Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Forest’s players found that Liverpool had gifted them another motivating factor. In his starting line-up for the first leg at Forest’s City Ground, Clough was taking a gamble on a young striker, Garry Birtles, who had been a carpet fitter a couple of years or so earlier when he had signed him from a local non-league side for £2,000.

  Birtles says of Liverpool that there was ‘quite a lot of piss-taking coming in my direction from more than the odd member of their squad’. Paisley’s players paid the price when the teams finally got down to business. Highly motivated by the barbs, the 22-year-old left Thompson for dead with a drag back to force a finger-tip save from Clemence, then was on hand to receive from Tony Woodcock to put Forest 1–0 ahead in Nottingham.

  It was a scoreline Paisley would always settle for in a European away tie. Liverpool’s players were so accustomed to overturning one-goal losing margins in an Anfield second leg that they began reminding their opponents of the fact on the Nottingham turf. Several Forest players claim members of Paisley’s team, including Hughes and Thompson, were telling them on the pitch that ‘one won’t be enough’.

  But Paisley would reflect afterwards that his team forgot their usual European principles and were lured into a First Division mind-set against Forest. Liverpool drove forward for an equaliser, where on any football field across the continent they would have been programmed to sit and settle. The consequences were disastrous.

  Consecutive clearances from Case and Neal bounced off Forest players and the second fell into the path of Birtles, who escaped Thompson’s lunging tackle and delivered a cross which Woodcock headed down for full-back Colin Barrett to volley in. The camera panned to Paisley, visibly cursing in the tight Forest dugout against its whitewashed back wall. ‘His comments – I wonder what they are,’ speculated commentator Brian Moore. His players didn’t need much imagination to know.

  Souness was one of those out of position as he drove forward for the equaliser and says he was traumatised by the late goal which he had to take responsibility for. ‘The boss, as usual, was right and instead of playing Forest as a European side we played them just as we would have done in a league match and went chasing after goals and a victory,’ he reflected later. ‘It taught me when to go and when to hold.’

  It was Garry Birtles who had the last word. ‘Will two be enough, then?’ he asked Thompson as Liverpool prepared to kick-off again at 2–0 down. Paisley was treated to the full repertoire of Clough oratory in the 14 days before the return leg. He milked his side’s underdog status. ‘We are not just battling against 20 players but over 50,000 people: the Liverpool management staff, the secretaries, everyone,’ he said. ‘I wish I was the manager of Liverpool. I envy Bob Paisley, the manager of the most successful club in the country.’

  Paisley did not consider his situation to be enviable at all, as the sides prepared to meet again. ‘We’ve got something to do now,’ he said in one of his statements of the obvious. ‘It’ll be hard to pull back two goals against Forest.’

  Bizarrely, Clough’s preparations for that night included receiving Shankly on the team coach. He and Clough chatted away as the bus rolled up to Anfield. Clough also ordered his players to walk right in front of the Anfield Kop in their club-issue blue blazers and grey flannels. Birtles thought it was an act of defiance.

  Forest played with only one striker in a performance of huge commitment in the second leg, with every one of their players dedicated to the task of keeping Liverpool out. It was a different kind of challenge Liverpool encountered in Birtles that night. ‘Phil Thompson and I would be knocking the ball back and forth to each other with Birtles, who had no real chance of winning it, still chasing every pass,’ Hansen reflected later. ‘Phil and I never ceased to be amazed by his energy and commitment. When the ball had been directed somewhere else I would turn to Phil and say, “Where did they get this guy from?”’

  The game ended goalless and Liverpool were eliminated. In 330 minutes of football against Forest since the side’s return to the First Division, they had scored just one goal. Paisley’s competitive instinct left him loathing this team, though, needless to say, he did not shout the sentiment. He wore the usual phlegmatic look when he spoke to reporters afterwards, his thinly disguised message conveying that Forest wanted only to repel and not to create. ‘We’ve never finished well against Forest,’ he said. ‘Things go that way in football. They defend well. It’s not easy to break down any team which concentrates on that.’ Souness put it more bluntly. ‘Forest keep us dangling on the end of a string. Whatever the competition, we seem to spend 85 minutes in their half, only to lose.’ The challenge was something unique in Paisley’s five years of management. Arsenal had been a bogey team, but nothing like this.

  The Forest perspective on Liverpool was that too many First Division sides arriving at Anfield were physically intimidated by them, especially when Souness and Case were in the ranks. ‘Some teams turned up and were very polite,’ says Ian Bowyer, the midfielder who played in both the European ties. ‘Souness kicked one or two of them and he didn’t worry much. The first goal was effectively the winning goal so many times and half the teams jacked it in if they conceded. In periods of the game they would move the ball very quickly and if they were ahead, they would keep it for long periods of time. Ray Clemence would keep it for an age and you would go five minutes at a time without even feeling the ball. They were very good at keeping possession.We tried to get them to pass the ball to where we wanted them to pass it.’

  In the second of the European ties, Forest tried to do some intimidating of their own, by ‘looking after’ Terry McDermott, as Bowyer describes it. McDermott, considered by Forest to be the weak link physically, was substituted after 70 minutes of that game, having lasted less than an hour of the first leg. ‘Terry, not you again is it?’ Bowyer shouted across to him as he left the field.

  A fractional drop-off in concentration was fatal against Paisley’s side, and Birtles believes the self-discipine Clough demanded allowed Forest to challenge them. ‘What they were good at was moving teams around and creating space. If you lacked concentration for a moment, you were in trouble. We defended from the front and didn’t let them break out.’

  Though Paisley was 16 years Clough’s senior, they did share some common philosophies. Both were suspicious of injuries incurred by players they needed to be available. ‘There was rarely anyone in the treatment room when Cloughie was about,’ said Forest’s Gary Mills. ‘If you were you anywhere near it, they’d tell you, “Get away from there. The boss is around.”’ There was more than a touch of Shankly and Paisley about that. You needed to be as hard as nails to play for Liverpool or Forest.

  Both managers had also identified the value of pragmatic, sometimes defensive football. And both had sought to generate strength through a fierce commitment and refusal to yield. The Liverpool and Forest players would both run through walls to win.

  It was where the manager fitted in that the parallels ceased. Liverpool’s players always felt that while Forest’s team worked for Clough, their own understated manager had them working for Liverpool, as well as him. Forest’s players dispute that, though no one could argue that it was the radically different personalities which added most texture to the titanic struggle between the two clubs.

  Clough ran Forest with a rod of iron utterly unrecognisable to Paisley’s squad. Players who incurred his wrath would find themselves receiving what they called a ‘red tree’ through their letterbox: a letter bearing the Forest red tree crest informing them of their punishment.

  Larry Lloyd found himself on the wrong end of what was described in the press as ‘the Great Blazer Row’. As Forest progressed beyond Liverpool to face AEK Athens in Greece in the European Cup second round, Lloyd neglected to don the ubiquitous blue blazer and grey slacks for the coach trip to Athens airport the morning after Forest’s win. When Clough ordered him to change immediately he said he could not, as the uniform was in a suitcase which had already been stowed
beneath the coach.

  The red tree letter summarily fined him £100, which leapt to £200 when Lloyd protested. When Archie Gemmill earned Clough’s wrath for the same offence, Tommy Smith reflected that it would never have happened under Paisley’s management. ‘Clough’s methods work to some extent but he gets lost in his own self-importance,’ Smith reflected.

  Souness felt the same after a match at Aston Villa when six of the Liverpool side travelled to London to take up an invitation to attend a Wings concert at Wembley with the players of other clubs. The Forest group that night – John Robertson, Martin O’Neill, Kenny Burns and Lloyd – clearly risked the wrath of Clough if they stepped out of line.

  ‘I could never have worked for that kind of manager,’ says Souness. ‘He always talked down to players to my mind and there were double standards about the way he laid down the law. He’d been in the Boot Room having a drink at Anfield but wouldn’t let his players go in our lounge for a drink. I suppose it is because I was used to being treated like an adult at Anfield by staff who put themselves on the same level.’

  Paisley was unyielding in other ways. His focus was on where the drop-offs in performance lay and where the Boot Room thought there might be a problem. Beyond that, he let the team run itself, and after Souness’s arrival it increasingly did.

  The First Division campaign did not present a difficulty, once the disappointment of the Forest defeat was put out of mind. Liverpool secured 21 points out of a possible 22 at the start of the season, with two points for a win and both Ipswich Town and Manchester City, two of the division’s stronger sides, quickly put away comfortably, 3–0 and 4–1.

  Spurs had arrived at a sun-dappled Anfield parading Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa, two new arrivals from the Argentina squad who had won that summer’s World Cup on home soil. Several players say that Paisley encouraged a mood of disdain among his players for this new-fangled piece of frippery. Liverpool swatted the South Americans out of town to the tune of 7–0. Paisley felt the seventh goal – Johnson raking a 40-yard pass to Heighway, who struck a first-time cross which Terry McDermott raced to meet and head in at the end of 70-yard run – was the best Anfield had ever seen. McDermott’s lung capacity frequently allowed him to clear the length of the pitch and still find the technical capacity to finish well, though Paisley would have ridiculed the terminology of a ‘box-to-box’ player.

  There were perceived failings, for all that: Emlyn Hughes was becoming surplus to requirement. He had started to become eclipsed by Hansen the previous season, though maintained a place in the side through his capacity to fill in at full-back. Despite the extraordinary domestic supremacy of that season, it was the defeats that Paisley sieved for evidence. Hughes had been instructed to remain ‘tight’ on Manchester United’s Steve Coppell in the FA Cup semi-final replay at Goodison Park in April 1979 which Liverpool lost 1–0. Though Hansen’s positioning was flawed, Hughes had been marooned some 30 yards upfield with Coppell, adhering far too literally to the management’s instructions, allowing Jimmy Greenhoff to nick in and score the winner. Hughes never played for Liverpool again. He thought he was being offered a contract extension when Paisley called him at home one day and told him he wanted to talk in his office. But the manager had decided it was time to let him go at the age of 31. Phil Thompson was made captain in his place and Alan Kennedy arrived from Newcastle United for £330,000 at the start of the following season.

  There had already been other departures, with Ian Callaghan and Tommy Smith having followed John Toshack to Swansea in the summer of 1978. David Johnson finally formed part of the team, in what was a case of fitting the yeomanry around Dalglish. He was not the most technically able striker and did not command Dalglish’s finishing prowess, but the players considered him a workaholic who would always score 9 for effort as he operated across the front line, ‘disturbing defences to create space for Dalglish to exploit’, as Paisley later put it.

  At first, Liverpool supporters wondered why a number 9 would sometimes drift to a position in front of them on the flank. ‘You could hear the supporters saying, “What are you doing? You should be down the middle,”’ Johnson says. ‘They wanted me to be like Keegan – mobile, just operating down the middle.’ The reasons for Paisley’s refusal of the Johnson transfer request became apparent. He scored 18 times in the 1978–79 season – second to Dalglish’s 25. It was the beginning of his emergence as one of the ultimate manifestations of Paisley’s collectivism.

  Players arrived and players left like ghosts in the night. Paisley moved around so noiselessly that some of them could not remember a single conversation with him, when their own Liverpool days were over.

  But the players did not need the manager in their ear, or dispensing letters with club insignia, because they answered to each other – and very often to Graeme Souness. ‘It used to scare you stiff, sometimes,’ says David Fairclough. ‘You were scared you were going to lose the ball because of the bollocking you used to get off the players. I lose it and I’m here and Ray Kennedy is there and it’s, “What the fuck are you doing?” The players around you were policing it as much as the staff.’

  Souness imparted most fear, though, as the new boy Alan Kennedy could attest. Paisley had always been impressed by Kennedy’s pace, which made him one of the few players he cautioned his team about when they went up against him when facing Newcastle. But the new left-back struggled to adjust to the notion of passing the ball out of defence and Souness, for one, did not think Kennedy was good enough.

  Souness called for the ball to be played short on the Melwood training pitch one day, but since Dalglish was also asking for it and was not one to take no for an answer, Kennedy played it long.

  Souness called for it short again. Kennedy went long again, prompting Souness this time to march up to him.

  ‘I couldn’t see you, Graeme,’ said Kennedy.

  Souness wound back an arm and punched him flat in the face. ‘Can you see me now?’ he asked.

  It was by no means the only fist thrown in that place over the years as the players fought for territory in the ultra-competitive environment that Paisley allowed to form. And it wasn’t the last. Once, a fight between Ray Kennedy and Joey Jones had begun on the team coach from Melwood back to Anfield and was still going on when the team arrived there. There was generally minimal intervention from Paisley. He, Fagan and Moran expected such behaviour, viewed it as part of the healthy environment and would simply step forwards and move players onto other activities. No one was censured.

  Souness led the team off the field, as well as on it. It was usually he who formed a bridgehead at the bar of one of the pubs they favoured, and it would often be he whom you would find in the players’ lounge at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, long after most of the others had gone home. Dalglish was not a figurehead player in the same way.

  The players liked drinking at the Sefton Arms pub in West Derby which was handy for Melwood, and the Granton in Anfield. ‘Clear away the empties’ was the only rule. They were obsessed about that, as if knowing the impression that the evidence would leave. There was plenty of clearing to be done. Phil Thompson, Alan Kennedy, Terry McDermott and Alan Hansen were all banned from the Hen and Chickens pub near Kirkby, the north Liverpool overspill, at one stage because the landlord had had enough of the drinking and swearing games.

  The players fought for each other, too. Souness would go to war in protection of teammates when he thought it necessary. He was on a run of games in the reserve team after injury when he saw Derby County’s Bruce Rioch dishing out some treatment to the young Liverpool striker Owen Brown. ‘Do that again and you’re getting it,’ he told Rioch.

  Alan Bleasdale, who persuaded Souness to appear in an episode of his Liverpool social drama Boys from the Blackstuff, which screened on the BBC, quoted a 16-year-old Liverpool apprentice in a piece he wrote about the player. ‘He’s not just captain of the first team. He’s captain of the club,’ the apprentice said. ‘Even if you’re a nobod
y who cleans the boots and scrapes a game in the youth team, if he thinks you’re getting picked on by someone, it doesn’t matter who it is, “Charlie” will put them in their place if he thinks they deserve it. And I’ll tell you one thing – he only has to do it once.’

  Souness’s authority created a hierarchy. A reserve-team player would be designated to keep an eye on Miss Stävin for him if he was to be late reaching a favoured Saturday night meeting point – often Ugly’s nightclub on Liverpool’s Duke Street. But when he and Owen Brown were browsing the Carson pour Homme boutique in the city centre one day and Brown was asked to pay £100 for a jacket that had been offered to Souness for only £80, the latter was furious. ‘Come on,’ Souness said to Brown. ‘We’ll spend our money where we’re appreciated.’ They walked out.

  And so it was that Paisley left this incredibly small group to form and self-regulate in pubs, clubs, on training pitches and football pitches. The ‘Jocks’ – leader Souness, superstar Dalglish and cool, sharp-tongued Hansen – liked to think they ruled the roost over the English.

  Hansen roomed with Alan Kennedy, who was virtually the valet in the relationship, often bringing Hansen his breakfast. Steve Heighway and Joey Jones formed another unusual rooming partnership and, Jones would admit, not exactly a meeting of intellectual minds. Jimmy Case and Ray Kennedy were another odd couple; almost inseparable and always to be found dining together away from the rest on European trips. The humour was relentless and merciless and you learned to live with it or you perished. Alan Kennedy was vulnerable because he was not always the sharpest. His nicknames included ‘Bungalow Billy’ (not much upstairs) and the more enduring ‘Barney Rubble’, after The Flintstones character.