The George Sephton Interview

Well Red tracks down a famous Kopite and asks them all about LFC. Here it’s stadium announcer, the voice of Anfield... GEORGE SEPHTON.

HE’S not strictly a Kopite. And he’d probably tell you he’s not famous, either. But his booth is near enough to the great stand, and to thousands he is every bit as much a part of match day as singing You’ll Never Walk Alone and clapping the opposition keeper. Oh, and he’s been on Match of the Day 2.
By RICHARD BUXTON

THE press room in Anfield’s inner sanctum is always heaving on match days but it is a very different place before the journalists converge.

Amidst staff pacing the corridors outside, Ronnie Moran pops his head through the door; no doubt taking a trip down memory lane about the legendary boot room he founded with Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley before the media men took residence.

Sitting a few feet from him is George Sephton – the club’s veteran stadium announcer – who clearly doesn’t class himself as part of the press pack that will arrive here in just two-and-a-half hours’ time.

“I don’t think I’m allowed in here,” he says with a smile.

But the 64-year-old – once described as “part of the furniture” by former chief executive Peter Robinson – is as much a part of Liverpool’s legacy as the managers and players that have graced Anfield’s hallowed turf.

His unmistakable voice has trickled down the terraces and stands of  Anfield for nearly four decades after he became the long-term successor to Merseyside broadcaster Alan Jackson.

“Early in the 1971-72 season, the voice changed on the PA system and I made a sarcastic crack to my wife one night about this guy because he did a couple of silly things,” he recalls.

“He played records at the wrong speed once or twice and he would give out announcements when the ball was in play, causing havoc. My wife said, ‘It’s all right for you down here. I bet you couldn’t do that.’

So I went home and wrote to Peter Robinson, basically saying ‘Dear Sir, Giz a job’.

“The next thing I knew I was sitting in his office and then in the roof of the Main Stand. Suddenly I’m the tannoy announcer. It was just surreal.”

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On that sunny Saturday afternoon in August against Nottingham Forest when Sephton first took to the stadium’s airwaves, he shared his debut as a club employee with a promising 20-year-old from Scunthorpe whose name would reverberate around the Kop in next to no time.

But unlike Kevin Keegan, George nearly incurred the wrath of the legendary Bill Shankly later that season over an announcement given during a Youth Cup game. “We were up for the championship with Leeds United who were playing Huddersfield Town that night,” he remembers.

“Peter rang me up midway through the first half and said ‘Huddersfield are winning 1-0. If there’s a break in play, give the score out’.

“So I did and there was a big cheer but halfway through the second half Peter rang me again and told me that Leeds were winning 3-1.

“When a break in play came I gave the score out, heard a bit of a groan and thought nothing more about it until I got downstairs after the game when the girl on the reception desk said ‘George, get out of here – Shanks is after you!’

“Apparently he said I’d personally destroyed the atmosphere in the ground. He was going to rip me limb from limb from what I could make out!

“The funny thing was that three days later I came in here for the First Division fixture on the Saturday and who was the first person I bumped into but Shanks.

“I was petrified, but he just looked at me and said ‘Morning son’ and there was never another word said about it.”

Still going strong 39 years on from when he first set foot in the gantry, George plans to enter the voiceover and after-dinner guest circuit but has no intentions of relinquishing the Anfield microphone anytime soon.

“I don’t want to retire. When the Americans turned up, a journalist I was talking to put me onto a book about American baseball.

“Traditionally, stadium announcers continue until they drop. Apparently they’ve got announcers who are 90 odd years old.

“At the moment I’ve got absolutely no plans to retire but somebody else might have,” he adds.

Sephton’s traditional, no-nonsense approach to broadcasting has become a rarity amongst the booming, over-dramatic MCs that most clubs now employ to deliver the forced razzamatazz that currently plagues English football.

Amidst all that supposed glitz and glamour George’s reluctance to step into the limelight, unlike his counterparts, has earned him a place in the hearts of Liverpool supporters, media men and the many local bands he has  regularly championed down the years.

“A couple of weeks ago Sam Wallace said in The Independent that the pre-match atmosphere at Anfield is still the best and he mentioned me by name which was nice,” he says.

“I was also listening to Radio 5 Live one morning and Danny Wallace was slagging off stadium announcers in general, saying we’re all halfwits.

“But Colin Murray said ‘They’re not all like that. What about good old George Sephton at Anfield’.

“Kevin Day from Match of the Day 2 was down here in September and he said somebody said to him I’ve got a voice like a warm blanket.

“At times you feel like jumping off the top of the Kop stand but when somebody says things like that it makes life worthwhile.”

Making Turkey out of Jose my Anfield highlight

THE first semi-final against Chelsea in 2005 wasn’t the greatest match ever but what made it special was the fact that it got us back into a European Cup final after such a long time away.

I’d been to the previous final we were in back in 1985 and that point we never for a moment thought it’d be 20 years almost to the day that we were back in another one.

The fact that we’d done it and a whole new generation of Reds can experience what it was like was something else.

Some strange things happened on that night – the goal Luis Garcia scored, that Jose Mourinho is still whining about all these years later, and the six minutes added time.

If you listen to recordings of that night there’s a gap between the fourth official holding his board up and me saying ‘six minutes added time’ because I couldn’t believe it.

I was just gobsmacked when that came up.

People were screaming and booing and quite a few approached me in the street after that and said ‘why did you give the six minutes added time?’ But I don’t! It’s on the board so I can’t do anything else.

I’d like to have said that there would be one minute but I’d be out of here If I did that!

I quite often say if I was at home instead of here, I would have got up, made a cup of tea and done the crossword to just to calm my nerves down because they’re absolutely shredded when it’s 1-0 and there’s 10 minutes to go.

As far as I was concerned, Shanks was God

It’s crazy because I started coming here as a spectator about a month after he had joined the club as manager and as far as I was concerned he was God, and still is. I flew out to Paris on the same plane as Shanks in 1981 for the European Cup final which was the famous trip when the late John Peel achieved his lifetime ambition by carrying Shankly’s bags into the hotel.

When I came home I got terrible earache from my wife because I came out the airport with Bill and he was carrying his own bag.  On the plane flying out, no one would sit next to him. Not because they didn’t want to speak to him but because they were so overawed.

The last person on board was the guy who sat next to him because that was the only seat available - next to Shanks.

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