WHEN Tony Gale picked up the phone to call his former West Ham team-mate Ian Bishop in the days leading up to arguably the biggest match in Blackburn Rovers’ history he was seeking reassurance.

Reassurance that the Hammers, fresh from securing their survival, would be nothing less than competitive in their final game of the season at home to Manchester United.

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Just in case, of course, the unthinkable happened and Rovers let the Premiership trophy slip from their grasp by losing their last match at a Liverpool side whose players and fans could not have made it clearer that they did not want bitter-rivals United to take advantage.

Safe to say Gale did not get the reassurance he was looking for.

“It was funny because I rung Ian Bishop in midweek and he said, ‘listen, mate, we won’t let you down’,” remembers Gale, speaking to the Lancashire Telegraph to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Rovers’ famous title triumph.

“But I said, ‘make sure you work your backside off because we might slip up against Liverpool’.

“He told me they wouldn’t let me down and that they’d be trying 100 per cent.

“So I was quite happy with that until he said, ‘but just to let you know, as we’re safe now, we’re all off to Spain for three days!”

If a Hammers knees-up in the sun filled Gale with dread, he needn’t have worried.

While table-topping Rovers did go down to defeat at Anfield on that unforgettable afternoon on Sunday, May 14, 1995, another of his old colleagues came to their rescue – Czech goalkeeper Ludek Miklosko.

“By the time the Liverpool game came round I was not playing but I was still in the dressing room and I got the sense that everybody was twitchy,” said Gale, who had joined Rovers the previous summer after his 10-year stay at West Ham came to an end.

“Even the manager, Kenny Dalglish, was tense and he had virtually done everything in football.

“It was just a strange atmosphere because we all knew what happened at Upton Park could be so important to us and, at the same time, we had the Liverpool fans all cheering us on – even the Liverpool players were joking before the game that they didn’t want United to win the league.

“But once you cross the white line, things change. You play football to win and there’s no doubt that’s what the Liverpool and West Ham players did even though they didn’t need to.

“I suppose we got lucky on the day because Ludek Miklosko had a magnificent game for West Ham.

“I was on the bench and I actually watched the last 10 minutes of their game on the screen next to me and I kept saying to Kenny, ‘oh, he’s pulled off another save’ – and he told me to shut my mouth and get on with watching our game!

“But it was driving me nuts because I knew we weren’t winning and that it was all down to West Ham.

“Luckily for us Ludek pulled through. He was actually one of my room partners, in his early days at West Ham, and I helped him with his English.

“It’s fair to say he paid me back and did us a right favour.

“But I still have to buy him a drink every time I see him!”

No doubt Gale, now 54 and a television pundit, also raises a glass to Rovers boss Dalglish and his late assistant manager Ray Harford.

As it was the duo who offered the defender a shock chance to become a champion of England in what would prove to be the final full season of his 19-year professional career.

Gale was 34 and out of contract in the summer of 1994 and training with friends at non-league clubs to keep fit after deciding to call time on his decade-long stint with the Hammers.

He could never have expected what happened next.

“I’d had approaches by lower-league clubs and offers to go out to Japan but I thought I was better than that,” recalls London-born Gale, who made 15 league appearances for Rovers on their way to their third top-flight crown and first in 81 years.

“But when the call came from the boys it still came completely out of the blue – and it changed everything.

“Ray Harford called first, then Kenny, asking if I’d join them for pre-season in Scotland, just a week before the Charity Shield. I was lucky in that respect as Kevin Moran had just retired.

“So I went up there and played in a friendly and they said to me, ‘right, we want to sign you and you’ll be playing in the Charity Shield next week against Manchester United at Wembley’.

“The rest is history and it turned out to be my last season because the following summer, when I signed for Crystal Palace, I got injured in pre-season and only managed to play three games before I had to retire.

“I had a career in which I hardly got injured and then all of a sudden I got the one at the end that finished me.

“So Rovers I always look at as my last season – and what a season it was.

“And, you know what, we deserved to be champions.

“As I always point out, we lost to Manchester United twice that season. That meant they got six points off us – that’s a 12-point swing, a hell of an amount when you think about it. But we shouldn’t have lost either of those games.

“I played in the first game at Ewood and we were 2-1 up when the referee gave a penalty and sent Henning Berg off for a foul on Lee Sharpe – it wasn’t even a foul let alone a penalty. They, of course, went on to win the game 4-2.

“Then at the game at Old Trafford Tim Sherwood scored a perfectly good goal and, if that had been given, it would have been a draw.

“So without those refereeing mistakes we would’ve walked it and not had to go through what we did at Anfield!”

Tomorrow: Tony Gale's regret at refusing chance to remain at Blackburn Rovers