Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Money never seemed to be a problem for the club where McGarvey was concerned. The player was devastated to find that he would be taxed at 83 per cent on all the proceeds above £400 on his £12,000 signing-on fee, having already committed a big slice of it to a detached house at Formby, the dormitory town north of Liverpool. ‘Have you missed out a “1”?’ McGarvey asked Peter Robinson, when his first salary cheque arrived.

  Liverpool paid McGarvey’s expenses for ten trips home to Glasgow, Robinson being aware that McGarvey drove north on those occasions and stayed with his family. ‘You must have got the train home this weekend? First class? And you stayed at a good hotel?’ he said, manufacturing £900 expenses for the player. His willingness to help him demonstrated Liverpool’s philosophy of always looking out for one of their own.

  McGarvey’s financial problems ran deeper than that, however, and the Liverpool players knew it. He liked the horses and his gambling gravitated into an addiction. After training, he and Emlyn Hughes would venture off to the bookmakers together where Hughes, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport, would take his winnings and leave. McGarvey would stay. He found himself so exposed financially that he persuaded a Liverpool-supporting bank manager he’d encountered to advance him £3,000, concocting a story about needing a house extension.

  Most managers would have wanted to know what was going on in their players’ private lives. Paisley, always eager to talk racing with anyone who was so inclined, just wanted to impart some tips and knowledge of the turf McGarvey’s way. ‘By the way, I was talking to Frankie today,’ McGarvey remembers Paisley saying, a reference to his friend Frankie Durr. ‘And he’s got a horse running at Leicester tonight. It’ll win. Put something on it . . .

  . . . and Frankie was talking to Henry Cecil. He’s got two running – one at Chepstow, one at Leicester. He thinks they’ll win. And Michael Winner says there’s one up in Carlisle that can’t get beat tonight . . .’

  McGarvey says he bet £10 on every horse the manager suggested and every one of them won. At that stage, Paisley did not seem to have the faintest idea that the man he’d persuaded to come down from Glasgow was drifting into an addiction that would come close to ruining him.

  McGarvey rarely encountered Paisley again after that, despite their mutual interest. He did approach him to ask approval to leave Liverpool for a few days to attend the birth of his first child, though Paisley wasn’t keen. Instead, McGarvey left for an overnight trip after training one morning, returning to Liverpool 20 hours later after a 450-mile round trip. On his return, Paisley spotted him driving through the Melwood training ground gates half an hour late and reminded him about timekeeping. ‘You never know where the Rat will be,’ someone observed wryly. There was never sentiment when the next game was up ahead, even if that game happened to be the reserve team’s.

  An opportunity seemed to arrive on 23 February 1980. David Johnson was injured for the league game against Ipswich and McGarvey was called into the squad. His heart was pounding as Paisley read out the team. ‘Up front will be Kenny and Davie Fairclough,’ he said. ‘McGarvey on the bench.’

  The match was combustible, as games against Ipswich tended to be at that time. Fairclough scored after eight minutes, Ipswich’s Frans Thijssen threw mud in Terry McDermott’s face as he took a penalty, Liverpool drew 1–1 and McGarvey did not get a look in.

  He was devastated and decided that it was over for him at Liverpool. Teammates told him to stick it out. But within a few weeks, he asked to leave and Paisley didn’t stand in his way. By the following season, he was starting out again at Celtic, having been sold for a £275,000 fee which made him only a £25,000 loss for Liverpool and was further evidence of Paisley’s and Robinson’s record in commanding high selling prices for their cast-offs. McGarvey would go on play over 150 times for Celtic and score nearly 80 goals for them.

  Still, from Paisley’s point of view, McGarvey was the only big-money buy of his managerial career who could be described as a failure, though that had nothing to do with the then 60-year-old misjudging what the St Mirren player was capable of. McGarvey bombed for no other reason than the team was so strong that Paisley could not summon any interest in testing him out in it. There were particularly meagre prospects in 1979–80 for those on the fringes: a season when Paisley used only 16 players and, given that four of those 16 started eight games or fewer, was effectively running a 12-man squad.

  This system of buying players to reduce profit had a human effect; leaving players who had invested their lives, careers, hopes and dreams in Liverpool out on a limb and forgotten. They were the collateral damage. If they happened to make it at Anfield, then so much the better. If not, then they had at least prevented the taxman walking away with the club’s earnings.

  The players accepted this because of the success Paisley brought. McGarvey’s decision to leave so soon was unusual. David Johnson’s agitations for a place included telling the Merseyside press corps he wanted out, as well as handing Paisley his handwritten letter to the same effect, hoping that would trigger a response. McGarvey could have helped his own case by showing more of the same indignation, which the Boot Room always liked to see. Asking for more money before reaching the first team would not have impressed Paisley, though it seems improbable that he didn’t badger at least once for a first-team place. In time, the Boot Room would have got wind of McGarvey’s gambling addiction, too.

  Most players felt the slimmest prospect of being a part of what Liverpool had become was worth persevering with, even if Paisley’s awareness of the more marginal players and their lives was breathtakingly vague. His first conversation with Kevin Sheedy – the midfielder who, like McGarvey, barely left the reserve team – concluded with Paisley saying, ‘Do your best, Philip.’

  Owen Brown was given the professional contract which saw him join Sheedy and McGarvey in the reserves. Paisley told him, ‘It’s fantastic that you’re a high jump champion. That’ll be great for us.’ Brown had been a long jumper.

  The details which Paisley cared about sometimes seemed odd. His curious observation to Brown, when giving him a contract, was to ‘take care of your feet. You’ve got to make sure you always keep on top of your toenails.’ There is logic to a manager telling a footballer to protect his key asset, though in this case the advice was baffling.

  The strikers were always the ones who complained about not playing because there was always more uncertainty for them than for the midfielders about who might start games. There was only one spot available. It was a question of which of three or four would partner Dalglish. But by the 1979–80 season, Johnson’s understanding with Dalglish was beginning to develop. ‘You can always give the ball to Kenny and he’ll sort something out, while the rest of us are moving off the ball,’ Johnson said at the end of that campaign.

  Liverpool had had a difficult start to it. They drew Dynamo Tbilisi in the European Cup first round, presenting Paisley with the kind of tough early challenge which had made him bring the players back early when they had drawn Forest the year before. He did so again. They lost again. Without Ray Kennedy and Alan Hansen, who both had thigh injuries, they took only a slim 2–1 lead to Georgia and crashed to a 3–0 defeat in a torrential downpour before a crowd of 80,000 partisan locals.

  The struggle extended to the league: the team won only two of their opening seven games and were ninth in late September after yet again succumbing to Nottingham Forest, losing 1–0 at the City Ground where the familiar pattern of failing to break down the Clough defence continued. With his usual awareness of where complacency might exist, Paisley said he felt his players were dining out on the ease of the previous season’s title and were showboating. He was perhaps doing a little of that himself, mixing metaphors as he rolled two light sound-bites into as many sentences: ‘We’re producing six or seven moves in build-ups but then we get carried away with the music of them,’ he said. ‘But when we get up there, where it counts, we’re powder puffs.’ Dalglish was not at his sharpe
st, he added.

  That criticism could not be applied for long. Johnson found a level of form and confidence that would make this his most prolific goal-scoring season, finding the net in wins over Ipswich, Manchester City and Everton as the side began to find their stride. They won every game they played in December, ascending ahead of Manchester United to lead the table with a 3–1 win at Aston Villa early in the month.

  Johnson did not ascribe his 27 goals in that season to any change in approach. ‘I was never a prolific goalscorer so God knows why I got so many,’ he says. But, in large, it was about numbers. Johnson started more games because Steve Heighway, who was 31 at the start of the season, dropped right out of the picture, starting only 26 First Division games in 1978–79 and a mere two in 1979–80. Even by Paisley’s own sparse standards, his relationship with Heighway was distant and many felt that the striker’s academic background did not help. ‘He would have seen Steve as a bit of an intellectual,’ says Souness. Paisley’s suspicion of those unlike himself was not an attractive characteristic and he seemed to avoid conversation with Heighway entirely, as the player’s part in the side receded. Johnson – or ‘the Doc’ as the players knew him, by virtue of the little blue bag of injury remedies he carried around with him – seized his chance. By spring he had earned his first call-up to the England team since 1975.

  Through a combination of confidence and growing intuition, the midfielders were beginning to capitalise on the opportunities Dalglish was creating. 1979–80 was also the first season in which Terry McDermott, operating in an advanced midfield position, scored more often. McDermott remained the life and soul of the squad, a player whose capacity to consume copious amounts of alcohol and be unaffected suggested he had hollow legs, and who reduced the dressing-room to fits of laughter. The source of one running joke was Paisley’s propensity to substitute McDermott. He was one of a number of players known as the ‘pop-up toasters’, a reference to the number of times his number 10 would be dug out of the little wooden box and held up, signalling that he was to be taken off. Sometimes when McDermott’s number came up he would run off the pitch backwards, as if being reeled in by a fishing rod. ‘Terry Gone Off’ they used to call him.

  His merciless Paisley imitations continued. It would be the following year, in the League Cup final at Wembley, that McDermott assumed the ‘Bob Walk’ – slight waddle, arm swinging out wildly – when the players walked out. Three or four players behind him followed suit. ‘Bob must have seen that later on TV,’ says Souness. ‘But as long as he was doing the business he would tolerate it.’

  McDermott, the roadrunner midfielder, could get ahead of the crowded middle to threaten a goal and then get back to mop up. He scored 16 goals in 1979–80, a crucial contribution that saw him voted Footballer of the Year by the football writers and his fellow professionals. But despite his comic value, McDermott had a diffidence which made him more akin to Paisley than perhaps either of them realised. He didn’t attend one of the two Player of the Year awards ceremonies where Paisley was presenting the prizes, having used the excuse of the train being late and deciding to head off to the Chester Races instead. ‘It just wasn’t me,’ said the self-deprecating McDermott. ‘I didn’t enjoy them type of things. And I still don’t enjoy them now. Very rarely go to one. I’m a pea and pies bloke.’

  At the ceremony, Paisley turned the tables and got a laugh at McDermott’s expense for once. ‘If Terry’s gone on one of his blind-side runs, it’ll be his last,’ he said, drawing one of those pieces of so-called football terminology that made him chuckle.

  Paisley had developed a little more confidence in the public realm by the start of the new decade – finding more ways, for example, to plant a false impression through the newspapers. After Alan Kennedy had scored a rather flukey goal in the 3–0 win at home to Leeds United in March 1980 to extend the lead on Manchester United to eight points at the top, Paisley told him to tell reporters he had deliberately curled the shot. The manager’s thinking had been, ‘Why not make opponents fear a Liverpool goal from out wide?’ even if the one in question hadn’t been intentional, Kennedy says. It was a little more Paisley ‘toffee’. He often tended to be tetchier when a big game loomed. One of the group of Merseyside reporters, the Liverpool Daily Post’s Nick Hilton, pushed him for more information about his team selection on one occasion, asking why he had not selected a particular player. ‘I’ve given you the team, haven’t I?’ snapped the manager.

  Paisley’s discussions of the press with his players revealed the same old innate suspicion of journalists, though. ‘Be careful with them,’ Paisley once told Kennedy. He felt that confidences could be breached if the relationships with reporters became too close.

  It could take years for a journalist to feel comfortable with Paisley. One four-hour train journey to Southampton demonstrated the challenges of striking up a conversation, for those who did not know him. Local media representatives would often travel on the same train or coach as the team to away matches and the Liverpool Daily Post’s photographer Stephen Shakeshaft found himself sitting at a table with Paisley. When some superficial football talk had run its course, Shakeshaft tried asking Paisley about Hetton-le-Hole and his upbringing. Paisley offered a a little insight, but even a subject so close to his heart didn’t stretch the conversation for long. The two men soon settled into silence. Shakeshaft would photograph Paisley right into his retirement years and that train journey was the closest they got to what he would call a conversation. Only towards the end of a 15-year working relationship did Paisley feel comfortable enough with the photographer to call him ‘Steve’.

  There could sometimes be understanding from him towards those he saw each week. An inexperienced Nick Hilton once unintentionally breached the mutual agreement which Paisley had reached with reporters when he was entrusted with making the Sunday telephone call to the manager on the behalf of the press corps. Hilton quoted a section of the conversation in which Paisley criticised Arsenal, intended as an off-the-record observation. Paisley always felt the north London side played negatively but would never have encouraged a controversy by saying so for publication. Hilton’s misapprehension saw the Post publish a ‘Paisley attacks Arsenal’ story and he feared the worst when he attended a Robinson’s Barley Water Young Player of the Month Award, at which Paisley was present. But in the presence of the older journalists, Paisley said of Hilton: ‘He’s young. He didn’t know the rules.’

  He was far less sanguine about Nottingham Forest, who continued to haunt him. As Liverpool slipped out of the European Cup again, Forest sauntered through the first round once more, with a pairing against Swedish side Östers Växjö which rendered Liverpool’s Tbilisi clash all the harder to take. Forest won 3–1 on aggregate and Clough was Clough. ‘Success hasn’t changed Peter and me,’ he said of himself and Peter Taylor. ‘We were arrogant at the bottom of the league and we are arrogant at the top – and that is consistency.’

  There was an opportunity to shut Clough up when Liverpool faced Forest in the semi-final of the League Cup, a competition then sponsored by the Milk Marketing Board. The chance came and went, though. Forest won in Nottingham through a John Robertson penalty and then doubled the advantage when the Scot despatched another at Anfield. Liverpool knocked Forest out the FA Cup, but Paisley’s nemesis remained. When the two sides subsequently met at Anfield in the league Robertson taunted the local supporters about his successful League Cup penalties by ambling up to the penalty spot and miming another successful strike, during the warm-up. He even re-enacted the celebration.

  ‘We had to make all the play against difficult tactics,’ Paisley said of the League Cup elimination, his competitive streak at its most acute when Clough and his players were in town.

  There was another knot of games against Arsenal in the semi-final of the FA Cup: a marathon involving three replays against the north London side. ‘The Arsenal series,’ as Paisley later described it. It was a sequence which captivated the nation, bringing in m
ore than £162,000 in gate receipts from an aggregate attendance of more than 170,000. The FA had declared that a fourth replay would be settled by penalties when the teams gathered at Highfield Road, Coventry, for the third tie. Both clubs denounced the idea and Liverpool’s players were ready to walk off the field in protest if such an eventuality came to pass.

  Paisley singled out the threat posed by Arsenal’s Brian Talbot before each of the four games, though he kept confusing him with Talbot’s former Ipswich teammate Roger Osborne, who had never played for Arsenal. The players kept hearing Paisley discuss ‘Osborne coming in at the far post’ and then ‘the lad Talbot’. The confusion cannot have helped and Paisley was, indeed, right about Talbot, who scored the winner in the last match of the marathon at Coventry. Ray Kennedy accepted responsibility for failing to pick up the midfielder, and suspected his teammates would judge him. ‘I’ve let a lot of people down,’ he said.

  Despite the abundance of games, it was still profoundly difficult to break into Paisley’s team, and David Fairclough remained more desperate about that than most. He scored all-but-one of Liverpool’s goals in the ‘Arsenal series’ and notched 13 that season yet was still down the pecking order. Paisley was pragmatic, wanting to have the player as an impact option and generally unwilling to give him a start. Fairclough’s introspection and readiness to take Paisley on created more confrontations than was normal in the Anfield dressing-room.

  One weekend, Fairclough was confident that his form had earned him a start against Aston Villa, though Paisley declared before the players dispersed for their usual Friday lunchtime saunter around Liverpool city centre that he was going to have a look at the Villa Park pitch the following day before deciding on the line-up. It was then that Fairclough picked up the early afternoon edition of the Liverpool Echo and saw the following day’s starting XI – minus his name – complete with the phraseology to suggest Paisley was the source of the information. He jumped into his car and headed straight to Anfield, where he encountered Paisley wandering through the building.