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A bloody good Reade


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For any insomniacs or those also lodged down under, excerpts from Brian Reade's book 43 Years With The Same Bird (extracts nicked from the Mirror):

 

"43 years with the same bird - Brian Reade's love affair with Liverpool FC

Brian Reade on his love affair with Liverpool FC

It has been a lifelong romance - and like any love affair, it's had its moments of joy and misery. Here we publish extracts from Daily Mirror columnist Brian Reade's brilliant new book on his life as a Liverpool fan...

 

 

1965 MY FIRST GAME, AT BOLTON

 

I was perched on my dad's shoulders at the back of a sprawling terrace surveying a sea of heads: flat-capped, bald, plastered with grease, flowing for what seemed like miles down to a bright green carpet.

I spent most of the time entranced by the white brilliance of the floodlights, staring at the pigeons chasing each other across the stand roof, wondering if everyone else was as bored as me.

In the early months of 1965 football was about as appealing as Winston Churchill's funeral. Actually, not quite as appealing. When that long, dirgeful parade unfolded on my Irish nana's telly she made me howl with laughter by yelling "Go od riddance, you dirty whore-master."

Agoal was scrambled and we were sucked a dozen yards down the terrace, Reg swaying like barley in a hurricane, shifting his balance from right foot to left in an attempt to keep me on his shoulders. It was the first thrill of the afternoon.

"How long left?" I asked. But by now only groans were leaving his mouth. He'd slipped a disc and had to put me down.

And there I stood in a black world of my own, staring at a man's overcoat which smelt of pipes and dogs, catching hairs in my mouth, gutted that Ian St John hadn't scored with a spectacular diving header I could recreate in the playground.

Reconstructing a fluke that went in off Ian Callaghan's arse didn't carry quite the same kudos.

 

 

1971 MEETING THE MESSIAH

Bill Shankly's bare manhood stood three feet away from me. OK, stood is an exaggeration. We were getting on well, but not that well.

Slacks with a crease that could shave a werewolf's four-day shadow had been removed and placed on a dressing-room hook with his left hand. In his right was a pair of crumpled shorts so old you could smell the Boot Room on them. Then a question: "What school are you from again, son?"

"De La Salle."

And the shorts, which had made their way to the expectant toes of his left foot, were abruptly pulled away.

"A rugby school?"

"No. Football."

Relief. Then animation.

"Thank Christ for that. I hate rugby. I remember turning up at a new Air Force post inWales and asking for a football. This officer says to me 'We don't play football here, only rugby.' So I says right, give me a rugby ball and I'll squeeze it intee a fitball."

He burst into a raucous laugh and began to squeeze an imaginary oval ball into around shape. "Christ, it's funny what things come back to you. I'd forgotten all about that."

Let's get this straight. I'm joshing away with Bill Shankly at Melwood training ground like a groom and best man before a stag night.

I've been in his company only five minutes and he's already told me a story nobody has ever heard before. Granted, in the league table of Shankly anecdotes it's six points behind Stenhousemuir. But it's mine to drop casually into conversations for eternity.

As this dawns on me a shiver jolts the blood.

There's a sigh I have to emit in short bursts for fear of being sucked inside out. Fear drifts from my brain, spreading down to feet doing epileptic taps. It's a feeling I would experience over the next 30 years of professional life before doing an interview.

But I would never feel the pure rush of pride I felt that June morning, knowing that whatever miserable hand life might deal, my self-esteem would never scrape a barrel's bottom. I would always be able to look a boss, a foe or a put-down merchant in the eye and tell them that Bill Shankly once shared a unique anecdote with me.

With his pride and joy dangling in my eye-line. At 17, life could only go downhill. PS: Huge. Obviously.

 

 

1989 RETURNING HOME FROM HILLSBOROUGH

 

The anger spilled out and I just started yelling at the telly. I screamed about people being dead because they didn't count.

About kids turning blue as they begged to be let out of cages and being ignored because police had been conditioned to view them as criminals.

I screamed about alsatian dogs making it into the ground but not ambulances. About the instinctive reaction being to keep the animals segregated and in their pens.

That way if there's any trouble the ones who'll get hurt will be their own kind. And they're only football fans.

I had the worst sleep of my life in which I seemed to sweat out my body weight. A recurring dream started, which would stay with me for months, in which black figures shaped like Edvard Munch's The Scream were being sucked up to the sky, gathering above and looking down at me in total silence.

I tried to climb up to them but couldn't.

When I awoke it felt as though a juggernaut had been driven into my central nervous system. Complete lethargy hit my body. I didn't want to read anything or speak to anyone. I just wanted to be on my own with my desolation.

I still let it out occasionally when no one is looking. Not at anything as specific as the anniversary but at random, unrelated things which remind me of that day.

They come at you sideways, these little prompts, and catch you unawares. You don't see them until it's too late. And then, like the wind, they're gone. A sunny spring morning. A Bangles song. A digital clock showing 3.06. A 96 bus.

Seeing the excitement on kids' faces as their pace picks up when the gates of a football stadium loom into view.

I let it out for all those young people we left behind in Sheffield - more than 80 per cent of the 96 were under 30 - and their families who've been saddled with such an awful burden ever since.

And I hope I always will.

 

 

1994 FINDING OUT YOUR SON'S A BLUE

 

Nothing can prepare you for that conversation with your son about the pivotal facts of life. No booklet, friend, shrink or agony aunt.

You just have to take it in your stride and flounder.

"Dad," said seven-year-old Phil, pulling back my duvet and interrupting a mind locked deep into slumber after a six-hour Friday night drive back from London.

"I've got something to tell you."

"What is it, son?" I mumble.

"I'm an Everton fan."

My head froze. "And I want the kit." My heart stopped.

"Can we go to the Everton shop today?"

My sphincter snapped.

He'd decided on a lifetime's loyalty to Everton in the days I'd been down in London.

A lifetime's sharing all of Liverpool's highs and lows lost for ever.

Why did I overlook a father's most basic task of ensuring his son enters the correct faith? I'd tried to get him interested in football, but when he didn't bite I thought better than to push it on to him.

So I'd played it cool and assumed his love for Liverpool would find him as it found me. It was such rampant neglect I should have been hauled away by social services.

I lay in bed trying to salvage something from the wreck that was my existence. It wasn't that bad. At least he liked football.

I decided it was on a par with him telling me he was gay. I'm shocked and saddened now at the inevitable future pleasures I'll be deprived of, but it might just be a phase. A scream for attention from a confused kid.

He needed my full support.

However painful it might seem, I was taking him to the Goodison Megastore. Even if he went for the double of kicking me in the balls and the wallet by asking for the name CADAMARTERI on the back his shirt.

 

 

2005 ISTANBUL - THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

 

Pandemonium. Grown men tumbling over plastic seats, falling and not caring where they land.

A mother in tears, shaking, clutching her hyp er - ventilating daughter.

Shirtless men, heads between their knees. Crashing music.

Fireworks.

A blinding headache.

Being stood on, not caring, kissing someone I had never seen before and never will again.

Down on the pitch, men in red, some on their haunches, alone in thought, others vaulting advertising hoardings and diving into the fans. Players in white, collapsed on the turf.

A scoreboard, high above now-deserted Milan seats. A blazing neon sheet, blocking out stars in the dark sky above a wasteland somewhere outside the old city of Constantinople. A clock moving towards one o'clock.

I'd never passed on the facts of life, or laid down the law about men having to do what they had to do. But there and then, I felt the most important piece of advice a father could ever pass on to his son speeding from my brain to my lips.

I pulled Phil so close his face touched mine.

"Look at that scoreboard: '3-3. Liverpool, champions.' And remember how it looked at half-time.

And how you were dead inside. And whenever you feel life's beaten you, think of this scoreboard and realise that anything, anything is possible. Will you do that for me?"

He nodded. I gulped.

 

 

Brian Reade: I thought Graeme Souness would chin me!

 

Exclusive extracts from Brian Reade's new book on his Liverpool love affair - DAY 2

By Brian Reade 30/06/2008

 

It has been a lifelong romance - and like any love affair, it's had its moments of joy and misery. Here we publish extracts from Daily Mirror columnist Brian Reade's brilliant new book on his life as a Liverpool fan...

 

 

2003 GRAEME SOUNESS - THE DAY I FEARED HE WANTED MY BLOOD

 

The hotel cellar bar, an hour after the filming of the Daily Mirror's Pride Of Britain Awards, is a mass of sozzled luvvies, daytime TV celebrities, and journalist execs.

From out of the scrum of backs a stocky figure in a dark suit turns to show me his bronzed face and moustache, gives me a steely glare, grabs my hand, crushes it, then mutters in a sinister Edinburgh drawl: "Ah, the bast**d who got me the sack. I've waited 10 years to meet you."

Oh no. It's Graeme Souness . Now I really need a drink. Because if his memory is as good as it seems, pretty soon I'll be lying on a hard bed with the signNIL BY MOUTH hanging above my head. Me and Graeme Souness had history.

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I wouldn't go as far as to say I got him the sack when he was Liverpool manager. He made a good fist of that himself. I just tried, very hard, to ensure it happened.

In fact, I tried relentlessly in my Liverpool Echo column for 20 months, from the day he hoovered up blood money from the Sun on the third anniversary of Hillsborough until the day he walked out of Anfield in January 1994. A walk that lifted my soul more than Nelson Mandela's stroll from Victor Verster prison four years previously. "You two bast**ds at the Echo. You and Tommy Smith. You made my job impossible," he said, still crushing my hand and moving his face closer to mine, making me think he was about to do an impression of his doppelganger, Yosser Hughes, and lay the head on me. Then he smiled and offered me a drink. And we talked. A decade had passed and he'd mellowed considerably. Until I told him that whatever I thought of him as a manager, he was one of the greatest players ever to wear the shirt. That's when the charmer vanished and the snarler came back out.

"Awhh, do me a favour, will ya? Don't patronise me. Every time I meet a Liverpool fan they tell me I was a fantastic player but a sh*te manager. And it p*sses me off no end."

I said nothing. I didn't need to because my eyes said it for me: "But you were, Graeme. You were."

If I became a bin-man tomorrow, I'd have Liverpool the cleanest city on Earth

I realised I'd never heard such clear footballing logic in my my life. He had clinical authority

It triggered relieved laughter from sycophants in the Press pack as he stared at me triumphantly

If his memory is as good as it seems, I'll be lying on a hard bed with the sign NIL BY MOUTH

 

 

1975 BILL SHANKLY

 

When he spoke of Liverpool it was as though he were talking about a love he had rashly abandoned. As though he'd jilted a woman for all the right reasons, but then realised she was the irreplaceable passion of his life and he would never have her back. His soulmate gone for ever.

"You see Melwood," he said when I asked him what the club was like when he arrived in 1959. "It was a wasteland. I built it with these hands. Every blade of grass. Every single brick."

I could tell he was beating himself up for retiring too soon, searching for something to fill the great void in his existence, and failing woefully.

He had no other interests. He hated holidays, didn't have the patience for books, cinema or theatre and all he'd watch on the TV, apart from the occasional old film, was football.

Football was his drug. And he had sentenced himself to a life of cold turkey.

But he still had the fire of socialism burning in his soul. It was of his essence. "If I became a bin-man tomorrow," he told me, "I'd be the greatest bin-man who ever lived. I'd have Liverpool the cleanest city on Earth.

"I'd have everyone working with me, succeeding and sharing out the success. I'd make sure they were paid a decent wage with the best bonuses and that we all worked hard to achieve our goals.

"Some people might say, 'ah but they're only bin-men, why do we need to reward them so well for a job anyone can do', but I'd ask them why they believe they are more important than a bin-man.

"I'd ask them how proud they'd feel if this dirty city became the cleanest in the world? And who would have made them proud? The bin-men."

 

 

1989 BOB PAISLEY - AFTER INTERVIEWING HIM I FELT LEFT I'D JUST HAD AN AUDIENCE WITH GANDHI

 

Bob Paisley was a few months short of his 72nd birthday, six years into his retirement, and living in a Woolton semi with his wife Jessie.

Due to the onset of Alzheimers it turned out to be one of the last times he would be capable of sharing his memories in public with any real lucidity.

He appeared to be struggling with the most basic of questions, mumbling back in broken sentences, looking away, going off on what appeared to be disjointed tangents. But as the conversation went on I realised I'd never heard such clear footballing logic in my life.

There was a calm but clinical authority to his words. At the end it felt like I'd just had an audience with Gandhi.

He gave me a story I'd never heard before. A Paisleyism to treasure: "Shanks was always encouraging all sorts of lads to come down to Anfield and get treatment for injuries. One day I was in my room and I heard him in the corridor telling this lad: 'What you've got there is no problem, son. Bobby Paisley will sort you out. He can fix anything. There's his room. Tell him I sent you'.

"And this poor young fella comes in in a wheelchair. Just sitting there looking up at me, believing I could cure him because Bill had told him I could. It was so sad. The lad was crippled. That was Bill. He'd think just by telling someone something it would make them believe in themselves." Two of his most telling utterances shed light on how Liverpool maintained their supremacy for so long. When he went to judge a player one thought was uppermost: "The first few yards are all in the head."

When asked to define the essence of Liverpool, he replied: "If you're lost in a fog you stick together. That way you don't get lost. If there's a secret to us, that's it."

 

 

1990 KENNY DALGLISH

 

"What's that? I don't understand you," growled Kenny Dalglish, leaving me feeling lower than a flea on a pile on a limbo-dancer's bum.

At a press conference ahead of Liverpool's 1990-91- season opener at Sheffield United, I'd asked a harmless question: "Is it a problem facing a newly promoted team like Sheffield United because they're an unknown quantity?" not out of any concern for the answer, but because, at 33, I still got a stalker's thrill talking to Kenny.

The problem was he didn't want to talk to me. A few days earlier I'd written a piece saying Liverpool might struggle to retain their title, which gave him further evidence that I was an impertinent little toe-rag.

My punishment was complete when he asked what type of club doesn't have the opposition watched and what kind of football reporter thinks Liverpool would sack all their scouts? It triggered relieved laughter from sycophants in the Press pack as he stared at me triumphantly.

You have to have been publicly shamed by a man you've idolised for years to know how crushed it leaves you. I didn't blame Dalglish. He held a view, always had, that the thoughts of journalists who have never played the game professionally should be treated with contempt.

And maybe he's right. Who are we, who sit ample-girthed before laptops, to tell those who have done it at the highest level where they are going wrong?

But I knew then that I had to get out of this job before it destroyed my faith in football. They say if you get too near to the flame, you get burned. I walked out of Anfield that day like Joan of Arc seconds after sparks licked her tootsies."

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Great Post.....

 

 

 

1989 BOB PAISLEY - AFTER INTERVIEWING HIM I FELT LEFT I'D JUST HAD AN AUDIENCE WITH GANDHI

 

 

He gave me a story I'd never heard before. A Paisleyism to treasure: "Shanks was always encouraging all sorts of lads to come down to Anfield and get treatment for injuries. One day I was in my room and I heard him in the corridor telling this lad: 'What you've got there is no problem, son. Bobby Paisley will sort you out. He can fix anything. There's his room. Tell him I sent you'.

"And this poor young fella comes in in a wheelchair. Just sitting there looking up at me, believing I could cure him because Bill had told him I could. It was so sad. The lad was crippled. That was Bill. He'd think just by telling someone something it would make them believe in themselves." Two of his most telling utterances shed light on how Liverpool maintained their supremacy for so long. When he went to judge a player one thought was uppermost: "The first few yards are all in the head."

When asked to define the essence of Liverpool, he replied: "If you're lost in a fog you stick together. That way you don't get lost. If there's a secret to us, that's it."

 

 

I love the bit above..... Thats Brilliant!!!...

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unforgiveable!

 

I blame the parents!

 

I've managed to make my 10 year old a red in a class full of Arsenal fans - Reade should take a long, hard look at himself.

 

Got very confused by Souness being a bin man..

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Does anyone one if Brian Reade is doing any local book signings to promote the book?

 

 

 

10th July, 6.30pm - Waterstone's, 14 - 16 Bold Street, Liverpool

12th July, 1pm - Pritchard's, Brows Lane, Crosby

12th July, 3pm - Waterstone's, 188-192 Grange Road, Birkenhead

17th July, 6.30pm - Waterstone's, 14 Eastgate Row, Chester

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