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The return after the international break sees Watford visit for a lunchtime kick-off. The game earlier in the season was also a Saturday lunchtime kick-off after an international break, and we didn’t fare too badly in that one. Of course, Watford had again replaced their manager (a running theme with the clubs involved in the Z-Cars derby) and were hoping for a new manager bounce. Claudio Ranieri’s team never got going, and Danny Rose at left back put in one of the worst displays I’ve seen by a professional footballer. I’m not sure he’s even played since that game. Maybe the managers (plural) after Ranieri just didn’t fancy him. They’ve got Hodgson in the hotseat now, and of course he’s someone who has worked for their owners before, as he had a stint as Udinese coach in 2001. Anyway: Moxie. Accuracy. Strength. Skill. Intelligence. Verve. Electricity. Work-rate. Audacity. Style. Power. Shooting boots. I don’t ask for much. As I said above, the game earlier in the season was one of our most dominant displays of the season. We completely wiped the floor with them, with Sadio getting the opener after a brilliant pass from Mo. Bobby bagged himself a hat-trick of tap-ins, and Mo got in on the act with a goal of the season contender every bit as thrilling as the sheer genius he’d produced against Man City just a couple of weeks earlier. Watford had only just bounced back from The Championship, and looked like a team several levels below Liverpool. The last times the sides met at Anfield was in December 2019 in our last fixture before the squad jetted off to Qatar for the Club World Cup. It wasn’t a vintage performance but we bagged the 3 points thanks to goals in each half from Mo to secure a 2-0 win. The first week of September 1985 saw the sides meet at Anfield and, despite an early goal from Watford’s Colin West, Liverpool ran out comfortable 3-1 winners thanks to a penalty equaliser from Neal and further goals from Skippy and Rushie. The Watford side that day contained a future Liverpool legend, but Barnesy could do nothing to stem the Red tide. Liverpool were quite inconsistent under Kenny who had taken a player-manager role after Joe Fagan had relinquished it in tragic circumstances following Heysel. That image of Joe stepping off the plane says a million words, as a jovial man who had served the game and the club with distinction, and who’d looked at the game as something to be enjoyed, was broken by the harrowing events of that night in Belgium where hooligans ran amok. Later in the season when Kenny picked himself, the team recovered its previous strength and would go on to claim a league and cup double. Better Liverpool sides than that one had not managed that feat. For all the success of later years, none have managed it since. This Watford game took place during a period when the Football League and the TV companies were at loggerheads, and there was no televised football. Here’s a match report. September 1985 saw the year’s biggest box office draw suitably atop the box office. The year 1985 itself is of significance too. Back to the Future is simply one of the greatest films of the decade, with a cracking concept delivered in the most entertaining way possible. For me it is still Robert Zemeckis’ best film as a director, and turned TV sitcom star Michael J. Fox into a movie star. And to think it was Eric Stoltz that was initially cast as Marty McFly. It didn’t work and he was replaced. It packs in so much humour as McFly tries to find a way back to his own time from 1955 while having to make sure that his future parents actually get together. His mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is a flirty and slightly rebellious all-American girl who clearly has a crush on Marty, and his father is the weedy George (Crispin Glover) who can never stand up to the incessant bullying of Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), nor muster up the courage to ask Lorraine out. The film brought Christopher Lloyd mainstream success as the eccentric Doctor Emmett Brown who delivered a time machine using a flux capacitor, calculating the optimal speed as 88mph, and harnessing the power of 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to punch a hole in time. The film also turned the DeLorean into popular poster art, and played about with the origins of Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Fucking great film. The game against Watford is a chance for us to claim top spot in the league, at least prior to City’s game, and means we could possibly go into the match against City the following weekend in a great position. First things first though, and the focus, attitude and application must all be right for the Watford game, whatever side Klopp puts out. The media will want to portray the game as some sort of statement to ramp up the hype for the City game. We just need to make it about the 3 points and nothing more. That’s the mentality for all our league games. Let the fans ponder the permutations and think ahead.