Perhaps you may have seen that clip recently of Graeme Souness getting so worked up in the television studios about the jargon of modern football, so aggrieved by what he perceives to be the loss of old-fashioned values, that he has a fit of pique and ends up flinging his pen across the desk in front of him.

It is classic Souness: dyspeptic, unflinching, never one for concealing his feelings. It is a big part of what makes him so watchable as a pundit. Everything will be fine, then something will prick his temper. Something you or I may not even notice that, in his eyes, is an affront to the profession. Souness isn’t wired to tolerate mediocrity. He cannot accept the idea there are footballers who might not possess the devotion that underpinned his own successes. Nor is he ever going to hold back when something has jarred those hair-trigger sensibilities.

Graeme Souness about to throw his pen.

The last time I saw him in the flesh the handshake was everything you would imagine: vice-like. For someone with such a hard reputation, there is actually a soothing, mellifluous quality to that Edinburgh accent. Yet he still has an aura. It is all in the eyes, testing you, probing you, letting you know that, if you ever did upset him, it is not completely out of the question that he might invite you to step outside, the old-fashioned way, as I once saw happen in his days as Blackburn manager with a journalist in a post‑match press conference. Souness, to give him his due, did eventually put everyone at ease by clarifying there would be no violence. Though it wasn’t easy to be sure if we could take him at his word, or if he had simply worked out the rest of us could be useful witnesses.

He turns 66 on Monday and it is just a pity, perhaps, that one of the finest footballers of his generation might always be viewed through hard, suspicious eyes when it comes to the city where he spent the more gratifying parts of his playing career. Souness was a great player for Liverpool, a truly great player, in a golden age for the club: three European Cups, five league championships, three League Cups and four seasons when he won a place in the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year.

Souness was the captain in a dominant period of the club’s history, a midfield titan who can be unfairly characterised sometimes because of his reputation for being fearless and, on occasions, downright nasty. There was more to Souness than embedding his studs in the limbs of various opponents. His greatness was because he combined those warrior instincts with subtlety, vision and football intelligence. He was, in the words of the sportswriter David Miller, “a bear of a man with the touch of a violinist”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You will not see a banner paying homage to Graeme Souness on the Kop.’ Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

In ordinary circumstances, a player of his achievement should be revered at Anfield. Sadly, these are not ordinary circumstances. Souness does not tend to be on the guest list when the old boys are invited to Anfield these days. You will not see a banner paying homage to him on the Kop and, though his achievements can never be airbrushed from Liverpool’s glory years, if you were to click on the website that is devoted to the club’s history, its verdict on Souness can be boiled down to this: being a great footballer does not automatically make that person a great football man. Souness will always be part of the nostalgia, but most Liverpool followers cut him free a long time ago. Or, rather, he cut himself free, depending on your viewpoint.

A younger generation of football supporters might not even fully understand what happened to make it this way. It has, after all, been nearly three decades since the acrimony began and, once the relationship had broken down, there has never been any hint of rapprochement. It would be nice to think there is still time for that to change. Realistically, though, I am not sure. It is not easy to see a day when it will ever be fixed properly.

All of which makes it a tricky subject to write about given the sensitivities attached to this story, the considerable evidence that time is not a healer in this instance and, above all, the attitude on Merseyside that they have it hard enough without being let down by someone they took in as one of their own.

Origi’s late winner sinks Newcastle and keeps Liverpool’s title hopes alive Read more

In particular when it involves the club’s relationship with the newspaper that had previously given its readers “The Truth”, its notorious version of the Hillsborough disaster, involving untrue stories of supporters stealing from the dead and urinating on corpses.

For those not familiar with the background, it is 27 years now since Souness was paid for an interview in the Sun (he says the money went to Alder Hey children’s hospital). It was dumb in any circumstances, as the then Liverpool manager, not to understand there would be a serious backlash. Yet it was the timing, more than anything, that explains why so many people have never fully accepted his apology and why Liverpool, the club that love to portray themselves as a family, no longer embrace him in the way they do their other greats.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sun’s story about Graeme Souness and his new girlfriend ran on the third anniversary of Hillsborough. Photograph: The Sun/News Licensing

Souness had conducted the interview while he was convalescing from the heart surgery that he had towards the end of the 1991‑92 season. The idea was for the interview to run in tandem with Liverpool reaching the FA Cup final. Yet their replayed semi-final against Portsmouth, played on a Monday evening, went to extra time and penalties, taking it past the newspaper’s first deadline, and that meant the interview was pushed back a day – to 15 April, which just happened to be the third anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy.

It was a front-page splash, featuring a cheesy “Loverpool” headline, a staged photograph of Souness smooching with his new girlfriend and published, oafishly, on the day Anfield was hosting a memorial service. Even now, it beggars belief that any Liverpool manager, especially one who was supposed to understand the club, could mess up so spectacularly.

Against that kind of background, can you ever see a day when Souness will be forgiven? In an ideal world, yes, though I hesitate to say that for fear of it coming across that I am recommending that is what should happen. For starters, I doubt very much that Liverpool’s supporters would appreciate being told how to think when I am sure they can do that for themselves. It is not my role to determine what should happen next and, just because it is football, that doesn’t mean it is immune to what happens in real life – human beings upsetting other human beings, grudges festering, attitudes hardening. It doesn’t always end in a group hug.

Hope and heart: emotions stirred in Liverpool at season's crescendo | Donald McRae Read more

What can be said is that if you saw Souness talking about it on Sky recently you would have seen what looked like genuine and deeply felt remorse. Souness is clearly pained that he could have been so reckless with people’s grief. “I should have resigned there and then,” he writes in his 2017 autobiography. “It ultimately soured my relationship with the Liverpool supporters forever and it’s something I deeply regret. If I could turn one thing round in my football career, it would be that.”

The question, perhaps, is whether he cares enough, all these years on, to want to do anything about it. Even then, it might not do him any good whatsoever to pick at an old scab. But it puzzles me slightly that someone in that position would not, say, write to the Liverpool Echo or use his column in the Sunday Times to offer, in full, some kind of long-form contrition. Where is the mea culpa? If he wishes it could be different, has he ever thought the only person who can possibly change that is himself? Has he approached the Hillsborough groups or Spirit of Shankly or any of the other supporter organisations? Or maybe, again, he is not wired that way. Has he just accepted, as seems to be the case, that it is done now and too late to change anything?

Sign up to The Recap, our weekly email of editors’ picks.

The explanation Souness put forward initially was that he had been managing in Scotland at the time of Hillsborough and, not being on Merseyside, misjudged the depth of outrage that led to Liverpool supporters boycotting the Sun. All these years later, it doesn’t wash. It didn’t then, either, particularly as there were reports that he had banned his players from speaking to the newspaper. Yet it was true that in 1992 the club were still dealing with the Sun.

Mike Ellis, who was then the Sun’s Merseyside football correspondent, was never ostracised and Souness claimed Ian Rush and Tommy Smith, both Liverpool legends, had public dealings with its reporters without any reprisals. Ellis had retained a direct line to the top of the club. Indeed, the story goes that Liverpool’s then chief executive, Peter Robinson, talked Ellis out of resigning. It was not until years later that the club marginalised, then barred, the newspaper that the Liverpool Echo now spells with an asterisk between the “S” and the “n” Plus it tends to be forgotten that, somehow, Souness continued as manager for nearly two years.

On Second Thoughts: Graeme Souness Read more

Not that this is an excuse or that his opponents will say he has even the shadow of a leg to stand on. Souness has stated before that he has no defence and, ultimately, the only part of this story on which everyone can probably agree is that this could all have been avoided.

“It should not be like this for Graeme Souness, explaining where it all went wrong,” Simon Hughes writes in Men In White Suits, his excellent book on Liverpool in the 1990s. “Souness should be in line with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard whenever Liverpool’s greatest post-war players are mentioned.” But it is like this and one of the saddest things is that nobody, including the man himself, seems willing to explore, over a quarter of a century on, if there is any way back.

Sol the survivor should now find himself in demand

To be at Moss Rose on Saturday to see Macclesfield Town complete their feat of escapology from the bottom of League Two was to witness arguably one of the success stories of the season. More than that, it felt like a form of vindication for Sol Campbell, bearing in mind all the clubs higher up the ladder who looked the other way when he was trying, for longer than he would probably wish to remember, to get a break in management.

When Campbell took over in late November the team were seven points adrift of the last safe spot, with two victories from their first 19 matches. Since then, Macclesfield’s financial difficulties have become so chronic the team have been training on a school playing field 20 miles away. The players apparently have not received their wages for four months and it is only six weeks since the club survived a winding-up petition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sol Campbell poses for a selfie with a Macclesfield fan after they stayed up. Photograph: Paul Currie/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Yet Campbell has overseen something truly special at the unpretentious little ground where I wrote this from a press box with the wifi code of Leak1615 – chosen because if you are in seats 16 or 15 on a rainy day the roof is not going to save you from being drenched.

It culminated in a 1-1 draw against Cambridge that means Macclesfield surviving at the expense of Notts County. The biggest problem for Macc now might be keeping their manager from other clubs. All of which feels a long way from the days when a former England international found, unlike many of his old teammates, he could barely even get a job interview.