My first full season as a fan, and football was all fun in those days. People say it was a difficult time for the city, and it was, but I was too young to know about the wider social context at the time. Just winning games was enough for me. It seems incredible now that you could lose 6 games a season and still win the league. If you lose 6 games now, you probably won't even make the top 4.
By today's standards, media coverage was minimal. There was no tv football for local viewers until January, and not much more for the rest of us either. When there was some more, it was strictly limited to one game a week only. And if there was a major event in another sport at the same time, e.g. 5 Nations/Grand National, you could forget about live football coverage.
Kenny was the new man in charge and it took a while for him to find his feet, with patchy early season form. I remember where I was though when Phil Neal scored his last goal for us. He would leave soon afterwards. We demolished the neighbours 3-0 in the first half, but had to grind out a win in the end. Following the difficult start to the season, the fightback began in November, with a number of comfortable league wins, and Molby destroying the mancs in the league cup in the space of 2 minutes. The league cup was a major competition then and you didn't rest players for it. If only it was still the case now. Gary Bloom's radio commentary of the equaliser is legendary, but as there was no tv coverage of the game, those who were not there on the night, only got to see it about 25 years later. In those days, radio football coverage was king. The following Saturday, Chelsea got a late point at Anfield, and nobody knew at the time just how important the return game would be in May.
I was at two home games that season, comfortable wins against Villa and Birmingham. The win against Villa at the beginning of December should have kickstarted the title challenge. But it was our last win of 1985. 86 stuttered and spluttered along at the start, where every time we turned a corner, it was a wrong turn. I didn't take the league cup semi final loss well at all. Watford got a 0-0 draw in the cup quarter final. Grob caught the butterfingers bug at home to the mancs, in the derby 2 weeks later, and at Spurs the following week inside the first 3 minutes. Nowadays he would be torn apart on the message boards, probably threatened by the keyboard warriors as well, and possibly dropped for Mike Hooper. Back then you just went home, laid low for a few days, dusted yourself down and got on with the next game, come what may. How it should be.
Monday night football was not on TV and was as rare as a needle in a haystack at the time, and it took a long time to win the replay at Watford, but it finally got us motoring in the right direction. The 4 points got from the Easter weekend put us top of the table, after the neighbours could only draw at the mancs. In those days, BBC World Service radio commentaries were the best, sometimes only way for me to keep track of live games, and restricted to the second half only. No 5 hour long Ultra HD digital coverage in Stereo Sound in widescreen, liveScore, 24h sportsnews, or 30 live league games per season for anyone. And absolutely no multiscreen on a red button. Neighbours and relations would sometimes have to help out to watch Sunday live tv games, if they could wrestle a tv aerial long enough to get the right signal. On the ground, players played twice on Easter weekend without complaints on rock hard pitches, it was an annual ritual that they just put on the stiff upper lip and got on with. Nowadays, it's restricted to Christmas time, and there's uproar every year at how demanding the schedule is, and how it must be changed. It's as predictable as "Do They Know It's Christmas?" booming out the airwaves every 5 minutes. But back then, the schedule was part of the football furniture, and it has never changed. It's still 4 league games every single Christmas.
After winning the cup semi final, the race to the title was on in earnest, as we reeled off win after win. Coventry were beaten up. We won at Luton, a banana skin place, on a plastic pitch. We beat Birmingham to send them down, a game so easy, that Gary Gillespie could run amok in our last home game of the season. He later thought the 9-0 game v Crystal Palace was better than the day he scored a hat trick past David Seaman down the Anfield Road End. That's Gary I suppose. We still needed a favour to win the league, and the new league cup holders Oxford did it for us, allowing us to go to Chelsea and wrap it up there. The neighbours won 6-1 that day and as they still had a game in hand, we needed to win at Chelsea in our last game of the season, and we did. It was a beautiful trophy, but the presentation wasn't quite the half hour glitz and glamour ceremony it is now, with everyone who is someone. In fact, it didn't happen after the last league game at all and seemed to be more of an afterthought, while the medal "presentation" was a box brought into the dressing room. It had to wait though until after the Screensport Super Cup semi final win at home to Norwich the following Tuesday, after we put another 5 past them. I finally saw the presentation on a club video 4 years later. Apart from the goal, the cup final was pretty much a non event in the first half. The second half had a difficult start for us as well, but once we got level, there was no looking back. Nobody had any trouble watching the trophy presentation for it, it was the only guaranteed live game in England every season, winning it for the first time in 12 years was a big deal, and winning the double then was a major achievement. Win the double now and unfortunately, it's barely mentioned.
On my next visit to a game the following October, I got the audio tape of the season review in WHSmiths, that Clive Tyldesley, Gary Bloom and Radio Merseyside put together. It was only 40 minutes long, and half of it was the cup final, but it was still a great production. The labels are worn off the tape by now!! No youtube, Dvd's, or Netflix around in 1986 at the touch of a button, if you wanted a souvenir of a season, you had to go out and get it yourself. I got my first replica shirt also, the yellow away shirt of the time. We got to share the Charity Shield for 6 months, but we did win the Screensport Super Cup though, beating the neighbours in the final again. I don't recall the trophy ever played again though, while at very short notice, Screensport quietly merged with what is now Eurosport, in 1993.
The 86 special on LFC was originally aired on the 30 year anniversary of it, a brilliant documentary without advert breaks. I thought they might do something similar for the 88 side, as the records that side set, and the football we played was even better than the side that won the double 2 years earlier. There's still time for that of course.
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