Life Lessons of Ian Rush
Liverpool FC legend Ian Rush was once credited with inventing a new type of work-ethic for football's centre forwards.
The football season is upon us in the UK, which is a relief, because we haven’t had any football since the European Championships ended just before the Olympics, which themselves ended last week. To mark the occasion, and the first article from Meridian Strip, here’s a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while, on the magic of former Liverpool FC centre forward, Ian Rush.
Ian Rush was a gentleman, although I’m not sure why that mattered so much. He had a moustache, like my dad, somewhat of a gentleman himself, but it wasn’t that either. Whatever it was about Rushie that made him an icon, it wasn’t just his mild-manners or his goals-scoring prowess. Okay, so he went about his business modestly, with a smile, a cheeky one, with the unmistakable glint in his eye of a boy on a playground. In the 1980s and some of the 90s, he was the greatest goalscorer in the most successful football club ever to come out of Britain. When he scored one of those goals, with an efficiency, a proficiency, and accuracy that would make him a global superstar, he celebrated like a man who’d just won a tenner on the pub diddler. A little jump in the air, a grin. I’ll get the next round in, boys.
Ian Rush played for Liverpool for the most of the 1980s, the club’s heyday you could argue, winning most of the trophies that sent the clubhouse cabinet for a few extra extensions. By the end of his career there, he was the club record goalscorer and a stone cold legend.
I first saw him play, in the flesh as they used to say, at my first visit to Anfield stadium, in 1990 – he scored in a 2-0 win over Chelsea. I remember it was a diving header, connecting with an Exocet waist-height cross bisecting the penalty area from the righthand side, driven in by Stevie Nicol, that doughty Scottish right back. I was a pitch-length away, he gliding in on his belly to set up the victory, paving the way for Nicol himself to plough in one in at the same end not long after. At least that’s how I remember it. I refuse to go to Google, that great bespoiler of warmly held memories.
What is for sure is that I was a pitch-length away for both goals, and my eyesight was pretty good for another couple of years yet. I saw it clearly, the movement of the players, the shimmy, the dive, the eruption of the fans behind the goal. If it happened now, I’d be asking who scored and who delivered. I was hemmed in by my dad on one side, and his brother-in-law, my uncle, on the other. At that age, I worshipped the Liverpool branch of the family. Liverpool had everything. My favourite uncles and aunts – I won’t name names, it’s a big family – and it had The Beatles and it had football. Until I was old enough to find out about girls, The Beatles and football were the only things that mattered in life. And Star Wars. And for a while, Action Force/GI Joe. And I liked to read. But mainly it was The Beatles and football.
The Beatles, of course, had the advantage of having existed in their entirety already by the time I was born, and so, even taking into account “The Long and Winding Road”, were guaranteed to never let me down. I could see them from beginning to end, the narrative full and complete. Football, however, was a different kettle of fish. It was unpredictable. Or, at least, few things about it were predictable. In fact, it seems in the 1980s that the only things that were predictable about football was that Liverpool would win trophies and Ian Rush would score goals. How naive I was.
To the uninitiated, and to break it down to its essence, football is the noble pursuit of goalscoring. And that is why the consistent scorers of those goals have tended to be the great superstars of the game. Okay, so there are exceptions, players who have transcended fame and respect within the game and not fulfilled this heroic role – Bobby Moore, Franz Beckenbaur, Barry Venison – but it’s usually the striker who catches the eye, the heart; it’s the striker who you pretend to be when kicking around on the playground (apart from that brief period when I had a thing for Romanian midfield general Gheorghe Hagi – but I was, in some ways, a peculiar, atypical child).
Ian Rush was a hero to a generation for one reason, and that was his uncanny ability to find the back of the net. There’s a strange phrase – the natural goalscorer – which isn’t something that’s really ever applied to any other professions – nobody refers to the “natural brain surgeon” or the “natural airline pilot”. What it means is that some players score goals, and some players are destined to score goals. They are born – nature more than nurture – to fulfil the most glorious accomplishment in all sport. To score goals. Whether it’s a 30 yard screamer or it ricochets in off your bum, a goal is the purest expression of sporting joy. When that ball goes over that line, it releases a valve, it blinds us to the worries of the world for a few seconds, and there is nothing but elation – no guilt, no shame, no worry, no anxiety – just happiness. It flashes in your heart with an intensity that leaves no room for anything else, not even reflection or evaluation. Just – YES! And Ian Rush did that.
So did lots of other players, true. But Rush had something else. He was known for working hard. He was credited with the invention of the idea of the “striker tracking back”, meaning he would come back and do the dirty work of tackling when his peers just focussed on the glory of scoring goals. Liverpool manager Bob Paisley called him the first line of defence, which wasn’t very glamorous at all, really. He didn’t need to do it. His job was snatching glory. Why tackle back? Somebody once said it was like expecting the Pope to take out the bins. But there was something about Rush, something about Liverpool back then, that had a deep unspoken connection to my own evolving identity, whatever that was. The message? Work hard and anybody can achieve what Rushie did? No, that wasn’t it. Work for the team? No, that wasn’t it either. I think it was that winning should come with values.
In Newport, growing up, the idea of “being Welsh” meant very little. The idea of “being anything” meant very little. Being working class was not an identity, it was just the world I knew. The council estate where I grew up, and then the non-council house we moved to when I was six or seven, the local football club, Albion Rovers, where my dad played and then managed, and where I spent many Saturday afternoons and smoky Christmas parties, bitter for the men, port and lemonade for the ladies — that was my community. People speak nowadays about fans not really being able to connect with millionaire players, but it’s almost a notional point. There’s a reason fans still have more respect today for players who put in a shift than the lazy one who nicks the winner. There is an important idea many fans hold close, and that’s that good people work hard. Politicians forever talk of the “hard working families” they pretend to adulate, as if the lazy-ass families are showboating. If there’s glory to be had in this life, then it’s in that doctrine somewhere. Working hard is virtuous. And if you’re not a natural goalscorer, if you work hard enough you can revel in the glory of those who are, because they work harder and they do it for us.
When I watched Rush score against Chelsea in 1990, it was during his second period playing for Liverpool. In 1986, when he was the most feared striker in Europe, he was bought by Italian giants Juventus. He had one inauspicious season over there and came back, came home, to help Liverpool onto more trophies for a while until the doldrums came for the club. But there was another story of a Welsh striker going to Juventus. Back then Google wasn’t the route to all rabbit holes, and our search engines were much more organic. You had to read books. TV only had four channels, and home entertainment, as it was grandly referred to, was expensive and built to last. I had to wait until Christmas for my At-At, my Action Force/GI Joe postal club subscription, and my VHS tape of Ian Rush’s top 50 goals. So it was books, and talking to your parents – or talking to your mates who had different books and different parents. The network was pretty sophisticated. And it was my dad who told me about John Charles. Charles was from Swansea and played for Leeds Utd in the 1950s. Like Rush in many ways, Charles was known as a gentle giant, always in football a euphemism for a significant unit whose mild manners and amenable character belied an unstoppable competitiveness. Charles also went to Juventus, and had a better time of it in Italy than Rush, scoring 108 goals in 155 games – an astonishing achievement in the infamously defensive Italian league of the catenaccio era. Juventus fans still regard Charles as a legend of the game. They built a statue to him outside the Stadio de Alpi. A statue. Back in the days where in Wales to get a statue you normally needed to be a lambchopped slave owner and dead a hundred years. My father – my grandfather, even – used to tell stories of John Charles like he was Hercules, walking the ancient black and white world, towering above mere mortal Italian defenders, the great stoic warriors of their people, heading goal after goal. When I grew up I used to sit in my local pub on a stool always very close to a framed photograph of Charles in action. The Swansea boy, honoured in Newport. My grandfather, a Kidwelly boy himself, had followed Charles’s adventures in real time. Another time. The time of giants. My grandfather’s Ian Rush.
After Rush came back from Juventus, somewhat humbled after his tough time out there in Turin, he took back up on the Liverpool front line like he’d never been away. In 1989, Liverpool faced Everton in the FA Cup Final for the second time that decade. Rush, the first line of defence, shone in the limelight, the memories of his time abroad cast out, scoring two goals, including the winner in a 3-2 extra time win against Liverpool’s greatest rivals. At some point after the win, Rush and teammates John Barnes and Peter Beardsley (also players I’d sometimes pretend to be on the playground) got into an elevator in a hotel where they were guests of honour, presumably along with the rest of the Liverpool team, at a party on the penthouse floor. In the lift were two young women, returning to their rooms after an exhausting day working silver service for some cup-final-related corporate event, black dappers in hands, hair finally unspooled. The footballers, my heroes, asked the girls politely if they’d like to come up to the party with them, meet the team, have a drink, have a dance. Burned out from waiting tables all day, and utterly clueless as to who these three men were, the two young women declined the invitation, and, alighting the elevator, respectful farewells were exchanged. The two young women, who went back to their rooms and probably shared a tub of ice cream and watched The Cannon and Ball Show or whatever was on that night, were my sisters, and I’ll never forgive them for being too tired to go to that party with those random men in a lift.
Whilst mulling on and writing this article I discussed the idea of Ian Rush and his work ethic with a few friends, and I was surprised to hear that the football fans among them only remember Rushie has a “goalhanger”1. I found myself passionately correcting them on this. As a youngster, my father gave me excellent advice on work ethics, although he didn’t call it that. Never stand on the worksite with your arms folded. Never volunteer for anything. Never take the third light from a match for fear of enemy snipers. That sort of thing. But Ian Rush taking out the bins was something that’s had a big impact on me. Rush himself went on to play alongside a young Robbie Fowler, a Liverpool striker who in the 90s would go on to pass Rush’s club goalscoring record and become a legend in his own right. Rush became Fowler’s mentor. He taught Fowler how to work hard, taught him that tracking back and being the first line of defence was as much a striker’s job as putting the ball in the net.
In 1996, Rush left Liverpool for a second time, to join Leeds Utd, and I remember his unveiling. It was a sad day, the day he joined “dirty” Leeds. But a few years later, reading Simon Armitage’s prose memoir All Points North, Armitage wrote of how he remembered it from the other side, the side of the receiver. He describes Rush standing there with manager Howard Wilkinson, holding up the Leeds scarf like it was an old dishcloth, and I laughed. I laughed hard. I laughed at Rush. And I laughed at him because football is a cruel game.
Some recommendations…
What I have been enjoying?
Watched Werewolves Within, new horror comedy on Netflix based on a video game, apparently. It’s a bit of fun with some cracking comedy performances, but, weirdly, in the end, didn’t need any of the werewolf stuff. My search for a great werewolf movie continues.
Read Clothes… and Other Things That Matter, the memoir of British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. Funny, insightful, learned a great deal, but also was fascinated by the lack of confidence and the consistent shadow of imposter syndrome from a woman who edited one of the most important and lucrative fashion bible for 25 years.
Listened to New Long Leg, debut album by British post-punk band Dry Cleaning. The album is great - enjoyed it a lot - but it did remind me of a gig I had many years ago writing up a festival and doing a whole blog post on the worst band names at the festival. This also reminds me of the new novel I’m working on, in which a minor character has spent his life forming and destroying countless bands, and I get to make up and list all the terrible hipster bands he’s been in, like John Connor’s Pack’d Lunch, and Fuck Magpies.
A player who hangs around near the goalmouth and knocks in stray balls; these players normally have high goalscoring records but do nothing else on the pitch - Gary Lineker was such a player, long before he set off on a career as a millionaire charm machine. One of the greatest shaming insults of the childhood football pitch was to be labelled a “goalhanger”.