Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Kenny Dalglish saw immediately his new manager’s appreciation of the small details which could turn a game. Alan Hansen was sitting next to Dalglish in the dressing-room before the 2–0 home win over Chelsea in early October when Paisley came across and said to Dalglish, ‘Watch out for John Phillips straying too far off his line.’ Dalglish put his suggestion about the opposition goalkeeper to work 90 seconds into the game from a position 30 yards out and Liverpool were ahead. ‘John in a Daze,’ reported the Daily Mirror.

  Another of the early pieces of wisdom Paisley passed on to his new Scottish forward was to allow the ball close into his feet when up against a player who had already been booked, so as to invite a foul. ‘Make sure it’s in the box as well,’ he would tell Dalglish. ‘If you’re going to get kicked get kicked in the box. It’s worth it in there.’ Dalglish said he always remembered that. While he might have come to view Paisley as ‘Wee Uncle Bob’ it was always win at any cost for him.

  Paisley was preoccupied with remoulding the team’s attacking dimension around Dalglish – a slower but far more imaginative striker than Keegan, who looked to exploit space from a deeper position rather than provide that rapid injection of pace that his predecessor in the number 7 shirt was known for. The ‘big man-quick man’ combination had gone. Dalglish was not suited to racing after the flick-ons Toshack used to provide for Keegan. What he brought was an ability to hold the ball up, shield it from defenders and bring other players into the game with one pass – as well as react instinctively to goalscoring opportunities himself. ‘He has an intuition that enables him to take decisions on behalf of other players,’ Paisley said. ‘If they are alive to his scheming, if they can tune into his wavelength, he can bring them in bang on cue. He will pull players into the game without them even realising it. He points and they start playing.’ Paisley liked to see Dalglish running the team, determining the course of play, demanding and dictating. He did not want players to wait for his instructions.

  To accommodate him, he dispensed with Shankly’s 4–3–3 and developed a 4–4–2 system with Dalglish one of two mobile strikers, or what in its purest form looked closer to 4–4–1–1, with Dalglish the withdrawn one of the pair. Within a year, Dalglish’s role as a creative nexus would begin turning Liverpool’s midfielders into heavy goalscorers, who would seize on the flicks and passes into space that he made.

  The £200,000 striker David Johnson had good reason to believe that he did not feature in this new formation, even though he had made a name for himself as one of two free-running strikers at Ipswich. He had only scored eight goals in 38 appearances in his 1976–77 debut season and, with no explanation from Paisley, was training with the reserves and initially excluded from a pre-season match at Hamburg – arranged as part of the Keegan deal – in August 1977. Though an injury to Heighway saw him called up for the trip to West Germany after all, Johnson decided to make his unhappiness known to Paisley, so knocked on his office door and handed him a written transfer request. Paisley ‘went ballistic’, Johnson recalls. ‘He was so angry I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he was angry.’

  When confronted with such threats and requests to leave over the years, Paisley’s reaction differed according to his future plans for the disgruntled player. Johnson felt he was being tested. ‘If I had stood there and said nothing they’d have said, “He’s a dud, ’im,”’ he now reflects. Johnson took his protest further, even travelling to Leicester to meet manager Frank McLintock, who had expressed interest in taking the then 25-year-old off Liverpool’s hands. ‘I went out of politeness but as soon as I walked through the door I told him, “Frank, I’m not coming. I’m not leaving Liverpool.”’ He returned to Merseyside to await the time when the Rat might consider him ready.

  For all the signs of encouragement that Keegan’s departure would not diminish Liverpool, there was a major competitive development on the horizon. Nottingham Forest had been promoted to the First Division the previous season and would immediately present the toughest and most enduring challenge to Paisley.

  Forest had not been given a prayer of challenging for the title, not least because Liverpool had won it in three of the previous five seasons, but perhaps there was an omen on the first day of their first weekend back in the First Division. Clough’s side won 3–1 at Everton and though Clough was proceeding to rollick the team for what he considered to have been a bad performance, none less than Bill Shankly turned up at their dressing-room door. Clough invited him in and the Scot proceeded to give the Forest players a 15-minute team talk. He told them they could win the league if they played like that and had Clough as their manager: ‘Don’t just be in the First Division. Win it.’

  Liverpool and Forest’s common and contrasting strands would emerge in time, as the two became inveterate foes, with Forest emerging as the only club who could be described as serious challengers to Anfield ascendancy. What was immediately apparent was that the clubs shared an ability to spot great players. Clough’s assistant Peter Taylor was the one with the gift in that respect, though Forest’s specialism was players whom the rest had given up on, including Larry Lloyd, the defender Paisley had considered persona non grata and who became a key part of a big domestic threat to Liverpool from 1977.

  Individual players rarely troubled Paisley. It was why he claimed not to remember their names. But it’s fair to say Forest’s John Robertson did consistently worry him. Forest won ten of their first 13 games in their first season back in the First Division, losing only one of them. They had established a credible lead at the top of the table and had just won 4–0 at Old Trafford when Liverpool arrived at the City Ground on Boxing Day 1977 for the first of their many encounters of this era.

  In the dressing-room before the game Clough told his players that he had been speaking to Paisley, who had told him that if his side didn’t match Forest for energy then they would be beaten. ‘It might have been just the way he said it, deliberately to give us a lift,’ Forest’s John McGovern has reflected. ‘But I remember thinking, “My God, are Liverpool really concerned about us now?”’

  Liverpool were happy to get a 1–1 draw, because Phil Thompson seemed lucky not to concede a penalty with a challenge on Forest’s Tony Woodcock late on in the game and Robertson proved to a handful for Neal. But that left Liverpool fourth, six points adrift of Forest, who still led the table.

  Forest were revealing an extreme form of what had brought Liverpool success: a fierce work ethic and defensive resilience, especially away from home, albeit with a deeper-lying defensive line than Paisley’s. They were very hard to break down. The Forest challenge emerged precisely when Paisley’s professional judgement about the future make-up of his central defence was being put to the test.

  Alan Hansen was the new member of it. His arrival demonstrated Paisley’s acquiescence to others when it came to signing new players. It was Geoff Twentyman who had watched him, not Paisley – and rejected him as a 15-year-old triallist before concluding that he was worth buying, despite a lingering concern about his languid style and reflexes and whether he might lack speed off the mark.

  Though not instrumental in the decision to sign him, Paisley had embarked on the usual little rituals to put the player at ease and get him into Anfield. Being driven in Paisley’s car was one of them. Hansen – who had not at all been sure about leaving Scotland – found himself leaving Liverpool’s Lime Street station in the back of the Rover, while Paisley and Partick’s general manager, Scot Symon, made small talk in the front. Hansen said little but Symon mentioned in conversation that Hansen was a keen golfer. Paisley stiffened. Liverpool didn’t encourage that, he said. The suspicion of golf stemmed from the Shankly days. Paisley had no such concern about his players being on a cricket field – that was a sport within his own narrow experience. He viewed golf with scepticism, as a rich man’s game.

  But this apparent black mark did not prevent the deal being closed. Hansen was uncertain about the possibility of a signing-on fee, though Ro
binson did not give a moment’s thought to agreeing 5 per cent of the £100,000. Symon thought Partick would be paid in instalments but Robinson turned to John Smith and asked, ‘Will you sign a cheque?’

  It took Hansen some time to assimilate. He was one of life’s worriers and initially convinced himself that Paisley was seduced by his laid-back performances in the five-a-sides, where tackling and heading were less important attributes. His expressive style and tricks on the ball, including a favoured drag back, proved particularly disastrous in one game against Manchester United when Jimmy Greenhoff was allowed to steal possession and feed Sammy McIlroy who scored in a 2–0 win. Hansen’s failure to deal with a Gordon Hill cross in the October game against United was even more calamitous. Lou Macari nipped in to score.

  But it was Paisley’s judgement that Hansen was good enough and intelligent enough for the side, and that a quiet word would suffice. The team were about to board a train to London for a match against Arsenal the Wednesday following the Manchester United defeat when he pulled Hansen aside and put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Look, lad, I know I’m getting on a bit but I’m still too young to have a heart attack. Just watch it, will you?’ The Boot Room also decided that Hansen wasn’t strong enough. They saw to it that Hansen put on two stones of weight under what they called the ‘Anfield diet’.

  There was no more intervention than that. The Boot Room’s expectation that a defender ‘have a look’ at how the team played and intuit the Liverpool method meant that Hansen was not told when to hold the team’s defensive line and when to drop back – players were encouraged to think for themselves.

  He played half of Liverpool’s league games in the 1977–78 season, though another quiet word from the manager formed part of the strategy to ensure that a more experienced central defender – Phil Thompson – was available to ease his introduction into the side. Thompson was badly missed after undergoing a cartilage operation, which had left him in hospital for 13 days. He was beginning his recuperation at home when the telephone rang. It was Paisley – making what Thompson thinks was the only phone call ever to his house. How did he feel? Paisley asked.

  ‘I’ll be OK in a week or so,’ Thompson told him.

  Paisley reminded him he was removing his own fireplace with his leg in plaster after his own cartilage operation. Thompson still remembers Paisley’s next words: ‘I thought you’d be back in by now.’ There was nervousness in the player’s laugh because he wasn’t sure whether the manager was joking. The telephone conversation lasted a minute or two but that was all it took. Thompson was into his car and at Anfield before the morning was out.

  The defensive juggling did not materially damage Liverpool. They would concede 34 goals in the 1977–78 campaign which was around the average for Paisley’s nine years at the helm. But Clough’s Forest had security at the back that Liverpool could not match. Lloyd was part of an unchanging central defensive partnership with Kenny Burns, backed up by Peter Shilton, which conceded only 24 goals all season.

  In the Boot Room, Forest’s emergence quickened the need to analyse who in the squad was not cutting it and which young players might be brought through next. Paisley did not consider himself the sole authority. Before Middlesbrough’s arrival at Anfield on 2 January, he told Roy Evans that Jimmy Case was unfit and wanted to know which of Sammy Lee or Kevin Kewley, from the reserve team, he should promote to the squad.

  ‘Kewley,’ said Evans.

  ‘OK,’ said Paisley, unconvinced. ‘Will he be the best of the two overall?’

  ‘At this moment in time he looks the better,’ replied Evans.

  ‘Will he be the best overall?’ repeated Paisley, clearly of the view that Lee was the right choice.

  Paisley went with his assistant’s recommendation. He gave Kewley his chance the next day and brought him on from the bench. It was the only game Kewley ever played for Liverpool; Lee went on to appear nearly 300 times.

  Paisley felt there was something missing, however. He wanted a strong figure at the heart of Liverpool’s midfield – and before long his growing belief hardened into certainty about completing a triumvirate of Scottish signings in the space of 12 months. There is no doubt that Paisley’s judgement drove the transfer committee’s resolve to add Graeme Souness to Hansen and Dalglish as the signings of 1977–78.

  Robinson’s press contacts were not needed this time. Instead, Paisley used his own informal network, to establish if Souness might be interested. One of the manager’s odd assortment of horse racing friends was Bob Rawcliffe, a car dealer who ran a shop at the back of his garage and became known to many of the Liverpool players by selling and servicing cars for them. Among his customers had been Phil Boersma, a Shankly signing sold by Paisley in 1975 to Middlesbrough, for whom Souness played.

  Paisley was not the type to consider it beneath himself to use a second-hand car dealer and his contacts to help him in the transfer business. So, just as Robinson had cultivated club secretaries and journalists to find players, Paisley asked Rawcliffe to ring Boersma and encourage Souness to make the move. When Paisley realised that Souness was playing for Middlesbrough at Everton on 10 December 1977 he told Robinson and Saunders to go to Goodison Park together and take one more look. ‘If you fancy him we should sign him,’ Robinson remembers Paisley saying. But his mind was almost certainly already made up. Within a month, Souness was meeting Paisley, Robinson and John Smith at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, with Paisley in usual benign player recruitment mode, keeping out of the hard business talk but ‘occasionally nodding or smiling’, as Souness recalls, and generally creating the sense that Liverpool would be the Scotsman’s new family. Liverpool signed him for £352,000.

  It was a different story when the player arrived. As so often, there had been no direct instructions from the manager and, such was the expectation Paisley had in him, it was assumed that he would intuitively know what was expected.

  Ten minutes into his home debut, against Birmingham City, Souness went deep inside his own half, received the ball from Phil Neal, took it ten yards, played it square to Phil Thompson and, having released it, was surprised to see Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran screaming at him from the touchline. Only in the dressing-room at half-time, when they laid into him, did he comprehend what the problem had been.

  ‘Do you know what you did out there?’ Moran asked Souness, whose shake of the head revealed no notion that he had been guilty of the weakness the Boot Room always felt Alan Hudson displayed. ‘You took a ten-yard past off our left-back, who right now happens to be the England captain. And you turned and passed to our centre-back, who right now happens to be a regular player in the England team. Don’t you think our left-back, who is England captain, can pass the ball 20 yards to our centre-back, who is a regular player in the England team? We don’t do fucking Huddy here, son. We don’t take the easy option just to get a touch of the ball. Get the ball in midfield and work, son. We don’t do that here.’

  Paisley rarely seemed to deliver the criticism, Souness observed. The Scot does not remember a cross word between the two of them. But he became convinced that the manager was as hard as nails too, despite the avuncular image he sometimes exuded, intended to take the edge off him being the boss. By this point Paisley had taken to sometimes wearing slippers around Anfield, and some of the cardigans he tended to sport were lived-in. The slippers provided more comfort for the ankle which always troubled him, but none of the players was fooled by the cardigans. Joey Jones could testify to that after the punishing FA Cup Third Round defeat to Chelsea in January 1978 which revealed that the joking could only go so far and that if you really crossed Paisley you were finished.

  The manager was always convinced that Jones could handle fast wingers better than Phil Neal, so he switched the two when he saw the name Clive Walker – the fastest player on Chelsea’s books – was on the teamsheet for that tie. But Jones was run into the ground and Paisley left his seat in the stand for the bench, where he threw Jones a tracksuit top when substituting
him on 75 minutes. The defender was frustrated, thrust an arm into the sleeve as he put it over his head and struck Paisley in the face. ‘There was no malice,’ he says, but Jones never played for the first team again.

  The Welsh defender sat out the rest of the season, though there seemed to be redemption for him when he started Liverpool’s pre-season friendly against Austria Vienna at the start of the 1978–79 campaign. That afternoon turned into a bloodbath, though, with Jones at the centre of a fight. He was removed from the pitch to bring some calm and sold soon afterwards to Wrexham, the club from which he had arrived. He was still only 23 but the Rat had no compunction. Jones fetched £200,000 – nearly double the sum Liverpool laid out for him and a remarkable figure for the second-tier Welsh side to pay. It was Liverpool’s capacity to bring money in by selling players before their decline which enabled them to buy the best, despite minimal differential between their profitability and that of other First Division clubs. Their average annual pre-tax profit during Paisley’s years at the helm was £67,800, compared with Manchester United’s average losses of £78,800, in a period when many clubs were in the red, yet Arsenal were making an average £129,400 a year across the same nine years.

  Far from the churn and team-building, it was a more gentle exterior the world saw during a rare venture into Paisley’s private world that season when, a mere three years after taking the job he had said he didn’t want, he found himself being presented with the big red book which was a measure of success in public life. The series of This Is Your Life in which Paisley featured also saw Eamonn Andrews springing surprises on Peter Ustinov, Virginia Wade, Terry Wogan, Arthur English and Barry Sheene. The complex preparations provided an insight into the people and places which mattered in life. Guests were still being contacted when Paisley made a trip back to Hetton-le-Hole with the European Cup. Old friends of his who had been invited to the Thames studios were asked not to meet him, just in case word got out and the surprise was spoiled.