Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  Meijer remains a cult figure at Anfield and he thinks he knows why.

  ‘The favourite players are the ones who show their human characteristics,’ he says, while walking me between a few of Maastricht’s finest public houses later on.

  ‘Robbie Fowler? He could have been the brother of any Liverpool fan. Me? I tried hard and looked like a guy you could have a pint with after a day in the factory.’

  Meijer is a pole apart from the introverted, monosyllabic modern footballer.

  ‘Now, players have the same personality. It’s all one kind of soup. There is no chicken, tomato or spice. It’s tasteless water. If you listen to an interview after a match, it does not matter which club the player represents or even whether he has won or lost. Many say the same thing. It’s boring. Why bother speaking to these players? Come on, it’s bullshit.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE LEGEND WHO BECAME MANAGER,

  Graeme Souness, 1978–84 and 1991–94

  IT SHOULD NOT be like this for Graeme Souness, explaining where it all went wrong. Souness should be in line with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard whenever Liverpool’s greatest postwar players are mentioned. Yet he took a risk on his reputation and, as he puts it, ‘blew the chance’.

  He dismisses my suggestion that he might regret accepting the role of Liverpool manager, ‘No, no, no, not at all.’ Yet he stresses the problems in 1991 were greater than anyone really appreciated. ‘Listen,’ he continues, ‘it was a job that I felt I had to do.’ Then, without any hesitation, he offers a caveat: ‘Though I took it at completely the wrong time.’

  Souness compares the situation he inherited to the one David Moyes found at Manchester United after Alex Ferguson’s sudden retirement.

  ‘You’ve got a club with twenty-five years of success,’ he says. ‘The first manager in is a bringer of bad news, where he’s telling players – in some cases legends – that their time is up. Nobody goes quietly. There’s a period when you are not going to be successful because you are buying in players that are going to take time to settle down.

  ‘You are asking supporters to be patient, and this is at a time when the expectation levels are still enormous. It has to be managed. For me, you don’t want to be the first one to follow Fergie, because you’ll be the one that gets all the flak for doing what would appear to be everything wrong, when it’s not really the case.

  ‘The second one [Louis van Gaal] comes in and maybe tries to achieve success too quickly by adopting an aggressive transfer policy without any real thinking behind it. Perhaps you could compare that to Roy [Evans] at Liverpool after me.

  ‘Ideally, you want to be the third one in, when expectation levels are back at a manageable level. Then you can build it up again.’

  The Liverpool move seemed like the dream appointment, both for the club and manager. ‘I was blinded by my feelings for Liverpool,’ admits Souness, who as a player at Anfield won nearly everything there was to win, both domestically and internationally. As an obdurate, iron-willed wall of muscle, he captained the greatest club in Europe before making a lucrative transfer to Sampdoria in Italy. His step up to management, at the hitherto struggling Glasgow Rangers, initiated a period of almost total dominance in Scotland.

  ‘Since leaving Spurs as a teenager, everywhere I’d gone it was success, success, success; medal, medal, medal; trophy, trophy, trophy,’ he says. ‘I thought the pattern would continue at Liverpool. I didn’t stop for a minute to think about what I was doing, to analyse the situation.’

  He was not to know at the time, but his reputation would spectacularly alter. Souness the player and Souness the manager are viewed somewhat differently. Considering his achievements as a captain – the swaggering style and spirit with which he led the team – I find it sad that he is not remembered with absolute reverence. He reminds me several times that although there are mitigating circumstances if people are willing to listen, only he is to blame for a blemished legacy.

  ‘I know I made mistakes,’ Souness says, immediately citing an interview he did with The Sun on the third anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. The paper was hated on Merseyside after it printed lies about the role of Liverpool supporters on that dreadful April afternoon in 1989. ‘I will regret the decision forever. I don’t have a defence.’

  Souness admits that also he took the wrong approach when dealing with players. ‘I appreciate that I was too hard with everyone. I’d come from a generation where the attitude to problems was just to get on with it: to look at yourself in the mirror and sort it out. As players, we were treated like men and expected to act as men.

  ‘The thing I miss most as a player is the confrontation and the rivalry, standing in the tunnel and waiting for the battle. If we lost, I found it hard to shake hands. I’d go home and sit alone for the evening. You see a lot of players now hugging each other. They swap shirts with the opposition at half-time. It’s wrong.

  ‘In management, I expected my players to feel the same as me. But the world was changing. Players were expecting a shoulder to cry on. The players were holding more power than the manager. I wasn’t cute enough sometimes, or political enough.’

  Souness speaks in the arrivals hall of Edinburgh Airport in his home city, where he is meeting with old friends for the weekend. I had interviewed him six years earlier at Anfield as he waited to go live on air for a Sky broadcast. He is an impressive individual. While Richard Keys and Andy Gray bantered away in an otherwise hectic room, Souness sat alone in a dimly lit corner amongst his own thoughts. I recall a lone sliver of bright light piercing through a tinted window and crossing Souness’s tough-looking face. It made him seem like a prisoner in a war movie as he slowly, thoughtfully and confidently spoke about his experiences. He exuded an awesome aura that instantly commanded respect. I thought Souness – the only Souness in football – was made of granite.

  I wondered whether he was born a leader. Like Irvine Welsh, the acclaimed and controversial writer of Trainspotting and Filth, Souness’s family came from Leith – Edinburgh’s industrial centre and dock area. Souness grew up, however, further inland in Saughton Mains, where the city’s prison is a brooding presence.

  ‘I had a very loving and caring family background,’ he tells me. ‘I was the youngest of three brothers, which meant I always had something to prove. When you’re around kids that are older, they always tell you that they are better at everything. I didn’t want that to be the case. It toughened me up.’

  Souness’s father was a glazier and the family lived in a prefab. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, Souness would sleep at his grandmother’s home in a tenement block a few miles away on Gorgie Road, where the air reeked of fermenting yeast from the nearby Caledonian Brewery.

  ‘She was lonely,’ he explains. ‘My grandfather had died and my brothers had cared for her before they hit sixteen as well. There was no questioning; we just did it. It was our way of life.’

  It did not mean Souness missed out on football. There was a big field outside his parents’ home. ‘I wasn’t bothered about Hibs or Hearts really, because I was always playing football on a Saturday, although Tyncastle was closer to my home. For as long as I can remember, I never thought about doing anything else. From the earliest age, the thought never entered my head that I wouldn’t become a footballer. Some people may have seen it as misguided confidence but I turned out to be right, didn’t I?’

  Although he’d been captain of his school team, Souness only took the role on for the first time as a professional at Liverpool, aged twenty-eight.

  ‘I wasn’t captain of the Spurs team that won the FA Youth Cup. I wasn’t made captain at Middlesbrough. I was a late developer, although I’d always played with arrogance.’

  Coming from the same Carrickvale Secondary School as the great Dave Mackay acted as motivation in the early days.

  ‘I occasionally stood on the terraces at Hearts and saw Dave play. He was a real warrior type. I was constantly reminded by my headmaster that I�
��d never be as good as him.’

  After playing for Scotland Schoolboys against England Schoolboys at White Hart Lane, Mackay – who was Tottenham’s captain and watching in the stands – recommended Souness to Bill Nicholson, Spurs’ legendary coach.

  ‘Dave was the only name ever mentioned by Bill Nic. He never mentioned John White, he never mentioned Danny Blanchflower – only ever Dave Mackay. It felt like I lived with him. I told him years later that I was fed up hearing his name. But I never set out to be like anyone else. I played the game as I saw it.’

  Souness insists he was more impulsive as a teenager than he is now.

  ‘I went to Spurs at fifteen and thought I was going to be a superstar,’ he admits. ‘I was headstrong and pretty soon I was knocking on Bill Nic’s door asking why I wasn’t in the first team.’ At seventeen, Souness was suspended for two weeks by the club without pay for taking a leave of absence in Edinburgh, citing homesickness. He felt ‘completely at sea with the London scene’. By nineteen, he was allowed to leave for Middlesbrough. ‘It came as a real shock when Spurs agreed the deal. It made me more determined than ever to become a successful footballer and to prove them wrong.’

  Souness’s towering self-belief and desire to win brought him more medals than an army veteran. Yet his career was fuelled not just by what he describes as ‘the unique taste of success’ but also by the whiplash of a few failures. ‘No person’s playing career is full of highs,’ he says. ‘My one real low came right at the start of mine. It kicked me where it hurt and I had to deal with it. It shaped the way I was thereafter.’

  His combative performances for Middlesbrough earned him a record transfer to Liverpool in January 1978. On his first morning in the Anfield dressing room, he remembers asking Tommy Smith, Liverpool’s most ferocious player, if he could borrow his hairdryer. ‘Tommy turned to Phil Neal and commented, “Everyone is allowed to make one mistake.”’

  Liverpool had great managers. But Souness believes the team was driven towards triumph because of its senior players. ‘I turned up at Liverpool when I was twenty-four. I was a bit of a Jack the Lad. At least I thought I was. Very quickly, I was put in place verbally by the senior pros. There were no prima donnas and no superstars. Any problems on or off the pitch, the more experienced boys would stamp it out.’

  He was made captain upon Liverpool’s 3–1 defeat to Manchester City at Anfield in December 1981, leaving Bob Paisley’s team in twelfth place in the league. Dalglish and Neal were older than Souness and considered favourites for the role after it was revealed that Phil Thompson was being relieved of the responsibility. By the end of the season, Liverpool were champions, having toppled Ipswich Town by four points.

  Michael Robinson, the striker who signed for Liverpool from Brighton & Hove Albion in 1983 before struggling to deal with the expectations of the club, said Souness approached every game exactly the same.

  ‘The attitude throughout the club was that if we didn’t do well, anybody could beat us,’ Robinson said. ‘If we did do well, nobody could beat us. It was humble. I remember once before a game against Brentford in the League Cup, Graeme had the dressing room buzzing like we were playing against Manchester United. There was no complacency – ever.’

  Robinson also said that Souness helped him deal with his own insecurities about being good enough to play for Liverpool.

  ‘Once you chipped off that varnish, I found Graeme a very personal, cuddly chap who was actually quite vulnerable about being a human being with emotions. To this day, he still tries very hard not to be this lovely cuddly person, when really he is.’

  When asked whether he found any aspect of captaincy challenging, Souness responds before I can finish the question. ‘None, absolutely none,’ he says. ‘My attitude didn’t change at all. Joe [Fagan] pulled me to one side soon after and told me to focus only on looking after my own game. I realized that if I set the example, the rest would follow.’

  Souness says his greatest performance for Liverpool came in his last match before joining Sampdoria, against Roma in Rome in the European Cup final of 1984. ‘It felt like we’d gone to the Coliseum and sacked the place. Nobody gave us a chance. But we had the most ridiculous inner belief. Had it been Barcelona in the Nou Camp or Real Madrid in the Bernabéu, we’d have done what we had to do to win the game and done a number on them.’

  He believes, however, that captaincy did not prepare him for management ‘one bit’. As captain of Liverpool, the responsibility was ‘easy because of the calibre of person and quality of player you’re sharing a dressing room with’. He reiterates that he rarely had to think about anyone else’s welfare, only his own. Management was different.

  ‘As a manager, I could not forget about the job – much to the irritation of my wife. It wasn’t a case of leaving the stadium and thinking about something else. I’d be thinking about it driving home, I’d be thinking about it when I got home, I’d be thinking about it when there was an interval on a television programme I was watching, they were the last thoughts in my head before I fell asleep. I found it impossible to switch off. It’s a roller-coaster ride. Not year by year, not month by month, not week by week, but day by day, hour by hour, result by result.

  ‘If I was winning – like I was at Rangers – or if I was losing – like I was more often at Liverpool – my mind was only ever on the job. As a captain, you concern yourself with your fitness and form. When you’re a manager, you think about the welfare of thirty players. Then there are the media and the board of directors that you are answerable to.’

  Souness became the first player-manager in Rangers’ history when he succeeded Jock Wallace at Ibrox in 1986, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. Financed initially by the club’s then owner Lawrence Marlborough, Souness and chairman David Holmes embarked upon a bold strategy of reclaiming the footballing ascendancy that Rangers had been desperately seeking in Scotland after years in the wilderness due to the dominance of arch rivals Celtic and the emergence of the ‘New Firm’, Aberdeen and Dundee United.

  At Rangers, Souness proved early on that he was not afraid to make difficult decisions. He capitalized on the banning of English clubs in European competition after the Heysel stadium disaster by signing numerous English players, in turn reversing decades of historical tradition whereby Scottish players moved south of the border. Not only did he revive the glory days, he succeeded in taking the most enormous and brave risks. After Mark Walters became the first black player to represent Rangers in more than fifty years, Souness made Maurice Johnson Rangers’ first Catholic player. Souness claims the decision to sign the pair was made for practical rather than any profoundly historical reasons. ‘They were two good players who I thought would serve us well,’ he says.

  A year after Souness’s departure from Anfield, Joe Fagan retired as Liverpool’s manager. For twenty-six years, Liverpool’s management structure had been comparable to that of a mafia crime family. In Bill Shankly, there was the boss, Bob Paisley was the consigliere or councillor, then Fagan, the underboss. Ronnie Moran, Roy Evans and Reuben Bennett were the capos, who headed the crew of soldiers – in football terms, the players. The organization was put in place so that Liverpool would achieve long-standing success. Like the mafia, Liverpool was led by a group of old men who met in private in a smelly old room to discuss their plans. Nothing was ostentatious or above suspicion. There were simple and ruthless principles and no fancy purchases. In the Boot Room after games, Fagan particularly was well skilled at slapping beaten opponents on the back with one hand and extracting information for future reference with the other, much like a mafia priest.

  By 1985, Shankly had died, Paisley had gone, Bennett had gone, as had Fagan – after just two seasons and sooner than anyone at the club had expected. Liverpool’s response was to promote Kenny Dalglish from soldier level to boss. Dalglish sacked both Geoff Twentyman as chief scout and Chris Lawler as reserveteam coach and began appointing his own people. Sackings had not happened since before Shankly
’s appointment. Dalglish was under pressure to achieve results while the backroom staff were being restructured. By the time he was to depart, Moran and Evans were not considered ready to make the step up. Before Souness, some traditions already belonged to the past.

  On Dalglish’s sudden resignation in January 1991, Souness did not think of leaving Rangers, where he was the second biggest shareholder and had been promised a job for life under new chairman, David Murray. There had been three Scottish First Division titles and four League Cups. Only once had he come close to a move away. Had Michael Knighton completed his takeover of Manchester United in 1989, Souness would have replaced a then struggling Alex Ferguson.

  Knighton had agreed to buy Martin Edwards’ stake for £10 million and appeared on the pitch at Old Trafford before a game dressed in a full United kit to publicize his proposed purchase. At a meeting in Edinburgh, Knighton discussed the project until the early hours of one morning with Murray, who planned to make a considerable investment in United. It was agreed that Souness should be United’s new manager and Walter Smith would earn promotion at Ibrox from his role as Souness’s assistant. Knighton’s acquisition, however, fell through when Murray had second thoughts. The FA were cracking down on individuals having influence in more than one club after the mess created by Robert Maxwell at Oxford United and Derby County. Chelsea owner Ken Bates had put money into Partick Thistle and, with investigations taking place, Murray was reluctant to get involved in a similar controversy. Knighton also approached Blackpool’s Owen Oyston but never completed the deal. He was later involved with Carlisle United, but the club entered voluntary administration in 2002.

  Souness received two phone calls from chief executive Peter Robinson asking whether he’d be interested in replacing Dalglish but had been informed by someone close to the board that Liverpool’s priority was to appoint from within, as they had done before. Moran had acted as Dalglish’s temporary replacement. First-team coach Evans was another contender, as were Phil Thompson and Steve Heighway, who led the reserve and the youth teams. Alan Hansen, captain since the 1985–86 season, had just retired as a player but he ruled himself out almost immediately. Then there was John Toshack, the former striker with the most experience of management, having recently left Real Madrid.