by Ian Herbert
The air of independence extended to the players being allowed a mid-season night away in 1976, where the talk carried on. They chose Llangollen in the North Wales Vale of Clwyd, an hour’s drive from Liverpool, with a meal at the Bryn Howel Hotel, a round of golf and some drinks at night. ‘We had never done anything like that when Shanks was the boss,’ said Keegan. It would become a regular practice.
The environment meant that players answered to each other as much as to Paisley. When Leeds United’s Eddie Gray had caused both Neal and Jones problems at Elland Road, it was Keegan who later took the defenders to task in the dressing-room. Paisley listened and five minutes had elapsed before he added his own slightly eccentric rider. He told the team that he would have had no problem with Gray that day. ‘Give me Eddie Gray in a confined space and he wouldn’t beat me,’ he said. That certainly took the heat out of the scene. The thought of Paisley facing Leeds amused some of his players.
‘I don’t know about that, boss . . .’ said one.
‘I’m telling you! If you put him in a confined space…’
Some headshaking ensued.
‘I’m telling you . . .’ Paisley said, and walked out. His self-effacement had its limits. He would not let them impugn his reputation as a Liverpool half-back.
Though Neal and Jones had struggled at Leeds, Hughes’s original observations were valid. Smith was not mobile and, though no one would say it, Lindsay was one of the slowest players at the club. The two new defenders’ contributions – especially wing-back Neal’s – would show the value of a manager prepared to listen to his players, rather than assume he knew best.
Hughes was by no means the most popular man in the squad. Some of the players thought he was always out for himself, and he also made the mistake of putting himself at odds with Tommy Smith, the bedrock of the squad’s Liverpudlian contingent, which meant that some of the local players were against him too. Smith used to call him ‘a creep’, and those in the Smith camp felt Hughes’s high-profile display at QPR reeked of self-publicity. ‘It was all designed for the fans – “Look at Emlyn!”’ Thompson still feels.
None of that bothered Paisley. To his mind, there was nothing wrong with creative tensions in a squad. In any case, he had not introduced the new full-backs on Hughes’s advice alone. The contents of conversations like that were fed, like everything else, into the poky, windowless room down the corridor from his office which had been a place to commune years before he became manager. The forenames of the select few who sat together in the Boot Room – Bob, Joe, Ronnie and Tom – were as ordinary and unaffected as its surroundings: upturned beer crates for seats, a calendar of topless models, a threadbare carpet on the floor, a kettle. Tom Saunders added a little gravitas but Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran could have easily been mistaken for the caretakers, given that they always walked around Anfield with bunches of keys hooked to their trousers.
That was how Paisley wanted it. Their values, laid down by Shankly, were based on working for one another and not getting ahead of yourself – and their room reflected precisely that. Footballs and training kit were stuffed onto grey metal shelving. A Perspex notice board appeared in the room a few years later and was considered sophisticated. ‘Just like Real Madrid,’ read the ironic message Moran scrawled across it, just in case anyone thought the Boot Room was getting above itself.
That’s not to say there were not hierarchies, because Paisley, like Shankly before him, believed in them, too. It was always the job of the assistant manager’s wife, for example, to wash the reserve team’s kit. Everyone knew that Bob’s seat, where he would nurse a glass of Scotch, was the one on the far left, as you entered.
When Melwood training was done – usually by 1 p.m. – and they had driven back to Anfield, this group had hours at their disposal. Though Paisley might have some calls to make, including to his bookmakers, the backroom staff had little else on their minds but talking football. In the empty afternoons after training they would sit for as long as four hours and leave at around 5 p.m., reflecting, arguing, planning all that time.
Part of the process on those occasions would be to log details of the training sessions in the black notebooks known as the ‘Anfield bibles’, which Paisley and Moran had begun keeping in the Shankly days, containing details of drills, injuries, opponents – the kind of stored collective memory which would today be called a database. The notes were a continual reference point amid changing times: a stored collective memory as to what had worked. No other club had anything like it.
Saunders became an increasingly significant part of it, establishing himself as a key confidant and adviser to Paisley: the consigliere. But Moran and Fagan were the manager’s main football authorities. They were the ones who had played the game. Both were Liverpudlian to their core, though Fagan, who was born within a mile of Anfield and underwent a trial with Liverpool, joined Manchester City, believing he would have more first-team opportunities at left-back there. He had returned to his home-town club 18 months before Shankly’s arrival and, for many players, provided the avuncular quality and powers of communication that Paisley lacked. On the many occasions when players left Paisley’s team meetings struggling to comprehend his instructions, Fagan would provide the translation.
Moran had the career as a Liverpool left-back that Fagan believed was beyond him, playing 379 times between 1952 and 1965. He was captain in 1959–60 and it was his monumental enthusiasm which led Shankly to invite him onto the training staff during the 1966–67 season. Alongside them in the ranks was the unremittingly tough Reuben Bennett, a Scottish former goalkeeper who was nothing less than Shankly’s henchman until 1971, given the task of driving every last ounce of effort from the players.
In time Fagan, Moran, Saunders and Reuben Bennett would be joined in the Boot Room by Roy Evans, who was brought up in the Bootle suburb on the bank of the Mersey and who had lost his place as a full-back when in 1974, at the age of 25, he was asked by Paisley to join the staff as reserve-team manager. Paisley saw the way he instilled sense into the younger players. Evans loved Sundays in the Boot Room when, having examined injured players and sorted out the kit for the next day, there would be time to reflect on Saturday’s game. ‘We’d sit there for 15 minutes,’ says Evans. ‘And then someone would say, “What about it? What did you think about yesterday?” Someone [else] would throw a player’s name out: “I thought he could have been better.” That’s how it started.’
Evans never initiated the conversation because he was the junior party: those hierarchies at work again. ‘He [Paisley] would talk to you about it, ask your opinion,’ Evans says. ‘I’m a 25-year-old guy and he is asking my opinion. He is saying, “You might not get it right but you might get one little thing we don’t.” They gave you your voice, your confidence, and that’s the only way you could learn, really. They say, “I know what you mean but no, that wouldn’t work that way.” It showed he wanted the people below him to have a voice and to speak. At the end they’ve all had their say and put their bit in but you as the manager have to make the final choice.’
The players knew they must not cross the threshold or breach the sanctity of the Boot Room unless invited to – which they almost never were, with the sole exception of when they were collecting their boots before leaving for international duty. Tommy Smith had the temerity to put the carpet out for sweeping one day. He was told in no uncertain terms to put it back.
If the players, and especially the younger ones, were making a noise outside, a head would reach around the door and issue the order: ‘Fuck off or shut up.’
The five of them ran the team together. Paisley’s word was not gospel and nor did he think it should be. He always sat in the stand during the first half of games and only took to the bench if things were not working. Sometimes, he would come down the interior staircase at Anfield and out to the dugout and suggest a substitution to Fagan, though it was not obligatory – as Smith discovered at QPR. If there was a shift in the pattern of the game before
he could get Paisley’s recommended substitute on, Fagan would leave things as they were.
Fagan was Paisley’s contemporary and perhaps closer to him than Moran. They knew him as ‘Smokin’ Joe’ because he was so often dragging on a cigarette. He would spot the smallest drop-off in performance effort and, like Paisley, could put the fear of God in a player without saying too much, but it was he who offered thoughtfulness. He didn’t often swear. ‘You buggers!’ was one of his catchphrases when something had got away from him at Melwood. He could also be something of a pessimist when watching from the bench. ‘Oh, they’ve shit it!’ was another of his sayings, signalling that he thought the game was lost. When Fagan let you have it, you knew he meant it and you knew there was trouble.
Ronnie Moran was the bad cop, the rabble rouser – generally effing, blinding, cajoling and demanding and always available to dish out a bollocking. ‘The fuck-off man’, they called him. His linguistic inelegance was matched by a very physical approach to the daily staff versus trainees games. His nickname – ‘Moransco’ – was the nearest they got to having a laugh at his expense. Moran is the only man the young striker David Fairclough knew who could shout ‘give and go’ continually for half an hour. He’d employ any device to get more out of players and get under the skin of the edgier ones. He became the feared man who would take the ball away from you and run you to death if you were not putting in the maximum effort – though many say the tough exterior obscured something subtler. On the occasions when Moran would give reserve-team player Owen Brown a lift to Anfield, the young forward would hear his tactical ideas in the car, but then would see him revert to type once they had arrived.
Paisley was not interested in annexing the territory of these men – each of whom, in their own way, formed the bridge to the players that Paisley once had for Shankly. He left them to run things. He would make the drive back from Melwood to Anfield in the brown Austin Rover which he drove in his early years as manager while the players, Moran and Fagan would be on the coach. Another ritual retained from the Shankly era was that the coach windows must remain up. The environment was rank but it was deemed unhealthy to left fresh air flow in. The players showered at the stadium.
There would be an hour or so for Paisley to deal with business in his office – another unpretentious, windowless affair, with a couple of grey and black telephones on a shelf on the wall, next to an unsightly ventilation pipe. ‘Like a foreman’s office on a Wimpey estate,’ Paisley’s rival Brian Clough called it. And then they would join the others back in the Boot Room.
There was plenty to discuss at the start of the 1975–76 season. After QPR, the early weeks lurched from bad to near catastrophe. The first of two home games ended 2–2 (against West Ham), then Liverpool trailed 2–0 to two goals in 16 minutes before half-time against Tottenham. Emlyn Hughes was still not fully fit and both he and Thompson were too adventurous for their own, and Liverpool’s, good. The opening goal deflected in off Hughes’s shin, the second left the two central defenders out of position. Liverpool mustered no chances before half-time.
Yet Paisley resisted any temptation to introduce substitutes, and the Anfield crowd contributed to a comeback, with three goals in 18 second-half minutes securing a 3–2 win. ‘I think we should have slaughtered them,’ said the Spurs manager Terry Neill. Paisley opted for one of his little homilies. ‘I wouldn’t like another 39 minutes like that,’ he said. ‘There’d be a few thromboses about.’ Privately, he knew he had more decisions to make.
One of the club’s biggest signings was struggling. Liverpool had hoped that Ray Kennedy would be a new partner for Keegan, with Toshack struggling for fitness. But it hadn’t worked. Kennedy wasn’t happy. The hard, self-regulating Liverpool environment was a different world to the one he had known at Arsenal. He’d started feeling odd muscular spasms, too. His right hip would push involuntarily when he walked, leading him to feel awkward and off balance. His right foot had a habit of scuffing the floor and he felt strains in his right arm and leg which he couldn’t explain. When speculation surfaced in the newspapers that he might be transferred to Leicester City, Kennedy asked to see Paisley. He told him he thought he was being singled out for indifferent form when he wasn’t the only one not playing well.
Kennedy had become accustomed to the niceties of life at Highbury. He liked the smoked salmon and chocolate cake they laid on for away trips. But Paisley’s response was cold and hard. Something along the lines of, ‘You need to lose weight and work harder.’ He didn’t pull any punches when the newspapers asked him about Kennedy, either. ‘If Ray wants to play for Liverpool then he can, but I only want those people who want to do well for this club,’ he was quoted as saying. It was a calculated manoeuvre. Paisley wanted a reaction and provoking one was a use he found for the newspapers. Kennedy seethed, learning for himself why they called him the Rat. He didn’t mind admitting that he hated Paisley at that time.
But Paisley liked Kennedy’s spatial awareness on the field and his range of passing. He thought him honest. The player had been born 20 miles due north of Hetton-le-Hole and, for Paisley, that kind of birthright was always a good sign. He wasn’t ready to sell him unless he had to.
By chance, the manager had come across Kennedy’s former secondary school games teacher, Rob Brydon, on one of his trips back to the north-east. Most PE teachers have plenty to say during a random encounter with a First Division footballer manager, and most managers look for a way to limit their exposure. But Paisley listened. Brydon mentioned that the schoolboy Kennedy had been a midfielder. Paisley thought about it. He might just try that.
He called Kennedy back to his office and told him that because he had lost some of his sharpness in attack he intended to take him back to where he had started on the field. Kennedy’s recollections of their exchange revealed that Paisley did not invite much conversation on the matter. ‘“You’re going to play in midfield in future. You’ll do better when facing the ball,”’ he said. He encouraged him to be more aggressive and put more fight into his game. ‘You don’t argue with a man like him,’ Kennedy reflected years later.
He was suspicious by nature, though. His nickname among the players was ‘Susser’ because he always seemed to be trying to ‘suss out’ an ulterior motive. His first instinct was that this might be Paisley’s way of putting him out to grass.
There was a five-game try-out in the reserve team’s midfield. Then the new role was put to the test in the First Division against Middlesbrough in November 1975 – a 1–0 win at Anfield. It was clear that this metamorphosis would take some time. Kennedy instinctively neglected the defensive side of his role and allowed players to get past him. In the Boot Room, they looked for a way to compensate. Joey Jones, who was less inclined to advance upfield, was asked to switch from right-back to left-back and Phil Neal was moved to the right. That bolstered the left side of defence and helped cover the spaces created by Kennedy’s runs.
There were others players to weigh up. No player was evidently discussed more in the Boot Room in the early months of the 1975–76 season than Jimmy Case, who combined his football with an electrician’s apprenticeship as a career back-up option. Case saw himself as a striker, though the options up front seemed scarce. His slight frame created questions about his ability to hold up a position in midfield. They worried about his physique.
He’d scored in the 3–2 comeback against Tottenham but was then put back in the reserves for a month. He was picked again, scored two in three games, and dropped again. There was little explanation from Paisley. On one occasion the manager just threw Case the number 9 jersey and said, ‘All right, lad, see if you can handle that one.’
Paisley knew more about the prejudice against shorter players than most, but still took some convincing about Case. Fagan seems to have argued the player’s merits harder than anyone. There’d been a punch-up involving the 21-year-old and Alec Lindsay, who had stuck out a foot after Case passed him one time too many in training, prompting him to respond
with a right-hander. Case was summoned the next day before Fagan, who tore into him, reminding him what the consequences would have been had he been playing in a European game.
But the episode appears to have convinced Fagan that his physical contribution might complement the more languid Kennedy. ‘That Case boy, he’s got some aggression, hasn’t he?’ Fagan observed at the time. ‘I think we’ll have some of that.’ They didn’t mind fighters, in the Boot Room.
The only player who seemed to get much of Paisley’s attention during that 1975–76 season was a young local striker, David Fairclough. Several times, Paisley offered him advice on the way he shaped to score in training, and he also wanted the young Liverpudlian to try out the speed balls as part of his fitness work.
‘He used to take me aside from time to time and offer ideas, little tips,’ says Fairclough. ‘That was odd because he didn’t do that with other people. It was a joke for a while. People used to say, “The Rat’s got a soft spot for you!”’
What Paisley wanted most was to balance defence and attack. He still sought more patience from the players and asked them to hold the ball more, rather than run themselves into the ground. It meant a slower tempo than some had become accustomed to under Shankly. The team was going to be playing 60-odd games a season in all competitions and this was a much better way to play, he said. They were starting to drop Keegan into a withdrawn midfield role away from home. For a second successive season, this was by no means popular. Coventry City were equally unambitious when the teams met at Highfield Road in mid-October, though the most absorbing drama was the sight of Larry Lloyd, the defender Paisley had dumped, proving not to be ‘overfriendly in his manners or tackles to former colleagues’. Liverpool lacked intensity and rarely threatened. ‘All a game of Paisley patience,’ the Daily Mail’s headline stated after the 0–0 draw. The accompanying report criticised the way the side ‘pack their defence, congest midfield and invite opponents to lose patience. It is unadventurous and unattractive.’ The withdrawal of Keegan from the conventional forward’s position that Shankly had found for him was ‘unpalatable’, the newspaper declared. ‘Liverpool guaranteed continuity when they replaced Bill Shankly as manager with their assistant Bob Paisley,’ the Mail’s Jeff Powell wrote. ‘But in time teams come to reflect their manager’s character. Shankly was full of passion and an overwhelming belief in the greatness of his team. Paisley is quieter, a more detailed planner, steadier. Now, so are Liverpool. They no longer frighten the life out of the opposition.’
