Big Nevs Book

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Player Valuation: £100m
Being Serialised:

Big Nev said:
He represented his beloved Everton in more matches than anyone else in the club’s history, won more medals and left a legacy which remains unequalled. Many stories and preconceptions persist about Neville Southall, but now the big man has written his autobiography to give people an insight into the kind of person he really is. In the first of an Exclusive three-part serialisation today, Nev recalls the 80s glory days and one of his best ever saves.ALTHOUGH we would eventually lose it after a replay, for me the 1984 League Cup Final represented a turning point in Everton history.

Because we matched Liverpool every single step of the way, it confirmed my conviction that we were the best team in the league. In fact, because Liverpool were the best team in Europe it put us on the same pedestal.

The first game at Wembley – a 0-0 draw on a muggy afternoon – hinged on a goal-line clearance by the hand of Alan Hansen, after Adrian Heath had dispossessed Grobbelaar and hooked a shot in.


Had it gone in or we’d have scored a penalty Everton’s barren streak would have been at an end.

What did I make of Hansen’s handball? I think everything ultimately evens itself out in the end. Those sort of decisions can kill you on the day or save you – as might have happened in the semi-final when Kevin Richardson got away with a similar offence.


But the good teams always get more decisions; that’s partly why they’re good teams. Whether it’s something in-bred in the referees, or because they’re cleverer players, I don’t know, but you do get more decisions in your favour if you’re at the top.


You know, for example, that if you go to Old Trafford there’ll always be a little bit more added time on if United need it. Part of it must be the human frailties of referees; they see famous players or large crowds and want to be liked and bow to their wishes.


I’ve seen it myself when Everton have played a lower-league team with a lower-league referee; it put us at a massive advantage. I think the same thing sometimes manifests itself in the top flight too.


Whatever the reason, that day referee Alan Robinson didn’t give us a penalty, nor did he send off Alan Hansen, and the match ended goalless.

After all the hype and expectation we made the short journey to Manchester for the replay the following Wednesday.

The match was massively anticlimactic and Liverpool won 1-0 through a Graeme Souness goal. But Souness’ strike was a sliver between two evenly matched teams and the way we had performed as Liverpool’s equals massively boosted our confidence.


All this was less than 17 months after the 5-0 annihilation and more recently the dark days of Christmas 1983. The transition from no-hopers to contenders had been incredibly swift but in other ways it didn’t surprise me.


At White Hart Lane on 3 April 1985, we were riding high at the top of the league, but Spurs weren’t far behind. It was a genuine six-pointer and had they won it might have changed the complexion of the title race.


The momentum that had been with us for months could have switched their way. We went into a 2-0 lead with goals from Andy Gray and Trevor Steven but, playing in front of their biggest crowd of the season, under floodlights, there was still plenty of fight left in Spurs.

With 17 minutes to go Graham Roberts buried a 30-yard shot past me and suddenly we had a game on our hands.

The moment everyone remembers came three minutes from the end. Glenn Hoddle crossed the ball into the area and from point-blank range Mark Falco headed towards my top corner.


I stretched for it and tipped it over the crossbar.

What more can I say? It was straight at me and I’d saved plenty like that on the training ground. I always knew I was going to get it.

For many people that was the moment we won the league title. Maybe they’re right, because we held on to win 2-1 and Spurs eventually finished the season 13 points behind us. But at the time you never think of the significance of what you’ve done, or say to yourself, ‘That was a great save.’


My team-mates certainly didn’t congratulate me. Ratcliffe yelled at me: ‘Why didn’t you catch it? Why are you f*****g giving a corner away?’

In the next day’s Daily Mail, Jeff Powell described it as ‘the most astonishing save since Gordon Banks left Pele dumbfounded in Mexico’.

He added: ‘Southall twisted through the night air like a marlin on the hook to divert the ball over the crossbar.’ I suppose it’s a nice way of saying, ‘It was right at him’.


The good thing about journalists writing nice things about you and deciding that you’re a ‘good’ player is that they start seeing things in different ways.


If you mishandle the ball you suddenly ‘did well’ to parry, instead of being slated for spilling a shot. If you flap at a cross you’re suddenly ‘unlucky’ coming out for a ball, instead of getting lost in no-man’s land.


You can see even now when they like a goalkeeper; no matter what the goal he’s conceded, he was ‘unlucky’ when trying to save it.


On the other hand, if the press don’t like somebody he’s considered too slow or over the hill or not trying hard enough. They all have their own agendas, don’t they?


When the media decided that they liked me, it meant I could do anything I wanted.


Soon after the Spurs match I was named the Football Writers’ Player of the Year. It’s the older of the two player of the year awards and in winning it I was the first Everton player, the second Welshman (after Ian Rush) and only the fourth goalkeeper (after Bert Trautmann, Gordon Banks and Pat Jennings) to ever do so.


No goalkeeper or Welsh player has won it since. It was nice to get the recognition but part of me felt a little uneasy to get all the plaudits when the players in front of me had also done so much.


I went down to an awards ceremony at London’s Savoy Hotel with Howard Kendall, but I was hardly able to speak, having contracted laryngitis after all the shouting I’d been doing on the pitch.


These dinners were never my thing anyway so I told Howard to do the speech for me. Unfortunately he fell off his chair and off the stage, and ended up splitting his pants. He had to get them sewn up backstage, before saying a few words after I’d collected the award from the former FIFA president, Sir Stanley Rous.


Obviously all the attention was on me, which I was embarrassed about.


But by then I’d developed a nice line that the journalists liked and which simultaneously played down my own role and talked up my team-mates: “I’ve watched some great games this season.â€￾
 
Big Nev said:
In the second part of our exclusive serialisation of his new book, Everton legend Neville Southall discusses for the first time how Kenny Dalglish once tried to sign him for Liverpool, and reflects on one of the low-points of his Goodison career – the 5-0 derby defeat by the Reds

KENNY DALGLISH was another manager who had a certain aura and commanded my respect. He was a football man who was massively enthusiastic, who always wanted his players to improve and was clearly very good at his job because he won lots of trophies.
If he had ever managed Wales I would have been very happy, but that was unlikely. So, too, was his chance of either of us crossing Stanley Park. But that wasn’t through his want of trying.

In the late 1980s Dalglish started to call me at home from time to time. I didn’t know him at all; I never socialised with my own team-mates so I wasn’t likely to go out with those of our biggest rivals. It was a bit strange, but I didn’t mind. I liked Kenny and still do; he’s a great football man and good fellow. They were just general football conversations really, but the underlying agenda was seemingly to find out if I was interested in joining Liverpool.



Clearly he could see the situation at Everton, that things weren’t going well and the team were going nowhere at the time. I don’t think he was doing anything wrong. But I would never ever have left for Liverpool: Everton was part of me and I knew how it would hurt the fans and the club, which had shown faith in me by giving me such a long contract. I know footballers today sometimes don’t value the paper their contracts are written on, but I was a man of my word. There was no way, having asked for a long contract, that I could have turned round and said ‘Oh, by the way, I want to go to Liverpool.’

Later someone told me that Liverpool were prepared to pay £4m for me, which would have doubled the British record fee we had paid for Tony Cottee. It would have been one of the most sensational transfers ever, but I was never going to be interested in defecting to Anfield.

I think that Merseyside football lost something more intangible the day Kenny left Anfield. Because he was such a great man and such a defining figure, the whole city struggled to come to terms with his departure. He had been a giant through Hillsborough and everyone respected him for that.

He brought dignity and class to Merseyside football. As Everton players we measured ourselves against him and what he’d achieved at Anfield. To beat Liverpool with Kenny in charge was a great achievement; he elevated the Merseyside derby to a different plateau and I don’t think that the rivalry between the two clubs has been the same since.


Even 30 years later this remains for many Evertonians the darkest day in the club’s history. The facts are this: Liverpool scored five goals without reply. My Wales team-mate, Ian Rush, grabbed four of them. Glenn Keeley, Howard’s captain at Blackburn who had been brought in midweek on loan as cover for the injured Mark Higgins, was sent off after 30 minutes when we were already a goal down. After that there was no hope. Even all these years later I’ve never watched a video of the game, so I can’t say if I was to blame or not. I don’t think I played that badly; I certainly don’t think I was absolutely shocking. It wasn’t that I was bitter or because I hated losing (which I do), I just didn’t like watching myself on the telly, whether I’d had a good game or a bad one. If I made a mistake I usually knew why I made it, or I’d sit down and talk to somebody or think about it. If I saw a mistake again on television I thought it was quite a negative thing. I know this seems slightly at odds with my perfectionism, closing off something that could be used to my benefit, but I just hated seeing myself on telly, full stop. Even now, I hardly watch Match of the Day and I’ve not played in the Premier League for more than a decade!


Why did we lose so badly? Afterwards Howard said that people had gone ‘overboard’ about the game. ‘We were beaten by a very good side and we only had 10 men for most of that time,’ he said. ‘Any side is going to have it all to do against a side like Liverpool.’ There was a lot of truth in that: Liverpool were a brilliant side, one of the greatest of all time. But it was a mistake to put Glenn Keeley in there. I know he was an experienced defender and had played for Howard before, but it’s hard for anybody to go into a game like that if they’ve never played in a match of such magnitude.


And Glenn had a nightmare.


It was one of those games where he should never have been stuck in.


What nobody outside the club knew was that I was carrying a nasty injury going into that fateful match. Maybe if I wasn’t so stubborn and desperate to play a part in every moment of every match I would have sat it out. I had started getting ulcerated toes not long after I joined Everton.


Corns would grow on the inside of the toes and spread out, burst and bleed. Lots of times they ulcerated down to the bone. During games my feet would swell up, but I’d struggle on. My feet would be puffed up afterwards and turn a violet colour. It was pretty unpleasant and went on for years. It’s one of the reasons that I used to be photographed wearing flip-flops before big matches – even at Wembley when I was in my suit. It wasn’t because I was scruffy, it was because my feet needed air. Before the Liverpool match it was particularly bad; so bad, in fact, that I thought I’d broken my toe. My toes were absolutely crippling me.


This might sound like an excuse long after the event and the truth is that I don’t know how it affected my performance. What I do know is that when I went to the physio after the game he sent me to hospital, where my feet were put up and my toes literally cut apart and kept that way. I was there for three days. When I got back and went into training I learned I was no longer first-choice goalkeeper.


Howard was never a shouter. He wasn’t best pleased with what had happened out there, but it was never his style to rant and rave or throw tea cups about. Colin would have a go now and again, but not on that day. I think because it was such a horror show there was also a degree of shock.


But if I’m honest I probably missed the worst of the aftermath as I was in hospital. Howard could act decisively and ruthlessly, and often did. After the defeat he dropped the right back Brian Borrows (who never played for the club again), Bails and Sheeds. Glenn Keeley was banned anyway and didn’t play for Everton again either.


Although I was technically injured for a few days, he also dropped me. Maybe the injury was a convenient excuse. Maybe he thought it was too much for me, although I didn’t think so myself. He never explained why. In fact he didn’t speak to me for some time (although in fairness I didn’t speak to him much either). That’s just the way Howard was, and the way I was too.


The Liverpool catastrophe marked the beginning of a six-month spell on the sidelines for me.

I suppose you could say looking back that it was a battle to save my Everton career, although I never thought of it that way at the time.:

!!!!!!!
 

Best player I've seen wearing and Everton shirt. I miss Nev.

Wahoo! Just ordered the limited signed edition direct for £30ish and preordered the upcoming Everton Encyclopedia from the same publisher too. Thanks for the heads up EB and Neiler :)
 


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