19 tales from Liverpool's 19 top-flight title wins: Part three
To mark the launch of '19' – a new book detailing the story of each of Liverpool's top-flight title successes – author Carl Clemente has shared a collection of anecdotes from the special publication.
Written with the help of the highly-respected LFChistory.net, the 540-page offering is packed with insights, facts and statistics from a journey that started back in September 1900.
It also features the thoughts, opinions and memories of the players, managers, protagonists and fans who were involved in delivering the championship to the Anfield trophy cabinet time and time again.
In the final of three excerpts from the book, which can be ordered here, Clemente provides a tale from each of Liverpool’s last seven title-winning seasons…
1981-82
Former skipper Phil Thompson won his sixth league championship medal and at the time became the only man in the 94-year history of the Football League to achieve such a feat with one club.
1982-83
Liverpool’s players and fans found that much had changed when they returned to Anfield for the 1982-83 season. Coloured seats were installed at the Anfield Road end of the ground and three sides of the stadium were now seated, helping to generate an increase in gate revenue as the club was able to charge more for seated tickets. However, no-one would have even contemplated the sacrilege of interfering with one of football’s great institutions, the Kop. The company that club secretary Peter Robinson used to install the seats had presumed they would be fitting the same red seats they had installed into the Paddock area of the Main Stand two years earlier. Bob Paisley had other ideas, though, and rang them up to ask what other colours they had available. His reason behind this was when he watched the reserves from the Kemlyn Road stand, the red shirts would get lost against the red seats in the Main Stand and the Paddock, so having a different array of colours put in would enable him to see the players better. Paisley chose orange, ochre, lilac, violet red, emerald green and cream, which gave Liverpool the most colourful stand in England.
1983-84
The 1983-84 championship was won on May 12, 1984, with a solid, if unspectacular 0-0 draw at Notts County in the Reds’ penultimate game. While most other managers in Joe Fagan’s position would have milked the occasion for what it’s worth, knocking back the champagne provided by Notts County, revelling in the back-slapping and basking in the media glare, the manager’s only concern was leaving Meadow Lane as he had found it. Fagan looked around at the mess that laid before him. With a resigned yet happy shrug, he picked up the nearest brush and began sweeping the dressing room floor. Someone had to do it and it may as well be him, he thought. It was polite to leave a visiting dressing room as spick and as span as you found it. It had always been a basic tenet of the Boot Room philosophy that if a job needed doing, no matter how small, then it should be done and done properly.
1985-86
The coaching staff at Liverpool always had plenty of goals to savour but on one occasion they had to keep their celebrations to a minimum. The Reds were looking to expand their unbeaten run to 10 games at St. Andrew’s on November 23, 1985. Prior to the game, the Liverpool bench had been asked by the police not to come out of the dugout if they scored because away-team staff had had objects thrown at them in previous games. In the 10th minute, Craig Johnston burst into the box on the right side and crossed hard and low for Ian Rush to make it 1-0; cue the celebrations! Ronnie Moran couldn’t get up and celebrate so he joyfully punched Roy Evans on the thigh and gave him a dead leg instead. Sixteen minutes later, Jan Molby’s free-kick on the left found its way to Paul Walsh, who headed in from close range. A big scuffle seemed to break out on the bench as staff tried to hit each other on the legs.
1987-88
Repair work on a collapsed Victorian sewer underneath the Kop prevented Liverpool fans from seeing their new-look team of 1987-88 in action until the fourth match of the season, as the famous terrace looked like a building site. Friendly matches were arranged to fill the gaps in the fixture list so that the players could maintain their fitness and sharpness. Liverpool won both games, beating an Irish Olympic XI 5-0 at Lansdowne Road and then securing a 1-0 victory over Atletico Madrid in front of 25,000 onlookers in the Estadio Vicente Calderón.
1989-90
After clinching their 18th First Division title at home to Queens Park Rangers on April 28, 1990, Kenny Dalglish was fulfilling his media commitments in the Anfield dressing room when he was suddenly lifted up by Bruce Grobbelaar and Molby and thrown fully clothed into the Anfield bath to join his fully-naked countryman Gary Gillespie for a post-match soaking.
2019-20
Victory over Tottenham Hotspur on January 11, 2020 extended the Reds’ unbeaten league run to 38 games, breaking a club record set more than 125 years earlier when Liverpool went 37 games unbeaten, from February 1893 to September 1894, spanning three different seasons in three different divisions [the Lancashire League, the Second Division and the First Division].
Click here to order your copy of 19 now.