by Ian Herbert
In memory of Tony Binns
(1943–1999)
Contents
Prologue
1 On Bank
2 Isn’t That So, Bob?
3 Not Me
4 Hello, Boss
5 Room with No Windows
6 We Need to Talk About Kevin
7 Munching Gladbach
8 Transfer Committee
9 Red Tree Challenge
10 Frank’s Lonely Road
11 Hetton Spirit
12 Trouble
13 End of the Road
14 Afterwards
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Plates
Index
Prologue
The black and white newspaper page from the early 1980s provides the haziest representation of the goal which delivered one of Liverpool Football Club’s most improbable victories and how it came to pass.
There is the outline of a white-shirted footballer, the tight black shorts of his day barely covering the thighs, the arms outstretched as he, Ray Kennedy, holds his balance having struck the ball with his right foot. It is grainy, with none of the cropped-in, telephoto focus to which we have become accustomed, and which could shout down through the years the story of that goal, in Bayern Munich’s Olympic Stadium.
And way down beneath, so small as to be barely legible, tucked away in near six-point type, are the briefest reflections of the Liverpool manager, which today, when every comment on football is pored over, deconstructed and analysed, would command the back page headline of every paper in the land. ‘This was our 113th European match and I believe it was our best performance in all these years,’ said Bob Paisley, after Kennedy’s studiously delivered shot had brought him the goal which sent Liverpool forward into the final of the 1981 European Cup: a match which they would win, amid scenes of wild acclaim in Paris.
It was in an April clear-out that I stumbled across this clipping and more like it, cut out from the newspapers of early teenage years and later stuffed into a cardboard box. The fragments had been first read and collected at our home in North Wales, where the foggy impression of the Kennedy goal belonged to the beautiful mystique those football nights held back then. There were BBC radio commentaries of matches from distant lands, too, but it was the newspapers’ breathless dispatches and corny headlines we really devoured. One for that Munich night, on which Liverpool’s defence was beseiged, carried the headline: ‘Back to the Blitz.’
Eight years after that match, I began my own career as a reporter on the Liverpool Daily Post – then still one of the great daily regional newspapers – in a city 50 miles away. In time, a circuitous path would lead me, late, into the world of sports reporting, for the Independent, then still one of the great daily national newspapers. By that point the monochrome world had long gone, replaced by a digital appetite for football information so relentless that the managers’ words were the talk of the land within minutes of a post-match press conference. Nowadays their observations are dissected so relentlessly that they generally avoid giving out any superlatives for fear of generating hyperbole. Those words from Paisley in Munich – ‘our best performance of all these years’ – would be gold-dust now, republished thousands of times above an image of the manager.
It was the new world which, amid the smudged and faded clippings, provoked a thought about the old one: ‘Where is Paisley?’ How could he possibly be absent from this narrative? His tactical imagination against the Germans that night had certainly been just as significant as Kennedy’s goal. His star forward, Kenny Dalglish, had been injured and withdrawn inside ten minutes. Paisley replaced him with Howard Gayle, a rookie substitute who became the game’s outstanding player. He then substituted the substitute and, having done so, saw Liverpool’s critical goal arrive. His defence was so injury-wracked that two of its constituent parts had a handful of games’ experience between them. He had repositioned Kennedy, a midfielder, to the place where the centre-forward should be, when he scored. And yet Paisley barely emerged from the newspaper margins. He was the six-point leader, you might say.
Today we are hurtling through the age of the box-office football manager, in which the most ordinary of that number assume the significance of international statesmen, the best are considered divinely gifted, and someone as undemonstrative as Bob Paisley, with his propensity for flat caps, Brylcreem and cardigans, is considered an anachronism. Sir Alex Ferguson won the European Cup twice at the helm of Manchester United and in retirement has become the subject of Harvard theses, speaking tours and management manuals. Paisley won the European Cup three times. He became a freeman of the City of Liverpool.
Ferguson delivered 28 trophies in 27 years; Clough 11 trophies in 18 years. Paisley won 14 in nine years, adding six league titles to the European Cups. If success in football management is judged – as it well might be – by the ratio of trophies to seasons, then Paisley stands head and shoulders above them all: 1.5 to Clough’s 0.61 and Ferguson’s 1.03. And yet that Munich match report was a metaphor for his abiding obscurity. Why?
There is a clue on the cover of the definitive encyclopaedia of Liverpool FC, written by the club’s celebrated Icelandic historians Arnie Baldursson and Gudmundur Magnusson. It carries a montage of those who have made Liverpool one of the most famous football teams in the world and on the right flank – the margins – is Paisley in flared grey suit and vivid, patterned tie, grinning. Centre stage, arms outstretched as if to say, ‘This is what I bequeathed you,’ is the legendary Bill Shankly, Paisley’s predecessor. Shankly was the man who took the club up to football’s First Division, secured a first title in 17 years, and with his charisma and vaulting self-belief established himself in perpetuity as the man who made Liverpool great. Shankly did make Liverpool great. And Paisley made Liverpool very much greater.
Within three years of succeeding Shankly, he had delivered Liverpool’s first European Cup, having introduced a new style of football. By the time he bowed out, he had won that trophy for a third time with an entirely reconstructed team. Shankly’s Liverpool won the English title three times in 15 years. Only twice in eight years, after his own first season of acclimatisation, did any team but Paisley’s Liverpool win that title.
Noisy, demonstrative, extrovert managers were becoming all the rage when, at the age of 55, Paisley succeeded Bill Shankly. Brian Clough, Malcolm Allison and Don Revie were the alpha-male leaders, running the alpha-male players who were living life large and basking in the new trappings of celebrity status.
Those managerial protagonists seem more attractive than ever now. We are transfixed as they leap to their feet from the dugout, ripping up the plan, ruling with a rod of iron, wheeling and dealing in the transfer market as football’s carousel spins faster and faster. We like their sound and fury because anything less than noise is viewed with scepticism in football’s widening gyre. The extrovert managers, with their jokes and aphorisms, controversies and stunts, make the writers’ jobs so easy, too. They construct the narrative and write their own headlines.
Not so the introvert. Paisley’s jokes were often lame, his County Durham accent was sometimes impenetrable and the idea of self-promotion embarrassed him. The only vivid aspect of Bob Paisley was the colour and pattern of his very wide ties.
Only in the past five years has quietness been shown to have a value in life, work and management. Susan Cain’s analysis, in her book Quiet, reveals a group who ‘listen more than they talk, think before they speak’. Some of the characteristics Cain describes – such as an aversion to personal conflict – do fit Paisley. Some, including a predisposition to deep conversations, do not. Invaluable though Cain’s work was, in society at large and sport most particularly, there is still no recogni
tion of quietness having, say, an equal value to extrovert behaviour.
But Paisley showed there was another way. The quiet man broke a football management mould by adhering to the principles and working practices that his predecessor, Bill Shankly, had put in place and resisting the temptation to rip it all up and create a team in his image. Then, undemonstratively and assuredly, he made changes to personnel and the playing system which took the team on to far greater heights.
With an innate distrust of grandstanding and the grandiose, Paisley worked in the finer details and built a route to success through the accretion of small improvements, decades before Dave Brailsford, as performance director of British Cycling, articulated the theory of marginal gains. ‘There are no big things, only a logical accumulation of little things done at a very high standard of performance,’ the late John Wooden, US basketball coach and leadership guru once said. Paisley left behind no such pearls of spoken wisdom, though these words pretty much encapsulate what he brought. Equally integral to his success was the capacity, identified by Cain as the crucial component of the quiet man’s armoury, to empower others and to embrace their input.
To take failing teams to greatness – as Ferguson and Clough did – was an almighty challenge. To succeed a managerial legend and make a great club even greater was unprecedented. Twice in the past half-century, Manchester United have demonstrated the near impossibility of doing so. Cain’s book was published in 2012, the year before Ferguson’s departure from United presaged a chronic disintegration at Old Trafford, which reacquainted the club’s faithful with an appreciation of what it takes to replace an individual who has become the heartbeat of a club. Ferguson’s successors are still ripping it up and starting again.
Appreciation of Paisley did not seem to be tumbling out of that box of artefacts I found. There was an ‘Official Annual’ series that Liverpool produced for a number of years. He didn’t even make it onto the cover of the 1983 edition, even though it was to be his final year at the helm. ‘There’s been a lot of talk about my retirement,’ he says in the ghosted preface. ‘As this is written, I can say that I’ve not made any decision yet. I’m still on a contract. I feel well, I have a few minor things to sort out about my pension but the main thing is that I’m not being forced into anything . . .’
How extraordinary to read Paisley – who had already delivered Liverpool 14 trophies in eight years by then – expressing gratitude that he was not being pushed out of the door.
It was in 1999, 13 years after he stepped down from the managerial seat and three years after his death, that his contribution was physically acknowledged in a set of black, wrought-iron gates erected outside the Liverpool FC stadium on Anfield Road. They were the product of the club’s realisation that it might have done more to mark the achievement of its most successful manager. The ironwork included the words ‘Paisley Gateway’ – though with Liverpool’s modern souvenir shop set ten metres behind them the gates did not lead anywhere. They were a ‘gateway’ to a redbrick wall. The accompanying tile depicting Paisley’s face, set into brickwork beneath, is generally overlooked because the fans who pass by don’t tend to stop and stare. They are absorbed by a different, more obvious landmark: the 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Bill Shankly, a few metres away.
As the club’s search to rediscover the success Paisley brought them in the 1970s and 1980s goes on, the thirst quickens for an understanding of why he delivered so much. When one of the journalists who reported day to day on his managerial career, the Daily Express’s John Keith, decided to stage a series of evening events in which some of Paisley’s former players shared their memories, he found that they were quickly selling out. The response, on one of those evenings, when someone suggested that there should be a statue to Paisley too, was spontaneous and unscripted: 150 people rose to their feet in unanimous applause.
Beyond Liverpool, there is less talk, though. The 25th anniversary of Liverpool’s last title – secured by Paisley’s successor Kenny Dalglish with a squad including most of Paisley’s team – came and went. Yet in the past two years, Paisley’s body of work has warranted barely a hundred mentions in the quality national press, a fifth of the number claimed by Brian Clough.
How could it have been that an individual so lacking in the egotism which has been a prerequisite of elite football could come to command a dressing-room of stars? How did he manage to assemble the greatest side of the late 1970s and 1980s when he lacked the powers of oration and was so palpably undemonstrative? How did he accomplish the feat of becoming Bill Shankly’s successor when football is littered with stories of failure after the second in command has stepped up to fill such huge boots? How did he keep winning, year after year? What did he really feel about the fact that the Shankly legend overshadowed him back then, as it still does now?
There was not a single image in the newspapers of Paisley from that spring evening in Munich, though the photographic archive did turn one up. It reveals the Liverpool ‘dugout’ in the Olympic Stadium to have been a makeshift bench, carried over the stadium running track to the side of the pitch. Paisley leaves the seats to others. The camera captures him in his overcoat, on his feet, eyes intently fixed on the pitch, his coaching team clustered behind him. To stare at this image is to be struck by what the most unobtrusive and unaffected leader can bring out in others. ‘Who was Paisley?’ After all of these years, it seemed like a good time to find out.
1
On Bank
The war was over and the land of the free called for a young man with the world at his feet. The Queen Mary passenger liner would sail from Southampton at 1 p.m. on Saturday 4 May, and he would be on it.
At the other end of the Atlantic Ocean lay an itinerary including the film premieres of Rita Hayworth and Lucille Ball, air travel, the jazz sound, baseball and heavyweight boxing at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There were to be two weeks of it, because the United States awaited the pleasure of young stars of Liverpool Football Club. It was a place for them to escape the bleak British post-war reality of factory closures and bread rations, to feel alive and to feel for the first time how it was to be famous. A group of GI brides would be setting sail with the Liverpool team, destined for their own new worlds. It was a voyage of discovery, for sure, and anticipation filled the air.
Yet even as they sailed, he longed for the day they would be back. He carried a small, blue gilt-edged diary in which he would measure out the days, chronicling how he had filled each one in small black capital letters, six square inches for each entry. In the future, when this diary was one of the very few written testaments to the workings of his interior mind, it would reveal that the celebrity sound didn’t suit him all that well. The quietness of his own front room was what he actually liked best. The diary reveals the kaleidoscope of experiences those 22 days brought: deck tennis and quoits on board the Queen Mary; travel on an aeroplane, from New York to St Louis, with a refuel at Daytona – ‘Lie down as usual while plane is in motion. Find it much the best,’ he wrote; watching Brooklyn Dodgers beat New York Giants 5–4 in beautiful California sunshine – ‘Nothing to arouse our spirits’; and discovering that there were no tickets to watch European heavyweight champion Bruce Woodcock fight – ‘Disappointment.’
The letters he received were where the joy resided: 11 on a single day in the second week away, and all of them from home, restoring him to the quotidian preoccupations of life back there – which is to say, love and a promise to bring home some stockings. His girl was called Jessie and he had told her he would fetch some.
‘Two letters from Jess and one from mother. Letters always help the moral [sic], especially from Jessie,’ he writes one day. ‘Two more letters from Jess, I think she loves me now,’ he reports on another. ‘Arrive hotel about 9. Lovely surprise 11 letters, eight from my darling,’ he relates. ‘More letters today. I have only got to see wether [sic] she keeps her word.’
They set sail again for home and the days of sunshine faded to cloud, th
ough that was a good thing. ‘Today is more like our own weather. Still, it shows we are getting nearer,’ he writes as the ship neared port. And then the purgatory was over. The diary was no longer needed. Bob Paisley was home.
Hetton-le-Hole sounds like a place that puts you down in the earth, with a distance to climb if you want to reach for the stars. That much is true. It was built on a coal seam, reached via a 6-foot-square-cage lift which sent a workforce 100 feet below the surface.
It was Bob Paisley’s place, though – the town south of Sunderland in England’s industrial north-east where he was born and to which he would look for any chance to drop in, down the years. He was 27 years old when he made his pre-season trip to the United States with Liverpool Football Club in 1946, but Hetton was still home to him, even then. It was the place that he carefully wrote on the address page of the diary he briefly kept during that trip: ‘Mr R. Paisley, 31 Downs Lane, Hetton-le-Hole, Co Durham.’
That was the Paisleys’ fourth house in the village. There had been Front Street, where he was born on 23 January 1919, then a rented place on The Avenue, followed by a Hetton Lyon’s Colliery house at Nicholas Street and, finally, the redbrick terrace on Downs Lane. The frequent house moves reflected the struggle to find somewhere big enough for a growing family of four sons.
The coal seam was becoming exhausted when he arrived as the second child of Samuel and Emily Paisley (née Downs). The miners pushed their luck to extract what was left of the raw material. Paisley’s father suffered a serious arm injury and insisted that his sons would not go underground as he had. Paisley was subsequently assigned a role sorting coal from stone in an area at the top of the pithead known as ‘On Bank’. The mine closed three months after Samuel sustained the injury. There was an air of grim resignation about that.
Some 200 miles away on the Ayrshire coalfield, the family of Bill Shankly railed against the same diminishing natural resource and working-class impoverishment. Shankly’s father, John, breathed socialist hellfire. But Samuel Paisley was a quiet, more passive soul. He would not have minded admitting that horse racing absorbed him more than socialism and he did not see himself as an organiser. In the only remaining image of him and Emily, taken on the doorstep of Downs Lane, it is she who stands in the foreground, hands clasped, exuding warmth, with the unmistakable air of a woman who got things done. Samuel stands in the semi shadow, the tie, waistcoat and jacket just visible.
