Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  ‘It’s very difficult with him there. He doesn’t say too much, but it’s just the players,’ Robinson recalls Paisley saying. ‘It’s awkward. The players don’t know what to say or call him.’

  More revealing than this embarrassment was the fact that he did not want Shankly back in. Had Paisley remained reluctant to manage Liverpool, Shankly’s return to the scene would have been the perfect route out; the ideal opportunity to hand back the reins and disappear back into the shadows. ‘Shank’ would have had the two-month break Paisley had proposed, only minus the cruise.

  Paisley’s disinclination to do that revealed that the quiet man was also an unyielding one. Once he had taken up the position, he did want to be manager and, what is more, he was not inclined to ask for his predecessor’s advice. Paisley tried to encourage Shankly to look for work elsewhere. He suggested some scouting missions to Scotland. He raised the idea of him taking Nessie along with him and Liverpool paying their expenses.

  None of this worked. Paisley then agreed with Robinson and Smith that something needed to be done. After several conversations with them, he left ‘upstairs’ with an agreed plan of action which they would put into effect. Shankly would be telephoned at home about the situation, rather than invited into Anfield. This unenviable duty fell to Smith who, in line with what he, Robinson and Paisley had discussed, pointed out to Shankly that visiting Melwood was fine, but could he please do so when the players were not there.

  There was no way of avoiding causing mortal offence. Shankly abandoned his Melwood routine, never to resume it, and began turning up at Everton’s training ground instead. Years later it was suggested that Shankly had called Smith and asked for his old job back. But he did not. ‘That definitely didn’t happen,’ says Robinson. ‘He might have wished for it, but knowing Bill and his pride I don’t think he could have done that.’

  ‘I had to take into account the fact that it was Shank,’ Paisley said in hindsight. ‘I knew it would be difficult for him to do anything but the top job in any club. If he advised you, you had to take his advice. Bill was a boss man – and I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense. If he had been elected onto the board at Liverpool he would have wanted top position; wanted to be in charge. His word was law – and that’s not advice.’

  Paisley was hard enough to go his own way, but wise enough to follow Shankly’s. The creed of football he had had laid down was socialist and collectivist in ethos – its founding principle being that every player be subsidiary to the team effort; running, supporting, anticipating, covering and generally delivering to others on the field. You passed the ball to a red shirt and ran to take up a position to receive it. You were subsumed by the team ethic. Paisley had lived and breathed that for 15 years. It was a philosophy heaven sent for Liverpool, a socialist city where pomposity and swagger had always been viewed with suspicion and where there is always an acute antennae for pretentiousness and arrogance.

  The first team were universally known by the coaching staff as as the ‘Big ’Eads’ – just so they knew that Shankly was always watching for signs of swagger. There would be no ‘Billy Bigtimes’ at Anfield. There was no time for anything that might be considered an affectation. The training kit was dowdy. The idea of building an indoor pitch, like Everton had, was scoffed at. ‘This was a proper, run-down workingmen’s club,’ says Phil Thompson.

  Complex tactical talk was viewed as pretention – even the practice of set-piece corners or free-kicks. When Shankly had, against his better judgement, been persuaded to attend a training course in 1971 at the Football Association’s Lilleshall base with Paisley and reserve-team coach Joe Fagan, he lasted a day before telling Paisley, ‘That’s enough, Bob. We’re going home.’ And sure enough, Paisley accompanied him back home to Liverpool while Fagan stayed to satisfy his curiosity about the new ideas on coaching.

  The Liverpool rules were simply that, ‘You get the ball; you give it, you move,’ says Steve Heighway. ‘It was the ultimate team game. You were only as good as your last game. You never got ahead of yourselves and you learned that the way you play is a waste of time without the physical effort.’ And what a physical effort it was. Liverpool was a school of hard knocks played by hard men. ‘If we tried to play the way we wanted to play without the physical effort, it wouldn’t work. So the ideas of heading, running, tackling, competing [all] came before anything else. You earn the right to pass. You earn the right to play. If you are playing against somebody who is working just as hard as you are and negating what you do, it might be the 85th minute before you wear the opposition down. If the opposition are negating what we do, we don’t change what we do.’

  Brian Hall, a university graduate like Heighway – the pair were known as Big and Little Bamber, after the University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne – observed something in the ethos of the place that was beyond intellectual analysis. ‘I can’t explain it. I can’t explain how they instilled into us a system of play, a pattern of play and the role of the individual within it. It became almost instinctive. You knew your little role within the system. I was never told too deeply what I had to do when I went out there. You quickly learned it.’

  As the first season developed, it did not take Thompson long to absorb what Paisley wanted to see in a centre-half. When the 20-year-old was stretchered from the field after twisting his knee against Stoke City at Anfield, eight games into the First Division season, newspaper photographs captured a look of deep concern on the manager’s face. ‘Six-weeker,’ Paisley said, as he surveyed the player in the treatment room. Fagan gently twisted the knee and unlocked it, to Thompson’s delight. It was two days later that a specialist diagnosed cartilage trouble. ‘You’ll be out for six weeks if all goes well,’ he told Thompson.

  For a time, the transition was seamless, though Paisley’s life was changed utterly. His new role encroached on the family existence he once knew. Jessie saw him less, though she roped him into events when she could. It later became an annual tradition that he would bring one of Liverpool’s trophies into the primary school where she taught and eventually became deputy head – St Mary’s, Grassendale. Children – and very often their parents – would queue up to have their photograph taken with the silverware and manager.

  Paisley opened the garden fête every year at St Hilda’s school – though Christine had moved on by then – and provided an autographed ball. It was a Church of England school run by Anglican nuns, the Order of the Sisters of the Church, with one of whom, a Sister Mary Grace, Jessie formed a friendship. It amused Bob that she would accept his offer of a little sherry.

  He cherished his Sunday afternoons away from Anfield – the only time of the week he properly saw the family, though Jessie related to the father of one of her pupils at St Mary’s that her husband was beginning to regret giving out his home number to journalists because of the number of calls he would receive on a Sunday. The parent, John Toker, asked why they didn’t get a second line installed. She looked at him with disbelief. ‘Mr Toker, I could never ask Bob to do that,’ she replied. ‘He already thinks that one line is an extravagance.’

  Eventually Paisley asked that one designated individual from the press corps telephone on a Sunday and share the information, to preserve his sanity when he sat down after his lunch at South Manor Way. Football rarely entered the home. His sons would watch football and if something about a game or commentary vexed Paisley he would make an observation, though not often. Denis Law was ‘past his sell-by date’, he announced on one occasion. ‘He’s kidding the public.’ He’d occasionally comment on a big transfer deal for a player he didn’t rate. ‘You’d swim across the Channel with him on your back to get that kind of money,’ was one of his popular refrains in the household – meaning he’d have be so glad to get rid of a particular player that he would have dropped him off at the purchasing club himself. (He certainly felt Manchester United got good value by selling Ray Wilkins to Milan for £1.5m in 1984.)

  There was a car accident four weeks
into his first season. Paisley collided with a petrol tanker and badly damaged his vehicle, emerging unscathed. But there is no evidence that escalating stress might have contributed to this. The only inconvenience was a clash of duties, with the wedding of his eldest son, Robert, scheduled for October 1974. That had to be shifted to a Friday so the Liverpool manager could attend. At that stage, the performances were good, Liverpool sat top of the league after six games and bookmakers offered 11-1 on against them winning the title.

  But then came the reality check: a visit to Manchester City, managed by Tony Book, in front of a crowd of 45,000. Liverpool’s 2–0 defeat – their first under Paisley – revealed that a new defensive philosophy isn’t made in a day and that defenders need to defend as well as pass. Both City’s goals were very poor from Paisley’s perspective. Colin Bell chested a ball past the static full-back Alec Lindsay to cross for the first, with Thompson and Hughes both absent as a tame Clemence parry was sent straight back past him into the net by Rodney Marsh. Dennis Tueart was equally free to exploit a cross and score the second.

  Results started to fluctuate, with a setback at home to Burnley one of two defeats in the following three games. Leeds United, struggling after Brian Clough’s whirlwind 44-day managerial tenure had ended, were beaten at Anfield. But a third defeat, away to Ipswich, convinced some of the newspapers that Paisley at Anfield wasn’t going to work. The Daily Mail’s Jeff Powell concluded that football was witnessing a shadow of Shankly’s great team. ‘Liverpool, naturally enough, resent suggestions that they are not the same team without Shankly,’ he wrote. ‘But the fact remains that something vital, urgent, alive and irresistible has gone out of football. The new manager, Bob Paisley, was always an influential figure in Shankly’s administration at Anfield. But Paisley without Shankly is something else. A compendium of foibles is emerging in players suddenly released from Shankly’s grip.’ Lloyd’s unhappy departure was being equated with the Keegan controversy as examples of indiscipline and the more pragmatic build-up was seen as evidence of a less visceral Liverpool.

  The garish headlines that were emerging from the Sunday newspapers after Paisley gave his post-match Saturday press conferences also concerned him. ‘I learned my lesson with one or two quotes when the Sunday print comes in after Saturday’s game and it’s in black and white,’ he ruminated later, referencing Jessie in the way he often did. ‘The wife used to say, “You know, you didn’t say that.” I’d say, “Well, I did, but I didn’t mean it that way.” It’s so different when it goes down in black and white.’

  But none of this had the same effect on him as the work of Frank Clough, chief football writer of the Sun, who was the most strident critic and didn’t have time for Paisley. Clough articulated most often the thought that the lack of blood and thunder in this Liverpool team made them drab and that they were a shadow of Shankly’s side.

  Paisley could handle the local reporters, but he saw the influence those writing from further afield was having and felt a deepening sense of gloom. He was so unsettled in the autumn of his first season that he walked into Robinson’s office and told him that he wanted to step down. The precise date of this development is unclear. The 1–0 defeat at Ipswich on 2 November was certainly a cause for concern because Bobby Robson’s side were one of Liverpool’s prime title contenders and the result took the East Anglian club within a point of them at the top. The defeat at home to Arsenal seven days later was actually more damning and there then proceeded a sequence of four draws, running into December, which left the team fourth.

  For the Liverpool board, Paisley’s declaration was a calamity in what had been a deeply difficult autumn with the Shankly–Melwood situation to deal with. They sat Paisley down once more and tried to understand what they could do. The conversation revealed a frustration which ran deeper than one journalist submitting Paisley to the indignity of unflattering comparisons with the Shankly era. Paisley also said he felt exposed by the volume of press appearances. He was embarrassed by requests he was receiving to speak publicly. He felt he did not have the grasp of language to do that, he told Robinson. Results cannot have helped his self-confidence at this time, though it was the ancillary work, not the football, which seemed to be the problem.

  Robinson and Smith again cast around for a solution. They asked themselves whether there was a chunk of the public role which they could relieve Paisley of, having done so to convince him he could manage the team in the first place. Was there someone within their ranks who could help with the public face of the job? Joe Fagan was certainly more comfortable with the press. He always seemed to be on first-name terms with most of them and had an uncanny knack of speaking comfortably without ever giving any information away.

  Fagan was needed in the Paisley coaching set-up, though. They decided on someone else to help with the work, who would become a more important part of the set-up than any of them could then have known.

  Tom Saunders was a former headteacher, Liverpool Schools and England Schoolboys coach, who had become Liverpool’s youth development manager a year earlier when the incumbent, Tony Waiters, had left. Liverpool had been surprised that Saunders was willing to give up a strategic educational role to join them, and he clearly had potential.

  It was put to Paisley that ‘Tom would help’. He would be put alongside him to assist with the public speaking, though at the outset no one was terribly clear how that would work. With his more refined background in education, Saunders certainly possessed the erudition that Paisley lacked. Yet he was modest enough to bring subtlety to the support system. Saunders was a very good judge of human nature and social situations and he became the one who tried to fit in. The Liverpool board were struck by how he purposefully avoided pushing himself upon Paisley. He sat in press conferences, offering the occasional joke or piece of levity to break the ice, and began preparing notes for Paisley to help him deliver public speeches. Gradually, he refined the note-making when it became clear that if there were copious notes Paisley would stumble over them. Saunders provided brief points instead, to which Paisley could apply his own words.

  Paisley found Saunders’s presence a deeper source of help than any had expected. Both he and Liverpool’s players found him grounded and reluctant to flaunt his academic background. A local solicitor, Tony Ensor, was appointed a Liverpool director several years later, and approached Saunders to discuss further education in a loud voice one day. ‘Tom, what university did you go to?’ Ensor asked. ‘Tony, I went to the university of life,’ Saunders replied, to the amusement of the players who overheard.

  This characteristic in Saunders appealed to Paisley – an individual whom life had not equipped for conversations beyond the fine points of football and racing and whose social awkwardness sometimes often limited what he had to say about those subjects, too. He was not a sophisticated man but Saunders’s easy manner put him at ease. A few weeks after this new arrangement was put in place, Robinson was surprised to find Paisley asking the former headteacher if he would be willing to move his desk into the manager’s office at Anfield. Saunders, needless to say, agreed.

  Saunders’s role developed to include scouting opposition. Paisley found the brevity of the notes he provided practical and effective. With their uncomplicated methods, Liverpool had never wanted an essay on where the threats lay. In time, scouting opposition evolved into scouting new players. Saunders’s assessments proved to be excellent on both counts.

  Another calamity had been averted, though how seriously Paisley meant his threat to leave is unclear. His family had never been aware of it, and if he ever discussed it with Jessie then it was not something she had made known to them. Robinson’s attempt to talk him around was not as torturous as the task of persuading him to sign up for the manager’s job in the first place. There is no evidence that Paisley was seriously determined to walk away.

  But there was another clue to his frustration in one of his daily encounters with the locally based journalists, whom Shankly had always accommoda
ted when they arrived at Anfield in search of stories. When the usual group loitered in the Anfield foyer several days after the home defeat to Ipswich, they found Paisley unwilling to engage in convivial chat.

  ‘What’s the team this weekend?’ Mike Ellis, the Merseyside-based journalist of the Sun asked, grinning. ‘Same as last week with a few out,’ Paisley replied flatly, and walked away. They knew something was wrong.

  A conversation ensued with the reporters in which Paisley again expressed frustrations with the media side of his role. He told them he was finding he had little to say, day after day, and that meant they had little from the gatherings to write. In truth, what the journalists really hoped for, to fill out their reports, was an encounter with one of the players in the corridor.

  The group put an idea to Paisley. A general discussion would take place with him, in which they would help shape the thrust and tone of what he said and at the end of it he would make it clear which elements he was happy to have them publish in his name. He would not have to do all of the talking. He agreed. An accommodation was struck that was always to be maintained with this trusted group: John Keith of the Daily Express, Ellis of the Sun, the Daily Mail’s Colin Wood, the Daily Mirror’s Chris James, and Nick Hilton of the Liverpool Daily Post. The evening Liverpool Echo made their own arrangements to call him.

  As these relationships grew closer, the reporters intuited what Paisley would want to say. Keith often led off the discussions and perhaps knew Paisley best, though it was Ellis who would later travel with him, ghostwriting columns at the 1980 European Championships in Italy. Sometimes Paisley might want to know: ‘How would you put that?’ The arrangement worked, though it could be an unusual experience for newcomers.

  When young reporter Ian Ross – no relation to the player of the same name Shankly signed in 1966 – replaced Hilton at the Daily Post, he discovered how difficult it was to participate in a press conference where the manager says so little.