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That games still annoys me. I’d been going to away games for 4 years by then, but it was too far on a school night, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. My dad had a van, so when we went to away matches we’d have a van full of blokes from his factory, who all chipped in towards the petrol and it covered the cost of our entry.

But what really pissed me off wasn’t that I couldn’t go. That was never in question. It was The kids in my year who did go. There weren’t actually that many of us who regularly went to games. I was in the St. John Ambulance cadets by this time, so I saw all the home games from the little dugout in the corner of the Ponty and the Brewery. That’s me you see jumping up and down in the box when Big Trev scored against Man City in the previous round. Funnily enough, years later I worked at Anfield with the St. John Ambulance when I was a first and second year student nurse. You can see me dodging being hit with the ball at the famous 2-0 last game defeat to Arsenal.

Back to the 82 Anfield game, I was in an English lesson with Mr. Holloway when a couple of lads got up to leave school early to go to the game. Mr. Holloway must have clocked the look on my face, cos he came over and said “you’re a big Barnsley fan aren’t you? I bet you’re hoping they win tonight aren’t you?” And I said “No sir, I hope we draw, so I can go to the replay”.

I would have been genuinely disappointed had we won that game, and probably not the only young Reds fan, which was why I wasn’t disappointed at only drawing at home to Horsham, because I knew exactly what their young fans would have felt like when the game got moved to the Friday. People on here under the age of 35 won’t appreciate how big Liverpool were in the 70s and 80s. And not big in a blow everyone else out of the water financially way, like how Chelsea and Man City suddenly dominated the league. It was Forest, the Manchester clubs and Wolves throwing the money around back then. Most of Liverpool’s big stars came from unfashionable clubs and from several divisions below. For every Dalglish, coming in from the Scottish Champions (where he was such a great striker, one year he nearly scored as many as their chunky midfielder) there were a few Clemence, Keegan, Neal and Rush’s coming in from Scunny, Northampton and Chester. But they were giants of the game and European Champions again when we played them.

The replay was fantastic. I got Graeme Souness’s autograph when I walked past him chatting to Terry Cooper (got his too, both long since lost) by the players’ lounge. And for a few minutes I really thought we were gonna win. Phil Thompson had been gobbling off about us (which made the shot of him even sweeter on Soccer Saturday in 2008) and had singled Colin Walker out for ridicule, on account of him having been a binman before signing for us. Thompson wasn’t laughing when the binman had stuck the ball in the net and had waved him back up the tunnel on a stretcher within the first few minutes! Wasn’t to be though, but to see the mighty Liverpool down at Oakwell and being given a big scare was the kind of thing I’d been dreaming of ever since my grandad first took me down there to watch us beat Workington 4-0 five years earlier. What a team we had.

 

Nice story but.
Souness long since lost. Have I misread that. ?.

 

I think he means the autographs