Red Machine Read online

  ‘When Kenny was manager, he wanted us to all go and live in Southport, but I wasn’t willing for the manager to come around and find that my car wasn’t there before he started asking questions about what I was doing in my spare time. The Wirral was a good option because there was a spate of robberies on the houses of Liverpool and Everton players, and I figured they’d wouldn’t bother going to the Wirral because they’d have to pay to get through the tunnel.’

  Grobbelaar drank in the Queen Victoria pub in Heswall.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I had one particular tipple,’ he says. ‘I drank everything. It didn’t bother me. Before I signed for Liverpool, I drank regularly, but once at the club you had to drink more to become a part of the social scene, otherwise you could easily become an outcast.

  ‘Everybody started to believe in me by the second season and this in no small part was down to taking part in the spirit-building exercises in the pub. Everybody had different party tricks and mine was opening bottle tops with my eyebrow. You’ve got to know which bottles to use, though; otherwise you’re fucked. I arrived at training loads of times with cuts across my head.’

  One morning, Grobbelaar woke up after a night out with a deep wound to his chin.

  ‘We were out in town and we bumped into an ex-con who was a bit of a fitness fanatic. He was slightly pissed and so were we, so we started testing each other – how far we’d go to outdo one another. One of his dares was to put our hands behind our backs and fall face forward, only using our hands in the last split second. I was exceptional at it, but the ex-con called me a chicken for using my hands too early. In the second attempt, I fell all the way to the ground just to prove a point. Unfortunately there was some glass on the floor and I cut my chin so bad that I could put my whole thumb right through it the next morning.’

  Another time, after a Christmas party, he turned up at Melwood with the ‘hangover from hell’.

  ‘We were warming up and I was leading the group with Roy Evans just behind me. I let rip with the biggest silent fart ever and, unfortunately for Roy, he was the first to run into it. The smell was so bad that Roy started vomiting, because he was a bit worse for wear as well. All of the players behind him either keeled over or ran away to escape the poisonous gas. I was pissing myself.’

  Sometimes, the tomfoolery would go too far.

  ‘I liked to wind people up and Liverpool was the kind of place where you thrived if you were quick-witted. But you had to earn the respect of everyone first by playing well on the pitch, and that didn’t happen with me. So I had to earn my stripes. Everybody had arguments. I fell out with probably every member of the team throughout my time at the club over various spats.’

  One teammate Grobbelaar struggled to get along with was Howard Gayle.

  ‘A lot of the first-team players liked to call me “Jungle Man” because of my military background. But Howard was of West African descent and did not appreciate the context. Instead of laughing it off, he became tetchy.’

  Their relationship worsened when Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson visited Melwood for a training session.

  ‘Daley was a decent footballer as well as a brilliant all-round athlete. Howie, though, reckoned he could out-sprint him in the 100m. Terry Mc was on the finishing line and I was the starter. Everybody was acting very seriously until I said, “Ready, steady … pick up your lips … go!” Daley fell on the floor, pissing himself with laughter, but Howie didn’t see the funny side. I realise now that the reactions of both Daley and Howard were different because of their upbringings. It was a lot tougher for Howard than Daley.’

  For the next few weeks, Gayle stalked Melwood in search of revenge.

  ‘I knew he was going to come for me straight away in the training session, so in the next tackle I slid 15 yards to win the ball off him – just to prove I wasn’t scared. He started swearing at me and wouldn’t let it go.

  ‘We get along fine now, but it was a shame that Howie went around with a great big chip on his shoulder, because it probably held him back at that time. He could have become a Liverpool regular and an England international – he had that much ability – but on a lot of occasions he went around with a scowl on his face.’

  Liverpool and Grobbelaar completed 1982–83 with another league and cup double, cantering towards the First Division title by 11 points. Such was their domination, the Reds could afford to lose five of their last six games.

  Grobbelaar married new girlfriend Debbie in the summer of 1983, a sign that he was beginning to finally settle down both on and off the pitch. The team travelled to the Far East for a pre-season tour and spirits were high – ‘Sammy Lee thought we were in Hong Cock and Bangkong’ – but the lax form from the end of the campaign before continued with defeats to Manchester United (twice if you include the Charity Shield) and Atletico Madrid, along with draws against Hamburg and Feyenoord, concerning Bob Paisley and his staff.

  ‘The reason why Liverpool got it right so often was because the management saw problems early on and eradicated them,’ Grobbelaar says. ‘Bob let us all know he wasn’t happy and bombed certain individuals out of the team. That scared a few and results soon changed.’

  And change they did. Although Liverpool only won the title by three points that season, with Southampton their closest challengers, they clinched a cup double for a third year on the run by beating Everton in a League Cup final replay.

  Better was to follow. Grobbelaar’s performances were outstanding in Europe – where he had failed previously – particularly in tough ties against Athletic Bilbao and Benfica. A 3–1 aggregate victory over Dinamo Bucharest cleared the way to a European Cup final in Rome against the city hosts and Italian Serie A champions Roma. The game finished 1–1 and this was Grobbelaar’s moment.

  ‘When it went to penalties, I was probably the most relaxed person in the stadium,’ he recalls. ‘Before the shoot-out, [Bruno] Conti cheekily started dancing around with the ball – he looked over-confident. So I said to the lads, “If he’s going to be cheeky and cocky, then so am I.” So I said to him as he walked up, “Let’s dance, Bruno.” I don’t think he understood what I said, but he ran up and scuffed it over the bar. I just started laughing my head off.’

  Next up was Ubaldo Righetti, who scored. ‘I thought that I dived the right way, but then I remembered that I was watching him in practice from the other side. So I fucked up.’

  Then came Francesco Graziani.

  ‘He had his arm around the referee, and I didn’t like that. I decided that the net looked like a bowl of spaghetti and started to bite it. Then I turned around and started wobbling my legs. Graziani bottled it.’

  Grobbelaar was supposed to take the fifth, and possibly deciding, Liverpool penalty.

  ‘When Graziani missed, I went crazy, running about everywhere, celebrating. The boss thought my mind had gone, so by the time I realised it was my turn to take a kick Alan Kennedy had grabbed the ball and started walking with it towards the penalty spot. It dawned on me that if Alan scored, we were going to win. I think I speak for everybody when I say that nobody truly believed Alan would beat their goalkeeper.’

  Kennedy did score. The European Cup was Grobbelaar’s seventh major medal in just three seasons at the club.

  ‘When I think about the shit I had to put up with at the start, it was definitely worth it,’ he says. ‘There is usually one player in every team that the fans look to blame when it all goes wrong, even if the team is successful. That person was me. But on that night, everything went my way.’

  By the following September, though, the crowd were once again voicing their concern following a mistake against Sheffield Wednesday – a mistake that the goalkeeper concedes was his worst in the Liverpool shirt.

  ‘It’s the one that I look back and think, “My goodness gracious.” Peter Shirtliff [the wardrobe-jawed Wednesday defender] cleared a long aimless ball from the back and I came out to meet it about 35 yards from goal. I tried to pass it to Barney [Alan Kennedy]
but Imre Varadi intercepted it, ran around me and scored.

  ‘The worst thing about the whole experience was that the boss [Joe Fagan] sussed that my mind wasn’t on the game and I got bollocked. Ronnie Moran was incandescent. They didn’t like me flying off for international duty because they thought it was a distraction. On that day, I’d already organised a private car to take me straight from Anfield to Speke Airport, then a private plane from Speke to Gatwick, where I could catch an Air Zimbabwe flight at nine o’clock that evening for an international match. This was on my mind all the time.

  ‘Before the kick-off earlier that day, Joe comes up to me and asks me who plays in goal for Zimbabwe when I don’t. I thought, “That’s a funny question.” We were flying over Birmingham when the pilot called me up to the cockpit to inform me that the onward plane to Zimbabwe had blown its engine and there wasn’t going to be a replacement. I asked the charter pilot to return to Speke and because it was only six o’clock when I got back I thought I might as well go back to Anfield, as I knew most of the lads would still be in the players’ lounge. I was walking down the tunnel inside the Main Stand and Joe was the only one waiting for me there. He said, “Why didn’t you ask me about the Air Zimbabwe plane that blew an engine this morning? If you’d gone there, you’d have been dropped.” Uncle Joe knew everything. At Liverpool, the manager always knew more than he let on.’

  Fagan would soon announce his retirement from football ahead of Liverpool’s fifth European Cup final in eight seasons. The Reds were due in Brussels to play Juventus. It was 29 May 1985.

  One hour before the match was due to start, with more than 60,000 fans assembling inside the Heysel stadium, a riot started, resulting in the collapse of an already crumbling wall and the deaths of 39 Juventus supporters. Liverpool fans were cited as the aggressors, and a five-year blanket ban on English sides playing in Europe followed. Liverpool received an additional ban of ‘indeterminate plus three years’ or, more precisely, three further years in which the club would be banned if they qualified for European competition. If they didn’t, the ban would roll on until they did. Eventually, it became ‘plus one year’.

  The shame attached to being associated with Liverpool at the time was razor-edged. For the perpetrators of the violence, it was deserved. When the 27 names to be charged with manslaughter were released, most had Merseyside addresses. Yet hooliganism was endemic across English football in the ’80s.

  ‘Heysel was almost certainly going to occur somewhere, because no one anywhere seemed capable of stopping the violence,’ said Peter Robinson, Liverpool’s club secretary, who wrote to UEFA before the tie to complain about the stadium’s capability of hosting a match of such magnitude, not only because of its fragile preservation but also because of absurd ticketing arrangements.

  Robinson’s main concern was that there was to be a neutral section of the ground set aside for Belgians right next to the two pens that would entertain Liverpool supporters. He disputed that this neutral area would only lead to both sets of fans being able to buy tickets from Belgian touts, thus creating a vacuum that potentially could be filled by troublemakers. Given that Brussels had a large Italian population, it was likely that the part of the stadium now infamously known as sector ‘Z’ would be filled with Juventus supporters. They would only be separated from Liverpool fans by chicken-wire fences. ‘I looked at the ground and hoped to God that there would be a sufficient police force near those fences,’ Robinson said. ‘On the day, my prayers were fruitless. UEFA and the Belgian authorities ignored my letter, and even as late as an hour before the kick-off there were only a handful of policemen on patrol inside the entire stadium with a few dogs.’

  ‘Some people see all of these reasons and all they see are the same old excuses,’ Grobbelaar says. ‘What happened that day was a disgrace to football. I felt like quitting afterwards. I am a man of impulse – I wanted to go back to South Africa. But a lot of people around me said that by doing that I’d let the scum survive.’

  The Liverpool team arrived at the stadium 90 minutes before kick-off as usual. Grobbelaar followed Alan Kennedy onto the pitch to breathe in the atmosphere while the kit was being laid out.

  ‘I remember remarking to Barney about the number of Italians in section “Z”. It was so obvious to me that surely the authorities could see the same thing? Me and Steve Nicol went for a walk around the ground to pass time, and it was a mistake. Rather than the jeering we expected from Juventus supporters, they showered us with concrete blocks and flash bombs. I started to get concerned for my wife and family in the stands, so after I got my shorts and socks on I returned to the side of the running track, topless, to see if I could spot them.’

  It was then that he saw a group of around 50 supporters in Liverpool colours surge across the terraces behind the goal.

  ‘It was clear to me that the group they were running towards didn’t want to stop and fight. They backed off and backed off before they became crushed against a wall like sardines. All I could think was, “Where are the fucking police?” The wall went like a crack of thunder and all I could see was a mass of arms and legs.’

  Grobbelaar’s nightmares of old returned.

  ‘It was worse than witnessing what I saw in the Bush. You expect death in wars but not at a football match. These were grown men behaving like savages.’

  He is adamant, though, that the instigators of Heysel were not from Liverpool.

  ‘People are still free now with blood on their hands,’ he insists. ‘My then mother-in-law came over for the final on the ferry, and she was one of many who were handed pamphlets by the National Front, which basically said, “Liverpool will not be in Europe again.” The NF saw Scousers as scroungers and envied Liverpool’s success on a football field. My mother-in-law said that a lot of the people handing out pamphlets had Chelsea and Millwall tattoos on their arms.’

  In an interview that Peter Robinson gave to the Liverpool Echo on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Heysel, he also intimated that the National Front were involved. ‘At 9 p.m., I made my way to the area where the disaster occurred. I tried to speak to a group of Liverpool fans. Some explained the problems – the total lack of control … people had tickets that hadn’t been torn off. Then a group of men descended on me and said their tickets were from the black market but they wouldn’t show me them. They had strong southern accents and they suddenly turned aggressive and started shouting, “Shankly”. It was well documented that members of the National Front went to matches. And it was very odd to me that this group should be here.’

  Grobbelaar was so ‘depressed’ and ‘obsessed’ by what had happened in Belgium, he later decided to try to find out for sure whether the NF were really implicated in Heysel.

  ‘I travelled to one of their headquarters just outside Slough for a group meeting. They recognised me straight away and because I was a white guy from Rhodesia, they assumed that I was racist. So they welcomed me. I had a drink and tried to relax. One of the heads approached me and we got talking. I asked whether they knew anybody who was involved in Heysel and all of a sudden he went cold, said no, then walked off. He sussed me and I decided it was best I leave for my own safety.’

  A few days after the disaster, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pressured the FA to ban all English clubs from Europe indefinitely. The English Football Association had pre-empted warnings by withdrawing all clubs from the following season’s European tournaments pending UEFA’s announcements. Given Thatcher’s previously stated aversion towards the city of Liverpool – because of its left-wing politics and strong opposition to her government and philosophy, not to mention the negative image created by the Toxteth Riots a few years earlier – it is unsurprising that Thatcher was granted her wish when UEFA banned all English sides for ‘an indeterminate period of time’.

  ‘I don’t think the ban for that length was necessary,’ says Grobbelaar. ‘OK, they felt that Liverpool fans were instigators. Therefore, they should have made Liverpool pla
y behind closed doors in Europe for a couple of seasons. But as players, we were not responsible for what happened. When it comes to blame, it’s easier to blame groups rather than individuals. Criminals are deemed innocent until proven guilty, but here everybody associated with Liverpool was found guilty by implication.

  ‘Thatcher was quick to make a decision on the miners and she was quick to make a decision on the football supporters. Personally, my quality of life in England improved under her governance. When I first arrived here, the tax on foreign workers was 85 per cent, but she brought it down to 40 per cent. It meant that people like me and Craig Johnston benefited. But I could also see that for most working-class people, she didn’t do a lot of good things.’

  Critics argued that Heysel and the European ban that followed would see an end to Liverpool’s dominance of English football. But they didn’t count on Kenny Dalglish’s ability as a player-manager after he succeeded Fagan.

  ‘The result of the match at Heysel didn’t matter to me, and when we were in the changing-rooms waiting for somebody to make a decision whether we should play, I just wanted to go home. I knew I couldn’t, because the stadium was a powder keg waiting to go off. Had the game been cancelled, the death toll might have been even worse.

  ‘My mind wasn’t on the game and I wasn’t even bothered that we lost to a dubious penalty … I think a lot of the lads felt that way. We all wanted to get away, and because it was the last game of the season we could forget about football for a while. But even when we returned for pre-season, I can definitely say that my appetite for the game had gone. Fortunately, Kenny recovered it.’

  Dalglish’s relationship with the players changed when he became manager.

  ‘He opened up more and communicated with people,’ Grobbelaar says. ‘I suppose he had to. He moved so easily into management, when before he was the piss-taker. He was ruthless with the younger boys, especially; but when he was manager, he realised that he had to change. Before him, there were a few cliques in the dressing-room, but he sorted it out and brought the family back together. Sometimes he could have protected me more from the continued criticism that came my way, but after a while I realised that he left me alone because he thought I had the mental strength to deal with it myself. That gave me a lot of confidence.’