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It was the win which defined a team, a performance to last a lifetime.

Liverpool FC ’s 5-0 triumph over Nottingham Forest was, for many Reds, the game of the 1980s. A footballing masterclass, executed to perfection and remembered by all.

For Reg Summers, the memory of that April evening lingers. As Anfield’s head groundsman at the time, Reg had looked on in awe as Kenny Dalglish’s side passed their way through a more than decent Forest side with ease. Slick, stylish and ruthless; it was a display which embodied ‘The Liverpool Way’, and produced on the turf he had worked so hard to prepare.

“After that game, I said to a colleague ‘that’s the best football I’ve ever seen by an English team,” Reg remembers. “That night, Sir Tom Finney was on television and said the same. He stole my line!”

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The following morning, Reg was back at Anfield, repairing the damage from the previous night, when he bumped into Roy Evans.

“I was made up with myself,” he remembers. “A game like that, and I’d prepared the pitch!

“So I walked up to Roy and said ‘I’ll tell you what, that’s the best football I’ve ever seen Roy’.

“Quick as a flash, he replied: ‘It was, and imagine what we could do on a decent pitch’. Burst my bubble, well and truly!”

Reg can expect a tad more appreciation this week, when he is honoured for the 44 years’ stellar service he gave to Liverpool.

Having answered an advert in the job pages of the ECHO, he spent 30 years at Anfield , before winding down his career on the staff at first Melwood, and then the Academy in Kirkby.

“I was due to retire a couple of years ago,” he says. “But I was enjoying it so much down at the Academy, I stayed on. The atmosphere and the people are first class.”

Despite being born an Evertonian – “I have always just wanted both Merseyside clubs to be successful,” he insists – Reg prepared the surfaces on which some of the greatest ever Liverpool sides performed.

“It was a lot of pressure at times, but it was a privilege to watch them play,” he says.

“I was very fortunate, in that my time at Anfield coincided with the most successful period in the club’s history. And the better the team do, the better the job is.

“It was high pressure at time, and a little stressful, because the club expected the highest standards. So when there was a big game, it was tense. In a way it was a relief when it was over, and the team had won. No inquests then!”

Of course pitches have come a long way since Reg began his Anfield career. The modern Premier League playing surface could easily be used as a bowling green, with state-of-the-art undersoil heating and drainage systems in place.

“It wasn’t like that when I started,” Reg laughs. “It used to be a battle with the pitch in those days.

“You’d have the first team playing there on the Saturday, and then the reserves on the Tuesday, and if you got heavy rain, the ground would be soaked for three or four days afterwards. It’d be a mudbath after five minutes.

“I remember my colleague, Alan Webster, used to always blame Steve Heighway for kicking up divots. Heighway was a jinker, who used to go both ways down the wing, and when we’d be repairing the pitch after a game, Alan would say ‘That was a Heighway one!’

“Thankfully, we very rarely lost a game to the weather. I remember one derby, in 1996, being rained off, but that was a freak occurrence, and there wasn’t much we could have done.

“The only other time I think we got close was a game against Leeds around the same time. It had rained all day, and at about 5 o’clock, the referee was certain he was going to have to call it off.

“But we used to have those ‘water hogs’, and we persuaded him to give us half an hour with them. We ran our legs off that night, I can tell you! Thankfully, the referee deemed it playable, and they won 3-0. But I remember walking onto the pitch after everyone had gone home, and it was like a bog! I’ve no idea how we ever got it ready for the next game, but that was our job.”

Saying it with flowers after Hillsborough

When Reg Summers began to prepare the Anfield pitch one glorious April afternoon, he had no idea that 24 hours later it would be covered by bouquets of flowers.

Of all the images of Anfield over the years, those in the immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster are the most moving, as Liverpool’s ground became a shrine to those who had lost their lives in Sheffield.

“I always remember it,” says Summers. “I was in work that afternoon, watering the pitch, but I had my car parked on the ramp between the Main Stand and the Anfield Road end, so I could listen to the match.

“I went back to the car just after kick-off, and heard the commentator saying there was a serious incident. As it developed, I just knocked the water off and went home.

“Peter Robinson made a fantastic decision to open the doors of Anfield the next day. At the end of the day, nothing else mattered.”

Reg, like many Liverpool employees, spent the days after Hillsborough offering support in any way he could. And having seen the pitch submerged by flowers and wreaths, it was his idea to turn them into a message of thanks from the club.

“We had someone up in the old camera gantry in the Anfield Road,” he remembers. “And we were down on the pitch re-arranging the bouquets to say ‘LFC Thank You’. I just thought it would be a nice gesture. I have the picture today, and it makes me very proud to see.”

Anfield legend Thompson was my helper

Reg Summers remembers the day a European Cup winning captain helped him clear water from the Anfield pitch – for a reserve team game!

“Jim Beglin had broken his leg,” he remembers.

“And he was almost ready to come back. Phil Thompson was the reserve manager at the time, and he was desperate to get a game on for Jim.

“I lived five minutes away from the ground, near Stanley Park, at the time, so I nipped home about 5 o’clock to have some tea.

“As I was heading back, the rain started, and it got quite bad. When I got to the ground, the woman on the switchboard said to me ‘Do you think it’ll be on?’

“I said ‘Of course it will, it’s only been raining for five minutes!’, but she told me it had been torrential there for over an hour. I lived five minutes away!

“Anyway, we got out there, and it was covered in water. We persuaded the referee to put the kick off back 15 minutes, and me, Alan Webster and Phil Thompson worked our backsides off to clear the water.

“I remember looking round at Tommo, Liverpool legend and former England player, brushing rain off the pitch so the reserves could have a game!

“Thankfully, the game went ahead, they won, and Jim didn’t hurt himself!”

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