by Simon Hughes
Gayle believes that some of the funniest people in football were at Liverpool towards the beginning of the ’80s. There was one game called ‘Ricks’.
‘If you mispronounced something, the whole squad would be on you. Hansen was ruthless for it. We were away in Marbella and having a five-a-side. The ball got kicked behind the goal and into the bushes. The common shout, of course, is “Don’t beat about the bush.” But I’ve shouted, “Don’t bush about the beat.” Hansen got on it straight away and I got slaughtered for months.
‘If someone said something stupid during a game, it would start straight away, and if you dropped one, there would be a kangaroo court at Melwood the next day where everybody would have the opportunity to laugh at you. There was a hierarchy as well – players you couldn’t touch – Alan Hansen, Terry McDermott, Tommo and Graeme Souness. If you went against one of them, the four of them would jump on your case and that was something you didn’t want.’
Some couldn’t handle the baiting. On one occasion at an end-of-season party, a comedian targeted a number of players in his stand-up routine. For Ian Rush, there was his nose and fashion sense; for Steve Nicol, there was his ginger hair; and for Bruce Grobbelaar, his accent was enough. Then he came to Gayle. The comedian dispensed a bag of white flour over his head. “Now walk through Toxteth,” he is alleged to have said. The room roared with laughter, and on this occasion Gayle is said to have not reacted.
‘The rigour of the banter was relentless and it hindered some of the lads’ progress,’ Gayle admits. ‘Maybe they took it to heart. Rush was one of them. People question why he didn’t score a goal for Liverpool in 12 to 18 months when he first signed, but a lot of it was down to confidence off the field. He let the banter get to him and nearly went down because of it. He’d get slaughtered because of his clothes and his hair. I remember speaking to him one day and he was really down. Because he was from Flint in Wales, he’d never mucked about with a group of lads who had generally grown up in the inner city. Everybody thought they were style icons, wearing the best gear and being quick about the tongue.
‘I wore whatever I wanted and turned up at Melwood with flared bottoms. I come in one day and Evo said, “What the fuck are they?” I didn’t give a damn. I had an Afro comb that I used to keep in my hair on the drive into training and the lads would rib me about it. Souey would say, “Ere comes the satellite dish.” Again, I could take it because I could give it. Rushy, for a time, couldn’t.’
Nearly 23 years old and already a member of a European Cup-winning squad, Gayle should have had ample opportunities to enjoy the company of the city’s young women.
‘We’d be in the TimePiece five or six nights a week. It was a predominantly black club and people would come from all over the place for a night out. There would be a lot of black males with black females or white females – not a lot of white fellas. So there was plenty of women to go about in theory. Yet Liverpool women are some of the hardest women on the planet to pull on a night out. They’re so wised up to what goes on around them. It has always been that way. Being a footballer didn’t really matter to girls in Liverpool. Most of the time they thought you were pulling their leg. When I went to other clubs in other cities after Liverpool, like Birmingham and Sunderland, they’d be all over you because they weren’t switched on like the Liverpool birds.’
After meeting a girl on a night out in town, Gayle had previously moved in to her family abode off Parkfield Road, close to Sefton Park and the bohemian Lark Lane. Later, after signing an improved contract, he bought an apartment in Mossley Hill. Despite settling down, living in the south end of Liverpool became an issue for Bob Paisley and the club.
‘It was constantly thrown at me. The gaffer was desperate for me to move, because he wanted all of his players to live in suburbia, where it was a bit quieter. He had his opinions about Toxteth and I had mine.’
Toxteth did not always hold such a dubious reputation. It was once countryside until Liverpool expanded with sea captains and rich merchants as well as bankers and judges building resplendent Georgian and Victorian houses around Canning Street. Even up until the Second World War, it was an upmarket suburb. Then, at the start of the ’50s, it started to change when the people with the money moved out as Liverpool rebuilt its port that had been reduced to rubble by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. The servants lost their jobs and, gradually, the grand homes in Toxteth were split into flats and, together with the construction of terraced houses, the area gradually took on a more working-class identity. Despite the wrecking balls, it still retained much of its ebullience. In the Granby ward, ‘swarms of spidery-limbed brown-skinned children were running everywhere, their ample mommas sitting on the steps of the towering, dilapidated old houses, chatting idly in the sun’ (John Cornelius, Liverpool 8). It was a close-knit community where everybody knew everybody else. Yet by the ’70s, as unemployment began to rise, Toxteth was particularly hard hit. Jobs vanished and even casual work on the docks dried up. Alehouses that once flowed closed down. Few white employers wanted workers from the place some labelled ‘Jungle Town’. Toxteth became inward-looking and understandably resentful.
By early July 1981, Paisley’s concerns about Gayle and the area he came from appeared vindicated. A month after Phil Thompson lifted the European Cup in Paris, the residents of Toxteth and thousands more who came to support them, lifted up paving stones and threw them at Thatcher’s stooges, the police, following months of tension. The stop-and-search law, ‘SUS’, had created a stand-off between many black residents of Toxteth, and the arrest of Lee Cooper proved a catalyst. The rioting was the most brutal case of civil unrest in Britain in the twentieth century, worse than Brixton and worse than the miners’ strike. More than 500 people were arrested, 100 policeman injured and 150 buildings burnt down across a period of just nine days.
Battles were fought with every weapon imaginable; there were lootings, cars overturned and set fire to, and historical buildings like the Rialto destroyed. (The Rialto was an old cinema and dance hall where The Beatles once played.) The Racquets Club, a private establishment where the circuit judges used to stay when they were sitting in Liverpool, was stormed and all of its old paintings stolen before the building was torched.
Ironically, Gayle went on holiday the day it all began.
‘Sammy Lee had booked a trip to Portugal with his girlfriend, and he was going to take Davie Fairclough with his missus as well,’ Gayle explains. ‘But Davie couldn’t go in the end, so I went instead. As it transpired, on the evening when it all started back home I was in the air somewhere above France with Sammy.’
Gayle knows a lot of people who witnessed what kicked it all off.
‘In the afternoon before, the lad who got caught, Lee Cooper, was riding up and down Granby on a motorbike. I’d gone to see my brother on Beaconsfield Street before I went, and I knew Lee. By the time I got up on the Sunday morning in Portugal, Sammy came rushing up to me with a newspaper saying, “Eh, lad, look at this.” I thought it was going to be a story about football. Instead, it was Toxteth with a load of buildings on fire. Lee had been dragged off his bike by the bizzies and people stood up for Lee.
‘I went and bought every newspaper. I couldn’t believe it because I’d been telling Sammy on the plane about what had been going on in Toxteth. People had just had enough; it was a tinderbox waiting to go up. It’s called the Toxteth Riots, but people were coming from all over the city – from Bootle, Speke, Kirkby, from everywhere. There were people getting the bus down there to take part in the social unrest because a lot of people were fed up with the police state and Thatcherism.
‘Two weeks later when I came home, it was still happening. It was like an event. The police were bussing in officers from Wales and Yorkshire – fellas that had just been policing the miners’ strikes. I was told that the police took a real hammering on the first night and they underestimated the ferocity of the reaction from the locals. The army were ready and waiting to go in and, allegedly, Thatcher said th
at if the riots spread into the city centre [less than a mile and a half away], then they’d be called in. If that had happened, I am sure that more people would have lost their lives.’
Had Gayle been at home rather than on holiday when the riots started, he dreads to imagine what he might have done.
‘It affected everybody in my family. It was such a huge statement of how people were thinking about the country and its governance. Coming from the streets and the background I had, I probably would have started fighting as well.’
Thatcher sent Michael Heseltine, then the Conservative environment secretary, to Liverpool on a PR and charm offensive when the rioting had stopped.
‘Heseltine didn’t change anything,’ Gayle says. ‘He devised the garden centre that cost £11 million of taxpayers’ money. One of the things that people had been rioting over was the lack of work and jobs. This garden centre [situated on the fringes of Otterspool], which wasn’t in our community and didn’t employ any of the people looking for work in the community and cost so much money, was a quango, because 12 months later it was gone.
‘There were some great organisations that were formed like the Liverpool Eight Law Centre [which closed in 2007] that stood the test of time. But from a social side, Heseltine and Thatcher did nothing for Toxteth. What they were good at was throwing crumbs on the floor and making people fight over the crumbs. Thatcher was an expert at dividing a community.
‘I’m very sceptical of all politicians. They’re all as bad as one another. They promise you the world, and as soon as they get into power they deliver nothing. People say to me, “Ah, if you don’t vote, you can’t change things.” But people do vote – lots of people – and they still don’t change things. There were millions of people who protested on the streets of London telling the country’s leaders not to go to war in Iraq. But what did we do? We went to war in Iraq. People go into politics with the best intentions, but as soon as they get power they’re corrupted by it and they forget the people that they’re serving.’
When Gayle returned for pre-season training towards the end of July, teammates within the Liverpool squad were talking about what had happened in Toxteth.
‘The Liverpool fans were vociferous in their support of the rioters as well, because they’re working-class people and understood what people were going through. It changed the perception of black people within the club. Fellas who used to maybe look down on me because I was black began to understand who I was and where I’d come from and the struggles I had to face on a daily basis. They appreciated that I wasn’t going to put up with any crap from within the club.’
But elsewhere, it got worse through the middle of the ’80s before it got better.
‘I remember turning up to Chelsea, and the BNP were handing out leaflets outside the ground. How the fuck could that happen? Chelsea were renowned for promoting racism and the BNP. Burnley was another one and to a certain extent Blackburn. Political racists were using those clubs as a tool to promote evil.
‘At Chelsea, they caned Paul Canoville – one of their own [black] players. It sickened me. In the middle of the game I said, “How can you play ’ere, lad, when those bastards are giving that to you?” He said, “You know what, la’, I get it everywhere I go. It’s normal now.” I told him to look for another club, but he loved Chelsea.
‘I later played at Chelsea for Sunderland in a Milk Cup semi-final second leg and they had to bring horses onto the pitch during the game because it got that bad. The government and the FA were talking about electrifying the fences on the terraces at that time and, although I fundamentally disagreed with that idea, maybe it would have been a good thing for some of those Chelsea BNP supporters. They were horrific that night. We were 2–0 up from the first leg at Roker Park and we went down there for the second leg. I got the impression that the Chelsea fans were trying to get the game postponed because they knew their team was going to lose. Stamford Bridge was a bad place to be.’
Like John Barnes after him, Gayle suffered at Goodison Park.
‘I only played there at reserve level for Liverpool, but when I later went to Birmingham I scored there and you got the usual monkey chanting aimed at you. Personally, I loved it because I knew I was pissing the Evertonians off. It was the best way to get back at them by scoring and playing well. I couldn’t jump in the crowd and start taking them all on, could I? Having said that, it was always a minority at Everton and not en masse like it was at Chelsea. I think Everton need a pat on the back, because that club has turned itself around.’
Opponents on the pitch also abused Gayle.
‘The old-school, experienced pros used to give it to me personally when I first started. I learnt quickly not to have a go back directly, but next time we came together in a challenge I’d just leave my foot in there. If a centre-half had a go at me, I’d do my best to make sure he had a bad night. And if I got the better of him, I’d torment him by letting him know that he had a shit game. Often they’d get wound up and end up getting sent off. I think that’s what made me a better player by the fact that I didn’t go under and instead said, “Bring it on.” I’d be going, “There you go – megged you again. There’s another goal.”’
Gayle believes the government and the FA did little to stop racism.
‘Their efforts were non-existent. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives blamed many of the country’s social issues on football, so she didn’t care whether players or fans were being abused racially. She banned all English clubs from Europe even before UEFA did after Heysel. What happened there was terrible, but a large part of it was a reaction to what was happening within the country – problems caused by Thatcher and her government.
‘Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s there were that many factories closed down that people had no work and couldn’t live with themselves. So it created social problems. Thatcher moved those social problems onto football. Dog dirt had a better reputation than football, so she wasn’t going to bother herself dealing with issues within it like racism.
‘It wasn’t until the late ’90s that black players really started coming through different clubs’ academy systems. In my opinion, that’s how you mark whether there is racism in football. You saw more at the southern clubs than the ones in the north. I know there were exceptions like Remi Moses at Man United and Roger Palmer at Man City, but throughout the ’80s especially there were very few black players emerging through youth systems at football clubs in the north.’
When the 1981–82 season began, Gayle expected to feature within the first-team squad on a regular basis during the league season. Instead, he and the club suffered frustration. While Gayle was kept in the reserves, Liverpool struggled to maintain form. After a Boxing Day home defeat to Manchester City, the Reds were nine points off the leaders.
‘People sometimes overestimate the difficulties clubs face. Every season, we’d always make a slow start. On Match of the Day, Jimmy Hill would love saying, “Ah, that’s Liverpool finished now.” The warmongers were out. But the one thing about Liverpool was we’d always finish strong. You could never write us off. People overlooked the fact that we’d suffered a lot of injuries at the same time and there were lots of youngsters like myself and Rushy breaking through into the side.’
Bob Paisley stripped Phil Thompson of the captaincy after the loss to City and replaced him with Graeme Souness. The decision started a feud between the pair that has continued for nearly 30 years. Gayle says that the pair clashed frequently at Melwood.
‘Until you’d played 250 games for Liverpool, you could never call yourself a regular. Everybody felt threatened. Tommo had been at the club for more than a decade but had the captaincy taken away from him because things weren’t right on the pitch. It caused problems between the two of them because they’re both proud men. If you look at Souey’s background and the single-mindedness he had as a leader, then if you look at Tommo’s background and understand the proud man that he is – a Scouser from Kirkby who’d led L
iverpool to championships and European successes – there was always going to be a personality clash. Ultimately, the club benefited from that because it shook everyone up and made the players realise that nobody was infallible. At one point Tommo came down to the reserves and we were playing at Preston one night. Tommo wasn’t having the best of games and maybe inside his head he was feeling a bit sorry for himself. At half-time, Evo tore into him. Then Robbie Savage, who’d never played a first-team game, kicked his backside as well. Tommo was told that he was still playing for Liverpool – even though it wasn’t at first-team level. Robbie went, “If you come down ’ere, you work your fucking tripe off like everyone else.” Then Evo went, “The only way you’re gonna get back in the first team is if you do it ’ere.” It was all very surreal. Second half, Tommo was brilliant and we went from 2–1 down to 5–2 winners. He came up to everyone and apologised for his first-half performance. The following weekend he was back in the first team.’
Gayle explains why he similarly holds an enduring respect for Souness.
‘Souey symbolised what the club is all about and why it achieved so much success. He understood that leadership isn’t just about what you do in matches; it’s about how you conduct yourself with the rest of the players and interact with people. Particularly Graeme’s attention to detail with helping younger players was fantastic. He couldn’t do enough for us and although some people say he was a bit big-time, he wasn’t. Big-time characters weren’t allowed at Liverpool in the ’70s or the ’80s. Everybody was humble and knew their place within the club. Graeme was a born leader. A lot of Liverpool fans caned him for that article with The Sun, but I think as Liverpool fans we have to think a bit beyond that. [In 1992, Souness sold the story of his heart bypass ordeal to the newspaper three years after it printed lies about the role of Liverpool supporters during the Hillsborough Disaster.] What Souey did for our club as a captain, he cemented us as the one of the greatest sides in modern-day football. Some people don’t realise how sick he was at the time when the article went to print, so maybe he wasn’t thinking straight. He managed to get off his sickbed and get to Wembley to oversee the victory over Sunderland, and for me that epitomises what the guy is about.