by Amy Lawrence
We had ordered a big plastic banner that was due to go on the front of the open-top bus just in case and it said ‘Arsenal FC League Champions 1989’ and it had been delivered during the day. I just rolled it up and put it behind my desk and I thought, I’ll throw it away on Monday morning and just get rid of it.
PENNY SMITH (ALAN’S WIFE):
Alan got up in the morning and off he went. I was in work for 8.30 at a beauty therapists. In those days it was no computers, the appointment book was written, so I’d put in fake appointments for the afternoon, moving ones that I could get done in the morning to the afternoon so the takings were all in the till regardless. My friend was manager of the salon and she had done the same so we were hoping to leave for Liverpool at lunchtime with her boyfriend. Just as we were about to go upstairs to get changed out of our uniform, our boss turned up. Oh my God. He’d come to collect the takings and was chatting away and we were desperate for him to go. We had to hide my friend’s boyfriend in one of the treatment rooms because he shouldn’t have been there anyway. Eventually off we went in his beige Ford Escort estate. The aerial had been snapped off, and he’d put a coat hanger in to make an aerial. Because we were late and got stuck in all that traffic, trying to pick up what was happening on the radio with a wire coat hanger as an aerial was quite difficult. It was very crackly.
ROY DIXON (LEE’S DAD):
I had a ticket but I was so nervous I couldn’t go. I was so uptight and worried about it I gave my ticket away to Lee’s uncle Albert, who was over from Australia. That’s the way it goes when you are a parent. I decided to watch it on television by myself in the house.
PAUL JOHNSON (ARSENAL TRAVEL CLUB MANAGER):
I was in charge of team, directors, reserves and supporter travel. We had 26 coaches going up in convoy and we were all late. I was on coach number 1 with Roberto, the coach driver, who took us up the hard shoulder to try to get us there. It became obvious the M6 was completely jammed. I was very worried. We had borrowed a phone for the journey as there were no everyday mobiles then. I put a call in to Ken Friar, Arsenal’s managing director. I then go through to Peter Robinson, the secretary of Liverpool, and to put this politely he said, 26 coaches or not we are not delaying the game. In the end there was a ten-minute delay but it wasn’t enough.
MARK LEECH (PHOTOGRAPHER):
We were supposed to meet at 1 o’clock at Toddington Services and were a bit late. We had to average about 40mph, said that would be a breeze and I think we were around Walsall at half past five with my friend and fellow photographer Andy Cowie driving his Peugeot 405. He was due to go to Hampden Park the next day for the Scotland v England game. Having to get back to London to catch the flight the next day he kept wondering if it was worth continuing or better to head back. Every ten miles we thought, we’re not going to make it. We’re not going to make it. Then the traffic moved for about three minutes and we’d say we’ve cracked it and then it would grind to a halt.
ANDY COWIE (PHOTOGRAPHER):
Well it was probably one of five times we said, look shall we just watch it in a pub?
MARK LEECH:
Andy had been covering Liverpool all through the late 70s and 80s and I remember him saying to me, ‘Well it’s just Liverpool picking up another trophy shot. I think we’ve done this enough times. Do we need another one?’ And I digested this for two whole seconds. It made sense and then I seemed to grab him by the lapels. ‘Young man, we’re going to photograph a team in yellow. Drive!’ Some of the fans must have been in Stoke-on-Trent at kick-off.
DAVID DEIN (ARSENAL VICE-CHAIRMAN IN 1989):
I’m always a supreme optimist so I thought we had a chance. I didn’t think we were going to do it but we’ve seen enough football in our lives to know that anything can happen. Going to Anfield that day I remember we hired a private jet, the board and a couple of friends. We didn’t want to chance driving up and getting involved in congestion on the motorway or a problem with a train that doesn’t run to schedule and then we’re going to miss the game. We wanted to make sure we were there on time. We got there and the Liverpool board were very nice, always very social and accommodating, and I think they felt inwardly confident that the league was theirs for the taking.
DAVE HUTCHINSON (REFEREE):
I was the first one there. The first thing I did in this case was to go and see Peter Robinson, the Liverpool secretary, to tell him he’s got a referee and then ask him if my colleagues are there. They eventually arrived. I had to get to know them and form some rapport with them. It’s the first time I’ve worked with them as far as I can remember. So, it’s a question of me weighing them up and seeing who’s nervous and who’s not. The last thing we talked about probably was the match. About an hour and a half before the game I say, ‘Right. OK, we’ve got work to do now.’ I always went out on the pitch with my two linesmen and I wanted to walk around the pitch and give them instructions about certain situations rather than do it in the dressing room, because it’s a funny thing at football grounds but everybody wants to come and knock on the referee’s door and have a word with him. If I’m out on the pitch then the only person who’s likely to come out is the one that says there’s a cup of tea for you in the dressing room. So, we went out on the pitch and we walked round and we stopped off, deliberately stopped off in this case, in front of the Kop. Even an hour and a half before, it was filling up quite full. It’s a question of getting the lads used to the atmosphere. We walked further round and stopped here and stopped there to emphasise certain points. Walk them through the position they should take for a goal-kick and for penalty kicks and stuff like that. It used to take about 45 minutes.
They know how to signal a throw-in and so on but it’s getting the teamwork correct. It was very difficult. You’ve got three things to consider as a linesman. Is the ball in or out of play if it’s coming from your left-hand side? Is there an offside situation? Or is there any foul play going on in that quadrant just in front of me? As a referee, I don’t want too much flag but I do want help. So the way I used to describe that was to say if a foul is just in front of you that if you were a referee you would blow the whistle for, please don’t flag automatically. Just count: one-two, and whilst you’re counting one-two make eye contact with me and you’ll see one of three things. I shall either be saying nothing, letting play on, and if you’ve put your flag up and I’m saying play on, I’ve got to knock you down in front of 45,000 people, which is not good for teamwork or for your morale and it gets me worried about you as well. The second thing is I’ll be saying play on, advantage. Not so bad if you have put your flag up because I can take the brunt of that one. The third possibility is that I’ll be looking at you and my eyes will be wide open and written across them in red block capital letters, six foot high, is the word HELP. That’s when I want the flag.
PERRY GROVES:
When you’re on the coach to the ground you talk about the game, what’s going to happen, when you’re in a group together. Players today can’t talk about the game and what’s coming up because they’ve all got headphones on. How can you then talk about situations you might find yourself in? We’d have Lee Dixon talking to Tony Adams about the distances they’re going to play for each other if the winger gets it. If John Barnes gets it, Dicko’s going to close him down and then they’ll shuffle across and he’ll try and bring Barnes inside. Kevin Richardson’s saying to Michael Thomas, if you go forwards you’ve got to make sure you get yourself back in. Merse and Smudge talk about when the ball comes forward and they are going to split. There are conversations with everybody that’s going to be around you. I don’t see how that happens today because of the headphones.
PAUL DAVIS (MIDFIELDER):
There were a lot of us in the changing room because everybody was up there for this game. Myself, Niall Quinn and Brian Marwood weren’t playing. We were all in our club suits so it came to a point where we knew we were going to need to leave the changing room and let the boys get on with it but w
e were waiting around for our tickets. Where were we going to sit?
NIALL QUINN (FORWARD):
There was no room on the bench. It was a sunken bench so you couldn’t just put chairs behind it because you would be blocking people’s view. There were no seats in the grandstand behind the dugout. There was a bit of confusion. It was suggested the safest place to go was in the section where the Arsenal fans were segregated from the Liverpool fans. Footballers weren’t as fussy then. We just followed orders.
PAUL DAVIS:
The boys were getting ready now about an hour before kick-off. We wished them all well, said our goodbyes and good luck, went out of the ground and walked outside to the entrance for the away fans and came back into the ground. So we were behind the goal in amongst the Arsenal fans. They couldn’t believe that we were there.
DAVE HUTCHINSON:
The official visitors were the team managers. So, anything you wanted to say or get across you said then. Experience tells me that you might just as well talk to a brick wall because they’re as emotionally tied up in the game as I am and once that game starts anything that you’ve said is most likely not going to be taken care of. But they were both experienced managers in this case. George Graham and Kenny Dalglish. There appeared to be lots of respect between the two of them. That’s great. I got the impression that they were trying to make me feel comfortable, which helps. It’s a bit like the boxing referee. Give me a good clean fight and get on with it.
I should think it was one of the biggest certs in the season to most people in terms of Liverpool being favourites but that doesn’t come into our thinking as match officials. That’s the last thing. I was aware of the maths.
I wasn’t nervous. I was conscious of the responsibility that I’d got as the match official. I desperately wanted it to go without any controversy and that meant I’d got to be on top of my game. It was the only game being played in the Football League that night and everybody who was a football fan was either at the match or watching it live on television. So there was a very special atmosphere and you could feel it and of course it was an emotional situation too. We’re all aware of the background to the game and the reason why it had been postponed, so all those factors add to the atmosphere.
JIM ROSENTHAL (ITV PITCHSIDE REPORTER):
I can tell you about arriving at Anfield because the last time that I’d been there the whole pitch was covered in flowers on the back of the Hillsborough disaster and that was a very, very emotional time for everybody. I can remember particularly Kenny Dalglish during that time. The way he’d conducted himself and the inspiration and the help he gave to so many people. He was a phenomenal figure during that immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy. The image of the flowers all over the pitch was very hard to get out of your mind.
It was the first time in a hundred years I believe – and it’ll probably be the first time in the next hundred years – that two teams played each other on the last day of the season and the title was at stake so of course it was unusual. Did we build it up in the way that we would have built it up now? We didn’t. It wasn’t that sort of era. I remember doing the interviews beforehand and I can remember George being really calm. Kenny was tense. I think one of the reasons was I don’t think they quite knew how to play the game – where you can lose 1–0 and you’re going to be champions.
BOB WILSON (ARSENAL GOALKEEPER IN 1971, GOALKEEPING COACH IN 1989):
I would have loved to have been there at the ground. I was sitting glued to the television. I was doing every bit of superstition that I thought possible. Anything really. I always have certain things close to me that link me to the club. It’s the old motto Victoria Concordia Crescit; victory through harmony. In recent times it’s as simple as a key ring with the Arsenal badge on it. It will be hidden somewhere on part of my body. It might be in a shirt close to the heart. It might be in a shoe. It might be wound round my finger. I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s a little key ring with the Arsenal badge on it and if we’re in trouble I sort of press this thing and it doesn’t always work but I’m trying everything to turn the tide, you know. My wife gets upset anyway when I start to lose the plot, shouting at the television, giving instructions. So she went out to meet some friends at a restaurant and I stayed at home and would meet them later.
This was the time of the explosion of television. Suddenly people were beginning to realise there is a mega audience out there and it’s something then that creates that piece of history. The difference between reading it in the newspaper the next day, like when we went to Tottenham in 1971 and won the title on the last game of the season, was significant. Obviously it has grown and grown but I think it was one of those early iconic moments in television.
JEFF FOULSER (ITV FOOTBALL EXECUTIVE PRODUCER):
Anyone under the age of 40 would be astounded with the way television is now compared to the way it was then. In 1988–89 it was the first year of live football on television, apart from the FA Cup final and the odd England match, and that season we covered 21 league matches. There were people in football that said this is going to kill the game. They just thought no one’s going to turn up. They’ll just watch it on TV. Now you can probably watch 21 matches in a week. So, it was a completely different landscape. We were getting audiences of 7, 8, 9 million on a regular basis on a Sunday afternoon. The average rating these days for a live Premiership game is probably 1.5 million.
We had a pundit booked for the night and we only had one pundit because there’s no point having a couple of people if you’ve only got three or four minutes to talk. They pulled out last minute and I knew Bobby Robson, who was the England manager, was going to be at the game and I cornered Bobby in the directors’ entrance at Anfield and said, ‘Look, Bob, we’ve got a real problem here. We haven’t got a pundit for the game.’ He just wanted to watch the game and I said, ‘Please just watch it with us.’ He was a lovely bloke and said, ‘Of course I will.’
DAVID PLEAT (CO-COMMENTATOR):
I went up on the day and met up with Brian Moore, who was the most fastidious, genuine, nicest man you could imagine. Although it was such a big game and we all knew it was going out on terrestrial, he was very good at relaxing people. I remember going up the stairs. At Liverpool you had to clamber along these planks to the gantry position, along the rafters with your head ducked down. There were only a couple of camera crews. The commentary position was good but there wasn’t a lot of room.
IAN WRIGHT (CRYSTAL PALACE STRIKER IN 1989, JOINED ARSENAL IN 1991):
The estate where I lived in Brockley, where David Rocastle grew up, locked down. I moved the television and had six cans of Foster’s. We all knew Arsenal were going to Liverpool that night and it was live on the telly. Everyone was talking about it. All of a sudden the cars stop driving down the road. There is nobody milling around. Everybody is inside. Come kick-off there is not a soul out there. It was amazing to think David off the estate was playing in one of Arsenal’s biggest games in their history. You could hear people in other flats jumping and screaming. That’s how exciting it was. I cannot emphasise enough how proud we were that we had somebody from the estate playing in one of the biggest games in English football.
LEE DIXON:
In the dressing room George was philosophical. He was determined that he wanted to go out to win it. He talked about the game, how he wanted the game to go. He didn’t normally do that, spelling out each part of the game. So, I think he had a vision in his head about the best way to try and beat Liverpool 2–0 at Anfield.
GEORGE GRAHAM:
If they score a goal first, in the first half, which they normally do, then we had to score three goals at Anfield. It’s never been heard of. Especially with that team at that time. So, I said to the boys we’ve got to keep it 0–0. We mustn’t go out there thinking we’ve got to attack. Because the papers were full of it. Arsenal’s got to win 2–0. They’ve got to go out there and have a go at Liverpool. Hello! I don’t think so.
Managers always look at your own team, your own structure, the way you play and the way the opposition play. You know, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? You try to exploit their weaknesses and try and force your strengths on to them and that’s the way most coaches sort the game out before kick-off. I had it all organised to play Liverpool and even though they won 5–1 in their previous game and were clear favourites, I still thought it was the right way to play.
PAUL MERSON:
Do you know it was 16/1 on the last day to win 2–0? There’s one for you. It was 16/1 to win the league in pre-season and we were 16/1 to win 2–0 at Anfield 37 games later. Ha ha ha.
I just couldn’t see it. I remember his team-talk. I remember sitting there like, what? I was thinking, as long as we don’t start getting beat 3s and 4s, that’s all right. I was thinking, he’s on what I’m on, isn’t he?