The Last Stand of the Kop

The Kop’s Last Stand

30 years ago today, 30th April 1994, I was among the 16,479 Kopites who sang their happy-sad goodbyes to the Kop on a sun-kissed Saturday, standing on the world-famous terraces for the very last time. Liverpool’s final home game in the Premier League season 1993-1994 vs Norwich City was the Kop’s last stand. In a sea of flags, banners, scarves, and confetti, we bade the world-famous old terracing a fond farewell. It was the end of an era and, for me, the game was never the same again.

The final home matches had been declared Flag Days, with fans being urged to make noise and add colour before the lights went out at the Kop end for good. The atmosphere on the Kop was electric in those final matches against Everton, Newcastle, and Norwich. I particularly enjoyed the 2-1 victory over Everton on March 13.

Then came the last stand, the match vs Norwich City.

My mother told me to take the camera and take some photos. I was never fond of cameras, and only started to use one in 2014. I said I would drink every moment in and absorb it into my very being. I did. The event remains so vividly present as not to count as memory at all. I remember the elation on the terraces that day. I also remember the sadness as, one by one, the fans drifted away, knowing it was likely we would not see the same old and familiar faces ever again, not in the same places. We left with a sense of mourning, knowing that the place we knew and loved would not be there in same form when we returned for the following season. Many remained a long time after the final whistle, soaking up and savouring every final moment on the terracing that had forged them as Kopites for life. I didn’t hang around long. I didn’t want to see the emptying out. I didn’t want my last memory to be that of the bare and lifeless stone and steel of a now empty terrace. I wanted my last image to be that of a packed, vibrant, loud, and lively terrace. I said my goodbyes bathed in the warmth of sound and vision.

It was a day for one final act of togetherness, remembrance and reflection. We knew we were bidding farewell to the old, friendly, familiar faces and places, and did so with scenes and sounds that were made to live forever in the memory.

Sometime shortly after the final game, the bulldozers arrived, and the process of demolishing football’s most famous terrace began.

The game itself wasn’t much. Liverpool were poor (or overwhelmed by the occasion), and were beaten 1-0 by Norwich City. But at least it was a fine Welshman, Jeremy Goss, who scored a cracking winning goal for the visitors. The game was merely the backdrop to the main event. We didn’t want the final whistle to come. The loss of the match was nothing compared to the loss of a way of life.

All the action was on the terraces as we waved our flags and scarfs for one final time.

It was a farewell to the great Ronnie Whelan, too, who was playing his final game for Liverpool at Anfield, having joined the club in the early 1980s:

"It wasn't a game when we could win anything major,” he said, “and we all knew this was the amazing Spion Kop that was going to be knocked down to make way for the seats. The Kop had such great memories for everybody. It was the first terrace that mainly people started to sing songs from and everybody was swaying, singing and happy… When you used to come up the tunnel from the dressing room from below the pitch, people had said, 'Wait until you hear this wall of noise that hits you from the Kop.’ … Because the wall of noise that hits you just gives you an extra spring in your step and an extra yard or two on the pitch.”

Before the game we were treated to a parade of former players and managers: Billy Liddell, Albert Stubbins, Ian Callaghan, Tommy Smith, Steve Heighway, Phil Thompson, David Fairclough (I met David, the hero of St Étienne!, charming fellow, very eloquent), David Johnson and Craig Johnston, each greeted with cheers, song, and applause. It set the tone of the day. It was a day to celebrate all that had gone before, the great matches, the European nights, the legendary players and managers, the 32 major honours, and the supporters who had brought the club to life in sound and vision. Kenny Dalglish was met with a rapturous reception, bettered only by the ovation former manager Joe Fagan received when entering the pitch alongside Nessie Shankly and Jessie Paisley, wives of legendary Liverpool managers Bill Shankly (‘natural enthusiasm’) and three time European Cup winner Bob Paisley.

The parade was followed by an ‘emotional’ rendition of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ as Gerry Marsden took to the field. Not wishing to sound critical, I remember Gerry being a bit off-key that day. I did my best to get the song back in tune, but I don’t think he heard. I seem to remember the Norwich fans joining us on this one, genial folk.

The Liverpool team was off-key, too. Maybe the occasion got to the team, but Liverpool were as lifeless on the park as the fans were vital off it. But at least it was a fine Welshman, Jeremy Goss, who would score the last goal in front of the Kop, as Norwich ran out 1-0 winners.

I have been told the tale of a lifelong Liverpool fan who, spotting a ball remaining on the pitch, evaded the stewards to get on to the pitch and curl a shot into the bottom corner at the Kop end. His name is John Garner, I believe. And I am sure he is out there somewhere claiming to have scored the last goal ever scored in front of the old Kop.

The actual match was a distant second to the occasion.

The fans rose to the occasion, forming a radiant sea of colour as flags, banners, and scarves were held high.

Flags of all colours, sizes, and persuasions were seen flying everywhere. As well as Liverpool red, there were ensigns of Ireland, Italy, America, Canada. Colours of Italian club sides were abundant: Juventus, Genoa, AS Roma. Any number of the ‘1977’ red and white chequered flags flew in the spring air. The legendary ‘Joey Jones Ate the Frogs Legs’ banner was raised one final time. Joey Jones is a Llandudno boy, of course!

The end was nigh when the Taylor Report decreed that standing terraces at football grounds be replaced with all-seater stadiums in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. At the end of the 1993-1994 season, the bulldozers would be called in, and the Kop would be no more.

It may be a controversial point – and I speak as one who was present on Leppings Lane the day of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 – but I still maintain that the problem that day was not one of standing or terracing but of wretched organisation and policing. I preferred to stand and move around at football and still do. At the recent Llandudno Ladies vs Briton Ferry Play-Off I made the effort to sit in the stand, and gave up after five minutes to go and stand by the touchline. I have a feeling that your legs should be moving around whilst watching football, as if kicking every ball.

The Spion Kop dated back to the 1905/06 season, when a new stand was built to reward the loyalty of the supporters on the occasion of Liverpool winning their second league title. A roof was added in 1928, forming an imposing sound-box structure housing the loud and lively supporters within.

I can remember my very first day on the Kop. I’m not one for crowds and enclosed spaces and to this day will seek the exit as soon as I have found the entrance. My love of football got the better of my fear of confined spaces. I got there maybe thirty minutes before kick-off. It was the days you could turn up and pay at the turnstiles. Liverpool was afflicted by mass unemployment and Anfield didn’t always have a full house at the time. I remember the queues outside, separated and kept in order by the police horses. (I remember the odd horse nibbling away at my woolly jumper on occasions). I remember the excitement of climbing the stone steps, entering the terracing, and going in search of a good spec, then the build-up of bodies, then the gradual merging of one and all in an all-singing swaying mass, functioning as a single organism. When one moved, all moved.

On the Kop, I would see the same familiar faces each week, the same people and the same groups in the same spots, or making their way through the crowds the same way as they always did. We’d talk football, talk anything that was in the air, and then go home, until next time. I knew their faces, but not their names. The seating broke up the fragile ecosystem that had developed over generations.

I didn’t care for the new seating. The couple who were sat to my left barely spoke to each other, let alone anyone else. Apart from polite applause every so often, they barely moved during the game. The man to my right with his son was more talkative. But not more lively. It wasn’t the same. It was hard to move. The atmosphere was dead. Instead of a collectivity, we had been separated into discrete individuals organised in passive appreciation of the spectacle. Instead of bodies merged as one, we were confined in our own little worlds, ordered in our plastic seats, atomised and rendered inert. Where once we would sway from side-to-side, all bodies as one body surging forward and falling backward as one red sea singing in unison, we were now separated in our own little plastic spaces. It should come as no surprise. It is the way of the modern ‘anti-society.’ ‘Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics’ (attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Needs of Strangers,’ 1985, p.108 and Daniel Kemmis, ‘Community and the Politics of Place,’ 1990, in the introductory commentary entitled ‘Voice.’) It fits the dominant fiction of the autonomous, independent individual, and breaks up the connection and solidarity human beings need for true fulfilment and happiness.

I didn’t like it. Something had died without, and my interest slowly started to die within. I hung on for a few more years, but the Liverpool I had known had gone. The price of the season ticket kept going up as the quality of the atmosphere went down. From the mid-90s to 2001 I was engaged in research in Manchester, which made huge demands on my time and money. Slowly but surely, going to football became a duty rather than a passion. The thrill dwindled away. And then the point came when, faced with another hike in prices, I realized I had fallen out of love with what the game had become. The roots and rawness had gone, to become a bloodless experience to endure, rather than a thrill to enjoy. I gave up my season ticket. Truth be told, I never did care for the Premier league from the moment it started in 1992. Something about it struck me as false, rootless, abstracted, gentrified. It was big money football for a global audience. And people like me were relics of a bye-gone age, an age rooted in place, person, and proximity. I was never to return. I would attend the Hillsborough services at the ground on the anniversary of the disaster. But it took football at grassroots to rekindle my love of the game.

The terracing was renowned for its (often robust) wit and banter, its enthusiasm, its singing, its camaraderie. And sportsmanship. Something that always disappointed me was the failure of ITV in 1989 to cover the Kop’s massive appreciation of the Arsenal side that had snatched the title from Liverpool’s hands with the last kick of the game in 1989. Liverpool were seconds away from a league and cup double when Michael Thomas struck with seconds left to win the title for Arsenal. Our hearts sank to the ground. And yet the Kop stayed almost to a man and woman to hail Arsenal as they were presented with the championship, demanding a lap of honour from the newly crowned champions. It would have been nice had ITV shown something of that, to show just how appreciative of football in general the Kop was. The Kop had done the same when Leeds United won the title at Anfield back in 1968, hailing the triumph of Liverpool’s closest rivals.

I have a little dream, which will never come true. I dream that the Kop will one day return, and all the old familiar faces are seen again in all the old familiar places, along with all youngsters we once saw, in the days when ‘ordinary’ folk could afford to buy a ticket or, as in the days when I started watching, paying at the turnstile (and being somewhat startled when he young kids would try to bunk in under your legs!) I’d like to see the flags and banners of yesteryear return, too. And the passion.

It may be just nostalgia. I remember an elderly gentleman who was a family friend who visited our house in the early 1980s. His carer accompanying him recalled the football of the ‘50s, telling me it’s not real football now, it’s just ‘blow football these days,’ he said disdainfully. He enjoyed the football of his younger days, as I did mine. We always think the best Christmases were in the past, little realising that those Christmases we enjoyed were always partly made by those looking backwards to their own younger years. Maybe I’m just saying the same as the elderly gentleman who visited our house in the early 1980s. But people who know tell me it’s like a library at Anfield now. I’m not surprised. I remember the change sometime in the 1990s, when loud music started to be piped in, drowning out the noise and chatter of people in the crowd, as if those in charge of the decisions knew that the new – monied, genteel - crowd of fans couldn’t be trusted to generate the atmosphere the fans of old could. I hated it. I thought it fake. We were being stunned into silence, spontaneity and passion supplanted by the clinical and soulless.

I remember the huge flags and banners, the scarves, the ‘original’ songs and chants. I also remember, as I played a video of one of the games back home, my granny asking ‘what are they all singing?’ I thought it best not to tell her and am rather glad she didn’t understand the words. Some of the words would offend the easily offended today. The world back then was a whole lot healthier and saner than the miserable and neurotic and divided world we live in today.

It may be the memory playing tricks, magnifying the past whilst diminishing the present, out of a yearning for days long gone, but I remember there being more flags and banners on the Kop back then than there are today. It’s very likely that the new flag rules have stifled the enthusiasm and creativity of the new fans. I’m told flags and banners have to be approved.

If you enjoy your football at Anfield now, good luck to you. I think the place is a pale shadow of its former self. And I think the removal of standing terraces was a mistake. I think all-seating and the hike in ticket prices eliminated a lot of locals, especially the youngsters. In the past, many of those youngsters would go on to be footballers. Gone. And when the roots ripped up, the fruits dry up.

I’d like to see one of those old flag days again. Just one more time. I liked those huge flags and banners that would come over your head on its way across the Kop. I always had ambitions of grabbing a corner and waving!

The last stand in the last match …

When the final whistle was blown, the fans departed, slowly but, like time, inexorably.

I lingered a wee while, but not long. We had already said our final goodbyes.

Once a Kopite always a Kopite.