by Simon Hughes
‘I’ve always got my head up, see.’
I am observing Mølby side-on now. There is an illusory goalkeeper somewhere in the middle distance of his vision.
‘I wouldn’t charge in either. I liked to take as long as possible. The confidence to do this only came with time, after I’d scored on a number of occasions. They say the pressure is always on the taker, but I liked to put it on the goalkeeper, make him worry.’
Two or three steps before meeting the ball, Mølby would still be watching the goalkeeper’s movement. Then came a swipe of the right leg. He preferred to strike with the side of his foot rather than the instep.
‘Control over power,’ he reasons. ‘It was like in one of those western movies – who blinks first? He goes right, I’ll go left; he goes left, I go right. If he didn’t move, I’d always put it to the keeper’s left. Always.’
In a League Cup tie at home to Coventry City in 1986, Liverpool were awarded three penalties: two at the Kop end, one in front of the Anfield Road Stand. They were all dispatched in exactly the same manner by Mølby, following the procedure just demonstrated in front of me.
In total, Mølby scored forty-two penalty kicks for Liverpool, which, until 2014 and thanks to the composure of Steven Gerrard, was more than any other player in the club’s history. Remarkably, perhaps, Mølby never practised them in training. ‘It was pointless,’ he says. ‘The pressure of the match changes everything.’
Mølby reiterates that the key to his success was confidence taken from the accumulation of truly important conversions. ‘Once you were on a roll, there was no stopping you. I remember the surprise on Ronnie Moran’s face when I insisted on taking the first one against Spurs in 1985. Ian Rush had missed in the weeks before, after taking over from Phil Neal, so I felt like it was my turn. I grabbed the ball; Ray Clemence was in goal. I saw it as an opportunity to make my mark. By the end of that game, I’d scored two penalties. It gave me a lot of self-belief.’
I sense, too, that Mølby trusted his eye for detail. He knew of a goalkeeper’s diving habits. Following a pre-determined routine made it easier for him. Unlike some ex-footballers, Mølby’s recollections are clear, almost pristine. Statistically, he is almost spot-on. He regrets not being able to take more penalties. He can remember the feelings of frustration when teammates were given the responsibility instead.
‘John Aldridge took seventeen or eighteen and only missed one; John Barnes took fifteen; Mike Marsh took a few, as did Mark Walters. It’s possible I could have taken 116 penalties if I’d played in every game. I’d have liked that. It would have been a world record, surely.’
He can also recall the games where he was not successful, mentioning the names of three goalkeepers who stopped him as though there remains a score to settle.
‘I never hit a single penalty off target; the ones that did not go in were always at least saved. The first one was Martin Hodge of Sheffield Wednesday [also in 1986]. We ended up drawing that game, so there are some regrets.’
The second was against QPR a few months later. ‘I think it was Paul Barron in a League Cup semi-final,’ he suggests correctly. The last was during a 5–2 victory at Stamford Bridge at the end of 1989, a performance that prompted Chelsea manager Bobby Campbell to claim that the Liverpool team would stand ‘a hell of a chance’ of winning the World Cup if it were allowed to compete the following summer.
‘That was the only time I knew I wasn’t going to score,’ Mølby reveals. ‘We’d battered them, total obliteration. It was one of those party afternoons.’
The Liverpool squad was appearing at the BBC Sports Personality Awards the following evening and had planned a boozy weekend in London around the match.
‘When Dave Beasant dived the right way, I was not surprised at all, because I wasn’t concentrating as I should have been.’
Mølby was never denied again. Upon leaving Liverpool eight years later, he’d taken another eighteen penalties. All eighteen were scored.
But Mølby’s penalty record is only part of the story of his time at Liverpool, which from the outside is easily summarized into two eras: the 1980s – good; the 1990s – not so good. As this seemed to match the story of the club as a whole over the period, I was keen to interview him at his home in Heswall, a wealthy area of private roads, towering oak trees and hidden family homes on the Wirral peninsula.
Mølby became the first footballer from his town to earn a cap for the Danish national side; when he was sold to Ajax aged nineteen, the transfer fee was the biggest ever paid for a Danish player to leave Denmark. On signing for Liverpool, he became the first Dane to play in three FA Cup finals, and after twelve seasons at Anfield Mølby was the first foreign player to be awarded a testimonial by the club. Whilst at Liverpool, he spent three months in prison for reckless driving. Football alone does not reflect the complexities of a human life.
There was also Mølby’s size. No discussion about him passes without mention of this. Footballers now are turbocharged athletes, probably capable of competing in the Olympics as middle-distance runners. Mølby – the midfielder with a mysterious slash through the ‘o’ of his surname – was the heaviest player in the Liverpool team. He was different: a proper bloke, right at the top of his profession. Mølby drank. Mølby ate. He was not capable of covering every blade of grass. But he had vision, hypnotic technique and a rocket of a shot. He was also a considerable personality. Under pressure in his trial match against Home Farm in Ireland, following the departure of Graeme Souness – the midfield warrior he was supposed to replace – Mølby responded by tricking his marker using his thigh, running on to his own pass, beating another defender, before thumping a volley past a goalkeeper who did not bother moving because of the ferocity. Two days later, Joe Fagan offered him a contract.
Mølby’s story begins in the summer of 1963 in Kolding, Denmark – a country that he says is markedly unspoiled by the pressures of modern life. A UN survey published in 2013 revealed that Danish people are the happiest in the world.
‘I can see why,’ Mølby says. ‘The stresses that exist here [in England] do not exist there.’
Danes put their contentedness down to a dynamic economy and a pleasant work–life balance, with people leaving the office on time, jumping on effective public transport and heading off to pick up their delightful children from shiny, well-run kindergartens. But there are others out to savage the myth of the happy Dane, arguing that low expectations of life account for their unusually positive disposition.
‘It is true that people have very basic aspirations,’ Mølby continues. ‘But this is not a bad thing. The best things in life are usually the simplest anyway: fresh air, open space and family. The term we use is hygge [it translates roughly as ‘coziness’]. We have time to analyse and interpret what life is about.
‘Yes, taxes are high, but education is always paid for: daycare, school and university. We are taught from an early age that life is not about making as much money as possible. You go through school, head to university then enter a working environment that is quite stable. You become a banker, a solicitor, a journalist or join law enforcement. The majority have steady nine-to-five jobs. Your company looks after you. There might not be many opportunities for people to become millionaires, as there’s not a lot of self-employment. But we aren’t really influenced by the rest of Europe – we don’t aspire to be American or British.’
Mølby speaks with a Scouse accent so thick you could spread it on toast. But he maintains that despite living in Merseyside for nearly thirty years, and raising a son and a daughter who are now adults during that time, he still feels emphatically Danish.
Although his father worked as a long-distance lorry driver for an oil firm, the Mølby family was from farming stock. He believes that this might account genetically for his distinctive powerful build.
‘My brothers are almost identical,’ he explains. ‘I spent my summer holidays in between my grandfather’s and my uncle’s, who were both successful farmers. We were out every
day at six o’clock in the morning, helping. We loved it. Most of the day was spent throwing bales of hay on the tractor, milking cows or picking strawberries. We did whatever we were told.’
Farming was all-consuming. The hours were long and tiring. There was no room for other interests in the lives of the Mølby elders. Yet Jan became obsessed by football. He believes it happened because the ground of Kolding’s football team was less than eight hundred yards away from the Mølby family home. In the late 1970s, the team would rise from non-league football into the Danish second division, where previously improbable gates of more than 4,500 were regularly achieved.
‘Every Saturday, I would see the crowd making their way to the game. The cars would park outside the house. I could hear whenever a goal was scored. A big roar went up. This fascinated me. My dad wasn’t interested at all. His passion was pigeon racing. But when I got to seven or eight and I was still kicking the ball around the garden, I think he realized the obsession wasn’t going to go away.’
It might be said that Mølby’s aspirations were typically Danish. They began and ended with playing for Kolding’s first team.
‘I still insist that one of the proudest days of my life came when they recruited me within their youth set-up and handed over club membership, meaning I could attend all of the first-team games for free. An attacking midfielder called Frank Sørensen was my favourite player. He was a number 10. I’ve never forgiven him for joining Aarhus.
‘Very quickly, I developed an adult game. At sixteen, I was calm – I already knew what to do. I played with some very good kids at Kolding. We were one of the top three teams for our age in Denmark. Yet only one of them aside from me played for Kolding’s first team. If you’d asked me at fifteen, I would have said most of those guys had a really good chance. The difference was I developed quicker. I was always bigger than the other lads but the game in Denmark does not rely on physicality. It wasn’t a case of me being able to muscle my way through games or being able to kick the ball further than anyone else. I was just able to get my overall game together a lot quicker.’
Mølby was training with Kolding’s first team at sixteen. He made his professional debut at seventeen, then his international debut for Denmark at eighteen. Each year, progression was noted through significant landmarks.
‘I remember looking around the dressing room at Kolding and there was a feeling that all the other fellas – guys twice my age – were looking right back at me as the missing link of the team. I felt a sense of responsibility straight away. But it never bothered me. I felt totally ready.’
Mølby’s development was not recognized in Denmark’s national press, however. ‘Nobody knew who I was.’ Halfway through his first season, Kolding played against a team from the outskirts of Copenhagen. ‘A scout from Ajax happened to be there.’ Afterwards, Mølby received a call from Danish international midfielder Søren Lerby. ‘He said that Ajax had seen me play and that they liked what they saw, but they did not know anything about me aside from my name. I told him my age and the length of my contract.’
Ajax watched Mølby for nearly a year before finally making an offer. By then, he’d played forty times for Kolding. ‘I was dominating games. I was ready again for the next step. You don’t see that happen much now. A couple of decent games and, whoosh, the player moves on.’
Mølby demonstrates again his memory for detail when recalling his Kolding debut: ‘Away from home – the crowd was intense,’ then he remembers the day Kolding won promotion to the first division. ‘It was in front of 9,500 people – unheard of in our town. When we scored the winner, the game wasn’t finished but the lord mayor ran on the pitch. Afterwards, we were invited to the town hall and our neighbours and former schoolteachers were there. This was a big deal for Kolding. For me, it was right up there with winning the First Division championship in England and the FA Cup.’
Mølby did not want to leave Kolding, even for Ajax. ‘I had the perfect life. I was working in a sports shop, InterSport, with my mate. I went to college twice a week, studying business. I was playing in the first division, I rode everywhere on my bike and had lunch every day at my mum’s. It could not have been better.’ Yet Kolding needed the money and Ajax offered in excess of £100,000. ‘The club was quite keen for me to go. I would have done anything to help Kolding. So I went.’
Mølby says the first months in Amsterdam were the most difficult in his professional career. He’d arrived from a part-time background believing he possessed an adequate level of fitness. But he was wrong.
‘It was the only time in my career when I didn’t feel a sense of belonging. I struggled. I was tired all the time. We trained three times a day in the pre-season camp. At quarter past seven in the morning, we’d go for a long run. At half-ten, there would be football training. Then at half-two, we’d be doing specific sprint or weight training. Eight nights on the run at seven o’clock, we’d play a competitive match against an amateur team. We’d win each one by a minimum of ten goals. But the process was exhausting. I was awful. The players judge you, don’t they? There was Ronald Koeman and Frank Rijkaard. We were all roughly the same age. I could see them looking over thinking, “This fella is crap.”’
The person Mølby wanted to impress most was Johan Cruyff, one of the game’s greatest players, who, nearing the end of his career, was rarely present during pre-season. ‘We’d be running up fucking mountains but Johan did not join in at all. He was allowed to set his own schedule. Then again, he possessed a natural fitness that meant he did not have to.’
Mølby talks about Cruyff as if he is not a real person. There was an aura of otherness, as though he was perhaps superhuman, untouchable.
‘You could not approach him. You were granted an audience. It was like having the Pope as a teammate. He lived up to the legend and beyond.’
Mølby would usually be found with the other Danes at Ajax, Lerby and Jesper Olsen.
‘Johan would come to us and never us to him. He could be a bit of a nuisance. He’d approach and ask what we were talking about. We’d tell him and he’d always start his reply with the same sentence: “Let me tell you …” He was very, very knowledgeable about everything. We’d play billiards after training. He’d tell us we were taking the wrong shots. “No, no, no …” Whatever you spoke about, he already knew. He was the oracle.’
Cruyff was a chain smoker. Mølby recalls observing him at lunch. As the light of a cigarette died, he used the butt before it was too late to fire a second cigarette. ‘It was constant. He was a chain smoker. I could not believe any footballer – let alone one of the greatest – would get away with this and still be right at the top of his game. During a lunch break, he’d light ten then go and train, no problem. Over five metres, even at his age, he was the quickest player I’ve come across.’
Aged thirty-seven, Cruyff remained Ajax’s most influential player at key moments during games.
‘His presence helped us to win leagues in successive seasons quite comfortably. We scored lots of goals. Johan would celebrate his own but never if it was anyone else’s. He probably created four out of five goals but whenever you turned around to celebrate, he wasn’t there. He’d be walking back to the centre circle instead. It became the accepted thing to do to wave your hand in his direction to recognize his efforts. I don’t think he meant this in an arrogant way. It’s just the way he was.’
Mølby says the most significant thing Cruyff helped him with was his passing.
‘Johan had this unique ability to understand a player’s strengths and weaknesses after just a few training sessions. It would have been clear to anyone that I did not have a burst of acceleration like other Ajax players, so maybe he thought I needed to improve elsewhere to compensate for that.’
Cruyff offered Mølby tutorials in the art of passing.
‘He told me that it is a misconception that the ball should be passed directly to a teammate’s feet. Instead, it should be passed a yard or two in front of him. That way the bal
l is always moving forward and it gives the team momentum. It was also about the pace of the pass. He wanted me to drill it – the emphasis had to be on the first touch. If a player could not control a fast pass, he was not good enough to play for Ajax. Success and failure were determined by how graciously a player controlled the ball.’
One routine remains vivid in Mølby’s mind. What an image this is – Cruyff showing Mølby how it’s done on the chilly Dutch training fields next door to Ajax’s brooding De Meer Stadium.
‘He used to get me and Ronald Koeman together and ask us to hit the corner flag from the halfway line. We’d have our backs to whichever corner we were aiming for then he’d play the ball into us at speed. We were allowed one touch to bring it under control before pinging it towards the flag. You weren’t allowed to float it. If you floated it and it hit the flag, it wouldn’t count. We’d repeat this for more than an hour and it could become tedious. But we never argued with Johan.’
Mølby says this practice helped later on in his career when playing as a midfielder in front of Liverpool’s back four.
‘It was my favourite position because I was protecting the defence as well as myself at the same time. I didn’t get dragged into areas of the field where my lack of pace would get exposed. I was right in the heart of the action. The more of the ball I saw, the better I became. I knew where to go. Critics would say I struggled to get around but I rarely got substituted. I could last ninety minutes.
‘You were expected to pass. And I could pass. But it takes it out of you too. Drilling fortyand fifty-yard passes kills your thighs. But I never struggled with it. I had the stamina to carry on. I was able to ping those passes into injury time, the final kick. I’ve always had strong thighs but I only learned how to use them in relation to my technique at Ajax. For that, Johan must take the credit.’
When Mølby joined Ajax, his new manager Aad de Mos told him that for the first season he would operate as a sweeper, replacing Wim Jansen. Instead, Cruyff encouraged the club to sign Leo van Veen. The pair had spent a season together at Los Angeles Aztecs.
