by Ian Herbert
Neal had converted ten penalties that season, two of them in the European Cup. He struck the ball right-footed, just inside the right-hand post from the keeper’s viewpoint. He did the job.
From his commentary position, Davies spotted Paisley near the end of the game, up out of his seat, ‘shuffling his feet, poised to do something that even Bill Shankly could not quite achieve’, as he put it. When the whistle sounded, and euphoria came, Paisley wandered out onto the pitch in his brown suit and light brown coat, beaming. He sought out and hugged Callaghan, the player with whom he went back furthest. The image of the two of them – toothy Callaghan and round-faced Paisley – would be one of the most remembered of that night. There was a similar embrace from Paisley for Keegan. There is also an image of the Boot Room team together, with Paisley, Moran and Evans shaking their fists, and Saunders holding up his own a little more demurely. For some reason, a pristine Gola bag, clutched by Fagan, features very prominently in the photograph. The backroom team’s sponsors must have been happy with that.
The subsequent television footage captures Paisley wandering around the fringes of the euphoria, the limp evident, not quite knowing how to join in as his players prepared for what they would always remember as the night of their lives.
The celebration was held in the banqueting hall of the St Peter’s Hotel, off the Via Aurelia Antica. The numbers were already substantial when Joey Jones really got the party started by opening the fire escape with Alan Waddle. It was an open house after that. Keegan received a black eye for all his efforts. Neal caught him with his hand, just under the eye, as he tried to prevent four teammates throwing him into the hotel pool. He was wearing a pair of leather shoes he’d just bought and was trying to get them off before he took the plunge.
No one could sleep. At 2 a.m. Peter Robinson gave up all efforts and left his room to sit outside, reflecting on the size of the accomplishment: how this football team, from a city so economically deprived, had seen off competition from all the major cities in Europe and won this Cup.
Paisley was reflective, too. Never at his best in a crowd, he was seen by half a dozen people that night in a seat in the corner of the St Peter’s banqueting suite, not venturing to take a drop of alcohol. ‘I didn’t want anything to affect the moment. I wanted to take it all in,’ he said later. Friends and players drifted in and out of the small corner where he sat. For Robinson, who had seen Paisley through those difficult early months, there was half an hour of conversation with him. The awkwardness of the early weeks, when Robinson sought the manager out once a day and Paisley was not always sure what to say, had evolved into a comfortable friendship.
Fagan and Moran were with him, too. No one was witness to that particular conversation, though how they might replace Keegan was surely a part of it. They’d collectively nursed him through this difficult final season, which had included some negative reaction from fans, and had been handsomely rewarded for it in the Stadio Olimpico where Keegan delivered the defining performance of his career and was, for most, the man of the match. ‘Keegan stood out,’ declared Paisley. ‘He’s played his finest game for Liverpool in his last game for the club.’ The search for his replacement could be put off no longer now.
It was the accomplishment which most merited reflection; not the next challenge. Only two other British clubs – Glasgow Celtic and Manchester United – had won the European Cup. A mere three years after he had taken up the job of manager, Paisley had redrawn the way that the team played. His Liverpool side had combined the control and technique of the continental passing game with the aggression and work rate of British football – a combination that Europe would feel the full force of for years to come. The side’s greater tactical awareness since 1974 had certainly been down to the blossoming influence of Paisley. Seven of the side in Rome – Clemence, Hughes, Thompson, Smith, Keegan, Callaghan and Heighway – had played in the Liverpool first team under Shankly.
When the squad returned to Liverpool, a hero’s welcome awaited at the city’s St George’s Plateau, though it was a sign of the abiding affection for Shankly that his name was the one being called by many – not Paisley’s. As so often during Paisley’s years at the helm, Shankly was with the Liverpool team and staff. Immaculate as always in his suit and red tie and heady in the euphoria of the moment, the Scot’s instinct was to respond and he moved forward to take the microphone. From his position at the back of the plateau, the reserve-team manager Roy Evans saw this. He’d taken a drink or two already and it was that which give him the Dutch courage to step in and stop Shankly. ‘Boss,’ Evans said. ‘It’s Bob’s turn first.’ Shankly knew Evans was right and, for a brief moment, the realisation left him overcome with emotion. ‘He went to blub a bit,’ Evans remembers now. But Shankly heeded Evans request and stepped back.
There was no desire on Paisley’s part to deny the stage to the man who’d laid the deep foundations for all this. After he had spoken, he handed the microphone to Shankly and he had his say. It was the next day that Shankly sought Evans out. ‘By the way, son,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much for doing that. That was right.’
8
Transfer Committee
The reverie of Rome did not obscure the underlying problem: how on earth would Liverpool replace Keegan, whose performance in the Stadio Olimpico demonstrated what a monumental space he would leave behind? The newspapers had plenty of suggestions for Paisley. Much of the talk was about Trevor Francis, Birmingham City’s 23-year-old who had just broken into the England team. Geoff Twentyman, Liverpool’s chief scout, had monitored the striker over a long period though his notes were hardly a decisive testament to the need to go out and buy him. ‘Very promising player. Worth noting,’ Twentyman wrote. ‘Lurks up front. Could become good.’ Both those entries were from 1971, and Liverpool were still no closer to signing him six years later. Francis had a poor fitness record and that was something that made Paisley, like Shankly before him, suspicious.
A solution was found for no greater reason than Peter Robinson attended a county cricket match in late July 1977, a few weeks before the new season began. He ran into a Sunday newspaper journalist who was fishing for stories. The Sunday sports desks were always more anxious for material than the daily papers at that time given the substantial space they had to fill on football. How Paisley would replace Keegan was, inevitably, the main topic of consideration.
‘Have you asked about Dalglish?’ the journalist asked Robinson.
‘There’s no chance. They won’t sell,’ he replied.
Dalglish’s name had first been knocked around at Anfield a year earlier, when Keegan announced his intention to leave. Celtic’s Jock Stein was one of the few managers Paisley got on very well with – there was a mutual interest in racing – so Paisley rang him. A few other informal inquiries were made, too. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ the Liverpool contingent heard. It was against this background that Robinson was sceptical about what he was told next.
‘You’ll get him now. Things have changed. You should go back,’ the journalist told Robinson, hinting that Dalglish’s hankering to move south of the border had intensified to such an extent that the 26-year-old would wait no longer.
The picture was complicated by Stein’s desperation to hold on to the player. It was made clear to Robinson that the Celtic manager was adamant he wanted Dalglish to stay, so Paisley’s friendship with Stein was of no help in coercing the Glaswegians to sell. Liverpool needed to get to the Celtic board before Stein got wind of their move. Robinson knew the chairman so he made the call and discovered that the journalist’s tip-off had been correct. There was now also a greater need for money at the Scotland end than Liverpool had anticipated.
The new season was imminent, so Robinson moved swiftly. Celtic were persuaded to consider a bid and by the time Stein became aware, the wheels were in motion. Stein then made several attempts to reach Paisley – first calling Anfield, and then the house at Bower Road, but Paisley had headed to Mallorca for a brea
k with Saunders. Robinson needed to get him back to Merseyside. It was Ray Peers who called Paisley and told him that he should take the first available flight. There was an air of resignation in Stein’s voice when the two managers finally spoke. He had told Paisley two years earlier that he expected the striker would want to leave one day. Though he’d hoped to hold on to him one season longer, it was an uphill task. If Dalglish refused to go on Celtic’s pre-season tour of Australia then his time in Glasgow would be over.
The most disquieting part for Liverpool – for whom this was a more important deal than any undertaken – was that they had been led to believe there was competition for Dalglish. They needed to conduct the negotiations with utmost secrecy. But the journalists knew Liverpool’s workings all too well. When Paisley and Robinson headed off anywhere together it was often because they were involved in buying a player. Three years into Paisley’s tenure, reporters who suspected a deal was in the offing had taken to calling the club secretary’s office to help establish if Robinson and Paisley were absent at the same time.
So it was decided that Robinson would stay at Anfield, leaving chairman John Smith to travel to Scotland with Paisley, thus limiting suspicion, though that was not the limit of the subterfuge. First, Paisley disappeared off to a hotel in North Wales, telling only Peers where he was going. Then he and Smith headed to Scotland, checking into a hotel in Moffat, an hour south of Glasgow, under the names ‘John and Bill’. Paisley later claimed his cover had been immediately blown because someone had asked for his autograph in the lobby.
Paisley and Stein met after a Celtic match with Dunfermline, both entering the club by a back door, and, with the Keegan cash already deposited, a British record £440,000 fee was agreed upon.
It didn’t take long to appreciate the wisdom of the decision the club had taken. The Melwood training ground could immediately see why Paisley wanted to buy Dalglish. Keegan had been the man of speed and indefatigability who ran through walls for the team, making himself the target for whom the midfielders could aim and then scoring freely: precisely 100 goals in 323 games. Dalglish was a more cerebral type of player, who brought technical excellence, spatial awareness and peripheral vision as well as exceptional strength. He drew those around him into attacking play. ‘The first five yards is in the head,’ Paisley once observed. The Scot happened to be a very good finisher, too. He scored seven minutes into his First Division debut at Middlesbrough and found the net again in Liverpool’s next three games. He could poach goals or score them from distance.
The purchase of Dalglish reflected the way Liverpool had come to operate in the transfer market with a manager whose absence of ego meant he did not make the selection and pursuit of players a personal fiefdom. By the beginning of the 1977–78 season they had established a system – agreed upon by the club’s board – by which Paisley, Robinson, Smith and Tom Saunders would look after player recruitment collectively, meeting up once a fortnight in Robinson’s office to go through possible targets. Saunders’s significance to the quartet cannot be underestimated. Though he’d been asked to help Paisley communicate publicly, it quickly became clear that his work as a youth-development coach for the Football Association had established in the former headteacher a keen eye for players, too. It particularly impressed Paisley that he was so very decisive about those he scouted.
Chairman Smith, who also sat on the Football League board, was not always available, so often it was just Paisley, Robinson and Saunders discussing targets. Paisley had the veto and the casting vote on any player. Each of them, with their various contacts, came to contribute significantly to a process of finding and buying players which rarely – if ever – brought duds through the door. Liverpool were ahead of their time, in this respect. Throughout the era when Paisley managed, the entire responsibility for transfers at other clubs tended to be vested in the manager.
Peter Robinson was a businessman, not a football man, though the work he had undertaken fostering relationships with his contemporaries at other clubs played a big part in buying players. Smaller clubs would ring and asked for tickets and Robinson always made a point of supplying some. As the purchase of Keegan had shown, those clubs would then be more willing to let Liverpool know first about their young talents.
Robinson’s relationship with Scunthorpe had paid dividends before Paisley became manager, and even before the Keegan purchase. He had previously worked for the club and it was that connection which brought the call from one of Scunthorpe’s directors to say that Liverpool should look at Ray Clemence. Robinson built up other relationships through offering them exhibition games against Liverpool. A string of Irish players arrived through that route: in 1977–78, Synan Braddish, Brian Duff and Derek Carroll were all picked up after a Liverpool friendly with Dundalk. A year later Ronnie Whelan arrived from Home Farm, an Irish club with which there had been a strong relationship; and so, too, Avi Cohen from Maccabi Tel Aviv, in the same year, following another of Liverpool’s tours to Israel.
With such an absence of agents, there was no obvious way of establishing contact with a player, so Liverpool also found the press an invaluable part of the process. They would discreetly inform a Sunday newspaper journalist of their interest in a player, prompting a story. Often was the occasion when that player rang Liverpool to see if the story was true, and the line of communication the club had sought was thus opened. Robinson had a small group of journalists in Manchester and London whom he could trust. Shankly would never have harboured the notion that a player could be signed by first letting the press in on Liverpool’s interest.
Of course, Paisley, with his knowledge and network of contacts, was the prime mover among the transfer committee quartet. It was Jock Stein who told him he should look at Alan Hansen, suggesting that the defender might not be cut out for the more physical Scottish game but would possibly settle in England. It was Paisley who felt that the club must sign Graeme Souness, a player he enthused about endlessly before bringing him in during the 1977–78 season. But Paisley’s eye for a physical flaw often also made him the one who pointed out why a player should not be signed. ‘He doesn’t run right,’ he would say. Or, ‘There’s a problem with his left leg.’
While chief scout Geoff Twentyman had been the main assessor of players in the Shankly years, the quiet influence of Tom Saunders came increasingly to the fore under Paisley. Saunders was the one who would be sent out to cast a final look at any player Liverpool had monitored. It was he, through his contacts in youth development, who discovered from Chester’s secretary that one of their young prospects, Ian Rush, was worth looking at and would be available for sale. The decision-making was certainly not always entirely analytical. The purchase of the ‘tax-deductible’ players each spring, to offset the substantial corporation tax meant that some gambles were taken without any great certainty that they would bear fruit. Rush – whose £300,000 transfer fee was very substantial for a 19-year-old – would not have been signed at such a price if the tax system were less punitive. Braddish, Duff and Carroll, just like Hansen, arrived this way. Joey Jones heard Paisley call the Irish trio a ‘job lot’. None of them ever played for the first team and they had vanished back into obscurity within two years. As always, Paisley had little time for those beyond the spectrum of who he might pick in his first XI. He remained below the radar, narrowing things down to the biggest job of all – picking the team, developing the patterns and assessing the weaknesses of those they would play.
That is certainly what Saunders saw in him. ‘When a goal’s scored, he’ll have the complete move analysed in a flash and he’ll often emphasise the contribution of players running off the ball who were not directly involved,’ he said. ‘You might not have been fully aware of them yourself. Every scrap of information is stored in his memory. He astounds me by recalling incidents of matches we saw a long time ago. He’s not given to idle chatter and, after we’ve watched a match together, often he’ll hardly say a word for long periods on journeys home. That’s pro
bably when he’s concentrating and reflecting.’
How Paisley also helped the system was by selling players surplus to his own requirements whom other clubs felt could do a good job for them. As he entered his fourth season at the helm in August 1977, he was calling less than ever on those players inherited from Shankly. Toshack, struggling once again for fitness, was undergoing an Achilles tendon operation as the Dalglish deal was being sealed. Though Paisley still considered the Welshman a valuable physical and psychological weapon against European opposition, he omitted him from a 16-man squad announced to the press for the opening European Cup tie of 1977–78 and yet revealed him as a starter 30 minutes before kick-off. Toshack knew his chances of football were limited and did not want to hang around for the occasional game.
Paisley was prepared to offer him an improved two-year deal, just to have him as part of the armoury, but Toshack declined and in January was in the manager’s office, hearing from the boss that Norwich and Liverpool had agreed an £80,000 deal. Toshack was more taken by the ambition shown by the owner of Swansea City, Malcolm Struel, in Division Four, and he returned to his native South Wales to manage that side, instead.
Shankly remained a conspicuous figure around the club and its players. He visited Toshack after his Achilles operation. But six of the side which started the 1977–78 season at Middlesbrough were players Paisley had either bought or, in Kennedy’s case, very substantially shaped.
