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I WAS ONLY 26 WHEN I JOINED EVERTON IN 1982 BUT I HAD experience of football – I’d played a lot of games and had a lot of injuries. It meant I was quite old compared with the group of players around me. You only have to go through them – Neville Southall, Kevin Ratcliffe, Gary Stevens, Trevor Steven, Kevin Richardson, Adrian Heath, Graeme Sharp and Kevin Sheedy. They were all young lads and good players but they were suffering from a lack of confidence.

When you play in the first team at that age and you’re struggling, it’s hard for any young player. But when I got in the team and Howard Kendall brought in Andy Gray, there were now two men alongside the youngsters who had experience and personality. These players I’ve mentioned had tremendous personalities but we brought that out on the football pitch and their confidence grew.

People talk about Leicester City’s 2015/16 Premier League-winning team and the camaraderie they have, and that’s what we had at Everton. Besides being a good, well-balanced side, there was a great team spirit. People were mates, they got on and that showed on the pitch. We all worked for each other. If anyone was in any trouble on the pitch, we helped each other out.

If anything summed up the determination we had in the side it was Andy Gray in a game at Southampton in 1985. We were leading 2–1 but were under the cosh and they had a corner. Andy was marking their centre-half, Kevin Bond, but as the ball came in, I could see that he’d lost him. Instead, Andy jumped up and headed the back of Bond’s head and the ball went into the stand. That was our centre-forward defending and that’s what wins you matches, on top of good football.

It was Howard Kendall who fostered the spirit in the team and throughout the football club. Howard knew how to get the best out of players but he was also very astute tactically, which a lot of people forget. I remember going to Bayern Munich for the first leg of our European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final in 1985 and playing a 4–4–1–1, which nowadays is supposed to be a new system. He played Trevor Steven in behind Graeme Sharp, then had Alan Harper on one flank and Kevin Richardson on the other, with Paul Bracewell and me in the middle. It was tactically clever and as a result we became the first English side to get a clean sheet away at Bayern.

For me the defining period that season was in the October, beginning when Graeme Sharp got his 25-yarder at Liverpool. It was our first win there since 1970 and the week after, we played Manchester United at Goodison Park. They were above us in the league and we beat them 5–0 and that was the best performance I’ve been involved in. We were brilliant that day.

Ron Atkinson had them in the dressing room for an hour afterwards and he hammered them – I know, because I was waiting to go out for a meal with Bryan Robson. We had to play them three days later in the League Cup and it was a physical battle. They had some hard men in that side – Robson, Norman Whiteside, Paul McGrath – and it was brutal but we matched them and we beat them 2–1. We’d showed we were a team that could play every type of football and win in different ways; those three games in that ten-day spell really gave us the belief, in the club and among the supporters, that we were a special side.

The 1980s was not an easy decade economically for the city of Liverpool and I was well aware of that. All my family lived in Liverpool and the football kept them going in my opinion. There was a strong music scene but the football was the biggest thing – Everton and Liverpool were probably the best two teams in Europe at the time and, but for unforeseen circumstances with the European ban, we might have underlined that.

If I had to remember one day from the decade, it would be at Wembley on 19 May 1984, winning the FA Cup final against Watford. It was the first trophy we’d won under Howard and the elation among the Evertonians is something I won’t forget.

THE HALTON ROYAL BRITISH LEGION, A FEW MILES UP THE ROAD from Runcorn’s railway station, is usually a place for some of life’s more mundane pleasures: women’s bingo on a Tuesday, quiz nights on a Thursday. On this Friday night, though, it has turned into an unlikely time machine.

Admittedly, an unprepossessing social club in a small northern town might not have the same cachet as Michael J. Fox’s DeLorean in Back to the Future, but there are no complaints from the 250-strong gathering of mainly middle-aged, predominantly male Evertonians. Not with an ‘Everton: Class of the 80s’ night under way.

John Bailey, Derek Mountfield, Graeme Sharp and Pat Van den Hauwe have all done turns, and now comes the crescendo as Peter Reid stands before us, mic in hand.

The following day, most of us present will be at Goodison Park to watch a spectacular late collapse from Roberto Martinez’s fragile Everton side against West Ham United: from 2–0 to 2–3 in the final twelve minutes. Right now, though, the woes of 2015/16 are forgotten: we are back in 1985.

Reid may be approaching his sixtieth birthday, but the 1985 PFA Player of the Year stands like a crackling energy field, issuing anecdotes and expletives, and one story in particular brings the house down.

It is a story that captures the blood-and-thunder commitment he brought to that Everton team as he recalls hunting down Søren Lerby after the Bayern Munich midfielder had left him with a gashed shin during the European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final that became Goodison’s night of nights.

‘Doc Irving is putting stitches in my leg and all I’m thinking of is this blond lad – I will have him, whatever happens,’ Reid bellows. He got his man in the end and, with Lerby laid out on the turf beneath him, growled an insult about Nazi Germany for good measure.

Cue the punchline: ‘He looks up at me and goes: “I’m fucking Danish!”’

The past that Reid evokes sounds less like a foreign country than another planet when set against today’s corporate-friendly, billionaire-funded elite European game, where scientifically conditioned players tumble cynically to the ground at the slightest touch. Clubs are global brands with so-called DNAs, stadiums are awash with plastic flags, and supporters are regarded as customers. Football served up more visceral thrills back then – for better and worse – but for Evertonians, there was certainly no more thrilling a time.

Everton were league champions in 1985 and 1987. They reached three successive FA Cup finals between 1984 and 1986 – and, overall, made ten visits to Wembley in the space of five years. They claimed the club’s first and only continental prize, the Cup Winners’ Cup, lifted in Rotterdam in May 1985 after victory over Rapid Vienna. Everton had won silverware before – ten major trophies prior to the 1980s – but never had they enjoyed such an intense rush of success.

It is little surprise so many Evertonians look back with a sense of wonder on the feats of Howard Kendall’s great side. The outpouring of emotion that followed the death of Kendall in October 2015 showed the affection, gratitude and admiration still felt for a man who went from title-winning Everton midfielder to the manager of their most titled team.

The sight of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral packed with mourners for his funeral underlined the depth of feeling – and not just from fans. So many of his former players turned out in force for their old manager and late that night, back at Goodison, some even sang a song in his memory: ‘Here We Go’, Everton’s 1985 FA Cup final song.

I was in my first year at secondary school, the Blue Coat School in Wavertree, when Kendall’s men embarked on the best season Everton have known – 1984/85. The miners’ strike had begun. Band Aid was just around the corner. In Liverpool, the Militant-led Labour council was at loggerheads with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when the IRA detonated a deadly bomb at Brighton’s Grand Hotel.

The world was opening up, but to an eleven-year-old Evertonian there was nothing more exciting than the sudden blossoming of Kendall’s fabled team. I was at Goodison when Everton beat Leicester City 3–0 in November 1984 to go top of the First Division for the first time since February 1979 – and there again, among the squeeze of bodies in the Bullens Road Paddock, to witness the 2–0 victory over Queens Park Rangers that sealed the league championship six months later.

There are other still-vivid memories from that campaign. Such as the thrill of seeing Andy Gray’s two flying headers against Sunderland and, in the same game, Paul Bracewell’s volleyed, crossfield pass for Trevor Steven to race on to before spearing a shot into the Park End net.

Or my big sister Rachel’s hug from a stranger after Derek Mountfield’s late FA Cup quarter-final equaliser against Ipswich Town on the afternoon of Kevin Sheedy’s famous twice-taken free-kick, when his first strike was disallowed so he promptly found the opposite corner of the net. The sight of Ipswich fans being attacked in the Stanley Park car park afterwards was an unsettling postscript, but a sign of the times.

Otherwise, in an era when live football on TV was a rare treat, I spent Saturday afternoons and midweek evenings with my brother Patrick kitted out in our navy Le Coq Sportif tracksuits, transfixed by the Radio City commentaries of Clive Tyldesley . . . and shedding tears after the 1–0 defeat at Oxford United that cost Everton another league championship in 1986.

Three decades on, the 80s has become the most-documented period in Everton’s history. The 1984/85 title-winning team is one of the last that even neutrals of a certain age can reel off from one to eleven: Southall, Stevens, Mountfield, Ratcliffe, Van den Hauwe, Steven, Reid, Bracewell, Sheedy, Sharp, Gray.

One wish when writing this book was to speak not just to 80s club icons like Kevin Ratcliffe and Neville Southall but to find some of the lesser-told stories, by speaking to players whose time at the club is only seldom recalled.

For this reason, for instance, I did not pursue Graeme Sharp, scorer of Match of the Day’s 1984/85 goal of the season for his derby-winning volley at Anfield and now an impressively articulate ambassador for the club. Instead I sought out Paul Wilkinson, the man whose goal decided the Goodison derby later that season, six months after he had stunned the same stadium with Grimsby Town’s winner in a League Cup upset.

While speaking to Wilkinson, I had to thank him too, as that Grimsby goal helped me get through an entrance interview at Oxford University; my future Spanish lecturer mentioned he was a Grimsby fan and the conversation switched immediately from the Spanish Golden Age to Everton’s – and Wilkinson’s last-gasp header in November 1984.

I was also eager to speak to Kevin Richardson, an unsung hero of the mid-80s who had come through the ranks at Everton but struggled to hold down a place in Howard Kendall’s team. It says everything about the quality of that Everton midfield that he was good enough to go on and win a second title with Arsenal.

In the southwest of France I met Paul Power, an improbable pivot in the 1986/87 championship campaign, who arrived at Goodison Park aged 32 having never won anything at Manchester City. Eleven months later he had a championship winner’s medal and the Supporters’ Player of the Year trophy.

If Power was kind enough to offer me a bed for the night, every ex-player interviewed for this book was generous in their own way – surprisingly so, in some cases. As a journalist I have sat down for breakfast with Michel Platini, interviewed Wayne Rooney in the Wembley tunnel after his record-breaking fiftieth England goal, and even found myself, utterly out of my depth, in the role of stadium announcer – in Spanish and Italian – at a European Under-21 Championship final between Spain and Italy in Jerusalem, yet the prospect of meeting Pat Van den Hauwe filled me with a rare foreboding. As it happened, the man they called ‘Psycho Pat’ could not have been more obliging.

Similarly, Southall’s reputation for gruffness was entirely at odds with the helpful and easy-going individual I met during an illuminating morning in Ebbw Vale, where Everton’s record appearance-maker works today with troubled, underprivileged teenagers. Southall remained at Everton until 1998 and witnessed the decline that set in at the close of the 80s; true to his plain-speaking self, he is not afraid to bemoan the club’s barren years since.

Pat Nevin shed additional light on the team’s slide after 1987, as did Colin Harvey, Kendall’s hugely influential right-hand man and successor as manager. To sit in Harvey’s home, reminiscing with the surviving member of the legendary ‘Holy Trinity’ about his lifetime’s service to the club, was one of the privileges of writing this book.

If there were grey skies above Goodison at the end of the 80s, the same applied at the start, and for an insight into the mood entering the decade of perms and Pac-Man, I arranged a Skype conversation with Mike Lyons, club captain at the time and now living in Australia.

Lyons, in his captain’s notes in the match programme for Everton’s fixture with Nottingham Forest on 1 January 1980, looked back on the frustrations of the old decade, noting: ‘Maybe the story of the Seventies is that we have always been there or thereabouts – but have let the fans down at the last minute.’

Everton had been league champions in 1969/70 but what came next was a catalogue of near misses, none more painful than the 1977 FA Cup semi-final defeat against Liverpool, following Bryan Hamilton’s inexplicably disallowed winning goal in the first game at Maine Road.

It did not help that in the 1970s Liverpool went from being the second-best team in the city (for number of trophies won) to the best in Europe, harvesting four league titles and two European Cups.

The two clubs’ first shirt sponsorship deals appeared to reflect the power shift that had taken place: while Liverpool wore the name of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi for the first time in 1979/80, Everton signed their own arrangement with the Wirral-based subsidiary of a Danish cooked meats company, Hafnia.

Even after Kendall’s installation as player-manager in May 1981, the gloom did not lift overnight.

Kendall had arrived at Everton as the management world’s bright young thing. He was 34 years old when he returned to the club after a seven-year hiatus. As an Everton player he had formed part of the club’s most celebrated midfield with Colin Harvey and Alan Ball, winning the league title in 1970.

He had subsequently started his coaching career as Alan Durban’s player-coach at Stoke City, helping the club win promotion to the top flight in his final match before embarking on a two-year stint as Blackburn Rovers’ player-manager. At Ewood Park he provided a foretaste of what was to follow at Goodison.

In the first season he led Rovers out of the Third Division as runners-up after sixteen victories in their last twenty league matches. During that run-in, in April 1980, he collected the division’s player and manager of the month awards simultaneously.

In his second term, he declined the opportunity to replace Terry Venables as manager at Crystal Palace and instead guided Rovers to fourth place in the Second Division, missing out on a second successive promotion on goal difference alone.

He was the coming man, yet he did not have it easy initially at Everton. His first crop of signings for the club, the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, proved anything but – though Neville Southall, a player he had first wanted to buy as Blackburn manager, would live up to that billing in time.

In Kendall’s first campaign, 1981/82, Everton had looked poised for a bottom-half finish before winning five of their final six games to reach eighth place. The 1982/83 season brought a record-setting 5–0 home derby defeat by Liverpool. In the FA Cup they were narrow quarter-final losers at Manchester United, yet the league table showed only a marginal improvement – from eighth up to seventh.

The pressure intensified on Kendall in the early months of his third season. A copy of the Football Echo from 8 October 1983 features a special report headlined ‘Everton – can they rise again?’. The opening paragraph starts, ‘Time is beginning to run out for Everton’ as the paper questions whether the club could ever hope to compete again with the English game’s pacemakers, citing falling gates and the grim economic situation on Merseyside.

There were 8,067 at Goodison for the League Cup second-round tie against Chesterfield at which leaflets calling for Kendall’s sacking were distributed.

‘Howard Kendall is one man who will be glad to see the end of 1983,’ declared Alan Parry, commentating for Match of the Day, before a goalless home draw with Coventry City on New Year’s Eve. That left Everton in the bottom half of the table with eleven goals from 21 games – the worst goal ratio across the entire English league pyramid at the time.

Yet just five months later, Everton had the FA Cup in their possession and three sunlit seasons in front of them. The turnaround was dramatic, as the pieces fell suddenly into place for Kendall, with the help of his astute promotion of Colin Harvey to the role of his number two, the inspired signing of Andy Gray and a late Adrian Heath equaliser in a League Cup tie at Oxford United.

His smile as he stood watching his players descend the Wembley steps after the 2–0 FA Cup final victory over Watford was movingly remembered by Peter Reid in the eulogy he gave at Kendall’s funeral – and there was much to smile about.

Looking back, what is striking about those 1984 Wembley winners is their sheer youthfulness: the starting eleven for the final against Watford featured seven players aged 23 or under. Kendall himself was still just 37.

The pity for Kendall, and his young, hungry squad, is that Everton’s wonder years took place during the darkest period for football in this country. In May 1985, there were football supporters killed by a burning stand at Bradford City and in rioting at Brussels’ Heysel Stadium.

The latter disaster at the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus led to a five-year UEFA ban on English clubs. The tragic human cost, namely the deaths of 39 people – 32 of them Italian, four Belgian, two French and one British – should never be overlooked. However, in purely sporting terms, for Everton, World Soccer’s 1985 World Team of the Year, it meant a precious opportunity to cement an international reputation was lost. It remains the biggest ‘what if’ of the club’s history – ahead, even, of the aborted King’s Dock stadium move in 2003.

It was during that same summer of 1985 that The Times, in a soul-searching leader article, declared with impressive prescience: ‘Future football matches may not have the excitement and romance of the national game of our past. But at least it may be a game again, a game worth playing and safe for export too.’

The lack of safety, a product of the hooligan problem of the 1970s and 1980s, was one reason for the falling crowds at Goodison in the 80s. It is ironic to note that the average league attendance for the less successful 1970s was 36,983, whereas in the 1980s it was down to 27,179. Indeed in 1983/84, Everton posted their lowest seasonal average since the First World War, just 19,290.

It seems logical to say this was a reflection of Evertonian dissatisfaction too, given the extraordinary 66 per cent increase to 31,983 in 1984/85. Everton’s turnover grew from £2.96m in 1984 to £4.69m in 1985 thanks to these larger crowds. With the game’s satellite TV revolution yet to begin, big gates were vital to a club’s revenue, though both Everton and Liverpool at the time showed a reluctance to increase ticket prices in the face of the economic problems facing the city in the 1980s.

When the decade opened, Liverpool was a city under a cloud, stricken by mass unemployment and gripped by a sense of stagnation. The once proud ‘Second City of the Empire’ had lost 100,000 people in the 1970s and now had a filthy river and swathes of derelict buildings. The docks had been diminished by containerisation and the shift in the direction of trade towards Europe, while a series of factory closures – such as Meccano and Tate & Lyle – meant the loss of an additional 40,000 manufacturing jobs in the five years from 1979.

In 1981 Toxteth went up in flames with the explosion of violence there. There were over 700 arrests and more than a hundred buildings destroyed. Other cities witnessed rioting that same summer but it was in Liverpool that CS gas was used on Britain’s streets for the first time to restore order. The oft-used quote of Michael Heseltine – then Secretary of State for the Environment and the man who as ‘Minister for Merseyside’ helped the city’s regeneration with the transformation of the dilapidated Albert Dock – was that ‘it took a riot’ for the Conservative government to recognise the city’s problems.

The following year, the plight of Liverpool’s unemployed was dramatised by Alan Bleasdale’s BBC series Boys from the Blackstuff, which provided one of the era’s memorable catchphrases through protagonist Yosser Hughes’s plea of ‘Gizza job’. It was a fictional cry but reflective of the mood, for by the mid-80s a quarter of the workforce had no job.

In 1984, a Conservative MP, Peter Hordern, delivered a report to Parliament on a visit to Liverpool in which he described ‘an atmosphere of very little hope’. It was in this context that Liverpool City Council staged its ultimately doomed rebellion against central government over that year’s newly introduced policy of rate-capping.

A Granada TV documentary, Home and Away, which followed a coachload of fans to the 1984 all-Merseyside League Cup final, opens a fascinating window on the time with a series of interviews with unemployed Liverpool men as they head to Wembley.

One of those featured, a jobless lorry driver wearing an Everton rosette, suggests that football is the only source of pride for a city that feels neglected and out on a limb. ‘It doesn’t matter whether the Labour government is in power or the Conservative government or the SDP,’ he tells the reporter. ‘This place will still get knocked but what is happening now at London, in Wembley, is ours and nobody can take it away from us, can they? We’ve got a full weekend of letting off everything we’ve been building up and building up and building up.’

The proud chant of ‘Merseyside’ rang around Wembley that day and heralded a period when Liverpool had the best two teams in the land. The league championship trophy did not leave Merseyside between 1982 and ’88, while between 1984 and ’89, Everton and Liverpool contested three Wembley finals.

Former England striker Jimmy Greaves, then co-presenter of ITV’s Saturday lunchtime football show Saint & Greavsie, complained before the 1986 all-Merseyside FA Cup final that he was fed up of the city’s domination. ‘I wish they’d cut Merseyside off from the rest of the country, float it out into the Irish Sea and let them start their own little league out there so all the other clubs have a chance of winning something,’ he quipped.

It feels like ancient history today. Since 1987, when Liverpool alone could boast more league titles than Everton’s nine, Goodison Park has witnessed just one new etching on the honours’ board – the 1995 FA Cup. In other words, in the past 29 seasons, the blue half of Merseyside has seen as many major trophies as Birmingham City, Luton Town, Portsmouth, Swansea City and Wigan Athletic.

Next year will bring the thirtieth anniversary of Everton’s last title triumph and there will be another wave of reminiscence. It is easy to understand nostalgia for those days of big hair and tight shorts and cheesy FA Cup final songs.

Football then was not the billion-pound industry it is today and players were closer to the fans. In the 1986/87 season, the basic average annual income of a top-flight footballer was £28,308, while the average for a UK worker was £11,648 – or 41 per cent of what his favourite player might be earning. By the 2009/10 Premier League season, the worker’s average of £34,112 was 2.9 per cent of his footballing counterpart’s salary.

Moreover, unlike today’s Everton squad, many of whom live in leafy enclaves in Cheshire, Howard Kendall’s players went out en masse in Liverpool every Tuesday night. It was integral to team spirit and, with it, the on-field exploits of Kendall’s side. Adrian Heath summed up that drinking culture with an explanation for why most of these interviews were conducted over cups of tea or coffee: ‘We had enough beer to last us a lifetime,’ he laughed.

It was not just Everton either. They did the same at Liverpool and Manchester United and even at Luton, whose ex-striker Brian Stein once told me he only touched his first drop of alcohol at 21 to avoid the fines issued for not joining in the drinking sessions.

Sport scientists will frown today but it created bonds that are less common in today’s large, multi-national Premier League squads – so uncommon, in fact, as to make the spirit of Leicester City’s 2016 title winners appear exceptional. It seems fair to say that, without the ubiquitous threat of a mobile phone being thrust in their face, footballers had more fun too.

The aforementioned cup-final songs are one example of that and the title of this book recalls Everton’s own contribution to this dubious genre. Everton’s version of ‘Here We Go’ – a song popular with both striking miners and football fans at the time – reached its peak position of fourteenth in the charts on FA Cup final weekend in 1985, when it perched, fittingly, between ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds and Tears For Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’.

It did not earn a generous review from The End, the groundbreaking Liverpudlian fanzine edited by Peter Hooton, lead singer of The Farm. ‘The funniest/worst football record for some time,’ declared the fanzine. Today, though, it is sung with gusto by Everton supporters. The reason is simple: ‘Here We Go’ evokes a golden moment for Evertonians.

For me it conjures memories of hunting for autographs at the gates of Bellefield, of hanging on to every word of those Radio City commentaries, and of hearing the cry of ‘Champions’ inside Goodison Park.

The 80s did not begin or end brightly for Everton, but in between a band of brothers emerged, right out of the blue, to give us something still worth talking about today.

MIKE LYONS

‘You always thought you’d let everyone down. The supporters might have been suffering but it’s ten times worse when you’re playing.’

MIKE LYONS HAS ONE OUTSTANDING MEMORY OF THE DAY HE left Everton in the summer of 1982. The outgoing club captain had driven across the Pennines to agree the terms of his transfer to Sheffield Wednesday and he was now heading back to Merseyside when the emotional impact of leaving the only club he had known struck him suddenly.

‘I’d been fourteen years at Everton and in the car driving back, that Vangelis song “I’ll Find My Way Home” came on and I got really upset,’ he remembers. ‘I had tears in my eyes and was really feeling down so thought I wouldn’t go straight home but would go to the pub and get a pint.

‘I went to The Meadows in Maghull and was standing at the bar. This guy turned around and said, “I believe you signed for Wednesday today.” I said, “Yeah,” and he went, “Thank God for that, I always thought you were shite.” It brought me right back to earth.’

Lyons, over eleven seasons and 473 appearances, invested as much heart and soul into Everton as any player before or since, yet that cruel – and quite unjust – verdict has its source in one hard fact: in all his time at Goodison Park, Lyons never won a single thing.

He is the man who embodied a luckless decade, making his debut when Everton were reigning champions in spring 1971 but suffering only a series of heartbreaking near misses thereafter. He had to endure a nineteen-match barren run in Merseyside derby games and when Howard Kendall, Everton’s most successful manager-in-the-making, came on the scene, he found himself ushered out of the door after just one season.

Typically, when Lyons returned to Goodison as part of Colin Harvey’s backroom staff in the late 80s, the winning streak had just ended. Hence his two-word reply when asked how he thinks Evertonians remember him today. ‘A jinx,’ he says with a chuckle.

‘Basically we started to be successful at Everton when I left and went to Sheffield Wednesday,’ he adds, with a wry smile. ‘When I first went to Everton, it was Brian Labone, Gordon West, Howard, and everyone. I was in between both the good sides.’

Lyons was only thirty when the exit door opened as Kendall looked to younger centre-backs Billy Wright and Mark Higgins, yet he does not bear a grudge. ‘That was probably one of his good traits,’ he says, graciously, of Kendall’s unsentimental side. ‘He could make decisions like that. With me, I’d been there a long time and wasn’t in the first team and it was time to move on. It’s life.’

In April 1982, the month of Lyons’ final Everton goal – in a 3–3 home draw with Manchester United – the British entrepreneur Clive Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum home computer, which was soon found in five million UK households and introduced a generation to the joys of video games such as Football Manager.

Technology has advanced somewhat since then. Today Lyons – and Mike, not Mick, is how he prefers to be called (not that his team-mates ever took any notice) – is speaking to me from nine thousand miles away in Perth, Western Australia, where he has lived for more than a decade. Our interview over Skype starts after a five-minute delay during which Lyons, as his partner Alison informs me, changes his shirt. Tellingly, when he does appear, that familiar grin filling my computer screen, he is in a royal blue Everton T-shirt.

Lyons moved to Australia initially for a coaching job in Canberra but then headed out west to Perth. ‘I came over to Perth to do the West Ham academy which then became the Southampton academy,’ he says. ‘Davie Jones was in charge of Southampton at the time.’ Today, at 64, he is still coaching, working with a semi-pro club, Mandurah City, in Western Australia’s State League.

His last visit home, in March 2016, came in sad circumstances following the death of his mother, Lily, but the occasion at least allowed him to return to Goodison where he unveiled an ‘Everton Giant’ plaque outside the stadium in his honour before the FA Cup quarter-final against Chelsea.

‘I was really proud of that moment,’ he says, before recounting his delight at seeing some old friends again. ‘I saw Higgy [Mark Higgins], and Jonesy [Gary Jones] and John Bailey. I saw Terry Darracott and Colin Harvey and went out for a pint with them. We’re all cripples, we seriously are. Colin has had three false hips. Terry’s back and knee have gone. I can’t jog any more. It just catches up with you, it really does. I used to love running but I can’t do it now. I can go on the bike and go in the gym but time catches up, especially when you play football.’

In his case, it seems little surprise given his full-blooded approach. In his five and a half years as Everton captain from 1976 to 1982, he offered unrivalled commitment on and off the field. ‘I always had a go and did my best,’ he says, succinctly. ‘I always tried to keep the lads going.’

On the pitch, he led by example, both as a central defender and, occasionally, a centre-forward and he inspired two future Everton skippers in Higgins and Kevin Ratcliffe. It was Higgins who told me of Lyons’ exceptional bravery, explaining: ‘He taught me about winning and being passionate about it. I saw him score a goal at Goodison against Leeds when Norman Hunter was about to clear it and Lyonsy dived to head the ball off Norman’s left boot.’

For all that, Lyons features in this book for one particular reason: to convey the mood at Goodison entering the 1980s. It is poignant reading his ‘Life with Lyons’ column in the match programme on the first day of the new decade, where he reflects on where Everton had gone wrong over the preceding ten years.

‘Many people were tipping Everton to be the team of the Seventies,’ he writes, before revisiting the hard-luck stories that followed, such as losing a twice-replayed League Cup final to Aston Villa in 1977. ‘The League Cup final replay at Old Trafford typified everything. We looked likely winners for a long time and then lost in extra time.’ Despite goals from Bob Latchford and Lyons himself in that second replay, Everton succumbed in the end to centre-back Chris Nicholl’s 35-yard winning strike for Villa.

A fortnight later there was more heartbreak with an FA Cup semi-final replay loss to a Liverpool side on the cusp of their first European Cup. It is the climax to the sides’ 2–2 draw in the first fixture at Maine Road that Evertonians still talk about today. Bryan Hamilton bundled a Ronnie Goodlass cross over the line to score an apparent winning goal for Everton, but instead referee Clive Thomas ruled otherwise.

Lyons recalls: ‘Bryan Hamilton scored more or less in the last minute of the game – it hit him on the chest and went in. Clive Thomas blew his whistle and disallowed his goal. He turned around and said, “You knocked it in with your hand.” But Hammo never knocked it in with his hand. At the end of the game Ken McNaught went to him and said, “What did you disallow the goal for?” and he said it was an infringement of the rules of the Football Association and he’d be proved right. On the Monday he turned around and said he’d disallowed the goal because it was offside.

‘I went to a sports forum in St Helens and the linesman who was on duty that day said, “Clive Thomas came into the referees’ room at the end and said, ‘Listen, lads, we’d better get our story straight about this one’,” so we were definitely robbed.’

Brian Viner, in his excellent book on Everton in the 1970s, Looking for the Toffees, writes about the ‘persecution complex’ of the club’s followers – and this was surely the day it was born.

At the same time, though, it was a decade when Everton were drawing bigger crowds than clubs like Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City, and Lyons, even in the face of Anfield’s accumulation of honours, never lost his optimism. ‘We always thought we’d win things,’ he reflects. ‘I don’t think we ever lost belief in ourselves, or in our club.’

The only problem was that elusive first trophy would not come. ‘The first time you win something you become a much better team, but we were always nearly there but not quite. We were unlucky against Liverpool when Clive Thomas definitely did rob us and we all know that.’

Lyons was born in Mill Road Hospital on 8 December 1951, on the same day and in the same place as Terry McDermott, the future Liverpool midfielder. He grew up in an Evertonian household and still has the pictures in his mind of spending boyhood Saturdays in the Bullens Road Paddock with his father Joe and big brother, also called Joe.

‘We had season tickets,’ he says. ‘We’d go there with my dad in his car and he’d park miles from the ground and there’d be lads saying, “Can we mind your car, mister?” and my dad had to pay them beforehand because he knew if we didn’t, something might happen to the car. But then we’d go in the Paddock and see them all in the boys’ pen!’

Lyons’ hero was Jimmy Gabriel, a midfielder in the club’s 1963 title-winning team. ‘He was up and down and had a right good go,’ says Lyons, this latter phrase a perfect description of his own efforts in an Everton shirt in the years to come. ‘He was honest and I just liked the way he played.’

By this stage Lyons was at De La Salle High School in Croxteth, where as a goalscoring midfielder he captained his school team to the Under-14 Echo Cup. Wayne Rooney and Francis Jeffers are more recent alumni of De La Salle, which in Lyons’ day was a grammar school. This meant he could not represent Liverpool Schoolboys and, instead, it was playing for a side called Holy Cross in the Liverpool Boys’ Association league that he caught the eye of scouts from Rotherham United, only for his team-mates’ misdemeanours to curtail the possibility of a trial.

‘We won every game in the LBA Under-16 league and had a good side. Tommy Docherty was at Rotherham and his scouts had seen our team so we all got invited there for trials. But the lads went on a day out to Rhyl and about three months later they all went back on shoplifting charges! So our Rotherham trial got cancelled.’ With a chortle, Lyons – who had missed the trip to Rhyl – adds: ‘That’s a typical Liverpool story.’

At De La Salle, he would watch Everton home and away – driven to some of the away games by Dave Hart, my father, who was coaching his school side. ‘Your dad used to take us,’ he recalls. ‘We’d play football for the school in the morning and go to watch Everton in the afternoon.’

Lyons was at Blackpool on 15 January 1966, the day that manager Harry Catterick was pushed to the ground by irate Evertonians following his decision to drop Alex Young in place of a sixteen-year-old debutant called Joe Royle. That incident – the so-called ‘Blackpool Rumble’ – came after a 2–0 victory for the hosts inspired by Alan Ball, the very man Lyons and his friends had bumped into on the beach before the game.

‘We were walking along and we saw Alan Ball,’ he recalls. ‘That was his ritual – before the game he used to walk along the beach. We stopped him and said, “Come to Everton.” We always maintained it was us who persuaded him to come to Everton.’

In Lyons’ case, it was his mother who wrote to Everton asking for a trial for her younger son, but though he began training with the club he still entered sixth form at De La Salle. Not for long, though. ‘It was September and I was playing four games a weekend. I was playing for the school Saturday morning and for Everton B team Saturday afternoon – my dad would give me a lift to Everton and I’d go in with dirty legs. On a Sunday morning I was playing for The Lobster pub and on Sunday afternoon my mates had a football team and we played in that.’

When his schoolteachers suggested it was time to ‘make up your mind what you want to do’ regarding football and further study, he went for an interview at the job centre in Liverpool. ‘They turned round and said, “We’ll give you a job here,” so I took a job in the job centre. Then I went to Everton and said, “I’ll be twenty minutes late for training because I’ve just got a job,” and they said, “We didn’t know you were leaving school. We’ll sign you.” So I never went to that job.’

That was in the autumn of 1968, meaning Lyons had yet to sign for the club when Catterick’s team played in the FA Cup final against West Bromwich Albion the previous May. Instead he travelled down to Wembley and bunked in. ‘I ended up in the wrong end,’ he grins. ‘I got in the West Brom end and it wasn’t the best – Jeff Astle scored the only goal.’

Lyons’ contemporaries in Everton’s youth ranks included Terry Darracott, David Johnson, Gary Jones and Billy Kenny Sr. He had joined the club as a forward but the speed of fellow striker Johnson’s development led Tommy Casey, the reserve-team coach, to convert him into a defender. ‘He said he was going to turn me into a centre-back and luckily enough I then started to play quite often. He always believed in me. He used to call me Big Colossus and Steve Seargeant was Little Colossus.’

He adds, ‘I think my attributes were more suited to destroying than creating. I was a defender. When I used to go up front it was more for nuisance value – and that was for my own side!’

It was as a forward, though, that he made his senior debut in a 3–2 defeat at Nottingham Forest in March 1971, earning his opportunity thanks to Catterick’s decision to rest players ahead of the European Cup quarter-final second leg at Panathinaikos. ‘Myself and Dai Davies and Billy Kenny got a game and I ended up scoring a goal near the end and it was on Match of the Day, but there was a newsflash and the commentator went back and said, “Lyons scored for Everton before the end of the game” – that was the only mention.’

Lyons witnessed the swift decline of Catterick’s title-winning side in the wake of the week that followed – which brought elimination on away goals by Panathinaikos and an FA Cup semi-final loss to Liverpool. In December that year Alan Ball left for Arsenal. ‘I don’t think Bally ever really wanted to leave the club,’ Lyons recalls. ‘We saw him with tears in his eyes. I just think Everton sold him, rather than Bally wanting to go. That was a big shock and it started the break-up of Ball, Kendall and Harvey. It is really sad now there is only Colin left. They were great players.’

They would be Everton’s last trophy-winning team until 1984. Long-standing Evertonians will not need reminding of the what-might-have-beens in between, starting with the 1974/75 campaign under Billy Bingham when Everton lost just one of their first 21 matches but ultimately finished three points short of champions Derby County in fourth place – having lost twice to bottom club Carlisle United. ‘If we’d beaten Carlisle twice, we’d have won the league,’ Lyons notes. ‘That was crazy.’

One oft-aired theory about Everton’s 1970s shortcomings is that they paid dearly for the failure to sign Peter Shilton, prior to his transfer to Nottingham Forest. ‘People always say the problem was we didn’t really have a top-class keeper – we had Dai and we had David Lawson and Jim McDonagh,’ says Lyons. ‘Woody [George Wood] came and I thought he was a really good goalkeeper but when Neville [Southall] came, he was a major difference. He was top class. If you look at Liverpool over those years, Ray Clemence was so steady. They were all good keepers but sometimes you need the top one to pull you out of it now and then.’

For Lyons, the best Everton team of his era was the one containing Bob Latchford, Martin Dobson and Dave Thomas. ‘We had a good side, with the Latch, Dobbo and Dave Thomas, and I thought we were a bit unlucky there. The Latch was a great goalscorer and Dobbo was really classy.’

In the touching foreword he provided for Latchford’s autobiography, A Different Road, Lyons described Latchford as his hero. He adds: ‘Latchy was a gentleman. He would sit quietly on the coach reading a book and when he got on the pitch he scored the goals. He was great at near-post and far-post headers, a super player.’

If Latchford was the man Lyons looked up to, the man he laughed with was Andy King. ‘When Kingy came we more or less adopted him,’ he says of himself and Trish, his then wife. ‘He was a top lad, Andy, and it’s so sad he’s not with us now. I was best man at his wedding. He had these new shoes and I used chalk to put “HE” on the sole of one and “LP” on the other.’ When King knelt down in the church, the congregation read the message “HELP”.

‘He didn’t even realise – he was just giggling because we were all giggling but he couldn’t see his shoes,’ Lyons remembers warmly. ‘That was funny. Kingy used to finish training and I’d give him a lift home and he’d go in the bookies and the girl would say, “Andy, please don’t have a bet today.” He was mad but a great lad.’

It was King who scored the goal that earned Everton their first derby win in seven years in October 1978 in front of 53,141 at Goodison Park. Lyons had never won a derby game – and was an injured spectator as King’s volley flashed past Clemence.

‘It was fairly depressing every time we played a derby because I used to have a five-pound standing bet with Phil Thompson, and it cost me a fortune,’ Lyons giggles. ‘They were from the same city as us so we knew them and would see them when we went out. That’s why we got so much satisfaction when Kingy whacked that one in.

‘I was on the side of the pitch and I ran on. There was a great feeling of jubilation. I had a terrible record against Liverpool, so it was a good day even if I lost my watch. My mum had bought me a watch for my eighteenth birthday and we scored and I must have got too near a Liverpudlian because it disappeared!’

It would prove one of the high points of Gordon Lee’s reign as manager of Everton, which ran from from 1977 to ’81. Lyons is sympathetic in his recollections of Lee, a man whom he remembers as a football obsessive. ‘We liked Gordon. He’d turn round and say, “Who’d win a game between a team of Mick Lyonses and a team of Andy Kings?” We’d always have discussions like that.

‘We were coming back from Norwich one day and stopped at a pub and we were sitting together at a table and he’s got my pint and gone, “Today, Kingy, you should have gone . . .” and he’s moving my pint everywhere. We were there half an hour and I couldn’t get a drink as he kept moving it around for the positions!’

All of Lyons’ tales come delivered in the same cheerful Scouse accent – unaffected by the years spent on the other side of the world – and he soon provides another amusing detail of those Lee-era away days. ‘We’d play Monopoly and it would always be war – the board would get thrown across the table and someone would be saying “You wouldn’t sell to me but you’d sell to him!”’

Away from the ‘Monopoly school’, Lyons and his Everton colleagues had a more strenuous extra-curricular assignment when appearing on the BBC’s Superstars show, in which they found themselves pitted against a team of athletes. ‘We were winning but the last event was double points and it was the tug-of-war. They had Daley Thompson and Paul Dickenson, who was a hammer thrower, and it was the quickest tug-of-war in the world, so we lost our 26-inch Rediffusion colour telly.’

That was the story of Everton under Lee: close, but no cigar. And after finishing third and fourth in his first two campaigns, they dropped to nineteenth place in 1979/80, avoiding relegation by a single place – the club’s worst league performance since the early 50s. It did not help Lee that he had lost his respected first-team coach, Steve Burtenshaw, to Queens Park Rangers.

‘He always wanted to play with style,’ remembers Lyons of Burtenshaw, whose replacement Eric Harrison clashed with a number of senior players, prompting the departure of Martin Dobson, Mike Pejic, Dave Thomas and Colin Todd as the old decade came to an end.