There are few footballers to have ever been directly transferred across Stanley Park and with good reason.
In a football-obsessed city such as ours, passions run deep as those who remember the torrents of anger the moves of Peter Beardsley and Nick Barmby unleashed when jumping ship would testify to. Fury would not just always be confined to supporters either, Liverpool manager Bill Shankly threatened to resign in protest when hard-knock midfielder Johnny Morrissey was sold by the Anfield board to Everton without his approval shortly after the Reds’ promotion from the Second Division in September 1962, while the likes of David Johnson and Steve McMahon were only able to turn out for ‘the other lot’ after signing for another club in between.
In general, it would be fans of the selling club up in arms about one of their players swapping red for blue or vice versa but this week marks the anniversary of a cross-Merseyside deal which at the time had both sets of supporters up in arms at the transfer of a player going through a difficult patch of form but who in time would win them all round to become a much-loved figure on both sides of the park after carving a unique slice of history for himself and even making the reverse move later on in his career as a coach.
Aigburth-born and raised Gary Ablett grew up as a Liverpudlian despite his first trip to Anfield as an 11-year-old in March 1977 ending in severe disappointment when he and his dad, a police officer who even showed his identification in a futile attempt to gain entry, were locked out of Liverpool’s sold-out European Cup quarter-final second leg against Saint Etienne. To make up for missing one of the Reds’ most famous nights en route to their first European Cup triumph, the dejected youngster did at least get into the ground three days later to see Bob Paisley’s treble-chasing side beat Middlesbrough to reach the FA Cup semi-finals and it only fostered his dreams of making it on to the hallowed turf himself one day.
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A prolific centre-forward in his schooldays, Ablett went for trials at a number of clubs including Manchester United where he wanted to go home after half an hour after being asked to go in goal because they had only invited one keeper. But he had been training at Melwood under the watchful gaze of renowned youth coach John Bennison, taking the 61 bus from Aigburth Vale to West Derby twice a week, and his dreams came true in 1982 when he was taken on by Liverpool as an apprentice, like many learning the ropes of what it took to be a professional footballer by cleaning boots, washing kits and absorbing the wisdom of around him while biding their time for the rare opportunity to break into a Reds team which set the standard across the country and beyond for excellence and consistency.
Ablett - now developing as a left-sided centre-half and full back - was signed as a professional two years later, and was thrilled to be taken to Rome as part of the official club trip to the 1984 European Cup final when Joe Fagan’s men completed a unique treble by beating the Italian champions on their own ground although he had to run the gauntlet of Roma ultras looking for revenge after their side’s defeat and almost missed the coach back to the airport as a result. Loan spells at Derby County and Hull City gained him some valuable Football League experience and his patience in waiting for a first team chance at Anfield came in December 1986 when Liverpool travelled to the Valley to face newly-promoted Charlton Athletic in a First Division fixture five days before Christmas.
The 21-year-old had been part of the Liverpool travelling party for matches before and was gratified by the fact he had moved up from cleaning Craig Johnston’s boots to being the Australian midfielder’s room-mate on this trip but assumed he was there as usual to make up the numbers, even with Alan Hansen a doubt after picking up a knock in the previous weekend’s televised victory over Chelsea at Anfield. He got the shock of his life when player-manager Kenny Dalglish named the team inside the dressing room barely an hour before kick-off with him in it, at left midfield in front of left back Jim Beglin.
“This was it. The moment I had waited for all my life”, he recalled in his autobiography, ‘The Game Of My Life’. “My big chance. And my initial reaction? F****** panic. I felt sick. Of course I wanted to play and the fact Kenny thought I was ready gave me confidence but I wasn’t prepared. I thought I’d just be warming the bench again. It was typical of Kenny and Liverpool not to make a fuss, maybe if he’d pulled me to one side at the hotel beforehand and told me I’d be making my debut, I’d just have spent the time worrying. Now I had no time to. It was 1.45pm and I had to get changed, warm up and get my head around a position I wasn’t totally familiar with. ‘Keep it simple’, I thought. ‘Pass and move, pass and move. The Liverpool way. Don’t do anything fancy.’ The game itself was a bit of a non-event and finished goalless, instantly forgettable for the 16,564 spectators who attended, but it will always live long in my memory. Jim Beglin played behind me and helped me through the game which I really appreciated. In some respects we were rivals, both looking to play left-back, but Jim could not have done more for me and made sure I was alright. I didn’t do anything particularly brilliant or anything particularly wrong. Just steady, which was fine by me. Charlton had some decent players like Robert Lee and Peter Shirtliff but even so Liverpool weren’t supposed to draw 0-0 with them and the coach home was fairly quiet. You could sense the disappointment among the players so it wouldn’t have been right for me to be sitting there with a beaming smile on my face but inside I was ready to burst. There were plenty of lads with the same dreams as me, some more naturally talented but who fell by the wayside for whatever reason. But I had realised a dream. No-one could take away the fact I had played for Liverpool now. I had made the step up.”
With Dalglish’s men being the reigning league champions and FA Cup holders, boasting defensive talent like Hansen, Mark Lawrenson, Gary Gillespie, Steve Nicol and Beglin, there were no guarantees when the youngster’s next opportunity would arrive and, after a brief substitute appearance as the holders crashed out of the cup at Luton the following month, it would be late April before Ablett was handed another chance. Six weeks earlier, Liverpool had looked on odds-on favourites to retain the championship after moving nine points clear of Everton at the top of the First Division table but four straight defeats, including defeat to Arsenal in the League Cup final at Wembley, had put Howard Kendall’s Toffees in pole position.
With Beglin having suffered a horrific broken leg months before and Lawrenson struggling with an Achilles injury which would bring his career to a premature end the following year, Ablett was drafted in for his Anfield debut at left back as Nottingham Forest travelled to Merseyside with Dalglish’s men looked to keep their fading title hopes alive. Brian Clough’s side had flying winger Franz Carr in their ranks, who Ablett remembered had given him a tough time in reserve games before, but the young defender handled him well as the Reds returned to winning ways, Dalglish opened the scoring eleven minutes before half-time with what proved the last of his 172 league goals for the Reds and Ronnie Whelan doubled the lead with an acrobatic volley six minutes after the break before Ablett put the seal on a 3-0 victory with his first - and what turned out to be his only - goal for the club, lashing the ball home first-time on the volley at the Anfield Road end after a loose Forest clearance sat up nicely for him.
“Anfield erupted”, he remembered, “but while the stadium went berserk all around me and the ball billowed the back of the net, I was there frozen for a split-second wondering, ‘What do I do now?’ My little dose of stage-fright - sheer embarrassment, actually - was cured by Steve McMahon who flung himself on top of me before the rest of my team-mates joined in, burying me at the bottom of a pile of bodies. I eventually emerged from a seas of red shirts and trotted back to take up my position, unable to suppress a smile. I felt a weird, tingling sensation but at the same time it felt amazing. This was another landmark in my desire to prove my doubters wrong and the culmination of years of hard work. Sure, I had played for Liverpool. But now I had scored for Liverpool. At Anfield. With tens of thousands of people clapping and cheering for me. What would the teachers at St Margaret’s Church of England High School in Aigburth, who had said I was daft pursuing a career in football, be thinking now?”
Ablett kept his place in the side and the following weekend contributed a memorable first assist to go along with his debut goal when firing over the accurate cross which enabled Ian Rush to seal a 3-1 victory over Everton at Anfield and in the process draw level with Dixie Dean’s record of 19 Merseyside derby goals in the Welshman’s last match against his boyhood club before he left to join Juventus in Italy. It wasn’t enough to stop the Blues regaining the title a week later but provided further belief to the young defender he belonged in such exalted company and a satisfying conclusion to his breakthrough season which was cut short the following weekend when he picked up an ankle injury in a defeat at Coventry.
It was a summer of change of Anfield with the Reds board giving Dalglish significant backing in the transfer market to rebuild his side in the wake of Rush’s departure and the concession of the league championship following a rare second trophy-less season in three years. England forward Peter Beardsley arrived from Newcastle for a British record £1.9m with Watford winger John Barnes arriving for £900,000 to join Oxford United’s Scouse goal-poacher John Aldridge who had signed the previous January. By the time Aldridge’s Republic of Ireland and Oxford team-mate Ray Houghton was brought in for £825,000 in October 1987, Dalglish’s revamped and flair-filled outfit were already shifting through the gears in what would be one of Liverpool’s most imperious championship successes but Ablett’s hopes of building on the progress he had made were initially hampered by the ankle injury which had curtailed the previous campaign and was troubling him when he returned for pre-season, eventually requiring an operation.
It would be late January by the time he was back in the side but, after getting the nod at left back for the Reds’ FA Cup fourth round victory at Aston Villa, he kept his place for the rest of the campaign as Dalglish’s men cruised towards what seemed an inevitable second league and cup double in three seasons. Although defeat at Goodison in late March meant Liverpool were only able to equal Leeds United’s record of 29 league games unbeaten from the start of a season, Nottingham Forest were seen off in the FA Cup semi-final before being annihilated at Anfield 5-0 four days later in the league as the Reds moved to within three points of sealing the championship with six matches left to play, legendary Preston and England winger Tom Finney describing it as “one of the first displays of football ever seen”.
“As a defender, I didn’t have that much to do”, Ablett admitted. “We used to just give John Barnes the ball and let him get in with it. He would keep it, weave his magic and terrorise opponents week in, week out. He was just out of this world, a magician who used to get kicked from pillar to post and suffered the worst imaginable on and off the pitch, and yet he was someone who just ensured he would have the final say. Kenny and his staff knew how influential Barnesy was that season and would be in the years to come but Ronnie Moran would always stick up for the likes of me and Ronnie Whelan, who he called “the ham and eggs” which basically meant we did a lot of the stuff that didn’t get any headlines but which allowed the team to function as one.”
Wimbledon produced one of the biggest cup upsets of all time to prevent the Reds adding the FA Cup to their 90-point league title triumph but when Dalglish swooped during the summer to bring Ian Rush back from Italy and add the Welsh hotshot to what was already being described as Liverpool’s greatest ever team, it looked ominous for the Reds’ rivals already wondering how they might be able close the gap in 1988/89. Things did not immediately go to plan however with Rush hampered by illness and injury problems which limited him to only 23 starts during the campaign, goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar contracting meningitis which ruled him out for four months and Alan Hansen picking up a serious knee injury in an early-season friendly at Atletico Madrid which kept him out of action until the following April.
Inevitably results suffered with the first defeat coming in the fifth league game of the season rather than thirtieth when Newcastle United (who would finish bottom of the league) won at Anfield in early October and by the time Dalglish’s men collapsed late on at Manchester United on New Year’s Day to lose 3-1, they had already been beaten five times to leave any hopes of defending their title seemingly in tatters and all but over. George Graham’s Arsenal had been a growing force since their League Cup triumph over Liverpool two seasons earlier and took over at the top from early-season pace-setters Norwich, the Gunners at one stage enjoying a 19 point lead over their rivals from Anfield, but the defeat at Old Trafford proved a turning point with a fantastic run of 11 wins and two draws propelling Liverpool right back into the title race with Ablett fundamental to the improvement in fortunes.
Hansen’s long absence at the heart of the defence gave the young Scouser a run in the side in his preferred position of centre-back and he was outstanding in holding things together while his team-mates searched for form and fitness. A ninth successive Liverpool win at Millwall on 11th April put the Reds top of the First Division for the first time all season, level on points with the Gunners but enjoying a superior goal difference, with six matches each left to play. From the gloom of mid-winter, Liverpool’s season was now blooming into life with long-term absentees Hansen and Rush on the brink of returning to action and the possibility of another league and FA Cup double again on the cards. Victories over Carlisle United, Millwall, Hull City and Brentford had set up a repeat of the previous year’s semi-final against Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough and thousands of Liverpudlians travelled over the Pennines to Sheffield on a beautiful spring morning full of excitement and belief that their team were on an unstoppable march to glory again. Alas, Saturday 15th April 1989 would be a day that changed the lives of countless people, as well as the city of Liverpool and the game of football, forever.
After serious concerns raised after the draw by Liverpool over the arrangements following the previous year’s encounter were ignored by the Football Association, catastrophic crowd mismanagement before the kick off by the South Yorkshire Police led to a lethal crush inside the caged pens of the Leppings Lane terrace Liverpool had been allocated, with an inadequate emergency response that included dozens of ambulances being left outside and prevented from trying to save lives by police fixated with non-existent hooliganism, ultimately meaning 97 innocent men, women and children were unlawfully killed in Europe’s worst ever sporting disaster.
Ablett and his team-mates supported the bereaved and the injured survivors as best they could as the city tried to process the enormity of the tragedy. “I pulled on a Liverpool shirt 49 times that season, the most I ever played for the club in a single campaign, but whenever I look back on it the overriding emotion is one of intense sadness", he wrote in The Game of my Life which he began after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the summer of 2010 and was published shortly after his tragic passing at the age of 46 in January 2012. "Over the past 16 months, I have been in and out of hospitals and spent more time hooked up to machines and attached to tubes than I would care to remember. But visiting the hospitals in Sheffield is still the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. There is no comprehending the pain and suffering the victims and their families and the survivors went through that terrible day and, just as significantly, still are many years later. When you are listening to someone tell you they had hold of a friend’s hand, only for them to be sucked away, ripped out of their grasp and lost in a mass of heaving, gasping bodies, what can you say? We listened to their stories in a state of disbelief. Big Al was sick in the corner of one room. It left you numbed. Shocked. Appalled.
“There were so many funerals and I attend 11. Whenever I was asked to, I put my name forward. I was a local lad and wanted to help because these were my supporters as well. I was one of them. Whether it was helping to carry a coffin or reading a service in church, which I found incredibly difficult, I tried to do my bit. Not out of a sense of duty but because I wanted to. This was our tragedy. Usually I would break down. I’m not ashamed to say that. But everything was so overpowering: the emotions and feelings of that terrible, dark day ; the loved ones who had been lost ; the ages of those who had died. It was horrendous, all of it.
"I only ever kept two Liverpool shirts over my career and one of them I gave to Phil Hammond to put in the coffin of his son, Philip Jnr, who died aged just 14. St Margaret’s, where I had gone to school, was just across the road from where Phil lived and I was asked to attend the funeral. Offering the shirt was just something I felt was the right thing to do. I can remember, in the days immediately after the tragedy, we walked out at Anfield and saw the wreaths, scarves and flags which were spreading all the way across the pitch, and the tributes on the Kop. A lad came up to me, just dressed in his jeans and trainers, and broke down crying. ‘I’ve got all my savings out of the bank’, he said. ‘Make sure they go into the appeal fund for me’. Then he handed me a big wad of cash. I broke down as well.”
After discussions with the families of those whose lives were lost and the football authorities, Liverpool returned to competitive action following an emotional warm-up friendly against Celtic in Glasgow with a Merseyside derby at Goodison Park against Everton who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their Merseyside neighbours in the aftermath of the disaster, the Blues having booked their place in the FA Cup final with victory over Norwich City at Villa Park in the other semi-final that same fateful day only two and half weeks earlier. Alan Hansen had been named in the side at Hillsborough to make his first appearance of the season after his long lay-off before the match was abandoned but Ablett’s impressive performances during the skipper’s absence saw him retained at centre-back and the pair stood firm to help see off Forest when the semi-final was re-played at Old Trafford to set up another all-Merseyside final at Wembley. The occasion proved a fitting memorial to those who died with the Reds triumphing 3-2 after extra time in a classic final, Ablett’s joy in lifting the trophy he and his team-mates knew they just had to win for their fallen fans evident in his joyous smile while wearing a brightly-coloured Liverpool bobble hat behind Ronnie Whelan as he raised the cup aloft.
Although the draw at Goodison Park had given Arsenal a slight advantage in the championship race, slip-ups by George Graham’s side in home matches against Derby County and Wimbledon coupled with Liverpool wins over Forest, Wimbledon and Queens Park Rangers put Dalglish’s men back in charge, with a 5-1 win over West Ham three days after the FA Cup final meaning the Gunners - whose listed trip to Anfield the weekend after the disaster had been postponed - would now have to win by two clear goals in the rearranged, final match of the season the following Friday night.
The Football Association’s insistence that all of Liverpool’s outstanding fixtures must be played before England’s Rous Cup fixture with Scotland at Hampden Park on 27th May meant the Reds players were forced to play eight matches in 23 days and the final one proved a step too far, Michael Thomas’s last minute goal giving Arsenal the 2-0 victory they required to snatch the title in the most dramatic finale ever seen to a league season. Ablett and his emotionally-drained team-mates returned after the summer break with a sense of unfinished business but if the Liverpool-born defender thought his sterling efforts at centre-half the previous year had cemented his role in Dalglish’s backline, he was in for a rude awakening. Swedish international Glenn Hysen was signed from Fiorentina for £1.1m and, with Hansen and Gillespie both now back to full fitness, Ablett now found himself fourth-choice at centre-half with the emergence of Steve Staunton and David Burrows also limiting his chances at left back.
A paltry 15 league appearances in 1989/90 just about earned Ablett another championship medal as Dalglish’s men regained their crown from Arsenal and that season did see what the defender himself described as his best ever game for Liverpool in a 5-2 win at Chelsea shortly before Christmas which saw the London side’s former manager John Hollins write afterwards he had never seen a left-back run the game before. With Hansen now 35 and nearing retirement, more opportunities were forthcoming the following campaign and Ablett again showed his versatility by putting in a superb performance doing a central midfield man-marking job on Paul Gascoigne - only months after the midfielder's starring performances for England in the 1990 World Cup in Italy - when the Reds travelled to Tottenham for a televised Sunday afternoon fixture, even leading the counter-attack with a surging sixty-yard run that set up Beardsley's clinching goal in a 3-1 triumph for Kenny Dalglish’s side, who had begun the season with a club-record eight successive league victories and still led the First Division at the turn of the year.
But nobody truly appreciated how much of a toll Hillsborough - as well as the relentless pressure to be successful he had worked under for twenty years at Celtic and Liverpool - had taken on the manager and he stunned the football world by announcing his immediate retirement as manager in February 1991. After Ronnie Moran took caretaker charge for a spell, former Reds European Cup-winning captain Graeme Souness replaced his fellow Scot in the April and, while unable to prevent Arsenal regaining the league title, was given a big war-chest to revamp what was becoming an ageing side, spending a British record £2.9m on Derby County’s Welsh forward Dean Saunders and another £2.2m on his club mate, England centre half Mark Wright, with winger Mark Walters arriving from the manager’s former club Rangers for £1.5m.
Eyebrows were raised among many supporters when Peter Beardsley was sold to Everton for £1.1m but there was an appreciation the squad was in need of a refresh with Liverpool now allowed to return to European competition after the ban following the 1985 Heysel disaster was finally lifted. Four victories from the first six league matches lifted Souness’s side to second in the league table but a series of early-season injuries to a number of key players, including new supposed defensive lynchpin Wright, saw a succession of poor results with Ablett - restored at centre-back alongside a struggling Hysen - sent off in the early October goalless draw at Manchester United and guilty of some costly errors, notably at home to Stoke in a League Cup tie when an under-hit back-pass enabled the second-tier Potters to claim an unlikely draw and away at Auxerre in the first leg of the Reds’ second round UEFA Cup tie, which the French club won 2-0 to leave the Reds with a mountain to climb in the Anfield return.
Liverpool had never previously overhauled a two-goal deficit in Europe but the loyalty of the 23,094 fans who braved a blustery November night was rewarded with first half goals from Jan Molby from the penalty spot) and youngster Mike Marsh which levelled the tie before Mark Walters’ 83rd minute in front of a jubilant and vociferous Kop sent the Reds through the next round, Ablett superbly marshalling an inexperienced back four which featured midfielder Marsh at right back along with Nick Tanner and David Burrows to prevent the away goal which would likely have ended the Reds’ hopes of progression. The French side’s Hungarian forward Kalman Kovacs had caused Souness’s team a lot of problems in the first leg and his effectiveness at Anfield was very much reduced by a hefty challenge early from Ablett which caused him to be substituted less than 20 minutes in. It may have helped Liverpool on the night but the manager’s reaction afterwards only deepened the defender's sense that he and the Scot were not on the same wavelength.
“I remember going right through the back of Kovacs right on the halfway line”, he recalled. “It was a poor challenge from me, one which betrayed my eagerness to play a part in what we hoped could be a famous European night and he had to limp off. When we got back into the dressing room after the game, Graeme came over to me. ‘Well done, great tackle’ is all he said. But I knew it wasn’t a great tackle. I’d mistimed it but it was clear that is what he wanted. None of it sat easily with me. I don’t think I was ever a Graeme Souness type of player. I wanted to bring the ball down on the floor and try to play football. Graeme wanted me to kick the striker I was marking, which wasn’t my natural game. I just felt right from the start of his tenure, there was an undertone that he wanted us to kick anything that moved.”
The fightback against Auxerre may have been a welcome reminder of the glories Liverpool supporters had been well accustomed to but the club was heading into a period of steep decline which was only underlined before the end of the same month when the Reds crashed out of the League Cup after an embarrassing defeat at Third Division Peterborough United, with Souness's side barely above halfway in the league table and way off the title pace being set by Manchester United and Leeds. Ablett was continuing to struggle for form and, with his confidence increasingly shot, became the target of abuse from sections of the Anfield crowd which, as a local lad and Liverpool fan, was very difficult to take.
“As much as fans will turn around and say the lad who came through the ranks is ‘one of us’, you’re often the first they turn on when things aren’t going well. I was always aware of that and it nagged at me, playing constantly in my mind and there was no escaping it. As a footballer you know you’re going to make mistakes, but like a golfer who suffers from the yips, one stray pass or poor piece of control can quickly snowball into something more serious. You make a mistake, hear the groans of the crowd, maybe someone shouting ‘F*** off, Ablett’ and the next time you get the ball there is a sense of anxiety gripping you. It is a horrendous feeling becoming a target for the boo-boys and you feel it a lot more being a local lad because you’re representing so many people - people like you.
“Being truthful, I couldn’t handle what was going on. My game felt like it was disintegrating around me and my displays became poorer and poorer with the crowd getting at me more and more as a result. There was no help or advice offered up by the coaching staff or my team-mates and the abuse was merciless at times. It reached the stage where I would avoid walking down Church Street in town, past all the market stalls, because I knew every step I took would accompanied by a chorus of abuse. It wasn’t particularly nasty but when you hear someone you’ve never met before telling you you’re ’s****’ for the 20th time, you do start to wonder why you’re putting yourself through it.”
Ablett did put pen to paper on a new four-year deal in November 1991 but admitted even he was signing it he thought it would be a miracle if he saw it out and in fact it was barely four weeks later he was informed by Souness the club had accepted an offer for him from Everton, confirming at the same time the defender was now third or fourth in the pecking order for a central defensive spot. Howard Kendall had returned to Goodison Park the previous autumn after his hugely successful spell in charge in the mid 80s and, with Ablett having already had positive previous dealings with the Toffees boss and now under no illusions he had no future at Anfield, felt he had little to lose in joining the Reds’ biggest rivals and playing somewhere where he felt wanted, a decision which was vindicated before he even kicked a ball in Royal Blue.
“Howard had always liked me”, Ablett recalled. “When he was at Manchester City, he’d once bumped into me and said I ever wanted a move, no matter where he was, he would take me. There was no great friendship between us, no obvious link, but I just found he was very personable and someone I liked and could get along with. We agreed to meet at Bellefield one evening to finalise the deal and Howard took me up to his office, which was about the size of a broom cupboard, and poured us both a little drink. ‘Listen, I’ve got to ring Graeme’, he said, picking up the phone and punching in Souness’s number. ‘Graeme, it’s Howard. I’ve spoken to Gary and he doesn’t want to do the deal’. He had a twinkle in his eye as he said that, moving the phone away from his mouth, covering the handset and smiling and winking at me across the desk while I just looked on, astonished. What the hell was he up to? I’d just told him I’d sign, no problem.
“’What do you mean he doesn’t want to do the deal?’, I could hear Graeme barking back down the phone. ‘You’re not offering him enough to go’. ‘How much does he want?’ ‘Another £25,000’. Howard moved the phone away from his mouth again. This time I was smiling. There was a pause. ‘Okay he can have it’, said Graeme. Just like that, Howard had got me an extra £25,000. Unbelievable although in one respect it showed how desperate Graeme was to get rid of me. Howard never discussed anything about that with me, he just did it off his own bat and I certainly wasn’t complaining. And he wasn’t finished yet. ‘Right lad, what are you doing now?’, he said. ‘Do you fancy going into Southport for a night out?’ ‘I live in the south end, Howard, I’d better get home to be fair’, I replied. The money his opportunism earned me went straight into my pension fund but, as soon as he did that for me, I knew he was the type of manager I wanted to play for and nothing changed from that day to this. I love the bones of the man and always like being in his company.
“Yet, despite Howard’s warmth, it wasn’t an easy move to make. Peter Beardsley had done it only months before but he didn’t bring the baggage of being local boy, Liverpudlians didn’t want him to go and Evertonians knew they were getting a player who’d enjoyed a brilliant career. In contrast, many Liverpool fans couldn’t wait to see the back of me after my form had unravelled and plenty of Everton fans were unimpressed at signing a reject from their bitter rivals. I’m not soft, I knew there’d be abuse, but I genuinely didn’t anticipate the level of vitriol aimed at me. You could be walking down the street and a car would go past with someone shouting, ‘F*** off, Ablett’ or ’s***bag’. It got to the stage where it felt like a free-for-all and I couldn’t tell who was abusing me: Evertonians or Liverpudlians.”
Ablett slowly started to win round his detractors in the blue half of the city, scoring his first Everton goal in a 2-0 win at West Ham a month after signing, but Kendall would be unable to reverse the slide in fortunes in Goodison which had arguably begun with his departure for Athletic Bilbao in 1987. A 12th place finish in 1991/92 - the club’s lowest since Kendall had been brought in to replace Gordon Lee eleven years earlier - was followed by more mid-table mediocrity the following campaign and a drop to 13th, although there was at least for Ablett the immense satisfaction of a derby win over Graeme Souness and Liverpool. Despite hammering Manchester United 3-0 at Old Trafford early in the campaign which would see Alex Ferguson’s side crowned inaugural Premier League champions, the Blues went almost two months without a league win in the autumn and were only one place above the relegation zone when the Reds - hardly pulling up any trees themselves in ninth - travelled across Stanley Park in early December. Mark Wright’s header just after the hour mark put the visitors in front but Scottish forward Mo Johnston equalised within seconds with a shot on the turn and, six minutes from time, Ablett’s clever pass found Beardsley in space on the edge of the box who rifled home the winner to send Goodison into raptures. “If it was a big moment for Peter”, Ablett reflected, “then I felt 10 foot tall. ‘Take that’, I thought. I knew I wasn’t a dud and maybe now one or two others would have the same opinion. It was just a shame there wren’t more days like that.”
Kendall would resign almost exactly a year later after the Everton board refused to back his attempt to sign Manchester United’s Dion Dublin and was replaced by Norwich boss Mike Walker who had led the Canaries into Europe and a famous UEFA Cup triumph over Bayern Munich months before but found himself out of his depth at Goodison. With only four league wins recorded after Walker took charge in early January 1994, the Blues went into the final game of the season at home to Wimbledon in real danger of being relegated, needing a victory and other results to go their way to preserve the top-flight status which had been theirs since 1951. The infamous ‘Crazy Gang’ took an early lead with a Dean Holdsworth penalty and doubled their advantage after only 20 minutes when Ablett scored an agonising own goal, trying desperately to keep the ball out of the net after a series of defensive errors. The Toffees’ goose looked cooked but Graham Stuart restored hope from the penalty spot before half-time and Barry Horne’s thunderous 25-yarder brought the Blues level before Stuart’s 81st minute winner secured the three points Everton needed, Sheffield United’s late defeat at Chelsea meaning it was they who were condemned to the drop as emotional Evertonians invaded the pitch in sheer relief.
“It was a surreal day from start to finish”, Ablett recalled. “Wimbledon’s team coach had been set on fire and burnt out at their team hotel on Merseyside the night before the game, but if that was done by Evertonians to try and intimidate them they had probably picked the wrong opposition. Being truthful, when the own goal went in I thought that was it. I thought I’d unwittingly had a hand in the goal that would send Everton tumbling out of the top flight. If I am honest, I’m still not sure about the third goal. It would be wrong for me to say I thought Hans Segars had deliberately let it in at the time. No-one thought there was anything out of the ordinary about how Graham Stuart’s shot slipped under his body and into the net. At the time, all you could think about was the noise and emotion that we may have just saved ourselves from the drop. But with the subsequent publicity that game has received and the allegations of match fixing, you do wonder. In the first half I had taken a free kick and put everything into the shot, catching it just right, and Hans plucked it out of the air as if he was picking cherries. Fast forward to Graham’s shot and let’s just say he could have done better. There was no huge celebration afterwards, just huge relief we wouldn’t be saddled with the tag of having taken Everton down but I’m still not totally sure how we managed to get out of the hole we were in.”
Walker was given the chance to try and improve Everton’s fortunes but, after 14 games of the new season, the Toffees were still winless and rooted to the foot of the Premier League table. Ablett’s header against West Ham in early November finally brought a much-needed first three points but it wasn’t enough to save Walker’s job and he was replaced by former Everton striker and title winner Joe Royle who had impressed by taking lowly Oldham Athletic into the top flight after a series of cup exploits. He enjoyed a dream return to Goodison by inspiring the Blues to a 2-0 victory over Liverpool in his first game which lifted the Toffees off the bottom with on-loan Scottish striker Duncan Ferguson notching his first goal for the club and, although Premier League survival would not be mathematically confirmed until three games before the end of the season, his ‘Dogs of War’ mentality restored fight, belief and hope within the Goodison ranks and led to a remarkable run in the FA Cup.
After Derby County, Bristol City and Norwich were seen off in the opening rounds, Dave Watson’s header defeated Kevin Keegan’s high-flying Newcastle United in the last eight to set up a semi-final showdown against Tottenham at Elland Road. With Manchester United paired with Crystal Palace in the other semi, sections of the media were already salivating over a supposed ‘dream final’ between Alex Ferguson’s back-to-back champions and Ossie Ardiles’s flair-filled side which boasted the likes of Jurgen Klinsmann, Teddy Sheringham, Darren Anderton and Nick Barmby but Royle’s men had other ideas. Matt Jackson and Graham Stuart put the Blues two goals ahead before the hour mark and, although Klinsmann set nerves jangling by pulling a goal back from the penalty spot, substitute Daniel Amokachi restored the two-goal cushion before completing what turned into a 4-1 rout in stoppage time with a close-range finish after a exhilarating counter-attack led by a lung-busting run and accurate cross from Ablett to confirm Everton’s place at Wembley.
Their opponents would be Manchester United, who the previous weekend had been pipped for a third successive Premier League title by Kenny Dalglish’s Blackburn Rovers, but were still red-hot favourites to retain the trophy they'd lifted the previous May when trouncing Chelsea 4-0 to complete the double. But Everton had displayed the big-match temperament Royle was instilling in them three months earlier when Duncan Ferguson’s towering header secured three precious league points over Ferguson’s side at Goodison and they repeated the feat under Wembley’s twin towers, Paul Rideout’s 30th minute header after a Stuart effort had cannoned off the cross bar proving the defence with Ablett, Watson, Southall and co performing a heroic rearguard to thwart United’s increasingly desperate attempts to draw level. It secured Ablett a unique place in Merseyside football history as the only man to lift the world’s oldest cup competition with both Liverpool and Everton, an achievement which still stands today and one he was hugely proud of. “It was a different type of success to that I had enjoyed earlier in my career at the club across the city because it was so unexpected. Because of that, what Everton achieved is up there with anything I did at Liverpool. To be able to say I am the only player who has won FA Cup winners’ medals with both Merseyside clubs is massively important to me and is a slice of football history I don’t see being emulated for some considerable time.”
Another medal followed after the Charity Shield victory over Blackburn the following August and Ablett had the pleasure of being involved in another derby victory over Liverpool, this time at Anfield, although he had been substituted after picking up a knee ligament injury in a challenge with Ian Rush by the time Andrei Kanchelskis’s second-half brace secured a 2-1 victory in November 1995 and, although he would recover fitness, with youngster David Unsworth and new signing Craig Short jostling for position as Royle’s preferred partner for Dave Watson, and Andy Hinchcliffe’s expert set-piece delivery regularly earning him the left-back spot, his time at Goodison was drawing to a close and after a short loan spell with Howard Kendall at Sheffield United, Ablett joined Birmingham City for £390,000 in June 1996 after making 156 games for the Blues. “I just wanted to play”, he admitted. “I was 30 and playing reserve team football which was no good for me at that age. It’s not the same as it is now, where you have a squad and seven substitutes. It wasn’t for me and Joe understood. He couldn’t offer me a regular place and I didn’t want to spend my Saturday afternoons watching from the stands.”
Ablett would play over 100 league games in three years at St Andrews and finished his playing days with a spell at Blackpool and a stint in the United States with Long Island Rough Riders before returning to Goodison in 2002 to coach the Blues’ under 17 side and, four years later, becoming the only man to cross Stanley Park twice by becoming Liverpool’s reserve team coach. “I would never have dreamt that four years down the line I'd be crossing sides again”, he said, “but opportunities to progress at Everton were always going to be limited because David Moyes already had a structure in place which he trusted and was comfortable with. I’d heard there was a vacancy at Liverpool with Paco Herrera who Rafa Benitez had brought over from Spain wanting to go back home to take up a job with Espanyol. I just thought there was no harm in applying so I sent my CV in and a couple of days later Rafa called me and said 'would you like to come in?' I was interviewed for an hour and a half and found it fascinating to be quite truthful. He grilled me on the tactics board so obviously he wanted to see I knew what I was doing. I waited for 10 days, maybe two weeks, before I got another call asking me to come in when he asked me to do a plan of the season for him, which I did for the young players. Four to five days later I was asked to come in again and was told that the job was mine.”
Under Ablett's guidance, Liverpool won the Premier Reserve League North in April 2008 and a month later became national champions after convincingly defeating southern champions Aston Villa 3-0 at Anfield but he was sacked as part of Benítez's revamp of the youth system the following summer. He was appointed Stockport County manager soon afterwards but with the club struggling financially and in administration was unable to prevent them being relegated and left a year later. He had not long taken up Roy Keane’s offer to join the Ipswich Town coaching staff when he was rushed to hospital after being taken ill on the training ground and was soon diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the same form of cancer that took the life of former Arsenal midfielder David Rocastle in 2001.
Ablett fought the disease with the same courage and dignity he handled the numerous setbacks he experienced during the football career but passed away in the early hours of 2nd January 2012 at the age of only 46. A host of former players and friends from Liverpool and Everton, as well as from across the world of football, attended his funeral at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral with many paying heartfelt tributes to a man regarded by many as one of the game’s genuine nice guys.
"He was a lovely guy and he was quite unassuming. Everyone loved him”, former Liverpool centre-back partner Alan Hansen said. “Even though we knew he was ill, his passing has left us all distraught because we thought and hoped he was recovering. 46 years of age is absolutely tragic. He came into the dressing room when Liverpool had one of the great teams and he was right in there because he was a top-class player as well. If he had joined Liverpool in the late 70s or early 80s he would have been a permanent fixture. He was a dedicated, consummate professional but he was right at the top of the tree. I had a couple of great centre-back partnerships at Liverpool and he was as good as anything. I played with him when he was on the left-side of defence and he made it really easy for me and as soon as he stepped into the Liverpool side I knew he was a top-class player."
“It takes a special kind of person to have the courage to make that move from Liverpool to Everton”, former Blues team-mate Ian Snodin said. “I was a little bit wary at first - as most players probably are - of someone who has played for their fiercest rivals but when ‘Abbo’ left Everton, I thought of him as a friend, a top bloke and a lovely, lovely man. He was the kind of fella you’d call if you fancied a pint - and you can’t always say that about all of your team-mates. But such was Gary’s personality and the way he conducted himself that he quickly became very popular at Goodison. He was under a lot of pressure when he made the switch - from fans of both sides - but the way he played and how he handled himself meant he won them all over, as well as all the lads at Everton. He mixed in straight away but the only way you can win the respect of fellow professionals is if you can play and Gary was an excellent footballer. You don’t make as many appearances as he did for Liverpool without having quality. But much more important than any football qualities he had, he was also a lovely lad. I feel for his family and friends to lose someone at such a young age. And I think the reaction on both sides of Stanley Park has underlined what a special person he was. But I think the fact both sets of fans mourn his passing equally is the biggest tribute you can pay to him. Gary was a winner - for Liverpool and Everton - and he was also a top fella. Abbo, RIP.”
