by Simon Hughes
Souness’s bond with Rangers had grown because of the relationship with his chairman. ‘David gave me a free reign,’ Souness explains. ‘He was a friend and our understanding couldn’t have been any better. We lived near each other and socialized most nights of the week. These were good times: success after success. We’d turned it round there and the team was ready to have a good go of it in Europe. There was no reason to leave.’
Yet living in the ‘goldfish bowl of Glasgow’ had its difficulties. Rangers were always under the spotlight and so was Souness. There were problems on a personal and professional level. Having separated from his first wife, he was regularly followed along the motorway from his Edinburgh home to Glasgow by tabloid reporters hunting for scandal. By 1991, Souness was in the middle of a long touchline ban, while an incident with a tea lady had nearly led to a fight with St Johnstone’s chairman after a league match. It proved to be a tipping point.
After the first brief talks at the start of February, Souness called Robinson back towards the end of March to try to establish whether an offer was still in place. Under Moran, Liverpool’s results had faltered and the recruitment process had stalled. Within twenty-four hours, Souness was meeting with Walter Smith and first-team coach Phil Boersma to tell them about his plans to quit Rangers. Souness wanted both Smith and Boersma to join him. Kirkby-born Boersma had scored thirty goals in one hundred and twenty Liverpool games before joining Souness at Middlesbrough in 1975. ‘Phil was a lifelong Liverpool supporter and could not have been any more excited.’ Smith, who would later manage Everton, decided against it and replaced Souness at Ibrox on Souness’s advice, even though Murray wanted a higher profile name. ‘Walter had been my right-hand man and someone I trusted implicitly.’ Smith was concerned that he might not be welcomed by Moran or Roy Evans, as their roles were similar. ‘I was disappointed, because it was my plan for everyone to work together,’ Souness says. ‘But even without Walter, I’d made my mind up to go.’
Murray made a final attempt to keep Souness in Scotland by offering a blank contract where he could fill in the details himself. ‘The decision had been made,’ Souness continues. ‘David warned me that going back to Liverpool would be a huge mistake. I have to admit it, he was right.’
Souness was warned about the problems at Anfield by Peter Robinson, who had been a key administrator at the club for almost thirty years and remained loyal despite several offers to join the Football Association. Robinson’s influence was so considerable that when Bill Shankly was offered the manager’s job at Sunderland following one of his many arguments with the Liverpool board in the early sixties, Shankly discussed the possibility of taking Robinson with him.
Souness had tried to sign Jan Mølby for Rangers and planned to build his new Liverpool team around the Danish midfielder and John Barnes. Robinson advised that Liverpool’s team had faded and only Barnes was capable of remaining in the long term.
‘Tom Saunders was also a respected figure at Liverpool and he told me as well that the challenge was greater than anyone on the outside recognized,’ Souness says.
Robinson warned of Manchester United’s business potential if they ever married a successful managerial selection policy with positive results on the pitch. Within a month of Souness’s appointment, United lifted the European Cup-Winners’ Cup with victory over Barcelona in Rotterdam. A year earlier, Alex Ferguson’s side had won the FA Cup in a replay with Crystal Palace, who’d beaten Liverpool in the semi. A new challenge was coming.
Souness believed Liverpool had to react quickly. It was his immediate view that many of his squad had ‘lost their passion for Liverpool’, and it came as a shock.
Not for the first time in this interview, Souness speaks about his expectations of ‘senior players’ during his time as captain.
‘Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan were the managers and Ronnie Moran was the disciplinarian. But the real lessons came from players like Steve Heighway, Phil Neal, Ray Clemence and Emlyn Hughes. The staff deserve all the credit for selecting the right type of person to join the squad but once they were in place Melwood governed itself. You’d have three or four leaders showing the way and the rest following, whether that’s in the match or socially. By the time I went back as manager, that culture had gone.’
Souness speaks of individuals more concerned by the value of their next contract. He refuses to name names, as he’s ‘made up with many of them since’, but this was a time where wages were accelerating. Ageing pros did not want to miss out on one final payday. Souness says his relationship with many of them was strained after Peter Robinson asked him whether he wanted to take charge of negotiating players’ contracts. Perhaps Robinson felt uncomfortable in dealing with the skyrocketing sums. Liverpool had long been notoriously tight with wages and used the history and position of the club as leverage. Robinson would enter discussions with a lower offer than the player expected. Often it meant a pay cut. Robinson would exit the room and leave the player alone with his thoughts. Then the manager, be it Shankly, Paisley, Fagan or Dalglish, would enter separately, informing the player he would help him by getting Robinson to raise his offer. This process would get the player believing the manager was on his side, immediately setting the agenda for their relationship, and leave the club paying roughly what they wanted to pay in the first place. Suddenly, however, the trusted routine was broken.
‘Initially, I thought it was Peter’s way of paying me a compliment but it was my first big mistake, agreeing to it,’ Souness says. ‘I couldn’t understand why anyone would grumble with being paid what I thought was a decent sum to play for Liverpool. Whatever I offered, they always wanted more. Liverpool was the only team I wanted to play for and I would have stayed forever had the club not accepted a really good offer from Sampdoria for me. There was no place I’d rather have been.’
You can detect the anger even now when Souness speaks about the shift in attitude and the haggling that took place.
‘I should have kept them on and waited for their replacements to bed in. Instead, I couldn’t help it. I’d tell Peter [Robinson] on the phone, “You know what? Whoever it is, get them to call me this afternoon. They can go tomorrow as far as I’m concerned.” That was a mistake. You’re buying under pressure then. I should have been far cuter.’
Peter Beardsley, aged thirty, Gary Gillespie, thirty-one and Steve McMahon, thirty, were the first of the most experienced players to leave, ones that with hindsight Souness wished he’d kept longer. Others, like Ray Houghton, remained. ‘Ray told me his wife was homesick and wanted to return to London, so I accepted a bid from Chelsea. Ray was halfway down the M6 when he called to tell me Ron Atkinson had made him a better financial offer. “You know what, Ray, do whatever you bloody want,” I told him.’
Souness was happy to release Jimmy Carter, Glen Hysen and David Speedie, who were ‘not up to it’, though he did not want to sell twenty-two-year-old Steve Staunton, the Irish left-back whose future was influenced by a ‘silly rule’ that classified non-English players as foreigners and decreed that only three could play at a time. ‘Steve had a beautiful left foot and could play in a number of positions,’ Souness says. ‘The regulation was withdrawn by the FA within twelve months and that really frustrated me.’
What also made it hard for Souness was that he was telling players who had developed an emotional attachment to Kenny Dalglish and, indeed, to Liverpool in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster that suddenly they were not wanted.
But ever since Bill Shankly had struggled with the idea of dispensing with key members of his 1960s team, leading to nearly seven years without a trophy and a humbling 1–0 defeat to Second Division Watford in an FA Cup quarter-final in 1970, Liverpool had never allowed sentiment to get in the way of decisive decision making.
‘When your time was up, it was up,’ Souness says. ‘I was a case in point. It was a transfer record between two English clubs when Liverpool bought me from Middlesbrough for £352,000. Then they sold me for £650,000
to Sampdoria. Although it also suited me to go, nobody sat me down and tried to persuade me to stay using football reasons never mind financial reasons. I was thirtyone years old. Liverpool figured they’d had seven years of great service out of me and they were more than doubling their money for a player who had peaked. It was ruthless business.’
After Hillsborough, the policy of moving players on before their decline became too evident understandably slipped and Liverpool’s team became a victim of circumstance.
Yet I suggest to Souness that Liverpool’s transfer policy had altered under Dalglish long before Hillsborough. After missing out on the title to Everton in 1987, and with Dalglish under some pressure, he decided to spend big. John Aldridge, aged twentyeight, Beardsley, twenty-six, Houghton, twenty-five and Barnes, twenty-four, all arrived for huge fees. For the first time in its history, Liverpool were outspending their rivals in an attempt to keep ahead of the game and nobody seemed to mind. The First Division championship was wrestled back in 1988 and won again in 1990. Yet behind the scenes, young players were either not good enough or had not been given the necessary exposure that would eventually enable them to secure long-term firstteam football.
In Dalglish’s five and a half years in charge, he signed seven players under the age of twenty that would play for the first team, promoting only Gary Ablett from the youth system. Of the seven, four left impressions that ranged from reasonable to good: Mike Marsh, Don Hutchison, Jamie Redknapp and Staunton. It meant that by the time Souness returned to Merseyside, Liverpool’s squad was made up of old players almost past their best and youngsters not ready to represent Liverpool on a regular basis. Souness was the first manager since Shankly unable to make signings and give them time to get used to the demands of the club by playing them in the reserves first.
‘Only Kenny will be able to tell you why he made certain decisions at certain times,’ Souness says. ‘All I know is, when I arrived the team wasn’t good enough and neither was the squad. There was a need for urgent reconstruction. The ability wasn’t there and the attitude was bad. I oversaw three or four testimonial matches in my first two years and that shows you how old the players were and where their priorities lay. In my six years as a player, only Emlyn Hughes was granted a testimonial. [It was actually four: Steve Heighway, Phil Thompson and Ray Clemence were also granted testimonials.] This was a period where the hunger was always there even though we won the league most seasons. Ronnie Moran was always telling us we weren’t as good as the old teams under Bill Shankly. That motivated us to prove him wrong. I wanted my Liverpool team to be like this.’
Souness recalls the afternoon Liverpool hosted Joe Kinnear’s notorious Wimbledon side and Vinnie Jones scrawled ‘Bothered’ across the famous ‘This Is Anfield’ sign that hangs over players as they enter the pitch. The reaction inside Liverpool’s dressing room was to laugh it off rather than seek retribution, as they probably would have done a decade earlier. It summed up the attitude.
‘We were too soft,’ Souness says. ‘Where were the leaders fighting our corner? In the eighties, we could beat a team by playing football. If the other team wanted a fight, we could beat them by fighting. We could deal with any situation. Things had changed.’
Souness believed he would be the manager that would take Liverpool into the twenty-first century. He wanted to make his own mark on the club by transforming the way the football staff operated.
‘I’d been in Italy and I’d seen how all the big clubs were run there. Since the days of Bill Shankly, Liverpool’s players had always changed at Anfield and got the bus up to Melwood. I recognized it was part of the routine – the banter in the dressing room and on the bus – but I wanted one base at Melwood, mainly because it would shave an hour off the working day and allow us to focus on other things rather than dodging the traffic in West Derby. Anfield was becoming a tourist attraction for out-of-town and foreign supporters and I felt it would be better for the club if they opened up the stadium. They could make more money and also guarantee the safety of supporters milling about in the car park by not having buses going in and out. Anfield would have been used by the players on a match day only. Yet there was great resistance.
‘We used to put lager on the bus on a Friday for an away game. It was a particularly strong lager. I was happy for the players to have a drink but I thought it was better if they had a lighter lager. There was also resistance to that. I wanted to change their eating habits. There was great resistance there as well.
‘I’d done all this at Glasgow Rangers and because they hadn’t won anything in nine years everybody was buying into it. When you go to a club where there has been non-stop success and go to the players, “By the way, you shouldn’t really be eating fish and chips straight after a game,” it wasn’t easy to convince them.
‘It was never going to be an easy transition. It is natural for people to resist change, especially when a method is in place that is tried and trusted. It’s a hard argument. But had the players listened, Liverpool would have been the first club in England to implement it. We’d have been ahead of the game. [Arsène] Wenger came into Arsenal in 1996 when Arsenal hadn’t won a league title in five years and he was able to do it. But, hey, did I try to change things too quickly? Yes.’
Contrary to popular belief, Souness says he did not order the Boot Room to be destroyed.
‘That’s a rumour still doing the rounds today but it’s absolute rubbish,’ Souness insists. ‘It was the club’s decision to demolish it. They wanted to expand the press room. The Premier League said the old one was too small, so a decision was made above my head.’
Souness cannot deny he made errors in the transfer market, especially with those he bought. He remains convinced some would have been considered good signings had they been integrated into the team when it was winning rather than struggling for form.
‘I would say Michael Thomas, Mark Wright, Rob Jones and David James all gave the club good service. You know, I liked committed players. Neil Ruddock, if managed properly, I thought, was a real asset because there were few left-footed centre-backs as powerful as him. He was a better footballer than people remember but he struggled with his weight. I liked Julian Dicks too. He was aggressive and rugged but wanted to play and had a will to win. I think I made a big mistake in selling Dean Saunders. I should have stuck with him. His goalscoring record was decent. He scored more than twenty in his first season. But I listened too much to players who told me they didn’t like playing with him. I foolishly agreed when I should have stuck to my principles and told them to get on with it.’
When Souness is criticized, the signings of Paul Stewart and Nigel Clough are usually mentioned.
‘Both of them came in for big fees, so I can understand it. Paul came in because I wanted us to have a bit more physicality in midfield. It was a department where we were lacking. I’d seen him play as a striker for Manchester City when I was manager of Rangers but he was better at Spurs in the middle of the park. He was man of the match in the 1991 FA Cup final against Forest and was desperate to do well at Liverpool but it never worked out.
‘Nigel was very quiet but I thought he’d be able to supply the passes for Rushie. But it didn’t work out between them.’
There was also Danish defender Torben Piechnik and Hungarian midfielder István Kozma, two individuals clearly out of their depth.
‘They were relatively cheap signings and both were intended to be squad players. Because of injuries, they had to play more often than I would have liked. Some of these you get right, others you get wrong. Both were low risk. But when the team is losing, players like this get highlighted a lot more.’
Souness had the opportunity to sign other players that could have made a difference. The first was Peter Schmeichel, who as Manchester United’s goalkeeper would win fifteen trophies.
‘I hadn’t been at Liverpool long. Ron Yeats was the chief scout and he came into my office one day and showed me a letter. It read: I am a Danish goalkeeper wh
o has been a Liverpool supporter all my life. I am willing to pay for my own travel expenses. Can I come to Melwood for a week’s trial? I was trying to edge Bruce [Grobbelaar] out. But it was proving difficult. I thought that if another goalkeeper turned up, we were going to have more problems with Bruce. So it never happened.’
The next was a striker later voted as the greatest player in United’s history.
‘We played Auxerre in the UEFA Cup. We lost 2–0 in the first leg in France, then won 3–0 at Anfield. Jan Mølby scored a penalty after about two minutes and that set us on our way. After the game, Michel Platini knocks on my office door and comes in. He said that he had a player for me. “A proper player.” He told me that he was a problem in France but would be perfect for Liverpool. The player was Eric Cantona. I said, “Listen, I’m fighting lots of fires here at the moment; I don’t need any more trouble.” It was another situation where I should have been more open-minded.’
A deal for Alan Shearer was closer.
‘I had a conversation with him on the phone while I was sat outside McDonald’s near Stockport railway station. I was really confident of getting him and I told my wife-to-be, Karen, that I really believed we’d push the deal through. Whether it might have been a woman’s intuition I’m not sure, but she told me that he’d go somewhere else. And she was right. When I later became Blackburn’s manager, I spoke to Tony Parkes, who’d worked for the club over a number of years. Tony told me that all the people at Blackburn recognized whoever got Shearer would end up winning the league. They were right too. I later managed Alan at Newcastle and I have to say he was the best English centreforward in post-war history.’
