Red Machine Read online

  Under Dalglish, Grobbelaar rediscovered his passion for the game as well as his form. By August 1986, with another set of League championship and FA Cup-winner medals in his cabinet at home, the goalkeeper made his 310th consecutive appearance for the club. He hadn’t missed a game since his debut five years earlier – a remarkable feat.

  ‘I don’t think any player will break that record. I also know that I am still the most-decorated goalkeeper that has played in the English league. Although I didn’t think about them too much at the time when I achieved them, landmarks like that are things I look back on now with a lot of pride. I’m not the kind of person to want to keep those records, though. I’m a Liverpool supporter and I’d love to see someone else surpass everything I’ve achieved, because it would mean that the club is doing well.’

  There were still mistakes, however: like the one in the 2–0 derby defeat of February ’86 when he let a hopeful Kevin Ratcliffe effort from 35 yards creep under his body. But by now Grobbelaar was changing attitudes towards goalkeeping. Before him, it was rare for a player in his position to go for a high ball beyond 12 yards from his goal or to sweep up behind his defence. Yet the Zimbabwean, who had such a torrid start to life in England, redefined the boundaries of what was acceptable for goalkeepers to do.

  ‘It gave me a real buzz to charge off my line and grab a high ball – just as much as a point-blank save when the centre-forward was clean through. I thought that you had the privilege of being able to use your hands being a goalkeeper, so you should bloody well use them. I couldn’t see the point of letting somebody have a free header at your goal when it was easier to catch it. Catching from well off my line was something I had always done – my father encouraged me to do it.’

  He learnt to ‘sweep’ while in Canada.

  ‘Tony [Waiters] was a big help with that. He taught me to narrow the forward’s angle of goal by coming well out of your box. If he had the whole goal to aim at, he had a better chance of scoring, so by coming off the line it sometimes also helped stop the play developing before it was too late. Playing in the NASL was a breeding ground for adventurous goalkeepers because of the shoot-out that was devised to decide matches. If the score was a draw at full-time, the teams would take turns with the ball placed on a 35-yard line and the forward would have five seconds to score. As a goalkeeper, the best way of stopping them was to come off the line and either smother it or boot it clear before the forward could get his shot away.’

  Grobbelaar says that the most complete keeper in England during the ’80s was Peter Shilton.

  ‘Although the boldest I’ve ever seen was John Burridge, who would have thrown himself under a bus to save a goal, Shilts was the ideal build. It was the way he trained that set him apart. When I was at Crewe, I was allowed to go over to Nottingham Forest for a few weeks to try to learn from him. Brian Clough was there when I arrived; he was sitting there dressed in squash gear. “Mr Grobbelaar, I understand you aspire to be a goalkeeper in the English First Division,” he said. “If you really want it, you should pack in that Mickey Mouse stuff over the other side of the Atlantic.” Shilton was as obsessive as Clough about the game. His intensity just during training was frightening. It was like he didn’t concede a goal.’

  Grobbelaar also rated Rinat Dasayev, the Soviet Union’s captain, and Spain’s Luis Arconada, although his hero as a child was Brazil’s maligned stopper, Félix. ‘He was the complete athlete and didn’t get the credit he deserved.’

  Outfield, he counts Graeme Sharp his fiercest opponent but says Pat Van Den Hauwe, also of Everton, was the craziest. ‘There was always a banter between the Everton boys and us, but we never socialised. Kenny wouldn’t allow it. I was driving up to Southport with my then wife and first-born child in the back of the car. I stopped at the lights on Lord Street and this fellow was walking across the road with his family, pushing a pram. He gave the pram to his wife, looked at my car and jumped on my bonnet. That was Pat Van Den Hauwe. You get nutters in football, but they’re not all goalkeepers.’

  There were other brilliant players. ‘I’ve faced a few: Hugo Sánchez, Johan Cruyff and Pelé, all greats. But I regarded anybody with the ball as the most dangerous person. It didn’t matter who he was – a Fourth Division player or an international – whoever had the ball in front of me was the best player in the world because he could score. The best player I played with was undoubtedly Graeme Souness. He had everything in every position except goalkeeper and was a phenomenal leader.’

  Souness had long left Liverpool by the late ’80s, but the medals kept on coming. Out of Europe, Liverpool played arguably their best football in the latter part of the decade under Dalglish. Again, triumph would be met with disaster.

  On 15 April 1989, Liverpool were drawn to play Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. The match was abandoned six minutes in. Ninety-six people were crushed to death. As a goalkeeper in front of the Leppings Lane end, Grobbelaar saw and heard everything.

  ‘I knew exactly what was happening from the pitch, so why couldn’t the people who had the power to make the right decisions change things? I told a policewoman to open the gates, but it seemed to take a long time for it to register with her the desperation of the situation.

  ‘On the 15th of April every year, I feel uneasy with myself wherever I am in the world. Mostly, I think about why nothing has been done for the 96 families. That’s what hurts most. It has taken so long for successive governments to even look at the police files. There are people still alive today who were in charge of safety that day that should have been made responsible in court for what happened. The simplest decisions would have changed everything. When The Sun newspaper took control of the story, it was the worst case of victims being made to feel the perpetrators.’

  The Sun claimed that Liverpool supporters ‘pissed on the dead’ and ‘stole their wallets’.

  ‘If the people who were writing those headlines or writing the stories genuinely believed what they were saying, they really have a lack of common sense. Anybody who is savvy will understand that if you just have one or two [drinks] en route to the match like you always do, then arrive at the ground before getting crushed to death, you are going to piss yourself because of shock and fear. I have seen grown men in the army piss themselves in times of desperation, so when there are thousands of people around you and you can’t breathe, it happens.

  ‘As for people going into wallets, how can you identify somebody without looking for identification? Some of the dead people had drivers’ licences, so the good people of Liverpool, naturally trying to help their own, left the ID of the dead on their chest. Instead, The Sun said they were trying to rob. It was a disgusting reaction.’

  Even after everything else that Grobbelaar had witnessed in his life, Hillsborough was the most difficult to deal with.

  ‘What Kenny and Marina [Dalglish’s wife] did should never be forgotten. They were incredible. I was shattered as a human being, but Kenny insisted that we try to help counsel the victims’ families. By doing that, we counselled ourselves.’

  Grobbelaar remained at Liverpool for another five seasons, winning another League title and a couple of FA Cups, but the appointment of Souness as manager and the arrival of David James from Watford in 1992 signalled the beginning of the end.

  ‘Graeme called me into his office and he said that the new guy [James] was going to take over first-team responsibilities from me in the medium to long term. He wanted me to teach him what it was like to be Liverpool’s number 1 goalkeeper. I understood because I was getting older and I think it’s important to help youngsters progress in the game if you are one of the old heads.’

  Grobbelaar’s understanding with Souness – the player he admired so much – deteriorated quickly. At this point in our conversation, he refrains from calling him ‘Graeme’ and instead uses the surname ‘Souness’.

  ‘Our first game of the following season was originally scheduled for 15 August 1992 away at Nottingha
m Forest. On the 16th, I was due to play for Zimbabwe in a World Cup qualifier against South Africa. The game was obviously very important to me because I was born in South Africa and had grown up in Zimbabwe. It was also South Africa’s first World Cup qualifying game after the end of apartheid. I told Souness that I was going to play for my national team, so I went over and we won the game 4–1. Liverpool unfortunately lost and Souness took the hump.’

  Relations between the pair got worse.

  ‘A few months later, having hardly played, I was in Lomé, Togo, for another international with Zimbabwe. The following weekend, we had another crucial game against Guinea. Souness called me and asked me to get myself back to the UK because Liverpool had a game midweek against Bolton Wanderers in the FA Cup. I flew from Lomé to Accra [Ghana], Accra to London and London to Manchester to make sure I was there for Monday, which would give me two days to prepare. I trained like a beast, but when it came to Wednesday night and the team was announced, Mike Hooper was in goal and David James was first reserve. It seemed like he did it in spite.’

  Even though they have since reconciled their differences, Grobbelaar believes Souness failed as a Liverpool manager.

  ‘Souness was the best player I’ve ever played with – the best in the world for a time. For that, I admired him. But his skills as a manager and his judgement were questionable. For a long time, we didn’t see eye to eye because of it. Maybe if he managed today, he’d be the best manager in the world as well, because now I can see that a lot of his ideas were visionary. He could see what way football was going, but the problem was he tried to change too much too soon. He always demanded instant success as a player and was intolerant of people who didn’t feel the same. As a manager, when you come in, it takes patience and time to change things, but Souness was impatient. Now, we get on well. He’s the nicest person you could meet. He’s been through his bad times and I’ve been through my bad times, so we have something in common.’

  With Roy Evans in charge, Grobbelaar was injured in a game against Leeds and never appeared again.

  ‘I would have liked a better finale. I read in a newspaper that I was going to be released on a free transfer. Roy had taken over by then and he is a great person, but he didn’t have the opportunity to tell me face to face what was going on. It disappointed me at the time, but my move to Southampton came about very quickly, so I didn’t have a chance to dwell on being upset.’

  Grobbelaar’s contract at the Dell meant that he earned more there than he did at any time during his 14 years at Liverpool. If he thought life would be easier from now on, though, he was wrong. In November 1994, he was accused of match fixing by The Sun newspaper during his final years at Anfield.

  ‘When it broke and the picture [of Grobbelaar in a meeting with the supposed fixers] was shown to me, I knew I was innocent,’ he says. ‘So I kept quiet, went to my lawyers here in Liverpool and sued the newspaper that very night. The police questioned me for days and days, but there was no evidence. They advised me to maintain a silence and allow the newspaper time to prove that I was guilty of wrongdoing. Because I knew I was innocent, that’s exactly what I did.’

  The saga eventually left him bankrupt.

  ‘Had the newspaper come to me with the story before it went to print, the whole business would never have gone to court. People ask me all the time whether the allegations affected my relationship with Liverpool supporters. But my answer is always the same – I had made mistakes since my first match as a goalkeeper. It made me an easy target. Do you think I threw every match?’

  Grobbelaar signed forms with eight different clubs following the court case. Like so many footballers on the verge of retirement, he struggled to deal with the fact that the training ground would no longer be his place of work.

  ‘A lot of ex-footballers go off the rails because they don’t know how to deal with the real world,’ he says. ‘I struggled for a time, especially around the time of the allegations and afterwards. The first game after the story broke, Blackburn supporters threw money at me. So I put it in my cap and gave it to the nearest steward. I could laugh at stuff like that. You have to have a sense of humour.

  ‘Life has got to go on. You can’t worry too much about the past, because you have the rest of your life to live. My mother was a huge influence on me, and she has always told me that life is full of disappointments and that it’s how you get over those disappointments that makes you a better person. Without her, I might have cracked.’

  Grobbelaar tried management with four different clubs in South Africa but now lives in Canada and supplements his income by doing motivational speeches for factory workers throughout Africa. ‘They are mainly very poor people – minimum wage. As a foreign player in England, I learnt what it was like to work for what was essentially a foreign company. A lot of the people I speak to don’t have the skills to communicate with their bosses and therefore get into conflicts. I was once a bit like them.’

  He seems to have found solace in his life.

  ‘I’ve got a beautiful wife, who works as a lawyer, and daughter, and it feels like I’ve got a second chance. This time around, everything is geared towards my wife’s career and I just do as she says. For so long it was about me. It was unfair on everyone else.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ORIGINAL TOXTETH TERROR, Howard Gayle

  ‘I’VE JUMPED IN STOLEN CARS, BEATEN UP POLICEMEN AND FOUGHT on the Annie Road terraces as a latter-day football hooligan,’ Howard Gayle reflects with a hint of remorse. ‘Then I made the first team.’

  Gayle, better known as the first black footballer to play for Liverpool, was born in Toxteth and spent many of his teenage years knocking round on Granby Street – a gritty melting pot of a community south of Liverpool’s city centre.

  Gayle played just five times for the Reds in half a decade between 1978 and 1983, yet he’s included in this book at the expense of more decorated Liverpool stars because he was a local lad whose upbringing and career path is unique and worth writing about.

  When I meet him at a school adjacent to Granby – the name given to it by people familiar with the area – the neighbourhood is deserted. Once a busy but underprivileged working-class bazaar of Muslim-, Hindu-, Rastafarian- and Christian-owned food stores, it is now your quintessential inner-city nightmare of steel-shuttered shops, wire grilles and boarded-up terraces. Many of the buildings look like crack dens.

  The district expanded to cope with the post-war influx of Afro-Caribbeans and West Africans, but today Toxteth has been taken over by refugees rather than immigrants. The modern Al Rahma mosque sits nervously nearby, and although some of the people outside are like second-generation Scousers with their adidas Spezials on foot, there is a resigned apprehension overpowering the scent of garam masala from a run-down restaurant. Looming in the distance is Britain’s largest Anglican cathedral – a brooding, enigmatic presence.

  Nestled amidst a hard-to-police low-rise enclave of maisonettes and bleak backstreets, this part of Liverpool is notorious because of what happened halfway down Selbourne Street on the evening of 3 July 1981, when an angry crowd watched Leroy Alphonse Cooper’s arrest.

  What followed was more than a week of rioting, with pitched battles between police officers and youths armed with petrol bombs and paving stones. It became a place of anarchy and has suffered since. Toxteth is now twinned in people’s minds with the Lebanon.

  Robbie Fowler, a future Liverpool great who grew up on Windsor Street, parallel with Princes Avenue slightly to the west, once observed that every top-flight footballer came from an inner-city council estate. ‘But Toxteth is somehow portrayed as being much worse than all the rest,’ he said. ‘Toxteth is the bogey-man of the inner cities.’

  Gayle can’t disagree. ‘Granby Street is gone – it’s dead,’ he sighs. ‘It has a negative reputation because of the riots. There’s only Danny Fife’s on the corner – a place that has served the community for generations – that has survived. That’s the only original
shop. There’s currently a cafe and a place that sells halal meat. That’s it.’

  Gayle, who now lives a few miles further to the south, close to Sefton Park, is clad in a black leather jacket and black jeans – the colour broken only by a green badge that promotes the end of racism in football. He has razor-cropped hair, a head like a bullet, the shoulders of a boxer and fists that could be a pair of wrecking balls on two bulldozers. His accent is nasally soft and classically Scouse, unlike the rapid-fire impenetrable twang you are likely to hear from some urban dwellers today.

  Gayle is back here because he runs a social-inclusion project, encouraging kids back into education with the promise of football coaching from an ex-pro. He is articulate and rarely swears, almost whispering most of the recollections from his playing days.

  ‘I don’t pre-judge kids,’ he says. ‘I treat them on the merit of what they do with me. I try to speak to kids on a level. I know where many of them are coming from because I’ve been there myself.’

  Gayle was born in May 1958 and spent his formative years close to the docks on Carter Street. Liverpool is a place where all roads feel like they head to the banks of the Mersey: the brownish trail of water that is the city’s lifeblood. From the waterfront, Merseyside’s historic dockland stretches north for eight miles, eventually gulped by the haze above Seaforth and Waterloo. It is no surprise that the river which shaped a city should also mould its relationship with colonial Britain, encouraging, amongst many others, Gayle’s parents to these shores.

  Liverpool is a city whose capitalists originally grew rich on the blood of slaves. No other port in Europe could compete with Liverpool’s geographical location as one point in the triangle linking Africa, England and the Americas.