Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten’s The Project and academic
There’s a difference between a stadium and a ground. You know it, even if you can’t precisely define it. Stadiums are where Taylor Swift comes to play in the off-season. Grounds care for nothing but the game. The MCG is a stadium. Wembley is a stadium. Victoria Park was a ground.
One of the glories of the Premier League is its proliferation of grounds. No one plays at Wembley, which is reserved for England and cup finals. For every Old Trafford there is a Bournemouth with its 11,000 fans. And for every Anfield – Liverpool’s magical home stadium – there is Goodison Park, a mere half a mile away, and home to the Everton Football Club since 1892. When Taylor Swift comes to Liverpool, she doesn’t play at Goodison.
Liverpool fans mock Everton with balloons signifying 30 years since Everton’s last trophy.Credit: AP
It has been an adornment. The first purpose-built football ground in England. The only ground to have a church – St Luke’s – in one of its corners. The first club ground to hold an FA Cup final, in 1894. The first in England to have dugouts. The first to have four stands, one on each side of the pitch, and to have a three-tier stand. The stage for the first penalty shootout in the European Cup, when Everton beat Borussia Moenchengladbach in 1970.
It’s also, on this day, my first match at Goodison. I’m a Liverpool fan – a Red – so Anfield is my haunt. But I’m here to pay my respects to Goodison. At season’s end, Goodison will be no more. It stands to be demolished, as Everton succumbs to the financial pressures of the Premier League and moves to a swish-looking new, Swift-worthy stadium by the river.
This is sadly inevitable. While Liverpool ploughed serious money into Anfield, making the stadium first class and allowing the Reds to stay, Everton took the other path: neglecting Goodison over decades such that relocation became compulsory.
This is therefore the last Merseyside Derby Goodison will host: the last time the Reds will visit the Grand Old Lady. “Form goes out the window”, goes the cliché, and at Goodison it’s actually true. Over the past decade, Liverpool have been the vastly superior side, winning every major honour while Everton has found itself flirting with relegation. This match, for instance, is 1st vs 16th.
Taylor Swift performs at Wembley.Credit: Getty Images
But for all that, today’s Liverpool hardly win here. In the last ten meetings, they’ve won twice, Everton once, and the rest have been draws. Tonight, I’m about to find out why. I’m sitting in the Gwladys St End – right in the thick of the most vocal Everton supporters. Whatever Goodison is, I’m about to get a face full of it.
I take my seat, to find it behind two steel pillars, making a corridor just off the centre of the pitch invisible to me. I’m on the lower level, and the roof above me is so low, I can touch it without jumping. Two things are certain: I won’t see much if the ball goes in the air, and this will be loud.
In the distance I glimpse the Liverpool fans. They’re waving around balloons that make the number 30 – the kind you’d see at someone’s 30th birthday party. They’re less marking an anniversary than mocking one: 30 years since Everton last won a trophy. Meanwhile, Everton fans greet the Liverpool players with chants of “red-white shite, red-white shite, hello hello”. We’re away.
The game is an odd, sea-sawing affair. One where goals just happen, where teams concede when they look comfortable. The penny drops for me about ten minutes into the second half, at 1-1. Liverpool, thinking this is a football match, try to play intricate, refined passes. Everton, knowing this is a fight, clatter into every duel. Liverpool passes go astray, or more tellingly, fall short, looking unsure, rattled.
Everton’s James Tarkowski soaks up the adulation.Credit: AP
Goodison rises and rises, and I feel I’m watching Liverpool slowly crack. Now I see it. “It’s a bear pit”, I think to myself. Claws everywhere. Everything more proximate than is comfortable. This is a ground.
Would this be possible in a stadium, or would it look more like 1st v 16th? Before I can conclude, Liverpool score, again without much warning, and Goodison turns. Years of disillusionment and frustration come pouring out. The players are hopeless, the decision-making stupid. People start leaving. Then out of nowhere, in the 97th minute…
I’ll spend a lifetime trying to describe what comes next. Spectators run onto the pitch. Blue flares are let off. The noise in the Gwladys St End bounces off the roof, off the concrete, and smashes me in the face. It is like there is no other noise in the world. Men are crying and hugging with so much force they might just begin Goodison’s demolition early.
A player brawl broke out in wild scenes at Goodison Park.Credit: AP
Final whistle, 2-2. A draw salvaged when all hope was lost, and it’s like they just won the Champions League. Everton’s striker, Beto, is sprinting laps around the pitch, whacking the badge on his shirt.
A scuffle breaks out between players in front of the Liverpool fans. Three red cards get handed out after the game, including to the Liverpool head coach who’s steaming at the referee. And amidst the maelstrom, the fans stay and sing and stay. The stands don’t empty. It’s not just rapture, it’s deeper than that: they’re saying goodbye. They will never have this again. Something serious is being lost.
Football clubs are nothing without continuity, story, place. Grounds matter because they distil that fact; because they show this is not a theatre of corporations or brands, but of blood and bone and sweat and devotion.
Do Goodison’s rickety stands and steel pillars provide a great fan experience? Yes, but only by the most elemental, spiritual metrics. “So come on, come on, get down to Goodison Park,” they sang, basking. “Everton, we never shone so brightly”. Perhaps. And perhaps not again.
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