Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Liverpool had conceded only three goals away from Anfield in the four preceding rounds of that run, with what the Daily Mirror’s Derek Wallis described as a ‘safety first’ approach in his third-round report from Śląsk Wrocław in Poland. Paisley described the 2–1 win there as, ‘The most difficult match we’ve played in Europe.’ The strategy that Liverpool had employed in that second half against Borussia Mönchengladbach in 1973 – packing Keegan into midfield to make the team more secure – had become the default mode on away trips to the continent.

  But Barcelona posed a more material threat than anything encountered beforehand and Paisley’s usual encouragement of Neal to push up from full-back did not apply. Neal still recalls Paisley approaching him in the dressing-room beforehand that night to tell him, ‘No attacking from the back for you tonight, my lad.’

  The Spaniards’ Carles Rexach, the man Neal was up against, contributed to Paisley’s conservatism. It was one of the Barcelona players – and probably Rexach – who elicited another of those baffling Paisley assessments which had his players in stitches and contributed to the tension being eased in the dressing-room beforehand. ‘He’s not fast but nippy,’ Paisley told his players. What he meant by that none of them were ever sure.

  But though the reputation of the Spanish preceded them, and they had Johan Cruyff in their number, Paisley had a surprise in store. He felt that there were weaknesses in their defence, so rather than pull Keegan into midfield he deployed him in the striker’s role and tried to strike early, as if this were a First Division match.

  It worked. Barcelona were rocked back and conceded in the 13th minute, when Toshack knocked down a long Ray Clemence clearance into Keegan’s path, took the return pass and scored. Then the Spanish had to come out and respond and left gaps. Liverpool did not push it. 1–0 was quite enough. After taking that lead, they gave a composed display of possession football. The Nou Camp fans contributed to the escalating pressure on their own side, expressing their displeasure by hurling white cushions onto the pitch.

  It was cue for a wild Joey Jones moment. He proceeded to throw the cushions back. On this occasion, Paisley was the better acquainted of the two with local tradition. ‘What the fuck? They’re throwing them at their own players. Put that cushion down,’ he told Jones, or words to that effect.

  The dispatches from reporters in the stadium after the match that night revealed how much this performance had meant to Paisley. Chris James of the Mirror, one of the Merseyside group who knew him so well, found him ‘emotional’ in the aftermath. Needless to say, that was not reflected in the words he offered to reporters. Paisley was matter-of-fact about a Barcelona being ‘a bit suspect at the back’.

  Paisley had also dispensed with the wingers that the continentals tended to use and operated more narrowly, using workmanlike contributions from Case, Ian Callaghan, Heighway, Kennedy and Keegan – to pack the midfield and prevent the Spanish from creating chances. The commentators saw Paisley’s role as substantial. ‘Mr Paisley, the architect of this great victory, laid down ideal tactics and the players carried them through to the letter,’ said one. Cruyff knew the quality in what he had seen. ‘You’ve always got to hope in football,’ he said of the prospects of overturning the deficit at Anfield. ‘But let’s face it. Liverpool must get through now. I don’t want to talk about Liverpool individuals but they have great individuals to make up the great team they are.’ Cruyff’s prediction was prophetic. A 1–1 draw at Anfield sent Liverpool through to the final against Club Brugge.

  Pragmatism – the key to the change in fortunes from the Shankly era – was still being preached when Graeme Souness arrived at the club a year later. ‘My job on really big games was to have a good look at it,’ Souness says. ‘Bob, Joe and Ronnie would tell me, “See how the game pans out. Don’t go chasing it.”’ In one unguarded moment Paisley seemed to reveal a desire to be playing less cautiously. ‘I can’t wait to get home and play some proper football,’ he told the Guardian’s Patrick Barclay after one particularly attritional trip.

  Paisley’s tactical vocabulary for these occasions was, needless to say, not exactly sophisticated. ‘We’ll do the European One!’ he said before one match, prompting the usual quizzical looks from the players. This, it transpired, was nothing more than an overlapping run by the full-back – usually Neal, the wing-back – from a dead-ball situation. Or perhaps it was just sardonic Paisley displaying his usual disdain for tactical labels. Paisley was generally very reluctant to practise set-pieces at all, so the fact that he was suggesting one indicated that he felt Europe was different and needed a little more ingenuity. ‘It hardly needed a name but maybe they felt we’d catch European teams out,’ says Steve Heighway.

  ‘I did not think Liverpool played as I had expected, being more defensive,’ reflected Club Brugge manager Ernst Happel. The Mirror’s Wallis also noted the more pragmatic Liverpool approach, killing opponents with their possession. ‘Many might argue that the performance here was a copy of the displays that some have found distasteful this season,’ he wrote. ‘“Not enough flair,” they said. “Insufficient adventure,” they argued.’ Yet who could really argue when the trophies are there to be admired? The side had been ‘composed rather than colourful, sound instead of spectacular’. The defeat of Club Brugge over two legs in May 1976 was another exhibition of the developing European collective. The ultimate continental challenge – the European Cup – came in the following season and it was the quarter-final against Saint-Étienne, the previous season’s finalists, that would test Liverpool to the core. The French were pragmatists themselves and had conceded only once in ten previous European ties.

  What the Liverpool Echo described as the ‘tactical battle’ of the first leg in the Massif Central began well. The febrile home crowd had been silenced by a display in which Thompson and Hughes were the stand-out players, yet the French had more of the ball. There were only ten minutes to play when a miscued cross from Gérard Janvion presented Dominique Bathenay with a goal, and a 1–0 lead to take to Anfield.

  In the home leg, the away goal rule left Liverpool needing to score two in 40 minutes after Bathenay equalised out Keegan’s early strike. Paisley immediately left his seat in the directors’ box for the dugout. Ray Kennedy scored, leaving Liverpool one goal short of their requirement, and he gave substitute Fairclough 14 minutes to conjure something.

  Again, Paisley offered no specific instructions to cloud Fairclough’s mind. ‘He just made me feel good and said he simply hoped that I would get a chance,’ Fairclough says. ‘He said, “Get a piece of something. See if you can turn this one.”’ Considering what Smith says Paisley told him about Fairclough being more motivated to prove something when arriving from the bench, the manager was pushing the button he felt would work.

  And it did. A deftly measured long ball was laid into his path from the left foot of Ray Kennedy. Fairclough ran onto it and scored. ‘Allez Oops,’ declared the back page headline in the Echo, above the iconic image of the leaping 20-year-old, arms outstretched. It did not require the greatest intuition to know that Fairclough was needed, but it was one of the many Paisley substitutions that worked. ‘I thought he was the lad to upset their defensive patterns,’ Paisley told reporters. ‘Dave has the pace, ability and skill I was looking for to take to the French defenders, who were tiring.’ Paisley preferred to use strikers as substitutes. He felt that a midfielder arriving from the bench could upset the finely calibrated function of the team by adding too much energy and tiring the rest out.

  The semi-final against FC Zürich was an anti-climax after that – a 6–1 aggregate win sending Liverpool to Rome for what would be Kevin Keegan’s Liverpool valediction against the Germans.

  The preparations and the superstitions for Italy were like none other. Tommy Smith’s wife, Sue, had been eating spaghetti with the children on the evening of one of the early round games, so maintained the same routine. A sprig of lucky heather was pressed into Paisley’s hand as he made his wa
y across the concrete at Speke airport in brilliant sunshine, for the flight to Rome. He took it, briefly looking serious until he made the final stride towards the plane and the broad smile materialised.

  The players mostly wore Gola polo tops and flared jeans and Paisley, limping a little, his old ankle injury probably playing up, a loud brown checked tie to match his jacket. It was a modest departure point for a side setting off to claim European club football’s greatest prize. The squad walked past a red Ford Popular and a Morris Marina estate, both parked up a few dozen yards from the runway. The players were mobbed by autograph hunters in the airport building. Friends of the club and family boarded the plane with the players. Jessie Paisley’s fear of flying meant that she watched the game at home with Christine.

  Across land and sea, supporters followed them in their thousands, selling possessions to make the pilgrimage, so the story goes. Eight-hour delays at Ostend railway station were no impediment. They basked in the sun at the Colosseum and around the Trevi Fountain, and what greeted the players when they arrived at the Stadio Olimpico took their breath away: a vast bank of red and white chequered flags carried by the 24,000 Liverpool supporters who had amassed there. The most vivid banner of all, homemade by supporters Phil Downey and Jimmy Cummings, proclaimed Joey Jones’s role in Liverpool’s journey past Saint-Étienne and FC Zürich.

  JOEY ATE THE FROGS LEGS

  MADE THE SWISS ROLL

  NOW HES MUNCHING GLADBACH

  The banner was testament to the humour which always made Paisley feel that Liverpool was his natural environment, and its people his people. Downey and Cummings had made up the first two lines as individual banners for the European quarter- and semi-finals against the French and Swiss but had struggled for something apposite for the final. It was Downey’s mother who came up with the idea of running all three together.

  This challenge in Rome was something new for the manager completing his third season: a one-off game on neutral territory, when the balance between attack and defence must be precise. Too much caution and the tie would be over; too cavalier and the consequences would be unthinkable. Paisley took what he could from the grapevine of rumour and talk. Denis Law had told Tommy Smith that Borussia Mönchengladbach were vulnerable in the air. No one knew why he should be such an authority, but Paisley looked to feed on German fears. Toshack was injured and had no chance of playing, but he must feature in the pre-match talk, Paisley decided. He put out the notion that the Welsh striker would be available for Liverpool’s line-up.

  It was Paisley using the media to affect the opposition’s thinking. In the Boot Room, they developed a term for disseminating information for the other side to chew on: giving them ‘toffee’. The squad also included another target man whom Paisley had never intended to use – Alan Waddle. It was known to the BBC’s match commentator Barry Davies by mid-afternoon that Toshack would not feature, though the message did not seem to have reached the Germans, whose players were on a win bonus of £3,750 per man. (For Liverpool, the figure was £1,600 each.)

  Paisley told the press that Mönchengladbach were a threat on account of having ‘five really good players; outstanding players’ – though he did not elaborate on this very specific number. They and Bayern Munich had been the artists of German football, the two clubs that dominated it for most of the 1970s through a creed of technical excellence: passing and playing, rather than mere efficiency. But Liverpool’s opponents arrived in Rome having established genuine superiority over Bayern, eclipsing the three Bundesliga titles the Munich side had won between 1972 and 1974 by taking the next three titles while scoring goals in abundance.

  ‘It will have to be a typical European job that will get us through,’ Paisley said. It was no secret by the summer of 1977 that Liverpool’s strategy was to choke off space in the centre and play a waiting game. When it came to team selection, Ian Callaghan was recalled in place of David Johnson – a more conservative approach than the FA Cup final, for which he had reproached himself. There was a little more discussion of the opposition than usual. Allan Simonsen, the mercurial 5 foot 5 inch Danish striker with a vision to create goals and score abundantly, and Uli Stielike, the central midfielder whose distribution was behind much of Mönchengladbach’s attacking thrust, were the two the Boot Room had talked most about. It struck the players that there were no forgotten names, no ‘Duggie Doin’s’ that night. ‘Simonsen’s the danger,’ Paisley told Hughes. ‘Watch the lad Stielke,’ he said, looking in McDermott’s direction.

  There was a rare set-piece idea, too. It involved Tommy Smith, who was detailed to go up for Steve Heighway’s corners and position himself at the near post to get some of his head on the ball, sending it on for Keegan behind him to meet and deliver a header. All of this must have been discussed at Melwood because Paisley did not have much to say in the Stadio Olimpico’s vast subterranean dressing-room. Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran did most of the talking, though Paisley did insist on mentioning that tank he’d sat on during the liberation of Rome. ‘We were laughing at him and that relaxed us,’ says Phil Neal. ‘I’m sure that was the purpose.’

  Liverpool opened the game out in their usual style for a European away match, easing the ball around, getting the measure of the Germans until such time that gaps might start to appear. ‘Patient skill. Inter-passing until the time was right for a forward move of penetrating efficiency,’ as the Liverpool Echo match report later described it. Paisley felt from the outset that Mönchengladbach looked too rigid in their thinking. They seemed prepared for the aerial onslaught which, with Toshack injured, rarely came. But that attacking threat they posed became evident early, when the West German international Rainer Bonhof, provider of the winning goal in the World Cup final three years earlier and presumably one of Paisley’s dangerous five, struck a shot which skimmed the surface of the turf, flew beyond the outstretched hand of Clemence and struck the post.

  It was through their rapid counterattacking pass-and-move football that Liverpool finally spotted a gap and went ahead. Heighway advanced into a space opened up on the right and slipped the ball between two defenders to find Terry McDermott, who had cleared 50 yards of turf to receive the ball and score right-footed.

  It was the contribution of Ian Callaghan to the goal that Paisley liked best. The 35-year-old’s presence drew away a defender, creating the pocket of space which Heighway exploited. Wing-back Neal, flying down the right on the overlap, can also clearly be seen distracting the German defence. The quality of the Heighway pass surprised Keegan. The goal-net was not taut as at home so the ball nestled into it beautifully when McDermott scored. Keegan always remembered that.

  But McDermott’s awareness was the finest aspect of the move. He had demonstrated that ability to see opportunities early, before a defender, and taken up a natural position in the box. ‘That’s nice. That’s McDermott. That’s a goal,’ was the BBC commentator Barry Davies’s way of describing it. The camera did not focus on Paisley, though there were no prizes for guessing his sentiment. Here was the Melwood pass-and-move mantra made flesh. He would have been delighted.

  The Germans’ vulnerability helped. It was a poorly defended goal. Herbert Wimmer, whose role was to offer defensive muscle to midfield, had departed with an injury after 24 minutes. Hans-Jürgen Wittkamp was weak in the air all night. Hans Klinkhammer, Wittkamp’s partner at the back, was careless in possession. The Guardian’s match report observed that Bayern Munich, winners of the European Cup for the three previous years, always had Franz Beckenbauer to organise and clear up after mistakes. But Mönchengladbach’s captain, Berti Vogts, had his hands full. The Germans had decided that Liverpool’s stand-out threat, Kevin Keegan, must be man-marked, and Vogts was allotted the task. His struggle to deal with the Englishman became a game within the game – an even more absorbing duel than the publishers of the match programme could have anticipated when they devoted the centre pages to these two players. Keegan didn’t mind Vogts’ close attentions. He said after the game tha
t being man-marked had actually given him confidence.

  For all their first-half superiority, it took a momentary lapse in concentration from Liverpool to allow the Germans back in and demonstrate why Allan Simonsen was enough of a threat for Paisley to have remembered his name and related it to his players. Case, in attempting to play the ball to Neal from in front of his own defence, sent it straight to the diminutive Dane, who seized it and scored with ruthless left-footed efficiency from a position just inside the left-hand side of the penalty box. Case was desolate. Smith still remembered the look on his teammate’s face years later. When the Germans’ goal spurred them and helped their fans find a voice, the consequences seemed grave indeed. Simonsen could not quite find the elevation to head in a searching cross from the right by substitute Christian Kulik. ‘And thank heaven he wasn’t a taller man,’ said commentator Davies.

  When Simonsen turned provider, crossing right to left across the Liverpool box for Uli Stielike, who won a 25-yard footrace with Tommy Smith to reach it, Liverpool fans held their breath. Clemence raced out to save with his legs.

  Then came the unscripted variation on the Paisley set-piece which would be stamped across the club’s history for all time. Liverpool won a 64th-minute Heighway corner and Smith advanced up the field for his much discussed flick. But Heighway, for reasons which have never been entirely clear, stepped across the perimeter running track to deliver the ball at such velocity that no flick was possible. It reached Smith smack on the forehead and flew in.

  It was 18 minutes later that Keegan, whose personal battle with Vogts had seemed more challenging for him after the interval, finally escaped the German right-back’s shadow, running beyond him into the box and drawing a foul and a penalty. Several Liverpool players were confounded by anxiety as Phil Neal prepared to take it. Neal looked at Wolfgang Kneib and wondered whether the goalkeeper would assume the spot kick would go to the same side Neal’s had in the Zürich semi-final. Should he try bluff or counter-bluff? Ian Callaghan was on his knees, closing his eyes and praying.