Rush rushes to Anfield

Press, 23 November 1988, Page 36

Rush rushes to Anfield

The top striker, lan Rush, caused a real storm .. with his sudden return to the leading British club, Liverpool, from the top Italian socper side, Juventus.

Reports had it that he had virtually fled to the safety of his former club because he could not stand the treatment he was getting from Juventus, its players, the fans, or the notoriously fickle Italian press. But the truth, as the 26-year-old Welsh-born footballing wizard was at pains to point out, was completely different. He was, he said, just homesick. There was no place like home, and he had learned that while playing with Juventus.

The lesson could be said to have been expensive for the Italian side, owned by the Fiat car tycoon, Gianni Agnelli. For just a year ago Juventus paid Liverpool £3.2 million to buy Rush and get him to move from the Merseyside team’s Anfield headquarters. And this year they accepted a fee believed to be about £2.5 million when selling him back.

The move home has delighted Liverpool supporters, and given them the impression that the team, with its wealth of striking power, is virtually unbeatable in English

soccer. The fans believe he will immediately resume increasing his old Anfield record of scoring 206 goals in 303 matches, and, after a slow start, he has hit the target freely in recent matches.

The supporters’ expectations take no account of Rush’s record at Juventus, where in the 1987 season he managed to score only seven league and Six cup goals. That sad performance, however, however, hides a major difference between English and Italian styles of soccer which hit Rush hard.

"Everyone knows my strength is with the ball in front of me in the 18-yard box — that’s how I score goals — but one day I was called into the coach’s office and told I had to dribble more,” said the Welsh Wizard.

“At Liverpool, every player worked for the team. In Italy they play for themselves. I kept waiting for someone to help me get rid of my marker, but it never happened.”

The drastic difference in playing styles led Rush to fear that what some saw as failure on the Italian field would lead to his virtual destruction as a player. “People demanded I score, and if I didn’t there

was no messing about — they just said I wasn’t good enough. “There were times when I began to wonder if Juventus had even watched me play before they signed me.”

The road from the small North Wales town of St Asaph, near Flint, to Turin and the promise of a fortune came after Rush had spent seven years playing for, Liverpool. The Merseyside team’s fans were distraught when their favoiirite striker, who has won 38 international caps for Wales, decided to follow the lure of the lira, i

They — and the club itself — were ecstatic to get him back again. The security of being back on on what Rush obviously feels to be his real home ground helped him regain his old goalscoring style. His acceleration and accuracy mean that he can, as one admiring opponent once said, “make goals out of nothing.” That style was not given free rein in Turin, as Juventus will no doubt discover to their cost as Rush settles back in at Anfield.

But the other unsettling factor was the Italian attitude to football and football players. While Rush pined somewhat for the pleasures of

the simple life back in North Wales or Liverpool, he had moved to the fast lane in Turin — and discovered that money cannot buy happiness. “An Italian newspaper reported I didn’t like life in Italy and stayed at home moping and eating baked beans. “When I denied this and said I liked going to the city with my wife Tracey to a nice restaurant, suddenly I was on the town too much.”

In fact, he says, he enjoyed Italian food and learning about the Italian way of life. He took Italian lessons. But he found himself being invested with a degree of glamour and fanworship of the sort normally granted only to superstars of the entertainment world such as Michael Jackson.

The Italians, said Rush, do not have major film, TV or pop stars — so they turn to football for their glamour and excitement.

“We are number one in their minds, our lives are examined every minute. Everything we do is important and stories grow around the smallest thing.

“Sometimes I had to stop and say to myself, this isn’t real, but that’s the way it is.” DUO COPYRIGHT.