Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  ‘Newcastle on Saturday,’ someone said, to open things up.

  ‘Aye,’ replied Paisley.

  ‘Same team?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Paisley.

  ‘Newcastle are playing well. What do you make of them?’ interjected Ross.

  The rest of the room looked surprised – as did Paisley – and the interview then followed a different course. The reporters trooped out a little later and one of them approached Ross. ‘Better not to ask him questions,’ he said. It was not quite the lesson Ross had expected to take away from a meeting with the manager of a top First Division side.

  There might have been less talking and stage presence but Paisley was quietly maintaining Liverpool’s standards. Despite the bumpy autumn, Liverpool were top at the turn of the year, though in February and March came six successive draws, include a goalless Merseyside derby at Anfield. The sixth, at Filbert Street on 19 March, was against relegation threatened Leicester City, who had won only two in 11 games since the turn of the year. Liverpool sat fifth, four points off the top with eight games to play. Though they had scored only 52 times in Shankly’s last season and would manage 60 by the end of Paisley’s first, the feeling still persisted that a light had gone out at the club. The argument struck a chord with fans. ‘We all met in the Abbey [pub] and for the first time in my life of watching the Reds people were saying things that were less than polite about the manager,’ one reflected in a supporter magazine. ‘Not really nasty things but, well . . . you know, was he up to the job and all that.’

  The supporters were so uncertain of the future that the Liverpool Echo reported that Lawrenson’s Coaches had cancelled all its match-day services a few days in advance as they had received no bookings for the trip to West Ham United in February. Five ‘football specials’ were put on by British Rail but only one left Liverpool’s Lime Street station.

  The Echo was full of debate about the reasons why. Some contributors blamed the midweek scheduling for a London away match. It was a time of deep economic uncertainty, with the trauma of the recent three-day week and miners’ strike a prelude to the era of Margaret Thatcher, who that month became the first woman to lead a British political party. And there was the ever-present spectre of Shankly. Some claimed the poor turnout was a protest against the club’s treatment of the man who had not been welcomed back into the fold. The newspapers remained fascinated by what Shankly’s departure had removed from Liverpool. A reminder of him appeared in the headlines after a 2–0 defeat at Arsenal, engineered by the London side’s Alan Ball. Shankly had written a piece for the Highbury match programme. ‘Ball shows just how much Shankly is missed,’ declared the Daily Mail.

  Toshack felt a failure to qualify for Europe by finishing runners-up could have left Paisley’s continuation as manager in question. Though Robinson insists there was no set target for that first season, there had been 11 consecutive seasons of continental football under Shankly.

  Where oratory failed him, Paisley would employ a little homily. Several players recall one of his that winter. ‘Always remember, the football press is like a swimming pool: all the noise is in the shallow end,’ he told them.

  He continued to dispense his eerily accurate wisdom on players’ weaknesses. One day he wanted to know why reserve-team player Jeff Ainsworth was not out on the training pitches.

  ‘Pain in the bottom of his back,’ he was told.

  ‘Do you drink vodka?’ Paisley asked Ainsworth, to the player’s astonishment. He nodded.

  ‘That’s why, then. That’s in your kidneys, lad.’ The diagnosis proved accurate.

  There were obsessions about diet which came from the Shankly years and were always maintained under Paisley. You could always have toast with soup, but would be castigated if you ate bread. They thought the players digested fresh bread less well and it could affect an individual’s weight.

  Paisley’s eyes were open to others. The Anfield maintenance foreman, Bert Johnson, mentioned a sign he’d made, for no better reason than there was some red and white paint and wood he couldn’t find a use for. In white letters on a red background, it read, ‘THIS IS ANFIELD’. Johnson thought he might place it above the players’ tunnel. Paisley agreed.

  The playing style did not differ hugely from what Shankly had bequeathed. The philosophy was still to pass the ball to someone in a red shirt and then take up another position in which you could receive it – and that was not as elementary as it sounded. The distributor needed the vision and intuition to accelerate or delay the pass to allow the recipient to receive it comfortably and, in turn, send it on well. ‘Who needs time on the ball?’ Paisley would occasionally ask a young trainee if he encountered one. And before they could answer, he would tell them. ‘It’s the one who’s going to receive it.’

  There was a clue to how else he would evolve the side in the purchase of a 23-year-old, Phil Neal, from Fourth Division Northampton Town in October 1974. Neal anticipated a period acclimatising to his new club, in the reserves, and certainly didn’t expected to be given a first-team debut against Everton, at Goodison Park, within a month of signing.

  Shankly, still very much a Greek chorus despite his departure from Melwood, was with newspaper journalists at the game and, in remarks published afterwards, said he worried about the idea of fielding Neal. ‘It’s not a place to test a player,’ he said.

  But Paisley was interested in finding an attacking wing-back for Liverpool. The benefits of such a player had been established as long ago as Nílton Santos’s performance in the 1958 World Cup and Ray Wilson’s for England eight years later, but Liverpool had never employed such a player, and there were few in the First Division. Midfielder Ian Callaghan seemed aware that Neal may be a different kind of left-back, as he sat on one side of him in the dressing-room. ‘I’ll cover you,’ he said. The more unreconstructed central defender Tommy Smith was the other side. ‘Just kick them,’ he said. Neal’s dipping shot at Goodison’s Gwladys Street end towards the close of the match demonstrated the attacking dimension he brought to the full-back’s role. Neal would play 650 times for Liverpool.

  There was evidence of Paisley’s propensity for little psychological ploys, in the way he tried to put Neal at ease, by omitting to tell him he was playing until an hour before the game began. Neal thought he would be facing Everton’s reserves when Saunders was dispatched to his digs on the morning of the match. The pair collected Neal’s boots from Anfield, then walked half a mile across Stanley Park, which separates Anfield and Goodison, with them concealed in a brown paper bag. Paisley was waiting behind a door when they arrived. ‘Do you want to play?’ he asked, grinning at Neal.

  That childlike pleasure of offering a young player a chance never left him. Many players say that the most warmth they received from him came before they kicked a ball – and, perhaps, before he would judge them. ‘Do you want to play for Liverpool?’ he asked Joey Jones, another new full-back, when making the eye-catching decision to sign him from Wrexham for £110,000 in the summer of 1975.

  The inclusion of Jones in the team illustrated Paisley’s fascination with finding the right combination of players – those ‘lesser lights’ to ‘support and bolster’ the greats, as he described the scene in the Malton stable yard. ‘You need the extroverts in the dressing-room and the loners,’ the manager reflected years later. ‘It didn’t worry me that Joey might have lacked a bit of footballing ability. He more than made up for that with the type of person he was. You couldn’t give him any important jobs to do . . . but he was a real comedian and sometimes it is good to have that in the side.’

  As often as not, these players would be signed on the basis of what Paisley thought they would deliver in the future, however much frustration that might bring them in the reserves, learning the way that Liverpool played. Terry McDermott – his second signing (£175,000 from Newcastle United in November 1974) – would become one of Paisley’s top players by the late 1970s, scoring 15-to-20 goals a season, displaying superb technique b
ehind the forwards. But in Paisley’s first two seasons he had a minimal role.

  Paisley was equally clear in his mind about which players he had no place for – and Lloyd was not the only one. John Toshack had scored 41 goals in the previous three seasons and been among the club’s top three scorers on each occasion, but Paisley had always been suspicious about the time he spent in the treatment room. Toshack’s £260,000 transfer to Leicester City – which would have been a new record sale for Liverpool – was so far advanced in March 1975 that the player had even been introduced to his new teammates.

  Toshack felt that Paisley had never liked him. His first day as a Liverpool player, after signing from Cardiff City in 1970, had been spent in the treatment room with him and the striker felt that from the start Paisley had considered him something of a lightweight. ‘I never really felt that I had won him over,’ Toshack says.

  The player’s medical at Leicester proved that Paisley’s distrust of Toshack was unjustified. X-rays showed the striker had a chronic problem – calcification of the muscles in his legs – and the deal fell through. He returned to Anfield and embarked on a lighter training regime, resigned to playing fewer games, though there was never an acknowledgement from the Rat that Toshack’s time in the medical room had been genuine. His first impressions were always hard to dislodge and the lack of empathy did not surprise Toshack. He had always found Paisley to be a closed book. ‘He was a strange character and a hard one. There was no warmth.’

  Toshack didn’t help the situation when, after the Leicester move had failed, he told Paisley that he intended to play a match for Wales in Budapest, ahead of Liverpool’s penultimate game of the season, against Middlesbrough, where the team needed to win to secure the second spot that would guarantee them European football. ‘If you play for Wales you’ll be dropped for Middlesbrough,’ Paisley informed him. Toshack assumed that Paisley may need him too much to follow through on a threat like that, so ignored the warning and travelled to Hungary anyway. It left Paisley with a decision to make, because Toshack had been his second top scorer in the First Division that year. He dropped him for Ayresome Park and Liverpool lost 1–0.

  Everything then fell on winning the last game of the season, against Queens Park Rangers at Anfield. Prouder managers would have left such a player out in the cold, though a moral victory was not the kind he was looking for. He selected the striker for the game and watched him score twice as Liverpool won 3–1, squeaking into the European qualification places by the narrowest conceivable margin: a 0.038 superior goal average over Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town.

  ‘I do wonder if Shanks, with his pride, would have found a place for me,’ Toshack reflects. ‘But that was Bob. He could take the emotion out. He would definitely hold a grudge. But he wouldn’t hold a grudge if he knew it was going to work against him.’

  It had been a tumultuous nine months, in which Liverpool had equalled the runners-up position of Shankly’s last season, though accumulated six points fewer. There was certainly statistical ammunition for those who doubted the new manager. At Anfield, where in Shankly’s last season they had won all but three matches, Liverpool had been materially less impressive. Away from home they were only marginally better, drawing more games than any side in the division.

  As Heighway left for his summer break he felt an acknowledgement was due to the players. ‘Credit the squad for not taking the piss,’ he says, looking back on that season. ‘It would have been easy to take the piss out of Bob – not because he was weak but because it was somebody doing the job who didn’t seem to want it and didn’t seem to have the skills for it.’

  That might have been the impression left by a manager whose press conferences were sometimes assisted, who rarely appeared on television and who had claimed in the first place that he would rather be somewhere else. But appearance and reality were different entities. Being observed in plain sight did not interest Paisley. The quiet persona and undemonstrative exterior obscured an individual who very much did want to manage Liverpool and take the decisions that came with it. Changes were under way and it suited him fine if others wanted to think otherwise.

  5

  Room with No Windows

  The away team dressing-room door at Queens Park Rangers was shut and the inquisition going on behind it was loud, angry and full of recriminations. Many of those taking part in it wondered where things were heading for Liverpool.

  The opening day of Bob Paisley’s second season had just started with a 2–0 defeat and it wasn’t just the result which had left two of the established members of the squad disgruntled. Tommy Smith, aged 30, and Alec Lindsay, aged 27, had been left out of the side by Paisley in favour of Joey Jones, the 19-year-old just signed from Wrexham, and the barely blooded Phil Neal. Smith had been at that club since 1960 and was one of the few Paisley would easily converse with. They would talk if they passed each other at Melwood, but there hadn’t been a word of warning from the manager that he was to be dropped for a new campaign. Even Smith was not averse to calling Paisley the Rat.

  Not for the first time in the last 12 months, the decision raised eyebrows and suggested that Smith and Lindsay, two members of the Bill Shankly old guard, might soon need to look for new clubs. Paisley’s assistant, Joe Fagan, had been talking before the match about Neal and Jones getting forward to join in the attacking side of Liverpool’s game. Everyone knew that Smith and Lindsay were not the quickest men on two feet.

  But the problem had been Emlyn Hughes, Liverpool’s supposedly dependable captain, who’d spent much of the game charging around all over the pitch and leaving wide open spaces in defence. The consequences were disastrous. With Hughes out of position, Gerry Francis had played a one-two around a stranded Phil Thompson, the 21-year-old centre-half, and scored. The game was settled with 20 minutes to play when Hughes charged forward again, was dispossessed and Rangers’ Mick Leach doubled the lead after a clear run on goal.

  Paisley had taken a seat in the main stand at the start of the game, but with the prospect of victory vanishing he’d headed down to the dugout and told Smith, the substitute, to prepare to go on.

  Smith was just taking his tracksuit off when Fagan told him to put it back on again, which puzzled him. Wasn’t the manager supposed to be the one in charge? Smith always remembered the force of Fagan’s instructions, though. ‘I’m not letting you go on and be associated with this shit. Go and sit down.’ So he did as he was told.

  The recriminations came thick and fast after the game. Paisley had not shared his true feelings with the press. The Sunday newspaper reporters were in the room when he gave his press conference and, having learned his lessons about them, he employed a lame joke to take the temperature out of the situation. ‘Everyone charged off to do someone else’s job, including selling the programmes,’ he told them. His face when he arrived in the dressing-room told the real story.

  ‘What the fuck? What the fuck were you doing?’ several players remember him shouting in Hughes’s direction.

  The captain had missed the pre-season through injury. He needed to ‘have a good run around’ is several players’ recollection of how he justified his positional indiscipline to Paisley. That certainly raised a snigger. Hughes always had a lot to say for himself. It never escaped some players’ attention that if you were at Anfield on a Sunday morning to have an injury looked at, Hughes’s car would be parked up on the forecourt, signalling that he would be in Paisley’s office, dispensing some wisdom.

  ‘So that’s how you thank me, is it?’ said Paisley. ‘I got you the two faster full-backs you said I should buy. That’s the last time I listen to you . . .’

  Silence dropped on the dressing-room like a stone and suddenly every eye in the room was boring into Hughes, who stared at the floor like a man who wanted it to swallow him up.

  ‘What did you just say?’ Smith demanded of Paisley. ‘He told you to buy new full-backs?’

  Never at his best in these situations, Paisley stammered out an attempt
ed retraction. ‘Didn’t mean that’ and ‘wasn’t like that’ were the only fragments that were audible. He was fighting a losing battle, because his conversation with Hughes was out there now.

  ‘You bastard,’ Smith said, marching towards Hughes. ‘I should knock the living daylights out of you.’

  Lindsay stepped in front of him. ‘Not before me,’ he said.

  Joe Fagan intervened before punches were thrown, but the team coach was shrouded in silence as it pulled through the streets of London that night. The Times reached its own conclusions about the Liverpool performance. ‘The Anfield army are not their old resolute selves. Where once they would have ground out a narrow victory they were defeated by wit and invention,’ it declared. But the story behind the scenes was more dramatic than correspondent Geoffrey Green knew.

  The episode revealed one of the substantial chinks in Paisley’s armour. He was not effective when it came to verbal sparring. ‘He didn’t get into conversations because he didn’t trust himself,’ says Phil Thompson. But it also demonstrated that by the outset of his second season as manager his players had a voice in a way that had been inconceivable under the hugely motivational management of Bill Shankly.

  Paisley always felt that Hughes, his first captain, might have been a better player if he hadn’t had quite so much to say for himself. Hughes always wanted to be ‘a charge hand’, the manager once said. But he was still free to suggest new players and ideas to Paisley. In the Anfield canteen Hughes and the 27-year-old goalkeeper Ray Clemence were, by the start of Paisley’s second season, sometimes to be found sitting at the coaches’ table. In the dressing-room voices could be heard far more often. Team talks had started to involve the players.

  Even some of those who thought life would never be the same after Shankly saw that a quieter manager could be a more democratic and empowering one, who would hear them out. ‘Shanks used to dominate these [team meetings] but Bob encouraged the players to participate fully,’ Keegan would say years later. ‘Even the lads who had kept quiet began to add to the discussion. Bob was willing to let the lads stamp a little of themselves on the club’s ideas. Bob was big enough to accept the fact that maybe a player could give a reason why a certain thing should be done in a certain way.’