Barnes mentions that game when I ask him if he can pinpoint the worst moment of racial abuse in his career.

When he was 20, in 1984, Barnes scored one of England’s greatest goals when he lit up the Maracanã by slaloming though the Brazil defence before he stroked the ball into the net.

Cyrille Regis said he could open a greengrocers with all the bananas that came on the field. “As much as people may focus on that moment as something unique or iconic, it wasn’t. But Barnes himself, a brilliant footballer who is now an admirably thoughtful man willing to ask searching questions about race and society, was never depressed by the absurd prejudice of the banana-throwers. Rather than being a transformative moment, the way in which Barnes back-heeled a banana off the pitch was his routine response to a depressingly familiar occurrence. Sign up to The Recap, our weekly email of editors’ picks. But Liverpool against Everton made it, all of a sudden, big news.”

I played for Watford against Millwall and West Ham when the same thing happened but those were not high-profile games so the press weren’t paying attention. I had been playing football in England since 1981 when bananas were thrown on the field every day. “Do you know why? Because it was Liverpool versus Everton in 1988. He does not even mention the incident in the book and now, back in Liverpool, he explains why it was remembered by so many people who had not lived his life.

It features in a splash of Liverpool red on the back cover of his new book, The Uncomfortable Truth about Racism, as well as in more sombre black-and-white on the inside pages.īarnes moves far deeper than that snapshot of racism in football to discuss slavery, colonialism and how race remains such a problematic issue at the heart of contemporary society. That image of Barnes brushing aside a miserable racial insult is one of the most famous in the history of English football. I don’t even remember doing that,” John Barnes says when, near the end of a 90-minute conversation about the deep roots and bruising reality of racism, I ask him about the moment he used his right boot, with deft and contemptuous skill, to flick a banana off the pitch in a Merseyside derby in 1988.

The Sky So Big and Black by John Barnes