First featured in last season’s matchday programme, Daily Mirror sports writer Mike Walters recalls some of the best individual displays he has witnessed the Hornets come up against…
Steeped in history, it was only a glorified broom cupboard beneath the old main stand at Anfield - but it had the spiritual powers of a holy temple.
The coaching dynasty Bill Shankly inaugurated at Liverpool would meet there every Sunday morning, with religious fidelity, for a ritual Bob Paisley compared with “popping down to the local.”
Apart from a kettle, the threadbare carpet and a calendar on the wall, it was as homely as a potting shed. But it was also the nerve centre of Liverpool’s success for 40 years - and it was also a post-match suite where visiting dignitaries and managers usually took stock of their team’s defeat.
Watford godfather Sir Elton John once revealed he felt more nervous visiting Anfield’s inner sanctum than playing a stadium gig in front of 100,000 fans in America.
After the Hornets’ 3-1 defeat on Merseyside in December 1982, so the story goes, the Rocket Man asked if they had any pink gin, but the wise men’s bar only served a nip of Scotch from a teacup, a swig of brown ale straight from the bottle or wisdom on draught.
Forty-one years ago, it had been a memorable first league trip to English football’s unrivalled fortress for the Golden Boys.
The giddy euphoria of the North London double - away wins at Tottenham and Arsenal - the previous month had been tempered by their first home defeat of the season, against Manchester United, but Anfield was the acid test for the First Division upstarts who had announced themselves in the top-flight with more tidal waves than ripples in the pond.
And for 45 minutes, the Hornets were schooled, blown away by an irresistible force, and orchestrating the rhapsody of mayhem in red was Kenny Dalglish.
Five years after he had been signed from Celtic to replace Hamburg-bound Kevin Keegan, by the 1982/83 season Sir Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish was just about at the peak of his powers.
He never scored more than 21 league goals in a season for Liverpool, but that’s only because he was also a creator supreme who provided assists like a croupier distributing cards at the poker table.
Liverpool’s opening goal, in this mesmerising masterclass, was not just a masterpiece in Dalglish’s gallery: It was pure Da Vinci.
The turn which left Ian Bolton for dead defied geometry, and the pass inside Steve Sims to the predatory Ian Rush was weighted as perfectly as the scales of justice above the Old Bailey. Rush’s left-footed finish, arrowed fierce and low into the far corner beyond Steve Sherwood, was brutally clinical, but the goal was conceived and sculpted by the genius of Dalglish.
It would not be the last time he led Watford a merry dance - not by a long chalk. In the final game of the 1984/85 season, he would come off the bench at Anfield with Liverpool 2-0 down to choreograph a spectacular revival, including a brilliant goal, as the Hornets went down 4-3 but were clapped off by the Kop for their audacity.
Dalglish remains one of the finest opponents ever to torture Watford. On that afternoon 40-odd years ago, he was so good that it felt more like a privilege than a defeat.
