Dubai: Liverpool legend John Barnes has urged his former club to keep their cool in the remaining four games of the season despite the emotion surrounding Anfield this week with the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster.
Jamaican-born winger, Barnes, 50, was on the pitch during the abandoned 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in Sheffield when 96 football fans were killed in a stadium crush.
The club could now honour the dead with their first league title win in 24 years providing they win their remaining four fixtures — away to Norwich City this weekend, at home to Chelsea, away to Crystal Palace and at home to Newcastle United.
But Barnes, who scored 84 goals in 314 appearances for the Reds between 1987 and 1997, has warned that while the Hillsborough factor has given the club extra impetus this season, too much emotion could also undo their hard work.
Barnes’ comments follow captain Steven Gerrard’s admission that tears following Liverpool’s pivotal 3-2 win over Manchester City at Anfield on Sunday were for victims of Hillsborough.
“All this emotion about Hillsborough and the excitement that we’re going to win the league could work against them,” Barnes told Gulf News on the sidelines of Harvey Nichols and Visit Britain’s ‘Sport is Great’ football fashion campaign at Mall of the Emirates on Wednesday.
“You don’t play to a stage or an emotion; you play the game and, if you get too carried away, you make bad decisions and get anxious.
“I don’t want expectation to be too great on the players because forget what’s happening with Hillsborough, Norwich have their problems too — they need to stay up.”
Whatever happens in the remaining four games, Barnes has asked supporters not to be too disappointed if they don’t win the league.
“At the start of the season, if you had said Liverpool would finish fourth you would have taken it,” said Barnes. “But now they definitely aren’t finishing fourth and at worst will finish third.
“I always felt that if they lost the Man City game, the title would have been lost, but I never felt that if they won that game the title was won.
“The English Premier League is so hard that you can’t say it’s over just because we’ve only got to play Norwich and Crystal Palace. Because who would have thought that Palace would have beaten Chelsea?”
Barnes added that while the Hillsborough disaster troubled him personally, it didn’t force him to re-prioritise his life as much as it did coach Kenny Dalglish and former teammates.
“As much as [former Liverpool manager in the 1960s and 70s] Bill Shankly may have said — and of course he didn’t mean it — ‘football is more important than life or death’. I never thought football was, so I never had to reassess my values like a lot of the players,” said Barnes.
“I’ve known and seen what’s going on in the world for many years. There are much more important things than football and I don’t need that to then tell me I was just concerned with football alone. It affected me as a person in so far as it was a tragedy to see human beings being killed, but that’s the only way it affected me.”
