Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  The consequences were more profound than he probably knew. ‘We were in pieces,’ says Thompson. ‘It was typical Bob and it relaxed us more than any team talk.’ Keegan felt the same. ‘I doubt that a team of players have ever worked more closely with their manager than Liverpool did with Bob,’ he said. ‘We willed him to win the league. We wanted to win it for him.’

  And they did. An early goal for Wolves, who needed a win to avoid relegation that night, set Liverpool back on their heels, but Keegan scored the equaliser, Toshack swivelled onto a shot to score a winner and Kennedy rounded off the night with a third as Paisley’s side clinched the title by a point from QPR. Paisley did not look like a man in his element when he made a rare appearance before the TV cameras that night.

  Emlyn Hughes ended the season with far more to say, just as he had started it. ‘He’s got to be manager of the year. He’s just got to be,’ he told the same television interviewer from amid the euphoria of the Liverpool dressing-room. By then, Paisley had vanished into the background and was nowhere to be seen. They’d done all their talking in the Boot Room. He could leave the discussion to others now.

  6

  We Need to Talk About Kevin

  Bob Paisley said that he had discovered quietness did have a place in running a football team. ‘I believe I have mastered the side of management which worried me,’ he told the Liverpool Echo in the aftermath of the league and UEFA Cup Double. ‘I had no experience of handling the players in other ways. Bill had always done that: that was the manager’s job. I had to learn to deal with the manager’s problems and I have found that it is easy to get involved in an argument and that it is better to be tactful. Never say anything that you might live to regret.’

  But despite the warm afterglow of his own breakthrough season, there was unchartered territory ahead. The next problem was beyond his very limited managerial experience.

  The UEFA Cup campaign had opened Kevin Keegan’s eyes to what a life beyond Liverpool might look like and left him determined to get a slice of it. After helping to carry the wobbly European trophy off the field in Belgium he told Paisley that he wanted to leave Anfield. Players generally only wanted to arrive there, but here was a player seeking a move for a reason other than having given up on a place in the team. He was Liverpool’s best player, too.

  There were few others Paisley considered remotely good enough to replace Keegan, though the forward did not seem to be in the mood to wait around in the summer of 1976. He had been particularly taken by Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium, where Liverpool had played their UEFA Cup semi-final in late March. Keegan looked around at the dressing-rooms in wonderment – ‘almost as big as Liverpool’s training ground’ – as well as the club’s own little chapel, the magnificent surface of the pitch and the crowd of 85,000.

  It was a time of financial rewards for football’s great players. In the summer of 1976 the newspapers were full of Johan Cruyff’s new £10,000-a-week contract at Ajax. The best paid British players, meanwhile, had an 82 per cent domestic super tax rate to deal with. Keegan collected a bonus from Liverpool of £2,000 for his contribution to Paisley’s second season, though that was reduced to £400 after tax – and then there were surtax demands from the previous year. The pound was sinking, too, despite the swingeing spending public cuts and higher interest rates announced in July 1976. Keegan being Keegan, he didn’t bottle up his thoughts as he left the Nou Camp. He wandered up to the press reporters who’d covered the match and told them how he felt, and his thoughts filled their reports. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he’d said. ‘I’m all for Liverpool. But in a couple of years’ time I think my inclination would be to play in Spanish football.’ His urge to leave was actually far stronger than that.

  A petty argument between Paisley and Keegan suggested that the manager would struggle to deal with a challenge of this size. Keegan had discovered that a member of the administrative staff, Ken Addison, whose role in Liverpool’s commercial department included charitable work, was not travelling to Belgium for the UEFA Cup final second leg against Club Brugge because Liverpool had not – as Keegan understood it – invited his wife. Keegan, with his very acute sense of right and wrong, went to see Paisley and told him this should be sorted out for Addison – though the manager was not interested. ‘She doesn’t like flying,’ Paisley replied flatly, with total disregard for Keegan. Even as the team manager he was never inclined to criticise ‘upstairs’.

  ‘It’s a disgrace. Extra press and all sorts are coming along on the plane and this bloke, who’d do anything for this club, isn’t invited,’ replied Keegan, irritated by Paisley’s tone.

  ‘None of your business,’ said Paisley. Keegan stormed off and when Liverpool lifted the trophy in northern Belgium he could barely bring himself to look at Paisley. ‘Well done. You deserve it,’ was the most enthusiasm he could conjure. These were the moments when Keegan missed Shankly’s warmth most desperately.

  The dispute was quickly smoothed over – Paisley was not generally inclined to sulk with a star player who could get results for him, so he and Keegan were rarely at odds for long. But keeping the player at the club was not so easily brushed away.

  For most managers of the pre-war generation, steeped in Anfield as Paisley was, the idea of Barcelona appealing more than Liverpool to a player so idolised as 25-year-old Keegan would have been a source of indignation. But though Keegan was contracted to the club for another three years, Paisley knew a flat rejection would not work. He wanted to find an answer and looked for someone who could provide it. ‘We’ll talk to upstairs,’ he told Keegan.

  Paisley knew that there was a relationship between Keegan and Peter Robinson, stemming from the part the club secretary had played in getting Keegan to Anfield in the first place.

  That had all started with a phone call Robinson received in the office in the spring of 1968 from Scunthorpe United, where Keegan’s career was starting. On the end of the line was Jackie Brownsword, a Scunthorpe coach who held the distinction of playing a few games short of 600 for the club. He had called, as clubs often did, to ask Robinson for tickets for a Liverpool game. Bill Shankly was in the background and gestured to Robinson that he wanted to speak to Brownsword, too. He didn’t know him but was always very taken with how he had managed to play until the age of 42. After arranging the tickets, Robinson put Shankly on the line and it was then that Brownsword recommended his club’s best prospect – Keegan. Liverpool had some reports on him but Scunthorpe had only very few games left to play that season. ‘I’ll send Joe and Bob and if they fancy him we’ll sign him,’ Robinson remembers Shankly saying.

  Paisley didn’t need to watch the player twice. He returned from the trip – a Friday night match at Grimsby – and urged Shankly to conclude a deal. Keegan never forgot that. ‘My best recommendation came from Bob Paisley,’ he reflected. He also always remembered the part Robinson had played. Years later, when managing Newcastle United, Keegan arranged for Brownsword to be at St James’ Park for the occasion of a Liverpool match. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ he told Robinson.

  Persuading Keegan to stay took more ingenuity than signing him had. Robinson conceived a plan by which the forward would stay for one last season and in return Liverpool would do everything possible to get him to a foreign club that suited him, whatever the price.

  Keegan took a little talking around but with Paisley’s persuasion became agreeable to it. Paisley was satisfied with the idea. It would at least buy some time. The club concluded there was no point trying to keep it a secret.

  The announcement that the player was to go came on the morning of the 1976 Charity Shield against Southampton, and he made no secret that he had a sense of his own value. ‘Yes, I know my worth,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘The rewards of playing for some club like Real Madrid are so staggering that by going out of the country I could be a millionaire in five years. I’m not pleading poverty now – it would surprise me if many other English players had a more lucrative cont
ract than mine. But with income tax at 82p in the pound for me, what’s the point in sticking around indefinitely?’

  It was a forthright declaration which would have made some managers flinch, though Paisley was more interested in trying to extract another season of high performance from Keegan. ‘He’ll have to be in top form to make European clubs go for him,’ he observed. Raising the prospect of there being no takers was his way of challenging Keegan to give him one more quality campaign.

  ‘Upstairs’ were proving invaluable for Paisley. First, Robinson had helped resolve his anxieties about appearing in the public realm, and now Keegan was sorted for the short term, even though several informal inquiries that winter about an individual Paisley felt perhaps could replace him – Glasgow Celtic’s Kenny Dalglish – met with firm rejection. ‘You won’t get him,’ Liverpool were told, several times.

  The significance of keeping Keegan and keeping him happy did not take long to reveal itself. He was one of the outstanding players in the autumn of 1976 and the best of the Liverpool side in the 3–1 win over Everton in which, almost inevitably, he scored. The influence of Ray Kennedy was becoming increasingly significant in his new role, too. He also delivered against Everton and was widely commended for his performance in a hard-fought 1–1 draw with Leeds United. His ‘courage’ in midfield was what one of the Sunday papers highlighted.

  Winning the title had created a greater air of confidence around Anfield. Paisley’s public discussions revealed further advances from the reticence of his first season. He was the reigning manager of the year now. Saunders was needed less.

  ‘We had no biorhythm,’ he told reporters when Liverpool lost 1–0 to Newcastle United on 25 September. There was glint in his eye when he said it. It was his way of sending up the pseudo-intellectual explanation for Liverpool’s second defeat of the season, which had not dislodged them from the top of the league. ‘We didn’t play well,’ he then added, by way of translation.

  Paisley had more prosaic notions of football wisdom, based in the very small details, though they took some comprehending at times. Before the league game against Norwich City in January 1977, he offered some odd advice to penalty-taker Phil Neal about Norwich’s Indian-born goalkeeper Kevin Keelan. Keelan had ‘short arms’ when he dived to his right for penalties, the manager observed. It was his way of saying that when Keelan leapt to his right, he used his stronger left arm to attempt to stop the ball, rather than his right, which would have extended out further. It seemed like an obscure observation to make but Liverpool happened to win a penalty against John Bond’s Norwich side that afternoon, which Neal placed beyond the ‘short arm’ of Keelan.

  Paisley also took to employing the occasional double bluff. Joey Jones, who was generally discouraged from advancing too far up the field, was puzzled to find the boss asking him one night to ‘go up for the corners’. The manager of the Aston Villa side Liverpool were playing three days later was in the stadium that evening. It transpired that Paisley’s instructions were a decoy intended to convince him to feature Jones in his match preparations. ‘I was nowhere near the six-yard box the following Saturday,’ Jones says.

  With Keegan in his last season and Toshack physically capable of playing only half Liverpool’s games, Paisley had moved boldly into the transfer market, when a club record £200,000 was paid to bring the striker David Johnson from Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town, four days before the start of the 1976–77 league season. Johnson was an England international and one of the new breed of striker who broke the old centre-forward mould by providing something other than height and brawn in the penalty area. Robson had experimented with deploying two mobile strikers – Johnson and Trevor Whymark – to good effect.

  But though picked to start the first eight league fixtures, Johnson was deemed in need of assimilation time. He was frequently the substitute.

  There was no explanation of this from Paisley, whose austere management style took some adjusting to for the forward. ‘Having come from a man like Bobby Robson who was a great manager, who dealt with players and spoke to them and inspired them it was very different,’ Johnson says. ‘Bob was the complete opposite. He wasn’t a motivator. He couldn’t talk.’

  Liverpool did not immediately need a new record signing. The only setback came just before Christmas in a heavy midweek defeat at Aston Villa – who were 4–0 up in half an hour and 5–1 up at half-time – which served another reminder that Paisley came well down the order of merit when it came to oration in the midst of a crisis.

  ‘That result just blew Bob’s mind,’ Heighway says. ‘He couldn’t even speak in the dressing-room afterwards. He was shell-shocked. He couldn’t even be angry. He didn’t do angry. There was just an astonished dressing-room with Bob shaking his head.’ This struggle for self-expression struck Phil Thompson, too: ‘No, he didn’t say too much.’ It was Joe Fagan who read the riot act. ‘I’m not detracting from those Villa boys,’ Paisley told the press. ‘They did well. But my defence – I didn’t think they could play so badly.’

  He kept virtually the same side for the next game, at West Ham, and Liverpool went down 2–0, conceding top spot. He convened a ‘squad discussion’ after the defeat in east London, though it was brief and he does not seem to have raised his voice like Fagan. He promptly picked the same side yet again to face Stoke City at home, the day after Boxing Day, and Liverpool won 4–0, climbing back to the top spot they had surrendered by the defeat in London. Keegan dominated once more, lofting a difficult opportunity over goalkeeper Peter Shilton’s head for one of the goals.

  The world around them was becoming a more challenging place in the winter of 1976 – a time when Harold Wilson’s surprise resignation as Prime Minister reflected surging unemployment which topped 20 per cent in Liverpool, with inevitable effects on gate receipts. Kevin Keegan was not the only one frustrated by the strictures placed upon him in football’s burgeoning commercial environment. Liverpool’s earning power in Europe was limited by the fact that they were able to sell only highlights to BBC or ITV for the domestic audience, rather than live televised coverage, and the two broadcasters were not exactly turning it into an auction. Liverpool could sell their own overseas TV rights – with the countries which lacked quality teams proving the keenest – though UEFA, European football’s fledgling organisation, took 4 per cent.

  Liverpool needed new ways to generate the money for the transfer market and the announcement, in Paisley’s third season, that there would be a mid-season trip to Gothenburg underlined that. A mid-season exhibition match provided a one-off opportunity to generate extra money that was too good to miss. The Swedes were not the only club wanting to host the First Division champions. There was interest from Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Israel and Ireland. Each of the games generated the equivalent of a single First Division game gate receipts.

  Paisley was receptive to the idea of travelling away in mid-season. ‘He knew that anything we made was spent on players or on the ground,’ says Robinson. ‘There was no one taking sums out of clubs like there were in some places.’

  Informing the players they would be heading off abroad was not always straightforward, though. Steve Heighway wanted to know what they would be getting when it was announced that the side was to play in Gothenburg. Tommy Smith backed him.

  As Paisley hesitated, Heighway tabled a bid. The players wanted £300 each for going, he said.

  ‘I’ll see what they say upstairs,’ Paisley replied.

  The next day Heighway inquired what the reaction had been.

  ‘They’ll give you that,’ he said.

  A few months later, Paisley announced they would be playing in Israel, and Heighway moved to broach the question of an even higher fee.

  ‘There’s no discussion. That’s what it is,’ said Paisley, at the limit of his willingness to negotiate. Deference on the Rat’s part – sometimes it seemed like subservience – to ‘upstairs’ felt rooted in class consciousness at times, and his players would have liked him to f
ight the management for them. Some felt he was a small figure when it came to taking on their paymasters. Shankly would have done more. It is hard to imagine him tolerating mid-season overseas excursions.

  But the travel brought good income in and Paisley came to enjoy it. The trips to Israel were the start of a long attachment to that country, in which his experience seemed very different from the ordeal which the United States had been after the war. A mid-season postcard from Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall to Jessie revealed as much. ‘Darling,’ Paisley wrote. ‘A quick note after our visit to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where we spent a really interesting five hours. The weather is good with a slight breeze which makes it more comfortable. Will drop you a line later on. Love, Bob.’

  The players were amused to know that Paisley earned some commercial income of his own. Gola wanted him to wear their tracksuits. One of those he sported was personalised, with his name stitched beneath the logo. He managed to get Gola deals for the coaching staff too, though since the club’s Umbro shirt deal was one of the best around, this became a little delicate on match days. On those occasions Paisley just had to settle for his Gola boots and dispense with the tracksuit. He also wore a Gola tie.

  There were other signs that Bob had gone up in the world. He and Jessie moved house in 1977, leaving behind the house in South Manor Way where they’d raised the children for a new home, at 29 Bower Road in the picturesque heart of Woolton village. They’d paid off the mortgage on the old house, though Paisley was becoming more recognisable and people would be looking in to see where the Liverpool manager lived, so it was seclusion they wanted, rather than luxury. The new place was detached but not much larger: a dormer bungalow with two large rooms in the roof space reachable by ladder rather than stairs. There was also a greenhouse for Jessie.

  Their lives were not ostentatious. Paisley’s Christmas present from Christine was often Brylcreem and a comb. His hair was always brilliantined, though Jessie sometimes cursed at the mark this left on the head-rests of his chair. The antimacassars didn’t do the job they were intended for.