Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  Irishman Ronnie Whelan was, like Rush, diffident and insecure, struggling to get to grips with the unyielding Liverpool culture. Whelan seemed to worry about how the local trainees viewed him when he arrived from Home Farm for £35,000, a few days before his 18th birthday. Both he and Rush thought they were sneering at them because they were on a higher wage. The Boot Room knew this, though Whelan’s struggles went deeper. Even his Irish accent embarrassed him.

  In one Boot Room conversation, Paisley said he saw something of Ray Kennedy in the elegance of Whelan’s midfield play. His name cropped up half a dozen times that season. Moran told Paisley he wasn’t ready and a reserve-team game seems to have convinced Paisley they should, indeed, hold off.

  At times, Paisley, Fagan and Moran were like a bunch of crotchety old men as they ran the team together. On Friday evenings before home games, they would be left in each other’s company at the Daresbury Hotel once the players had retired – but it only took one of them to say he was turning in early to offend the others. Fagan decided he would pass on the drinks, one night. ‘Suit yourself, if that’s how you feel,’ said Paisley, waddling off. Fagan changed his mind and descended to the bar with Moran, Evans and Saunders, but there was no sign of Paisley that night. Saunders was usually the peacemaker.

  A far more serious dispute added urgency to their perennial talk of change. It occurred during the annual night away at Llangollen’s Bryn Howel Hotel that Paisley had instituted. The squad had headed there straight after a derby match, though Ray Kennedy and Case became separated from the rest of the group, who had decided to make a trip into nearby Chester for a night out. The pair had asked to be told when the rest were departing for the evening but no one had remembered to do so. Terry McDermott appears to have been the offender. Several bottles of Chablis had already been consumed with dinner and McDermott’s idea of fine dining was never much more than a beef sandwich, so he may not have been up to the role of social secretary. Kennedy and Case were instead driven up to a local Llangollen pub by the Bryn Howel landlord Albert Lloyd, though when the Chester contingent returned at 2 a.m. Kennedy made his displeasure with McDermott known. He appears to have swung for him when Lloyd, trying to prevent a fight, said ‘Come on, Alan.’

  Being called the wrong Kennedy brought down the usual red mist for the midfielder and within minutes he, Lloyd and Lloyd’s son were all involved in a conflagration. Kennedy’s version of the story includes him hitting McDermott, picking up a chair and throwing it at the landlord. Case says no chairs were thrown.

  It was pandemonium. The police were called and Kennedy and Case were taken into custody. Paisley’s sleep was not interrupted: Moran and Fagan dealt with it. A month later, both players pleaded guilty to causing affray and were charged £150 each.

  Publicly, Paisley said nothing about this. It was his practice to leave any serious disciplinary incident to Peter Robinson, and the other players witnessed no dressing down of Case. But the manager appears to have been starting to harbour doubts about the midfielder, who had also been convicted of drink-driving. The decision to start young Liverpudlian trainee Sammy Lee in his place, six games into the 1980–81 season, indicated that Case had not been delivering enough on the field to allow the misdemeanours to pass.

  Paisley had initiated many of the Boot Room conversations about Lee, having been impressed by him in reserve-team games. He liked his dependability. It was a month after Llangollen that Paisley took Case aside to say that John Toshack’s Swansea City had been in touch about buying him.

  ‘I thought it was a bit strange, the way [the Swansea interest] came about, but I put it to the back of my mind and carried on as normal,’ said Case. It was the beginning of the process of moving him on.

  Behind the scenes, Paisley kept investing faith in the training routine which nourished collectivism and which, they believed, would allow them to shrug off their injury problems. The Melwood ethos was fundamentally the same as Shankly’s, designed to create pass and go footballers who would give to the last. The endless five-a-side games, beloved of Shankly, were a microcosm of all the challenges that would be faced the following Saturday. But some said it was a tougher, more unsparing regime than Shankly’s. Under the management of Paisley, Fagan and Moran, the five-a-sides were refined so that they would replicate the specific contest that Liverpool were facing next. When the next opposition was known to sit deep, the five-a-side rule would be that everyone must be over the halfway line for a goal to count – encouraging a high defensive line. ‘Two-touch’ five-a-side games were the Boot Room’s favourite, the rule being that if you took a third touch you conceded possession. The players would groan, ‘Two-touch again?’ when Moran announced them. Sometimes there was the luxury of a ‘three-touch’. There were ‘pressing’ five-a-sides in preparation for the more challenging matches against teams who needed to be closed down. You conceded possession if you didn’t press the next man. And there was the ‘move’ game. If you didn’t move when you’d passed the ball, the other side were awarded a free-kick. ‘Don’t watch the ball. Don’t watch it,’ Moran would bellow from the sidelines, encouraging immediate movement after a pass was placed.

  The footballs would be blown up as hard as concrete and as if that was not enough of a challenge, players would be told individually to leave the match they were involved in to embark on the shuttle runs they called ‘doggies’ – eight repetitions of 80 metres; four repetitions of 40, if it was a good day – then back to the five-a-side pitch, where the rules might have changed from ‘two-touch’ to ‘press’. ‘The man receiving needs time. The man receiving needs time,’ they told them over and over again, drilling in the fundamental requirement of a Liverpool footballer: the delivery of a pass which will not force the recipient to be under pressure in possession. That might mean delaying the release of the ball until he has found space or it might mean distributing it fast, before an opponent closes in. Thus, passing the ball was a cognitive process. ‘Get your head up.’ ‘Move it on.’ ‘Let the ball do the work.’ Some players, like Alan Kennedy, took time, but to survive and thrive at Anfield you learned the process by osmosis.

  Paisley kept out of the drills, peering out from his office, where he was recognisable to his players behind the unfrosted section of the long window overlooking the training ground, which was protected by wire mesh to stop footballs smashing the glass. There was a telephone on top of the filing cabinet beside the window and Paisley would often be on it as he watched – placing his telephone bets with the bookies, the players always reckoned.

  The radiator seemed to be a convenient height for a 5 foot 7 inch manager. ‘We always thought he was keeping his balls warm on the radiator,’ remembers David Fairclough. Sometimes, on a blisteringly cold day, he would head out to the pitches, clad in hat, padded jacket and big gloves, and approach Joe Fagan. ‘Cold today, Joe, isn’t it?’ he would say, delighting in the austerity of it all, before heading back in for the radiator.

  There was deep suspicion harboured in the Boot Room of anything they didn’t know about, were not familiar with, or that broke with their little routines. On one occasion David Fairclough found himself reprimanded for doing extra shooting practice with reserve-team goalkeeper Steve Ogrizovic, another who felt he was short of match preparation. Fairclough was ‘found out’ after he banged his head on a goalpost and had to be taken to Liverpool’s Broadgreen Hospital for stitches.

  At the end of the training ritual, there would be the part Shankly had lived for: the coaching staff versus trainees’ games, which were played when the ‘Big ’Eads’ had boarded the bus out of Melwood to shower and change at Anfield. Paisley and his staff fixed it to win, just as Shankly always had. If they were losing the game, they just continued until they had taken the lead, with the choice of referee rigged to make sure this happened sooner or later.

  A trainee knew he was in form when the staff selected him to be on the coaches’ side, as the one to do the running around for them. Roy Evans, the youngest of the c
oaches by a distance, did much of the leg work. Moran and Fagan controlled the midfield. Paisley, immobile as ever, took up his position in goal, with the humour residing in the black leather gloves he always wore and his reluctance to catch the ball. He always punched it out theatrically, two-handed.

  If you hoped for technical tips or a sign that you were progressing, then you could be waiting a very long time. The assumption remained that if you played for Liverpool, you did not need to be told or coached.

  Fairclough, anxious as ever, looked to Moran for advice at Melwood one day.

  ‘You haven’t got your old form back,’ Moran told him. ‘I know what I’d do.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Fairclough asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me, son. Work it out for yourself,’ Moran replied.

  The barrack-room culture was very often unfair. One trainee was bawled out by Moran for having the impudence to beat him in a challenge. ‘You think you’re good enough to be a Liverpool player, do you?’ Moran asked. ‘Let me tell you, you are shit. You will never play for this team . . .’ And he didn’t.

  For all this effort, the domestic struggle was unceasing in 1980–81. There were five games without a win from the end of January to the end of February. Paisley looked for changes in routine which might introduce some intensity. The match-day ‘boots under the table’ routine was in regular use. He also put a stop to the usual Saturday afternoon practice of Liverpool’s equine enthusiasts spending time in the players’ lounge watching the horse racing before arriving in the dressing-room at 2.30 p.m. They had to report there by 2 p.m., he said. This was a blow, as the 2.15 was often the big race of the day.

  Results coincidentally picked up and the next week Paisley put his head around the door at 2 p.m. ‘Let us know who wins the 2.15, will you?’ he asked. There was a positive effect on the dressing-room. It was Paisley’s way of letting them know they’d weathered the storm.

  But by the time Liverpool beat Southampton 2–0 in late February they were eight points adrift of leaders Ipswich. David Johnson withdrew at half-time with a hamstring strain that day, which meant that Colin Irwin – supposedly a defensive deputy for Thompson and Hansen – found himself taking over as an emergency striker.

  Dalglish’s usual goal tally was being missed. He managed only eight in the First Division that season, comfortably his lowest of the Paisley era. A mere three years after the squad was getting a £50,000 pay-out from a newspaper for breaking through the 84 in a season barrier, only four Liverpool players managed to score more than six in the 1980–81 league campaign. Just one player made it into double figures: Terry McDermott, who scored 13. Just twice between early October and early May did Liverpool win consecutive home games. The record from January read: played 17, won six, drawn five, lost six; 16 for and 15 against. Such statistics don’t win titles. Aston Villa claimed the championship instead. It took a couple of late-season wins just for Liverpool to finish fifth in Division One.

  It was not much consolation that Nottingham Forest were struggling to maintain their standards too, slipping below Liverpool to finish seventh. Only a point divided the sides domestically and Forest had proved the same obdurate defenders of old. Both league games ended 0–0.

  Paisley did have reason to take some quiet satisfaction from what was happening at the Red Tree club, though. Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor were falling out. The obsession over not allowing the side to age too much – something always on Paisley’s mind too – saw the European Cup-winning side of 1979 and 1980 dismantled. Garry Birtles went to Manchester United in 1980 and some of Taylor’s signings suggested that he might have lost his Midas touch in the transfer market. Justin Fashanu arrived from Norwich for £1 million – in what Clough and Taylor would later admit was possibly the worst deal of their managerial careers together. Ian Wallace, from Coventry, cost another million, and Peter Ward arrived for £450,000 from Brighton. They could not come close to maintaining the standards the European Cup-winning sides had set.

  For Liverpool, a release from the domestic purgatory came with a first League Cup win, against West Ham United. The final went to a replay, for which, with Davids Johnson and Fairclough missing, Ian Rush played, causing centre-half Alvin Martin a lot of trouble, curling a shot against the bar and earning praise from Paisley. Rush was ‘. . . the bonus of the night,’ he said. ‘His control is good. He is difficult to knock off the ball, and brings people into the game, which is Kenny’s asset.’

  Amid the First Division struggles, the prospect of conquering the heights of Europe seemed forlorn, though continental competition provided the opportunity The first round obstacle of Finnish side Oulun Palloseura was welcome, after the obstacles of Forest and Dynamo Tbilisi in previous years. A 10–1 win at Anfield sealed the progress.

  Then, Paisley encountered an Alex Ferguson team for the first and only time. Ferguson’s Aberdeen were fresh from shattering the dominance of Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, and the Scot was displaying the fledgling oratory for which he would become known at Manchester United. ‘Come the hour, I will definitely have belief in winning the game,’ Ferguson said. ‘As long as there’s a ball in the park and the human element comes into it, we are in with a chance. For Liverpool, this is full of imponderables. For Aberdeen, it can only be a night they have never experienced before.’

  Paisley’s own press conference before the Pittodrie fixture had a more understated aim, though even the most partisan Aberdonians had to agree in the aftermath that, in psychological terms, it had been the more effective.

  Liverpool had arrived north of the border to find vast volumes of newsprint devoted to Aberdeen’s chances of bloodying Liverpool’s nose. ‘A 28-page pull-out, 27 pages of which were about what they were going to do to us,’ as Alan Hansen later put it. Much of the focus was devoted to Gordon Strachan, the 23-year-old winger who was such a significant part of the Ferguson side which had gone back to the top of the league before this match.

  In the circumstances, Paisley decided that he, too, would have something to say about Strachan. ‘If Aberdeen ever relent and decide to sell Gordon, he’ll become Scotland’s first £2 million player,’ he observed. ‘He impresses me greatly, as do Aberdeen as a team. They don’t give much away and, with a few wins under their belt, they’ll face us with confidence.’

  It was a confidence trick and Paisley’s players knew it. Talk up a player and you build the pressure on them – classic Paisley toffee. The manager ensured that the slant of the local coverage was not lost on his players. ‘It meant a lot to me to ram those comments back down the throats of people who made them,’ Hansen said. ‘I never performed with as much fire and aggression as I did in that game.’

  Strachan was anonymous and Liverpool won by a Terry McDermott goal at Pittodrie before a 4–0 victory in the return leg. It was the Liverpool style, rather than the Paisley psych-ops, which Ferguson spotted. The discipline, possession-based football and game management attached to playing in Europe were still intact after two years away.

  ‘After that Anfield episode I knew I didn’t have to say another bloody word to my players about keeping the ball, particularly in European games,’ Ferguson later reflected. ‘That was a part of my education and it’s always been part of my strategy. Hold onto the ball. Keep passing it. Let the other teams do the chasing.’

  There was a 5–1 home leg quarter-final defeat of CSKA Sofia, where the dual absence of Johnson and Fairclough presented 33-year-old Heighway, in his testimonial year, with a chance to reveal that he still had something to offer – and he seized it. His performance, setting up two of Souness’s three goals, brought letters to the Liverpool Echo demanding to know why he had been overlooked.

  Heighway also came on after half-time in the first leg of semi-final against Bayern Munich at Anfield, a 0–0 draw which left Liverpool with a lot of work to do in Germany. This time, Souness was out with a back injury, while Terry McDermott played with a dislocated thumb.

  Aware that his Liverpool days w
ere effectively over, Heighway had already signed a two-year contract in the North American Soccer League with the Minnesota Kicks, sold his house and was scheduled to move his family out to the US on the week of the Munich semi-final second leg. Sensing a last opportunity at the club which had been his life, he knocked on Paisley’s office door.

  ‘The house is sold and we’re leaving next week, Bob,’ he said, as reluctant as ever to call his manager ‘boss’. ‘But if you want me to stay I’ll wait and move the family into a hotel. I can do that if you might need me . . .’ Paisley said that would help, and without hesitation Heighway moved his wife and children into Liverpool’s Adelphi hotel.

  Liverpool were playing the following Wednesday night and 24 hours before Liverpool flew out to Germany, Johnson was showing no sign of recovery. Then Heighway was told that Paisley wanted to see him.

  ‘I’m not taking you,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘You’re joking?’ replied Heighway.

  ‘I’m not taking you. I’m taking the boy Gayle instead.’

  ‘But I asked you did you want me to stay. You said: “Yes.” We’re in a hotel. We cancelled the flights . . .’

  The rest of Paisley’s explanation was the mumble that tended to accompany these social confrontations. He would never be a match for Heighway in such an encounter so the conversation was over. Heighway exploded. The players heard the commotion at the bottom end of the corridor, in the lounge area adjoining the canteen. Heighway returned to his hotel, where he picked up the phone, organised flights and in a couple of days had gone. And that was the way his 11 years at Liverpool Football club ended.

  There had not been much substance on which to base a decision to select Howard Gayle, who had only one previous senior appearance to his name – as a substitute at Manchester City six months earlier – since when he had suffered back trouble.