by Ian Herbert
The partnership Paisley and Robinson were forming saw Liverpool announce at Christmas 1976 that both of them were to be offered new seven-year contracts, running until 1983. For Paisley, the new deal was worth £105,000 over its entire seven-year span. He would earn in seven years what Cruyff earned in ten months.
That same press conference provided another sense of the new commercial landscape. Plans were announced for an export drive to market the club and its merchandise overseas. Anfield would have a new executive lounge for shareholders. The club’s first sponsored match would take place later that season, when Bell’s would pay for an association with the match against Manchester United on 3 May. Perimeter adverting would be introduced at Anfield. Robinson also made Liverpool the first league club to secure shirt advertising – first with Hitachi, then Crown Paints.
A ban on shirt advertising in televised matches, FA Cup ties and European games, however, did frustrate Liverpool. It was estimated that the Hitachi income would have been £250,000 without the strictures. Paisley viewed this as another way of earning money for players. He seized a paintbrush and wore a replica crown for the publicity shots with Crown Paints, grinning over his shoulder for the camera.
The burgeoning working relationship with Peter Robinson was significant in the complex commercial landscape that football began to occupy. It was an improbable one: Robinson, the educated, erudite and ambitious football executive who had gravitated from positions at Stockport, Crewe, Scunthorpe and Brighton to become club secretary aged only 29, in June 1965; Paisley, the trained County Durham bricklayer 17 years his senior who had worked his way up at Liverpool the hard way.
For Paisley there had been an awkwardness about this at first, whereas Shankly, who had generally been first into Anfield each morning, would typically be straight into Robinson’s office and would call him four or five times a day, sometimes in the evening just to discuss a programme he must watch on television. It was different with Paisley. He and Robinson would speak just once a day. The conversations usually entailed Robinson heading downstairs to seek him out and see if there were issues on his mind. They didn’t generally last long. It was not Paisley’s natural realm. Many a time when there was a problem ‘downstairs’, Tom Saunders would discreetly head up to see Robinson about it on Paisley’s behalf, sparing Bob the awkwardness of having to broach some gripe or complaint felt by the players. Saunders was a bridge to the board, too.
Robinson always felt that his own relationship with Shankly might have contributed to Paisley’s gaucheness. ‘He had seen the relationship I had with Bill and was probably apprehensive about how I would react to him,’ he says.
The arrangement Paisley and Robinson had struck with Keegan continued to serve the club well, though. Keegan basked in his soon-to-be continental status, appearing with Anderlecht’s Robbie Rensenbrink on the cover of Shoot! in March, though he continued to be the player around whom points accumulation was built.
A rare blemish came with a bad miss in a goalless spring-time draw at Stoke. But he was instrumental to Liverpool winning a potentially title-defining game at Manchester City, scoring soon after firing into the side-netting. Liverpool sat second on goal difference, with a game in hand on QPR and through to the semi-finals of the FA Cup and European Cup, leaving Paisley to observe that, ‘We must be in with a chance of something.’ He was still not one for earth-shattering disclosures to the press.
The club’s attempt to make every penny count always made spring a busy time for Paisley. High corporation tax rates made the club determined to minimise the profits they made and find any available means of doing so. At that time, all of a player’s transfer fee could be written down into a year’s accounts, rather than spread across the period of the player’s first contract, as it eventually would. In a good year of revenue earning, buying in the spring helped reduce the profit and tax liability. The Football League’s deadline for buying players was mid-March, to ensure that clubs did not distort the end-of-season run-in.
The battle to keep the taxman at bay was helped by the arrival of a 21-year-old defender, Alan Hansen, from Partick Thistle in the spring of 1977. Liverpool had indicated their interest in him on 3 May 1977 and concluded the deal on 5 May, 24 hours before their tax-year ended. The club’s accountants were happy. ‘I was tax deductible,’ Hansen later said. Paisley was happy to fit in with the accounting system. ‘Lost in tax’ was how he described these deals, some of which were gambles with money which the club would otherwise have lost to the Inland Revenue.
The players were looking for their own ways of making money, too. The tax demands meant that every penny that could be earned was earned, though the energy with which Keegan monetised his superstar status was extraordinary. It reached a level which would have made working life difficult with a less laissez-faire manager than Paisley.
Keegan had always possessed an acute sense of his own worth. His record ‘It Ain’t Easy’, with the Liverpool band The Fourmost as backing singers, pre-dated Paisley’s time as manager and was a source of rich amusement at Anfield. It sold 12,000 and, Keegan liked to say, reached number seven in the Merseyside charts. By the mid-1970s, Keegan was getting so much mail that he set up an office in the back room of a junk shop run by a friend, Lennie Libson. It was there that he based his limited company Nageek Enterprises – Keegan spelt backwards – which he set up when he realised that he was paying far too much tax. It helped that newspapers paid cash for interviews.
In the space of a week before the start of his last season, Keegan racked up 1,000 miles for a promotional trip to the Isle of Man, studio analysis for London Weekend Television’s live coverage of the Czechoslovakia v West Germany European Championships final, an appearance in an all-star XI with Billy Bremner, his 1974 Charity Shield bête noire, against Brazil to mark the sixth anniversary of the founding of the Paris Saint-Germain club, plus the opening of a fête in Rhyl, in North Wales. Then came an appearance in a heat of the BBC’s Superstars entertainment programme, which pitched the continent’s sports stars against each other in a multitude of pursuits, and saw Keegan crash from his bicycle in a race to reach the first corner of the track ahead of the Anderlecht captain Gilbert Van Binst – yet still become the first footballer to win the heat. He collected his prize money, collapsed from nervous exhaustion at Newport Pagnell Services on the way home, and spent three days on an intravenous drip at Northampton General Hospital. ‘He’s young but I hope he’ll learn that he can’t move mountains,’ Paisley said.
This was extraordinary equanimity given that pre-season was almost upon Liverpool. Paisley would not have stood for that with a player so invaluable. For some of the squad at Liverpool, it seemed that the stars could do what they wanted without jeopardising their place in the team, while the rest of them fought for the remotest sense that he would see what they had to offer. Those outside of the elite felt an injustice. Paisley’s calculation was hard but pragmatic. He was less willing to antagonise those most likely to help the club win.
For those on the periphery, the Rat’s indifference was maddening. Liverpool’s performance-related salaries meant that players earned £300 per point, which made a precious place in his 12-man squad so important to them. But he remained impervious to those who did not feature in his plans. He was so absorbed by how he would win the next game that, on occasions, he even forgot to tell the unlucky 13th man that he would be watching from the stands. (Teams had only one substitute then.)
This was becoming a particular frustration to David Fairclough who turned 21 midway through the 1976–77 season. Fairclough’s burst of speed had earned him the nickname ‘Whip’ and he was a regular sensation from the bench, with a goal against Saint-Étienne at Anfield proving crucial to Liverpool securing a place in the European Cup final against Borussia Mönchengladbach in Rome. But Paisley was not convinced by his consistency. Tommy Smith later said that Paisley had told him there was a psychological problem with Fairclough, who was excellent when arriving from the bench wit
h a point to prove but less so when playing from the start, in what Paisley described ‘a comfort zone’.
The greatest agony for the peripheral team members came whenever Liverpool were on a poor run of form. The team would not be announced on a Friday, as usual, but 13 appointed players would have to wait until they arrived on a Saturday to find out which of the 12 of them would be changing into their match kit. This gave Paisley, Fagan, Moran, Bennett and Saunders an extra evening to deliberate. The suspense was increased by a little routine in which the boots of the 13 players were lined up underneath the treatment table before the match. Fagan would then send the players out ‘to look at the pitch’ and when they returned the 11 starters’ boots would be under the shirts with the remaining two left underneath the table. It was torture for those without Keegan’s certainty of playing.
One Saturday, early in 1976, Fairclough and Heighway arrived back from their ‘look at the pitch’ to find both of their pairs of boots still under the table. Heighway, an agitator when he felt the need, approached Fairclough. ‘If this is what they think of us let’s just go and have a cup of tea in the players’ lounge,’ he said. They both walked out of the dressing-room. Five minutes later, Fagan arrived there – presumably dispatched by Paisley. ‘Dave – it’s you. You’re sub,’ he said. There was no explanation for Heighway, whose afternoon was over.
The players could fulminate as much as they wanted but it made no difference: results did the talking for Paisley. They would put up with his coldness because they craved a part in the winning side his Liverpool were becoming. The players he was increasingly turning to – Kennedy, Case, Neal, Thompson – were flourishing, so demonstrating that when it came to recruiting and selecting players, Paisley came into his own. From the turn of the year to the end of the 1976–77 season, Liverpool lost only twice in the league, while also progressing towards the finals of the FA Cup and European Cup.
It was the turn of David Johnson to feel the chill of unexplained rejection before the FA Cup semi-final against Everton, his first club, a game in which he was expected to play. ‘Was I excited?’ recalls Johnson. ‘You bet I was. In my head I was playing.’
Three hours before kick-off, he and his room-mate Keegan were heading down for the midday pre-match meal at the Lord Daresbury Hotel in Warrington, the team’s traditional pre-match base, when Paisley sauntered along the corridor towards them.
‘Good morning, boss,’ said Keegan.
‘Good morning, Kevin,’ replied Paisley.
‘Good morning, boss,’ said Johnson.
‘You’re sub,’ Paisley said, scuttling straight on to his room, opening the door and disappearing behind it.
‘I wondered if I’d heard him right,’ says Johnson. I asked Kevin, “What did he say, Kev?”’ There was no, “Can I come and have a chat with you?” I didn’t think that was the right way to do it. I was looking for a taxi to go home but Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran came out and talked me around. I think it was in his make-up, though. He was a man of very, very few words and half of them you couldn’t understand anyway. I have to say there were times as a player when you really didn’t like him.’
Liverpool drew 2–2, won the replay 3–0 to reach the final and by April were also well on their way to a second successive title. A 1–1 draw at QPR in early May was significant, with the well-established Case scoring, and a goalless home draw against West Ham a week later secured the prize. Liverpool had won the league through sheer consistency of performance and effort, though had not been the most dazzling. Five sides had scored more First Division goals than them; none had conceded fewer.
Then came the FA Cup final and another decision for Paisley. Would Johnson or Fairclough, the star of the previous campaign, start at Wembley? Fairclough’s reasons for believing it would be him reflect Paisley’s dissembling when picking a team – a failing which often compounded the blow for the unlucky player. He’d not selected Fairclough for a league game at Coventry, promising him, ‘You’ll be in my Cup final team,’ according to Fairclough. In the course of going back on that promise, Paisley then revealed the comical consequences of bringing his limited conversational skills to bear to soften a blow.
The day before the final, Fairclough opened the door of his room at the team’s Sopwell House hotel in Hertfordshire to find Paisley loitering, rather suspiciously, outside. The manager beckoned him up the corridor towards his room and he was about to wave him inside when he evidently gave up plans for the consoling speech and said what he had to say to the 20-year-old there on the landing. ‘You won’t be playing tomorrow,’ Paisley told Fairclough. ‘But I will need you in Rome.’ And so the discussion ended.
It was a better attempt to break bad news than most of Paisley’s players were treated to. His own experience of being dropped from the 1950 final may have played a part in this unusual inclination to speak to Fairclough. But the suggestion that the 20-year-old would have a place in the European Cup final against Borussia Mönchengladbach was quickly forgotten when Paisley announced his team in Rome. Fairclough was one of five substitutes. He sank back in his seat in desolation and was not sent on there, either. Though it seemed the wrong time to make a scene, he would reflect years later on how that had ‘cast a shadow over what should have been the greatest moment of my career’.
For a man who was usually so clinical, Paisley’s unnecessary empty promises were odd – perhaps his way of avoiding at all cost the kind of verbal challenge for which he was ill-equipped.
Entirely unaware of the manager’s dissembling behind the scenes, supporters were confident ahead of the FA Cup final. ‘Smith and Jones – United Funeral Directors’ stated one of their banners, in celebration of Tommy Smith and Joey Jones. But Liverpool, whom Paisley had organised in an attacking 4–3–3 formation, could not capitalise on their first-half superiority and then went behind after Stuart Pearson ran across Joey Jones and fired the ball past Ray Clemence. Case equalised but almost immediately a Lou Macari shot cannoned off Jimmy Greenhoff to win the Cup for United.
There were recriminations. In the confines of the dressing-room, Paisley blamed Jones, wanting to know why he had not brought Pearson down before the opening goal. Jones, revealing the flinty personality that helped persuade Paisley to buy him in the first place, did not accept the criticism. ‘Well, you’ve been telling me all season not to bring players down,’ he replied. Paisley apparently didn’t return fire. ‘I think he was just surprised I’d answered back,’ says Jones.
But it was one of the few major games in which Paisley said he felt he had made a tactical miscalculation. The Football Association had announced before the game that if the final was drawn, a replay would not take place until 27 June – the problems of rescheduling having been caused by Liverpool’s European final in Rome.
Paisley, furious about the notion of waiting 33 days for a reply, decided that Liverpool must win the game there and then at Wembley. He opted for a very attacking set-up, with a three-man forward line – Keegan, Johnson and Heighway. ‘My worst ever tactical decision’ is how he later described his decision to field Johnson, rather than Callaghan as an extra midfielder.
The players, rather than their manager, found a way of lifting themselves from a gloom that seemed to deepen as their journey home began. They were bussed to Watford station, where their 7.45 p.m. chartered train north to Liverpool became stuck behind a broken-down football special and remained stationary in the middle of Hertfordshire for two hours. In the hiatus, Ray Clemence threw a wrapped sugar cube across the carriage, and then another. Someone threw one back, and then another. Drink was taken. It evolved into a party on the motionless train in the middle of nowhere, interspersed with choruses of the team’s 1977 FA Cup record ‘We Can Do It’. That seemed enough to erase the disappointment of Wembley.
Paisley’s immediate concern was Keegan. He was the individual most capable of a moment of class to deliver Liverpool a European Cup but he was racked with uncertainty about his future. In football’s complex
new commercial world, the move to Europe that he, Keegan and Robinson had talked about was just not materialising. One of the difficulties of signing or selling players in the late 1970s was the lack of agents to help facilitate a move. Keegan was one of the first British players to have a commercial agent and Liverpool had thought that might help him find a team. But the club, placed in the unusual position of needing another side to come forward for their best player, found that the work being done on Keegan’s behalf only entailed finding him commercial appearance opportunities. No one was on the telephone trying to secure him the move he wanted.
Keegan, on the other hand, suspected that Liverpool were stalling, waiting for the right valuation. He noticed that Bayern Munich had made a reported £500,000 from the sale of Franz Beckenbauer to the New York Cosmos, so had ready money to buy him. Keegan made direct contact with John Smith on 5 May, two weeks before the FA Cup final and in the midst of the title run-in, in a state of concern that the club chairman may be trying to play him. ‘I told him that if he didn’t keep his word [to sell me] I would quit. The season was running out and my patience was running short, though I knew Liverpool were hoping to receive an offer closer to their valuation.’
Paisley was keen to see developments. Intermediaries seemed to be everywhere but none were reliable. Rumours of interest from Bayern and Real Madrid failed to materialise into anything concrete. Paisley was also concerned that nearly 12 months had elapsed and there was still no obvious successor to Keegan. He had been monitoring Kenny Dalglish but the word from Glasgow was that Celtic were still not selling.
‘I have to admit I was becoming quite worried,’ Keegan later reflected. ‘What if no one came forward? Imagine the embarrassment of going cap in hand to Liverpool and asking to stay.’
