A current Manchester City player has recounted how a comprehensive defeat to Liverpool triggered a chain of events which left him and several teammates in tears.
Kyle Walker was in the Tottenham side which were thrashed 5-0 by the Reds in December 2013, a result which led to the dismissal of Andre Villas-Boas as manager a day later.
The 34-year-old reflected on that sobering result for his team on his BBC podcast, ‘You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker’, recalling the devastation of the Portuguese native and many of the Spurs players to the news that he’d been sacked.
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Walker said of his former boss: “He was just so, so nice. He was so nice and sometimes I think that probably killed him. He was too nice. I can remember when he left, and I will never forget it. I swear to you, I will never, ever forget it. We were sat in the auditorium and we got wind that he was going.
“(Daniel) Levy sacked him but he was still in the building and we were still ready to train. He came downstairs and started crying in front of us. He started crying in front of us, and I remember his assistant was telling him to pull it together. He started crying; I’ve got tears running down my eyes. A lot of the lads had tears.
“Michael Dawson is welling, he can’t stop crying. He’s emotionally crying, because that is how much he meant to the lads. We probably didn’t do him justice on the pitch because that’s why he got the sack, but for 10-12 men to be crying because the manager has gone, he has done something well in the dressing room.”
That 5-0 mauling at White Hart Lane was one of Liverpool’s standout performances in the unlikely Premier League title charge of 2013/14, right alongside the 5-1 drubbing of Arsenal and 3-0 win at Old Trafford.
As we know, Brendan Rodgers’ Reds fell agonisingly short of finishing first that year, but the trouncing of Spurs in north London – a fixture that we’d lost for five seasons in a row prior to that day – laid down a marker that Luis Suarez, Phillipe Coutinho, Daniel Sturridge and co would be in the race for the long haul.
Villas-Boas (who was just 36 at the time) never managed in England again, with subsequent posts at Zenit St Petersburg, Shanghai SIPG and Marseille before moving away from the dugout and into the boardroom. Now 46, he was voted in as FC Porto’s president earlier this year.
Although Walker’s memories of that lopsided match at Tottenham’s former stadium are heartbreaking for him, it was a day which summed up the excitement that Liverpool fans felt in the 2013/14 season and was long overdue for us after so many lean years beforehand.
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