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44,297Arsenal’s first Premiership victory at Anfield for nine years proved a springboard for their eventual championship success, achieved as it was by playing with 10 men for 55 minutes. Giovanni van Bronckhorst, already booked, received a second yellow for diving, but the visitors then scored twice and held on against guileless opponents.Compiled by Steve Tongue. A pitchside advert at Shrewsbury Town’s compact and exotically named stadium, Gay Meadow, extols the virtues of Shropshire Lad – “Beer with a kick!” A kick was what Shrewsbury’s manager, Kevin Ratcliffe, delivered to his team in the wake of a 6-0 defeat at Boston United last weekend; that the blow had been well-aimed was evident in the 4-1 Boxing Day victory over Bury. Of the six-goal humiliation by the League’s newest club, he admitted: “I didn’t think we could sink as low as that.” Four goals in the Bury net prompted the further comment: “If you want a reply after Boston, that’s the reply you want to see.” It was certainly a reply Ratcliffe was pleased to catch sight of, since the next visitors to Gay Meadow on Saturday, in the third round of the FA Cup, are Everton, the club he led to a fistful of honours in the last era of Goodison glory in the mid-Eighties.Two League championships, the FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners’ Cup were all annexed under Ratcliffe’s captaincy, so it is fair comment that he is looking forward to the occasion.

“For me, it could not have worked out sweeter,” he smiled.Because of the obvious connections, he has arranged pre-season friendly visits by Everton in the three years he has been managing Shrewsbury, the most recent one ending in a 3-0 win for David Moyes’s Premiership side “But those matches were nothing of this magnitude,” he said. “It’s the only time in my career I haven’t wanted them to win the FA Cup. That in itself is a feat, because the first result I always look for, other than those in our own division, is Everton’s. And it always will be, even if I go on to manage at a higher level. When you spend half your life with one club you have got to have feelings for it.”Having played for the youth team at 15, Ratcliffe spent 11 years, from 1980 to 1991, as an Everton professional. The official records give him 359 League appearances and the Everton website marks up a total of 461 games for Ratcliffe, but he is certain he fell just a couple of outings short of 500.”I was looking at it yesterday, actually, because my missus bought me an Everton book as a Christmas present For a start, I played 59 FA Cup games.

I am a bit disappointed not to have reached 500, because I could have made it so easily. I remember towards the end of one season I missed a game against Luton, mainly because I was feeling a bit tired, so the manager left me out.”Ratcliffe’s happiest memory of Everton is the second championship, collected in 1987, “because the second one is always the hardest, and the previous season we had missed out on the Double to Liverpool, by two points in the League and 3-1 in the Cup final. Two games cost us the Double, Liverpool at Wembley and a League match at Oxford, where we felt bitterly robbed by a penalty. Gary Lineker missed a few chances as well, considering he had scored 40-odd goals that year. I thought, ‘I’m going to strangle the bugger’.”Failure certainly wouldn’t have been for want of trying on Ratcliffe’s part.

One of his central defensive partners, Dave Watson, recalled: “Kevin read the game so well, his distribution was great and as a captain he had the lot. He would organise the team on the pitch and off it and the lads looked up to him.” Andy Gray sums Ratcliffe up as “one of the most capable and commanding defenders I’ve seen. Over short distances Kevin was unbeatable, the Carl Lewis of Goodison”.Subsequently, Everton’s Carl Lewis meandered, rather than sprinted, towards the end of his career, with spells at Dundee, Cardiff, Nottingham Forest and Derby, before ending up at Chester. “Eventually in 1995 I was appointed player-manager at Chester, but I never actually played when I managed. It was very difficult to do both, and the Third Division was a hard place to anybody who had played at a higher level.”I say to the people I have here at Shrewsbury, like Mark Atkins, Ian Woan and Nigel Jemson, who have played in the higher divisions, ‘I don’t know how you do it because it was so frustrating for me’. Your mind still thinks quick but your legs don’t, and when you make a mistake nobody is covering you That’s why I stopped playing at 34, I wasn’t enjoying it I preferred reserve-team football, helping the kids.