. Didn’t think we’d do it but nevertheless we were going to make a night of it. I would guess there was about 20 staff and it was a complete range. It was everyone from the groundsman, the plumber, the electrician, box office staff. We went out for a meal on Blackstock Road and all came back into one of the rooms at Highbury. There was a regular TV in what was then called the Ladies Lounge but it was probably 20 inches and we thought, well there’s 20 of us, so we phoned up a local retailer and hired in for the night something we thought was very swish. It must have been about a 36/38-inch TV. We hired some drinks in.