Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  ‘You said you’d look at the pitch,’ screamed Fairclough. Paisley found the attack as discomfiting as usual. He wasn’t at his best in this situation. ‘Don’t be coming here on the bounce,’ Fairclough remembers him saying.

  ‘The Echo,’ Fairclough shot back. ‘You’ve told the Echo but not me.’

  ‘Well, sometimes you’ve got to do what they want an’ that,’ Paisley blurted out.

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ Fairclough demanded to know.

  ‘Upstairs,’ he said, gesturing.

  It was one of Paisley’s weaker pieces of dissembling. Robinson and Smith would never have had a say on which striker he chose. The habit of saying anything to get out of a tight confrontation never left the European Cup-winning manager.

  Steve Heighway’s own fight for recognition around that time, and the personal difficulty he had with Paisley, related to what he felt was a similar lack of thought when it came to being dropped.

  The curious struggle to be straight on team selection extended to the habit, also employed by Shankly, of using injuries as a good excuse. Terry McDermott travelled to Coventry on one occasion hopeful of playing.

  ‘Terry, you’re sub,’ Paisley informed him on hearing that the midfielder was ‘injured’.

  ‘“Injured”? I’ve only got a sore thumb,’ McDermott replied.

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Paisley told him.

  And yet if a player was in form and of use to Paisley, it didn’t matter how bad the injury he was carrying appeared. ‘It was “Are you fit?” and “You’re playing” before you could hardly answer,’ says Phil Thompson.

  The chosen ones in Paisley’s squad looked at the frustration of those on the edges and feared the consequences of drifting onto the wrong side of the divide themselves. Injury terrified them because they knew that once they were out of the team they might not get back in – their ‘jacket’s on a shoogly peg’ to borrow an expression coined by Peter Cormack, whom Paisley sold in 1976.

  When Fairclough, certainly one of life’s worriers, developed a nagging pain behind his knee he was desperate for a solution, knowing that without bursts of pace his game was nothing. ‘It might be in your head,’ Ronnie Moran told him. Fairclough tried homeopathy, without success, and then visited a specialist who recommended an arthroscopy. ‘It involves putting a camera into the knee,’ Fairclough explained to Paisley. ‘Ah, don’t go singing until the tune’s played,’ said Paisley, innately suspicious. Eventually Fairclough persuaded them to allow the examination to take place. It revealed that a fragment of bone behind the knee was causing the problem, and a section of it was taken off, which resolved matters.

  Even Keegan had felt this paranoia. ‘At Liverpool the greatest fear was to be sick or injured. However big your name, there was never a guarantee you’d be back in,’ he said. Players would go to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact that they were injured.

  Joey Jones, who always found praise from Paisley very hard to come by, was accidentally caught by Ian Callaghan’s studs in a match at West Ham and was shocked to find, after returning home and taking his trousers off, that the whole of the back of his right leg had gone blue. The rules were that you were to report to Anfield on the Sunday with an injury like that but Jones decided he would try to get away with it and work the injury off. He played the next three games in agony, just convincing himself that it would all go away, provided no one caught him in the same place. Eventually, Moran spotted the swelling and discolouration on his leg. ‘What’s that,’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I just caught it on the kitchen door,’ replied Jones.

  He played on until ‘one whack too many’ on the leg, as he put it, led Paisley to order him to hospital, a full 24 days after the match at Upton Park. The doctors said the bone had calcified; Paisley told Jones he could have snapped his thighbone if he’d received another blow to it. Jones dropped out of the side – though mercifully, from his own perspective, Liverpool then lost one and drew two games and he quickly made it back in.

  Yet if Paisley didn’t think your injury was genuine then you would be up against it, however justified your presence in the treatment room might be. Kevin Sheedy was one of many players for whom Paisley’s much vaunted physiotherapy training never engendered much empathy. He suffered a back injury which the manager and his assistants were suspicious of and later told of being left sitting on a treatment table at Anfield for hours. Sheedy secretly paid for a course of acupuncture at a clinic in Liverpool’s Rodney Street – imagining that Paisley would not approve. It solved the problem. By the time he left for Everton in 1982, having rarely broken into the first team, Sheedy felt his reputation had been damaged.

  The disparity between available first team places and players desperate to win one of them was illustrated by the extraordinary success of the reserve team. One fixture brought them up against an Aston Villa side filled almost entirely with first team players, who had been dropped as punishment for a bad First Division defeat. Liverpool won 5–0.

  But even keeping a reserve-team place was challenging at Anfield. Owen Brown scored a hat-trick in the Villa game but was on the bench for the following fixture. ‘The Rat’s been on the phone,’ Roy Evans told him. ‘He says Steve Heighway wants a game.’

  Though Paisley had achieved much by the arrival of the new decade – he’d reshaped and modernised the team and collected no fewer than seven trophies in his first five seasons – his track record for developing young players was not good. Case and Fairclough were the two he had brought through by the end of the 1970s, but the Liverpool careers of many young players went by the wayside – and, of course, Fairclough was hardly a first-team fixture. One of the standard jokes when the Merseyside reporters gathered in Paisley’s office and asked for Saturday’s team was: ‘Same as last season.’

  Paisley didn’t have the slightest idea how the young reserve-team striker Trevor Birch felt when, after the 21-year-old had spent four free-scoring years in the reserves, he called him into his office one day in 1979 and flatly told him Liverpool had accepted an offer from Shrewsbury Town. Birch had come through the Liverpool academy and Paisley was too legendary a figure to challenge. When he was out of the office, and once out of sight, he wept.

  The results still talked, though. Europe might have been Forest’s domain for a second successive year, with Hamburg defeated 1–0 in the final, but Liverpool put together a decisive unbeaten run of 19 games from October into January.

  A 2–1 win over Tottenham in November sent them to the top; a position rarely relinquished. There was some talk about Manchester United’s potential to dent their ambitions but it didn’t come to much. United’s hammering by six goals at Ipswich brought that ambition to an end. It was not until 3 May that Liverpool’s title was secured with a 4–1 win over Aston Villa, which coincided with United losing at Leeds.

  ‘The players don’t think we’ve had as good a season as the previous one when we won the league by a record number of points,’ Paisley reflected after the title was won. ‘But I do. I regard it as a season when we had to battle. When the brain isn’t ticking over quickly, when they’re drained mentally, careless things keep coming in. They have to run a few extra yards instead of making their brains do the work.’

  Such were the injuries that had piled up by the end of the campaign that Paisley’s first overseas international signing played against Villa. The Israeli defender Avi Cohen put through his own net to give Ron Saunders’ team an equaliser on the title-winning day, then scored in the correct net. He was sold two years later.

  Within a month of leaving Liverpool, Frank McGarvey scored the winner for Celtic in an Old Firm derby and was standing in front of Parkhead supporters, arms aloft. Aberdeen manager Alex Ferguson missed out on buying him and was not pleased, having been promised by McGarvey that he would head to Pittodrie if he left Anfield.

  The Scottish press wondered what the problem had been at Anfield. But the answer was perhaps there all along, in a conversation McG
arvey had with reserve-team coach Evans.

  ‘Try and pass the ball,’ Evans suggested, articulating the Liverpool way of pass and move. ‘Play a one-two and get the ball back.’

  ‘I’ll be more comfortable taking him on there,’ McGarvey replied. ‘I’m confident I’ll beat him, draw a few players and then play the ball in. Draw players to me. That’s what I do.’

  ‘Well, just play the one-two and you can get the ball back right away,’ Evans insisted.

  ‘No,’ said McGarvey, persisting with the idea that he would operate his own way. Evans did not push it. The conversation would have certainly been fed into the Boot Room and turned over there. At Liverpool you rarely had to be told twice about the way the team played and, in any case, Paisley had another striker. Ian Rush was an 18-year-old who’d been signed for £300,000 – another tax-deductible player. If it worked out with him, Liverpool gained; if not, then at least the taxman didn’t.

  11

  Hetton Spirit

  Bob Paisley had a picture of a litter of piglets on his office wall. ‘It isn’t easy to stay on top,’ stated the accompanying caption. It always amused him. Beside it was a framed copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ – a gift from Jessie and the children – and a joke clock which went backwards, bestowed upon him by an insurance company.

  There was nothing up there quite so emblematic as the image entitled ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’, the iconic Depression era photograph of 11 men sitting on a girder with their legs dangling over New York, which Alex Ferguson chose for his office 20 years later. Ferguson thought it reflective of the qualities of team spirit, which he drummed into each of his young Manchester United players.

  Paisley didn’t really go in for emblems. It was straightforward qualities and characters which he looked for, to slot in among his few superstar names: like the donkeys among thoroughbreds at Malton, the North Yorkshire stables where he would spend a week or two each summer with his friend Frank Carr. That was what made Alan Kennedy the player Paisley always swore by. It was significant that when he had finally shrugged off his nervous disposition and convinced himself he could make it at Liverpool, Kennedy tended to be the one who would pop up late and score. The biggest percentage of his goals for the club came in the last 15 minutes. Kennedy was an individual who ran to the last.

  There was always an element of unpredictability about the defender, too, and that did sometimes tend to make Paisley nervous. On the night Kennedy drove from Newcastle to sign for Liverpool, in August 1978, the windscreen wipers on his Triumph TR7 packed up in the sheeting rain, and the visibility was so bad that he had to stop at Leeds. ‘I thought because it had a gold stripe along the side it was a good, reliable car,’ he said years later. With no way of alerting anyone to this predicament, he arrived several hours late at Burtonwood Services on the Liverpool-bound M62, where he found Paisley reading the racing papers and drinking tea, willing to wait.

  It was a metaphor for much that was to follow, but Paisley’s belief in his own kin prevailed. Kennedy, 24 when he signed, had been full of insecurity about whether he would ever get a big move from struggling Newcastle. He thought he’d played well enough in the 1974 FA Cup final to demonstrate something to Liverpool, but nothing came of it. On a summer tour of the southern hemisphere with the England ‘B’ team in 1978, he took to asking squad members from big clubs – Fairclough, Ipswich’s Paul Mariner and Manchester United’s Gordon Hill – whether their managers might be interested in him. He even took to growing a beard for the Newcastle United team photograph at that time to signal that he was a wild nomad and wanted away. ‘Daft idea,’ he later concluded.

  For Paisley, the chip shop in Hetton-le-Hole was a more significant part of the decision to buy him. Kennedy’s mother, Sarah Ann, used to serve Paisley fish suppers there. He knew the boy’s people. Kennedy never forgot the look on Paisley’s face when he actually ran into that service station, praying he had not lost his chance. ‘Glad you got here,’ Paisley said, grinning, before they drove to the Liverpool Atlantic Tower Hotel to sign a contract. The manager was happy. A little piece of Hetton spirit for his Liverpool team.

  Many shared Graeme Souness’s initial scepticism about the new left-back’s ability. Ray Kennedy, not always a bundle of joy, expressed frustration with his namesake’s lack of awareness. ‘He took five years off my career. Whenever I wanted a short ball he’d hit it long. If it should have been long, I’d get a short pass. Alan had no nerves and not much brain, which was why he was lethal at penalties. I didn’t dislike him but we didn’t gel on the pitch.’

  It was a bewildering experience when Kennedy made his debut against Queens Park Rangers at Anfield, at the start of the 1978–79 season. Bill Shankly was standing in his customary spot near the directors’ entrance, where he liked to greet the incoming players, and handed him what, at first glance, appeared to be a pill to calm his nerves before the game. It turned out to be a boiled sweet. It did not have the desired effect. There was an inauspicious start when the defender fired a warm-up shot way wide of the net before kick-off and by half-time he had badly miscued several passes. Paisley did not spare the player’s sensitivities at half-time. ‘Christ,’ he said, walking into the dressing-room. ‘They shot the wrong Kennedy.’

  It was one of Paisley’s most memorable lines and evidence, as Souness always insisted, that his wit could occasionally be razor-sharp. ‘We were beside ourselves,’ says Souness. ‘Alan had his head in his hands. He wasn’t the most confident.’ That’s how unsparing the Liverpool dressing-room was.

  The Boot Room asked Paisley more than once whether he was sure about Kennedy, but he was convinced that showing persistence and drilling him in the Liverpool way would see the boy through. The manager never felt that Kennedy developed the capacity to pass with the same vision as the best of his players, but that was not the point. ‘He’s not the type of player who sees a move three or four passes in advance,’ Paisley reflected years later. ‘He is instinctive, rather than the calculating type, who reacts to situations rather than creates them. He is not a typical Liverpool player.’ He was the one player whom Paisley could be indiscreet about in the company of the Merseyside reporters. ‘He’d be genuinely exasperated about how unpredictable Kennedy could be,’ says Nick Hilton. ‘But he’d tell you that with a smile on his face. You could tell how much he liked him. It was as near as Paisley came to giving a sense of affection.’

  The rewards of persisting with Kennedy came in the difficult season of 1980–81 – arguably the toughest of them all – when character mattered more than superstar quality. Paisley found himself assailed on all sides by injuries in that campaign and several believe that was when he detected age in the side. Nothing was said, but the players he had relied on to score Liverpool’s goals were growing older. Jimmy Case was 28, David Johnson and Terry McDermott were both approaching 29; Dalglish and Ray Kennedy had already turned 29. The average age of the side which started the first game of that season at home to Crystal Palace was 28 years and seven months. The Shankly side that had started the 1960–61 season, 20 years earlier, had averaged 25 years and three months. The side beginning 1970–71 averaged 23 years and nine months.

  Liverpool won 3–0 against Palace, with Alan Kennedy scoring seven minutes from time, though gradually the injuries began to hit. This was the season in which Paisley was forced to use far more of his players – 23 in all – and in which only Phil Neal managed the full complement of 42 in the First Division. Kenny Dalglish’s run of 147 consecutive appearances, sustained since his arrival from Celtic in the summer of 1977, was finally brought to an end by a damaged right ankle which saw him out of the picture for two games in December and struggle to regain form. David Johnson missed matches with hamstring trouble and David Fairclough required knee surgery but it was the defence which sustained most casualties.

  A broken collarbone sustained by Phil Thompson at Crystal Palace in mid-November kept him out for two months, 11 games, and left Paisley going to extreme l
engths to preserve Alan Hansen for the side after he jammed his knee in a challenge on Garth Crooks at home to Tottenham in December. With his eye for an injury, Paisley would have known that Hansen had a ‘four-weeker’ at least. But he kept him going with cortisone injections and Hansen felt he was operating ‘virtually on one leg’ by the time he played against Wolves just before Christmas. He heard the Molineux manager John Barnwell urge his players: ‘Get after the number 6.’ It was in the Boxing Day clash with Manchester United at Old Trafford six days later that he finally gave in to injury and was substituted on the hour.

  A subsequent medical examination revealed the need to remove a growth on the side of his knee joint. Hansen still missed a mere four matches and was back by February, considerably earlier than advised. There were limited defensive options: untested locals Richard Money and Colin Irwin from the reserves and the Israeli Avi Cohen, who as an Orthodox Jew faced a barrage of criticism that season for playing on a Saturday which was the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. When it was put to Paisley that Cohen’s religion might not permit him to play on Saturdays, he replied, ‘I know a few of mine who don’t play on Saturdays.’ More evidence that by now the jokes were not always lame. There were consequences for a defence that was chopped and changed, however: the concession of 42 First Division goals, more than in any other of Paisley’s championship campaigns.

  Two younger options emerged further up the team and Paisley was tempted, though the consensus in the Boot Room was that they were not ready. Ian Rush, signed at the end of the previous season, was tried out in Dalglish’s absence at Ipswich, though he went straight back to the reserves the following week.