The time has finally come to say goodbye to Goodison Park and it will be some valediction on Sunday: 100,000 people or more drifting up to the old place for celebrations tinged with regret that men’s football among the red-brick terraces is vanishing into history.
All will be remembering goals, games, glories, though it is the sounds of this inimitable stadium which are the most vivid part of the memory for one of the greatest players to have graced its turf.
The muffled noise of supporters trampling across the concourses above the home dressing room, by which he and his team-mates knew if there was a big crowd in. The wall of noise that would hit him on the big occasions when he reached the last of the 13 white-washed steps leading up from the narrow tunnel on to the pitch.
‘When you were doing well, you couldn’t reach the top of those steps quick enough,’ says Graeme Sharp. ‘You could feel like you were invincible.’
He ran his race at Goodison in the best of times – a three-year period in which Everton won two First Division titles and the European Cup-Winners’ Cup.
They’ll tell you he was the best volleyer in Goodison history – never mind his many headers – but it’s the sheer volume of goals which has assigned a vast image of him its place, between Dixie Dean and Joe Royle, on the back of the main stand on Goodison Road.
Everton legend Graeme Sharp has spoken to Mail Sport about his time there in various roles
As a player, he spearheaded the club to a plethora titles during their golden period in the 1980s
However, his involvement in boardroom affairs saw many fans call for him to leave the club
That image of the youthful Sharp, the ball at his left foot and arms out for balance, strikes you as you approach the stadium from the red-brick terraces of Winslow Road. A spiritual experience.
Around 80 Everton heroes will be in the house for the last home game against Southampton on Sunday, though for many months Sharp seemed destined not to feature in this drawing-down of blinds.
His role as an unpaid non-executive director and adviser to the board during the club’s descent to near ruination under Farhad Moshiri made him guilty by association, in the eyes of some fans. They felt he had aligned himself too closely with Bill Kenwright, chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale and Moshiri, the orchestrator of the club’s dysfunctionality.
Though Sharp doesn’t put it in such a way, he was cast into a classic contemporary football maelstrom, with social media an accelerant of suspicion and rumour. An alleged act of aggression against one Everton director which Sharp says he knew nothing about. Claims that Sharp had contributed to the tarnishing of protesters by complying with advice from Everton’s security team that board members should stay away from Goodison for their own safety.
‘Sharp out’ read one banner at the very end of the ground where his goal against Bayern Munich, nearly four decades earlier, had lifted the roof off the place.
‘Yes, it hurt,’ the 64-year-old says, sitting in the morning sunshine at the canalside Port and Anchor eaterie at Ellesmere Port, on the road to his North Wales home. ‘I’m past all that now but it hurt because I wanted to help the club. I thought I was contributing.
‘We were told by a security team not to come to games and if it had been up to me, I would have said, “I’m coming to the game”. They decided they couldn’t take the chance of us coming and something happening. I’m not saying it would have happened, but just say someone threw something at you?
‘It isn’t as easy as people say. They say, “He should have been there at the stadium”, and of course I wanted to be there. I’m being told I can’t, whether I like it or not. In this day and age, you’re never going to win. There’s so much written and things then go from there to there to there. That’s the hard thing.’
Everton fans held up a banner that read ‘Sharp Out’ – as they called for him to step down
His role as an unpaid non-executive director and adviser to the board during the club’s descent to near ruination made him guilty by association
Reflecting on that vitriol, the 64-year-old admitted that it ‘hurt’ to see from the Toffees fanbase
He respects the right of Everton fans to challenge those running the club, as they always have, most forcibly. He doesn’t know if Moshiri or Kenwright took a blind bit of notice of any opinions he offered.
There have been too many managers in recent years, he says, observing that the place has been crying out for the intelligence of David Moyes. ‘Someone who says, “Let’s get things in order. Let’s do things the proper way and see where it takes us”, rather than throw the balls up in the air.’
Sharp had resolved never to return to Goodison. A letter to him from Everton’s new owners the Friedkin Group seems to have done most to get him back for the home match against Ipswich, at which he was warmly received two weeks ago. In a significant conversation, Moyes reminded Sharp how valued he was.
So, after more than two years away, he walked back into the stadium on which he first clapped eyes as a 19-year-old, newly arrived from Dumbarton, in 1980. He gazed out again at the distinctive Archibald Leitch criss-cross steel architecture on the Bullens Road Stand, which had first struck him as a teenager. ‘I’d seen the same Leitch design at Rangers,’ he says.
He first competed on the Goodison pitch for Everton’s Central League reserve side, in front of 100 people, in his first two seasons which were a struggle. ‘The early memories were emptiness; nobody there,’ he says.
He had homesickness to contend with back then. His father would drive him north after every Saturday home game – 2pm kick-offs – and he would get the train back the next day.
Sharp has praised the appointment of David Moyes to steady the ship and change the fortunes
But then the Goodison goals started flowing. The first he remembers came late against Dutch side Excelsior, in a pre- season friendly in August 1980. ‘I lobbed the goalkeeper.’ Simply getting on to the pitch was enough. He recalls going on from the bench against Middlesbrough in April 1981. ‘A lovely sunny day.’
Those early 1980s days could be unremittingly tough, with the team struggling. ‘Goodison was a hard place to play, even for the home side,’ Sharp says. ‘The crowd were brilliant when things were going well but when they weren’t, they let you know in no uncertain terms. They could be a tough crowd to please. It was a difficult time.’
There were barely 9,000 in for a League Cup tie against Coventry in November 1983, a few days after a heavy, televised defeat at Anfield. But Sharp’s 91st-minute winner marked the beginning of the team’s renaissance under Howard Kendall, with a run to the final against Liverpool. ‘I’d done my knee ligaments and I was hobbling,’ Sharp says. ‘I threw my head at it.’
It was a big gamble which really changed everything, he says. The signing, in the same pivotal month as the Coventry game, of a 28-year-old Andy Gray who, with the incoming Peter Reid, gave Everton the fire they had lacked.
The team, with Sharp in it, had lost 5-0 to Liverpool on one of Goodison’s sorriest days in 1982 and had been told by Kendall to ‘go home, lock the door and don’t come out until Monday’. Now they were imbued with new belief.
‘I remember thinking, “This is his last chance”, Sharp says of Gray’s arrival. ‘He was injury-prone, maybe coming to the end. But he and Reidy raised everything up. We would even emerge from our games of head tennis with cuts to our eyes. The belief came in.’
Andy Gray’s arrival to Everton helped enhance the Toffees fortunes alongside Sharp in attack
Sharp’s greatest Goodison moments include the 2-0 victory over QPR, the No 9 scoring with a header which clinched the 1985 title 40 years ago this month. Then there is the 3-1 win over Luton two years later – Sharp got the third – when Everton paraded the title they had won at Norwich five days earlier.
Luton games were always feisty. Reid had laid out Mick Harford in that match and wanted to continue the lap of honour until that most uncompromising opponent was safely in the dressing room.
‘Reidy asked me, “Has Mick Harford gone down the tunnel?”, Sharp remembers with a grin. ‘We’d done three laps of honour before it was safe to leave!’
But nothing holds a candle to the night of nights: the Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final second leg against Bayern in April 1985.
‘When we got into the ground… Wow!’ Sharp says. ‘From the dressing room you could always sense what the crowd was because you could hear the people upstairs in the main stand walking across. You could sense the mood when you walked up the tunnel steps, too.
‘At the top step you stopped and when the Z-Cars theme started, you walked. But when you reached the top step that night, you were hit by this wall of sound. From that moment on there was this sense of, “We’re not losing this”.’
Sharp celebrates with his team-mates after winning the 1985 European Cup Winners Cup final
Bayern scored before half-time. Sharp equalised after half-time, after Gray had helped on a long throw. ‘A glancing header,’ he smiles. ‘I mean, an eyebrow header!’ Gray scored the second and Trevor Steven the third. ‘It was pivotal to everything our team had done and what everyone aspired to,’ Sharp says of a night which ended in the Sands pub behind Ainsdale beach and saw him sleep in his clothes.
The break-up of that team came far sooner than he anticipated. He traces it to a phone call he received from a devastated Gray, barely two months after Everton had beaten Rapid Vienna in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final.
‘When I answered it, Andy was in tears,’ Sharp relates. ‘He’d been told Everton were signing Gary Lineker.’ Sharp tried to persuade him to stay. ‘He said, “No, I’ve got to go”, and that was him. He left.’
Sharp’s association with the club would run far deeper.
Juventus, Manchester United and Monaco were interested in him but it was 1991 before he left for Oldham, where he later became player-manager. He was back at Goodison only nine years later in an ambassadorial role into which he invested huge energy over two decades.
Mail Sport’s Ian Herbert sat down with Sharpe ahead of what is set to be an emotional Sunday
If a former player’s contribution was being acknowledged or remembered, Sharp would be there on the club’s behalf. He had been the face of the club, its beating heart, before taking on the role which would break his heart.
The wounds have not healed, despite that recent repatriation with Goodison. ‘I never used to miss a game but I’ve fallen a bit out of love with football,’ he says. He has bought two season tickets for Everton’s new Bramley-Moore Dock Stadium. ‘So maybe in time I’ll take one of my grandkids, slip in and slip out.’
Even now, 40 years on, members of that glorious, trophy-winning team will meet when they can.
‘I’ve got the memories and no one will be able to take them away,’ Sharp says. ‘The players I’ve played with and against. Stuff that’s gone now, locked up in a box, but will always be there. They were the best of times.’
