Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Paisley related how he’d tried to persuade ‘Shank’ to go on that cruise but there was no persuading him this time. So ‘upstairs’ had been on to him, asking him to take over, he said – his term of reference for the Liverpool board. He’d refused but they wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, so he was going to have to do it and see how it went.

  Kevin Keegan responded first, wearing a look of earnest concern on his face, which went against his persona as the dressing-room joker, for which they all called him ‘Andy McDaft’. Paisley had to take the job. He was entitled to it, Keegan said. Then Ian Callaghan contributed. Paisley knew all there was to know, he said. The players looked across at him because Callaghan only tended to speak when there was something worth saying. Emlyn Hughes, the captain, was snivelling in the corner, still unable to accept that Shankly was going. A few of the players rolled their eyes.

  Witnesses say Paisley mumbled some self-conscious thanks. He said they’d see how it went. He’d try to tide them over until someone else was appointed. Three minutes later he’d run out of things to say. That was it, then. They’d better get on with the job and make the best of it, he concluded, and ventured off, with the familiar limp they’d all come to know.

  His uncertainty was something Robinson and Smith already knew all too well about. Mixed up with it was the culture embedded in the club about not knifing your boss. ‘It was his way of saying he hadn’t in any way stabbed Shanks in the back and didn’t go looking for that kind of job,’ Toshack says.

  But most of the team saw a man who just didn’t want to be there. For perhaps a minute after he’d gone there was silence, as the enormous collective realisation dawned on the players of what Shankly’s departure actually meant. They were to be led by a manager who had never given a team talk in his life and who seemingly could not string a sentence together.

  Heighway, the de facto shop steward of the group, tended to take the lead when there was organising to be done. It was he who broke the silence after Paisley had left. To this day he remembers what he said to the players, in a rallying speech which lasted considerably longer than Paisley’s: ‘Listen. Unless we pull together and make this work, this could all fall down like a pack of cards. Better to have Bob than have some bloke come in who doesn’t rate half of us. At least we know there’s a good chance that Bob will see something in all of us because he’s has been here for ever and we have all been playing.’ (Heighway was the only one who never called Shankly ‘boss’ – he didn’t go in for that obsequious footballer hierarchy stuff – and he certainly wasn’t going to give Paisley that title.)

  His teammates nodded, though the fear which had gripped them most in the week since Shankly had made his big announcement is what Heighway remembers: ‘At first we were worried sick that someone who didn’t know us would come in, or somebody would come in that didn’t rate you as a player,’ he says. ‘We worried that the success over the past two or three years had been down to Shanks more than the fact that we were good. It probably took Shanks’s retirement to make us think that way. He was the great protector of the team. He would never criticise you in public. The group was really close. Any stuff that needed to be brought out was brought out privately in team meetings. And suddenly he’d gone, and so the next thing was that Bob came in and apologetically announced he didn’t want to be there.’

  Only the players know how Paisley looked at that time. There is television footage of the sensational press conference in which Liverpool chairman John Smith, reading from notes in his clipped southern accent, declared: ‘It is with great regret that Mr Shankly has intimated that he wishes to retire from active participation in league football.’ Tony Wilson, who within eight years would launch the Factory Records label and the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester, was the then energetic local TV reporter who followed up with a question for Shankly. ‘How can you of all people hope to survive without football?’ he asked.

  But Paisley does not feature. All we see of him taking up the post is a black and white image from the Liverpool papers of him walking past the empty seats flanking the room at the meeting of the Liverpool shareholders when his appointment was announced. He bites his bottom lip and there is applause from an audience of fairly ageing men, in their suits and ties. There was certainly no introductory press conference.

  What was going through his mind? Almost certainly the thought of what had happened 40 miles up the road, where a mere five years earlier a 31-year-old Wilf McGuinness had stepped into the shoes of Paisley’s friend and former Liverpool teammate Matt Busby at Manchester United. Paisley knew Busby well enough to have an insight into Farrell’s disastrous 18 months in the post. There was enough in that precedent to know that the taking over from a legend carried the risk of embarrassment.

  Years later, Paisley said he knew that United’s experience carried a lesson for him. ‘Bill’s image had to be broken – just as in an earlier case the image of Sir Matt Busby had to be broken at Manchester United before the club became successful again.’ Bold words, though they were spoken with the benefit of hindsight, when he had taken the club on after Shankly. It is doubtful that Paisley’s ambitions would have extended to breaking with Shankly and the past as he stood up to tell the players he would be in charge.

  It says much for Shankly’s ensuing struggle to cut the umbilical cord with the club that he chose to take the team out for the Charity Shield on 10 August, leading them out at Wembley when they, as the previous season’s FA Cup winners, faced Leeds United, the Division One champions. But Paisley then faced a mopping-up job after the disastrous consequences of that valedictory game of his predecessor’s.

  The match took place against a backdrop of national concern over hooliganism, and when Kevin Keegan and Leeds’ Billy Bremner were sent off for fighting on the pitch it touched a nerve. It didn’t help that the Keegan had looked like a hooligan, ripping off his shirt to reveal his torso while still 20 yards from the sidelines and, to Paisley’s horror in the dugout, encountering a supporter who’d broken free to challenge him as he reached the touchline.

  It looked very bad when Paisley found himself on the 7 a.m. train to London Euston with Keegan and chairman John Smith to appear before a three-man Football Association disciplinary panel. ‘Shameful example’ was the headline of that morning’s Daily Mail leader column. ‘Footballers who throw their fists at each other are symbolically licensing violence.’

  The FA read the public mood and took no prisoners. The hearing went as badly as it could because the chairman of the tribunal seemed to have a distaste for football. ‘You footballers are paid far too much money,’ he said. Keegan and Bremner were both banned for 11 matches and Keegan’s sense of victimhood saw him take himself off to his family in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. It was a desperate start to Paisley’s tenure, considering that Keegan had been Liverpool’s top scorer in each of their previous two seasons and was undoubtedly his greatest asset.

  It didn’t help the situation that Shankly publicly said he would have secured a better settlement for Keegan from the governing body. Paisley passed it all off with a joke; the first public evidence of a line in gentle humour which he would employ in the bad moments across the next nine years. His wit in the public sphere wasn’t the sharpest and the metaphors, frequently derived from horse racing, were strained, and yet this had a habit of breaking the tension. ‘The only injury we have at Anfield at the moment is my heart. It’s broken,’ he declared.

  It was more serious than that. Keegan had scored 52 goals in the previous three years. Paisley wondered where those goals would come from in the next two months, yet he didn’t reveal publicly the full extent of his anxiety. ‘It sent a chill down my spine. It could have ended my career,’ he said years later.

  He lacked the words to coax Keegan back into the fold so operated at a more practical level, seeking help from those who could bring influence to bear. The Keegan family were his own kind of people. Keegan’s father, Joe, was a son of Hetton-le-Hole. So he played
that angle, telephoning him to help get the player back to Merseyside, where he could employ the quiet powers of persuasion he’d always found worked best with Keegan. The player returned.

  The opening game of the 1974–75 season, at newly promoted Luton Town, awaited the new manager. Paisley adopted the Friday routine at Melwood that Shankly had always laid down. There would be the same team meeting at 10 a.m. in the little Melwood training-ground room, for which the players would gather on chairs around a table with a baize cloth laid on top of it and blue figures to mark out the tactical plan. Paisley, the improbable speechmaker, then embarked on a discussion about the players in Harry Haslam’s team, who had just completed a spectacular rise from the Fourth Division to the First in a mere seven years.

  It was the lack of grasp of detail which the players remembered later. Paisley’s instructions for defender Tommy Smith were not to go ‘wandering round like a miner without a lamp’ but to keep an eye on his man, though precisely which man was unclear.

  Smith didn’t want to look like he was testing Paisley out, so he left Paisley to continue. Brian Hall remembered being the next man singled out for instructions. He was to ‘keep an eye’ on ‘what’s-his-name’ – a player represented by the blue figure Paisley was clutching. Hall, a squad player looking to begin the season by making a serious impression, wanted to be sure who he was supposed to be dealing with. ‘Who are you talking about, Bob?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Eerm, eeerm . . . what’s his name . . .?’ Paisley replied, still apparently unable to conjure the name.

  ‘OK, then,’ said Hall, looking around at his teammates and knowing there was no value in pushing it.

  ‘Ah bollocks,’ said Paisley. He swept the figures to the floor, told the players to just go out and beat their opponents, and left the room.

  To some, this was a sign of a new manager hopelessly out of his depth. Ray Kennedy, who had only been at the club for two weeks since arriving from Arsenal as Shankly’s last signing, was used to Don Howe’s carefully crafted team talks and wondered what kind of future he had walked into.

  But Paisley’s first pre-match team talk actually had all the hallmarks of a classic Shankly stunt. Shankly, too, enjoyed upending the tactics board and refusing to dignify the opposition with a discussion of their names. His assistant Reuben Bennett had once delighted Shankly and the team by returning from a scouting mission with the names wrong, calling a midfielder ‘Wheelbarrow’ instead of ‘Barrowclough’.

  Tommy Smith offered reassurances for Kennedy. ‘Listen,’ he told him. ‘We’ve done all the right things in training. Everybody knows the job. If we want to know which Luton players he was talking about, we’ll just look in the match programme tomorrow.’

  There had already been a hint of something different about Paisley’s method, though, and no one could have failed to observe its significance.

  Central defender Larry Lloyd, one of Liverpool’s traditional centre-halves, had missed the end of 1973–74 season through injury and Shankly had given his jersey to midfielder Phil Thompson, a ball-playing alternative to Lloyd, who had played only a few games at centre-back for the reserves. Thompson, elegant in possession but less commanding in the air than Lloyd, had also played in central defence at Wembley in the 1974 FA Cup final.

  In the first training match of the new campaign, the first XI v reserves, the question was whether new manager Paisley would restore Lloyd to the senior ranks or keep him with the second string. ‘Reserves,’ Lloyd was told, to his own fury. He was a big personality at Liverpool and was never slow to complain. That’s why they called him ‘Albert Tatlock’, after the curmudgeonly Coronation Street character. During the practice match, Lloyd advanced into the first XI’s penalty box and delivered a header which went narrowly over the bar. ‘If you had a big centre-half in your team I wouldn’t have had that header,’ Lloyd shouted.

  Thompson says he heard Paisley shout back: ‘Why didn’t you fucking score, then?’

  Paisley sold Lloyd on 15 August, two days before his first game in charge of the club – releasing him to Coventry City at the age of 25 for £240,000 – a fee three times bigger than Liverpool had ever earned for a player. It was a bold move for the first week in a new role; a decision which did not seem to be one of an individual pushed unwillingly into a job and lacking all notion of how to deal with it.

  This new central defensive philosophy was hardly unknown because times were certainly changing. West Germany captain Franz Beckenbauer had been excelling as the classy, nimble-footed central defender since the late 1960s. The Dutch World Cup team had sparkled with elegant central defenders in the summer of 1974, with Arie Haan, a converted midfielder, alongside Wim Rijsbergen. They reached the final in Munich against a host nation side captained by ‘the Kaiser’ Beckenbauer at centre-half. Shankly had signed off his last season with both Thompson and Emlyn Hughes, another converted midfielder, in the middle of his defence.

  Paisley seems to have been more attached to the new ways than Shankly, who in 1969 had taken the decision to sign Lloyd – another stopper in the mould of Ron Yeats, whose time had passed, but a technically inferior one.

  Paisley rarely involved himself in the minutiae of training but the exclusion of Lloyd from virtually his first training session went to the heart of what kind of a side his would be. ‘That was Bob’s biggest call and it came right at the start,’ says Thompson, who went on to play 37 games that season, partnering Hughes in central defence. ‘It was Paisley saying, “I want a different kind of central defender. This is what I believe in.”’

  John Toshack, who had been a Shankly player for four years, feels that Paisley was ‘a little bit enthralled with this European style’, and that the immediate effect in his first season was greater emphasis on possession and a build-up from the back. ‘You might say it’s a strange thing from someone from Durham who had played in the 1950s, but he decided to play Thompson and Emlyn [and] completely did away with the traditional stopper centre-back that Liverpool had always had. Liverpool became a team that kept possession at the back, built up slowly and patiently. Of all the things Bob did in management that was the biggest fundamental change. The brain centre was the understanding that the goalkeeper and two centre-backs had.’ Toshack’s description of the side as ‘patient’ is significant. There was immediately less blood and thunder about the team’s play.

  They won 2–1 at Luton, with goals from Smith and Heighway. A goalless draw followed at Wolves three days later – and then victory against Leicester at Anfield on a night when a new manager might have basked in the self-satisfaction of his first home win in charge. Paisley was a footnote to the main occasion, though. The match had been designated as the one in which Liverpool would bid farewell to Shankly who, with his inimitable sense of occasion and bond with the people, materialised in the middle of the Kop terrace.

  None of the journalists asked Paisley whether Shankly’s presence was awkward for him, nor what he’d thought of the barbed observation that he would have done better for Liverpool at the Keegan hearing. Judging by the newspaper reports, no one asked Paisley much at all on the occasion of his first Anfield match at the helm. His predecessor was the shadow on the wall in those early months.

  Shankly had realised almost immediately that resigning was a monumental mistake and he could not let Liverpool go. When the players arrived by coach at Melwood at 10 a.m. each morning, maintaining the routine that he had set down, Shankly would be ready in his training kit at Melwood, his car already parked up at the front. Ostensibly, he was there to keep himself fit. In reality, he was there because he craved the life he had relinquished.

  ‘Morning, lads,’ he would greet them.

  ‘Morning, boss,’ they would reply, awkwardly, not knowing how to address him with Paisley within earshot. Shankly then proceeded to jog around the running track with them on their warm-ups and provide the encouragement that managers generally give, while Paisley watched from the sanctuary of his office: the office which Shankly
had once occupied.

  There was a collective state of mourning for Shankly in Liverpool at the time. The local papers were dominated by plans for a permanent reminder of his work. A local Liberal councillor, David Alton, wanted to rename the recently pedestrianised Bold Street ‘Shankly Parade’. The first of Shankly’s ghost-written Liverpool Echo columns described the evening he’d spent in the company of supporters at the Vines pub in Liverpool city centre and the Mons establishment in Bootle.

  ‘Keep at it, son,’ Shankly told Ray Kennedy when he encountered him at Melwood one morning. Kennedy became convinced that Shankly was privately expressing doubts about laying out £200,000 to buy him from Arsenal. Word got back to him that he had asked Bob Wilson, television pundit and one of Kennedy’s former Arsenal teammates, ‘Should I have spent the money?’ Kennedy was one of life’s worriers.

  There was an exchange in those early weeks between Shankly and the young teenage striker Trevor Birch, who was last in the Melwood dressing-room and lacing his boots when Shankly strode in.

  ‘Alright, son?’ Shankly said, leaving Birch searching for something to say in such stellar company.

  ‘Bob’s doing well, isn’t he, boss?’ the teenager replied, seizing on Paisley’s first weeks since taking Shankly’s old seat, which by then had yielded five wins and a draw. ‘They’ve won a few games now.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, son,’ Shankly retorted. ‘I could have left a monkey in charge.’

  Paisley said nothing to Shankly about this awkwardness. Verbal confrontations were never his game. With Shankly, there would only be one winner and with innate respect for hierarchy, he would still have considered him his senior. It is why they had never argued down the years. Paisley did make his feelings known to Robinson when he met him back at Anfield after training, though.