How Good Was Beardsley?
- Thread starter Gerry_A_Trick
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Wonderful player who would be on the bench for my version of the LFC All-Time XI and should have seen his career out with us. It was apparently thought he didn't get enough goals, which is one of the biggest errors of judgment we ever made about a player IMHO.
I couldn't remember much about him except his appearance. Then I watched a charity game, he must have been 40 something, it was nostalgic and I was thinking aw look that's Peter Beardsley. Bless. Then he started playing and was miles better than anyone playing in our first team. Everything he did was flawless. Even Robbie Fowler looked inferior playing alongside him.
I remember the summer we signed him. We bought Digger as well for the quite laughable £900,000. Beardo was the more expensive signing about 1.3mill I seem to recall. Anyway Digger started off that season like a rocket banging in goals and generally being fucking ace. Beardo started a little slower and was generally seen as a bit of a disappointment until about half way through the season. Then he exploded and didn't look back. He was frighteningly good. The fact we sold him has to go down as one of the biggest balls ups we ever did as a club.
Check this little beauty out. I remember this like it was just the other day.
Check this little beauty out. I remember this like it was just the other day.
The Lucas of his day in terms of getting booked for clumsy fouls, but what a wonderful player he was. Similar to Suarez in the way he could get the ball and wriggle around players in the box, and few were as inventive and imaginative as him in a crowded penalty area. You just came to EXPECT something magical from him. To be fair.
When he first joined he cost about 2x what John Barnes cost, who joined the same time (£1.7M vs £800K I think), and I recall commenting to a friend of mine, about 3 matches into the season, how we didn't get comparative value for money. My mates response was a dismissive "shows what you knwo about football" ... and he was damn right.
Towards the end of Kenny's managerial reign he started gettign left out of away line ups, to most fan's consternation; there were some rumours about off field differences that contributed to this.
Souness took over & the first summer there was a big focus on how we needed to maximise our English personnel vs "foreign" (including scottish, welsh and irish) due to UEFA (& FA?) quotas, and so our Graeme went & did the incomprehensible in gettign rid of the english Beardsley & replacing him with the welsh Saunders. The fact he went to the Blues just rubbed salt into the wound.
In short 100% agree with JJ in that he should never have left and should have retired a red. Never ever understood how that didnt happen.
Towards the end of Kenny's managerial reign he started gettign left out of away line ups, to most fan's consternation; there were some rumours about off field differences that contributed to this.
Souness took over & the first summer there was a big focus on how we needed to maximise our English personnel vs "foreign" (including scottish, welsh and irish) due to UEFA (& FA?) quotas, and so our Graeme went & did the incomprehensible in gettign rid of the english Beardsley & replacing him with the welsh Saunders. The fact he went to the Blues just rubbed salt into the wound.
In short 100% agree with JJ in that he should never have left and should have retired a red. Never ever understood how that didnt happen.
Beardsley cost us £1.9m. A British transfer record fee. And a bargain. In style of play he's a bit like Lallana, except not rubbish. Certainly played that slightly deeper support striker role to perfection.
He actually got dropped at one point! Amazing.
And @Red Astaire posted exactly what I was trying to say in my first paragraph, far more eloquently, as I was typing it .
I remember being stood on Gwladys St one year, we were playing towards the opposite end, and at one point he picked up the ball tight on the right hand touchline about midway in their half. I said to myself "What the f&*^ are you doing out there, you're supposed to be a striker!", but he took the ball infield and diagonally forward about 10 yards & then unleashed an unstoppable shot into the top left corner of the binman's net.
His story about how he signed makes it seem like a century ago. He didn't have an agent, and was going to just accept the first thing he was offered before Dalglish took him to one side and explained how Peter Robinson expected him to haggle a bit and told him what figure to insist on.
Not many players play for Liverpool and Everton and are very fondly remembered by both sets of fans. I remember him scoring against us in a derby -consolation goal as we won 3-1 I think - and we started singing "Beardsley is a Red Man"
At the time I was well excited to be signing Saunders, but the fact that Beardsley was being sold to Everton soured that a bit.
No, I was appalled at the time, as were most people. This is what Beardo said when he was on LFCTV talking about his time at the club:
You were still scoring goals in 1991. When do you think things started to go wrong for you at Liverpool?
Probably when Kenny left. Nobody still knows the reason but I have my opinion and that is what he did for the families of Hillsborough eventually got to him. I don't mean that in a horrible way because the man was sensational. That is my feeling of it - I might be totally wrong there.
When he decided to go I was stunned. We were going to Luton to practice on the plastic pitch, but Ronnie Moran called a meeting in the dressing room and basically we got told Kenny had resigned. I was gobsmacked.
Why do you think there is this misconception that you and him didn't get on?
I don't know, I really haven't got a clue. It baffles me. I think Kenny would tell you the same. I wanted to be in the team - no doubt about it. But to be fair everybody else wanted to be in the team and that's the way it was. There were never any vendettas at Liverpool.
You wanted to be in the team - of course you did. But there was never a problem if you weren't because we had so many great players. When you look at rotation now, that was probably just the start of it. In those days people didn't rotate. Kenny was probably the first and ahead of his time.
Graeme Souness arrived at the club and a lot of the former players talk about how he perhaps somewhat ruthlessly came in and underestimated some of the potential still left in some of the players. Is that how you saw your relationship with him? Was he fair to you or not?
I wouldn't say he was unfair. What I would say - and I don't know this for a fact - is that he had a preconception of me before and almost made a decision before he came in. I was on the bench from the start. It wasn't as though he saw me play and then made a decision.
At the end of that season, we went out on tour and we played Arsenal in Mauritius and Graeme said at the end of that game: "You show me that attitude that you've just shown tonight, you will be in my team at the start of the season." Without being big-headed, I had always thought my attitude had been the same, but he had never seen me play because he made a decision and the team were going well. They kept winning most games and just missed out on the league.
I came back and always tried my best. But we were in Sweden on a pre-season tour and he called me to see him and said: "Everton want to buy you and I'm going to sell you." I asked him how much for and he said: "It's not up to me to tell you. Howard will tell you if he wants to tell you." I get on unbelievably with Graeme now but I was really disappointed in that. I would never have asked to leave Liverpool.
Beardsley, in that 1% of footballers that you could never ever say had a questionable attitude or failed to give his very best
Arggghh - Reading that interview macca just posted brings back all those feelings of anger and annoyance about when he left. 25 years later! 😡
Souness was a great player but a cunt of a manager (for us anyway)
He made some exciting and/ or interesting signings like Dean Saunders, Mark Wright, Rob Jones, Paul Stewart, Nigel Clough, Neil Ruddock, all of which made sense, but didn't all work out. But he let too many class players go, and also signed some obviously dreadful players
I recall someone talking about Beardo at Newcastle, with a coach full of fucking cunts sitting there listening to shit R & B on headphones, oblivious to one of the finest Geordie footballers of all time below them, dragging a bag of kits onto the bus. Genuinely sickening.
I think some memories of him are a bit too skewed by memories of our last great title winning team. He was very good and could destroy teams on his day, but my (imperfect) memory is that he also had games and patches when he seemed to barely get a kick.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there was also a perception that he didn't perform well in very physical matches - which was a bit of a criticism toward the end of that team's time wasn't it? Ridiculous in hindsight.
He'd still walk into every squad we've had since he left of course.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there was also a perception that he didn't perform well in very physical matches - which was a bit of a criticism toward the end of that team's time wasn't it? Ridiculous in hindsight.
He'd still walk into every squad we've had since he left of course.
Whereas balotelli has always had the balance about right. As did Lucas when he first arrived.
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