Football News: Partnerships 2: Hansen and Lawrenson

Partnerships 2: Alan Hansen & Mark Lawrenson

When you look back at the Hansen-Lawrenson partnership it is easy to assume that they played together for most of the six and a half years that the pair played in the same Liverpool team. They are just such a perfect duo together in defence that I think most of us forget that most of his Liverpool career saw Lawrenson playing in a number of other roles for large portions of his time on Merseyside.

It could all have been so different for a number of reasons. Firstly Hansen very nearly quit football altogether at the age of 15, when he gave up the sport in order to concentrate on golf with the intention of becoming a professional in that instead. His brother John (who was a professional footballer himself) and dad convinced him to go back to football but he still rejected a first professional contract offered to him by Hibernian as it would have put a stop to his golf dreams.

Lawrenson nearly never ended up at Liverpool, after missing his first choice to join when Brighton & Hove Albion outbid them to get him from Preston North End for £112,000 and Graham Cross going the other way in part-exchange. Though that move nearly fell through as he had been away in Spain on a ‘jolly’ with some teammates only for BHA chairman Mike Bamber and director Dudley Sizen to turn up and tell him he was sold in a Benidorm beachside bar. He then failed his medical due to high blood sugar levels but it was traced back to drinking too many blackcurrant-flavoured Guinesses on the holiday. He was 20 at the time and PNE’s player of the year under then manager Bobby Charlton. He would later play under Bobby’s brother with the Republic of Ireland.

It was also never certain he would even make it in football, certainly it was not the vocation his mother had in mind for him as she wanted him to become a priest. But he joined Preston as a youngster but even then, at least according to former teammate at PNE, BHA, Liverpool and Republic of Ireland, Michael Robinson:

“Yeah, we were also at Preston, Brighton, and Liverpool at the same time and we both represented the Republic of Ireland during the same time too. When we were both playing in the youth leagues in Blackpool, Mark played for our main rivals called Bispham Juniors. You would think that any player of Mark’s stature would have excelled in these youth leagues and stood out by a mile. However, that wasn’t the case for Mark, as he struggled to even get a game for Bispham, simply because…