The Cup That Time Forgot

[Originally published in Issue 7 of Well Red magazine - April / May 2011]

 

 

 

Rome. Istanbul. Paris. Dortmund. Wembley.  The settings for some of our greatest triumphs. Occasions that are embedded in Liverpool folklore. Matches that live on in our songs and in our memories. Trophies that illuminate and define our history.  For, as was often said, before Ian Ayre and his bean-counting bosses moved the goalposts, Liverpool FC exists only to win trophies.

The longer we went without success, the more intense our yearning for silverware. It is therefore only right that we approach each new season with a burning desire to be victorious in every competition we enter, be it the smugly self-regarding Premier League, the unjustifiably pompous Europa League or the sporting equivalent of Netto’s own-brand cornflakes, the Capital One Cup. 

But it hasn’t always been like that.  Mention the name “Screen Sport Super Cup” to Merseyside football supporters of a certain vintage and you’re likely to be met with a weary shrug of indifference and the same kind of resigned apathy that enables slack-jawed charisma void, Vernon Kay, to maintain a media career free from the threat of chemical castration. To the uninitiated, victory in the ironically-titled Super Cup represents further confirmation of Liverpool’s 80’s pre-eminence. To those unfortunate enough not to have expunged all traces of it from their memories, it was a tournament that no-one wanted to enter and no-one was bothered about winning.  In hindsight, it was doomed from the outset.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the by-products of the expulsion of English teams from European competition in the wake of the Heysel disaster was the loss of lucrative revenue streams for the qualifying clubs.  In an attempt to plug the income gap the Football League, under the adroit governance of human raincloud, Graham Kelly, hit upon the idea of a tournament involving those teams directly affected.  And so, with notions of glory and the pursuit of excellence taking a backseat to cold economic pragmatism, the Super Cup was born. 

Admittedly, the prospect of a midweek trek to Norfolk or Salford was shrouded in slightly less glitter than a trip to Vienna or Bilbao (or Runcorn, if truth be told), but beggars, we were reminded, could not afford to be choosers. However, given the lack of enthusiasm from the competing parties, the diffidence of the television companies and the failure to attract worthwhile sponsorship, an inter-club Top Trumps championship may have held more widespread appeal.  And would certainly have carried greater prestige.

Effectively, the Super Cup brought together some of the biggest names in the football stratosphere – Liverpool, Manchester United, er…Norwich – locked them in a disused warehouse, encouraged them to chuck pieces of mouldy cake at each other for a couple of hours and then forgot about them. It was an exercise in futility, derided, devalued and unloved, and ultimately amounted to little more than a passing curiosity, a scribbled postscript at the bottom of Liverpool’s extensive roll-call of honours.

Which is not to say that it was a competition totally without interest.  As one of the 16,000 people at Anfield for our opening game, against an equally unenthused Southampton team, it was a rare treat to witness a situation where the voices of the players drowned out the noise of the crowd.  If nothing else, it was a valued insight into how life must be as an Everton season ticket holder. 

Similarly, the sight of Ron Atkinson’s Manchester United finishing bottom of their three team group behind both Everton and Norwich, winless after four matches, provided amusement to rank alongside Paul Walsh’s mullet-gone-wild or Howard Kendall’s IMAX forehead.

 

 

 

With the bare minimum of effort, Liverpool progressed to the final, a two-legged affair against our beloved neighbours, although it was by now abundantly clear that this was a tournament to rank somewhere alongside the coveted ‘Tidiest Moustache’ award on the club’s wider list of priorities. 

Like a bloated Dr. Frankenstein acutely aware of the horror of its creation, the Football League belatedly realised it had to destroy the Super Cup.  What better way to achieve this than to shunt the final, the showpiece event, back a season, staging it more than twelve months after the competition’s initial commencement?  And, in bitter acknowledgement of its failure to fire the imagination of the media, to rename it after the unknown cable channel that eventually agreed to sponsor it, at a market rate rumoured to be the equivalent of seven Chomp bars and an old Billy Joel album?

 

In fairness the two-legged final provided much to enjoy, with an Everton team containing players of the calibre of Peter Billing, Kevin Langley and Neil Adams meekly surrendering, both home and away, to an oddly motivated Liverpool. Although the 7-2 aggregate scoreline is remembered now principally for Ian Rush’s five-goal haul, my personal highlight took place in the first leg at Anfield, when Steve McMahon’s long range header exploded into Bobby Mimms’ net, a strike that contravened several commonly accepted laws of physics and geometry.

Passage of time makes it easy to over-romanticise such incidents.  Take Jan Molby’s legendary goal against Manchester United in 1985.  In my mind’s eye I still see Big Jan ploughing through United players like a portly Robocop on a mission to rescue an imperilled kebab, before detonating a shot to leave keeper, Gary Bailey, with a face coated in black ash in the style of  Wile E. Coyote after a cartoon explosion.  Similarly, to me McMahon will always be suspended eight feet off the ground somewhere near the Anfield centre circle, the ball exploding from his forehead with the velocity of a speeding truck, accompanied by the thud of 20,000 jaws simultaneously hitting the floor in awed wonder.  This is my Super Cup memory and no-one can take it away from me.

Legend has it that, during the lap of honour after the Goodison victory, Ian Rush presented the Super Cup trophy to one of the ball-boys and told him to keep it in his bedroom.  Whether he did as instructed or exchanged it for a pack of Panini stickers in the schoolyard the following morning has gone undocumented. Suffice to say, it was never required again.  The competition was abandoned as a failed experiment with as much haste as it was introduced.

It wasn’t missed.

But at least it was a trophy.  Wasn’t it?