“I JUST WANTED TO MAKE EVERTON PAY”
UEFA had handed Ian Rush the most prestigious task in club football, but they were getting worried.
Liverpool’s record goalscorer had been asked to carry the cup onto the field ahead of the 2019 Champions League Final between the Reds and Spurs, at the Wanda Metropolitano in Madrid. There was just one problem: he was nowhere to be seen.
“UEFA phoned me asking, ‘Where are you?’” Rush laughs now, as he talks to FourFourTwo. “I said, ‘Well... I’m walking on the motorway’. They said, ‘You’re what?’”
Of all the experiences during his 40-year association with Liverpool Football Club, this was one of the most bizarre. “There was me, John Henry the owner, Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard on this coach from the team hotel – we’d decided to get to the stadium early to take in the atmosphere,” continues Rush, who now works as a club ambassador. “But the driver took a right turn and the road was blocked off. He couldn’t go forward, he couldn’t go back, it was 35 degrees and we all had to get out on the motorway and walk.
“Everyone – John, Kenny, Stevie, me – was walking up this motorway and all the people in the cars were Liverpool fans. I don’t think they could believe what they were looking at. When we arrived at the ground, UEFA came to get me. Peter Moore and John Henry had no idea where to go, so Peter said, ‘Just follow Rushy, he’s with UEFA now!’ I got there with about two minutes to spare.”
Television viewers would never have known. Rush carried the trophy onto the pitch before kick-off, then did the same after the game as Liverpool lifted it for a sixth time.
“WHEN LIVERPOOL FIRST CAME IN FOR ME, I SAID NO. I DIDN’T BELIEVE I WAS GOOD ENOUGH”
“EVERTON DIDN’T WANT ME. I WAS GUTTED”
Rush twice won the European Cup as a player – successes that were powered by rejection. “I was a huge Everton supporter when I was a kid,” he says. “My brother used to take me to matches – I was in the Gwladys Street End watching Bob Latchford, my hero, when he scored 30 league goals in 1977-78. I didn’t realise that the next player to get 30 league goals in a season would be me.”
Not with Everton, though, as he dreamed back then, aged 16. Soon he was making his breakthrough with Chester City in the Third Division, but it wasn’t enough to impress his
