Everton 0 Liverpool 5 — November 6th 1982
“Ian Rush is leading Everton a merry dance” and according to song writing legend, through a Red River Valley too. A retrospective.
Growing up as I did in the late 1970’s and primarily, and cognitively, in the early 1980’s, I collected every imaginable VHS cassette I could lay my eager hands on concerning Liverpool Football Club. It was the usual array of “Greatest Hits” collections of season reviews, a history of the club, their European Cup successes or individual television “specials” that were then sold as early collectable editions on cassette tape. Almost without exception, all contained the 5 goals from this storied game but nothing more. Just simply the goals. 5 magnificent goals against 0 conceded. At Goodison Park, the home of their city rivals Everton and just a short stroll through a park called “Stanley” from Anfield, the home of Liverpool. Less than a mile separates the Blues of Everton from the Reds of Liverpool and the rivalry has swung wildly over the years from the “Friendly Derby” to a much more venomous and bitterly angry tussle as the chasm between the Blues and the Reds of the same city of Liverpool grew and grew and grew.
Here in 1982 the roles the teams had previously enjoyed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s had been completely reversed. Whereas in the 60’s Everton were dubbed the “Mersey Millionaires” and won the English 1st Division Championship in 1963 and 1970 and in between these coveted titles famously won the FA Cup in 1966, the Reds of Liverpool were rebuilding again under their legendary Manager Bill Shankly. In this same time frame the Reds won the 1st Division twice in the 1960’s before winning the game’s top English honour a phenomenal five times in the 1970’s as well as a litany of other trophies and the very biggest Europe could offer too with four European triumphs in the 1970’s alone.
As the 1980’s were born Liverpool were truly in the ascendency as both the number one team in Liverpool, England and in Europe too but here in 1982 and under the guidance of their Manager Howard Kendall, Everton now too were rebuilding again and leaving aside the score from today’s game Kendall would go on to create a team that would win the 1984 FA Cup and lose in the Final the following season. They would also win the 1st Division Championship in both 1985 and 1987, sandwiching their Red cousins from across Stanley Park with their own League Championship triumph in 1986. Everton also won the European Cup Winners Cup on a storied night in 1985 but in the same year came the disaster and tragedy at the Heysel Stadium where 39 Juventus fans were killed when a wall collapsed and with Liverpool fans largely to blame (there is a much longer story to be told, but not here), all English teams were banned from playing in Europe and the Blues from Everton were rightly angry and bitter that their chance of real English and European dominance had been denied them. The “Friendly Derby” degenerated into a bitter and often family splitting affair and 40 years on from this game the once jovial and friendly atmospheres when these two giants of English football once tussled has now become a spiteful, bitter and often one sided affair for the victorious Reds of Liverpool.
I was only 10 years old when this game was played and although I have zero memory of the game at the time I was most certainly a Red, obsessed with Liverpool’s number 7, Kenny Dalglish, and only mere weeks prior had seen my footballing heroes for the very first time as they played in a triangular pre-season tournament at my hometown of Portsmouth. Liverpool is over 250 miles away from my birthplace on the South Coast of England but due to my dear old Mum’s early urgings (as well as scarves, badges, mugs, replica shirts and every piece of memorabilia she could afford to spoil me with) I was a Liverpool fan, but in a city as far away as could possibly be. Or at least that’s what I’m sure my 10 year old mind was thinking at the time.
To complicate matters further, my so dearly missed Mum was as big a fan of Liverpool rivals Manchester United as could be and why she didn’t indoctrinate me in her favoured team was never really explained. The romantic in me likes to believe that beautiful old lady received two joys in one by spoiling me and bathing me in the Red of Liverpool, as she always looked out for their score and was always made up when they won as she knew her son would be as happy as can be. This was all done after ensuring she knew the score for her beloved Manchester United first, obviously! If it wasn’t for her much missed influence I’d never have become a Red and there are a lot of “never’s” I could go on to list here but I’ll top and tail a rather long list by saying I’d never have seen days like Wembley in 1986 or Dortmund in 2001, and never have telephoned her directly afterwards every time just to hear her beaming pride flowing through a telephone line for a football team her son supported.
Over the intervening 40 years this one game, this 5–0 defeat of Everton, has gained in almost mythic proportions and in a season where the Reds would go on to lift the Division 1 Championship trophy for the 14th time and the League Cup trophy for the third season in succession. The team almost wrote itself and before the proliferation of team nicknames these days they were often called “The Red Machine” with Bruce Grobbelaar (“The Clown” according to my Mum!) always in goal, Kennedy and Neal flanked Hansen and Lawrenson in defence and a workhorse midfield consisting of Souness, Lee, Whelan and Johnston supplied the all time record goal scoring partnership of Rush and Dalglish. This team and this season they were arguably at their collective peak and with one or two additions would go on to lift a treble of trophies in 1984 but still two years from that incredible feat they really put their Evertonian neighbours to this sword on this day, and a day, a result and a goal scoring feat that would soon become immortalised in song.
Now the familial legends state that my dear old Mum was many things but one that I know to be absolutely true follows and why do I know it to be true? That’s because I heard it with my own two ears. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I still completely believe it! My Mum always stated that when she was a young wee thing she trained and had lessons as an opera singer and I have no reason then or now to disbelieve her, it’s simply the passage of time perhaps that makes you doubt her veracity? An opera singer? As a little girl? In Portsmouth? But my Mum was never the storyteller, unlike her son, so it must be true? She adored the classics through to contemporaries and modern day (especially if they had an operatic bent), she adored Roy Orbison alongside Luciano Pavarotti, Gene Pitney or Michael Ball or Alfie Bowe. So it was hardly a surprise when one day long ago, and in a valley far, far away, that I was singing a Liverpool song called “Poor Scouser Tommy” and my dear old Mum and inspiration for this story abruptly announced:
“That’s not Tommy! That’s Red River Valley!”
The history to “Red River Valley” from a simple and cursory glance at The Matrix, would seem to be a long and winding one and includes historical 20th Century greats such as Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers but the song would seem to have much deeper and longer roots even than the early 1930’s and through cowboy and Native American roots, but my Mum loved the Marty Robbins version and immediately corrected me when I first started singing it around her. The Liverpool football chant now replaced a “Scouser Tommy” for the cowboy in the original song and would meander through a description of being wounded on the battlefield and with his last breath:
“Oh, I, am a Liverpudlian, and I come from the Spion Kop”
and much like the song upon which it is based, Poor Scouser Tommy has a lengthening legion of stories and questions as to how, why and who, but the romantic version I love is that it’s based on a Lancashire Regiment who fought in the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th Century and a battle named “Spioenkop” (there are varying spellings) and from which a huge number of the Lancastrian men died. However, the song includes lyrics of a Highland Division, Arabian Sun, and an Old Nazi Gun so this doesn’t chime with it’s more romantic and established roots. If you can indeed equate war with romance, but then again, it’s only a song. And a very fine song it is too and, crucially, and so in keeping with Liverpool Football Club and their fans in particular, absolutely unique for it’s time. This is no ordinary football chant, not now and certainly not back in the early 1980’s. Football chants are traditionally quick, simple and repetitive (or based on popular songs of the day). Poor Scouser Tommy is long and slow when sung at it’s best, aggressive loud and uniquely Scouse when sung these days, and a rambling 30-45 seconds in length. When on that day, the 6th November 1982, a gangly striker named Ian Rush scored four times in a Merseyside Derby, the wordsmiths and songsmiths on Liverpool’s traditional favourite congregating place behind the goal, “The Kop End”, decided to add some more lyrics to one of my Mum’s favourite songs.
The song now ends with a joyous repetition of the number of goals the Welsh striker smashed past his best friend and Wales International goalkeeper Neville Southall, a loud proclamation of pride in the dominance of their football team both in England and throughout Europe before adding a dash of The Beatles to completely end with as the refrain is “All You Need is Rush” rather than The Beatles “love”, but all well minded individuals realise we all need a little bit of both.
The five goals themselves (Mark Lawrenson scored the other) have been ingrained on my Liverpool memory for 35+ years now, and only four days ago did I watch the 35 minute highlights available on www.youtube.com and I was stunned, frankly, that the team dressed in Red didn’t reach double figures. The King has a goal wrongly disallowed, Rush and Sammy Lee hit the frame of the goal and Liverpool just pour relentlessly toward the Everton goal and the beleaguered if brilliant Neville Southall who could do nothing to prevent any of the goals and purely kept the score line at 5–0. After watching the new Beatles film Get Back recently (highly recommended), it’s very easy to forget that these “events” actually happened as we have grown up with them and mythologised them too. But John, Paul, George and Ringo really did sit around smoking endlessly, wearing those clothes, recording musical genius and playing live for a bemused London audience from atop their own building, and for their own pleasure and Scouse amusement too. The players of the “Red Machine” already previously noted have been mythologised too over the years but in 1982 here they were, in all their hair styled pomp and glory, Graeme Souness biting into tackles and his room mate on away trips Kenny Dalglish scoring a magnificent goal wrongly disallowed and being that niggly, never lose behemoth that he was. Brucie the Clown in goal and saver of ridiculous saves, Rushie up front scorer of goal after goal after goal. Skippy never stopping running and nor does Sammy Lee, with Alan Hansen strolling around with a football at his feet and without a care in the world.
Watching this recently I was also struck with the obvious comparisons with the modern game of VAR and the neutral, tepid, vacuous and stop start nature of a game that when played at it’s best, say, in 1982, it was free flowing, imaginative, hard working, spontaneous, never stopping, footballing theatre. That said, Referee Derek Civil did correctly send off one player but he should have sent off more in a tempestuous game I hope I colour in for you shortly. VAR and a referee watching this game on a monitor 200 miles away would have a field day with this game today! But rather than my well worn antipathy toward today’s politically correct game than the beautiful one I grew up with, I was also struck by one of the mantra’s of the modern game: transition.
Liverpool transitioned the play between defence into attack like a (Red) machine on this day and albeit only highlights, they were much more impressive and much more deserving of an even bigger score line than the 5 goals by which they absolutely and thoroughly defeated their Blue neighbours on this day, the 6th November 1982.
So, do you want to hear a tale about a “Scouser Tommy”?
“Can I tell you the story of a poor boy?
who was sent far away from his home
To fight for his King and his country
and also the old folks back home”
The breathless opening ten minutes of the match set the scene with Everton, in the shape of their Skipper Billy Wright, spurning a half chance with a header before Liverpool catch their stride and show the blueprint for their game as usual. They press Everton all over the park, hunting in packs and collecting every loose ball and immediately pushing forward. The much vaunted transitions of modern football are already apparent and incredibly quick for the period. Then on 11 minutes they strike.
GOAL! Everton 0 Liverpool 1 (Ian Rush 11 minutes)
Andy King’s loose pass is intercepted brilliantly by the elegant Liverpool central defender Alan Hansen who skips an immediate challenge before striding forward, gazelle like, all arms, legs and elegance personified as he slides a perfect through ball through the Everton defence which Ian Rush calmly places underneath the advancing Neville Southall. The goal covers 2/3rds of the length of the pitch and is accomplished in one intercepting touch, a touch and skip past a challenger, a pass and a cool shot into goal. Roughly 6 seconds of just perfection.
On 15 minutes it should be 2–0 as Sammy Lee releases Ian Rush with a perfect through ball and with the angle narrowing against the Welsh striker he hits the post with a ferocious right footed drive and 5 minutes later a brilliant one and two touch move involving Lee twice, Souness, Dalglish and Phil Neal led to a fine header from Kenny Dalglish that Southall palmed away. Immediately after, Glenn Keeley, making his Everton debut in the centre of defence makes a mistake and lets in Dalglish who from 7 yards out inexplicably blazes over the crossbar. Everton finally string a forward move together and Graeme Sharp hits a tame shot directly at Bruce Grobbelaar but almost immediately a brilliant sweeping move from Hansen to Kennedy to Dalglish covering the entire length of the pitch, results in a superb diving header from Dalglish that flew past Southall in the Everton goal. The goal would be cruelly disallowed for offside. If not, this would have been one of THE Merseyside Derby goals of all time. Then, a catastrophe for the Blues.
“Now they put him in a Highland Division
sent him off to a far foreign land
Where the flies flew around in their thousands
and there’s nothing to see but the sand”
Alan Hansen was again at the centre of the action with this time a beautifully curling through ball to his Scotland teammate Kenny Dalglish. Dalglish just got the run on Glenn Keeley and was bearing down on goal when the defender hauled him back by the shirt giving the referee no alternative but to send him off. The now 10 man Blues defended the resultant free kick until the loose ball found Sammy Lee and his acrobatic attempt on goal crashed against the bar. The first half would run out with yet more chances, one for ex Red Kevin Sheedy as a goalmouth scramble saw the closest Everton came to a goal all game and this was sandwiched with a great team move and a header from Mark Lawrenson that needed a smart save from Southall and when Souness refused to give up a lost cause, the ball filtered to Dalglish and his shot was saved at the near post.
HALF TIME SCORE Everton 0 Liverpool 1 (Rush).
“Well the battle started next morning
under the Arabian Sun
I remember that poor Scouser Tommy
who was shot by an old Nazi gun”
Graeme Souness is everywhere at the start of the 2nd half, leading his men to chase and harry their opponents in Blue at every opportunity and their pressing results in a free ball which Alan Hansen, again, strolls purposely and gazelle like forward with the ball at his feet.
GOAL! Everton 0 Liverpool 2 (Ian Rush 51 minutes)
Hansen, seemingly without a care in the world and as unrushed as we’d all be accustomed to seeing for so many years to come, passes to Ian Rush who with a couple of touches makes room for a long distance shot which takes the tiniest of deflections before passing a flat footed Neville Southall into the bottom corner of his goal. Southall could do nothing about this at all but the Reds were deservedly 2–0 up and the next 5 minutes alone typified so many aspects of a “Derby” football game that we as fans all perversely love. Firstly Lawrenson released Rush who crossed for Dalglish at the far post who’s header was unbelievably saved by Southall and gave rise to BBC commentator John Motson’s colourful phrase of “Ian Rush is leading Everton a merry dance”. Next Kenny Dalglish (footballing vernacular) “leaves his foot in” and leaves an imprint of his studs on the thigh of Everton’s John Bailey. In today’s VAR and death by instant replay culture Dalglish would receive at least a yellow card if not red. It wasn’t a pleasant exchange to say the least. But from the resulting thrown in, Liverpool would increase their lead to 3–0.
“As he lay on the battlefield dying (dying, dying)
with blood gushing out of his head
As he lay on the battlefield dying (dying, dying)
these were the last words he said”
GOAL! Everton 0 Liverpool 3 (Mark Lawrenson 55 minutes)
The resultant throw in was looped over John Bailey’s head to Dalglish who squared a simple cross that evaded the Everton defence and Mark Lawrenson slid in a simple goal to make it 3–0 and almost immediately it should’ve been 4–0. As the strains of an early, loud and jubilant “You’ll Never Walk Alone” rang out from the away end of Goodison Park, a brilliant team move of one and two touch football from a short corner involving Lee, Kennedy, Lawrenson, Dalglish and Souness resulted in a brilliant near post goal from Ian Rush that was disallowed for offside. Then the busy midfielders of Craig Johnston and Steve McMahon “clashed” on the halfway line, and when I say clashed, Johnston punched McMahon who pushed him in the face as a return! He actually punches him! Referee’s verdict? Free kick to Liverpool! In today’s game both players would have seen red and been sent off. Here, not even a word from the Referee. How times change!
Three majestic sweeping moves would round off the match in favour of the Reds with first a brilliant pass from Dalglish is met by his partner Rush who waits for Dalglish to make up the ground before he shoots directly at Southall. Again, the move had started with Dalglish and swept 2/3rds of the pitch in 7/8 seconds. The next two sweeping moves would finish the match with five minutes to go.
“Oh, I, am a Liverpudlian
and I come from the Spion Kop
I like to sing and I like to shout
I go there quite a lot (every week)”
GOAL! Everton 0 Liverpool 4 (Ian Rush 71 minutes)
Mark Lawrenson passes unrushed to Dalglish who in turn releases a rampaging Ian Rush. His first shot strikes the post but he follows in and smashes the rebound past his best friend and Wales colleague Neville Southall. This in turn gives rise to yet more iconic commentary from BBC’s John Motson as he exclaims “That’s the first hat-trick in a Merseyside Derby since 1935!”.
GOAL! Everton 0 Liverpool 5 (Ian Rush 85 minutes)
The Reds save arguably their best for last as Alan Hansen passes to Sammy Lee from inside his own penalty area and immediately Lee is off and running and there isn’t a Blue shirt that can catch him. Rush bends his run to beat the offside and meets Lee’s inch perfect pass before rounding an oncoming Southall and tucking the ball into the empty net. Again, back to front, defence to attack to goal in 7/8 seconds. Poetry in motion.
“We support the team that’s dressed in Red
a team that you all know
A team that we call Liverpool
and to glory we will go”
FINAL SCORE Everton 0 Liverpool 5 (Rush 11,51,71,85 Lawrenson 55)
5–0 is as comprehensive as perhaps it gets and especially so given it was accomplished, and in such fashion, at the home of your nearest and dearest footballing “enemy”. Two disallowed goals, Dalglish inexplicably blazing over when it was easier to score and twice hitting the frame of the goal is indeed as comprehensive as it gets. It also gave rise to an addition to a particular song in the process.
“We’ve won the League. We’ve won the Cup
and we’ve been to Europe too
We played the Toffees for a laugh
and we left them feeling Blue — Five Nil!
Rush scored one. Rush scored two
Rush scored three and Rush scored four
Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na”
If you now add the famous “Kopites” of Liverpool singing The Beatles All You Need is Love to the words “All You Need is Rush”, you have the twisted Liverpudlian footballing story of a poor boy.
Mum and I had this silly tradition whereby whenever our respective team won a trophy we’d immediately call the other and give them some faux congratulations. We’d won nothing after all, or perhaps in my case it would have been because I was there, at Wembley, Cardiff or Dortmund, singing loudly about a Tommy and a battlefield and how the Reds had once left the “Toffees” of Everton feeling blue. I wasn’t in Qatar in 2019 when Liverpool defeated Flamengo of Brazil to become the official World Champions (of sorts) and the UEFA Club World Champions. Roberto Firmino’s winning goal in extra time was the culmination of 18 months whereby the Mighty Reds of Liverpool barely lost a game, won everything the game had to offer them, everything, and perhaps, for one mighty spell the Reds had realised the determined prophecy of their legendary Manager Bill Shankly that he wanted to build his team into a “bastion of invincibility” and that the football authorities would have to send a team from the planet Mars to beat them.
Immediately the final whistle blew my telephone rang with the congratulations from my jubilant Mum who stayed up especially late to see the game through to the end. “Your team are the Champions of the World” she probably said.
I miss my football chats with my dear old Mum.
For my Mum, Maureen.
