Here is our second article relating to Wembley memories. This time it is from “merseypete” one of our forum regulars.
If by reading this you have your memory stirred and want to tell us about your Wembley memory, let me know via the contact page.
Anyway, over to Pete:
“YOUR SPECIALIST SUBJECT?
THE LEYLAND DAF CUP FINAL OF 1991
Like a lot of Blues fans, I swore that I’d never go near Wembley until I could see Blues there. Of course, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice as I wasn’t exactly inundated with invitations to go and see England or to go to other teams’ cup finals. In fact my overriding emotion on cup final days has always been jealousy, plain and simple. Why weren’t WE there?
Anyway, when my chance finally came – it was in the highly unlikely form of the Leyland Daf cup final; I’d been too young to go in 1956 and our 1963 League Cup win was of course a two legged affair. I went to both games but it wasn’t the same thing at all. Let’s face it, the Leyland Daf wasn’t in itself a great attraction or even a great achievement, but Wembley is Wembley so when it came to it I was naturally beside myself with excitement.
It may seem strange now, but in fact it wasn’t too easy to get tickets for the Blues end for the Leyland Daf, so I called into Prenton Park and got my brother and myself tickets for the Tranmere end. Rovers’ fans were generally, I knew, fairly amiable types and unlikely to cause us any trouble. In any case, when we arrived there were as many Blues fans in the Tranmere as Rovers fans so we felt perfectly at home. The bloke next to me sat down, looked round in a highly satisfied way, and pointing to a stand at the far end, said to his son ‘That’s where I sat in 1956’!
We all know what happened in the game – the ‘John Gayle Final’ – and I was as excited as anyone, forgetting the modest nature of the achievement. The odd postscript came months later, when I bought a video of the match. I watched it with my four year old son, then hovering between Blues and Liverpool (his home town team, who of course won out in the end). He watched the final avidly and over the next three years must have watched it at least fifty times. For reasons I could never establish the game had an endless fascination for him. Since he settled for the Reds I’ve bought him dozens of LFC videos but he hasn’t looked at the lot of them in total as often as he watched our Wembley triumph. If he went on Mastermind I think his specialist subject could be the Leyland Daf cup final of 1991. “Who went down injured in the 69th minute?” – “That would be Dean Peer, John”.
So, when on his visits home I trek to Anfield with him to watch his beloved Reds I’ve always got the consolation that there is ‘in some corner of a Liverpool heart a patch that is for ever Blues’.*
*with apologies to Rupert Brooke.”
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