Everton legend Peter Reid has revealed that he enjoys watching Liverpool play. In the week of the last ever Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park, that’s quite the admission from the Blues icon who still regularly attends home matches at the club where he won a brace of League Championships, the FA Cup and European Cup-Winners’ Cup.

Speaking on Grumpy Old Men, a new podcast where he is joined by Viv Anderson and Tony Woodcock, the 68-year-old was discussing tactics in contemporary football and said: “Listen, I understand possession football, I understand keeping it, working teams, without a doubt. But, you’ve got to ask questions sometimes, for me and if I’m honest, with a lot of the possession football, I get bored, I get bored watching it.”

Reid added: “Now, do you know what? Don’t put this out. I enjoy watching Liverpool. Because, they’re at it, all over the pitch.

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“I enjoy watching Forest, because they’re at it all over the pitch. But, it’s hard for me to say that.

“But, I love the technical side, but I want to get excited. I want to go, huh, get in, brilliant, you know. And to be fair, Newcastle United, I thought they were at it last night (winning 3-2 at Birmingham City in the FA Cup).”

Huyton-born Reid, who was a boyhood Kopite before Howard Kendall brought him to Everton from Bolton Wanderers for £60,000 in 1982 – with the manager later describing the midfielder as the club’s most important signing of the post-war era – made 234 appearances for the Blues, netting 13 goals.

Writing in his autobiography Cheer Up Peter Reid, the former England international, who was brought up with an Everton-supporting mother and Liverpool-supporting father, recalled his childhood and said: “I’ve got to be honest, I felt like I hated Everton then. It wasn’t a real hate, it was how a kid hates someone or something.

“They were simply the wrong club, the wrong team and they wore the wrong colours. Liverpool were the only team for me and it was the same for my dad, who was a really rabid Red.

“Fast forward 15 years and I went on A Question Of Sport, the BBC television quiz show. They showed an old picture of me with my dad and we were holding a red scarf.

“I was mortified. I didn’t hate Liverpool then and I don’t now but I have an irresistible sense that they are the other team, not my team.

“I couldn’t have imagined that as a kid but it’s the way things have turned out and I wouldn’t change that for the world. I might have been the boy who would walk to Melwood with dreams of getting Tommy Smith’s autograph, but as a man I would have walked over broken glass if it meant getting a win against Liverpool.

“When people talk about the zeal of the convert, I know exactly what they mean because I have felt it, and I still feel it to this day. Once a Red, now always a Blue. My mum had been right all along.”

• You can click here to watch the first episode of the new Grumpy Old Men podcast with Peter Reid