Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  But it was with Carr that Paisley established a habit of spending a week or two each summer – staying at the jockey’s place at Malton, North Yorkshire, in the close season and passing the days wandering around the stables, heading out on the gallops with Carr and contributing to such estate management work as dousing overgrown areas with petrol and throwing a match on it. Carr, a small man with comically large ears, came to stay at the Paisleys on one occasion, and there was no lack of suppressed mirth among the children.

  This interest in racing reached further than studying the form guide, as he had always watched his father try to do. At Malton, Paisley thought he began to see patterns of behaviour and physiology common to horses and the football players he worked with for most of the year. ‘You might get an older horse, like the occasional old professional footballer, looking as if he is saying, “Oh blimey, training again!” and just plodding around,’ he once reflected. ‘But on the big race day he’ll be there showing himself off in front of the crowd and fairly flying in the race. We all know footballers like that, don’t we? If you’re edgy, the players will be edgy. If you’re tense, they’ll be tense. Players sense these things and I’m sure horses do, too. You can do too much with some horses in training and they’ve got nothing left for the race. Others love training and can’t get too much. So it is with footballers. Some need the loud voice; some the soft. Some horses are good in any going the same as some players, whereas some are just not suited to the heavy ground. A real thoroughbred will often want a donkey or a goat to travel with it in its box. In the same way, great players need lesser lights to support and bolster them.’

  In the brash world of Liverpool Football Club some laughed at this notion, but Paisley was impervious to that and it became one of the foundations of the way he viewed football. The application of equine analysis to football extended to him viewing physiological strengths and weaknesses as vital to performance in both sports. He developed a near sixth sense about opponents’ physical weaknesses, which colleagues found to be spookily prescient at times. In a match at Newcastle United in September 1961, he saw Newcastle’s Ivor Allchurch fall in the first half and indicated in the dressing-room at half-time that he felt the player was immobile and should be pressed. Liverpool did so and won 2–1. The Stoke City defender Calvin Palmer was another he pinpointed as a weak link – carrying a thigh injury – at Anfield on Boxing Day 1963. Liverpool won 6–1. Several players also recall Paisley identifying the way that Bolton Wanderers goalkeeper Eddie Hopkinson fell badly in a match the same season and urging the players to push harder at corners. Another Liverpool win at Anfield ensued: 2–0.

  The same intuition contributed to an absorption with creating the right blend of players, perhaps using the strengths of one to mitigate for a weakness of another. ‘The perfect player has never been born,’ he once said. He knew that the finest players did not always bring the best results. He continued to watch Liverpool’s reserves and scouted players that Liverpool thought they might sign. He looked for any way of winning.

  What he’d not lost in the ten years since playing was the satisfaction that beating opponents brought in the hard game of football. Ten years with ‘Shankly’ – witnessing his mood after defeats – made the desire for success infectious. Winning became routine. It made Paisley a sore loser.

  Others shared the sentiment. By 1967, Paisley, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett had been joined on the backroom staff by 33-year-old Ronnie Moran, a former Liverpool captain in the twilight of his Anfield playing days. The quartet had seen at close quarters what Shankly’s football creed had achieved – and the further it took them as a club the more absorbed they became about how to extract the slightest hint of competitive advantage. Fagan worked a few evenings a week as coach for the employees of the Guinness Export brewery at Aughton, north of Liverpool, and they repaid him in kind with a healthy supply of the stout. They stored it in the little room at Anfield where the players’ boots were kept and where, for week after week, Paisley, Moran, Fagan and Bennett sat on upturned beer crates and dissected the players, opponents and challenges ahead. Some of their ideas would make it to Shankly, though he was not part of the collective and didn’t tend to venture into the place they called ‘the Boot Room’, besides occasionally arriving to seek out Bennett, his assistant until the 1971 reshuffle. He was wise enough to see that there was wisdom generated in there, though did not contribute to it.

  It was in a more conventional football physiotherapist’s role that Paisley became better known to the wider world. The Kop paper described breathlessly in 1967 how he was using ‘some of the most modern equipment and medication ever discovered to keep the Liverpool lads at peak fitness’. The paper encouraged its readers to examine an image of Paisley using his aerosol on winger Ian Callaghan on the pitch – ‘the type usually used to contain fly killers, air sweeteners and ladies’ hair lacquer’. Paisley explained how the aerosol ‘deadens the nerve ends, prevents swelling and, if there’s a cut on the injury it congeals the blood’. A ‘mod’ is what The Kop called him.

  He certainly wasn’t always that. His enthusiasm for the sample products which the medical companies sent his way was not always judicious. ‘It was torture at times!’ says St John. ‘And it was funny, because none of them had a degree in anything except football.’

  There was an episode involving the director T. V. Williams and laxative tablets on an away trip which few ever forgot, and there were also consequences when defender Chris Lawler’s cartilage locked on him during a game at Queens Park Rangers, prompting Paisley to produce an ice pack of crystals which he packed around the defender’s leg and bandaged up. The team were on the train back north to Liverpool Lime Street when Lawler’s knee began throbbing and burning. Lawler disappeared to the toilet to investigate the problem and removed the bandage and crystals. The crystals had fixed themselves to the skin and ripped off as he tried to take them away. A specialist who examined the leg at Anfield the next morning was dismayed by what he saw. Paisley’s crystals had been a disaster and Lawler was told he must wait a month for the skin to heal before a cartilage operation. Lawler felt that his leg was never the same again and suspected that the delay to surgery was significant. He even felt Paisley had pushed Shankly to get him selected for Liverpool’s 1974 FA Cup final against Newcastle United as a way of paying him back for causing irrevocable medical harm. He says Paisley told him, ‘I owed you one,’ after Liverpool’s 3-0 win. Both Shankly and Paisley would try anything if it made winning more likely.

  Over time, the two of them became complementary: one providing such vision and inspiration that the players thought they could part the seas; the other the details underpinning it. Neither of them was at his best when it came to direct confrontation, but Paisley could at least take the emotion out of those moments. Beneath the quiet exterior, he was the harder and more unflinching of the pair. It meant that he became the conveyor of Shankly’s bad news, gripes and complaints.

  Shankly would use Paisley as a proxy when it came to dealing with his most common grouse: players who were on the treatment table. ‘Is he swinging the lead, Bob?’ Shankly would generally say to Paisley in a loud voice, within the offender’s earshot.

  Paisley reached such an understanding of how Shankly’s mind worked that he seemed to know how to head off a scene between the boss and a player. He knew there was no point entering into an argument with Shankly, because there would only ever be one winner, so he looked for more cunning means of persuasion.

  ‘If you were unfit, Bob pronounced you as unfit, but you had to say you were fit, run around a bit and then let the boss talk you out of it,’ says St John. ‘He did it with me one time. I said, “I think I’ll be OK, boss.” When Shanks saw you it was, “Christ, son! You can’t play.”’

  John Toshack felt that Paisley’s cunning stretched to double-bluffing Shankly over team selection. ‘Bob reached the stage where if Shanks said, “I don’t know whether to play John or Kevin,” and Bob wanted him to play
Kevin, Bob would say, “I’d play John,”’ says Toshack. ‘Bob was very, very clever and shrewd in that respect.’ St John would often hear the long-suffering assistant’s account of Shank’s latest far-fetched request. ‘Bloody hell. You’ll never guess what he wants now . . .’

  More often than not, Paisley’s role as the bridge between Shankly and the players simply entailed being the bringer of bad tidings. And that contributed substantially to the sense that he was the manager’s lackey or hatchet man, reporting tales back to Shankly which might affect the players’ chances of playing the next week. Paisley’s nickname was ‘the Rat’ and though that had initially been in recognition of his role serving with Montgomery’s Desert Rats, many of the players had a more literal and unheroic application of the term.

  ‘Shanks’s hatchet man,’ is how Kevin Keegan described him. ‘Shanks would load the gun and Bob would fire the bullets.’ Steve Heighway, signed by Shankly in 1970, viewed the fealty of Paisley with suspicion. ‘He was always at Shankly’s shoulder, always trying to see through what Shanks wanted,’ says Heighway. ‘If there was ever any criticism it would come from Bob. If there was any toughness it would come from Bob. Not in an aggressive, big-time personality way. But when he came out, everybody was on their guard. Everyone was quite frightened of Bob in the early years before he became manager.’

  It would have helped Paisley’s popularity if his own powers of communication had been better. But while Shankly won people’s hearts and minds, Paisley, for many, lacked a redeeming feature, and that made him hard to love. ‘Shanks was the one who could build you up and make you feel special,’ says Phil Thompson, who was coming through the ranks. ‘Bob was the one to knock you down. He would be there, scurrying, pointing the finger at you. He was the nark.’

  Toshack’s interpretation of Paisley’s machinations would prove to be extremely shrewd decades later but, in the early seventies, he simply didn’t seem to have a relationship with the man: ‘It was very, very difficult to get Bob to open out . . . to have any conversation with him – like trying to get blood out of a stone. He was a strange sort of character. There was always a little bit of a mystery about Bob. For us as players, it was all Shanks. Bob was just a physio.’ John Bennett, who was signed by Shankly but never played for him, remarked that ‘one stare from Bob made you go cold’.

  Yet Heighway would be surprised to know that to others Paisley could be the father confessor at times, able to grasp the small personal detail which Shankly had neither the time nor patience for.

  Paisley’s medical samples may not have helped Lawler but the defender sought solace in him when Shankly refused to allow him to go on honeymoon after the European Cup semi-final against Internazionale in 1965, insisting instead that the full-back accompany the rest of the squad on a players’ trip to Mallorca – without wives. Paisley was ‘much easier to deal with than Shanks because he listened to your problems’, according to Lawler – though he still had to go to the Balearics, as Shankly had instructed.

  It was Paisley who talked to Ian St John, a part of the team since 1961, when Shankly dropped him to the bench for a league match as the end of his Liverpool days approached in the autumn of 1969. ‘Remember how Shank has been to the players down the years,’ Paisley told him. ‘Everyone has to accept that the end will come.’ St John got to know him through the Sunday mornings at Anfield, when he would be on the treatment table receiving Paisley’s medical treatment. ‘You could talk to him,’ says St John. ‘He always made good points. I loved that.’

  In later years, when Paisley managed the team, the joke would be about his impenetrable north-east accent. ‘That’s footballers being piss-takers,’ St John says. ‘Shanks was precise and dogmatic if he was giving someone orders. Bob was different but you could hear what he was saying.’

  Why did Paisley divide opinion in this way? Perhaps because the players who wore their hearts on their sleeves, like Keegan and Alec Lindsay, were the only ones this essentially awkward man could reach, and on those occasions you imagine they would have done more of the talking. Things were different with the more aloof and worldly characters, like Toshack and Heighway. With his essential shyness, Paisley did not excel at initiating social pathways.

  Older players felt he was bringing technical and tactical changes to bear too. Tommy Smith always believed Paisley had made Keegan ‘more tactically aware’. Paisley also worked closely with young goalkeeper Ray Clemence. In his early days at Liverpool, Clemence had difficulty kicking the dead ball and he always recalled being heckled by his own supporters in a home game against Swansea Town (soon to become Swansea City) in September 1968 for scuffing his goal-kicks in a gale. It was so bad that Swansea’s players were deliberately shooting wide to concede goal-kicks as way of regaining easy possession. Paisley identified the young keeper’s fear of playing in the wind and had the flags removed from the top of Anfield stadium to take his mind off the breeze. He would also work in the gym with him on boxing routines. Paisley’s skill on the boxing speed balls was his only sporting attribute which impressed the players. He believed that developing a similar skill would help the goalkeeper’s reactions.

  It was always the quiet word from him on these occasions, rather than the group discussion, and to those who discovered this side he was the human face of the Shankly–Paisley partnership. ‘He got wiser and wiser and wiser,’ says Keith Burkinshaw, who played for the reserves from 1953 to 1957 and later became Tottenham Hotspur manager. ‘There was absolutely nothing fancy about Bob. He just got right to the meat of the problem immediately. There were no fancy words with him and he stripped everything to the bone. The players knew this and they responded and reacted to the honesty that shone through and the plain way he said things.’

  There was a Boot Room purdah which made it difficult to know whether Shankly or Paisley contributed most to specific developments in the team’s playing style, though the fact that Shankly never joined those gatherings seems significant. He appears to have concentrated on getting the psychology right while the backroom staff handled the mechanics, with Paisley the most tactically literate of them all. ‘We would not know what went on in there,’ says Ian St John. ‘And no one dared ask. No one knew what Bill or Bob suggested. It just happened.’

  Paisley seems to have played a substantial role in the development of a new style of goalkeeping at Liverpool which had a lasting impact on the way the side played throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Tommy Lawrence, the keeper signed before Shankly’s arrival, made up a Melwood five-a-side team also comprising Shankly, Paisley, Fagan and Bennett which regularly took on five of the first team’s outfield players. There were no goalkeepers in those games so Lawrence played as a defender. The coaches realised that they were conceding fewer goals than they would had he operated in his goal. Shankly subsequently called Lawrence into a meeting in his office, at which the Boot Room members were present, and told him he was to advance out of his area in Liverpool’s games as well, thus allowing the midfield to push up and play a high defensive line. The team’s keepers continued to do so for the next 20 years.

  Paisley’s intuition about injuries helped solve some substantial difficulties in that realm, too. There was a serious problem when Keegan persistently complained of foot discomfort, soon after signing in the summer of 1971. Shankly was so irritated that he told him to his face that he was a ‘malingerer’ – one of his favoured terms of opprobrium for those in the treatment room.

  It was Paisley who methodically searched his medical experience for a solution. ‘He started to interrogate me about the strangest things,’ Keegan said. ‘Did I live in an attic with a lot of stairs? Was I walking up hills? Was I going horse riding? They even asked me if I had been skiing! In Liverpool?’ Eventually, Keegan’s new car, a green Capri, was seized upon as the suspect. ‘They went out and virtually stripped the motor, lifted the carpets. It was decided that one of the pedals was too stiff. For someone who wasn’t fully qualified, Bob was as good a physiotherapist as a club
could have.’

  Shankly later ascribed himself the leading role in the Keegan foot-injury discovery. In his autobiography, published in 1976, he said it was he who had interrogated Keegan about the Capri and then sent Joe Fagan to go out and test the clutch. ‘That,’ said Shankly, was ‘how we paid attention to detail.’ Keegan ‘stopped driving that car and stopped driving altogether for a while until his foot was better.’

  This reflected Shankly’s descriptions and discussions of his relationship with Paisley. He rarely acknowledged the assistant. Theirs was one of those double acts which, like Busby and Jimmy Murphy, Clough and Peter Taylor, Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison, have delivered some of the greatest success stories in football. One of the pair is generally brash; the other more contemplative and withdrawn. But Busby and Clough were far more inclined to acknowledge the quiet man’s contribution. ‘He was my bridge to the players,’ Busby said of Murphy. ‘I couldn’t have done it without him,’ Clough said of Taylor.

  But acknowledgements from Shankly about Paisley are hard to find. The Scot’s autobiography mentions just two specific contributions from Paisley, and neither has much significance. One came on the eve of Liverpool’s European Cup semi-final against the Milanese giants Internazionale in 1965, when the noise from the abbey bell tower in Como, northern Italy, threatened the players’ sleep, and Paisley was standing by, ready to be deputed to climb the tower and wrap cotton wool and bandages around the offending bells at Shankly’s request – though they were talked out of it. ‘That would have been one of the funniest things Bob had ever done!’ Shankly writes.

  The other came when defender Emlyn Hughes was injured in a pre-season friendly in Cologne, in the summer of 1967, after a challenge that looked likely to earn him a dismissal. Paisley was instructed to make a fuss of Hughes’s injury as a stalling device to prevent him being sent off, though the strategy didn’t work and Hughes was ordered off.