Chelsea vs Liverpool: The slow-burning bona fide rivalry that fans refuse to acknowledge

Inform a diehard Liverpool or Chelsea supporter that their club has a valid rivalry with the other and you risk derision. Liverpool hate Manchester United and sustain their historic, civic oneupmanship campaign with Everton, they will tell you, while Chelsea despise West Ham, Tottenham and their older fans nurture a hostility for Leeds. The reluctance even to acknowledge it is instrumental: neither will deign to do the other the honour of considering them worthy of the status.

You will hear it in the songs at Stamford Bridge on Saturday evening when opposing fans attempt to define the other club in terms of their own prejudices. “F--- off Chelsea FC/You ain’t got no history,” the Liverpool fans will sing, scoffing at the relative novelty of their opponent's serial and successful pot-hunting. “F--- off Liverpool FC,” will echo in return, “You live off your history.” Chelsea, painted as parvenus, strike back by characterising Liverpool as a kind of heritage club. It’s a step up from the traditional “Liverpool slums” and “Chelsea rent boy” slanders and its roots lie in the football fan’s greatest fetish, the assertion of authenticity.

Until you have five European Cups and 18 leagues, Liverpool’s original song attests, you lack both the familiarity and competitive equality to deserve the designation ‘rival’ while Chelsea’s alludes to the five titles, five FA Cups and Champions League they have won since Liverpool won their last of each.

They may be two distinct kinds of snootiness - disdain for Johnny Come Latelys and contempt for the old order - but it is snobbery all the same. Looking down on other clubs and formulating a hierarchy of hostility are part of the fan’s code and pretending that rivalry doesn’t exist is just another put-down, one that requires a hauteur of its protagonists that could only be matched had Princess Margaret ever been cast as Lady Bracknell.  

It has been a strange, slow burning antagonism, one, unusually for English football, that has been fomented principally in European rather than domestic matches but it is a genuine rivalry despite its freshness. They began as friends - on Sept 4 1905 First Division Liverpool opened Stamford Bridge in a friendly before Chelsea’s first home game of their inaugural Second Division campaign. They had been invited as reigning Division Two champions and would go on to win the title for the second time the following spring but were beaten 4-0 by the new boys. From the off the club founded by Gus Mears were seen as emblematic of modernity, offering a brochure rather than a plain team sheet, ball boys and telephones beside the press seats.

Chelsea’s bid to establish themselves from a standing start made them keen exponents of team building by chequebook and over the next 40 years would invest tidy fees in household names such as Fatty Foulke, Hughie Gallacher and Tommy Lawton in crowd-drawing attempts to fill their vast stadium, the second biggest in Britain.

They also scouted and recruited lesser-known prospects - Jimmy Windridge, George ‘Gatling Gun’ Hilsdon, the Danish amateur Nils Middelboe (who struggled to take time off work so mostly played home games), 'Dusty' Miller et al - who flourished in royal blue and helped to establish the club as a Football League perennial but had scant days in the sun for all their pre-Second World War endeavours - three promotions and the 1915 FA Cup final where they were trounced 3-0 by Sheffield United.  

Lawton, the greatest header of a ball who ever lived in Sir Stanley Matthews’ opinion, was 26 when he signed for Chelsea in 1945 but played only one full season for them on the Football League’s resumption, which they began as one of the favourites for the title. But in merely their third game they were 6-0 down after 50 minutes at Anfield, fought back to 6-4 with 18 minutes to go but ultimately lost 7-4. Liverpool, after a wobble of their own at Old Trafford, signed Albert Stubbins and went on to win Division One, their fifth title and first for 24 years. Chelsea, their optimism punctured, could not build any positive momentum, lost more than they won and finished in 15^th.

The year after Liverpool were relegated in 1954, Chelsea won their first league championship, truly an annus mirabilis for a club that finished in the top half just three times in the 15 years from 1946 until they, too, went down in 1962, the year Bill Shankly took Liverpool back up. For much of the Seventies and Eighties, Chelsea’s near destitution contrasted with Liverpool’s imperial supremacy but in the 1960s, the two were frequently title contenders in a more competitively egalitarian age.

Shankly admired Chelsea’s manager, Tommy Docherty, who had inherited his No4 shirt at Preston North End in 1949, and the two got on well even if he would never let ride any opportunity to motivate his own team or temper the buoyancy of his friend and his “wee, cocky, southern b------“. “He’d never say you were rubbish,” Docherty said. “He’d say, ‘You’ve a good, wee team. Not good enough’ or ‘You were beaten by a great team today, Tom.’ I loved going there even though all you ever got was a cup of tea and a good hiding. You came away a bit wiser.”

In March 1965 Liverpool, the champions, played Chelsea, the league leaders, in the FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park and won 2-0. Docherty said that Shankly had brought his side into the Chelsea dressing room before the match and told him in front of the players: “I think your team’s good enough to win the Cup … next year.” Somehow during that visit, it is claimed, he found the proofs of Chelsea’s Cup final brochure and pinned them up on his own changing room wall to fire up his players. If it sounds far-fetched, no one who knew him would put it past Shankly to have concocted it himself. His cunning is more persuasive than Docherty’s hubris. In any case, it worked and Liverpool went on to win the Cup for the first time and Chelsea’s draw in the away leg against Leicester a fortnight later won them the League Cup, their first proper trophy.

Docherty at least got one over on Shankly when selling on his record signing Tony ‘the Headmaster’ Hateley, a beast in the air wholly unsuited to the style of play each manager preferred. We venerate Shankly’s wit but should not forget his waspish cruelty, easily the equal of Docherty’s. During his year at Chelsea Hateley’s passes should be addressed “to whom it may concern”, Docherty said, and when Shankly had paid £96,000 for him but moved him on after a year, the Doc extolled the misfit’s virtues. “You have to say he’s good in the air,” he said. “Aye, so was Douglas Bader,” replied Shankly.

Liverpool secured one half of their first Double at Stamford Bridge in 1986. Kenny Dalglish’s smile was more eloquent than any of the words he said and he never conveyed satisfaction as radiantly as it did that day after the player-manager had cushioned Jim Beglin’s flick on his chest and rifled in a superb volley. Chelsea had managed the odd victory during their yo-yo years but it wasn’t until the mid-Ninteties, when Matthew Harding’s investment began to transform their standing, that they achieved a competitive parity. In 1997 Chelsea rattled them in the FA Cup third round when Ruud Gullitt brought on the old warhorse Mark Hughes and he swiftly began to terrorise Liverpool’s flaky defence. He scored one and made another in the 4-2 victory and at the season’s end he lifted the FA Cup for the fourth time in his career.

Two years later palpable ill-feeling between the two sides erupted when Robbie Fowler decided to augment the Liverpool fans’ homophobic baiting of Graeme Le Saux by reprehensibly twice bending down and wiggling his backside in front of his England team-mate and joining in the crass invective. Le Saux, offered no help by the referee, Paul Durkin, later elbowed Fowler and received the brunt of the media criticism afterwards. Le Saux had suffered disgraceful verbal abuse for years for the cardinal sins of not reading a tabloid newspaper, being relatively articulate and having interests beyond the game and Fowler, though he subsequently apologised, at first claimed to have been misinterpreted and scapegoated.

If Chelsea’s fans had been some of the most vociferous employers of the ‘sign on, sign on’ chants for years, here was Fowler escalating the mutual dislike in the crudest fashion. The fact that it was Fowler, a man routinely goaded with false accusations by Everton fans, a player who demonstrated his solidarity with the city’s dockworkers during a long-running strike, illustrated how toxic it now was.

Evidently there was discord before Jose Mourinho and Rafa Benítez moved to the Premier League in the summer of 2004, rancour existed prior to the last match of the 2002-03 season when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-1 and took the last Champions League place and condescension predated Roman Abramovich’s money changing his club forever. The combative volatility of Mourinho and Benitez was simply fuel to the flames.

Mourinho’s courtship of Steven Gerrard in 2004 and the Liverpool captain’s flirtation and transfer request the following summer did not help. Indeed Gerrard’s own goal in the 2005 League Cup final that levelled the match at 1-1 with 11 minutes to go inspired Mourinho to walk in front of a section of Liverpool fans who had been advising him to depart to the tune of La donna e mobile and shush them. He was sent to the stands where he watched his side win their first trophy, 3-2 in extra time.

Two months later they met again in the Champions League semi-final, second leg at Anfield after a 0-0 draw at Stamford Bridge. More than a decade on Mourinho was still bitterly complaining about Luis García’s ghost goal that proved decisive, conveniently forgetting that it looked in, awarding it saved Petr Cech from a red card and never mentioning Eidur Gudjohnsen’s preposterous late miss. To him it will always be explained as “the linesman’s scored”. Chelsea won the Premier League, Liverpool their fifth European Cup and Benítez pointedly said the following September after a 0-0 draw that Arsenal played better football and were more exciting to watch than Mourinho’s side. As patrician contempt goes it was a fey cheek-slap compared with Jorge Valdano’s magisterial dig at both managers for their “s--- hanging on a stick” football, “very intense, very collective, very tactical, very physical, and very direct”.

There was nothing mysterious about Luis García’s second semi-final goal against Chelsea, this one a year on from the phantom, a peach of a half-volley at Old Trafford that put Liverpool on course to win the FA Cup. In 2007 the two were drawn in the Champions League semi-final once more and this one proved tighter than ever and was taken to penalties after Daniel Agger’s goal levelled the tie at 1-1. Oddly, as Mourinho prowled, Benítez chose to sit cross-legged on the touchline, channelling the zen calm of Buddha and it worked, Geremi and Arjen Robben’s misses giving him a semi-final victory over Chelsea for the third season in succession.

When Mourinho was away in Italy and Spain, Chelsea had the upper hand on the biggest stage, winning the Champions League semi-final, 3-2 in the second leg after extra time in 2008, the quarter-final in 2009 following a ridiculously entertaining 4-4, see-saw draw featuring Fabio Aurelio’s exquisite con artist free-kick and Alex’s venomous response, and the 2012 FA Cup final which they won 2-1 in the teeth of the blessed Andy Carroll’s one-man revival mission.

Fernando Torres had already left Liverpool for Chelsea at that point but did not come off the bench though he was still subjected to volleys of “Judas” and “turncoat” taunts, a fate that did not greet Benítez when he accepted the caretaker’s role at Stamford Bridge and faced more bile from his own supporters than he from Liverpool’s at Anfield in April 2013. Chelsea drew 2-2 that day and Torres’ replacement, Luis Suárez, bit Branislav Ivanovic. Benítez’s failure to condemn Suárez convinced Chelsea supporters that their deepest suspicions about his loyalties were now indisputable. “We don’t care about Rafa, he don’t care about us,” they sang ever more loudly until they were muted, momentarily, in Amsterdam when Ivanovic scored the towering 93^rd-minute header that won the Europa League final.

When Mourinho returned to Chelsea and then to Anfield in 2013-14, one slip by Steven Gerrard launched an orgy of mockery, some sympathy and contributed to erasing Liverpool’s three-point advantage over Manchester City in their quest to win a first championship for 24 years. His counter-attacking masterclass persuaded some Liverpool fans to think themselves moral victors, a title as yet without a trophy.

Although Chelsea had still been in with a faint chance of finishing top had both Manchester City and Liverpool lost their final couple of games, it seemed they drew almost as much satisfaction at sabotaging Liverpool’s chances as they would have had they gone on to steal it themselves. Having a hand in dashing another’s hopes is more than mere consolation for the football fan who lives by the old maxim that was popularised and given a twist by Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.” Steven Gerrard may be 400 miles away in Glasgow on Saturday night but Chelsea’s song of undistilled schadenfreude will ring out from his television as raucously as it did when freshly minted. 

Chelsea’s late Carabao Cup victory at Anfield on Wednesday night was a phoney-war prelude to Saturday’s match. Chelsea were coming from behind in 2014 and this season may yet represent the first genuine head-to-head battle between them for the title, City’s outstanding credentials now as then notwithstanding. Perhaps this is what it will take for each to concede what is obvious to the rest of us: Liverpool and Chelsea are engaged in a bona fide rivalry that is far greater than championing Frank Lampard or Gerrard and all that they epitomise.

When something so integral to each club’s identity makes fans of the other gag, when aversion runs so high, how could it be anything else even if its origins are recent? It is the model of a very modern rivalry. They may deny it and maintain that it’s a media construct but that is all part of it - and counterintuitively makes it all the more real.