Thirty years of hurt ago: The story of Liverpool FC's last title win
On April 28, 1990, Liverpool won their 18th league title. It was a dominance over English football few thought was about to end
When you’ve been an unparalleled leading actor for decades, it’s difficult to play a bit-part in someone else’s Hollywood ending.
A proto-“Agueroooooo” moment the week before Kun’s first birthday, Arsenal’s title-snatching 2-0 win at Anfield on Friday 26 May 1989 formed the emotional peak of Nick Hornby’s seminal Fever Pitch and the film adaptation that followed. But for most outside north London, this was not how the script was supposed to go.
For once, the dominant power had the sympathy vote: having collected 40 points from the previous 42 to overcome a 19-point deficit on George Graham’s Gunners, Liverpool were meant to win the league and complete the Double as a humble sporting balm for the searing pain of the Hillsborough disaster, six weeks previously. But Arsenal didn’t play the patsies, and Michael Thomas’s stoppage-time second goal won them the title on goals scored.
As the stunned Scousers filed out while the “wrong”team lifted the trophies - besides the ornate century-old commemorative jug known as “the Lady”, the winners were forced by sponsors Barclays to parade a horrific concoction featuring a crown on a ball on a pyramid - the inquest was already underway.
“In the changing room after the game, it was hard to comprehend the loss,” midfielder Ray Houghton tells FourFourTwo. “To be so close to doing the double and losing that game in the last minute, with no time to come back, was so disappointing.
“The dressing room was devastated,” right-back Barry Venison tells FFT, still shuddering from a distance of decades. “You came in and you still didn’t really know what had happened, you just couldn’t believe it. There were strong words in that changing room, a lot of shouting.”
There was also a lot of experience: Liverpool had won nine of the previous 13 league titles. Manager Kenny Dalglish and captain Alan Hansen had been there for seven of them. Coaching staff like Roy Evans and the teak-tough Ronnie Moran had been there for decades. They knew Kipling’s line about triumph and disaster, the latter word looming larger than football in light of recent events. They always took the long view; they could afford to.
“That night it was difficult,” the team’s chief dangerman John Barnes admits to FFT. “But the day after it was forgotten about. You can’t wallow in self-pity and despair forever. Yes, it was disappointing and it was a difficult night because we lost in the 91st minute, but we quickly forgot about it to raise ourselves to go and play again.”
Venison concurs: “Ultimately, the reaction was not that different to what it would have been if we had won the league. Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans would make sure that nothing changed in our attitude. The first thing you’d hear after patting yourselves on the back was ‘Hey big-heads, get your mind on next season, this season’s over’.”
Barnes insists that the Arsenal loss, in itself, wasn’t a motivation – “it wasn’t mentioned again. You can’t mention in pre-season that you lost the league in the last game of the season” – but obviously standards had dipped and that had to be addressed.
Given Everton’s title triumphs in 1985 and 1987, the trophy hadn’t left the city since 1981 until Arsemageddon. Just as 23 years later, when another eight-year power-sharing arrangement between Manchester United and Chelsea was disrupted by some noisy neighbours, the emergence of a new rival focused minds and increased determination.
“When we got back into training, we knew what we had to do,” the team’s Great Dane Jan Molby reflected recently. “The anticipation around the club was that we would keep winning.”
“The quality of players in the squad was obvious and the mentality they carried was unbelievable,” reflects Houghton. “They believed they were the best… it was as simple as that.”
“Liverpool were a winning machine,” Venison concludes. “They’d never say ‘We expect to win the league’ – Kenny would never utter those words. But there was always a desire and a belief that it would happen and that ran through everything we did.”
As midfielder Ronnie Whelan put it, “It just felt like any other season. The first aim was always to make sure you played 14 games so you would get a medal, as we were always confident we would take control of the title race. Do you know why that was? It wasn’t a big secret. We had the best players and the best manager but we also had hunger. Ours was a very successful dressing room but we all wanted to win more and more.”
Compared to modern days, in 1989 Anfield was similarly terrifying to visit but architecturally very different to behold. The Kop was still a terrace: Lord Justice Taylor’s full Hillsborough report, which suggested all-seaters (citing Ibrox’s seat price of £6), wasn’t released until January 1990. The Anfield Road End, from where away fans watched through their fingers, was still a single-tier – as was what was then known as the Kemlyn Road stand (before the Kemmy became the Cenny then the Kenny). Although refurbished in 1973, the Main Stand nevertheless dated back to 1906, and hidden at the centre of its structure and its soul was the Boot Room.
This literally-named think-tank was where the wise heads of Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran, Roy Evans and others had shared a whiskey or beer and cooked up plans for world domination. When Fagan – a quiet man and always a somewhat reluctant successor, although so had Paisley been initially – retired in 1985, haunted by Heysel, Liverpool had turned to Dalglish as player/manager, initially with the avuncular Paisley on hand with advice if needed.
A Bonaparte in boots, Dalglish led the club to a first Double in 1985/86, but the next campaign ended trophyless – only the second time in 12 seasons that such a distressing fate had befallen Anfield. With his own playing career effectively over and strike legend Ian Rush off to Juventus, Dalglish showed his managerial mettle by hiring John Aldridge, John Barnes and English-record signing Peter Beardsley, who promptly shredded the First Division.
Rush returned after a single season of struggle but 1988/89 brought the horror of Hillsborough and Arsenal’s walk-on part in that plot-twist ending. Going into 1989/90, Liverpool wanted to prove they were not just, in local parlance, “boss”, but THE boss. Having beaten Everton in an all-Mersey FA Cup Final the week before that Arsenal denouement was cold comfort: with Europe off the menu, the Football League title was the only thing that mattered.
Venison knew that. Moving from Sunderland in summer 1986, the adventurously-mulleted right-back quickly learned he had joined a team where victory was not optional. “It seems almost arrogant to say it now, but if you weren’t winning the league at Liverpool then you were failing,” he tells FFT. “That was the mentality every single year.
“When I went to Liverpool they had just won the double but even if you won the FA Cup during that time, if you hadn’t won the league as well then it was seen as a huge disappointment.”
Liverpool had never been afraid of rebuilding; Dalglish himself had been bought, for a British record £440,000, to replace Kevin Keegan. There wasn’t much structurally wrong with Liverpool’s squad, but with Hansen turning 34 in June 1989, after a season in which a knee injury had kept him out for all but the last nine games, Dalglish knew he needed cover for his compatriot, captain and dressing-room leader, who was gingerly approaching 600 games for the club.
In came Glenn Hysen, an experienced Swede at Fiorentina who had caught English eyes while repelling Bobby Robson’s side at Wembley in an Italia 90 qualifier. Manchester United laid on a lunch at Old Trafford but Hysen left without signing and Liverpool nipped in with a £600,000 bid. Soon after, amid talk of a £20m takeover by Michael Knighton, United instead broke the British record for a defender by paying £2.3m for Gary Pallister; a fortnight later, amid tabloid rancour, they would add West Ham’s Paul Ince. Forces were assembling.
Unlike at Manchester United, where the trophy haul from the previous 21 seasons totalled three FA Cups, Liverpool needed evolution not revolution. The eventual league appearance figures for 1989/90 suggest some developmental rotation around the edges of an extremely solid spine.
Goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar would appear in all 38 Football League games, as would midfield motor Steve McMahon. Alongside local hero Macca, string-pulling Irishman Whelan - the silk to the Scouser’s steel - played 34 times, as did the fearsome Barnes. Up top, Beardsley made 29 appearances and Rush, having overcome the injuries that marred his first post-Italy season, only missed two league games.
At the back, Hysen settled straight in and played 35 times, more often than not alongside Hansen, who managed 31 games. Either side of them, young David Burrows (26 games) started to own the left-back slot while Venison (25 games) was the default right-back, although each was subject to tactical switches if Dalglish preferred either of his adaptable Steves, the promising Staunton and the reliable Nicol. Houghton appeared in half the games on the right of midfield: “Ray was a really underestimated footballer,” said Dalglish, “but I rated him so highly for the way he read the game. Ray’s astute positional play was a real asset.”
Burrows and Staunton aside, this was not a young team. But neither was it dangerously old: McMahon, Whelan, Rush, Nicol and Houghton were 27 at season’s eve, Molby 26, Barnes and Venison 25; barring the Hansen/Hysen pairing, the oldest regular outfielder was Beardsley (28).
It also had players in each section of the team steeped in The Liverpool Way. Grobbelaar was starting his 10th season at the club, Hansen his 13th, Nicol his 10th, Whelan his 11th, Rush his ninth. These were Europe-conquering medal-hoarders, and they weren’t going to relinquish their perch easily.
Liverpool had a chance at immediate, if low-level, revenge on Arsenal when both teams warmed up with the Makita International Tournament, a four-way Wembley bash with Dynamo Kiev and Porto held over Bank Holiday weekend. They beat Valeri Lobanovskiy’s Kiev but lost to Arsenal: Steve Bould, wearing No 10 for reasons unfathomable, bonced in Nigel Winterburn’s free-kick.
Within a fortnight – after Liverpool had graced their growing band of Scandinavian fans with a four-match tour, their fourth successive pre-season appearance over the North Sea – England’s two finest teams reconvened at Wembley for the Charity Shield, and Liverpool put down a marker. Beardsley’s goal on the half-hour proved sufficient but Liverpool should have had more and never looked like conceding.
The Times’ Stuart Jones noted how Hansen and Hysen “give the impression that if a hand grenade were lobbed in their vicinity, they would casually await the explosion and check in which direction the shrapnel was flying before taking evasive action. They epitomise composure, almost nonchalance, under stress.”
By contrast, Arsenal looked jaded - Graham blamed their own pre-season itinerary, including the heat of Miami – and did so again when losing their opening league game 4-1 at Old Trafford, after Knighton’s ball-juggling warm-up act. Down the M62, Liverpool suffered no such glitch, seeing off Manchester City 3-1; the Sunday Times’ Rob Hughes wondered “Is it too soon to say the holiday is over, that the championship is returning to the place where it has rested 12 times in 17 seasons? I think not.”
Fittingly in retrospect, the scoring at Anfield was opened by John Barnes. After moving from Watford in summer 1987, the Jamaican-born England winger ignored horrific racial abuse to lead Liverpool to the 1987/88 league title and collect both the PFA and Football Writers’ Association personal awards; in 1989/90 he would have his best ever goalscoring season, bagging 22 in the league – only Gary Lineker managed more – and 28 all told.
If that sounds like a lot for a left-winger, that’s because at club level ‘Digger’ – a nickname inspired by a character from TV soap Dallas, proving that the show’s 20 million UK viewers included both aspirational housewives and professional footballers – was untethered from that role, his manager combining defensive rigidity with attacking flexibility.
Beardsley, who told FFT that Barnes was “The best player I ever played with, bar none: for three or four years at the end of the '80s, John was possibly the best player in the world,” explained that unlike Bobby Robson’s strict mandate for Barnes to stay wide, “at Liverpool, Kenny Dalglish used to say, ‘go where the ball goes and enjoy yourself.’”
That freedom meant that Barnes frequently found himself inhabiting the same spaces Dalglish habitually occupied, dropping into the holes created by defences wary of Ian Rush’s pace. The humble Barnes would never dare make that comparison, but he tells FFT a (slightly) more recent partnership springs to mind.
“I liken it to Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole: I think Dwight scored more goals than Andy one year, but Andy was always the No 9 goalscorer. Dwight would score goals but he wasn’t the No 9, the goalscorer, and I wasn’t: I think I scored more goals than Ian that year but he was always the centre forward. It was just one of those things where everything worked.”
Barnes opened the scoring again in midweek at Villa Park, where his old Watford manager Graham Taylor curiously selected as right-back a 21-year-old debutant bought the previous week for a nominal sum from Alvechurch. The Times wrote that Andy Comyn “was little more than a helpless spectator as Barnes, a wizard weaving spells, scored one brilliant individual goal and threatened to turn the evening into a prolonged display of his dazzling talent. But his colleagues, though they earned a lavish amount of possession and were indisputably superior, were generously profligate.”
Villa saved a point through the as-yet-uncapped David Platt and Liverpool’s wastefulness continued on Kenilworth Road’s plastic pitch, upon which goalkeeper Alec Chamberlain – later to spend a loan spell on the Anfield bench – denied the misfiring Rush four times to secure a stalemate. Liverpool ended the three-game opening week in fifth, and newspapers were quick to blame the Welshman up front – much to Dalglish’s disgust.
“It surprised me that Rushie initially attracted some critical headlines,” he later wrote. “Newspapers’ capacity for ignorance never ceased to amaze me. ‘Pay no attention,’ I told Rushie. ‘It’s all bollocks. I brought you back. I have faith in you and that’s all that matters.’”
Unusually for the time, they then had a fortnight off domestic action. The FA had decreed a free Saturday before England’s mustn’t-lose return qualifier in Sweden, and Liverpool were excused from the previous midweek programme because they’d been booked for a friendly at Real Madrid. The rare foray to face top-class European opposition must have felt as piquant as the programme cover incorrectly describing the visitors as “Campeon de Inglaterra”.
Liverpool lost at the Bernabeu but the break did them good. After Hysen captained Sweden to another 0-0 against England now best remembered for the health-and-safety nightmare of Terry Butcher’s blood-soaked shirt, a 3-0 win at Derby ended Rush’s personal drought, Barnes and Beardsley adding deserved emphasis. Then came a scoreline to ring down the ages.
For the rearranged midweeker at home to newly-promoted Crystal Palace, Liverpool would replace surprise early leaders Millwall atop the league with any scoreline, but the resultant 9-0 scoreline was an unveiled threat. Barnes, Rush and Whelan combined for Nicol’s seventh-minute opener, and when Palace’s Alan Pardew hit the post, Liverpool broke for McMahon to score a breathtakingly confident chip over Perry Suckling. After Rush underlined the dominance on half-time, the Liverpool players knew they were onto something good.
“We were walking off the field at half-time and I looked at Steve McMahon,” Steve Nicol told FFT. “We just stared at each other for a few seconds. We thought, ‘It’s unreal, it’s just so easy.’
“Usually two halves are never the same - the other team make adjustments and are more compact in the second half. But that day it wasn’t the case. We put up an absolute clinic. It was a perfect game, from start to finish. It could have been 14-0, 15-0. We pretty much drove them into the ground.”
Indeed they did. As Ray Houghton notes to FFT, “Liverpool could be relentless. Sometimes 1-0 was enough, but other times we could take teams to pieces. There were eight different scorers against Palace… that shows you the strength we had as a team and the fact that goals could come from any area of the pitch.”
After the oranges, Gary Gillespie and Peter Beardsley increased the damage before Liverpool were awarded a penalty. Barnes was an able taker but there was a better story to write. Despite being three years older than Ian Rush, John Aldridge had been signed to replace the Liverpool legend – but when the Welshman’s Italian job was curtailed, his Scouse avatar was suddenly surplus to requirements.
Relegated to the bench and nearing 31, Aldridge had attracted a bid from Real Sociedad and Dalglish had accepted. A diehard Red, Aldridge was hurt - with the numbers evidently burned into his heart, he later told FourFourTwo “I’d just scored 63 goals in 104 games for Liverpool and he decided to sell me, which I was very hurt by” – but Dalglish insisted it was for the striker’s benefit: “You’re at a premium now and can cash in.”
With the deal imminent, Dalglish saw his chance to let ‘Aldo’ bid a fitting farewell to his beloved Anfield. Bursting from the subs’ bench, the Scouser scurried on and slotted the spot-kick home to score with his first touch. At the final whistle – after Barnes, Hysen and Nicol had completed the rout and Geoff Thomas had skied a penalty – Aldridge threw his shirt and boots into the Kop. “I must admit I had to brush away a few tears,” he recalled.
“He's our most popular player,” Dalglish acknowledged to the post-match press pack. “He's achieved a lifetime's ambition by playing for the club and contributing so much to it. We're only selling him because we can't give him what he deserves.”
Four days later, they were held to a goalless Anfield draw by Norwich and neighbours Everton went top – but that was rectified a week later on derby day. While 30 miles east Manchester City were whupping United 5-1 at an exultant Maine Road, Liverpool were much less considerate house-guests at Goodison.
First, an excellent opener from former Anfield schoolboy Mike Newell was cancelled out by a Barnes header: “He was incredible in the air,” recalls Venison, remembering an underheralded weapon in Barnes’ armoury. Then Rush – who had scored 21 in 23 Mersey derbies – made it 23 within the space of three second-half minutes.
A fortnight later, Liverpool faced a different kind of testing trip, to Wimbledon’s Plough Lane. Risen from non-league untroubled by the accumulation of airs or graces, the long-ball Londoners had stunned Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final (memorably summarised by John Motson as “the Crazy Gang have beaten the culture club”). But with Rush temporarily sidelined, Dalglish subtly shuffled his pack, playing Staunton and Venison in wide midfield with Beardsley floating off front-runner Barnes.
An unkind analyst might have called it 6-2-1-1; the Sunday Times described it as “the bludgeon against the rapier”.
At the back, Hysen did what he was bought for, controlling John Fashanu and lessening Liverpool’s aerial vulnerability: Dalglish would later write “Glenn brought authority in the air during onslaughts from opponents such as Wimbledon, even Arsenal when Alan Smith was up there.” Up the other end, Barnes played in Beardsley for the opener and then, immediately after Grobbelaar spilled for the equaliser, set up Staunton for a shot parried into the path of the delighted Whelan.
As Houghton tells FFT, “It didn’t matter how you wanted to play against Liverpool, they were up for the challenge. They could mix it with physical teams and they could out-play the teams that tried to play football against them.” The rapier had won out.
Then, suddenly but protractedly, the wheels came off. First, a Southampton forward line of Matt Le Tissier (just turned 21), Rod Wallace (20) and Alan Shearer (19) made merry at The Dell, winning 4-1 and prompting Dalglish to publicly rebuke his players: “those who turned up to watch did better than those on the pitch.”
It was only Liverpool’s second loss since New Year’s Day, but the next one came much quicker: a midweek loss at Highbury in the League Cup, a competition which was then desired rather than derided. And after winning the season’s first live TV game – on 29 October, mark you – against Spurs, Liverpool lost at home to Coventry (with Dalglish enraged into tautology: “I won’t accept that as an acceptable standard for this club”) and then 3-2 at QPR. From mid-October to mid-November, Liverpool had lost four games in five.
QPR manager Trevor Francis may have been playing up his own victory when he assured Liverpool fans that “I think we'll find at the end of the season they are the best,” but revolution was tangibly in the air and old orders were crumbling. On the night Arsenal beat Liverpool, the resignation of the UK’s chancellor Nigel Lawson stunned Margaret Thatcher, whose three successive election victories had given her a decade of power and the air of invincibility; the Guardian called Lawson’s shock resignation “her bleakest hours since she came to power.” Darker days were to follow for Thatcher, who would struggle for sympathy on Merseyside.
At the same time, the decades-long Soviet experiment was coming to an end. Two nights before Liverpool’s game at QPR, the Berlin Wall came down after the East Germans authorities finally abandoned the idea of a border fence designed to keep people in rather than out.
While Thatcherism wobbled and the Cold War thawed, Liverpool’s loss of domination felt like another ending: “Very rarely would Liverpool lose two games in a row,” recalls Venison. But over the years they had developed a plan to combat underperformance, and it wasn’t anything to do with sports science.
“When things weren’t going particularly well,” explains Houghton, “we had a ‘dog day’ or a ‘half dog day’ – we’d have a couple of beers and if anyone felt another player wasn’t pulling their weight, you’d tell them. That was as far as it went and then it was just a case of getting back to winning ways.”
For the manager, “Such sessions were vital for camaraderie. I certainly encouraged the full dog days. As long as none of them ended up in jail, it was all right.”
As Barnes recalls, “We didn’t expect to win every game. There were games when we lost but how do you respond when you lost? If you go on a five- or six-game losing run, that’s a major problem.”
How Dalglish responded in his next game - a potentially tricky trip to the (old) Den – was to change formation. Knowing Millwall would go long towards Tony Cascarino and Teddy Sheringham, he deployed Molby as a sweeper behind Hansen and Hysen, pushed on Venison and Staunton as overlapping full-backs and moved Barnes back up top alongside Rush, sacrificing Beardsley. Barnes was “spellbinding” (The Times), chipping the opener and “dragg[ing] Liverpool into the contest by his own virtuosity” as he led them to a “desperately earned victory”.
The next two games demanded that demons be confronted. When Arsenal returned to Anfield, the TV millions, Liverpool overcame Venison’s ninth-minute concussion – Dalglish again showing his tactical fearlessness by throwing on the discontented Beardsley and switching three players round – and Barnes’s saved penalty to win through McMahon’s drive and Barnes’s superb free-kick. As Molby would recall, “It was just a case of winning the games that mattered. That’s what we did back then.”
More soul-searchingly, the next midweek brought the unavoidable return to Hillsborough. The 95 dead – Anthony Bland would become the 96th in 1993, after nearly four years in a coma – were commemorated with wreaths laid before kick-off, while visibly distraught Liverpool fans dropped their own floral tributes from the seats above the closed Leppings Lane terrace.
“It was freezing cold,” recalls Houghton, “very hard for everyone connected to the club. It was very emotional and it was one of those occasions when you just wanted to get through it.”
Dalglish detested every second of it. Having attended so many funerals and felt the pain etched onto the community, he found the night “really difficult, really distressing... we couldn’t get in and out quick enough.” The 2-0 defeat mattered little in the greater context: “I understood why the players’ hearts weren’t in it: they couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened the last time they were here,” said Dalglish. “I sensed their discomfort before, during and after the game. We fulfilled our obligations, took the defeat and sped home.”
Having been forced to overcome the psychological barrier of returning to Hillsborough, Liverpool could use unity as strength. Venison admits that the disaster “was one of the main motivations” for winning the league. “That will never go away, the grief, almost the guilt – it was a really tough time but everyone responded with dignity and handled it better than anyone could have imagined. The thought was that it would really, really fitting to win the league.”
After losing at Hillsborough, Liverpool went on a 20-game unbeaten run. They weren’t at their most imperious and didn’t always win: eight of the 20 unbeaten games were draws. (For comparison, by mid-March 1988 they had played 29 league games, won 22 and drawn 7 - and the following spring there was that run of 40 points from a possible 42 leading up to The Arsenal Night.) But perhaps more than any side outside of Alex Ferguson’s as-yet unimagined prime, Liverpool knew how to keep grinding. Barnes ascribes it to mentality, which he says is the mark of champions.
“Consistency comes from mentality,” he tells FFT. “You have teams who play fantastically well but then because of their mentality, they don’t play well in some games. Inconsistency comes when we play well, score goals and think we’re great, then all of a sudden we don’t play well in the next game because we’re a bit complacent.”
So while Margaret Thatcher saw off a tentative leadership challenge from hitherto unknown stalking-horse called Sir Anthony Meyer, Liverpool set about their own pretenders to the crown. A patched-up side without Barnes, Hansen, Venison and Nicol - and with Gillespie and Staunton limping off – nevertheless won 4-1 at Maine Road. A 10th successive changed line-up went behind at home to title challengers Villa but shared the points through Beardsley, then contenders Chelsea were dismissed 5-2 at the Bridge, with manager Bobby Campbell claiming Liverpool would be worthy contenders for the forthcoming World Cup.
Not everyone was swept away. Manchester United had been problematic Anfield visitors for the entirety of the 1980s, restricting Liverpool to only two wins in 11 clashes; they ended the decade making that two in 12 with a 0-0 that could have been worse, Dalglish saying “if that’s the best we can do we’re in trouble” while the Times called it a “humbling” for the home side and wondered if Alex Ferguson would survive the forthcoming FA Cup trip to Nottingham Forest; “otherwise, he may not be allowed to complete a championship race which, ironically, his side has helped to make more open.”
Liverpool set about closing up the shop again with two straight wins to go four points clear at the turn of the decade, but January would be clogged with FA Cup games: both Swansea and Norwich earned replays at Anfield. In the league, 2-2 draws at Forest and at home to Luton both permitted two-goal comebacks that questioned that defensive solidity. As The Times reported, “Hysen and Hansen tend to be a vulnerable couple: each of these two senatorial figures needs to be abetted by someone quicker.”
January ended with the Taylor Report, the first McDonald’s in Moscow and Liverpool top on goal difference; February brought an Anfield derby win but a new table-topper led by a familiar face. In 1982/83, Graham Taylor had guided newly-promoted Watford to second place behind Liverpool; four years later, he had made the seemingly odd decision to drop a division, taking over at Aston Villa.
He was proven right when Villa swapped places with Watford and two seasons later, here he was having another tilt at the title. Villa were a curious hybrid of experienced heads (graceful centre-back Paul McGrath, stylish midfielder Gordon ‘Sid’ Cowans) and fresh legs (darting winger Tony Daley, goalscoring midfielder David Platt, named PFA Player of the Year on April Fool’s Day); during the season, Taylor augmented with more of the same, namely Tony Cascarino and Dwight Yorke.
It worked: between Christmas and late February, they won 10 out of 11 games (if we ignore the Zenith Data Systems Cup, which seems fair enough). But having hit the top, they hit trouble with successive defeats against Wimbledon and Coventry while Liverpool’s victory over Millwall restored the favourites to the box seat.
Not that Houghton was bothered about rivals. That wasn’t The Liverpool Way. “In all honesty, Liverpool never thought about the results and performances of the other teams – it was all about what we could do,” he says. “As long as we played to the standards we could and we got the result, then we didn’t have to worry about anyone else.”
With their schedules staggered, the two sides swapped the lead throughout March; Liverpool had the benefit of run-in experience, but retained their season-long inability to string together three league wins. A commanding victory at Old Trafford in which Barnes’ two goals outweighed Whelan’s bizarre 25-yard own goal was negated by a first league loss in three months, at Tottenham.
However, while London burned in riots protesting against Thatcher’s imminent Poll Tax and the residents of Manchester’s Strangeways prison staged their own three-week-long rampage, Villa suffered a run of one point from three games against QPR, Palace and Manchester City; Liverpool’s odd-goal victories over Southampton and Wimbledon pushed them three points clear with a game in hand by the time they arrived at Villa Park for the FA Cup semi-final against Crystal Palace.
The Eagles had been obliging opponents, adding a 2-0 Selhurst loss to the Anfield annihilation which had prompted sympathy from Dalglish: “The next day, I dropped Palace manager Steve Coppell a supportive letter, saying it was a freak result and I knew they’d go on to have a good season.”
And so they did, climbing away from the drop zone and reaching the semis of two cups (because they didn’t ignore the ZDS). The late-November decision to make Bristol Rovers’ Nigel Martyn the country’s first £1m goalkeeper helped, as did hiring commanding centre-back Andy Thorn.
With Liverpool top and Palace 15th, while the other semi-final was between Manchester United (16th) and Second Division Oldham Athletic, the path seemed relatively clear for Liverpool to finally complete the Double they’d come agonisingly close to for two successive seasons. But Palace, like Arsenal, refused to read the script.
“When you inflict a heavy defeat on an opponent,” reasons Houghton, “they’re even more determined to get something against you when you play them again. It hurts them. Palace undeniably played that day with the memory of the 9-0 spurring them on.”
Written off in the build-up, Palace took succour wherever they could. The previously unbeatable boxer Mike Tyson’s defeat to James Buster Douglas was invoked. En route to the ground, a member of the catering staff pointed out a sign saying “With God, anything is possible.”
At Anfield, promising young striker Ian Wright had cried tears of frustration on the pitch before John Pemberton punctured the mood in the team bath by suggesting of their hosts “I reckon they’ll do OK this season”. In the players’ lounge a genuinely intrigued Ronnie Whelan had asked Geoff Thomas, who’d missed a penalty: “Can I ask you a serious question? Do you train with a ball or do you just run?”
Coppell - a proud Scouser, with his own reasons for revenge – did indeed run his players hard in training and that fitness would help. At half-time they were 1-0 down to an Ian Rush goal but Thorn, who had helped Wimbledon beat Liverpool in the 1988 final, knew the fabulous could be fallible. The pacy Pemberton set up Mark Bright for an early equaliser and Palace went in front from a set-piece through Gary O’Reilly.
A lesser team might have crumbled when Liverpool levelled through McMahon’s volley on 81 minutes and almost immediately took the lead from a Barnes penalty. But Andy Gray levelled to order extra time on a hot April early afternoon, and suddenly Palace’s punishing fitness work would be worth it.
“We had a number of significant players affected by injury that day,” mitigates Houghton. “I should have come off at half-time because I was carrying an injury – but Steve Staunton came on for Ian Rush, who was also injured and Barry Venison came on for Gary Gillespie.” After the match, Beardsley was diagnosed with a stress fracture of the knee.
By comparison, Palace – whose starting XI averaged 25.22 years old to Liverpool’s 28.95 – were raring to go. Coppell sent them out back out saying “This is your time, you have to grasp it. You’re fitter, younger and hungrier” – and Gray’s corner was nodded on by Thorn for Alan Pardew’s winning header.
In the inquest, Dalglish blamed his team’s defending at set-pieces while Coppell noted “The team with the best players doesn't always win a semi-final.” Looking back now, Venison calls the memory “horrible, just horrible,” while Dalglish himself would muse on his sympathetic message to Coppell: “sending that letter was not one of my wiser decisions.”
Three days after the semi, Liverpool returned to Selhurst Park – where they faced Palace’s tenants, second-bottom Charlton. Rush was replaced by on-loan Israeli striker Ronny Rosenthal, who marked his first start with a perfect hat-trick in a 4-0 win, then opened the scoring at Anfield as Liverpool raced into a 2-0 lead before being pegged back for a draw.
Against Forest, minds were on the past – 364 days after Hillsborough, Liverpool faced their opponents from that day – but also the near future: the following Wednesday they would visit Highbury. Arsenal were the better team for much of the game but sub Rosenthal pushed them back, and Barnes’ late equaliser effectively grabbed the trophy from the holders’ hands: “We knew we’d win it then,” said Molby, especially as Villa had lost at Old Trafford.
That Saturday, Rosenthal’s fifth goal in five games kick-started a 4-1 Anfield win over Chelsea. That week, UEFA’s Lennart Johansen had indicated that the blanket ban on English sides would end that summer; as FA chairman Sir Bert Millichip put it, “English football has stepped back into the sunshine.” Although in the end Liverpool would remain subject to an extended isolation (later reduced to one extra season), this was closure of a kind for the horror of Heysel.
The title was clinched at Anfield in a style befitting the season: Liverpool recovered from a blow (Roy Wegerle’s opener for QPR) to grind through the gears and get the win, courtesy of Rush and Barnes (from a somewhat suspect penalty). Three points wouldn’t have been enough mathematically but Villa were held at home by Norwich and Liverpool had collected their 18th league title; at the time, nobody else had more than nine.
It wasn’t, then, the finest campaign Liverpool ever fought. “I wouldn’t describe it as a vintage season,” remembered Molby, “and I’m sure a lot of fans would be the same. I don’t think anyone looks back and says ‘Weren’t we brilliant?’ in the way they did about the 1985/86 or the 1987/88 team.”
However, it recalled Graeme Souness’s remarks six years earlier after Liverpool had confirmed the title with an underinspiring 0-0 at Notts County: “Maybe by our standards we didn't deserve to win the League this time,” said the Sampdoria-bound skipper, “but by everybody else's standards we did.” As Dalglish put it this time, “We won the title because we’ve been the best team this season.”
It was a defensive comment but undeniably true, says Venison. “Over the full league programme you had to prove week-in, week-out over nine months that you were the best team. That was drummed into us. I was lucky enough to win it twice – and it really should have been three.”
Grobbelaar threw his manager in the communal bath but Dalglish had his own celebration in mind. For the midweek home game against Derby, the 39-year-old named himself on the bench: “For the first and last time in my career, I pulled rank.” He brought himself on for the last 19 minutes, to make his 502nd and final Liverpool appearance, on the night they lifted the top-flight trophy for the last time in 30 years.
Despite that sentimental sub appearance, little changed. As Houghton remembers, behind the scenes victory received as little ceremony as defeat: “The title-winning medals came in a big cardboard box that Ronnie Moran put on the treatment table. He went around the room and asked if you’d played enough games and if you had, he’d throw you a medal!
“It was a case of ‘Put it in your cabinet and forget about it... it’s all about what you do next season that is important now’. It was relentless at Liverpool.” The club didn’t even organise an open-top bus tour.
History has a habit of moving on. Just as Manchester United would avenge Aguerooooo in 2012/2013, Liverpool had reasserted their dominance, but it didn’t last. Just as Manchester United would in 2012/2013, Liverpool had come back from their own Aguerooo/Arsenal-at-Anfield agony to reassert their dominance, if only for a season. And with Europe back on the agenda, a line had been drawn under another dark chapter. But for Dalglish, a relatively inexperienced manager with just five years on the clock, the more recent disaster at Hillsborough was too much to get over.
At the time, only a few psychiatrists might have talked about closure. Until after the first Gulf War which started in late 1990, few in Britain had ever heard of the phrase post-traumatic stress disorder. Whether or not Dalglish was suffering medically from the horrors he had witnessed at Hillsborough, he certainly wanted out of his own personal front-line. That summer, describing himself as “almost exhausted,” he tried to turn down a contract extension but after a summer break reluctantly agreed to continue.
He tried to rejuvenate the team with new signings but winger Jimmy Carter’s flying start stalled and Caledonian aggression-ball David Speedie was a divisive choice from the off. In late February 1991 –three months after Margaret Thatcher had finally been toppled by her own party, but more relevantly just after a 4-4 FA Cup draw at Goodison in which his league-leading team had been pegged back four times – Dalglish resigned.
Although Alan Hansen was the early favourite to replace him, the board understandably went with his predecessor as captain: Graeme Souness had established Rangers as Scotland’s dominant team. A new broom with plenty of bristle, Souness wanted revolution rather than evolution.
“Graeme came in and he wanted to transform the club,” remembers Venison. “He wanted to do it yesterday, he wanted to do it very, very quickly. There were a lot of immediate, dramatic changes. It was a transitional period.”
Down the East Lancs Road, his similarly confrontational compatriot Alex Ferguson had also undertaken an unpopular overhaul - but that was rooting out satisfaction with mediocrity, which had rarely been a problem at Anfield. A month after Souness arrived, Ferguson led Manchester United – who had beaten Crystal Palace in the FA Cup final – to European Cup Winners’ Cup glory against Barcelona.
In 1993, a part of footballing history was wiped when the rebuilding of Anfield’s main stand required the demolition of the boot room to accommodate a revamped press room. The journalists didn’t spend long listening to Souness there: he resigned in January 1994 and was replaced by Roy Evans, but Liverpool would have to wait a while longer for the title-winning magic to return.
Originally published by FourFourTwo magazine April 2020 issue, out 5 March; online version here
