Heart As Big As Liverpool – A Forty Year Celebration
Life-changing experiences. So precious are they - that a life can’t be guided or altered too often if the experience is so profound. It is with a full-bodied and passionate gratitude that I can celebrate and give thanks on the fortieth anniversary weekend of what I could see as my first visit to a soul’s temple – Anfield, L4.
How uncanny is it that the weather in Liverpool today reflects that journey on a cold Saturday morning in January 1985, as we drove the hundred-and-eighty-eight miles from Llanelli, through the ice and ever-increasing snow; up the hills of East Wales to somewhere which immediately became a second home to me. Pictures of a white city’s surroundings and reports of safety checks before, who else? Only the biggest rival of all this time visiting the now-expanded Anfield – but Manchester United. This intensifies the nostalgia further between the memory of a nine-year-old boy’s dreams becoming further reality.
Of course, the academic result of Liverpool 3 Aston Villa 0 in the third round of the FA Cup was but a part of the whole magic, in the coloured mosaic of the day. In an era of mass unemployment, hardship and industrial collapse which certainly linked my hometown Llanelli, with its closing steel factories, encompassing coal mines and its working-class ethos alongside that of the Mersey city – in looking back at the eighties, the myths; cultures and legacies of the era were nothing short of astounding.
When football hooliganism was a torrid black flag, synonymous with regular news of the period, the violent mentality of too many impartial “fans” of what’s seen as the beautiful game could justifiably be sneered at, for being nothing short of empty-headed, misogynistic and base in their values and goals. Liverpudlians at the time, while concurrently being neglected by a Conservative government via its refusal to aid funding, were often patronised and ridiculed by other team fans, branded as thieves and unequal by regular stadium chants.
Even Harry Enfield’s famous satirical look at “The Scousers” towards the end of that decade and into the nineties – cemented urban belief in an equally self-deprecating way, as native Liverpool actors such as Joe McGann were a part of the joke – showed the depth of character and community that I found for the first time on the fifth of January, that year. The welcome we received everywhere was another marker for why it instantly became a second natural haven. That quick-witted humour which has always influenced me since, still has a warmth unrivalled in my life’s experiences. Billy Connolly has paid testimony to it from his early stand-up comedy shows in the 1970s as a similar match for his own Glaswegian, rugged-but-sharp outlook.
Thus, it speaks volumes for resilience oozing from the cracks of the Liverpool pavements to the flowing Mersey – through that time of hardship for the city, always countered by humour, togetherness, backbone – and of course, beautiful football; played in the best atmosphere a nine-year-old boy could imagine. But - it gets better. Not only did my father manoeuvre the risky roads of winter to get to the city, through the snow for a quick lunch at the Berni Inn Beefeater, then to Stanley Park in time to walk to Anfield – but upon the rapturous entrance of the team before kick-off, the signed plastic ball, sponsored by Crown Paints and autographed by our Scottish fullback Steve Nicol – was caught by my father as well, when it was booted into our block of the Kemlyn Road Stand. If there was a Match of the Day equivalent to its player of the month via ‘Dad of the Month’ – it may have been a walkover in the first weekend, in my opinion. If only I had looked after that ball and kept it, rather than practising overhead kicks on my bed for the ensuing years…
Anyway, the atmosphere. I was already used to between ten and twelve thousand people (which felt like twenty in those days) each Saturday with a passionate, vocal crowd watching Llanelli RFC in its heyday at our own temple inside Stradey Park. In a tragic sense, those glory boyhood days of my clubs in red being the top national teams in both association football and rugby union didn’t follow in parallel for city and town, respectively as I grew older. As Liverpool became announced as European Capital of Culture in 2003 and managed a level of regeneration industrially, the iconic squalor and destitution captured in photographs of Liverpool’s more run-down suburbs of the eighties (as well as many neglected cities across the north of England and rest of Britain), has subtly and less clinically swapped places with Llanelli’s job market. A vibrancy which still existed forty years ago in my home town and indeed, up to the early years of the new century – has been silently nuked by the bomb of 21st Century deindustrialisation. This, in the age of professional rugby, competing with the Premier League and modern football world has made sustaining a successful rugby union region as tough as town regeneration in Wales, where highly employing production sites have not been replaced by alternative secure jobs.
Which brings me to the question; the grimaces and raised eyebrows – a reaction I’ve faced for the last forty-odd years. “Why do you support Liverpool and not Swansea or Cardiff City?” It’s simple. Despite my uncle’s efforts in indoctrinating me to the old Vetch Field and Swansea City’s faithful from the early eighties – I’m from Llanelli. The passion of Scarlets fans against the All Whites of our neighbouring city – always seemed to me a rivalry as relevant as that of Liverpool and our Manc adversaries, with losses against them as painful as those of football defeats. So why would I support Swansea City when we “Turks” were the subjects of jibes from the Swansea Jacks? I wouldn’t expect a St Helens rugby league fan to support Wigan Athletic or another rival rugby league team’s football club.
So, after the non-plussed first visit to the Vetch Field on my seventh birthday, it was during the following year my attention turned swiftly to my heroes in L4. With a national hero such as Ian Rush, one of Liverpool’s key players and reigning top goalscorer, alongside the warmth and genius of Kenny Dalglish and the like-minded, genuine community I always found from that day forward in Liverpool – it was always my home and team. I’ve lived through the dark times at the club as well as those glory days. Only a few months after I visited Anfield on this occasion, I watched the European Cup Final against Juventus at Heysel Stadium. I remember the horror. I remember seeing our manager Joe Fagan’s face on the news, the sheer devastation and years of hurt following as inquests began and fingers were pointed at us. Only to be followed by worse, widespread tragedy four years later at Hillsborough in the FA Cup semi-final, a horror which has still not – for many, ended or been personally overcome.
Some of my biggest heroes are people such as Anne Williams, Margaret Aspinall and Trevor Hicks, along with their families and iron-fisted community support against the so-called “Iron Lady” and her corrupt institutions of the age and beyond. I’ve lived through the humiliation of the Fergie days, where we played second fiddle to our enemy who categorically aimed to become bigger than Liverpool, in reaching the highest point of British and European football. And I’ve never been prouder of both club or city for what it’s always done for me. As Granby councillor Margaret Simey (also originally from Glasgow) stated, “the magic of Liverpool is that it isn’t England.”
Having lived across the world in the past few decades, some of my flagpole greatest memories are of watching Liverpool from my homes in Australia, Qatar, London and now Brighton and Hove, as well as in huge European matches in Germany and Spain. I’ve held memberships at the LFC Supporters Club at the famous Imperial in Melbourne. I fell in love with dancing at Cream on Wolstenholme Square, after numerous visits in the mid-nineties which was an incredible influence on my DJ career, as well as naturally knowing most of The Beatles songs by that point as a twenty-year-old. So, it was one of the most fitting celebrations to be at glamorous Butlin’s in Bognor Regis for Rockaway Beach festival, where I now write these words. After seeing proud Scouser Pete Wylie perform here on Friday night – on the fortieth anniversary of my first trip to the ‘Pool, where his penultimate song, “Heart As Big As Liverpool” was dedicated to the sufferers of the Hillsborough tragedy, I could never have been prouder. It was almost like a full circle has been reached from nine to forty-nine-year old’s experiences.
All that remains now, to fully accomplish a glorious weekend – is to beat the old enemy in just over an hour. Either way, my blood will always be pumped with blood as red as from a heart belonging to Liverpool.
N.B. Despite the result from the match following this writing exercise – it changes absolutely nothing. YNWA.
