Liverpool Stories
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
I can see clearly now - A couch potato's lament
By John Williams
I am a reluctant member of one of the largest and yet most despised tribes on the planet soccer. I am an armchair supporter, one of the sub-species of football fans who are always one stride behind the game because the limitations of television ensures that I never see the full picture.
Like millions of others, a form of visual dyslexia renders me unaware that an opposing attacker is free on the left wing until he pops into view, usually in the bloody six yard box, ready to side-foot home.
As if this weren't sufficient punishment for being a soccer untouchable I am forced to listen to commentators like Ron Atkinson, whose every utterance is an offence against the English language. The next time Homo Braceleticus says something intelligible will be the first time.
Of course, I wasn't always the epitome of that most modern outcast, the six-pack leper. Whenever televised images of the sixties Kop appear on television I strain to catch a glimpse of myself among the ecstatic throng that was the largest male voice choir the world has ever seen.
The sheer exhilaration of being part of that joyous mass of acolytes at the Cathedral of soccer excellence engendered a faith in me that will be part of me until the day when I am forced to attempt entry of the great turnstile in the sky.
My backsliding grew out of a complacency borne of the fact that all of my simple prayers had been answered when the Reds beat Leeds in the 1965 F.A Cup Final. By 1972 I was sated with success. The European Champions Cup was still very much a continental plaything, but ironically it was television which tempted me from the righteous path, and with typically diabolical cunning.
It was sometime in either '72 or '73 that I met a Dutch guy Called Vim, who funnily enough, supported Ajax. He was desperate to stand on the kop and since I was the only Scouser he'd met who showed any interest in soccer, a result of his mixing with the British branch of the Woodstock Anti-Athletic supporters club, he asked me if I'd go along with him.
I agreed, as it had been at least a year since I had attended a live match and I was dangerously close to being declared an apostate, or worse, an Evertonian.
Thus it came to pass that we went to see Liverpool versus Burnley, who in those days were a first class first division side. We should have been three down in the first ten minutes but the usually lethal Ralph Coates inexplicably missed several sitters. Then, just as I was unsighted by a man mountain who had suddenly decided to re-locate from the Alps to the Himalayas Liverpool scored.
I wasn't too bothered at missing it because since the 1970 cup final my brain had been programmed to expect an instant video replay, a series of delicious slow-mo's. You can imagine my sense of hollowness when the game simply restarted!
The reds went on to score two more, but my joy was cut by the absence of the director's cut and I was left feeling as if I'd had the main course but been cruelly denied the sweet.
The years passed and Liverpool regularly embraced those terrible twins, triumph and tragedy, which I witnessed from the edge of my chair. By 1999 I had two children, both boys, both candidates for the faith. There was, however, a major obstacle to their initiation, money, which was in short supply as it was being diverted into infidel religions such as Playstations and designer footwear
Fate, in the shape of a Spur's supporter, intervened. My eldest boy, then 14 and already past the optimum age for conversion, had been invited by the Tottenham loving father of a school friend to watch Liverpool versus Spurs in the Worthington cup.
My son begged me to go with them. I could hardly refuse as that would have meant my son losing his street cred and I took comfort from the fact that the dismal record of Spurs at Anfield would at least guarantee that my son's initiation into the faith would be blessed with a victory. Talk about hubris!
In the quarter of a century since I had last been part of the Anfield congregation there had been radical and unmissable changes. I was reminded of the time I had attended a requiem mass and found out that Latin was as outmoded as a football rattle.
As we queued to enter I caught sight of the tariff, something like fifteen pounds per ticket. Aghast, I remembered the last time I'd been to a match and paid just six shillings to observe the red tide sweep aside everything in its path, and so for fifteen pounds I had expected a Tsunami at the very least but what I got represented the low water mark of Liverpool's decline from a soccer super power to a client state of the new empire of the Sky.
As soon as Neilsen looped a header over the head of Brad Friedel I knew I was in for a torrid time from my Spur's supporting companion. Spurs added two more goals and my cup of bitterness was filled to overflowing when a band of Spurs supporters, who'd penetrated the kop, an event I'd never before witnessed and which spoke volumes about the club's demise, began to set up their own chants.
I was appalled at Liverpool's lack of spirit, and my own sank even lower when Michael Owen was injured.
The drive home was a nightmare as I was a passenger in the victor's car. I accepted the defeat with ill grace, muttering that Spurs wouldn't go any further that year, never dreaming they would go on to win the damned competition, and tried to deflect any discussion by evincing a keen interest in the post match radio phone in.
I remember one man saying we should get rid of Roy Evans and all the Norwegian dead wood he'd bought. The reference to the Beatles' hit was the only bright spot of a dismal night and I was relieved when we arrived home.
The radio phone-in was still on air and so I rang in and added my name to the list of assassins. As I put the phone down my ears echoed to the phrase, 'Et tu Brute'. Two days later Roy Evans put aside the helm of the vessel that was already foundering before he had taken command, and I was filled with remorse.
Some time afterwards I took part in another radio phone-in where I tried to salve my conscience by offering a eulogy for the departed Skipper. I pointed out that without him we might have sunk to depths previously un-plumbed, which was no lie.
Evans had steered his stricken battleship through the minefields of the post Hillsborough doldrums, the storms of player power and the fact that two previous commanders had, without malice, left him in charge of a limping craft beset by storms in the uncharted waters of modern soccer with its unpredictable currents that demanded all English teams competing in Europe to field a limited amount of foreign players.
Sorry Roy, and thanks for keeping us afloat long enough to be fitted out with new armaments.
For my penance the radio presenter awarded me the prize of two tickets for the next match at Anfield. Filled with anticipation that this time he would witness a victory I took my son with me to see the first game of the following season.
Result Liverpool 0 Watford 1 !