by Tony Evans
18
Up for the cup
The FA Cup was important for both Liverpool and Everton. Until the mid 1960s, it was a symbol of Everton’s superiority in the city.
The Blues first won the oldest knockout competition in the world in 1906, beating Newcastle United 1–0 at Crystal Palace. They triumphed again at Wembley in 1933, cruising to a 3–0 victory over Manchester City with the great Dixie Dean on the scoresheet. Liverpool, meanwhile, were unable to get their hands on the venerable old trophy.
Liverpool’s first two finals ended in disappointment. They played in the last final before the First World War, a 1–0 loss to Burnley in 1914, and their first visit to Wembley in 1950 ended with a 2–0 defeat by Arsenal.
By the time the sixties arrived, Liverpool’s inability to win the cup was a standing joke. Evertonians sniped that the Liver Birds would spread their wings and fly when the Reds won the trophy. It underlined Liverpool’s status as second-class football citizens against the prestige of the Mersey Millionaires of Goodison.
The crucial tipping point in the balance of power between the two clubs came in 1965. Bill Shankly’s first great side reached the final in an eventful campaign. In the third round, Shankly’s team won away at West Brom before making hard work of Stockport County, who would go on to finish bottom of the fourth division, drawing 1–1 at Anfield before sealing the tie with a 2–0 win at Edgeley Park in the replay.
In the fifth round, Shankly’s team were drawn away to Bolton Wanderers. The 1–0 win was straightforward enough but a surge of away supporters after the goal caused a wooden barrier to collapse at Burnden Park. There were no serious injuries but it was a worrying incident that again highlighted how precarious safety was for football fans. Few lessons ever seemed to be learnt: 33 supporters had died in a crush in the Railway End at Burnden in 1946 at a cup quarter-final against Stoke City. This day in 1965, all the Liverpool fans were able to walk away from an FA Cup tie.
It took two attempts for Shankly’s side to beat Leicester City in the last eight, a single goal in the Anfield replay deciding the tie after a 0–0 draw at Filbert Street. That set up a semi against Chelsea – the glamorous west London media darlings – at Villa Park.
Somehow, Shankly got his hands on a Chelsea brochure prepared for the eventuality that the London club were successful in the semi. The Scot exaggerated the significance of the document and raged against the arrogance of Liverpool’s opponents. The team were instructed to ‘stuff those wee cocky southern buggers’. They duly did and a 2–0 victory put them on the road to Wembley.
The scramble for tickets was even more frenzied than usual. The cup was the holy grail to Liverpool fans. They flocked south displaying the usual fanaticism but it was mixed with fear and craving. They were desperate to kill off the sense of superiority the cup wins had brought to Goodison. They were terrified defeat would reinforce the myth and inferiority complex.
Evertonians looked nervously at the Liver Buildings but they could take heart because Liverpool’s opponents in the final were Don Revie’s Leeds United. The Yorkshire side were emerging as one of the first division’s powerhouses. For the next decade, they would be one of England’s best sides. They were talented, brutal and their cynical nature reflected the personality of their manager.
The final was attritional. Gerry Byrne broke his collarbone in the first minutes of the game. There were no substitutes, so Liverpool were faced with a choice: go down to ten men or let Byrne play on. The defender continued. For 90 vicious minutes, the teams battled it out in difficult, rainy conditions with neither side able to score. Byrne would face another 30 minutes of agony.
Extra time burst into life. Roger Hunt gave Liverpool the lead three minutes into the additional period, heading home a cross from the magnificent invalid Byrne.
Billy Bremner, the Leeds midfielder, equalized eight minutes later but Shankly’s team would not be denied.
With three minutes left, Ian St John scored a diving header. Liverpool had at last won the cup. The Liver Birds stayed put, despite the Everton propaganda. Nothing changed … except now Anfield had no reason to feel inferior to Goodison. The balance of power was shifting. Now Kopites could sneer at their neighbours. After all, Everton had not won the cup since before the war.
That did not last long. A year later, Scouse fanaticism was on display at Wembley again. Everton reached the final against another Yorkshire club, Sheffield Wednesday. If film of the Kop singing on the BBC’s Panorama documentary series in 1964 had cemented the passion of Anfield’s disciples in popular consciousness, then this May Saturday two years later let the nation see that the Blues were just as ardent, excitable and manic as their Red friends and relatives.
Before the match, young Evertonians stripped the local touts of their tickets. After 1966, the black-market profiteers had an extra expense on cup final day – bodyguards. The ‘liberation’ of tickets became part of football underground folklore. Inside the stadium, the ardour of the Gwladys Street took centre stage. Eddie Kavanagh was its personification.
It looked as if it was going to be a disappointing final when Wednesday went 2–0 up just before the hour mark. The showpiece event seemed to be subsiding without the late drama of the previous year.
Then Everton hit back. Mike Trebilcock, a Cornishman who would only play 11 games for the club in three years, scored twice in five minutes to level the scores. Kavanagh, who had once been on the books at Goodison as an aspiring player, chose this moment to earn infamy.
Balding and dressed in a suit, Kavanagh stepped from the terraces to join the celebration. ‘As soon as that ball hit the net, I was on me bike,’ Eddie later said. ‘That’s how quick it was. I think the crowd got to you more than anything. They were all screaming. You’d have to see it to believe it. I couldn’t explain that.’
The players – and the television viewers – were struggling to explain or believe what they were seeing. First, Kavanagh ran to the goalscorer. Many of the players would have known the interloper from his time on the staff. The Cornishman was not one of them.
‘I’d seen Trebilcock and I went for him first,’ Kavanagh explained. ‘I grabbed him, pulled him on the ground. He shit himself because he didn’t know me. We all played in blue and white, didn’t we? Sheffield were in blue and white, and we’re in blue and white, so he didn’t know who I was.’
His plan was to head next to the goalkeeper, Gordon West, to offer some advice. ‘I was coming across then to Westy. I was going to say, “Gordon, for God’s sake don’t let no more in.”’
The next few moments would turn Kavanagh into an Everton legend who will be talked about long after Trebilcock is forgotten. The police were at hand to eject the pitch invader. The first officer grabbed at his quarry but, like his team, Kavanagh was not going down so easily. As he ran away, the constable grabbed a handful of jacket. Eddie wriggled out of his coat as if shedding a skin and the policeman landed flat on his face having arrested the top half of Kavanagh’s suit.
‘I’d seen this busie [policeman] come after me,’ the Evertonian said. ‘He caught up with me and got me by the coat. But I just took it off.’
Shirt hanging out and braces askew, Kavanagh set off for the goal area but his mazy run was ended when another policeman came from nowhere and performed one of the few rugby tackles seen on cup final day. The Scouser remained disappointed and resentful about it until the day he died in Cantril Farm in 1999.
‘I didn’t see the other fella come around me,’ Kavanagh said. ‘He wasn’t even a busie, he was only a special [constable], but I didn’t see him coming because he wouldn’t have caught me. Six of them had me pinned down like I was one of those [great] train robbers.’
Kavanagh was escorted from the pitch and thrown out of the ground. By the time Derek Temple scored the goal that won the cup for Everton, Eddie was back in the stadium having bunked in. He was able to sum up what winning the cup meant to him – and many others, Blue and Red, across Merseyside.
/> ‘I was hysterical,’ he said. ‘After all the years we’d waited. There’s never been a build-up like that. If you love your side like I do, you’re not worried about your kids, or your ma or your da, you’re just wanting to win the cup.’
For his efforts, Kavanagh won the nickname ‘the first hooligan’. It was unfair. But his sense of overwhelming excitement was not so unusual at Goodison or Anfield. The FA Cup always brought out the fanaticism of the city. Those two Wembley finals in 1965 and ’66 put the madness on a national stage at a time when the world’s attention was on Merseyside.
Since then, each team had won the cup once: Liverpool in 1974 and Everton a decade later.
Most of Kendall’s squad owned a cup-winners’ medal from the victory over Watford two years earlier. At Anfield, only John Wark had won the trophy, with Ipswich Town. Throughout the most glorious years in Liverpool’s history, a time when they had won seven titles, four League Cups, four European Cups and a UEFA Cup they were unable to win the FA Cup. They wanted it badly. But there was an extra incentive.
Kendall and Dalglish had their sights set on another Wembley visit but also on something much more special: the league and cup Double. That feat had only been achieved twice in the twentieth century and four times overall. Everton had come close the previous season but Manchester United stopped them. They now aimed to go one step better.
The Merseyside clubs were neck and neck in the league. They hoped to be kept apart in the FA Cup draw.
The FA Cup began for top-flight teams on 4 January. It was cold and snowy on Merseyside. Both clubs were drawn at home, so their ties were played simultaneously, two 3 p.m. kick-offs on Saturday. Everton made hard work of lowly Exeter City, winning 1–0, while Liverpool dispatched Norwich City with five unopposed goals.
The Blues had an easier time of it in the fourth round. Drawn at home to Blackburn Rovers they advanced 3–1. It looked trickier for Dalglish’s men. They were handed a trip to high-flying Chelsea but the Reds negotiated a difficult tie by winning 2–1.
The fifth round took nearly a month to complete because of bad weather. Liverpool drew 1–1 away to York City, brought the third division side back to Anfield and eased to a 3–1 victory. Everton’s tie with Tottenham Hotspur – planned to be their first live televised match since the blackout – was postponed and when the game was eventually played Kendall’s team secured a 2–1 victory.
Both teams took two attempts in the quarter-finals. Everton survived an awkward encounter on the plastic pitch at Luton Town. After a 2–2 draw they went back to Goodison Park and beat the team they had defeated in the previous year’s semi-finals 1–0. Liverpool drew 0–0 with Watford at home and, on a Monday night at Vicarage Road, took until the second period of extra time to edge ahead 2–1.
The draw was kind and kept the Merseyside giants apart. Liverpool would face Southampton at White Hart Lane – their fifth meeting of the season because of both teams’ involvement in the Super Cup. Sheffield Wednesday came out of the bag to face Everton. Their semi-final was slated for Villa Park. The dream of a first Merseyside FA Cup final was alive and well.
Merseyside was desperate for an FA Cup final derby. Liverpool and Everton had never reached the Wembley showpiece together.
Two years earlier, the teams had contested a Milk Cup final. Huge numbers of Scousers had decamped to London and used the event as an expression of local pride. Chants of ‘Merseyside’ resounded across the capital.
That final, in March 1984, was in a different political climate. The miners’ strike had just got under way and the city council were on the offensive and making progress in their battle against Thatcherism. There was optimism and defiance among the legions of young Scousers heading to Wembley. ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ was chanted almost as much as Liverpool and Everton songs. There was still hope that the National Union of Mineworkers would force the Thatcher government into retreating on its more extreme policies. Things had changed significantly since then.
The left-wingers were on the run. Not just on Merseyside. In March, 80 Labour councillors from Liverpool and the London borough of Lambeth lost their case against their removal from office and the imposition of personal fines levied for refusing to set a legal rate. They were facing disqualification for five years. There was a feeling that the left’s defeat was inevitable. The only victories were coming on the pitch.
19
Fighting talk
FA Cup semi-finals used to be one of the great experiences for football supporters. They kicked off at 3 p.m. on Saturday, took place at a neutral venue and generally had a more or less even split of fans in the stadium. The final at Wembley always had too many neutrals present because the FA rewards its functionaries and county associations with tickets for the big day. Many sell them on at exorbitant prices but enough are keen to see the game to give the atmosphere a different feel. At the semis, there were very few non-partisans in the ground.
White Hart Lane was the venue for Liverpool’s last-four tie with Southampton. Tottenham Hotspur’s ground was an atmospheric, claustrophobic stadium with the main standing terrace running the length of the touchline. Usually, the most fanatical supporters stood behind the goal – like on the Kop or in the Gwladys Street End – but at the Lane they occupied the Shelf, a two-tiered standing section with a level of seats perched above. It was a fearsome sight for rival supporters. There was plenty to be concerned about on a visit to Tottenham.
The 30-minute walk from Seven Sisters underground station was legendary. In the 1970s and ’80s, it became regarded as a sort of sniper’s alley for away fans. Before and after the match, travelling supporters would run the gauntlet on their journey up the High Road. Groups of Tottenham hooligans would pop out from side streets and pubs in ambush parties. West Ham’s Green Street had a worse reputation and the walk up the Fulham Road to Chelsea was always a nervous one but many seasoned matchgoers regarded a trip to Spurs as the most hostile and dangerous day of the season.
Liverpool fans of my generation had been on the receiving end of one of the worst beatings of the era at Tottenham. In 1980, the Reds were drawn against Spurs in the sixth round of the FA Cup. Terry McDermott scored a magnificent goal to give Liverpool a 1–0 win and the Scousers in the Park Lane End went wild. The Tottenham fans reserved their craziness for afterwards.
There was anarchy outside. Running battles took place down the High Road. Liverpool might have won on the pitch but the local boys ensured that we would remember the day not for McDermott’s goal but the terror and beatings that followed. Even now if a middle-aged man claims to have ‘followed Liverpool everywhere in the seventies and eighties’, reply with the simple phrase ‘Tottenham in the Cup’. If they don’t visibly wince at the memory, they’re lying.
Personally, it was not a lucky ground. In 1984, Liverpool were drawn at the Lane in a Milk Cup game. For midweek matches in London, we had a familiar routine. Meet between 11 a.m. opening and noon in the Wine Lodge, move to the Yankee around 1 p.m. and then leave there at 2.55 and nip to platform seven at Lime Street to get the 15.05 to Euston.
It was a good system. The licensing laws forced pubs to shut in Liverpool at 3 p.m. but in those pre-Heysel days you could drink at the buffet of the ordinary timetabled trains. Drink had long been outlawed on football specials, so taking normal services was desirable because it meant access to more beer.
There was still time in London to get a couple of pints before the match, so we took the Victoria line to Finsbury Park and drank in the pubs near Highbury. The logic was simple: Arsenal territory was the least likely place in north London to run into trouble when you were playing Tottenham.
When we got back to the Tube, the ticket office was shut, so we jumped on, expecting to pay at Seven Sisters. When we got there, we joined the queue to pay at the excess-fares window inside the barrier.
The rest of our group got their tickets and were waved through. I was the last. The policeman who grabbed me had let the others go. W
hy he picked on me I’ll never know.
He asked where I’d come from. I said Finsbury Park. He asked why I’d been to that station. I explained the rationale. It was a safer place to drink. Then the officer said he did not believe me. He thought I’d come from Euston and tried to bunk the Tube.
I denied it but then he played his trump card. He smelt my breath and said, ‘Drunk, are we? And disorderly? You’re heading for a night in the cells.’
I folded immediately and said I’d come from Euston. With a smirk of triumph, he led me into a room concealed in the Tube station. He clearly wanted to nick a Scouser and I was the unlucky victim.
Initially, I planned to give a false name and address. Few people carried any form of ID and the ruse had worked before for plenty of people I knew. Unfortunately, I had a student rail card in my shirt pocket. It was concealed under a crew-neck jumper but if he did decide to search me and I’d given a false name it would definitely mean an overnight stay in the cells.
It was just as well I gave the correct details. There was a knock on the door and the policeman opened it. One of my mates was standing there and asked, ‘Can Tony come out to play?’ To say I was unimpressed is an understatement.
Anyway, the constable took my details, issued me with a caution for underpaying the fare and kicked me out. I was at least able to get to the match. I shouldn’t have bothered. Less than five minutes after kick-off, Bruce Grobbelaar spilt a routine shot into the path of Clive Allen and Tottenham scored the only goal of the game. It was a night to forget all round.
It had been wiped from my memory until I arrived back from work one day to an angry household. A policeman had turned up earlier with the message that I’d been charged with the offence because it was ‘football-related’. There was a letter from Horseferry Road Magistrates Court.