Souness (Poll)

[Hades]

Never saw him but the older lads on here go on about him like my generation does about Gerrard and Suarez. Clearly he was some exemplar of stellar manliness that lives long in the memories of men.  I imagine it felt like an immense betrayal at the time.

[VladimirIlyich]

6 minutes ago, Hades said:

Never saw him but the older lads on here go on about him like my generation does about Gerrard and Suarez. Clearly he was some exemplar of stellar manliness that lives long in the memories of men.  I imagine it felt like an immense betrayal at the time.

It still is an immense betrayal. Souness left the club as a player for big wages in Italy and seems to have been motivated by money for a good while.

[RobbieOR]

I want to like the bloke. I enjoy listening to his punditry when we win. But I just can't. 

[Bjornebye]

I heard a story a while back either someone on here or someone I actually know in real life (I think it was the latter) about them being at a wedding and the Newcastle team were staying at the hotel it was being held at. A few of the team (Souness included) gatecrashed the party and apparently he was an arrogant cunt. Making lewd comments to women in his tracksuit and just generally being a cunt. 

[Jenson]

He's an (ex)professional footballer of the highest level, of course he's a money-motivated cunt. Show me one who isn't.

Immense player, second only to Dalglish in that late 70's/early 80's period. Only Gerrard has surpassed him since. Legend as a player, not so good as a manager, but clearly still loves LFC. Was a really good interview I thought.

No problem for me at all, completely forgiven. I'd rather save my anger and hatred for Mackenzie etc.

[Mook]

I think this thread goes to show that he's forever tainted by the interview. I still find it absolutely incredible that someone could make a 'mistake' of that magnitude.

 

I don't see that it matters whether I forgive him or not to be honest, but I don't.

[moof]

Yeah, he’s apologised, it seems genuine, I can accept that. But he will never, ever be on the level of a Dalglish, Rush, Barnes, Gerrard etc. like his talent and achievements should dictate. 

[razor]

 

A good interview, with the reflection and regret expressed in teh last few minutes.

[VladimirIlyich]

10 minutes ago, razor said:

 

A good interview, with the reflection and regret expressed in teh last few minutes.

On Sky Sports,owned by the same cunt who owned the rag.

[Joey8FrogsLegs]

On 10/24/2018 at 1:57 PM, Jenson said:

He's an (ex)professional footballer of the highest level, of course he's a money-motivated cunt. Show me one who isn't.

Immense player, second only to Dalglish in that late 70's/early 80's period. Only Gerrard has surpassed him since. Legend as a player, not so good as a manager, but clearly still loves LFC. Was a really good interview I thought.

No problem for me at all, completely forgiven. I'd rather save my anger and hatred for Mackenzie etc.

 

I’d say that besides Gerrard, I probably also rate John Barnes higher than Souness, even if his peak lasted shorter. But that’s about it out of the post Souness lot.

 

 

[thegreatelephant]

On 10/23/2018 at 9:12 PM, No2 said:

There is no or right or wrong answer here, everyone is entitled to forgive or not forgive.

quite agree so i prefer to talk about the footballer and his talent and achievements on the park.

 

quite simply a winner who was feared by the opposition both physically and for his all round playing ability both home and abroad. delivered it all up trophy wise in arguably Liverpool's greatest era ever as captain. thoroughly respected by his team mates and opponents. 

 

makes some of the average rubbish often lauded on here look like the nothing players they often are. was genuinely worth every single penny he earned and worked hard to get to the very top. what would he be worth in today's market? an absolute fortune. cliche alert- probably the one player i'd have in the team if my life depended on it.

 

although Yosser Hughes was 'better looking by far'

[Geoff Strong]

Souness the player a legend simple as that, Souness the manager a disaster tore up a decent team and bought average at best replacement, as for Souness the man obviously flawed and made a couple of very serious errors. 

 

Personally though i just want to remember the player at his Jaw Breaking best.

[Oh Buoy]

If you interact, entertain or even touch that shitstain rag then you have absolutely no connection with Liverpool, be it the club, the city or the people. He's lead a brilliant career but that's a step too far for me.

 

It's like the mange. It's with you for life and will be engraved on your gravestone. Live by the mange, die by the mange.

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2019/may/05/will-sun-ever-set-on-rift-graeme-souness-liverpool

 

Will the sun ever set on rift between Graeme Souness and Liverpool?

Daniel Taylor

 

 

Perhaps you may have seen that clip recently of Graeme Souness getting so worked up in the television studios about the jargon of modern football, so aggrieved by what he perceives to be the loss of old-fashioned values, that he has a fit of pique and ends up flinging his pen across the desk in front of him.

 

It is classic Souness: dyspeptic, unflinching, never one for concealing his feelings. It is a big part of what makes him so watchable as a pundit. Everything will be fine, then something will prick his temper. Something you or I may not even notice that, in his eyes, is an affront to the profession. Souness isn’t wired to tolerate mediocrity. He cannot accept the idea there are footballers who might not possess the devotion that underpinned his own successes. Nor is he ever going to hold back when something has jarred those hair-trigger sensibilities. 

 

The last time I saw him in the flesh the handshake was everything you would imagine: vice-like. For someone with such a hard reputation, there is actually a soothing, mellifluous quality to that Edinburgh accent. Yet he still has an aura. It is all in the eyes, testing you, probing you, letting you know that, if you ever did upset him, it is not completely out of the question that he might invite you to step outside, the old-fashioned way, as I once saw happen in his days as Blackburn manager with a journalist in a post‑match press conference. Souness, to give him his due, did eventually put everyone at ease by clarifying there would be no violence. Though it wasn’t easy to be sure if we could take him at his word, or if he had simply worked out the rest of us could be useful witnesses.

 

He turns 66 on Monday and it is just a pity, perhaps, that one of the finest footballers of his generation might always be viewed through hard, suspicious eyes when it comes to the city where he spent the more gratifying parts of his playing career. Souness was a great player for Liverpool, a truly great player, in a golden age for the club: three European Cups, five league championships, three League Cups and four seasons when he won a place in the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year.

 

Souness was the captain in a dominant period of the club’s history, a midfield titan who can be unfairly characterised sometimes because of his reputation for being fearless and, on occasions, downright nasty. There was more to Souness than embedding his studs in the limbs of various opponents. His greatness was because he combined those warrior instincts with subtlety, vision and football intelligence. He was, in the words of the sportswriter David Miller, “a bear of a man with the touch of a violinist”.

 

In ordinary circumstances, a player of his achievement should be revered at Anfield. Sadly, these are not ordinary circumstances. Souness does not tend to be on the guest list when the old boys are invited to Anfield these days. You will not see a banner paying homage to him on the Kop and, though his achievements can never be airbrushed from Liverpool’s glory years, if you were to click on the website that is devoted to the club’s history, its verdict on Souness can be boiled down to this: being a great footballer does not automatically make that person a great football man. Souness will always be part of the nostalgia, but most Liverpool followers cut him free a long time ago. Or, rather, he cut himself free, depending on your viewpoint.

 

A younger generation of football supporters might not even fully understand what happened to make it this way. It has, after all, been nearly three decades since the acrimony began and, once the relationship had broken down, there has never been any hint of rapprochement. It would be nice to think there is still time for that to change. Realistically, though, I am not sure. It is not easy to see a day when it will ever be fixed properly.

 

All of which makes it a tricky subject to write about given the sensitivities attached to this story, the considerable evidence that time is not a healer in this instance and, above all, the attitude on Merseyside that they have it hard enough without being let down by someone they took in as one of their own.

 

In particular when it involves the club’s relationship with the newspaper that had previously given its readers “The Truth”, its notorious version of the Hillsborough disaster, involving untrue stories of supporters stealing from the dead and urinating on corpses.

 

For those not familiar with the background, it is 27 years now since Souness was paid for an interview in the Sun (he says the money went to Alder Hey children’s hospital). It was dumb in any circumstances, as the then Liverpool manager, not to understand there would be a serious backlash. Yet it was the timing, more than anything, that explains why so many people have never fully accepted his apology and why Liverpool, the club that love to portray themselves as a family, no longer embrace him in the way they do their other greats.

 

Souness had conducted the interview while he was convalescing from the heart surgery that he had towards the end of the 1991‑92 season. The idea was for the interview to run in tandem with Liverpool reaching the FA Cup final. Yet their replayed semi-final against Portsmouth, played on a Monday evening, went to extra time and penalties, taking it past the newspaper’s first deadline, and that meant the interview was pushed back a day – to 15 April, which just happened to be the third anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy.

 

It was a front-page splash, featuring a cheesy “Loverpool” headline, a staged photograph of Souness smooching with his new girlfriend and published, oafishly, on the day Anfield was hosting a memorial service. Even now, it beggars belief that any Liverpool manager, especially one who was supposed to understand the club, could mess up so spectacularly.

 

Against that kind of background, can you ever see a day when Souness will be forgiven? In an ideal world, yes, though I hesitate to say that for fear of it coming across that I am recommending that is what should happen. For starters, I doubt very much that Liverpool’s supporters would appreciate being told how to think when I am sure they can do that for themselves. It is not my role to determine what should happen next and, just because it is football, that doesn’t mean it is immune to what happens in real life – human beings upsetting other human beings, grudges festering, attitudes hardening. It doesn’t always end in a group hug.

 

What can be said is that if you saw Souness talking about it on Sky recently you would have seen what looked like genuine and deeply felt remorse. Souness is clearly pained that he could have been so reckless with people’s grief. “I should have resigned there and then,” he writes in his 2017 autobiography. “It ultimately soured my relationship with the Liverpool supporters forever and it’s something I deeply regret. If I could turn one thing round in my football career, it would be that.”

 

The question, perhaps, is whether he cares enough, all these years on, to want to do anything about it. Even then, it might not do him any good whatsoever to pick at an old scab. But it puzzles me slightly that someone in that position would not, say, write to the Liverpool Echo or use his column in the Sunday Times to offer, in full, some kind of long-form contrition. Where is the mea culpa? If he wishes it could be different, has he ever thought the only person who can possibly change that is himself? Has he approached the Hillsborough groups or Spirit of Shankly or any of the other supporter organisations? Or maybe, again, he is not wired that way. Has he just accepted, as seems to be the case, that it is done now and too late to change anything?

 

The explanation Souness put forward initially was that he had been managing in Scotland at the time of Hillsborough and, not being on Merseyside, misjudged the depth of outrage that led to Liverpool supporters boycotting the Sun. All these years later, it doesn’t wash. It didn’t then, either, particularly as there were reports that he had banned his players from speaking to the newspaper. Yet it was true that in 1992 the club were still dealing with the Sun.

 

Mike Ellis, who was then the Sun’s Merseyside football correspondent, was never ostracised and Souness claimed Ian Rush and Tommy Smith, both Liverpool legends, had public dealings with its reporters without any reprisals. Ellis had retained a direct line to the top of the club. Indeed, the story goes that Liverpool’s then chief executive, Peter Robinson, talked Ellis out of resigning. It was not until years later that the club marginalised, then barred, the newspaper that the Liverpool Echo now spells with an asterisk between the “S” and the “n” Plus it tends to be forgotten that, somehow, Souness continued as manager for nearly two years.

 

Not that this is an excuse or that his opponents will say he has even the shadow of a leg to stand on. Souness has stated before that he has no defence and, ultimately, the only part of this story on which everyone can probably agree is that this could all have been avoided.

 

“It should not be like this for Graeme Souness, explaining where it all went wrong,” Simon Hughes writes in Men In White Suits, his excellent book on Liverpool in the 1990s. “Souness should be in line with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard whenever Liverpool’s greatest post-war players are mentioned.” But it is like this and one of the saddest things is that nobody, including the man himself, seems willing to explore, over a quarter of a century on, if there is any way back.

 

[VladimirIlyich]

8 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2019/may/05/will-sun-ever-set-on-rift-graeme-souness-liverpool

 

Will the sun ever set on rift between Graeme Souness and Liverpool?

Daniel Taylor

 

 

Perhaps you may have seen that clip recently of Graeme Souness getting so worked up in the television studios about the jargon of modern football, so aggrieved by what he perceives to be the loss of old-fashioned values, that he has a fit of pique and ends up flinging his pen across the desk in front of him.

 

It is classic Souness: dyspeptic, unflinching, never one for concealing his feelings. It is a big part of what makes him so watchable as a pundit. Everything will be fine, then something will prick his temper. Something you or I may not even notice that, in his eyes, is an affront to the profession. Souness isn’t wired to tolerate mediocrity. He cannot accept the idea there are footballers who might not possess the devotion that underpinned his own successes. Nor is he ever going to hold back when something has jarred those hair-trigger sensibilities. 

 

The last time I saw him in the flesh the handshake was everything you would imagine: vice-like. For someone with such a hard reputation, there is actually a soothing, mellifluous quality to that Edinburgh accent. Yet he still has an aura. It is all in the eyes, testing you, probing you, letting you know that, if you ever did upset him, it is not completely out of the question that he might invite you to step outside, the old-fashioned way, as I once saw happen in his days as Blackburn manager with a journalist in a post‑match press conference. Souness, to give him his due, did eventually put everyone at ease by clarifying there would be no violence. Though it wasn’t easy to be sure if we could take him at his word, or if he had simply worked out the rest of us could be useful witnesses.

 

He turns 66 on Monday and it is just a pity, perhaps, that one of the finest footballers of his generation might always be viewed through hard, suspicious eyes when it comes to the city where he spent the more gratifying parts of his playing career. Souness was a great player for Liverpool, a truly great player, in a golden age for the club: three European Cups, five league championships, three League Cups and four seasons when he won a place in the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year.

 

Souness was the captain in a dominant period of the club’s history, a midfield titan who can be unfairly characterised sometimes because of his reputation for being fearless and, on occasions, downright nasty. There was more to Souness than embedding his studs in the limbs of various opponents. His greatness was because he combined those warrior instincts with subtlety, vision and football intelligence. He was, in the words of the sportswriter David Miller, “a bear of a man with the touch of a violinist”.

 

In ordinary circumstances, a player of his achievement should be revered at Anfield. Sadly, these are not ordinary circumstances. Souness does not tend to be on the guest list when the old boys are invited to Anfield these days. You will not see a banner paying homage to him on the Kop and, though his achievements can never be airbrushed from Liverpool’s glory years, if you were to click on the website that is devoted to the club’s history, its verdict on Souness can be boiled down to this: being a great footballer does not automatically make that person a great football man. Souness will always be part of the nostalgia, but most Liverpool followers cut him free a long time ago. Or, rather, he cut himself free, depending on your viewpoint.

 

A younger generation of football supporters might not even fully understand what happened to make it this way. It has, after all, been nearly three decades since the acrimony began and, once the relationship had broken down, there has never been any hint of rapprochement. It would be nice to think there is still time for that to change. Realistically, though, I am not sure. It is not easy to see a day when it will ever be fixed properly.

 

All of which makes it a tricky subject to write about given the sensitivities attached to this story, the considerable evidence that time is not a healer in this instance and, above all, the attitude on Merseyside that they have it hard enough without being let down by someone they took in as one of their own.

 

In particular when it involves the club’s relationship with the newspaper that had previously given its readers “The Truth”, its notorious version of the Hillsborough disaster, involving untrue stories of supporters stealing from the dead and urinating on corpses.

 

For those not familiar with the background, it is 27 years now since Souness was paid for an interview in the Sun (he says the money went to Alder Hey children’s hospital). It was dumb in any circumstances, as the then Liverpool manager, not to understand there would be a serious backlash. Yet it was the timing, more than anything, that explains why so many people have never fully accepted his apology and why Liverpool, the club that love to portray themselves as a family, no longer embrace him in the way they do their other greats.

 

Souness had conducted the interview while he was convalescing from the heart surgery that he had towards the end of the 1991‑92 season. The idea was for the interview to run in tandem with Liverpool reaching the FA Cup final. Yet their replayed semi-final against Portsmouth, played on a Monday evening, went to extra time and penalties, taking it past the newspaper’s first deadline, and that meant the interview was pushed back a day – to 15 April, which just happened to be the third anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy.

 

It was a front-page splash, featuring a cheesy “Loverpool” headline, a staged photograph of Souness smooching with his new girlfriend and published, oafishly, on the day Anfield was hosting a memorial service. Even now, it beggars belief that any Liverpool manager, especially one who was supposed to understand the club, could mess up so spectacularly.

 

Against that kind of background, can you ever see a day when Souness will be forgiven? In an ideal world, yes, though I hesitate to say that for fear of it coming across that I am recommending that is what should happen. For starters, I doubt very much that Liverpool’s supporters would appreciate being told how to think when I am sure they can do that for themselves. It is not my role to determine what should happen next and, just because it is football, that doesn’t mean it is immune to what happens in real life – human beings upsetting other human beings, grudges festering, attitudes hardening. It doesn’t always end in a group hug.

 

What can be said is that if you saw Souness talking about it on Sky recently you would have seen what looked like genuine and deeply felt remorse. Souness is clearly pained that he could have been so reckless with people’s grief. “I should have resigned there and then,” he writes in his 2017 autobiography. “It ultimately soured my relationship with the Liverpool supporters forever and it’s something I deeply regret. If I could turn one thing round in my football career, it would be that.”

 

The question, perhaps, is whether he cares enough, all these years on, to want to do anything about it. Even then, it might not do him any good whatsoever to pick at an old scab. But it puzzles me slightly that someone in that position would not, say, write to the Liverpool Echo or use his column in the Sunday Times to offer, in full, some kind of long-form contrition. Where is the mea culpa? If he wishes it could be different, has he ever thought the only person who can possibly change that is himself? Has he approached the Hillsborough groups or Spirit of Shankly or any of the other supporter organisations? Or maybe, again, he is not wired that way. Has he just accepted, as seems to be the case, that it is done now and too late to change anything?

 

The explanation Souness put forward initially was that he had been managing in Scotland at the time of Hillsborough and, not being on Merseyside, misjudged the depth of outrage that led to Liverpool supporters boycotting the Sun. All these years later, it doesn’t wash. It didn’t then, either, particularly as there were reports that he had banned his players from speaking to the newspaper. Yet it was true that in 1992 the club were still dealing with the Sun.

 

Mike Ellis, who was then the Sun’s Merseyside football correspondent, was never ostracised and Souness claimed Ian Rush and Tommy Smith, both Liverpool legends, had public dealings with its reporters without any reprisals. Ellis had retained a direct line to the top of the club. Indeed, the story goes that Liverpool’s then chief executive, Peter Robinson, talked Ellis out of resigning. It was not until years later that the club marginalised, then barred, the newspaper that the Liverpool Echo now spells with an asterisk between the “S” and the “n” Plus it tends to be forgotten that, somehow, Souness continued as manager for nearly two years.

 

Not that this is an excuse or that his opponents will say he has even the shadow of a leg to stand on. Souness has stated before that he has no defence and, ultimately, the only part of this story on which everyone can probably agree is that this could all have been avoided.

 

“It should not be like this for Graeme Souness, explaining where it all went wrong,” Simon Hughes writes in Men In White Suits, his excellent book on Liverpool in the 1990s. “Souness should be in line with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard whenever Liverpool’s greatest post-war players are mentioned.” But it is like this and one of the saddest things is that nobody, including the man himself, seems willing to explore, over a quarter of a century on, if there is any way back.

 

I didn't even realise myself that his interview in the shitrag was published on April 15th as I have never even picked a copy of it up since some time in the early 80s. My feelings are simply to do with associating with it at all regardless of dates of publication but that timing doesn't help placate me any less.

[Trumo]

Quote

Souness isn’t wired to tolerate mediocrity. He cannot accept the idea there are footballers who might not possess the devotion that underpinned his own successes.

 

This is the guy who signed Neil Ruddock.

[magicrat]

On 26/10/2018 at 18:40, Geoff Strong said:

Souness the player a legend simple as that, Souness the manager a disaster tore up a decent team and bought average at best replacement, as for Souness the man obviously flawed and made a couple of very serious errors. 

 

Personally though i just want to remember the player at his Jaw Breaking best.

Yeh agreed, Best pundit on the box these days ,

He was terrible manager and very arrogant . That article was diabolical and something he will never live down but he knows that I'm sure. I for one can let it go after all these years although I'll never forget it.

[Jennings]

He fucked up.

 

I can forgive.

 

He's a legend. 

[Bjornebye]

I like his punditry and realise that he was arguably our best ever midfielder. A player that we could do with on any given day. Criminally underrated as a player.

 

That said. The guy used to be an absolute cunt. 

[Barrington Womble]

I've always had the thought that when Souness agreed to do that piece, his brain just couldn't have been in the right place. I'm not trying to excuse it, it just stands to reason that someone who played at his level, was still training with the players, could possibly have seen that coming and had to deal very quickly with all of a sudden at such a young age not being invincible and a triple heart bypass back then was a much more dangerous op than it is today, and it's no walk in he park today! And then by he time he realised he needed to defend what he had done, he was not mature enough to admit he had made a mistake and instead tried to weasel out by claiming he didn't understand. That was insulting to us all. 

 

Having said all that, I find it really hard to forgive. I can't help but like souness when I watch him on sky, then I just remember all that stuff from back then. I think actually that guardian article hits the nail on he head. He needs to be honest with the fans. Publicly step away from his original stance that he didn't understand and all that shite. Just say he was a tit, his head was up his arse and he was just a thoughtless prick. He's had a lot of years to try and make up what he did and he can't fix that now, but I think if he held is hands up with a sorry about me speech, it would go a long way. It would for me. 

 

It is a shame he's not seen as a legend of the club, he's without doubt one of the finest players to ever pull on the shirt. His attitude and will to win as a player epitomises everything the club should stand for. Yet he has nobody else to blame by doing what he did. 

[Lee909]

I genuinely hope there can be something sorted before he's gone. The man 66 and it would be terrible if it was left too late imo. The damage is done and he will never have the accolades his play deserves. 

 

When you read what a prick Tommy Smith was to Howard Gayle

 

Jan Molby drink driving

 

Bruce Grobbelar allegedly throwing games

 

Yet they where all welcome back

Yes he majorly fucked up. It was inexcusable but all these years later forgivable for me. Only need to see that interview a year back to see it hurts him. 

 

Would hate to see it left till its too late. 

[No2]

Not sure what that article is looking to achieve. He said his piece on Monday night football last year, its clear as day he is remorseful but again what is the journalist hoping for? Does he want a welcoming back ceremony for a person that isn't even officially unwelcome? There can never be a universal forgiveness, no one gets to decide for everyone else, it is up to every one individually to forgive or not.

 

Personally I have forgiven him but i was only 11 back then so its not my forgiveness he is after. I wonder is he still good friends with his former team mates? Maybe one of those can send some positive PR in his direction.

[Aventus]

6 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2019/may/05/will-sun-ever-set-on-rift-graeme-souness-liverpool

 

Will the sun ever set on rift between Graeme Souness and Liverpool?

Daniel Taylor

 

 

Perhaps you may have seen that clip recently of Graeme Souness getting so worked up in the television studios about the jargon of modern football, so aggrieved by what he perceives to be the loss of old-fashioned values, that he has a fit of pique and ends up flinging his pen across the desk in front of him.

 

It is classic Souness: dyspeptic, unflinching, never one for concealing his feelings. It is a big part of what makes him so watchable as a pundit. Everything will be fine, then something will prick his temper. Something you or I may not even notice that, in his eyes, is an affront to the profession. Souness isn’t wired to tolerate mediocrity. He cannot accept the idea there are footballers who might not possess the devotion that underpinned his own successes. Nor is he ever going to hold back when something has jarred those hair-trigger sensibilities. 

 

The last time I saw him in the flesh the handshake was everything you would imagine: vice-like. For someone with such a hard reputation, there is actually a soothing, mellifluous quality to that Edinburgh accent. Yet he still has an aura. It is all in the eyes, testing you, probing you, letting you know that, if you ever did upset him, it is not completely out of the question that he might invite you to step outside, the old-fashioned way, as I once saw happen in his days as Blackburn manager with a journalist in a post‑match press conference. Souness, to give him his due, did eventually put everyone at ease by clarifying there would be no violence. Though it wasn’t easy to be sure if we could take him at his word, or if he had simply worked out the rest of us could be useful witnesses.

 

He turns 66 on Monday and it is just a pity, perhaps, that one of the finest footballers of his generation might always be viewed through hard, suspicious eyes when it comes to the city where he spent the more gratifying parts of his playing career. Souness was a great player for Liverpool, a truly great player, in a golden age for the club: three European Cups, five league championships, three League Cups and four seasons when he won a place in the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year.

 

Souness was the captain in a dominant period of the club’s history, a midfield titan who can be unfairly characterised sometimes because of his reputation for being fearless and, on occasions, downright nasty. There was more to Souness than embedding his studs in the limbs of various opponents. His greatness was because he combined those warrior instincts with subtlety, vision and football intelligence. He was, in the words of the sportswriter David Miller, “a bear of a man with the touch of a violinist”.

 

In ordinary circumstances, a player of his achievement should be revered at Anfield. Sadly, these are not ordinary circumstances. Souness does not tend to be on the guest list when the old boys are invited to Anfield these days. You will not see a banner paying homage to him on the Kop and, though his achievements can never be airbrushed from Liverpool’s glory years, if you were to click on the website that is devoted to the club’s history, its verdict on Souness can be boiled down to this: being a great footballer does not automatically make that person a great football man. Souness will always be part of the nostalgia, but most Liverpool followers cut him free a long time ago. Or, rather, he cut himself free, depending on your viewpoint.

 

A younger generation of football supporters might not even fully understand what happened to make it this way. It has, after all, been nearly three decades since the acrimony began and, once the relationship had broken down, there has never been any hint of rapprochement. It would be nice to think there is still time for that to change. Realistically, though, I am not sure. It is not easy to see a day when it will ever be fixed properly.

 

All of which makes it a tricky subject to write about given the sensitivities attached to this story, the considerable evidence that time is not a healer in this instance and, above all, the attitude on Merseyside that they have it hard enough without being let down by someone they took in as one of their own.

 

In particular when it involves the club’s relationship with the newspaper that had previously given its readers “The Truth”, its notorious version of the Hillsborough disaster, involving untrue stories of supporters stealing from the dead and urinating on corpses.

 

For those not familiar with the background, it is 27 years now since Souness was paid for an interview in the Sun (he says the money went to Alder Hey children’s hospital). It was dumb in any circumstances, as the then Liverpool manager, not to understand there would be a serious backlash. Yet it was the timing, more than anything, that explains why so many people have never fully accepted his apology and why Liverpool, the club that love to portray themselves as a family, no longer embrace him in the way they do their other greats.

 

Souness had conducted the interview while he was convalescing from the heart surgery that he had towards the end of the 1991‑92 season. The idea was for the interview to run in tandem with Liverpool reaching the FA Cup final. Yet their replayed semi-final against Portsmouth, played on a Monday evening, went to extra time and penalties, taking it past the newspaper’s first deadline, and that meant the interview was pushed back a day – to 15 April, which just happened to be the third anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy.

 

It was a front-page splash, featuring a cheesy “Loverpool” headline, a staged photograph of Souness smooching with his new girlfriend and published, oafishly, on the day Anfield was hosting a memorial service. Even now, it beggars belief that any Liverpool manager, especially one who was supposed to understand the club, could mess up so spectacularly.

 

Against that kind of background, can you ever see a day when Souness will be forgiven? In an ideal world, yes, though I hesitate to say that for fear of it coming across that I am recommending that is what should happen. For starters, I doubt very much that Liverpool’s supporters would appreciate being told how to think when I am sure they can do that for themselves. It is not my role to determine what should happen next and, just because it is football, that doesn’t mean it is immune to what happens in real life – human beings upsetting other human beings, grudges festering, attitudes hardening. It doesn’t always end in a group hug.

 

What can be said is that if you saw Souness talking about it on Sky recently you would have seen what looked like genuine and deeply felt remorse. Souness is clearly pained that he could have been so reckless with people’s grief. “I should have resigned there and then,” he writes in his 2017 autobiography. “It ultimately soured my relationship with the Liverpool supporters forever and it’s something I deeply regret. If I could turn one thing round in my football career, it would be that.”

 

The question, perhaps, is whether he cares enough, all these years on, to want to do anything about it. Even then, it might not do him any good whatsoever to pick at an old scab. But it puzzles me slightly that someone in that position would not, say, write to the Liverpool Echo or use his column in the Sunday Times to offer, in full, some kind of long-form contrition. Where is the mea culpa? If he wishes it could be different, has he ever thought the only person who can possibly change that is himself? Has he approached the Hillsborough groups or Spirit of Shankly or any of the other supporter organisations? Or maybe, again, he is not wired that way. Has he just accepted, as seems to be the case, that it is done now and too late to change anything?

 

The explanation Souness put forward initially was that he had been managing in Scotland at the time of Hillsborough and, not being on Merseyside, misjudged the depth of outrage that led to Liverpool supporters boycotting the Sun. All these years later, it doesn’t wash. It didn’t then, either, particularly as there were reports that he had banned his players from speaking to the newspaper. Yet it was true that in 1992 the club were still dealing with the Sun.

 

Mike Ellis, who was then the Sun’s Merseyside football correspondent, was never ostracised and Souness claimed Ian Rush and Tommy Smith, both Liverpool legends, had public dealings with its reporters without any reprisals. Ellis had retained a direct line to the top of the club. Indeed, the story goes that Liverpool’s then chief executive, Peter Robinson, talked Ellis out of resigning. It was not until years later that the club marginalised, then barred, the newspaper that the Liverpool Echo now spells with an asterisk between the “S” and the “n” Plus it tends to be forgotten that, somehow, Souness continued as manager for nearly two years.

 

Not that this is an excuse or that his opponents will say he has even the shadow of a leg to stand on. Souness has stated before that he has no defence and, ultimately, the only part of this story on which everyone can probably agree is that this could all have been avoided.

 

“It should not be like this for Graeme Souness, explaining where it all went wrong,” Simon Hughes writes in Men In White Suits, his excellent book on Liverpool in the 1990s. “Souness should be in line with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard whenever Liverpool’s greatest post-war players are mentioned.” But it is like this and one of the saddest things is that nobody, including the man himself, seems willing to explore, over a quarter of a century on, if there is any way back.

 

I hope the cunt is proud of himself for including a pun of the shitrag in the title of that article. 

[Strontium]

People should always be forgiven if they are genuinely contrite.

 

[Bjornebye]

4 hours ago, Barry Wom said:

I've always had the thought that when Souness agreed to do that piece, his brain just couldn't have been in the right place. I'm not trying to excuse it, it just stands to reason that someone who played at his level, was still training with the players, could possibly have seen that coming and had to deal very quickly with all of a sudden at such a young age not being invincible and a triple heart bypass back then was a much more dangerous op than it is today, and it's no walk in he park today! And then by he time he realised he needed to defend what he had done, he was not mature enough to admit he had made a mistake and instead tried to weasel out by claiming he didn't understand. That was insulting to us all. 

 

Having said all that, I find it really hard to forgive. I can't help but like souness when I watch him on sky, then I just remember all that stuff from back then. I think actually that guardian article hits the nail on he head. He needs to be honest with the fans. Publicly step away from his original stance that he didn't understand and all that shite. Just say he was a tit, his head was up his arse and he was just a thoughtless prick. He's had a lot of years to try and make up what he did and he can't fix that now, but I think if he held is hands up with a sorry about me speech, it would go a long way. It would for me. 

 

It is a shame he's not seen as a legend of the club, he's without doubt one of the finest players to ever pull on the shirt. His attitude and will to win as a player epitomises everything the club should stand for. Yet he has nobody else to blame by doing what he did. 

To be fair to him he pretty  much has said that.