Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Early in the 1978–79 season, Kennedy’s teammates lured him into returning a phone call to a supposed ‘Mr C. Lyon’ on a local Liverpool number, with the promise that this might present a rare promotional opportunity for him. The number Kennedy was told to dial certainly belonged to a place frequented by sea lions. It was not the first time that Liverpool players had used Knowsley Safari Park for their wind-up stunts.

  Things were edgier when Ray Kennedy was on the receiving end of the wind-ups. He was combustible and hated finding himself involved in mix-ups with his namesake new signing. So one player would dial the Anfield players’ lounge phone from another extension and Kennedy would be told the call was for him, only to find the caller asking: ‘Is that Alan?’

  Amid the high jinx, Paisley, Moran and Fagan gave the impression of three wise monkeys – ‘Allowing us our heads as long as it did not affect what was going on during matches,’ as Souness put it.

  Paisley was only concerned when he perceived the socialising to be affecting the football. Ray Kennedy spent an afternoon drinking Drambuie and gin with a friend after attending a funeral. A few days later, he was still struggling so much that he put in a tackle on Manchester City’s Paul Power which resulted in the defender having to leave the field. Paisley approached Kennedy in a corner of the dressing-room after the match. It ‘wasn’t the injury’ which put Power out of the game, he said quietly.

  Kennedy asked what he meant.

  ‘Power must have smelt your breath,’ he replied.

  Was the Paisley drollness laced with a warning? Kennedy could not be sure and that was what made it unsettling. He would think twice next time.

  The manager’s Friday morning team meetings were as brief as always. They were always prefaced by groundsman Eli Wass staggering in with the 6-foot-long Subbuteo-size table with balls and magnetic men who would be laid out in two teams of 4–4–2. The players would arrange their chairs in an L-shape around the table before Paisley arrived for a talk, which Souness says did not once entail the use of the actual table in the entire seven years he played for the manager. Often, Tom Saunders’s opposition scouting reports would be designed to put the frighteners on the team, but Paisley’s message was usually the same: ‘You’ve trained properly and if you’re at it this week you are going to be no match for them. You are better players. You win.’

  The players’ gathering before Paisley’s talk was always the main event. Kenny Dalglish had a friend at McVitie’s so he would bring the biscuits – chocolate ones, otherwise known as ‘the Jock biscuits’, for himself, Souness and Hansen; ordinary digestives for ‘the riff raff,’ as the Scots called the rest. Domestically, no one could touch this tight-knit group. Liverpool were already so dominant by the time they hammered Derby County 5–0 at Anfield in mid-October that they led the table by three points with a goals tally of 33, almost double the number of any other side. Paisley’s task was made easier by the supreme confidence that winning bred. They felt that they could beat anyone.

  The only real concern that winter was the weather. Paisley began wearing the flat cap which became one of his trademarks – to protect against the cold, his family said – and snow wreaked havoc on the football programme. Liverpool played only two competitive games between Boxing Day and 30 January – a goalless FA Cup third-round tie in ‘atrocious conditions’ at Southend United’s Roots Hall ground, and an Anfield replay which they won. Paisley felt a desperate need for competition and was grateful when Bangor City director Charles Roberts phoned him at Anfield to ask if the club might like a friendly, because there had been ‘no snow’ up in North Wales.

  When Paisley and Roberts walked out onto the pitch an hour before kick-off, on 27 January, flakes began to descend. ‘If this isn’t snow, then what the fuck is it?’ Paisley asked him, though to Roberts’ relief it was only a flurry and a full-strength Liverpool won 4–1, with goals from Dalglish, McDermott and Fairclough. ‘Unless you were in football he didn’t really respect you and if he considered you an outsider, as I was, he could be very abrupt,’ Roberts says of Paisley. ‘But Liverpool were professional. They brought a full-strength team and several directors and that day set us up financially.’

  When the thaw came, goals flowed in the league, too – 6–0 v Norwich; 3–0 v Arsenal; 4–1 v Bolton. But it was the defence which was the most extraordinary aspect of that 1978–79 season. With the personnel now settled – Kennedy (Alan)– Thompson–Hansen–Neal was Paisley’s favoured quartet – a mere 16 goals were conceded all season, and two of those were a result of Thompson and Souness putting the ball into their own net. Clemence, who kept 28 clean sheets, had refined the sweeper role that Tommy Lawrence had been ordered into, operating from a high line on the edge of his box. He also introduced the early throw, which became a trademark part of Liverpool’s counter-attacking style, based on the idea that ‘an opposition team can be at its most vulnerable the moment the ball changes sides’, as the goalkeeper once described it.

  Paisley and the Boot Room’s constant look-out for the whiff of complacency ensured that the slightest drop-off in form could be seized upon with seeming relish, though. When Liverpool lost 3–1 at Aston Villa in April on Easter Monday – the single occasion in the 1978–79 season when the side conceded more than one goal – Thompson’s own goal was one of the three. The press room afterwards was treated to one of Paisley’s little witticisms: ‘They’ve been reading too many papers, thinking they’ve won the league already.’ But for the dressing-room, the Rat had planned an act of personal humiliation.

  ‘Is the captaincy getting to you?’ Paisley asked Thompson in front of the others after the game. ‘Is it too much for you?’

  Considering this was Liverpool’s first defeat in 13 games Thompson was understandably stunned.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he replied.

  ‘What, what, what do you mean, “Fuck off”?’ stammered Paisley, not expecting Thompson’s come-back.

  ‘If you don’t think the captaincy is right for me, take it back,’ said Thompson.

  Terry McDermott was in his element later that evening, doing his Paisley impersonations and re-enacting the scene, amid general mirth among the players. ‘“Is the captaincy too much for you?” “What do you mean fuck off . . . ?”’

  But Thompson knew what Paisley had been doing. ‘He had this way of stirring you up,’ Thompson says. ‘He was looking for a response and he got it. What he said hurt me.’

  Alan Kennedy also received a fierce dressing down from Paisley. The day before that game he had been quoted in the papers saying that Liverpool were virtually assured of the title – a reasonable assumption to make since they were six points clear at the time. When Kennedy arrived in the dressing-room with Liverpool 2–0 down, Paisley turned on him, blaming him for the set-back by winding Villa up with his comments. ‘It’s all your fault. Never, ever say you’ve won something until you have the medal in your hand.’

  The extraordinary level of dressing-room recrimination seems to have been a case of Paisley and staff seizing a rare opportunity to sharpen their team’s edge, though the manager may, indeed, have already been forming a notion that Souness would be a better captain than Thompson. He told one trusted journalist as early as 1980 that Souness was the man he wanted to lead the side.

  ‘Champagne Charlie’, by then aged 25, occupied a different world to Paisley, yet a friendship developed between them, which was more than could be said about Paisley and any other player. Souness was the only player, for example, whom Paisley regularly met outside of the parameters of Melwood and Anfield. The meeting point was the garage run by Paisley’s friend Bob Rawcliffe, the intermediary who had helped lay the foundations for Souness joining Liverpool in the first place. The Scot’s house in Sandfield Park was a mile from the garage and also close to Melwood, so, after dropping his children at school, he took to joining Paisley and Rawcliffe in the shop’s back office on the way into training.

  ‘Am I OK to . . . ?’ Souness would inquire at first, to ens
ure he was not stepping over the line between manager and player

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Paisley would reply, and the three of them would settle down together over a mug of tea. Football rarely, if ever, entered the conversation when Souness was around – racing always dominated it. The encounters seemed to reveal Paisley’s ability to compartmentalise his life. Football was work; racing was his passion. ‘I can never remember any lengthy conversation about football in the garage,’ Souness says. ‘That was another part of his life.’

  Paisley’s residual shyness was obvious to Souness, even on those occasions. ‘I don’t think he was ever comfortable one-on-one,’ Souness says. ‘He always had to have a buffer there and if it wasn’t Bob Rawcliffe it would be his big friend Ray Peers, or else Tom Saunders.’

  That said, the Scot also felt Paisley’s wit to be sharper than some players appreciated. ‘He was very quick-witted. Often too sharp for those around. Never put on an act. He had a poker player’s face.’ Paisley seemed to consider himself and Souness akin to each other in some ways. ‘He may have thought we were similar types – similar players – looking to lead on the field, making the important tackles and not going in for the fancy stuff,’ Souness says. ‘It helped me to know how he wanted us to play and I learned more from him than anyone.’

  On Paisley’s part, there was an unashamed favouritism about this friendship. David Fairclough – who, like Souness, lived at Sandfield Park between the garage and Melwood – also belonged to Rawcliffe’s social network, yet there was no scope for him to pull up a chair on weekday mornings. As he continued to struggle to break into Paisley’s starting XI, he resorted to using Rawcliffe as someone who could help persuade Paisley how good he was. ‘I’m feeling sharp,’ Fairclough would tell Rawcliffe, hoping that the message would get through to Paisley.

  ‘I’m telling him, I’m telling him,’ Rawcliffe would reply when pressed, though Fairclough’s use of the intermediary had a negative effect on his self-esteem. When the striker called in at Rawcliffe’s on one occasion, looking for positive feedback, he was confronted with the size of the challenge he faced. ‘He’s saying you’re not the player you were,’ Rawcliffe told Fairclough. ‘You’ve not got that injection of pace you used to have.’ This sent Fairclough into the depths of introspection. ‘It made you aware of what his doubts were,’ he says. ‘I always began to look for that in myself. You didn’t go around totally oblivious to what he thought. It sharpened up my senses. But it also made me terribly insecure.’

  Rawcliffe, whose intentions were good, resorted to trying to generate a sense of self-belief in Fairclough – an approach never adopted by Paisley. A routine developed by which Rawcliffe would bring cars up to Melwood for players and call into Paisley’s office for a cup of tea while they watched training, standing in front of the radiator. ‘I saw you this morning, smacking that one in,’ he would tell the striker the following day.

  Fairclough felt that ‘chucking-out time’ on his Liverpool career was nearing. He dropped completely out of the first-team picture after the 1978 European Cup final, appearing in only four First Division games throughout 1978–79 and, on a Thursday afternoon midway through the season, went to see Paisley. The manager heard him out and the brief exchange was amicable enough, but the player secured no assurances and concluded after the meeting that it was over for him at Anfield.

  Three days later, in the Sunday newspapers, Paisley was quoted saying, ‘I had a chat with Dave earlier in the week. He’s happy here and willing to fight for his place.’ Fairclough had said no such thing. Paisley would rather he remain in the ranks than risk watch him scoring for another side and knew the player’s deep emotional attachment to the club would make it hard for him to push hard to leave. The Rat had no qualms about feigning a misunderstanding.

  Liverpool were soaring – in a way which made the manager’s team selection as unimpeachable as ever. By the time the side faced Aston Villa for a second time in that 1978–79 season, three games from the end of the campaign, they were already champions-elect and playing so well that the title was assumed in all the newspaper previews. A win would bring them the league back out of Forest’s clutches.

  The Villa game took place 40 years to the day since Paisley was first signed by Liverpool, and the match programme depicted a team shot of the side, with Paisley in his customary position in the front row, hands on knees. ‘40 years on’ was the headline.

  Liverpool won 3–0, with goals from Alan Kennedy, Dalglish and McDermott. The aftermath featured a chorus in which Paisley’s name was chanted – something of rarity over the five years ‘Uncle Bob’ had been at the helm and perhaps a reflection that Paisley had not sought out the supporters in the way that Shankly had. Cultivating such a relationship was not his style.

  But at the end of that night – 8 May 1979 – a rendition of ‘We want Paisley’ rang out clear and long.

  Souness responded – pushing Paisley out towards the Kop. But he walked no more than halfway there, holding his hands aloft before wheeling around and heading back to the tunnel. The images captured him walking quietly amid his players, wearing a garish tie – Paisley pattern – and Liverpool scarf. He cut a very small figure amid the noise and jubilation.

  Five minutes later, he arrived in the dressing-room with the championship medals. ‘They’re in there,’ he said. He left the cardboard box in the corner of the dressing-room.

  The dominant back page item in the next day’s Liverpool Echo unintentionally told the story that was preoccupying him as much at the end of this season as it had the last. The piece was ghost-written in the name of Clough, proclaiming Liverpool’s recapture of the title. ‘We will try somewhere along the line to catch up with them,’ Clough wrote. ‘We know we are going forward all the time but we hope that for every three steps we take, Liverpool are taking two and half.’ Three weeks later, Forest beat Malmö in Munich to take Liverpool’s European crown. Clough shouted loud and long about that. It remained to be seen whether the quieter brand of management might actually win out.

  10

  Frank’s Lonely Road

  While Liverpool were taking the title in cruise control in the spring of 1979 St Mirren’s Frank McGarvey was heading south over Glasgow’s Kingston Bridge to Anfield with nothing more on his mind than what Bob Paisley might be willing to pay him to be their next big-name striker. It was a warm Wednesday morning in the late April of that year and he didn’t dwell on why Liverpool were in such a rush to sign him now, when the end of the football season was six weeks away.

  The motives behind the club’s timing were the same as they had ever been. It was reaching the end of their financial year and they wanted to pay St Mirren in time to reduce their profit by the size of McGarvey’s transfer fee – £270,000 – to ease their tax liability.

  McGarvey’s companion in the car, the St Mirren manager Jim Clunie, mentioned something about this but McGarvey thought nothing of it at the time. When they’d got as far south as Motherwell, McGarvey was speculating over a £10,000 cash signing-on fee on top of £300-a-week basic pay. By Carlisle, he was thinking maybe £40,000 and £500. McGarvey and Clunie met John Smith, Peter Robinson and Paisley at a hotel in Preston and Robinson offered a £12,500 fee straight up and £425 a week. McGarvey, who had been earning £150 a week at St Mirren, didn’t need to think twice.

  He immediately became Liverpool’s fourth most expensive signing, but the club did not seem to be in any rush to get him playing. Paisley was in that avuncular mode which he always assumed during a signing. ‘Settle yourself in. Have a little break. Find yourself a house. We won’t need you until next season,’ his new manager said. McGarvey was a little crestfallen. He didn’t want a ‘little break’, particularly when Liverpool supporters spotted him in the stand a day or two later for a midweek game and started to sing his name.

  All seemed to be well when McGarvey joined the players at Melwood at the start of the 1979–80 season. ‘You’re changing with the first team. You’re a first-team pl
ayer,’ Paisley told him.

  The 23-year-old was slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m not one of them yet,’ he replied. Liverpool had paid even more money – £300,000 – to Hereford United for 19-year-old Kevin Sheedy, yet Sheedy was changing with the reserves. But McGarvey was privately satisfied with Paisley’s words. When he took up a seat in the first-team dressing-room each morning that autumn – directly opposite Kenny Dalglish – he was convinced his chance would soon come.

  It never did. McGarvey would play for Jock Stein’s Scotland against Argentina in a friendly that summer, but when he returned to Merseyside he appeared week after week for Roy Evans’s reserves, imagining that he was proving his worth. He was the side’s top scorer, found the net in 16 consecutive reserves games at one stage, and drew lavish praise from Evans for a particular performance against Nottingham Forest.

  But Saturdays came to follow a grimly familiar routine. The reserves travelled in the morning for their 1 p.m. kick-offs and would be back on the coach by late afternoon – just in time to hear which of the first team had scored in a campaign which, though it started slowly, seemed to suggest that Liverpool were well capable of retaining the title in 1980.

  McGarvey looked for signs that Paisley could see what he was delivering. But there were none. The early rounds of the League Cup, which brought Chesterfield and Tranmere Rovers to Anfield, seemed to offer opportunities that winter for a young player who had shown ambition, taken the leap and left Scotland. The games came and went. Liverpool remained at full strength every time. Eventually, McGarvey knocked on Paisley’s office door, intent on testing out what his prospects were. He asked for a £50 pay rise on account of the number of goals he was scoring for Evans. ‘No problem,’ Paisley told him. ‘I’ll arrange it tomorrow.’ It would be another £50 a week.