Bill Shankly's bare manhood stood three feet away from me
Ok, stood is an exaggeration. We were getting on well, but not that well. Slacks with a crease that could shave a werewolf's four day shadow had been removed with military precision and placed on a dressing room hook with his left hand.
So starts the prologue to the best football book I've ever read, Brian Reade's "Forty three years with the same bird." With such an imaginative title (it being adapted from a flag, I think in Athens, which read "Another night out with my bird") it couldn't really fail. Add to that those first few lines (if slightly irreverent, possibly even sacrilegious to our great leader) and it definitely wasn't going to!
What a book! I say, what a book! Ok, I've slipped into Fred Elliott mode but my word this was a seminal few days. Sometimes you're so glad you've done something it makes you almost want to weep.
Well I did actually shed a few tears through the book, especially at the gut wrenching, brilliantly written parts about Hillsborough. I'm glad I read this book that my son Ste bought me last week for my birthday but actually only got round to giving me two days ago.
Rarely, very very rarely, all too rarely do I even pick up a book these days being as I am so busy with my own writing career paired with the part-time unbridled and unpaid (although I should be paying my Angie for the privilege) joy of looking after my little Katie, most of them having been bought for me but cast aside and left, unfairly, gathering dust never mind read one.
Never have I read such a voluminous book so quickly. I raced through Nicky Allt's astoundingly brilliant "Boys From The Mersey" in about four days and Alan Edge's fabulous "Faith Of Our Fathers" in slightly longer time but most books take me so long to read that I'd need a pair of Shankly's slacks to shave with if I was to grow a beard in the process.
As I say, this is most definitely the best footy book, possibly even the best of any genre, I've ever read. I am, I feel rightly, very proud of my efforts in writing three books so far (yes I am working on the fourth, stop giving me grief) but Edgey's Faith knocks spots off any of mine.
I never thought I would read a footy book as good as Alan's again. Brian's book however does to Edgey's what his did to mine.
I mean, just go back to that prologue. Are they the best opening lines to a book you've ever read? I think they are.
There flows throughout the book so many other laughs that shook the gargantuan Evo belly it would be mad, and spoil it for you, to list them all. Tears flowed too, not only at Brian's accounts of Hillsborough and Heysel but also his vivid descriptions, his grief and his perceived guilt (although I don't think you were guilty of anything Brian) at the deaths of his brother Vic at the too young age of 29 and his his beloved Ma, both taken so cruelly and quickly from him that he didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.
I don't neccessarily agree with all of Brian's views on the causes of Heysel but bloody hell he did write that account openly, frankly, honestly and superbly. He did the same with Hillsborough and I was 100% with him on everything he had to say on that subject.
Brian started going the match in February '65, six months after I did, but at the age of seven he was four years ahead of me in terms of the age I started going.
Brian was at the same matches as me and continues to be at the same matches as me although I'd struggle to recognise him even though I must even have been in his drinking company sometimes.
Get yer grid on the LFC TV channel a bit more Brian and I'll buy you a pint when I next see you.
Uncannily Brian's biggest regret in life, never mind football, mirrors my own. We both never went to Rome in 1977, undoubtedly Liverpool Football Club's and Liverpool Football Club's fans finest ever night and achievement. Yes, including Istanbul! I could feel Brian's pain as he was telling the story.
That empty feeling I have in my head, that lung bursting feeling I have in my chest and those eyes filled with lachrymal fluid whenever even a clip is shown of that famous night. I want to reel back time, freeze Tommy Smith's header before it enters the Borussia net and travel time machine wise to the Olympic Stadium Rome 25th May 1977 and press the play button again.
Such things, we know, cannot happen. I'll always feel regret, guilt even, at missing that most marvellous of nights as so will Brian but we both had our own very valid reasons. Still doesn't make it any easier for us though.
I'll forgive Brian a couple of factual inaccuracies. Inter Milan was '65 Brian, not '64 and the mists of time have befuddled your head if you think we were kicking into the Annie Road first half when Alun Evans scored his two debut goals in the 4-0 demolition of Leicester in 1968.
Like you Brian I was in the Annie Road that day, making the graduation from Boys Pen to Kop but having to time serve in the Annie first and those four goals in the first mad ten minutes of that match were all scored in the Kop goal (I refuse to call it the Kop end - sounds too wool). Sack your proof reader though mate for allowing 1991-2006 to become 25 years.
With a cover price of £13 (ok £12.99 but I don't deal in 99ps apart from the 99p shop in town, although I don't think our Ste actually paid that much for it) it is a hardback bargain.
Forget Carra's book or any of the others supposedly written by footballers but actually only spoken into a tape recorder and ghost written by a sometimes anonymous journalist with that journalist's own particular spin put on and all the footballer's embarrassing bits left out get yer dosh out for this one.
Oh and at least one of mine too if you've got any dosh left.
Peter Etherington (known to everybody as Evo - NOT Eevo!)
www.onthekop.com
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