The Everton legend who won't ever be back at Goodison Park 40 years on from iconic goal
Where have all the heroes gone? One in particular in the case of Graeme Sharp. On this weekend of all weekends, he should be feted. Carried on the shoulders of Everton fans all the way down to the team's fixture against Ipswich Town at Portman Road this afternoon.
Instead, one wonders whether someone for so long synonymous with a special club is even checking the score. “I’ve moved on,” he says, hinting at some pain.
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Hide AdWith two grandchildren, aged five and four, that’s been an easier, perhaps even inevitable process. “I have them on a Saturday. I have enough on my plate without watching Everton!” Based in north Wales, he rarely goes into Liverpool anymore. “I’m not comfortable,” Sharp says.
I can recall hearing him say with faltering voice at a crematorium in a north Edinburgh suburb, back when it was entirely natural that Sharp would speak at the funeral of a club great, that if you asked Evertonians of a certain generation for their favourite Everton player, “nine out of ten of them would say Alex Young”. The same might be said of Sharp, who celebrated his 64th birthday on Wednesday.
It means that, when he scored one of Everton’s greatest-ever goals to secure a 1-0 win over Liverpool 40 years ago tomorrow, he had just turned 24. And yet he was already on the way to earning legendary status with the Goodison Park club, who he joined as an “unknown” – as the Liverpool Echo put it - from Dumbarton in 1980.
As was entirely fitting, Everton sent out a birthday greeting to Sharp on X, describing him as "one of our greatest number nines and a true Everton Giant". The replies made for interesting and sometimes slightly depressing reading. Some of the sourer comments will have surprised those who aren't completely au fait with all the recent goings on at Everton.
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Hide AdSuffice to say, a short period as a non-executive board member during Farhad Moshiri’s dysfunctional ownership, when some felt Sharp aligned himself too readily with the status quo, including the increasingly divisive figure of chairman Bill Kenwright, saw the atmosphere become fraught to the point of hostile. Kenwright died a year ago, by which time Sharp had already stepped down alongside CEO Denise Barret-Baxendale and strategy officer Grant Ingles.
No one based outwith the area should patronise Everton fans by telling them how they ought to feel, particularly knowing what they've gone through over the years. It reached a new nadir when their team managed to lose 3-2 to Bournemouth in August having led 2-0 with three minutes of normal time left. As one Evertonian remarked on X, "This has to be a social experiment".
Still, it felt pleasing to be able to wish Sharp happy birthday down the phone line on the day itself. He had intended to play golf but torrential rain wiped out that plan. Never mind, he was happy to have heard “from eight or nine of the boys”, by which he means the boys of that great English title-winning team of 1984-85.
The boys eventually all scattered, though not before another title win two years later. Even Sharp, the club’s greatest goalscorer after Dixie Dean, was packaged off to Oldham Athletic.
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Hide AdBut, in 2000, he came back. For the next two decades and more he was part of the fixtures and fittings at a club where he was adored, and where his image still occupies a large space on a giant mural at the back of the main stand on Goodison Road, between Dean and Joe Royle.
Sharp was initially made an official ambassador, hence why he was in Edinburgh to pay his and the club's respects to Young, and why, three years earlier, he travelled to the same city but to a different cemetery for a much lower profile headstone-unveiling event for FA Cup-winning goalscorer Sandy Young, who was buried in an unmarked grave after he died in 1959. Sharp took his role seriously. He was the face of the club, its beating heart. And then he wasn’t.
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Let's have a flashback: 20 October 1984. Liverpool v Everton, the 130th Merseyside derby. As well as pointing out it was Ian Rush’s first appearance of the season, commentator John Motson, in Match of the Day highlights available on YouTube, notes it's the striker’s 23rd birthday. It seemed set up for the Welshman, a regular hammerer of Everton, to return with a bang, although underlining Liverpool’s struggles at the time was an additional detail provided by Motson concerning Kenny Dalglish, Rush’s strike partner. He had been recalled after being dropped the previous weekend.
No such worries for Sharp, who had scored eight goals already that campaign, including the winner over the same opponents in the Charity Shield at Wembley. But this was Anfield, where Everton hadn’t won since 1970.
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Hide Ad“Obviously with Liverpool having been top for so long, Everton teams I had been involved with would go over there with a slightly defeatist attitude, ‘we are never going to get a result here’,” recalls Sharp. “That season we started to turn things around, the team was growing in confidence. It was probably the first time we thought we could go there and win."
In a move straight out of the Bill Shankly book of tactical sleights of hand, manager Howard Kendall requested some balls from Liverpool to train with in the week before the game. Unlike now, when balls are all uniform and probably not permitted to be kicked in anger unless inflated to some Uefa or Fifa approved air pressure standard, clubs were free to use their own choice of brand. Liverpool had recently switched to Adidas Tangos, while Everton were still using old heavy Mitres.
"The Adidas Tango was a lighter ball and moved a lot more in the air,” says Sharp. "In training that week we noted they dipped and swerved and made life a lot more difficult for the goalkeeper." He drew the benefit of this volatility in spectacular style three minutes after half time. “I made a good connection and fortunately the ball flew over Bruce (Grobbelaar)," he recalls with absurd modesty.
To flesh out the details a little more, right back Gary Stevens had played the ball up to Sharp. He controlled it well with his left foot, a single deft touch. He knew he was never going to beat Mark Lawrenson in a footrace so why not have a crack on the volley from 30 yards and see what happens. “The ball sat up perfectly for me,” he says. “I had no other intention. I was not going to run it into the corner or try to run away from Mark. It was a case of have a go. Fortunately, it went in.”
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Hide AdThere is a striking photograph of Sharp with the Kop behind him – and many Evertonians on it, as was normal at the time. He is a portrait in blue, feet suspended half a yard off the ground and with his Le Coq Sportif right boot having just connected with the goal of the season. Pick that one out, Brucie. The ‘keeper almost got it on the way back out, as they say.
Sharp’s late father, a former business journalist at the Glasgow Herald, kept all the cuttings. “I am sure they are in a scrapbook somewhere,” says Sharp. “The important thing was we won. It wouldn’t have bothered me if it had hit my backside and gone in. But obviously scoring a goal of that calibre elevates it a bit. It was a sign this Everton side had something about it.”
A 5-0 win over Manchester United back at Goodison seven days later, Sharp scoring again, underlined this sense of a coming team and by the time they faced Liverpool again in May, winning 1-0 once more, they were already champions, with the Scot eventually contributing 30 goals all told, including four in the run culminating in a European Cup-Winners' Cup final victory over Rapid Vienna.
But, as midfielder Peter Reid put it, of all the goals scored by Sharp and others in that glorious era, the strike at Anfield 40 years ago was “the one”. Fans burst onto the pitch, including one bespectacled gentleman dubbed the ‘Windmill Man’ due to his furiously flailing arms. “I used to get fans coming up to me, saying ‘Do you remember me?’” says Sharp. “I’d be like, ‘No I am sorry’. And they’d say, ‘I was the fan that ran onto the pitch that day with the arms...' I'd reply, ‘Really? Ok…..'”
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Hide AdPut it this way, just as there were a lot of people at the 100 Club in 1976 to see the Sex Pistols, there are a lot of Windmill Men. “Then about ten years ago, I was out playing snooker in Liverpool,” recalls Sharp. “There was a guy sitting in the corner. Someone came over and said, ‘Excuse me Graeme, do you mind coming over and seeing this boy, he’s a bit shy….’ I said, ‘Yeah, what's the problem? And he said, 'Well he's the Windmill Man...' I am like, 'No, I am not having this!' Turns out it was him...."
It’s understandable if Sharp is warier of fans approaching him now although he did recently appear at an event at the Bridewell pub in Liverpool. “I got quite emotional at the end,” he says. “People were saying to me they were behind me, and I appreciate that.” Given next year's significance, more such nights are obviously planned.
“We have dinners, speaking occasions,” says Sharp. “We are out and about. It will be good. It will be a busy few months.”
Forty years is a good anniversary since players are often still in decent enough fettle to attend and in Everton’s case, the team is intact – touch wood. “It’s just sad Howard Kendall won’t be there, Terry Darracott, one of the coaches, also recently passed away,” Sharp says. Another absence will be notable when they return to Goodison, which seems particularly regrettable since Sharp is still very much with us and just a short drive away. He has not been to watch a game at the stadium since two Januarys ago, following a claim that a “real and credible threat” to the safety of directors had been received before a match against Southampton.
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Hide Ad“I just think the way things happened … it’s a difficult one. To be treated the way we were, was awful,” he says. “People don’t know what went on but they were quick to make a judgement and could not be further from the truth. I just think the stick that I got was totally undeserved, and I thought – nah, I don’t need it.
“I have not been back, not that the football club has invited me back. Numerous people and my friends have invited me to go with them, and I still have season tickets, but I don’t see myself going back.”
If he is referring to Goodison rather than the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, then chances are running out. After 132 years at the Grand Old Lady, there are just 15 home league matchdays left before the flit. It’s why the schism that has developed between Sharp and his detractors is so badly timed. The Scot seems unpersuadable. He’s clearly been hurt. “I know people say it will be fine, but it’s scarred me a little bit," he says. "It’s a shame to say it. It’s not the same.
“It will be interesting, because no doubt this 40-year celebration, the lads will all be back out for the last game of the season. But not for me, I don’t think. Not for me.”
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Hide AdHis son Chris, a former player for Rhyl and FC United among others, still sometimes goes, but Sharp’s last two matches in the flesh have been at Bangor City, where he used to be player-manager, and Partick Thistle of all places, where he met old Scotland international teammate Alan Rough. “It’s like Ally McCoist going back to Rangers and getting battered, because of what happened when he was manager,” he adds. “Some of the things that went on with the protests, it was OTT.
“The amount of people that’s spoken to me, saying it’s a minority, which I understand. It’s just stuck with me. I’ve lost a bit of the … .appetite. ‘You have to come to this game, you have to come to that game..’ I am not really bothered now.
“To be fair, Sean Dyche, the manager, has been great. He has asked me on numerous occasions to go up to the training ground, all credit to him for that. You know what? I lost interest a bit. Whether that comes back, it remains to be seen. I doubt it.”
Even the new stadium, a development he was heavily involved in, doesn’t give him “the spark” to contemplate returning. “There might be one day when I wake up, and go, you know what, I am going to do it. But I can’t see me (doing that). I appreciate everyone trying to get me there. I just think too much has gone on. It’s not the same.”
He says no one can take away the memories. On this weekend of all weekends, never a truer word spoken.
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