The Merseyside derby and the loss of Goodison Park

In the most dramatic way possible, the final Merseyside derby at Goodison Park was a fitting final chapter for a rivalry that stretches back to Victorian times.

In a way, it didn't really make any sense. The clock on ninety minutes had indicated that there would be five minutes of additional time to be played at the end. How could it even be possible to play more than four minutes when there were only 90 seconds of stoppage-time left to play? And then there was the goal itself. First, there wasn't an offside by a hair's breadth. Then there wasn't a foul by a hair's breadth. And then the ball hit the back of the net, and it all went off.

And of course it made sense. How could it not? How could the final goal scored in a Merseyside derby at this place not be a 98th minute equaliser, followed by lengthy interjections from the Robo-Ref over first an offside and then a foul? There had been a growing tetchiness throughout the closing stages of the game which was only exacerbated by the lengthy delay. Everything was leading to this point.

The Final Goodison Merseyside Derby had its late, late drama, all the more so when a post-match celebration in front of the travelling supporters resulted in four red cards, one of which was for a manager and another for his assistant. The pundits talked excitedly about the "passion" that was "overflowing", choosing to overlook the fundamental absurdity of a bunch of fully-grown adults in bright colours pushing and shoving each other around, like an episode of Jeux Sans Frontieres demanding to be taken seriously.

It was, if nothing else, an appropriately rancorous final Merseyside derby, since this rivalry was created by stadium drama in the first place. There was a time when Everton were the only professional club in the city of Liverpool. John Houlding, a local businessman and Conservative politician, had been involved with the club since almost the very beginning, and he found a piece of land on the edge of Stanley Park, on the north side of the city, which could be used after they were asked to leave their previous pitch in 1884. Houlding bought the land, which became known as Anfield, and charged the club rent to play there.

But rent increases damaged trust between Houlding and the rest of the board. In 1889, Everton paid him £100 in rent; by the 1889/90 season this had risen to £250, although crowds had risen by this time to 20,000. It was the future development of the area which proved to be the fatal blow for this relationship. The previous owner of the Anfield Road site also owned land adjacent to the ground and planned to build an access road across Houlding's land. The only way to stop this was to rent or buy this piece of land. Houlding wanted Everton to buy both his and the other party's land by floating the club.

Had these proposals been accepted, Houlding would have made a considerable amount of money, but ultimately these disputes led to Everton leaving for a new site on the other side of the park instead. Goodison Park, the joint-oldest purpose-built football stadium in the world, opened in August 1892, on the same day as Celtic Park did in Scotland. Houlding, now with a football ground but no team to play there, formed Liverpool FC in the same year. When he died in 1902, players from both clubs carried his coffin.

133 years on, Goodison Park has now staged its last Merseyside derby, and it was at least an evening which honoured the fractious way in which this cross-city rivalry began. Everton scored, Liverpool levelled within five minutes. With seventeen to play, Mo Salah scored again for Liverpool and it really did look as though that was that. Crowing songs about winning the League at Goodison Park echoed around the stadium.

But pride can come before a fall, and eight minutes into stoppage-time it did. This was, of course, peak Barclays, football as an exercise in performance theatre. Two Everton players clonked into each other and required a substantial amount of treatment, with a minute to play on the clock. And when the goal came, it was volleyed in by the blood and thunder right foot of James Tarkowski, arguably the most Sean Dyche player of all time. First it was checked for offside. Then it was checked for a foul. Then, after a four-minute break, it was finally given, and Goodison Park erupted again.

At the full-time whistle, it went off. Liverpool's Curtis Jones and Everton's Abdoulaye Doucoure picked up red cards for scrapping in front of the Liverpool supporters, and later for Arne Slot and his assistant Sipke Hulshoff over their complaints regarding the refereeing. Under Premier League rules, anyone who’s been sent off can’t appear at post-match press conferences, so only Everton were represented for this one.

The loss of this fine old stadium is a blow to the culture of the game in this country. Goodison Park is living history, 133 years the home of one of the great institutions of the English game. And for those of us who don’t pay hundreds of pounds a year to sit in a seat there every other week, the deeply imperfect experience of actually watching a match there wasn’t a great concern. But for those who did, the extremely restricted views and even more cramped seating areas were no joke. By the standards of the 21st century, the harsh truth is that Goodison Park wasn’t really up to scratch any more.

But let’s make no mistake, here. The loss of Goodison Park will be the loss of a piece of English football history. It has hosted an FA Cup final and an FA Cup final replay, in 1894 and 1910 respectively. It was the venue for the Dick, Kerr Ladies when women’s football briefly but vertiginously rose in popularity during and after the First World War before the FA snuffed it out with its infamous 1921 ban.

And at the 1966 World Cup finals, it was the de facto second venue after Wembley, hosting five matches in total; the three group matches which signalled Brazil’s elimination from the tournament at this stage for the first (and still only) time since 1930, the quarter-final between Portugal and North Korea in which Korea took a 3-0 lead before Portugal—and in particular Eusebio—walked all over them for a 5-3 win, and the other semi-final between West Germany and the USSR. The England vs Portugal semi-final was due to be played there but it was controversially switched, as it could be at the time, by the organising committee.

It’s a ground which still houses some of the finest work of football’s best known stand-builder, Archibald Leitch, and it has hosted 70 years of consecutive top flight football. It still also holds the record for being the stadium which has hosted more top flight matches in this country than any other.

The new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock will be bigger and more spacious. Every seat will have an unrestricted view. But it won’t have that weight of history behind it, because that weight of history takes that amount of time to build. It’s dyed into the wood of the old stadium, and it’s not really transportable.

But one person’s nostalgia is another’s discomfort and restricted views. A grand old stadium has to make way for more plate glass and steel, and considering the fact that my own club did the same, it feels churlish to complain. Mine is on the site of the old one, and that did matter a lot to me, but I wasn’t in a place to be able to get angry over whatever decision they ended up taking.

Had I been more deeply invested things would have been different. But then, I did know that the interior of the stand that I occasionally sat in at White Hart Lane looked like the interior of a multi-storey car park and that the ground was was too small. The new stadium is a magnificent building, but it’s different. Everton will be different too, after they leave this messy old place they call home.

There’s still the rest of this season to play, of course. But last night’s match really did feel like a grand finale, of sorts, the end of a story that began towards the end of the century before last, before the first manned aircraft and in the same decade as the first car going on retail sale. Whether they meant to or not, everybody involved last night really did make it what it was.

Fire and brimstone was how it began at the start of the 1890s, a falling between a football club and a Conservative MP landlord over a piece of land, and fire and brimstone was how it ended, with four red cards and the loudest goal celebrations that we’ll probably hear all season. It’s difficult to imagine that the Merseyside derby can ever quite be the same again, both for better and for worse.

The file image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Taken by Jon Candy through Wiki Commons.