It is February 1986 and a youthful David Davies, then a touchline reporter for Match of the Day before climbing to the position of executive director of the Football Association, breaks into the transmission to reveal the full details of an attack on the United team bus as it approached Anfield.
“A brick rebounded off a window at the side of Mark Hughes,” Davies reported. “Then outside the players’ entrance at Anfield, as the players got off the bus, someone sprayed a considerable quantity of liquid, possibly ammonia, in their direction.
“An angry Ron Atkinson and his players ran directly on to the pitch, but 22 spectators, many of them children, suffered just as badly if not worse. One 12-year-old boy was taken to hospital.”
...with United returning to Anfield on Boxing Day following the attack 10 months earlier, it required the presence of Bob Paisley, three years after retiring as Liverpool manager, to travel to the game on the visitors’ coach in order to promote a more harmonious image of relations between the two clubs.
“Bob came on to our coach at the team hotel,” recalls Bryan Robson, the United captain at the time. “He travelled with us to make sure there were no problems after the previous trip.
“I think it turned out to be tear gas that was directed at us a few months earlier as we got off the bus at Anfield. It actually missed most of the players, none of us were really badly affected, but the Liverpool fans got it worse.
“I can remember those Liverpool supporters being invited into our dressing room by our medical staff so that they could have their eyes washed to stem the effects of the attack.
“That was one of those occasions when the hostility between the two sets of fans boiled over but, thankfully, those days seem to have gone”
