by Ian Herbert
Finally, at the 11th hour, on FA Cup final weekend, an approach was made – from Hamburg – the only club remotely able to make the deal happen, and, as things turned out, the proposition was better than the Anfield board had anticipated. The German side paid £500,000 in cash.
Keegan thought it had not been a good season for him. He felt he was a marked man in many ways. Defenders were out to stop him and Anfield had grown suspicious of him. ‘People eventually accepted that I was leaving and while that was a good thing it also had its disadvantages,’ he reflected. ‘I began to feel that some of the supporters were turning against me. When a substitution was about to be made, I sensed that some people wanted me to be brought off, although I cannot be sure whether that was simply a psychological reaction on my part.’
It was to Liverpool’s benefit that Paisley was willing to accept that his prime striker would rather be somewhere else in the 1976–77 season. Because of the agreement struck between Keegan, Robinson and himself the previous summer, Liverpool were equipped with a top scorer who found the net 20 times that season. This resolution would have been less straightforward under Shankly, much though Keegan had idolised him. ‘I wondered if I could have approached Shanks in the same way once I had said I wanted to go,’ he reflected. ‘He might have just laughed it off and not wanted anything to do with it. Bob knew I meant it when I approached it.’
His goals tally was one that none of his teammates came close to matching and it would have been hard to see Paisley winning the title without it. Yet Keegan’s contribution had become so integral to Liverpool’s push for the title that it barely carried the headlines. Against Arsenal, during April’s title run-in – a 2–0 Anfield win which enhanced Phil Neal’s claim on an England place – it was Keegan who pounced on goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer’s failure to collect a ball, and scored. In a controversially physical match at Ipswich in early April, it was Keegan who delivered the decisive second goal, rising to head home David Johnson’s cross. The sum of money secured for Keegan at the end of the season allowed Liverpool to be competitive in their search for a replacement for him. But he had not yet quite fully repaid Liverpool for the imagination they had shown in keeping him. There was one last night in Rome yet to come.
7
Munching Gladbach
Keegan was the last man aboard the plane for Rome and the send-off must have made it seem worth that year’s wait in Liverpool. In scenes reminiscent of The Beatles at Speke airport, a balcony at the little terminal – a preferred vantage point as the players and staff made their way across the concrete to their plane – was packed. Liverpool had chartered a British Airways flight to get everyone on board for their first European Cup final, against Borussia Mönchengladbach. Club secretary Peter Robinson had taken steps to ensure a smooth passage through Rome. After Paisley’s side had reached the final, he’d received a telephone call from an established London-based Italian football fixer and agent, Gigi Peronace, who had also played a part in most of the big deals that saw British players – John Charles, Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law – transferred to Italian clubs. His reasons for calling Robinson related to the Italian journalists. Peronace told Robinson that Liverpool could have ‘a difficult time’ with the Italian press out in Rome. But he could work for the club to make things easier. He would need ‘some small gifts’ to give to the journalists, but it would be in the club’s interests.
Robinson asked Peronace what he had in mind. ‘£2,000,’ he replied. Good money, if not a fortune, and worth it, Robinson thought, if it meant an easier ride for Paisley and his players during the build-up to the match. The Italian press had been aggressive the last time Liverpool had played in the country, 12 years earlier, and Paisley, of course, was not at his most relaxed in a media environment. An agreement was struck and, with Paisley’s knowledge, Peronace set to work.
After the two-hour flight to Rome, the players disembarked to a battery of flashbulbs and hordes of journalists waiting for them at the city’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport. One of the Italians opened with a benign question for Paisley, just as Robinson had hoped.
Was this his first time in Rome? he was asked.
No, he replied. The last time he’d been here was in a tank.
It amused him that he’d last driven in to liberate the city in 1945, though not all of the Italians felt the same way. Many of them were old enough to remember Benito Mussolini leading them into war on the side of Nazi Germany and the atrocities carried out on their nation by Adolf Hitler when Italy surrendered to the Allies after their forces had landed in Sicily. Mentioning the war was a diplomatic minefield. Robinson winced, as did Smith, Case and Ian Callaghan. Tommy Smith, more worldly than Paisley in this environment, spotted that a group of Italian journalists was looking to build up an angle out of the comment when they spoke to the Liverpool players. Smith had been nominated as the best person to speak to them, so before he left the airport he found himself explaining that Paisley was simply proud to have been a part of the Allied liberating forces and felt a compassion for the Italian people because of that. The ‘I invaded Italy’ line did not make the Italian press, thanks either to Smith’s diplomacy, Robinson’s investment or a combination of both.
Paisley meant no harm, though if it had been pointed out to him that he shouldn’t mention the war then he didn’t appear to take much notice. He mentioned the liberation several times more before the trip was done. ‘Rome was a place that I’d been to during the war and I’d had a particular fancy for the whole city,’ he repeated years later.
The faux pas that he had been oblivious to reflected the treacherous waters that European football always held for him. The continental challenge appealed to Paisley the football strategist, and from the start his more pragmatic approach was suited to the competition. A four-man Liverpool defence replaced the side’s usual three at the back for the first European Cup campaign of 1963–64. But it was a suspicion of European football, rather than a fascination with it, which most informed Paisley’s thinking – as it had Bill Shankly’s. In an era when very little European football could be seen on television and the only available information on opponents had to be brought back to Liverpool by scouts, usually Tom Saunders, Paisley’s approach was principally to emerge as unharmed as possible from overseas trips and get the thing finished at home. Shankly and Paisley ‘hated it in the beginning,’ says Ian St John. ‘They felt the opposition were all cheats.’ Paisley made it Liverpool against the world.
The roots of the suspicion lay 350 miles north of Rome, in Milan, where on the evening of 12 May 1965 he and Shankly had experienced a 3–0 defeat they would never forget, to Internazionale in a European Cup semi-final in San Siro. The result, in front of a 90,000 home crowd, overturned a 3–1 first-leg win at Anfield and sent the Milanese into the final they had so badly wanted – scheduled, as it was, to take place in their own stadium.
Smoke bombs – ‘purple things’, as Shankly described them – landed in front of Paisley and left him reeking of smoke. There had been another diplomatic incident, when the Milanese press had somehow taken offence at Liverpool parading the newly won FA Cup at Anfield before the first leg and described the Liverpool fans as ‘animals’. But the match left the distinct suspicion that referee José María Ortiz de Mendíbil had made decisions intended to ease the Milaneses’ safe passage to a final against Benfica.
The conspiracy theory stemmed from the sense that decisions – free-kicks, throw-ins – went almost entirely against Liverpool. Two of Milan’s goals were highly contentious and Tommy Smith was so incensed that he manhandled De Mendibil after the second goal and kicked out at him as the two sides trooped off. Liverpool’s doubts were fuelled when evidence later emerged of systematic bribery of referees by Italian officials from the 1960s. It was an experience which Paisley often recalled, hardened him to the vagaries of Europe and convinced him that in foreign fields you must check under your bed as well as under your pasta.
He was certainly a more accomplished tr
aveller than Shankly, though. There had been the Liverpool American tours of his twenties and thirties, which acquainted him with time differences and new cultures. Shankly, on the other hand, refused to put his watch back on one transatlantic trip, remaining steadfastly on English time. He generally skipped pre-season trips abroad and left Paisley in charge.
The type and standard of opposition was often more technical than the First Division blood and thunder. Rather than relying on pace and strength to drive through teams, European sides demonstrated a high standard of ball control to find spaces and score. Defeating them required a more subtle blend of attack and defence. Even when they had won in Europe, Liverpool had sensed that the size and nature of the challenge was changing. They’d played Borussia Mönchengladbach four years before the Rome final, in the two-legged 1973 UEFA Cup final, and thought they were cruising, only to realise how mistaken they’d been.
In the Anfield first leg, Liverpool won 3–0. The Germans struggled to deal with John Toshack, a player Paisley would make much use of in Europe because opponents were unaccustomed to the target man. But then they found themselves overwhelmed in Germany, 2–0 down at half-time and, as the Daily Telegraph’s Robert Oxby described it in his match report, ‘tottering under successive waves of attacks’. Bernd Rupp and Jupp Heynckes combined to particularly devastating effect but others – Günter Netzer, Herbert Wimmer and Dietmar Danner – joined in the fast shifting of the ball. Shankly whipped his players up in the dressing-room at half-time, insisting the Germans had gone and ‘shot their bolt’. After the game, he told journalists that he could see Borussia were tiring, even in that first half, and that, ‘I knew it would be all right.’ He was the only one in the BÖkelbergstadion who did. It was psychology beyond the remotest imagination of Bob Paisley.
‘You’ve got to hand it to Shanks,’ striker Roger Hunt later reflected, drawing on his experience of a decade playing for Shankly before he left Anfield in 1969. ‘You know he’s wrong but somehow you can’t help believing him.’
The tactical switch that saved Liverpool that night against Mönchengladbach seems to have been of Paisley’s making. Kevin Keegan was moved into midfield and space was denied to the Germans, who could not find the all-important third goal in the second half. Liverpool squeaked home.
Shankly’s rhetoric alone could not always save a side who were still in the foothills of their continental journey of discovery, nine years after their first competitive fixture in Reykjavik. He described Ajax as ‘too defensive’ after they took Liverpool apart 5–1 in Amsterdam in 1966. That match was played in thick fog and, as St John recalls it, resulted in Shankly taking to the pitch while proceedings were still on-going and urging his players, who could not see each other, to ‘stop charging up the field. We’ve still got the game at Anfield.’
The game should never have been played and the fact it took place offered more ammunition for the view that the foreigners were not to be trusted. In the Anfield programme for the second leg of the Ajax match, Shankly told a Dutch journalist that ‘most continental teams do a lot of bluffing’. There were echoes in that statement of Shankly’s comments after the 1966 European Cup Winners’ Cup final, in which Liverpool played Borussia Dortmund at Hampden Park. The Germans had been ‘frightened men’ Shankly said. His side lost that one 2–1.
In the autumn of 1973 came a 4–2 aggregate defeat to Red Star Belgrade – a 2–1 scoreline in both legs – in the European Cup second round, which confronted the club with the distance they lagged behind the best when it came to the elite continental competition. Liverpool couldn’t get close to the Yugoslavs’ slick superiority as they navigated the ball around the last third of the pitch. ‘That was real football,’ purred Gerald Sinstadt, commentator for the highlights of the match on BBC’s Sportsnight.
Red Star were prepared to play a waiting game and stunned Anfield with two immaculate goals from distance in the second leg. It didn’t help that Toshack missed several good chances from close range. It would be Shankly’s last shot at the biggest European prize. Eight months later he stepped down.
His successor wanted the build-up in Europe to be slower and more conservative, particularly away from home. Denying the opposition scoring opportunities would also quieten the home fans and put home sides under pressure, Paisley told his players. That, in turn, would force them to take chances and open up spaces. Shankly had shown pragmatism, with his four-man defence and instructions on the field at Ajax, but Paisley took that to another level.
So, almost immediately, Liverpool laid siege far less, even though the effect could be particularly metronomic and dull on foreign fields. Defender Tommy Smith said Paisley had told him before an early European game that ‘the quickest way forward is to push the ball back and frustrate your opponents into making mistakes’. Phil Neal recollects a conversation, probably in 1976, in which Paisley told him that ‘keeping the opposition quiet’ was paramount: ‘Do that. Make plenty of passes. Deny them scoring chances in the first half and their fans will start to get fidgety.’
The ball-playing centre-halves, Phil Thompson and Emlyn Hughes, and keeper-sweeper Ray Clemence were an important part of the new strategy. Paisley saw that the continental sides had fewer of the strapping target-man centre-forwards who were such an important part of the artillery in England. It meant that central defenders did not need to be built like barn doors; deploying more mobile, less physical men did not constitute a risk.
For Toshack and Keegan, higher up the team, the slower build-up took some adjusting to. ‘I remember Kevin saying to me in one game that we needed to be more patient. There was no point continually making runs,’ Toshack says.
Paisley’s views on foreign countries varied according to where Liverpool happened to be going. He liked Scandinavia, where the club regularly journeyed for money-spinning friendlies, generally scouring the cities where Liverpool played for keepsakes to bring home for the family. There was always a doll of some description for Christine, though the troll he brought home from Norway is the one the family always laughed about. Arriving back at South Manor Way in the early hours, he left it on the living-room table and gave Jessie the fright of her life when she walked in on it the following morning. It was not an object of beauty, though he liked it and in time it gravitated to his Anfield office.
Eastern European trips were a different story. On the morning of a European draw, Paisley would wait in his office to discover what fate had in store. Once he knew, he would be out across the pitches to tell the players. If there was no spring in his step, they knew they were heading out to the east. Paisley always called these trips beyond the Iron Curtain ‘missions’. If there were raucous supporters outside the team hotel, he generally assumed it was an organised attempt to prevent his men sleeping.
Though it was Tom Saunders’s role to undertake the reconnaissance mission, Paisley also ensured that two Liverpool hoteliers and friends of the club, Alan Glynn and Harry Wright, travelled to check out the food on offer and ascertain whether Liverpool needed to bring some of their own. Players knew better than to consume any of the local produce or drink the tea at half-time in a communist country. A mauve soup was served up in Romania. ‘Don’t touch it,’ Paisley told his players. ‘It’s probably drugged.’
The strategy was to be in and out of enemy territory in minimal time. Robinson realised that chartering flights would make the process quicker. When he first raised the idea there was some anxiety, because it was a charter flight that had crashed in Munich with Manchester United’s young squad on board in 1958. That was still part of the collective memory. But Robinson satisfied Paisley that it would be preferable, allowing the side to fly in and out of the places where they played European games in one day. They would nearly always leave Liverpool’s Speke airport on Aer Lingus BAC111 flight, with the same appointed pilot, Barney Croughan, in the cockpit. If the flight would not return them to Speke airport by 2.30 a.m. they would stay overnight, but otherwise they would always be out after the ga
me. The plane was always blessed and carried the lucky shamrock. It amused them all that Paisley always checked the door. He’d been on a flight to France with Liverpool in the early days when the door flew open.
Occasionally, the plane might be diverted to Manchester and Jessie would set out to collect him in the Rover, with Christine for company, then Paisley would drive them home. After one trip, Paisley and Liverpool director Sid Reakes sat in the front, while Jessie, Christine and Emlyn Hughes crammed into the back.
Paisley always sought to elicit what information he could on the opposition from his network of friends and contacts. Before a particularly inhospitable trip to play Trabzonspor of Turkey in October 1976 he spoke to the Chesterfield manager Arthur Cox, who had been coaching in Istanbul, and Malcolm Allison, who was managing the Turkish club Galatasaray at the time. Liverpool lost 1–0, a margin overturned with a 3–0 win at Anfield, taking them another step towards the Rome encounter with Mönchengladbach.
There were times in the hotels of Europe when Paisley’s apparent struggles with the new-fangled complexities of international travel seemed comically gauche. Butter and sauce packets in restaurants always seemed to be beyond him, and if he did open any it would be at the wrong end or in such a way that the contents would squirt out everywhere.
He had a little routine, when they were away, of throwing peanuts up in the air and trying to catch them in his mouth. They always seemed to miss and bounce off his chin instead. At times, he seemed to be deliberately adopting the figure of fun character. If it was a Friday night at the Daresbury, BBC2’s Pot Black would often be on the television and Paisley would predict the pocket a player would aim for. ‘Bottom left,’ he would say, matter-of-factly, before a player aimed bottom right.
But there was serious intent, where the football was concerned. The first demonstration that Liverpool were making progress in Europe under Paisley came on 30 March 1976 in the UEFA Cup semi-final at Barcelona’s Nou Camp, in his second season at the helm. The Spanish side’s West German manager Hennes Weisweiler was under pressure, yet the UEFA Cup semi-final still posed a huge challenge.
