Hard Case--The Autobiography of Jimmy Case by Jimmy Case

Author:Jimmy Case [Jimmy Case]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784182205
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2014-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

TIME TO MOVE ON

I didn’t know it until the last possible moment, but as we moved into the 1980s my time at Liverpool was running out. Perhaps I should have spotted the clues. Incidents like the one in Tbilisi must have been noted by Bob and the coaches and I have to confess, it wasn’t an isolated occasion. There was something of a drinking culture at Liverpool in those days. Ray and me were usually at the heart of it, along with Terry McDermott, Phil Thompson, Emlyn and Smithy – everyone, really.

If we went out for a night in Liverpool, there were so many people wanting to buy us a drink you could easily have ten pints lined up in front of you and not pay for any of them. It never really got out of hand, but there was the time when I was breathalysed and I suppose that didn’t go down so well either.

That was in 1979. I had some friends over from Manchester for the weekend and we had a few beers, as you do, when we decided to get a takeaway… and I volunteered to fetch the food. It was only just up the road, I still had my slippers on in the car, but I got stopped and that was that. I have no excuse, I shouldn’t have done it. At the time, I never really thought that it might affect my place at Liverpool.

The coaches knew all about the drinking – it went on at all the clubs – and my thinking was that because we trained all week, played a hard game on a Saturday, to go out and have a few drinks afterwards was something we had earned. In my view, we were just letting our hair down a bit, but the club in those days didn’t like that type of thing. I suppose they must have thought I was a bit of a bad lad.

After I left the club attitudes changed and certainly after Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan had left there would be incidents of players getting into a few scrapes, and still they were kept on at the club. One player terrorised half the Wirral, with about four police cars chasing him, but the club kept him on. Let’s put it this way, I’m not the only number 8 in the history of Liverpool FC who has been arrested, but my punishment was to be eased out of the club. It doesn’t seem to happen these days.

We never did the drinking at the wrong times and we never let it interfere with our performances on the field – not counting the time we took on a bunch of Alicante waiters. The game was played on 29 May 1975 at the Estadio Municipal F; we won 2–1.

We had gone on an end-of-season trip to Benidorm and it was bedlam. To justify the trip, it was agreed we would play this team of waiters and let’s just say when it was time to kick-off, one or two of us were feeling the effects of overindulgence.

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