by Simon Hughes
Souness is more frustrated that he did not get to see young players like Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and Jamie Redknapp flourish in the mid nineties. His problems at work, though, were nothing compared with his problems at home. Souness faced not only a bitter divorce, the death of his father due to natural causes as well as the death of his two German Shepherd dogs who were shot by a farmer herding sheep on a field near his former home in Knutsford, but also the sudden news that he required urgent open-heart surgery, although he swears his health had nothing to do with the pressures of football. ‘I had two uncles that died of heart attacks in their thirties. I’ve got the dodgy gene.’
A triple-heart bypass operation for a then thirty-eight-year-old man would scare most people but he insists he took it all in his stride. ‘I was determined to be the hospital’s best-ever patient and get back into football as soon as possible, so I pushed myself.’ Souness was due to be released but collapsed, resulting in a second operation, and spent twenty-eight days in bed rather than ten.
The ordeal of coping with so much should have worked for him like it did for Gérard Houllier years later but instead it only served to further alienate him from the fans at a time when league results were not in keeping with expectations. He does not blame the stress of the time for the gross misjudgement that followed.
Souness shared a professional working relationship with the Sun’s Merseyside reporter, Mike Ellis, a journalist who eventually wrote his second autobiography in 1999. That Ellis was on holiday during the week beginning Monday, 13 April 1992, Souness says, was significant.
He’d agreed to sell the story of his hospital ordeal to Ellis. After his operation, the interview appeared in The Sun on ‘the 6, 7 or 8 April’. Initially, there was no angry reaction, with Souness claiming Ian Rush and Tommy Smith, both Liverpool legends, had had public dealings with the newspaper before him and post-Hillsborough without a public fallout. Souness was approached again on 13 April by a photographer from The Sun, asking if he could take a picture for the following day’s edition, a picture that would reflect his road to recovery. Liverpool were playing Portsmouth that evening in an FA Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park. With Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans in charge while he was in hospital, Souness told the photographer that he could take a picture providing Liverpool progressed, as it would be bad if he was seen smiling in his hospital bed the morning after a defeat. Eventually, Liverpool did win but only on penalties. Because the photograph was taken so late – beyond the 11 p.m. copy deadline – editors decided to use the picture a day later instead and included a short caption. Rather than appearing on 14 April, Souness’s photograph was printed in The Sun on 15 April 1992 – the third anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster.
‘Mike would have advised the paper not to print it on that day, there’s no question about it,’ Souness says. ‘Instead, it looked terrible: me smiling and confident of recovery on the same day a lot of people were still in mourning.’
As he was in Scotland at the time of the disaster, Souness maintains he did not appreciate the depth of bad feeling towards the newspaper.
‘I have nobody to blame but myself, though,’ he adds. ‘I gave all the proceeds from the interview to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. I knew I’d got it wrong. Ignorance is no excuse.’
The episode made Souness’s position at Liverpool ‘impossible’. Merseyside reporters, who had always worked as a pack, were annoyed that they had been left out of an exclusive story and were unsympathetic towards Souness in their column inches when the public tide turned against him. Souness sat on the bench during Liverpool’s FA Cup final victory over Sunderland and looked ill.
‘What I should have done is resigned after the FA Cup final both because of the mistake I’d made and because of my health. Looking at pictures of myself, I shouldn’t have been there, because I was still fragile.’
Somehow, Souness continued for another eighteen months. He even survived a period where Liverpool slumped to seventeenth in the Premier League table as late as March – just three points above the relegation zone. Though the team finished the 1992–93 season in sixth, in a congested table, it was a mere ten points above the bottom three.
‘I lost the dressing room and that hurt me, because it started with some of the players I’d worked with and looked after as young boys,’ he says. ‘I was disappointed in a lot of people but I was far from blameless. I went into Liverpool probably believing I knew everything there was to know about management because I’d been successful elsewhere. The setback at Spurs served me well for the rest of my playing career but that was twenty years earlier and as a manager it felt like I could win everything in a rush. I’m not blaming anybody but myself, because if I did it again now, I’d do a lot differently. I would hate to think this is coming across as me not holding my hands up.’
To hear this admission from someone who appeared outwardly indestructible as Liverpool’s captain is quite humbling. Souness is seen as a cold and uncaring type of person but he clearly regrets the errors made in his life and the opportunities missed.
Souness realized his time was up at Anfield before Liverpool’s FA Cup replay with Bristol City in January 1994. While he was eating his pre-match snack of toast and tea at the Moat House Hotel, Souness could hear the visiting manager holding a team meeting in the next room.
‘Russell Osman had seen enough of us in the first game at Ashton Gate to tell his players that if they matched us for effort we’d bottle it in front of our own supporters. I knew he was right. This was coming from Bristol City in the old Second Division.’
After a 1–0 defeat, Souness tendered his resignation in person to chairman David Moores as well as Peter Robinson and, with that, he was gone.
‘The bottom line was I didn’t feel I was getting the full support of the players,’ he says. ‘After the Sun thing, the supporters inside Anfield could have turned on me in a big way. I was aware attendances went down but verbally they were always very encouraging to the team.’
Souness continued his management career and there were some achievements. After winning the Turkish Cup at Galatasaray, he planted the flag of his club’s colours in the centre of the pitch at city rivals Fenerbahçe.
‘One of their board members had called me a cripple earlier in the season, so I thought it was the right thing to do,’ he reasons. ‘I loved it in Turkey and would have stayed much longer had the president that appointed me been elected again.’
Abroad, he also managed Torino and Benfica, and at home, Blackburn Rovers (where he was happiest) and Newcastle United. Yet the drive to improve himself and get results meant he could rarely enjoy the moment.
‘There have been far better players than me that have won nothing,’ he concludes. ‘I won a hell of a lot. I’ve had the most fantastic career in football when you consider where I started off to where I ended up. I have twenty-six medals to my name. I’m deemed as a failure as a manager of Liverpool. But I won eleven trophies in three countries after moving on. There are far better managers than me who haven’t won anything. So I’m proud of what I’ve achieved.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EVERYMAN,
Roy Evans, 1963–98
ROY EVANS’ PUPILS narrow somewhat, although not in a hostile way. There is a sense of acceptance. He appreciates the subject matter is near, the one he has discussed during every interview since leaving Liverpool in 1998 following thirty-five years’ service to a club where he filled nearly every staff role.
I have been leading to this point. We have spoken about his childhood, his brief playing career, becoming a successful reserve-team manager, first-team coach-cum-physiotherapist, then Graeme Souness’s assistant. And now here we are, arriving at the inevitable, discussing a term that ended up defining his entire managerial career, possibly his life – the Spice Boys.
‘I knew we’d get there eventually,’ he shrugs, taking a quick sip of his coffee before answering the question I’d just posed to him: did you feel let down by
the players in any way?
‘Listen,’ he begins matter-of-factly, sinking into the couch behind him. ‘You can call them Spice Boys or whatever you want, but when they played football matches, they wanted to win.’ A pause. More coffee. ‘The attitude was always good when it came to the game. They had a great ability. Did we fulfil our promise? Probably not. On our day we were as good as anybody but our day didn’t come quite often enough. We got caught out too many times believing we could attack any team and outscore them. It was my choice to go that way. Attacking was our strength. Just look at the players we had. But you could also say it was our downfall. The outside stuff – when players went home – it was irrelevant.’
There is a curious mix of positivity and stoicism in Evans’ tone. He is clearly proud of managing Liverpool. Yet there is pain. Surely it annoys him, being asked repeatedly about those white suits worn at the 1996 FA Cup final before losing to Manchester United, with people believing it was symptomatic of the fact he was too nice to impose the discipline supposedly required to achieve success?
‘I don’t see what the problem is with being a nice guy,’ he responds swiftly. ‘I hope I am a nice guy. Other Liverpool managers before me were nice guys too. We tried to do things in the right way.’
Evans insists that there were situations when he couldn’t be, as he puts it, ‘Mr Friendly’.
‘Like when you’re standing there in front of twenty lads doing a team talk and someone starts giggling at the back, you have to be on it. When Don Hutchison started sniggering about something I’d said in front of the group, I ripped straight into him and the room fell quiet pretty quickly.
‘You don’t have to like all of your players as people. You don’t even have to like all the staff you work with. But you have to make sure you have a relationship that works for the benefit of the group and the club. I was never one to stay angry. I brushed things off. I got on with things as normal after telling someone off. If there was a confrontation, I’d get over it quickly. Maybe some people saw that as me not being tough enough. Any manager will tell you, though, you can’t afford to hold grudges.’
He did not set out to be Liverpool’s manager anyway. Evans was no careerist.
‘I never wanted to be a coach, you really must understand that,’ he explains. ‘I’d played a few games for Liverpool’s first team. I was twenty-six. Bill Shankly had just retired and Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan approached me, asking whether I wanted to join the staff. “No way,” I told them. I felt like I had plenty of games left. It became a bit of a myth that I had problems with injuries. I just wasn’t playing much because there were better options than me. In the end, Bob and Joe nagged for a while. They wanted me to take charge of the reserve team. “Why not take the chance?” they kept asking. Tommy Smith was my best mate and best man at my wedding. He thought it was a good idea. So, after a lot of persuasion, I took it.
‘Individual ambition amongst the coaching staff wasn’t particularly encouraged at Liverpool. There wasn’t any clear policy but you had a job and you did it. You didn’t look for the next guy’s job. If it came along, great. As time went on, I progressed. I became first-team coach, running on to the pitch with the sponge. Then I became assistant under Graeme [Souness]. When Graeme left, I was offered the [manager’s] job by the chairman at his house and I’d accepted it within an hour. It was all done in a day. I didn’t ask him how much the contract was worth or anything like that. Until that point, I’d never really considered it – being a manager. But I realized that I had a lot of experience, having worked under some great people. I figured it was my turn.’
Anfield had been his place of work for his entire professional life. He knew of little else. Between 1994 and 1998, he was the gatekeeper to all Liverpool’s hopes and dreams. Yet he is the man on the street with the ordinary-sounding name: Roy Evans. His marriage to Mary is halfway through its fifth decade. He left school without many qualifications. He says he doesn’t read books. He wears a tank-top and when he meets me he is rattling a set of keys like an off-duty caretaker. He is short and has cropped silver hair. He speaks in old-school Scouse: fast, hushed and often from the side of his mouth. You have to listen closely. You could imagine him being the voice of reason in a lively football debate amongst punters at a darkened Dock Road tavern.
Evans was originally appointed after Souness’s departure because Liverpool wanted to return to tradition. Evans considered himself as the ‘spokesman’ for Liverpool. Yet he was the one with everything to lose.
When Evans took charge, only four years had passed since Liverpool’s last title. During his era, Liverpool were expected to be champions. They never were. Whenever Liverpool lost, the radio football phone-ins were clogged with listeners wanting to be listened to, talking about Evans’ position. Even when Liverpool drew or conceded a soft goal, there was a jam, the same people taking part, the same topics being discussed.
‘Of course I’d hear them,’ Evans says. ‘It’s very nice to get patted on the back. But most of the time as manager you’re taking stick. The good times don’t last very long. I’m always saying to people, “Hey, you might have an opinion but yours will never get put to the test.” My opinion was being tested week-in, week-out; day-in, day-out.
‘I’d supported Liverpool since the 1950s. I can remember when we were in the Second Division and struggling to get out of it. By the 1990s, there was a generation of supporters who’d been brought up on nothing but success. They wanted more of a say about what was going on. It might have been better if some of them had gone through a period of lean years. Then they’d understand what football is all about.’
Evans felt ‘an unbelievable pressure’ of expectancy. Before him, Souness underwent a triple heart bypass. Bill Shankly died a sad and lonely man. Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan were unable to communicate to a wider audience and their successes made them even more nervous as speakers in the public arena. Kenny Dalglish admits he lost the ability to make decisions, later referencing in the first of several autobiographies a Shankly quote about a ‘lifetime of dedication’ that ‘follows you home, follows you everywhere, and eats into your family life’. Evans had been there for all of this. He was aware that being in charge of Liverpool came at a price.
‘I’m not sure that being a fan of the team you manage is necessarily a good thing,’ he continues. ‘The doubts start the first time you get beaten. Only then do you realize what it means to so many people. You take the job, you say to yourself, “This is great – I’m managing Liverpool, the club I love, I know what this is about.” But your heart rules your head. When you’re winning, life is rosy. When you lose, you realize how it can spoil a person’s day or week. It’s your feelings multiplied by forty-five thousand people at Anfield and those watching it on TV or listening on the radio. Liverpool is a club where you’ve got people waiting outside the training ground every single day. It’s not just kids, either. Fellas are there; they’re twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five or forty years old. These people, they’re dependent on the result. It breaks their hearts when that doesn’t happen.
‘That’s the difficult part. It hit me hard. You obviously need to have some sort of social life yourself. If you haven’t seen the wife all week, which was regularly the case, you’d go out for a meal on a Saturday night. It wasn’t nice if we’d lost. You felt like you’d let people down, there was a horrible feeling deep in your stomach. You didn’t want to be there. There was a level of embarrassment to it. Whenever you were beaten, it felt like there were no positives. I’m certain it hurts even more when you support the team you’re managing. It hits you two ways. Like any person, you take a pride in your job but it also hits you as a fan. It’s a double whammy. The key is not to show any of this to the players.’
It took him weeks to even think about watching a replay of the 1996 cup final. ‘Would you want to watch that first half again? Fuckin’ hell …’ he pauses again. ‘But look, I came through the system, I’m probably the luckiest Liverpudlian ever, to be
able to be there as a kid, a player, do every job and end up as the manager. I don’t think there will be another person who does that.’
Evans was born on 4 October 1948 and grew up three miles north of Anfield in Bootle, an area that had suffered serious bombing during the Second World War due to its close proximity to Canada Dock and Gladstone Dock, a pair of significantly sized maritime landmarks that provided cargo links with North America and West Africa. Although Bootle is now virtually politically impregnable as one of the safest Labour seats in the country, at the start of the twentieth century it had been a Conservative haven – a reasonably prosperous suburb of boulevards and towering Victorian houses owned by rich merchants who once elected Andrew Bonar Law as their MP, a future Tory Prime Minister. After 1945, with the borough in need of rebuilding, those with money moved up the Mersey coastline to neighbouring Crosby or further to Blundellsands, Formby and then Ainsdale, Birkdale or Southport. Bootle took on a new identity. On the flattened land, new cheaper homes were built.
Out towards Netherton, an inland tangle of featureless council estates, the Evans family lived on Masefield Crescent before moving to a terraced house close to the large Mons Public House in the mid fifties. The Evanses were workers, his mother for English Electric and his father, Bill, on the production line at the nearby Dunlop rubber factory on Rice Lane in Walton. Bill’s income was supplemented through football. After playing for Liverpool’s youth team before the war, he signed for Cardiff City. It led to a decade playing semi-professionally for a series of clubs in the Welsh Football League.
‘Every Saturday, he’d be driving a few hours for a decent wage, £8 a week or £10 a week,’ Roy says. ‘It was a decent standard; there were no mugs. The teams were full of Liverpudlians with the same idea. Even when he stopped earning, he continued playing in the Business Houses League across Merseyside. It meant my mum saw more of my games than my dad did, because he’d be out earning money.’
