Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  The myriad orders carried out for Shankly by his assistant also included pumping air into footballs the Scot was wrongly convinced the opposition bench were deliberately deflating during one pre-season tour (leaving the said sphere resembling a ‘small boulder’, according to Ian St John) and painting St John’s testicles and groin with iodine and boot polish, allowing the manager to ‘prove’ to the press that a Coventry City player, Brian Lewis, had grabbed them on Boxing Day 1967. (St John had punched Lewis and been sent off.)

  ‘Perhaps some of my psychology has rubbed off on Bob,’ Shankly reflected later. ‘I’m not saying that he copies me, but he might say to himself, “Well, I remember one time such-and-such happened and Bill did that. I’ll do the same.”’

  There were times when Paisley found Shankly’s indifference to others excruciating, though there is no evidence that he ever told him so. There were no arguments between the two that any can recall. Paisley remembered a trip to play Swansea Town in 1963, and the team stayed in Porthcawl. Two elderly women were in the television room of the hotel, waiting to watch Coronation Street and thus preventing Shankly from watching the boxing on the other channel. There were 14 in the Liverpool group, so he called for a vote. ‘Shank thought he was being democratic,’ Paisley reflected. ‘I walked out, I was too embarrassed to stay and watch.’

  The pair once drove four hours to Lincoln to watch a goalkeeper, stopped at Doncaster to eat, arrived late for the match and had only observed a quarter of an hour’s play before Shankly announced, ‘I’ve seen enough.’ ‘The goalkeeper had had nothing to do but Shank had already decided he wasn’t for us,’ Paisley said. ‘I don’t know what he saw, but he saw something. [Shankly] was an impulsive man.’

  Paisley seems to have challenged Shankly’s thinking only occasionally. ‘The business of offering advice is fraught with problems,’ he said years later. ‘Bill didn’t give advice. He gave orders. Advice, by its very nature, must be something other people can take or leave.’ In another reflection on their partnership, he said, ‘The only thing possibly we had in common was we wanted to win and we were two bad losers.’

  It could not be said that they were friends. Though Jessie Paisley and Nessie Shankly came to know each other better later in life, no one can remember Shankly ever turning up at Paisley’s front door. There was no social visit from the Shanklys that Paisley’s family can recall.

  There was plenty to discuss by 1970. Perhaps it was inevitable that, having inculcated such self-belief in his players, Shankly should not have seen that they were mortal and ageing fast. A humiliating FA Cup sixth-round defeat at Watford in 1970 was the most graphic sign that the side Shankly had built up were fading. Watford won 1–0 but the indignity could have been far worse. Ray Lugg made a fool of defender Peter Wall, placing the ball through the defender’s legs and crossing for Barry Endean, who had been left free to head past Tommy Lawrence.

  Alun Evans, signed for £110,000 as an 18-year-old from Wolves, Tommy Lawrence, long-standing defender Gerry Byrne, St John and Ron Yeats were no longer good enough and this was the game which persuaded Shankly to let most of them go. ‘A lot of our players were about the same age and I had given them a set time as to how long I thought they would last,’ Shankly said in his autobiography. ‘I had told them, “If you are a good athlete, your best seasons will be between 28 and 33. I had my best seasons during that period of my life.” I thought some of them would have gone on longer than they did, because of their experience. Maybe the success they had shortened their careers. Perhaps they were no longer hungry enough. We had a mediocre time for while in the late 1960s as we prepared for the 1970s.’

  Paisley had a different view of longevity. In his eyes no two players’ ‘best seasons’ would necessarily be the same. Some of those who had delivered most for him were sold before the age of 28. None was kept until the age of 33.

  If the ageing Liverpool side was a source of concern to Paisley, then he either said nothing or failed to persuade Shankly of the fact. After Liverpool had won their second championship in three years in 1966, they did not win a trophy for six years – finishing fifth, third, second, fifth and fifth in the five subsequent seasons. The runners-up finish of 1968–69 looked more competitive than it was: Liverpool finished six points off Leeds United, with the two Manchester teams’, Everton’s and Arsenal’s titles in surrounding seasons providing a sense that there were dangers everywhere.

  Gradually, Liverpool emerged from the barren years. Shankly bought young players from the lower leagues – Keegan and Clemence – and, in time, they were ready. The side won the First Division title and the UEFA Cup in 1973, and the following season’s FA and UEFA Cups. The players who gathered at Anfield for pre-season training in July 1974 were viewed as the ones who stood on the cusp of renewed success. The local papers offered no sense of clouds on the horizon. Heighway had scored 41 not out in 11 overs for Southport v New Brighton in cricket’s National Club Knockout. The Liverpool Echo announced that Clemence would be switching on the Christmas lights in Skelmersdale that winter.

  And then came two bombshells. Shankly told the world that he was stepping down, and Liverpool told Paisley that they wanted him to be their next manager. For the man who had spent the best part of 15 years lost in Shankly’s conversation, the first revelation was shocking. The second was beyond belief.

  3

  Not Me

  Christine Paisley was 20 and had been at a schoolfriend’s wedding in Liverpool on the day that the Anfield edifice came crashing down and her father’s boss announced that he was walking away from the club which had become his spiritual home. The news about Bill Shankly was everywhere. They’d even officially announced it on the public address system in St John’s Market in the city centre. But somehow she hadn’t caught the news until she walked back up to the front door of South Manor Way, let herself in and her mother told her. Christine had never considered her father to be famous. The nearest she had got to such a notion was seeing him run onto the field with a sponge. The reaction of her mother, Jessie, made it patently clear that the last thing Bob Paisley intended to do was to stake a claim to be the next Liverpool manager. This was the man who still liked to do the ironing on Sunday afternoons and who often wore Jessie’s ‘Dame Edna Everage’ spectacles for reading because he had never got around to buying a pair of his own. A man whose capacity for a life without football was evident every time he leaned back in his black vinyl swivel chair in the front room, placed his feet on the mantelpiece and watched the racing, or put on Jim Reeves or Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado on the record player.

  ‘Is Dad going to take over now?’ Christine asked her mother.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she replied.

  Paisley, back at the club that day, felt the same. His morning talk was full of the usual summer recollections – the stables, the seaside and the cricket. He would take some convincing that this wasn’t just one of those standard threats to resign which ‘Shank’ had issued several times before this time of the year. Summer madness: that’s what Peter Robinson, the club secretary who seemed to have been talking Shankly out of finishing every June since the late 1960s, always called it. The hot summer of 1974 – when the world was absorbed by the death throes of President Richard Nixon’s attempts to ride out the Watergate scandal and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus – seemed no different. ‘Just give it a couple of weeks and he’ll be back to normal,’ Robinson assured the board.

  Robinson always put Shankly’s loose threats about walking away down to the way the emptiness of the close season gnawed away at his self-confidence, when there were no football matches to occupy his restless mind. For all his exuberance, Shankly had a terrible fear of failure and of what that would mean to the supporters. In the six fallow years between 1966 and 1973 many fans had written to the Anfield board to say Shankly was finished. With his obsessive knowledge of every aspect of the club, there would have been no keeping that from him.

  Paisley and Shankly were no
t the kind to share such anxieties, or how they saw the future unfolding. The only interest they shared beyond football was boxing – with a mutual admiration of Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson. The only ‘Bill and Bob’ ever known to sit in the front room of the Paisley household were Paisley’s accountants Bill Roberts and Bob Loughlin (also known to the family as ‘Bill and Ben’), who were paid for their help with a crate of Guinness Export, brought home from the Boot Room. Paisley tried his own way to talk Shankly down. ‘Go off on a cruise and recharge your batteries,’ he told him.

  But alarm bells rang when Robinson went down to Shankly’s office to remonstrate with him for a third time that summer and still could not get through. ‘Look, Bill, really you shouldn’t go. You’re too young and useful to go. You can stay here, and I know I can persuade the directors to let you do whatever you want,’ Robinson said. ‘You can work one day [or] every day, be manager or, if you don’t want to be manager, general manager – anything. You can literally name your job if you’ll stay.’

  But Shankly’s mind was set. ‘No. I want to go. I want to go,’ are the words Robinson remembers him saying. Conversation had to start moving on to who could fill the space he would leave. As the Liverpool Echo’s headline put it: ‘Search is on for a Superman.’ This, the paper reported, was the ‘biggest sensation in soccer’ since England had sacked Sir Alf Ramsey in April that year.

  Eventually, when it was clear he really could not be persuaded, Liverpool chairman John Smith and secretary Robinson asked the 60-year-old whom he felt should succeed him.

  ‘Jack Charlton,’ Shankly replied.

  It was an odd suggestion. Charlton was only two years into his first managerial appointment, at Middlesbrough. But it was his direct style of football that Robinson and Smith – whose joint task it was to recommend a successor – felt would not fit Anfield. ‘We just didn’t think Jack Charlton and the way he played was right for Liverpool at that time,’ says Robinson. There was a second man under consideration, as well as Charlton. It was not Crystal Palace’s Malcolm Allison, even though Allison did not dispel a link between himself and the position at the time. ‘No,’ Robinson says of the Allison link. ‘We would not have thought he was right for Liverpool at that time [either].’ The second man’s most likely identity is Bobby Robson, who had turned struggling Ipswich Town into fourth-placed finishers in each of the two previous First Division campaigns, having applied speculatively for the East Anglia job. Robson, who was 41 at the time, did fit the Liverpool mould, with his focus on good scouting, good judgement of players and ‘quality time on the training ground’ as he described the key to the Ipswich success which continued with a third-place finish in 1974–75. His imagination about the way the game should be played also made Ipswich one of the first sides to do away with the target-man striker at the time.

  But more important to Robinson and Smith than what an outside candidate might bring was their desperation to hold on to what Shankly had built – and so the notion that there might be a successor right in front of their eyes gained ascendency very quickly. Of Shankly’s backroom staff, that had to be Bob Paisley. His quiet and undemonstrative nature was certainly a world away from that of Shankly but Robinson and Smith felt that the other members of what had become known as the Boot Room meant that the then 55-year-old would not be on his own. The feeling was that the characters around him – Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran and Reuben Bennett – were also strong.

  There was not unanimity about appointing Paisley. One of the six-man Liverpool board wanted a younger man and was generally committed to the idea of appointing young people to lead the club. He felt that Paisley was too old and Robson, a full 14 years younger, was certainly of a different generation. But the dissenter on the board fell into line quickly. The contemplation of recruiting an outside candidate did not extend to Liverpool actually speaking to either Charlton or Robson.

  ‘We did look at one or two managers who were employed at that time and, of course, thought about Bob,’ says Robinson. ‘It was left to John Smith and me to recommend to the board who to appoint. We thought that with the backroom staff we had we’d got a very strong set-up and we leaned towards Bob.’

  Shankly made no contribution to the discussion of his successor beyond the initial answer he had given. ‘Apart from when we asked the direct question who we should recommend, he didn’t mention it again [though] I’m sure he congratulated Bob,’ says Robinson.

  From his vantage point as a senior member of the squad, John Toshack felt it was the board’s fear of losing the recipe they had, rather than a deep conviction about Paisley’s talents, that lay behind the decision. ‘The board were thinking, “We don’t want to bring in anyone new who is going to shake the bottle. Let’s let the water float a little bit and see what happens,”’ he says.

  The problem was how to persuade Paisley to take the position on. He was part of the club’s fixtures and fittings and comfortable enough in this realm to be on first-name terms with all the directors. But in two initial conversations, he made it categorically clear he did not want the role – though was not expansive about precisely why. ‘He kept saying, “No, I don’t feel I can do it,”’ says Robinson. ‘The meetings with Bob tended to be brief because he was not a great talker. He did develop as a manager, to deal with things, but initially he didn’t say much. We were not sure what the exact problem was.’

  Time was not on the side of Robinson and Smith. They were in new territory. No Liverpool manager had resigned before. Now, they had three weeks before the start of the 1974–75 season to find a successor. They sat Paisley down and tried to get to the bottom of what was troubling him.

  It transpired that there were two concerns in his mind. The first was how people would react to him following Shankly, with an unspoken code among the backroom team at that time that one would never covet or seek to accede to another’s job. The second was Paisley’s aversion to the idea of handling the business of buying players and renewing their contracts. He didn’t think he was capable of that. So an agreement was reached. Paisley would have the say if he wanted a player but Robinson and Smith would deal with other clubs on the buying side, while Robinson would deal with the contract renewals, or ‘re-signings’ as those arrangements were known.

  While these discussions took place in an atmosphere of anxiety at Anfield, the newspapers listed the various contenders to succeed Shankly. The Liverpool Echo toyed with the idea of two former Liverpool players – Coventry City team manager Gordon Milne, who was in part-time charge of England’s under-18s and Ian St John, then managing Motherwell – as well as Allison, Robson, Jimmy Bloomfield (Leicester City) and Gordon Jago (QPR). Also mentioned was Tony Waiters, the former England international goalkeeper who had left a role as Liverpool’s youth development manager two years earlier to pursue a career in football management and, via Burnley and Coventry, had taken over at Plymouth.

  The Liverpool Daily Post’s chief football correspondent Horace Yates led the entreaties for the appointment of Paisley, whom he knew well. ‘Is Paisley the man to answer the Anfield call?’ he asked. ‘One of the reasons why the knowing ones claim Shankly is unique is that on the field and off it he has developed a pattern in which blows can be sustained and wounds healed without recourse to outside aid. Nobody has absorbed his ideas and patterns of play more assiduously and there are few greater readers of play and players anywhere than Paisley.’

  There was not a tumult of pieces in this vein. Shankly seemed to hint at the idea of an outsider coming in. ‘When the new manager comes, I go. He may not want to have me anywhere near the place.’ And when the announcement of the Paisley succession came, it hardly reverberated across the land. A small article suggesting ‘the board may turn to Bob Paisley’ was buried amid the Liverpool Echo’s second-hand car advertisements – £625 for a beige 1971 Mini 850; £1,145 for a bronze 1973 Cortina 1600 – while Brian Kidd’s signing for Bertie Mee’s Arsenal for £100,000 seemed to capture the na
tional imagination more.

  ‘Paisley is King,’ the Post declared on Friday 26 July 1974, the day his appointment was confirmed. But it did not feel like a coronation. The Times’ report of Paisley’s appointment that day ran to just 241 words.

  During the annual general meeting at which shareholders received the news, on the evening of 26 July, Paisley received a standing ovation as he stood up from his seat, though it was Shankly who took the limelight that night. His speech – confident, funny, erudite – brought the house down.

  Liverpool’s Tommy Smith claimed that on his last day at the club Shankly typed a note and left it on the desk in the manager’s office for Paisley to find the next day. The note, intended to boost Paisley’s confidence, stated simply: ‘Bill Shankly says Bob Paisley is the best manager in the game.’ If Smith is to be believed, Paisley found it, added two commas and arranged for it to be posted to Shankly’s house: ‘Bill Shankly, says Bob Paisley, is the best manager in the game.’ The quiet man of the partnership would take some persuading that he had not wandered into the wrong room.

  4

  Hello, Boss

  It didn’t help that Bob Paisley was wearing his unflattering red Gola tracksuit. It had never done much to conceal the rotund demeanour that had made him such a foil to the taut drill sergeant Bill Shankly. The kit had always been part of the faintly comical air Paisley gave off in the years when he was just plain ‘Bob’, the assistant manager and man in the shadows, pottering around Liverpool’s Melwood training ground.

  Yet now here he was standing in front of the players, on a July morning in 1974, telling them he was going to be their manager. It would have lifted the mood of stunned despondency caused by Shankly’s declaring he was stepping down if Paisley had been able to impress upon them that they were all in this together. But it wasn’t like that. He didn’t want to be here, Paisley told them, over and over. Someone counted the times he repeated the assertion: eight, Steve Heighway thought.