In his latest Liverpool FC long read, Dan Kay looks back at the Anfield career of Stan Collymore
It is a long time now since Liverpool last broke the British transfer record in the summer of 1995 and, given how the football financial landscape has changed since, it may never happen again.
On three previous occasions – the signings of Kenny Dalglish (for £440,000 in 1977), Peter Beardsley (£1.9m in 1987) and Dean Saunders (£2.9m in 1991) – the Anfield coffers were plundered to bring a top-level forward to L4 and send out a message to the rest of the league that the Reds meant business.
The three record buys in question enjoyed varying degrees of success but the most recent time Liverpool splashed the cash in such a manner was on one of the English game’s most mercurial talents and, over 25 years on, examination of his time of Merseyside still makes it impossible not to wonder what might have been had a Reds side with such rich potential fulfilled its undoubted promise.
The lavishly-gifted Stan Collymore arrived at Anfield for £8.5m in July 1995, smashing the £7m Manchester United had paid Newcastle for Andy Cole seven months earlier, with the hope being he might be the final piece of the jigsaw to restore Liverpool to power after the Old Trafford club’s dominance of the opening years of the Premier League era.
Despite more than respectable goal tallies for him and strike partner Robbie Fowler amid some of the most swashbucklingly entertaining football seen at Anfield in years, Collymore would spend only two seasons with the Reds during a period largely now looked back on through the frustrated prism of wasted opportunity, even though there were sparkling moments which hinted that a club initially seemingly left behind by a new brand of football and breed of footballers was ready to strike back.
The summer of 1995 saw the biggest wave of optimism around Anfield for quite some time.
The dismal opening couple of Premier League seasons which had seen Liverpool stumble to previously-unthinkable league finishes of sixth and eighth had led to manager Graeme Souness being replaced by the succession from within of Roy Evans, the ‘last of the Boot Room boys’, in chairman David Moores’s words when appointing him in January 1994.
Evans’s first full season in charge saw silverware return to Anfield with the League Cup won following Wembley victory over Bolton Wanderers as the Scouse coach’s tactical innovation of playing three central defenders with wing-backs started to get the best of a Liverpool squad which featured an intriguing blend of young talent like Fowler, Steve McManaman, Jamie Redknapp and Rob Jones, experienced older heads like Ian Rush, John Barnes and Michael Thomas, and shrewd defensive acquisitions like John Scales and Phil Babb.
With the League Cup triumph having secured the Reds a return to Europe in the UEFA Cup, there was real expectation that 1995/96 would see Liverpool build on the undoubted promise of the previous campaign and launch a credible assault on the league title with the absence of the championship trophy from Anfield already stretching to half a decade.
With legendary striker Ian Rush who as club captain had lifted the trophy at Wembley set to turn 34 soon into the new campaign, many fans hoped steps would be taken to bolster the young but raw talents of a strikeforce led by 20-year-old Fowler who had rattled home 31 goals in all competitions the previous season.
Having begun his career with his local non-league side Stafford Rangers, the 24-year-old Collymore had gained a grounding in league football with spells at Crystal Palace and Southend United before a £2.2m move to Nottingham Forest in 1993 saw him over the course of the next two years carve a reputation for himself as one of the most exciting young strikers in the country.
His power, pace and eye for goal saw him score 22 times in 1994/95 to help newly-promoted Forest gain a third place Premier League finish and receive a first England cap against Japan in that summer’s pre-cursor to Euro 96, the Umbro Cup.
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