CapeRed

I thought he had a decent game

They took a big risk with their 7 -1 split and no back up 9 and 10 and also lost their only hooker in this game. Conditions suited their style though also AB’s missed a trick not kicking for post.

They believe in their system . Not nice to watch but for them it works , small margins.

Well done the Boks .

For Jordan Henderson’s final Liverpoolappearance at Anfield in May, there was a crowd of 53,306. When he turned out for Al Ettifaq against Al Riyadh last Sunday, there were 696 people watching. So far, the biggest SPL crowd to watch Steven Gerrard’s side was away at Al Ahli last month, where there were 14,045 spectators. The biggest Al Ettifaq home crowd Henderson has seen, at the Prince Mohamed bin Fahd Stadium in Dammam, was for his debut against Al Nassr in August — 13,930 people watched. Jordan Henderson's SPL crowd sizes FIXTURE ATTENDANCE Al Ettifaq v Al Nassr 13,930 Al Ettifaq v Al Khaleej 4,200 Al Hilal v Al Ettifaq 13,656 Al Ettifaq v Damac 2,281 Abha v Al Ettifaq 976 Al Ettifaq v Al Tai 4,865 Al Ahli v Al Ettifaq 14,045 Al Ettifaq v Al Fateh 9,827 Al Riyadh v Al Ettifaq 696 Average 7,164 The combined attendance for all nine fixtures Henderson has played in is 64,476 — not much more than the capacity at Anfield. In promotional material given to international media ahead of the 2023-24 SPL season, it was claimed that “80 per cent of the nation’s population now engages with football, either through watching, playing, or following”. However, despite the big-name recruits over summer, that engagement is yet to translate to full terraces. Of the 95 SPL matches for which attendance figures have been released this season, 18 had a crowd lower than 1,000. That was not confined to a couple of clubs — eight teams have had home crowds smaller than four figures. The SPL’s smallest crowd this season was 133, when Al Riyadh lost 1-0 to Al Akhdoud at the Prince Faisal bin Fahd Stadium in Riyadh on September 1, which is the same stadium where Henderson played last week. The SPL club with the lowest average home attendance is Abha, who were 16th out of 18 in the table at the time of writing. Abha lack the big-name foreigners recruited this summer by the SPL’s four Public Investment Fund-owned clubs — Al Ahli, Al Hilal, Al Ittihad and Al Nassr — and their average home attendance is 1,988 this season. For their home match against Al-Riyadh, the crowd was 210. Away to Al Wehda it was 661. Most of the stars recruited to the SPL over the summer have so far avoided playing in front of crowds of under 1,000, an attendance far lower than last season’s National League average of 3,349 — the fifth tier of English football. The smallest SPL crowd that current Ballon d’Or holder Karim Benzema has played in front of for his new team Al Ittihad was 4,149, when they played at Al Raed at the start of the season, a match in which former Premier League stars N’Golo Kante and Fabinho also featured. Al Itthad’s average home attendance this season is 25,658, the highest in the league, although on Thursday against Al Hazem there were only 12,113 fans. As well as having the highest average home attendance, reigning SPL champions Al Ittihad had the second highest attendance for a single match, when 55,764 people watched them lose 1-0 at home to Al Ahli on October 6 at the King Abdullah Sports City stadium just north of Jeddah. Playing for the opposition in that match were Roberto Firmino, Riyad Mahrez, Edouard Mendy and Allan Saint-Maximin. That foursome signed for Al Ahli over the summer and they all appeared in a 5-1 loss away to Al Fateh in front of 11,715 spectators, which is the smallest SPL crowd they have played in front of this season. The third biggest SPL crowd this season was Al Hilal at home to Al Ahli yesterday, which was watched by 50,896. The fourth biggest SPL crowd was Al Ittihad at home to Al Hilal, which was watched by 23,742 people. The biggest SPL crowd this season was at the King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, when 59,600 turned up, presumably because they wanted to see the pre-match unveiling of Al Hilal’s new signing Neymar ahead of the team’s 1-1 draw with Al Fayha. Neymar didn’t play in that match. Neymar’s first start for his new team came away to Damac, a match played in front of 11,072 people. Neymar made his debut as a substitute in a 6-1 win over Al-Riyadh, a home match with a crowd of 15,373 in which Kalidou Koulibaly, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Ruben Nevesalso played. Neymar’s only other SPL appearance before getting injured came against Al Shabab at home in front of 14,769 people. The smallest SPL crowd that Cristiano Ronaldo has played in front of this season was away to Al Tai, a match which his team Al Nassr won 2-1. Also playing for Al Nassr were Sadio Mane and Aymeric Laporte. The crowd that day was 10,898, a far cry from what the former Premier League stars were once used to.

Yip He had a hamstring injury and I think they rushed him back too soon with the result that he never fully recovered and lost that speed he had.

Hearing a body had been found suspected that it’s the shooter.

England boiling French piss. Kind of satisfying. Final is going to be an interesting contrast in styles.

Apparently they didn’t speak to Curry. Almost like they wanted it done and dusted .

Very nice .

Stoke 1-0 v Leeds , Patrick Bamford missed a pen , terrible effort, his 3rd in a row . The first two were in the premier league.

Love that it boils the bitters piss .

Things are not helped by the faux outrage of the pundits who are going overboard.

The bitters didn’t lose to us because Konate didn’t get a yellow. They lost because they’re shite. Yes they can be upset because they feel a second yellow should have happened but an excuse for defeat is just smoke and mirrors.

Are you across the ditch in NZ ?

Neville doesn’t have the balls to do it IMO.

These days, the relevant people at Manchester United prefer not to talk about the wild, eccentric story that identifies a champion racehorse, Rock of Gibraltar, as the catalyst for everything that has gone so spectacularly wrong for the club ever since. Sir Alex Ferguson, in particular, has made it clear the subject is off-bounds. Ferguson’s achievements at Old Trafford make him the most successful British manager there has ever been. But the Rock of Gibraltar affair in 2003 was not one of his successes and, for United, the consequences are still being felt to this day. A new generation of United fans, meanwhile, might think the extraordinary chain of events that led, ultimately, to the fall of a once-mighty team — Malcolm Glazer’s takeover, the fan protests, the debts, the years of decline, the rancour and recriminations — seem a bit far-fetched. “The biggest football team in England,” might come the response, “and you’re seriously telling me it all started to unravel because of a racehorse?”. Well, yes, though not just an ordinary racehorse, bearing in mind the achievements of ‘Rocky’ in happier times, when it was registered under Ferguson’s name via his friendship with John Magnier and JP McManus, aka the ‘Coolmore Mafia’, two Irish businessmen who turned out to be the hardest opponents the Scot ever encountered. To introduce them properly, Magnier and McManus were the richest men in Ireland, and it hardly did them justice when the English media described them as simply racehorse owners. Their power and wealth went much further than that. Ferguson had befriended them through his love of horseracing and, in turn, persuaded them to buy their way into United as shareholders. It was a formidable alliance. Magnier and McManus, operating from the Coolmore stables on 7,000 acres of rural farmland in County Tipperary, were at the top of their profession. So was Ferguson, managing the Premier League champions, and so was Rock of Gibraltar, developing a reputation as a serial winner on the biggest stage. “I went into racing for the simple reason of the release and the enjoyment away from my own job,” said Ferguson in a four-page interview published by The Players’ Club, the official magazine of the Professional Footballers’ Association, in 2002. “It (football management) is a pretty exhausting job, it is demanding. Somewhere along the line, you’ve got to find a release.” The association with Rock of Gibraltar began, he explained, after the then colt had raced in the Coventry Stakes at Ascot the previous year. It finished sixth. “Nobody knew how good Rock of Gibraltar was going to be, not John Magnier, not (trainer) Aidan O’Brien and not me,” said Ferguson in the same article. “I’ll probably never get a horse as good as this again.” And then, as often happens with men of wealth, they fell out over money. Attitudes hardened. Ferguson started litigation and, almost certainly, under-estimated who he was dealing with. He was told it was a mistake, but went ahead with it anyway. Everything since at Old Trafford can be traced back to that falling-out. Would the Glazers have seized control of United otherwise? Unlikely. Would the club be in such a mess now? Unlikely. Does it all link back to Rock of Gibraltar? It’s a long story but, yes, absolutely. All of which explains why the author and former newspaper editor Chris Blackhurst has a chapter titled “It all started with the horse” in his book ‘The World’s Biggest Cash Machine: Manchester United, the Glazers and the Struggle for Football’s Soul’, which is being published later this week, and why he writes in its introduction that the U.S-based Glazer family “have a racehorse and an almighty personal falling out to thank for their amazing good fortune”. Today (Monday) is the first anniversary of Rock of Gibraltar succumbing to a heart attack, at the age of 23, and the fact the horse has its own Wikipedia page is a testament to the number of occasions it was paraded in the winners’ circle. It was, to quote former champion jockey Richard Hughes, “a wonder horse, the best in the world.” It was also running in Ferguson’s colours — the red and white of the football club he managed. Ferguson, however, claimed he was entitled to half of Rock of Gibraltar’s stud rights — a breeding programme potentially worth tens of millions of pounds — as part of what he believed to be a gentlemen’s agreement with Coolmore when the horse was put in his name. Coolmore’s view was that Ferguson had badly misunderstood, maybe because he was new to the industry. Magnier and McManus said no such deal had been put in place, and nor would it ever have been, given the huge numbers potentially involved. GO DEEPER Manchester United: Purpose, passion, profit - Sir Alex Ferguson, the businessman “Ferguson, of course, was not really the co-owner,” writes Blackhurst. “The horse was registered in his name, but it was someone else’s property. No money ever changed hands, Alex Ferguson never bought and paid for a share in the horse.” It was, the author explains, an entirely different arrangement. “Magnier was grateful to Ferguson. He said it was good of him to do it, to put his name on the horse and, if it won, make the speech.” Ferguson believed the stud fees for such a brilliant thoroughbred could make him a fortune and, knowing what we do now, he was not wrong (Rock of Gibraltar sired 256 horses that entered races, including 77 worldwide winners and 16 at the highest level). Relations soured. Legal letters started to fly about. A writ was served by Ferguson and an all-out war was declared between United’s manager and the club’s two biggest shareholders. Two decades on, The Athletic has been told the United board were horrified by this position. They also took independent advice that came back to say Ferguson had little chance of winning his case. He pressed on, using a Dublin barrister. Roy Keane also felt entitled, as United’s captain, to challenge his manager about it. Keane, one of Irish football’s greats, advised Ferguson it was unwise to take on Magnier and McManus. “I told him I didn’t think it was good for the club,” Keane writes in his 2014 autobiography. “He was just a mascot for them (Coolmore). Walking round with this Rock of Gibraltar — ‘Look at me, how big I am’ — and he didn’t even own the bloody thing.” All the while, the Glazers were watching. The Americans already had a stake in United, as well as being owners of NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Nobody, however, could be sure of their motives at that point. Instead, the media — unaware of the huge split between Ferguson and his Irish allies — were full of stories about Magnier and McManus solidifying their position by buying up shares, including entertainment magnate Rupert Murdoch’s stake, through a company they owned in the Caribbean’s Virgin Islands called Cubic Expression. The common belief was that they were preparing a takeover in tandem with Ferguson, their friend who had a long-held ambition to own the club. In reality, they were turning the screw on Ferguson, establishing themselves as United’s majority shareholders, with all the politics and extreme awkwardness that caused the club employee who was suing them. It was a power-play: tactical, aggressive and, for Ferguson, deeply unsettling. He had been fighting all his life, ever since his days growing up in Govan, at the heart of Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry. But this was different. It had quickly become clear he had bitten off more than he could chew. Patrick Harverson, then United’s director of communications, spoke to an Irish journalist after the news came out about Ferguson launching legal proceedings against Magnier and McManus. “I am being serious,” came the warning. “Whatever you do, don’t mess with them.” Blackhurst, an award-winning writer, heard more on the same theme while researching his book, which involved visiting the Coolmore stables. A friend of Magnier’s told him: ‘The softest thing about John is his teeth.” Coolmore had a formidable PR company working on its behalf, which was adept at manipulating the English media and planting a series of stories to turn the newspaper headlines against Ferguson. At United’s annual general meeting, several awkward questions were asked about Ferguson’s transfer activity by half a dozen individuals posing as shareholders when it turned out they were hired actors. It was never clear who paid them. Magnier and McManus employed their own researchers too, and turned up the heat by hiring Kroll, an international private intelligence firm, to take a closer look at Ferguson’s involvement with United’s transfer dealings, and the frequent involvement in them of his football-agent son, Jason. It was a hugely aggressive move and on January 16, 2004, they went for the jugular in the form of a letter, marked “strictly private & confidential”, to Sir Roy Gardner, then United’s PLC chairman. That letter contained 99 questions Coolmore wanted the board to answer. Over eight pages, it was intended to make the club, and Ferguson in particular squirm. Many of the questions were about player purchases and, devastatingly for Ferguson and United, the entire document found its way to Charles Sale, a prolific story-getter for the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper. “It blew the lid off,” Sale says of his exclusive. “As JP McManus said of the relationship with Ferguson, ‘Once the toothpaste comes out of the tube, it’s very difficult to put it back in’. The 99 questions were Coolmore squeezing the toothpaste.” Coolmore followed that up with another letter to Gardner, also leaked to the media, asking about Ferguson’s contract extension, his age and health issues. These were wounding attacks and, for United, a source of enough embarrassment for an edict to be passed that they could not allow the manager’s son to act for them in transfer negotiations again. Ferguson was on the ropes and the regular journalists on United’s beat can recall seeing his vulnerability, close up, in a way they had never witnessed before or since. In one audience with Manchester’s football writers, he talked about people rummaging through Jason’s bins and, in a performance that felt strategically aimed at the club’s supporters, how distressing it was for himself. What amazed me was that Ferguson talked about it at all,” recalls Tim Rich, then the northern football correspondent for UK newspaper The Independent. “Usually, he shut down any conversation that veered from team affairs. “When, in happier times with the Coolmore Mafia, the Daily Star (another British paper) suggested Magnier and McManus wanted to make him chairman, he rounded on the newspaper’s United writer, Bill Thornton. Now, instead of batting the question away or aggressively rounding on us, he talked. His voice was lower and more halting than usual but he explained this was something he had to do and he was doing it because it was morally the right thing to do. I don’t think there was a follow-up question — maybe we were too amazed at what we had got, maybe he didn’t allow one — but nobody questioned him on the absurdity of a club employee suing its major shareholders.” It had an effect, though. Ferguson had brought happiness to millions of United fans. He had, to use his own quote, “knocked Liverpool off their f***ing perch” after being appointed in 1986 and re-established United as the leading team in the country. Now it was those fans’ turn to come out fighting for him. Protest groups by the names of Manchester Education Committee and United 4 Action sought to target Magnier and McManus where it would hurt them most. The first demonstration took place the following month at Hereford racecourse in the south west of England, when 30 or so protestors ran on the track before a race featuring Coolmore-owned horse Majestic Moonbeam, hung banners over the fences and threw glass into the paddocks, where horses are paraded before races. A follow-up protest was planned for the Cheltenham Festival, the pinnacle of the British jump racing calendar, in the March, only for Ferguson to go public and ask the fans to back off. The legalities over Rock of Gibraltar were eventually settled out of court, with United’s manager receiving £2.5million ($3m), tax-free, if he agreed to drop all claims over the horse. Ferguson admitted there had been a “misunderstanding.” But the whole process had been gruelling on both sides and McManus explains in Blackhurst’s book why, by the time that settlement was made, he and Magnier had already decided to sell their stake in United and get out of football. “It was part of my life for a while but, for something that was meant to be a bit of pleasure at the start, it ended not being so pleasurable,” he says. “I couldn’t get far enough away from it quickly enough.” The final straw? “When the fans stopped the racing that day in Hereford. I said, ‘I’ve had enough’.” One problem: who was waiting in the wings? “Riding the speculative boom caused by Coolmore’s huge share purchases was Malcolm Glazer,” John-Paul O’Neill, founder of FC United of Manchester, the breakaway club formed by United supporters in response to the Glazer takeover, tells The Athletic. “After Ferguson embarrassingly backed down in the public spat, and with Coolmore looking to divest, Glazer was forced to stick or twist on his own investment. He chose the latter, (with) Coolmore’s holding allowing the only real viable way to a full leverage buyout.” And so, a new era for United was about to begin. On May 12, 2005, Magnier and McManus sold their stake to the Glazers, making nearly £100million profit. The Americans moved into power at Old Trafford and, while history will always remember Ferguson as a manager of authentic greatness, many fans on the front line of the anti-Glazer protests came to feel let down. “Ferguson’s support was crucial to the banks lending Glazer the money,” O’Neill says of the takeover. “He rejected supporters’ private appeals to quit in protest, claiming he had to think about the staff he worked alongside. This faux solidarity would, in future, only be extended to the Glazers. ‘Wonderful owners,’ he would laughably suggest. ‘No value in the market,’ he would say to excuse the absence of funds for meaningful transfer dealings, as the emergent Manchester City hoovered up the likes of Sergio Aguero, David Silva and Vincent Kompany for relative peanuts.” Ferguson, who now attends matches as a director of the football board and highly paid ambassador, retired as manager at the end of the 2012-13 season — after delivering United’s most recent Premier League title. “Even then, there was no desire (from him) to side with fans increasingly disillusioned with owners crippling the club,” says O’Neill. “The supposed Socialist backing the arch-capitalists to the very end.” In Ferguson’s most recent book, Leading, published in 2015, there is not a single word about Rock of Gibraltar, the split from Coolmore and what it meant for the club he managed for 26 years. His previous book, a 2013 autobiography, does touch upon it, but only for a few sentences. “I have to say that at no point was I sidetracked from my duties as manager of Manchester United,” he wrote. “It didn’t affect my love of racing and I am on good terms now with John Magnier, the leading figure at Coolmore.” That last line comes as a surprise to some of the people who are familiar with this story and suspect there is, in fact, no relationship, or contact, between the two men. So why say it? It is difficult to know — Ferguson chose not to be interviewed for Blackhurst’s book. As for Rock of Gibraltar, its last years were spent at the Magnier family’s Castlehyde Stud in County Cork. A plaque commemorates the horse. There are pictures on the walls at Castlehyde and, even if nobody at Old Trafford likes discussing this part of the story, its impact is still being felt in Manchester.

Can I just clarify . They already have the same rights as every other citizen of Australia They can vote , receive welfare and medical support . Schooling is freely available but in some of the remote areas it can be an issue for sure. The referendum was a proposal to put recognition of aboriginals into the constitution and create what would be called a voice to enable the to sit down with the government and give input on anything that they felt impacted them. IMO it was the voice portion that lead to a strong no vote. I think Skaturation gave a good descriptive overview.

It’s a mix IMO although ,given slanted media coverage, it’s kinda difficult to evaluate. I got the feeling that what some might call the elite were very much in favour but there were also indigenous folk against it saying that they did not want to be seen as being different to all other Australians.

Big ead Joe Royle used to hit all his pens down the middle into the roof of the net.

Some show that was 3 hours on stage , respect for an arl arse !!

He said after the match that he thought Mo would go down the middle .

Bob Thomas had no idea he was about to take an era-defining photograph. When he set off from his home in Northamptonshire bound for the Merseyside derby in February 1988, his focus was simply on capturing an almighty sporting tussle between the two most successful football clubs of the decade. Everton, as reigning First Division champions, had won the title in two of the previous three seasons; Liverpool had claimed the other, having dominated English football in the 10 years before that. Thomas liked to arrive early. For a 3pm kick-off, he would be settled two hours before. He considered Everton’s Goodison Park an awkward venue for angles, depending on the light. His favourite position was along the Bullens Road touchline, level with the Park End penalty area. He does not remember why, but for the second half, he decided to switch, taking up residence in front of the Park End, as Liverpool kicked towards it. Close to the corner flag, it offered a perfect view of John Barnes. The Jamaican-born left-winger and England international had become Liverpool’s first Black signing the previous summer and at Goodison, he was the only Black player on the pitch. The focus on him became sharper that day because of a new shaven haircut, administered in the hours before kick-off by room-mate Peter Beardsley. This development was worthy of some analysis from the match commentator, John Motson, who in the opening moments of the BBC’s coverage chirped up by suggesting that Barnes looked like the Black boxer, Lloyd Honeyghan. Motson, however, said nothing seconds later when Barnes received the ball and was loudly booed, a reaction that could be heard clearly in the front rooms of millions of homes across the United Kingdom. And it went on throughout the game. Thomas says it was impossible to hear exactly what was being said about Barnes on the terraces. He could, however, see some things that the television cameras, mainly following the ball, could not pick up. He recalls a banana being chucked from the Bullens Road stand at Barnes, just missing him. Thomas was about 30 yards away but he decided to watch him for the next few minutes. Then, it happened again: another banana flying towards him. This time, Barnes saw it, glancing just behind him. Thomas started pressing into his camera. He could see the studs of Barnes’ right boot connecting with the banana with a degree of force that sent it into the air, before it landed on the dead side of the touchline. Liverpool won the game 1-0, thanks largely to Barnes’ arcing cross delivered from the same area of the pitch. Thomas, however, was not sure exactly what he had on his film until he returned home. Shooting in colour transparency, the photographs would not be processed until the next day at his studio in Northampton, and they were syndicated to the worldwide press the day after that. This meant that newspapers did not pick up the image until the middle of the week after the match. For 48 hours or so, only Thomas, Barnes and the person who threw the banana, as well as those nearby who had witnessed it, knew what had happened. This was Barnes kicking the racists into touch. And as soon as he saw it, Thomas knew what he had in his possession. “I immediately thought it was an important picture,” he tells The Athletic. “And so it has proven.” Thomas’ photograph from 35 years ago has become one of the most famous in sport but in the days and weeks that followed, media coverage was minimal. Unaware of its existence, the next morning the local Liverpool Echo newspaper was preoccupied with skiing stories — Britons escaping a fire at a Bulgarian resort and the Duchess of York going on a third Alpine holiday since announcing she was pregnant with her third child. Throughout the week, the focus of the back pages remained entirely on football. Everton had another important game on Wednesday, a League Cup tie at Arsenal. The sports news cycle, therefore, was moving on from the Merseyside derby by the time Thomas’ photograph was circulated. The Echo claimed to be “the voice of Merseyside sport” and “the paper that keeps you in the know”. But while crowd disturbances at Luton Town and Millwallearned coverage across their pages, as well as an incident in Argentina, where goalkeeper Ubaldo Fillol had projectiles including a guitar thrown at him, there was no mention of what had happened to Barnes. The Echo wasn’t alone. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, racist incidents were common in football and barely made the news. Only one British newspaper initially published the photograph of Barnes, and that was part of a tabloid picture special. The caption in The Sun, which a year later came to be reviled on Merseyside due to its lies about the Hillsborough disaster, made a joke of it. “What a banana shot!” read the caption. “John Barnes not only skinned the Everton defence to lay on Liverpool’s FA Cupwinner on Sunday. He also made sure there would be no slip-up when he neatly backheeled this banana into touch when it was thrown at him by a Goodison fan.” There was no condemnation of the act, which is now considered a hate crime. And though reporters and their editors were unaware of Thomas’ photograph when match reports were published, there was no mention across nine national newspapers of the verbal abuse that Barnes was subjected to either. The coverage largely focused on his haircut. Four months earlier, the reaction had been slightly different when Liverpool hosted Everton at Anfield in a League Cup tie. This was Barnes’ first experience of the Merseyside derby, an occasion where fans in the away end sang, “N*****pool, N*****pool, N*****pool,” as well as “Everton are white!” London Weekend Television held the rights to the game’s highlights. Though some of this chanting was audible beyond the commentary, it was not mentioned later that night. There was, however, a response on some radio channels. While BBC Radio 2’s Alan Green, backed by summariser Denis Law, highlighted what was happening in front of them, Clive Tyldesley, representing the local station, Radio City, condemned it live on air. Tyldesley would become one of the most famous commentators in Britain, later working for the BBC and ITV. He says his reaction was instinctive because he considered Barnes a friend. When Barnes joined Liverpool in 1987, Tyldesley liked his “charismatic and enigmatic” personality. They both lived across the River Mersey in Wirral and would sometimes socialise together. Until the start of that friendship, Tyldesley says there were not many black or brown faces in his professional or social circle. It was only through coming into contact with Barnes due to his high-profile move to Liverpool that he came to understand him as a person, and appreciate the difficulties he faced. “I sort of needed John to come along to make me realise a lot of things,” he tells The Athletic. The post-match routine of the Liverpool and Everton players involved drinks at the Continental Club on Wolstenholme Square in the city centre. He cannot remember exactly when the following “minor incident” happened, but it might have even been after Barnes’ first experience of the Merseyside derby. Tyldesley says he was one of the first into the club that night, waiting at the bar for others to join him. From behind, two men he did not know approached him and asked whether he was Clive Tyldesley. He turned around, expecting to sign an autograph, only for one of them to tell him he’d heard on the radio what he’d said about Barnes. “You’ve got to decide which side you’re on,” the man concluded. Tyldesley says he didn’t lose any sleep over it, but it did unsettle him. Though there was coverage in the local papers in the days that followed, the conversation was mainly amplified through phone-ins like the BBC’s In and Around Town show, with some callers expressing their abhorrence at what had happened at Anfield. The headlines, though, would come from an authority figure in Philip Carter, Everton’s chairman, who was also the president of the Football League. Freakishly, the fixture list pitted Liverpool against Everton again in the league just four days later in a broadcast beamed live by the BBC, not only in England but to millions of viewers across the world. Carter called the perpetrators of the songs aimed at Barnes “scum”, but Barnes felt Carter’s interjection helped no one. He was booed when he touched the ball in the early stages of the subsequent match, with Barnes later recalling that some away fans sported badges reading “Everton Are White – Defend the Race” Well, the crowd have always got something to sing about,” enthused Barry Davies, the BBC commentator as the cameras panned in on a knot of Liverpool fans near the away end exchanging gestures and taunts. Davies said nothing, however, as play restarted and the racists howled “N*****pool.” Two moments of brilliance from Barnes helped Liverpool to a comfortable enough victory and much of the talk afterwards focused on Barnes’ contribution to the outcome, rather than the attention he had received. Four months later, in the bowels of the main stand at Goodison Park after the clubs had been pitted against each other yet again in the FA Cup, Barnes says he was not questioned about the racial abuse. Instead, the first time he spoke publicly about the incident was in an interview with the Daily Mail two months later for a feature about racism, which involved his wife. Barnes laughed off what had happened, saying that “fruit and vegetable dealers did well that day”. Barnes suggested that if he was short and fat, he’d be targeted for a different reason and when he insisted “it doesn’t hurt”, he was believable. His positive body language in the photograph revealed that. Barnes had signed for Liverpool in the summer of 1987, but newspaper reports had linked him instead with a move to Arsenal, who did not end up making an offer. It meant he was not exactly welcomed with open arms at Anfield, where racist slogans promoting the National Front were daubed on the walls of the stadium’s car park to greet him. In his 1999 autobiography, Barnes remembers other messages like “White Power”, “No Wogs Allowed” and “Liverpool are White.” He says he expected it, partly because some people thought Liverpool was his second choice, but also because of the history of the city, which had grown powerful through the slave trade. It was a place where segregation still existed, and the six per cent Black population was rarely reflected at Anfield or Goodison. The race divide had been highlighted in Liverpool during the riots of 1981, an event that Black locals in the inner-city area of Toxteth still refer to as the “uprising”. Six years later, Barnes describes a “bad aura clinging to me… had I played badly, it would have been hell for me”. Barnes thought the solution was simple — deliver on the pitch and make the fans love him. “The Kop would have slaughtered me with racial abuse if I had faltered on the field,” he said. “If I had been playing for Everton, and doing well, their fans would not have been throwing bananas and spitting at me. Liverpool’s would.” Barnes was fortunate because the stadium’s famous Kop grandstand was closed for the first three games of the season because of a sewage problem. Liverpool had to play away. Had his debut instead been at Anfield, Barnes believes he’d have been booed, “and that could have affected me”. In his last season as a Watford player, Barnes was jeered at Anfield. Nigel Spackman, a recently signed midfielder in the Liverpool team, tells The Athletic that he remembers it clearly, although he believed it was “because of his links to Arsenal”. Barnes ultimately joined Liverpool, where he initially moved into the Moat House hotel in Liverpool’s city centre, living just down the hallway from Spackman, just signed from Chelsea. The Moat House was not the Ritz but it was popular among footballers because it had a restaurant attached to it. Barnes and Spackman regularly ate together and Spackman remembers thinking how relaxed Barnes was about the social barriers he was encountering. Certainly, it seemed as though Barnes wasn’t going to change his ways just because he’d signed for one of the most famous clubs in the world. Barnes had a tremendous appetite, for example, and would sometimes order the Chateaubriand or the rack of lamb. “But that’s for two people, Mr Barnes,” a waiter would warn. It didn’t matter. His manager, Kenny Dalglish, was adamant that he did not once consider the colour of Barnes’ skin: he just saw a talented player. Others saw it differently. Immediately after signing, Barnes received hate mail at the Moat House, and he’d sometimes spend his evenings reading the letters. One read: “You are c**p, go back to Africa and swing from the trees.” Barnes’ response was to laugh at the grammar and pass the letters around to his team-mates, “imagining the pathetic types of people who’d written them”. He would learn later that these were only a small percentage of the racist letters written about him. His new club received many more but opted not to make him aware of them, worrying they would upset him. The squad had not changed that much from the one that involved Howard Gayle six years earlier. Gayle became Liverpool’s first Black player, having been picked up as a teenager from local football. He had grown up as one of only a few Black kids in a white area of the city and was used to challenging the racism he encountered, but Barnes was raised around other Black people in a middle-class military family in Jamaica. Gayle was conditioned not to ignore the barbs that came his way, including from his notoriously sharp-tongued team-mates. Barnes, by comparison, had a different way of dealing with things. As an expensive signing going straight into the starting XI, his entry point was different to Gayle’s, who had the additional challenge of fighting his way past team-mates if he wanted to take their place. Barnes saw racism not as football’s problem but as society’s. His team-mates laughed when, before one of his earliest training sessions, a dinner lady forgot to serve him a cup of tea having given one to each of one of his white colleagues. “Is it because I’m Black?” Barnes asked. Over the months that followed, Barnes would hear team-mates calling opponents “Black b*******”. He says he would call them out on it, only to be told that they got called “white b*******”. He concluded that “dressing rooms were not the best place for heavy debates”. Barnes changed the style of the Liverpool team, from one that passed opponents off the pitch to one that dribbled past them. His 15 league goals in 38 games helped Liverpool win the title by nine points. In one game in which he did not feature, at Norwich, he heard Liverpool fans booing Ruel Fox, the Black winger. Even with his success, Barnes thought the reaction was “hardly surprising”. GO DEEPER The different faces of racism Jimi Jagni, a half-Gambian, half-Chinese social activist, grew up in Toxteth, segregated from the rest of the city. He wasn’t into football but remembers Barnes signing for Liverpool as really “big news”. There were lots of talented footballers in Toxteth but only Cliff Marshall at Everton, then Gayle at Liverpool, who were both born in the area, had made it into the first team at either club. Barnes came to represent L8, Toxteth’s postcode, in a different way. He would socialise in its nightclubs, bringing along Liverpool team-mates such as John Aldridge. Barnes became a physical and visible link between a district that felt separated from the rest of the city. Yet Barnes’ experiences, especially in his first season at Liverpool, reminded L8 that if he couldn’t get the media to speak up about the injustices of the world, then they had no chance. “We didn’t know for certain whether a banana had been thrown at him (in February 1988) because it didn’t receive the attention it should have,” Jagni says. “He was a superstar and very few people said a word about it.” Emy Onuora, the author of Pitch Black: The Story of Black British Footballers, was one of what he thinks was just two Black Evertonians who followed his team home and away. Joe Farrag, who now happens to be Jagni’s next-door neighbour, was the other, though Onuora was only ever accompanied by white people and occasionally would bump into Farrag at away matches. There were lots of talented footballers in Toxteth but only Cliff Marshall at Everton, then Gayle at Liverpool, who were both born in the area, had made it into the first team at either club. Barnes came to represent L8, Toxteth’s postcode, in a different way. He would socialise in its nightclubs, bringing along Liverpool team-mates such as John Aldridge. Barnes became a physical and visible link between a district that felt separated from the rest of the city. Yet Barnes’ experiences, especially in his first season at Liverpool, reminded L8 that if he couldn’t get the media to speak up about the injustices of the world, then they had no chance. “We didn’t know for certain whether a banana had been thrown at him (in February 1988) because it didn’t receive the attention it should have,” Jagni says. “He was a superstar and very few people said a word about it.” Emy Onuora, the author of Pitch Black: The Story of Black British Footballers, was one of what he thinks was just two Black Evertonians who followed his team home and away. Joe Farrag, who now happens to be Jagni’s next-door neighbour, was the other, though Onuora was only ever accompanied by white people and occasionally would bump into Farrag at away matches. As a season ticket holder, Onuora decided that he did not want to attend Merseyside derbies during this period. He describes the abuse towards Black players as “regular”, but with the addition of Barnes, “it was one game where it was going to be too much. I couldn’t bring myself to go”. Onuora’s matchday experience usually went something like this if a Black player was involved: the abuse would happen, he would challenge it, and the fan or the fans would respond by saying, “I don’t mean you, mate…” Onuora says he became the target of racist abuse on one occasion. He was in the Bullens Road stand and he responded by punching the abuser. “There were fewer stewards and more police officers. An officer was on the edge of the pitch, pointing at me, saying he was going to arrest me. But he couldn’t get his radio to work.” The environment was not exclusive to Merseyside. Pat Nevin, who signed for Everton in 1988, after Barnes backheeled the banana, had joined from Chelsea. He had notoriously confronted racist fans — including some from his own club — abusing Paul Canoville, a Black Chelsea player, at Crystal Palace. Nevin says racism across Britain was “normalised. There were pockets at every ground. Some of them were more sizeable than others. But they were always loud. You’d have to stick your fingers in your ears not to hear them”. Nevin had been a social justice campaigner since his student days, marching against Apartheid. He became involved in the Merseyside Against Racism (MAR) campaign that followed the 1987-88 season, though he stresses the organisation for this came from like-minded colleagues involved in the players’ union rather than the clubs, their representatives or the authorities. Nevin had concerns about signing for Everton, asking the manager Colin Harvey whether the club had an apartheid policy of no Blacks. He was reassured when Harvey told him he was only the club’s second-choice signing: the first had been Mark Walters, the Black Aston Villa winger, who later moved to Liverpool. Onuora identified a pattern across football terraces after a team signed a Black player. Fans tended to cease the booing of their own Black players, if they were successful, but those from opposing teams would still get it. At Liverpool, Onuora says Barnes’ impact on the pitch “changed the mood” but Everton did not have any Black players at that time and this dynamic had long-term consequences. “Because Liverpool had one Black player, and because of the rivalry, a section of fans revelled in having a white team,” Onuora says. “The racist abuse at Everton cranked right up. This section wanted to distinguish themselves by being more abusive, more racist and celebrating Everton’s whiteness.” Onuora thinks it was only when Kevin Campbell joined in 1999, going on to become captain and scoring the goals that arguably saved the club from relegation that attitudes started to really improve. “Suddenly, we had a Black player in a position of authority,” Onuora says. “That was the game-changer.” And as for Barnes? It says much about the abuse suffered by a man who went on to become one of Liverpool’s greatest players that, in multiple interviews since, he has said he can’t even remember kicking that banana. He remains, however, a thoughtful and at times forthright voice in the debate over how to combat racism and why football should be seen as a symptom, not a cause, of prejudice. Bob Thomas’ famous picture, meanwhile, serves as a memento of another era — one many people would rather forget.

Yeah and the article mentioned that there was too. I remember bananas being thrown at Clyde Best from the Kop. The article itself was about how that pic of Barnes and the banana came about and the racist shit he put up with at Liverpool and it included stuff from our side when he was at Watford.