Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Twelve months earlier the endless comparisons with Shankly had led Paisley to inform Robinson that he couldn’t deal with the press. But his robust defence of himself at Coventry suggested that he had underestimated what he was capable of. ‘It may not be good for football and perhaps it’s not entertaining,’ Paisley declared. ‘But to win the championship you have to find the happy medium between adventure and the need to get results. We are committed to playing in a certain way at Anfield because of what our fans expect. If we have to play like this away from home and inch our way to the title, that’s how it will have to be.’

  Paisley did not always know the reporters away from Anfield, but his discussions were none the worse for it. He was clearly trying something substantially different away from home than at Anfield, where the old spirit was intact. Liverpool scored 11 goals in their first five home league games of the 1975–76 season and four goals away.

  Though Paisley ‘never used two words where one would do’, as Keegan put it, the players began to take some pleasure in the fact that his vocabulary had a life of its own and that his sentences never quite seemed to finish, often tailing off with ‘’n that . . .’ His most emphatic catchphrase was, ‘What the fuck?’, though it took a lot to get him agitated enough to say it.

  ‘Tactics’ sessions were also something to savour. There was talk in a Melwood briefing one day of ‘Tony Currie’s far flung one’. This, it transpired, was Paisley-speak for a long ball from the Sheffield United midfielder.

  On another occasion Paisley accused Tommy Smith of ‘hitting the slow ro-lo’.

  The term had been allowed to pass when Smith interjected. ‘Hang on. What the fuck is a “slow ro-lo”?’

  It was possibly rolling a pass across the pitch, possibly under-hitting a pass – no one ever quite got to the bottom of that one. Paisley grinned as he delivered some of these esoteric expressions. They did have some meaning but they reflected the deeply embedded ironic disdain for fancy tactical talk, which Paisley saw as the height of affectation.

  David Fairclough heard the manager tell him on one occasion that he was to be ‘the lone star ranger’. He took that to be Paisley-speak for playing as the lone striker.

  If Paisley heard a piece of so-called technical football terminology used in the media, he would ask his players what on earth it meant. ‘Leading the line’ was one of his favourites. The term ‘blind side run’ was another; many was the time he would walk off chuckling to himself after hearing that one and asking what it meant.

  His scepticism was also reserved for those players whose reputations were bigger, to his mind, than their contributions on the field of play. ‘Doing a Huddy’ derived from the Boot Room view of Alan Hudson, the Stoke City midfielder much fêted as a midfield technician. Paisley was always adamant that Hudson should hold no fear as he operated deep in midfield, from a position where he would not be challenged by opponents and therefore cause no harm, thus ‘doing a Huddy’.

  Another of that ilk which always tickled him was England manager Sir Alf Ramsey’s description in 1968 of West Ham midfielder Martin Peters as ‘ten years ahead of his time’. Paisley was still grinning at the notion ten years later.

  A journalist talked about Leeds United’s Duncan McKenzie having ‘flair’ before the match against Jimmy Armfield’s side at Anfield in February 1976. Flair, Paisley replied, was something you found at the bottom of a pair of trousers. Others that would set him off included: ‘We must be more positive’ (‘Time to call an electrician’ was his stock joke); ‘giving the ball enough grass’ and ‘doing the business in the final third’.

  Paisley’s own vocabulary could be a mystery, too, because of his struggle to recall a name and the thick north-east vernacular which made him hard to comprehend. For reasons which have never been entirely clear, he disclosed before a game against Aston Villa that he had been speaking to one of their scouts, whose surname eluded him. ‘I’ve been speaking to Duggie . . . Duggie . . . Duggie doin’s,’ he said. The players dissolved into laughter and from that day on, Paisley was collectively known to them – sometimes out of earshot – as ‘Duggie Doin’s’ – or sometimes plain ‘Duggie’.

  His players also adopted the ‘Bob walk’. The troublesome ankle of Paisley’s created a tendency for him to sway from side to side as he moved, with a pronounced swing of the arm. This was recreated to great comic effect by players who complemented the routine with his favourite expletive: ‘What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck are you doing?’

  The great mimic was Terry McDermott, the Liverpudlian who had been signed in the autumn of 1974. McDermott had only been at the club a few months when, with the players gathered in the Melwood dressing-room ahead of one of the manager’s weekly Friday morning tactics talks (always a brief affair) he assumed the ‘Duggie Doin’s’ pose, waddling around the tactics board, forgetting players’ names and dropping the miniature player figures on the floor, while keeping a close eye on the door in case Paisley walked in. But there was a back door to the room and he entered that way instead, catching McDermott in flagrante. ‘Would you like to give the talk then, Terry?’ Paisley asked, deadpan.

  The laughter took the edge off and brought some warmth to what was an unsparing and hard environment. Paisley didn’t mind the jokes, even though his own were not exactly cutting edge. One of his favourites was about the chairman of Bishop Auckland, the great amateur team he’d done so well with, deciding to send the result of one of the club’s away games back by homing pigeon so that the scores could go on show. Except the chairman wasn’t sure how homing pigeons worked, so he looked the bird in the eye one day and dispensed with written instructions. ‘Tell ’em we won 3–1, pet,’ he said.

  Phil Neal, one of the more serious-minded in the dressing-room, recalled more than the malapropisms which seemed to stick in other players’ minds. The level of detail garnered from Saunders’s opposition reports impressed the young defender. He would be detailed to pick up a particular player from set-pieces on the right, on the basis that the player had slipped his marker a couple of times the previous week. A decoy runner in the opposition ranks would sometimes be identified in advance. There would be reminders of Liverpool’s failings against the previous week’s opponents.

  They were all better listeners than talkers in the Boot Room and that became clear after matches, when they started inviting opposition managers into the room. Visitors would come to include Elton John, who had brought his Watford team to Anfield before his curiosity took him down into the sanctuary. ‘Do you have pink gin?’ asked the singer. Paisley always liked to relate their reply: ‘Sorry, we’ve only got Export.’

  But a pop star was insignificant. To Paisley, Moran, Fagan and Saunders, the ten minutes spent with opposition managers at 5.15 p.m. every other Saturday mattered hugely. ‘We tried to find out what other people did,’ says Evans. ‘Travel, food. And then later, when they’d gone, we might say, “We should think about that.”’

  Years later, Paisley would present the idea of inviting opposition managers into the Boot Room as a sign of sportsmanship. ‘At the end of the day . . . the only thing you can do is say, “Look, come in, have a drink; win lose or draw, you can come in, irrespective of what words we’ve had, or anything.” The game’s a sport, really, and that’s the attitude.’

  That was economy with the truth on Paisley’s part. For him, this was another intelligence-gathering exercise. Southampton manager Lawrie McMenemy saw that in the end. The little reception committee in the Boot Room left him feeling that Paisley was one of the nicest individuals in football, but he came to realise that their offer of cheap beer and talk was a hustle.

  On one occasion McMenemy arrived wearing a fashionable new light-coloured raincoat, and when Paisley told him to ‘sit there, son’ and pointed to a dusty beer crate, he felt he was being tested for a reaction. A glass of Scotch from a cup or a beer were the offerings. McMenemy, ‘wanting to be one of the lads’, took a seat and started talking players, teams an
d systems with them. Five minutes in, he discovered that he was imparting information about his own players – ‘best foot, ability in the air, his personality’. Only when he was on the way home did it dawn on McMenemy that he’d given away secrets. ‘You’d been getting the third degree without realising it. If you’d said anything positive about the player in question then you could expect them to turn up at your next home game to scout him.’

  In his pursuit of football knowledge Paisley wanted to know exactly what other managers thought of his own players, too. ‘There’s a lot of talk goes off in there [the Boot Room] and that’s interesting because you’re always interested in what people think about your own players. They tell you more about your own players than you really know yourself, or vice versa,’ he later reflected. No manager recalls leaving the Boot Room armed with Liverpool’s view of his team.

  The one exception to that rule was the night when one of the Manchester City coaches, Jimmy Frizzell, arrived in the Boot Room and proceeded to suggest City’s manager Billy McNeill, didn’t know what he was doing. ‘Hey, hey don’t be telling us, mate,’ Moran said. ‘Be telling your manager. It’s easy to criticise.’ An assistant bad-mouthing his own manager ran against the Boot Room respect for hierarchies and of never trying to steal your boss’s job.

  Nobody else seemed to be on to the value of this fact-finding opportunity. The only person who Paisley remembered asking a meaningful question during all those years in the Boot Room was Arsenal’s Don Howe. ‘What are your methods? How do you do training?’ Howe asked. Bob, Joe, Ronnie and Tom always respected him for that. They would not have missed the opportunity to ask Howe about Ray Kennedy.

  This information-gathering began to yield results, and the little pieces of wisdom coming their way were not lost on the players. Liverpool played at Tottenham in mid-December and again began the game with caution. Some compared it to a European away game, Liverpool drawing Spurs out, ‘wary of having run into a booby trap’ as the Daily Post’s Horace Yates put it. Jimmy Case had scored a hat-trick in midweek, against Ślask Wroclaw in the UEFA Cup, but had been located deep in midfield, which seemed puzzling.

  When Keegan scored an opening goal, Liverpool began to show more ambition and the afternoon turned into an exposition of what attack-minded players breaking through from midfield might offer. Kennedy had remained in the reserves along with Joey Jones, who was taking time to reach the Liverpool level. But Case burst forward to score a fourth goal in two games, and substitute David Fairclough looked dangerous. The value of the attacking full-backs Hughes had wanted revealed itself, too. Neal advanced to exploit space and scored his first Liverpool goal. A 4–0 win took Liverpool from 5th to 2nd on goal difference.

  Fagan had been right about Case. It was becoming a breakthrough season, in which he would score 12 goals from midfield. Tommy Smith was the surprise package, adapting himself to the new ball-playing style in a way few thought possible. ‘He was handier with his feet than people realised,’ says Ian St John. But Hughes’s goal in the win over Stoke at Anfield – taking the ball from the halfway line, beating three defenders, exchanging passes with Keegan and beating a fourth man to score – underlined why Paisley considered him a player of class, if a little too much conversation.

  The decision to reposition Kennedy eventually began to reap results. In March 1976 Paisley walked into the dressing-room and asked Kennedy if he wanted to play for England. The manager, Don Revie, had been on the phone. He won his first international cap against Wales that month and scored his first international goal. He masterminded the 5–3 home win over Stoke City in mid-April which took Liverpool to the top of the table. ‘What a great player Kennedy has become,’ reported Yates.

  Fairclough – the only one Paisley had seemed to coach – proved to be the difference, though. After a surprise 2–0 home defeat to Middlesbrough had restored the doubts about whether Paisley could take this team to a league title, the young striker embarked on a run of four goals in three consecutive league games. He had already seen off Norwich and Burnley when he beat five men to finish with a low shot into the net against Everton with three minutes remaining. It was a hugely resonant and long-remembered strike which kept Liverpool two points off leaders QPR with a game in hand and five games to play. Liverpool had won seven and drawn one of a vital eight matches.

  The goal also created a finale which had seemed beyond any expectation on that opening afternoon at Loftus Road – the possibility of a First Division and UEFA Cup Double. Liverpool had progressed steadily through the European competition, securing a place in the two-legged final against Belgian side Club Brugge by overcoming Barcelona with a shrewd tactical display which brought them a 1–0 victory in the Nou Camp stadium.

  The televised Club Brugge home tie came first and in the television studio George Best looked at a Liverpool team now populated by players who, Keegan aside, he had hardly heard of. He just could not see them finding a way past the talented Belgians. ‘You look at some of those players and wouldn’t really say they were world-class players,’ he said.

  One of Paisley’s young additions – Neal – did struggle at Anfield, at the hands of the Belgian international Raoul Lambert. Liverpool were two goals down inside 12 minutes.

  Paisley had little to offer by way of words at half-time. ‘Nothing that I remember and nothing like Shanks,’ says Toshack of his interventions. But he employed a tactical switch for the second half which changed the course of the night. Toshack was removed, Case sent on and Liverpool attacked down the flanks instead. Case immediately scuffed an easy opportunity on the mud-caked Anfield pitch but went on to deliver a command performance. He and Kennedy ran the midfield, both scoring as Liverpool found the net three times in five minutes around the hour mark to take a lead into the away leg.

  In Belgium, Lambert sent Club Brugge ahead with an early penalty, but Keegan’s crashed 15-yard equaliser was enough and the side held out to clinch Paisley’s first trophy. For many, the converted midfielder Kennedy was the stand-out player.

  There was a lack of ostentation about the way Liverpool paraded the UEFA Cup around the new Olympiastadion in Bruges on the night of 19 May 1976. The base of the trophy fell off. ‘Paisley’s hits are so composed,’ stated one corny headline, reflecting on the unglamorous way Liverpool had found their way to victory.

  Toshack was devastated to have been removed from the action so early at Anfield, yet he would later reflect that Paisley’s decision was visionary and not something he could argue with. ‘A change of approach was needed and the final scoreline was a tribute to the tactical knowledge of Paisley as much as anything else,’ Toshack says.

  The arithmetic for the last First Division match of the season, at Wolverhampton Wanderers, underlined how tight the league season had been and the significance of Fairclough’s contribution, in what was a spring-time like none other for him. Paisley’s players could afford to draw 0–0 or 1–1 in the Midlands and still win the league, but 2–2 or defeat would hand the title to QPR. For Shankly, this would have been a moment for steadying minds with the big speech. For Paisley, it was another moment of unintended comedy gold.

  Vast numbers of Liverpool supporters had turned up without tickets that night, including Phil Thompson’s brothers, Owen and Ian. Thompson was worrying about them getting in and, since the door of the dressing-room at Molineux opened out onto the main road which runs past the stadium, he kept disappearing out through it to see if he could find them. A message then reached him that his elder brother was at the main stadium door so he ventured off again, returning five minutes later with a plea for Paisley. ‘Boss, you have to help,’ he said. ‘My brothers have been to every game this season and now they can’t get in.’

  Paisley went out into the corridor, buttonholed the elderly steward for a key to the door out onto the street and, after returning with it, told Thompson to ‘get them up here’. Thompson jumped onto a bench, spotted his contingent through the high window which gave a view onto the street a
nd signalled to them to come to the door, which Paisley duly opened. It was not just the two Thompson brothers who stepped through it. Friends and extended family numbering eight walked in and, to their astonishment, found themselves standing in the dressing-room where Paisley was attempting to prepare the players for his most significant night in 36 years at Liverpool.

  It was while Thompson was placing his entourage into the company of a police officer and asking him to see them to the Liverpool end that Emlyn Hughes – never one knowingly to pass up an opportunity – stepped up onto the bench Thompson had used and informed Paisley, ‘Boss, my mates are out there as well.’

  Paisley opened the door once again, and this time a procession of around 40 people filed in, carrying flags, banners and horns and singing their Liverpool anthems in the dressing-room. What was supposed to be an environment of organised calm was now becoming bedlam. Paisley started to panic. ‘What the fuck. What the fuck?’ he shouted at no one in particular, single-handedly attempting to force the door shut. ‘How many are in your family? This has gone too far.’