As part of Liverpool’s Black History Month, Liverpool FC has made a film on the history and contribution of black players. Emma Pinch reports

WHEN Ryan Babel and Jermaine Pennant line up against Chelsea on Sunday, it’s their silky skills on the ball they’ll be judged for and nothing else.

And it’s the sturdy shoulders of Liverpool’s black football pioneers they have to thank.

In 1977, though, Sefton Park was teeming with black kids pretending to be Pele, the proud faces on LFC’s club pictures had been white since 1892.

Liverpool University social history professor, Mike Boyd, 60, a lifelong Liverpool fan like his father, was one of those hopeful youngsters.

“If you took the likes of Bedford Sunday League or Stanley House youth team, there were some very talented footballers but they were never discovered,” says Mike.

“There was a lad a bit younger than me, Cliff Marshall, who went to Everton, but like thousands of other kids rarely made it into the first team. Often they’d end up playing amateur football for places they ended up working, like Plessey.

“Whether they were given the opportunity to go to that level was questionable. They never seemed to be chosen to take apprenticeships.”

As the 70s went on, it became an increasingly racist decade, against a context of rising numbers of black players, says Rogan Taylor, director of the football industry group at the University of Liverpool.

“It always occurred to me, how could those two clubs for so long, with the oldest black community in Europe, fail to gather some of the talent that would surely be there?”

Football-mad Toxteth teenager, Howard Gayle, didn’t rate his chances of finding a job.

“There were no prospects for black people in the city then,” he remembers. “I tried to get various jobs in the building trade. For me, I don’t know what I would have done or how I would have turned out if I was not talented enough to break into Liverpool FC.”

His future hung on the night of his trial in August, 1977. He had to show them what he was made of. Gayle remembers taking the ball in his own half, so close to coaches Bob Paisley and Roy Evans he could hear them talking.

“I had turned my ankle and they saw I carried on playing; I confirmed to them I was not the sort of player who was going to go off injured, that I’d struggle through. After a month, I’d broken into the reserve team and I was holding my own and doing well.”

Bob Paisley signed him, but Gayle gained a reputation in some circles for having a chip on his shoulder.

“There were players that didn’t like the fact there was a black player among them, because maybe they felt they were superior,” he says. “I won a huge group of them with my performances but it was always the case I’d stand up for myself.”

Gayle made five appearances with the club. Three days after scoring a hat-trick in 1981 for Liverpool, he got the chance to play as a sub for the first team in the European Cup semi-final.

He played for 65 minutes before being subbed himself.

“They were the fastest 60 minutes of my life. They went so quickly, even to this day there are things I can’t remember about this game.” The 19-year-old exhausted the Germans with his phenomenal pace. He was thrown in at the deep end, he said, “but it was a game that had so much significance. It showed how far I had come, from the park to playing European football in two years.”

AFTER that appearance, his star faded. Perhaps his fighting spirit counted against him. “It may well have done, but it was called looking after yourself. I was born in Toxteth and brought up in Norris Green. Like any black youth in a predominantly white neighbourhood, I had to look after myself and that’s how it was on the football pitch.

“In 50 years, I’ve never had a black person say to me I had a chip on my shoulder. It’s always a term by white people because I would not turn my back on racism.”

Howie’s first team Liverpool career was short, but galvanising.

“To anyone who was an ethnic minority or black roots in Liver- pool, Howard Gayle was big,” says Mike Boyle. “Before Howard Gayle, there was nothing, then there was Howard Gayle.”

For another ferociously talented black youngster, seeing Howie reach the European Cup semi-finals fuelled dreams that he could do the same.