Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  He was deflated when the faces he cherished as much as any were not in Hetton, though that didn’t prevent the trip providing one of the images of Paisley which perhaps best captures the quiet man among his own. He was sitting on a bench in the centre of the village flanked by three old friends. With the formality that those of his time knew, all four were wearing jackets and three sported ties. Paisley wore the beaming smile of a man in his natural milieu.

  Liverpool’s fixture list got in the way of the programme. It was arranged around a Tuesday evening game against Queens Park Rangers, the idea being that he and the players would be accommodated in London overnight, with filming on the Wednesday morning. But adverse weather caused the game to be postponed, so the programme was filmed on a Saturday evening, after the rearranged match at Loftus Road, and broadcast over Christmas. Paisley was peering out into the London rain, from his seat next to chairman John Smith on the team coach, when Andrews emerged from his hiding place near the emergency exit and stepped down the aisle past the players, with his red book.

  The manager was lost for words and briefly covered his face with his hands as the grinning Andrews delivered his introduction. ‘I thought it was the QPR centre-forward,’ he said eventually: a typically gentle piece of Paisley humour which elicited roars of laughter from the players and the broadcaster.

  Peter Robinson had convinced Paisley that the camera crew on the bus were working on a documentary for German television and he was under the misapprehension that the team coach’s destination was Euston station, for the train north after a 2–0 defeat – only to find himself disembarking at the Thames studios on Euston Road instead.

  ‘It’s all your fault, this!’ he whispered to Christine when the children walked onto the stage, to be greeted by him and Jessie. By prior agreement the family had spent the day holed up inside with other guests lest word somehow get out. They felt the recognition delighted him, though the recipient of it said considerably less than the surprise guests who stepped out from backstage to shake his hand that night. They included school friend Tom Hope, whom a teacher had feared was seriously injured when the young Paisley used a toy knife – with a blade which retracted into the handle on impact – on him. Hope had played his part in the ruse by falling dramatically to the ground.

  Paisley’s younger brother Hughie told a story of how they awoke their father Samuel by boxing each other one afternoon when he was sleeping late, after his shift. Hughie’s Durham accent was fairly inpenetrable – just as the players sometimes found their manager’s to be. Yet though the camera spotlight was also vastly less familiar to him, Hughie seemed the more confident and gregarious of the two brothers as he recounted the story of Samuel arriving in the room and throwing his alarm clock at the pair of them.

  An old friend, Alwyn Wade, was filmed in front of a brick toilet block the Liverpool manager had once built in Hetton and George Walker, who had laboured for bricklayer Paisley, stepped out from inside it, to fine comic effect. And then, in what to the Liverpool Football Club contingent must have been a moment of some drama, Bill Shankly stepped onto the stage to acknowledge the successor who, so soon after succeeding him, was basking in the kind of celebrity recognition that the Scot still yearned for.

  In elegant grey suit, cherry shirt and striped red tie, Shankly overshadowed Paisley, whose own suit was brown and unflattering. Shankly looked the younger man, though he was six years Paisley’s senior. He took a seat on one of the guests’ back rows when he had offered a brief tribute to his former assistant – ‘a dedicated, loyal man; he was efficient as well and like me he wanted to win’ – yet appeared immediately at Paisley’s shoulder, centre stage, when the credits rolled. The spotlight drew Shankly like a moth to the flame.

  The TV people had suggested that the contingent might retire after the programme to the bar at The Churchill hotel, where many were staying overnight, though the family found a pub around the corner instead. They knew Paisley would want to buy drinks and thought it would be more affordable there, in an environment more modest and to his taste. Frankie Carr, who had flown in from his new base in Hong Kong, was the guest Paisley seemed most pleased to see. ‘He’s not sent me money back,’ Paisley joked, implying he was owed some.

  The programme ended with some words from Matt Busby, seemingly delivered from his back garden. ‘One might get the impression that Bob is a very quiet person,’ Busby said. ‘Yes, I would agree with that. But he has this inner steel to motivate his players to great heights and this is a great thing in his favour. He is prepared to give anyone else the limelight, rather than himself. This is a very rare thing these days.’

  Such acknowledgement of the then 58-year-old’s achievements was a break from what had become an unremitting season – in which there was no escaping Clough’s Forest, who had established an unassailable position at the top of the First Division when Liverpool wound up facing them in the League Cup final, too. Only one of the clubs could play in red, so Paisley arranged to drop in to the City Ground, have a drink with Clough and toss a coin for the right. Clough’s son, Nigel, span it, Paisley called heads and it dropped tails. ‘I can’t even win the bloody toss against you lot,’ Clough recalled Paisley saying.

  Clough had no time for Liverpool’s reputation. As he and Paisley led their teams out at Wembley, he stopped to tell his players to wave to the supporters. Paisley didn’t notice and had walked on several steps. When he realised, he had to stop and wait for the younger man to catch up.

  The Wembley match was drawn 0–0, but four days later at Old Trafford there were the first signs in Paisley’s players of what would frustrate them to the core in the years to come against Forest: an inability to convert their superiority into goals against the most resolute of defences.

  The frustration boiled over into some harsh challenges. Forest’s Peter Withe and Viv Anderson were booked; Ian Callaghan picked up the first yellow card of a long Liverpool career. A controversial penalty, awarded against Phil Thompson for a foul on John O’Hare who seemed fractionally outside the Liverpool area when he fell, sealed the night.

  But with a team containing five reserves, Forest had beaten the champions of Europe and won the first major trophy of their new era. Liverpool had failed to manage a single goal against Clough’s teenage goalkeeper Chris Woods in the two matches, the first of which included extra-time. Lloyd might have lacked the finesse that Paisley looked for in central defenders but the fortress was effective. ‘The Great Wall’, Clough liked to call him.

  It was the same story when Liverpool met Forest at Anfield for a First Division game at the end of the season. Liverpool’s minds were fixed on European competition by then but Paisley declared the need to ‘keep our concentration, maintain our rhythm’ which felt like code for not becoming frustrated again. Some of Forest’s minds were fixed on awards. Lloyd’s central defensive partner Kenny Burns missed the game to collect the Football Writers’ Player of the Year Award. That had gone to Emlyn Hughes the previous season. Liverpool finished with 57 points, the same tally that had won them the league in 1977. Forest accumulated a full seven more and became the first side to complete the First Division and League Cup Double.

  The European Cup presented an opportunity to salvage the season. The road to the final was not without its surprises and causes for suspicion, as Paisley always knew there would be. Though Liverpool beat Dynamo Dresden 5–1 in the first leg of the second-round tie, they faced such an extraordinary display against the East Germans in the second leg that Paisley and the Boot Room felt that the opposition must have benefited from some kind of stimulant. At least three of the players thought the same. ‘Supercharged’ was how Ray Kennedy later described the opposition. Liverpool lost 2–1, and Paisley always considered it one of the strongest performances against his side in Europe and another reason to guard against complacency.

  The convincing way Liverpool beat the opponents they had met in Rome a season earlier, Borussia Mönchengladbach, was promising. The 3–0 semi-fi
nal second-leg win put a grinning Paisley on the front of the Daily Mirror with Emlyn Hughes: ‘Pride of English.’ It was Dalglish who secured the acclaim, scoring in that win and setting up another for Kennedy, who had run the midfield again. Case scored the third with a fierce shot in off the underside of the bar.

  The biggest challenge Paisley faced for the final against Club Brugge at Wembley was the usual one that he dreaded: who to leave out and how to avoid their relentless demands to be picked. Steve Heighway had badly bruised a rib three weeks before the Wembley final, felt he had shaken it off by the time the team had trained on the eve of the match, but Paisley had decided he did not want to use him. As the players boarded the coach to their hotel – the Holiday Inn at Swiss Cottage – Paisley approached him and said that he had spoken to Tommy Smith about Heighway’s injury. Smith said he had experienced bruised ribs and it had taken a month to shake off. On that basis Heighway would not play, Paisley announced, disappearing back down the bus to join Joe Fagan on their seat at the front.

  That Paisley – the master assessor of injuries – would need the medical opinion of Tommy Smith to inform his decision was pure concoction. He just couldn’t find the words to tell Heighway, who walked to the back of the bus and literally shed tears of frustration. ‘I was flying at that time,’ he recalls. ‘I absolutely knew I was flying. I don’t think he ever understood the torment that caused me. Not because I wanted to play but because I knew I was OK to play.’

  Paisley had no compunction about sending Heighway on early – just past the hour – when the final at Wembley against Club Brugge was locked at 0–0. Decisive in dropping him, decisive in fielding him, the substitution turned the game by inducing panic in the Belgian defenders, as Shankly observed on the local radio commentary that night. Heighway had been right – he really was ‘flying’ – though the Rat would not have admitted it.

  The goal which saw Liverpool home also demonstrated the combined benefit of £792,000 of transfer business. Souness, one of the night’s most dominant characters, squeezed a pass inside two Club Brugge defenders for Dalglish to run on to and flip the ball over Birgir Jensen, the goalkeeper, to win the final 1–0.

  Souness always said that there was an element of fluke about the pass; that he went to block the ball in a tackle, expecting to be kicked, only for the Club Brugge defender to pull out and leave him to guide the ball to Dalglish. For all that, it looked like a sign of shrewd investment from the transfer committee. And it set up Dalglish’s 30th goal of the campaign for Liverpool – an extraordinary debut-season tally and one he would not match again in a 13-season Anfield career. Forest’s Clough would later marvel at the sums of money at Paisley’s disposal (which he did not have), though the value of buying and selling well was revealed in the Anfield financial results for 1978, which showed a profit of £71,000 on a £2.4 million turnover. By the time Paisley’s management of Liverpool was done, he had spent £5.5 million on 25 players over nine years and picked up £3.5 million in fees by selling 35 players, putting him a mere £2 million in the red.

  That only went to show the value of trusting in others; heading off to the Mallorca sun and relying on Peter Robinson being at the cricket, working his contacts between the overs.

  9

  Red Tree Challenge

  Graeme Souness preferred grilled lobster and Sancerre to the cod and chips which Bob Paisley would instruct John the coach driver to stop off for on the way home from games. They added German Hock to the drinks order of lemonade, lager and orange juice in the end. ‘Charlie’, they called Souness, short for ‘Champagne Charlie’.

  He dated Mary Stävin, who was the reigning Miss World when he arrived at Liverpool in 1978, and he led the players out of the Melwood dressing-room to show them his new white BMW 2000 at a time when Phil Thompson’s Saab had previously been the high-point of motoring sophistication. The lifestyle made Souness about as far removed as any player could be from Liverpool’s homespun philosophies. When he had appointed him captain several years later, Paisley said that he half expected him to toss up with a gold American Express card. But the glamour ended when the game began, from which point Souness ran the team. That’s what Paisley loved about him.

  In Souness, he found the individual with the force of personality to take Liverpool’s philosophy of self-regulation to its ultimate level. Souness could change the system in the midst of a game, according to the course it took. In the dugout Ronnie Moran and Joe Fagan would issue orders, but Souness didn’t need them. ‘You don’t coach Souness,’ says Roy Evans, who was in the dugout as reserve-team coach. ‘You’re just putting ideas in his head and when he gets out there, the game changes. You can say what you’ve seen and what your scouts have brought in, but when the game starts the players have to work it out for themselves.’

  It was from his seat at the front of the team coach one Saturday evening that Paisley was witness to the Souness influence. Liverpool had just lost in the FA Cup but some singing had started at the back. Furious to see that defeat could be taken so lightly, Souness marched down the back of the bus with a face like thunder, ready to throw a punch at the offenders. Roy Evans restrained him. ‘I started it,’ he told Souness. He had wanted to find a way of lifting the spirits, since there was another game in three days.

  Souness was haunted in the early weeks of his first full Liverpool season – 1978–79 – by a defeat which Paisley took harder than any other. Paisley had warned, in the moments after beating Club Brugge in London, that Nottingham Forest, who as English champions would be in the competition with holders Liverpool the following season, posed a major threat to a third consecutive continental triumph. His observation was in black and white, on the back page of the Daily Mirror of 11 May 1978, which reported the Club Brugge final. The headline stated: ‘“Now for the treble,” says Paisley’, on account of the fact that he told reporters, ‘The treble is on.’ He would have winced at that. It was unusual of him to have spoken so liberally. Perhaps the Wembley euphoria had got the better of him.

  Souness later revealed that Paisley had talked about Forest in the Wembley dressing-room too, though ‘No one had taken much notice.’ They did when Liverpool drew Brian Clough’s side in the first round of the following season’s competition.

  Forest were hardly delighted by the news either. Their winger John Robertson says his first thought was, ‘Oh, Jesus, we’re not even going to get a proper trip into Europe here,’ and the papers were full of how Forest lacked ‘the know-how’ to fare well in Europe. But Paisley was the more worried of the two managers. He’d already seen the challenge Forest posed and brought his players back early from their summer holidays for a longer pre-season tour. Since the sides did not meet until 13 September, 25 days after the opening game of the First Division, he was clearly concerned.

  His battle with Clough was becoming an increasingly absorbing part of the English football landscape. Clough hailed from Paisley’s own north-east – Middlesbrough, 30 miles south of Hetton-le-Hole – and he, like Paisley, had started out on his own journey in August 1974, succeeding Don Revie at Elland Road shortly before Paisley was confirmed as Shankly’s successor. It said everything about their respective profiles that Clough’s appointment dominated the papers that month, even though it lasted only 44 days.

  They were yin and yang, with radically different ideas about winning. One of Clough’s tricks, which Liverpool seemed to be on the receiving end of more than most, was casually tripping up opposition players to wind them up. Phil Thompson followed Alan Hansen into the players’ tunnel at Anfield on one occasion in 1978 and found Clough behind the young defender, clipping his heels.

  Hansen, still too young and gauche to challenge this, kept looking around but Clough carried on. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Thompson asked him. ‘Clough didn’t flinch,’ says Thompson. ‘He turned towards their dressing-room and disappeared without even a glance back.’

  Jimmy Case got a kick up the backside from Clough as he left the field at h
alf-time during another match. It was evidently retribution for a number of over-the-top challenges. Paisley let this pass. He rarely discussed Clough and had little desire to fraternise with him, with the occasional exception of a Boot Room encounter.

  Clough would one day declare in a Granada TV tribute to Paisley that, ‘We at Forest learned from Liverpool and they knew it.’ But the Forest manager showed a remarkable lack of curiosity on those occasions when he turned up in the Boot Room at 5 p.m. on Saturdays. As with all the managers they invited in, Paisley and his men were surreptitiously seeking intelligence from Clough about his team, but they never heard him ask about Liverpool.

  Clough claimed that he appeared at Anfield one day in 1980 to try to buy Terry McDermott, and that Paisley opened his fridge to offer him a beer. ‘There was mould inside it, so I said, “Let’s have a cup of tea instead.”’ The honest truth was that Paisley never knew which Clough would turn up. He told a story of getting ready to go home one day when there was a knock on the office door and he found Clough outside, in an old tracksuit holding a bottle of whisky. ‘He wanted us to talk football over a drink,’ Paisley related. ‘I told him I couldn’t because I was going home for my tea. Eventually he got up and said he was going to watch Tranmere’s match. I think he walked over the river.’

  Someone else’s battle with drink would find no empathy from Paisley if that individual happened to lead the team which Liverpool found to be their most implacable foe. Clough would later reflect that Paisley ‘had a smile as wide as Stockton High Street’, alluding to the Teesside town they both knew well. ‘He has exorcised the silly myth that nice guys don’t win anything.’ But any politeness on Paisley’s part was a surface impression. He hated the way Forest were encroaching on Liverpool.

  Nevertheless, the outlook for Paisley as the sides prepared to meet in the European Cup first round seemed promising. Liverpool had started the season well – beating Spurs 7–0 only 11 days earlier, while Forest had struggled to rediscover the quality which had won them the previous season’s championship. Few commentators doubted that Liverpool would win the Battle of Britain. A poll of the other 20 First Division managers asked them to predict the winner. Just three backed Forest: John Neal of Middlesbrough, Chelsea’s Ken Shellito and Alan Dicks at Bristol City. Paisley would have winced at that, too. Such a put-down would certainly have been an incentive for his players. Clough did, indeed, take a leaf out of the Paisley book of psychology by using it. He actually told his players that only one of the managers had backed them.