Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  In the Boot Room, they always wondered about Gayle’s temperament. Some of them considered him one of the awkward squad, though he had good reason to be. He was the first black footballer to break into the Liverpool first team and did so at a time when those of ethnic extraction in the city were feeling the profound sense of racial injustice which, on 13 July 1981, would find expression in the Toxteth riots.

  There were some distinctly unenlightened attitudes to colour within Anfield at the time. Tommy Smith knew Gayle as the ‘white n****r’ and did not appreciate that was offensive. It was ‘a compliment’, Smith suggested several years later, bestowed upon Gayle because the young man had shown he would stand up for himself to him. Perhaps it was no coincidence that those Gayle considers to have been in his corner were all men whom Paisley chose as captains: Emlyn Hughes, Phil Thompson and Graeme Souness.

  Some on the coaching staff knew Gayle as ‘the Black Prince’ and the colour of his skin certainly formed part of the way he was tested. There would be references to his colour at Melwood. When the decathlete Daley Thompson came in to help Liverpool with sprint training at one stage, and Gayle was about to race him, someone shouted: ‘Ready, steady, pick up your lips, Go.’ The Olympian seemed to accept the casual racism, though Gayle – who had fought it throughout a difficult childhood in a predominantly white district of the city – did not. For that, he always felt he was marked down as a troublemaker. Paisley seems neither to have contributed to nor challenged this prevailing attitude towards colour which existed in his football club’s predominantly white community of the time. Gayle’s potential to help him beat Bayern Munich was his only consideration in April 1981.

  It was again the defence which concerned Paisley most that month. The back four for Munich was makeshift, with both Richard Money and Colin Irwin starting in the Olympiastadion, where only one visiting team had ever avoided defeat in European competition, and where Liverpool needed to avoid one. There was some motivational material, at least. Souness remembers Bayern leaflets promoting package trips to the Paris final, which Paisley got his hands on and waved around in the dressing-room, just as he had used the Scottish newspapers to motivate his players in Aberdeen. Newspaper cuttings also reported the Bayern captain’s declaration that Liverpool had shown ‘no intelligence’ in the first leg. There were also mutterings about Liverpool being past their best. All grist to the Paisley mill.

  An encounter the manager had at the Liverpool dressing-room door in the minutes before kick-off proved even more significant, though. The Austrian UEFA match official asked Paisley, as witnesses remember, to ‘tell me about this Howard Gayle’, the inference being he may not be a legitimate member of the squad.

  ‘He’s a registered player of Liverpool Football Club,’ Paisley replied, sending the official on his way.

  There’d been more worry than usual about the make-up of the team. Ray Kennedy, rooming with Case as usual, heard Paisley, Moran and Fagan arguing loudly over the team selection in the room next door, the night before the game.

  With Phil Thompson and Alan Kennedy operating with the untested Irwin and Money in an unrecognisable defence, Paisley, who had taken the extra precaution of personally scouting Bayern with Tom Saunders, worried about the midfielder Paul Breitner, the legendary German international and 1974 World Cup-winning goalscorer. He decided that Sammy Lee must man-mark Breitner. It was the only time in nine years at the helm that he employed such a strategy – though the testimony of Graeme Souness suggests that his decision was so late as to border on an impulse. ‘We’re lining up and the buzzer goes [to call us out to the pitch] when Bob says, “Sammy, tonight you man-mark Paul Breitner,”’ Souness recalls. ‘We’re saying “What? Well, good luck with that one Sammy.”’ There was no place in the starting line-up for Case, who knew when he heard Lee being issued with such challenging instructions that his road ahead at Liverpool looked bleak.

  Paisley looked a rather helpless figure as he took a seat on one of the benches arranged for the coaching teams (with the stands so far from the pitch there were no dugouts in the Olympiastadion) – even more so when Dalglish went down under a wild challenge from Karl Del’Haye. With the game only five minutes old Dalglish was off, having suffered serious ankle-ligament damage.

  Rush would have been the obvious choice to replace him but the Austrian official’s questions about who Gayle was persuaded Paisley to deploy him instead. If the Austrian knew nothing about Gayle then neither would the Germans, he figured. As he put it later, ‘The Germans like to do things by the book. The unknown can unnerve them.’

  The BBC’s commentator Barry Davies captured the size of the gamble. ‘Liverpool have lost their most experienced striker and national and international footballer, who has been replaced by a 19-year-old,’ he observed. For once, one of England’s most distinguished commentators was getting carried away. Gayle was nearly 23.

  Nonetheless, it was a Paisley substitution to go alongside Case’s deployment at the half-time stage for Toshack against Club Brugge in the 1976 UEFA Cup final, and Heighway’s against the same opposition in the 1978 European Cup final. Gayle’s pace mesmerised the Germans and repeatedly stretched Bayern’s defence, pushing the side back, and consequently relieving the pressure on Liverpool’s own makeshift back four. Chasing a long ball from Alan Hansen into the left side of the penalty area, Gayle was brought to ground by Wolfgang Dremmler, whose run straight across the Liverpudlian’s path should have brought a penalty.

  On 66 minutes, Gayle was booked and Paisley calmly substituted the substitute, concerned that the combustible element in his game could lose Liverpool a man. Case arrived in his place, initially taking up a position in attack and then dropping into midfield. It meant that when Johnson went down injured, with a strained hamstring, Liverpool had used their substitutes and had no further options. He signalled to the bench who waved him on. ‘Give us your gun. I’ll shoot the bastard!’ Evans heard Paisley say.

  The Liverpool goal seven minutes from time was the fruit of those months of hard labour at Melwood. Paisley indicated to Kennedy that he should move up the field to assume the role of striker. The struggling Johnson crossed for him to score with his left foot. Lee shut Breitner out of the game. Hansen checked the unexpected diagonal runs of Karl-Heinz Rummenigge by taking two steps into the space which he anticipated the German running into. But above all Liverpool prospered by employing the European style Paisley had developed: slowing play down, passing, keeping possession, waiting for the moment to break.

  ‘Composure, awareness, resilience,’ enthused the Liverpool Echo. Bayern forward Uli Hoeness reflected on the clashes the two sides had had in 1970, in the Fairs Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup. ‘Compared with their style then, Liverpool are more like a continental side now,’ he said.

  Paisley was amused by an encounter in the dressing-room corridor after the match, between Lee and Breitner.

  ‘Well played,’ said the German international, who’d just been marked out of the game by someone seven years his junior.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Breitner,’ said Lee as he walked past.

  Paisley’s appreciation of the way Lee had carried out his man-marking role went beyond the parameters of that game. He saw a lot of his own playing style in Lee: they played in similar roles and did similar jobs, and they were both 5 feet 7 inches tall. Lee was one of the few players Paisley talked about at home.

  The manner of the victory did not prevent more talk of some of Liverpool’s players being too old from forming the backdrop to the final in Paris, where Liverpool would meet Real Madrid.

  ‘They are veterans. We will outrun them,’ said the Real coach Vujadin Boškov before the match. Liverpool were also caught up in a wrangle with UEFA over whether they could use sponsors’ logos on their kit – something Peter Robinson was trying to resolve in the last hours before the game.

  Liverpool limited their exposure to Paris. The team turned the match into a standard European game – flying late to Orly airport, whe
re the familiar Aer Lingus charter was struck by lightning as it approached the runway. The squad checked into the Trianon Palace in Versailles barely 24 hours before kick-off. They left the Trianon at 6.30 on the night of the match – for an 8.15 p.m. kick-off in the Parc des Princes.

  At last, it was a final that Jessie could attend. She was as reluctant as ever to fly, so Christine, Robert, Graham and their families all travelled with her across the Channel by hovercraft to France. Jessie was the usual organising force: they all had their own packages of sandwiches for the trip, made by her, each with their names on them.

  The difficulties for Bob included young Ian Rush’s desire to play. ‘“You’ll definitely be involved,”’ Rush says Paisley told him. When the time came to reveal his 16-man squad for Paris, Rush’s name was not on it. Kenny Dalglish’s ankle had been in plaster but he was out of it in time to play.

  Alan Kennedy was also on Paisley’s mind. He had broken his wrist in the first leg of the Bayern semi-final, had played on with it through the match, and, inevitably, had to miss the second leg. The arm was tested out with a plaster cast in a league game against Manchester City. Kennedy, too, started in Paris.

  The Spaniards had the outstanding player on the pitch: the little midfield architect Juanito. But Liverpool brought to bear what had now been long years of experience of continental competition, playing their collective way. They paced their game carefully, were reluctant not to waste possession with ambitious passes, though they did not hesitate to use the long ball if the situation demanded it. The Guardian’s description of Liverpool’s game sounded like a mantra straight from one of the Boot Room black bibles. ‘They always kept their movements wide and always the man with the ball had good support as colleagues ran intelligently into space.’

  With a little of that old inferiority complex, Alan Kennedy was a slightly anxious figure as he walked in at half-time, with the score 0–0. Paisley had told him to keep on his feet against Laurie Cunningham, Real’s exciting English winger who, as things turned out, had left him on his backside a couple of times. A ‘right rollocking’ is what he thought he would get in the interval.

  But Paisley said that Liverpool were not pushing up enough, which meant too much of a gap was forming between the defence and midfield. That was why Kennedy was standing where he was standing on 81 minutes when Ray Kennedy sent a throw-in towards him. Considering the midfielder’s views on his namesake, he may not have expected much to happen, but Alan Kennedy’s surge up the touchline caught Real by surprise. Rafael García Cortés’s attempt to thump the ball clear was spectacularly ineffective. If Kennedy had been made of lesser mettle he would have flinched to avoid the Spaniard’s hack. Instead he stood firm and was there in the penalty box, finding his momentum carrying him beyond the defender, to swing his left foot through the ball and thrash it into the back of the net. It was a goal that would define him for all of his days.

  Years later, Kennedy would describe how the word ‘goal’ actually formed in his head as he saw the Spanish goalkeeper dive to his left, clear of the shot which he had sent straight at him. Then he ran with all he had to the Liverpool fans ten yards beyond the goal.

  It was a little distance and, for a moment, none of his teammates arrived. He wondered where they all were. Had his effort been disallowed? Was he, at this moment, making a ‘complete arse’ of himself in front of millions of TV viewers as the match kicked off again behind him? Then Terry McDermott, one of those players who had also lived through the doubts and struggles and exclusions from Paisley’s plans, arrived and the fog of momentary doubt lifted. ‘You lucky fucking sod!’ McDermott said, beaming.

  12

  Trouble

  As he watched Alan Kennedy’s moment of unconfined ecstasy from the stand, Ian Rush seemed a very long way from making it at Liverpool. He didn’t seem to belong to the club that Paisley, Moran, Fagan and Saunders had evolved. Rush was of a different, younger generation, with his preference for the Human League, two-tone bands, skin-tight jeans and white socks. Souness, Dalglish and Hansen were of an ELO and Commodores persuasion – they wore Pierre Cardin trousers and in the dressing-room they destroyed Rush and his fashion statements. ‘How many polyesters died to make that shirt,’ Souness would ask the self-conscious teenager, who had nothing to hit back with in return. Rush took to wearing a plain t-shirt and pair of jeans to go to training, but the onslaught was unremitting. On account of his pastel clothes and pencil moustache they called him ‘Omar’, as in Omar Sharif.

  There had been the usual Paisley charm offensive to sign him. It helped that Rush’s father was a Liverpool fan, and a tour of Anfield helped seal the deal. Like so many before him, Rush was bemused by how this manager had won anything. Paisley, in his cardigan, white shirt and patterned knitted tie and Brylcreemed hair, looked like ‘one of the old guys I used to see on the benches around the bowling green in my local park’, Rush later reflected.

  This avuncular effect helped, though, as walking into Anfield had frightened the life out of Rush. It had been Tom Saunders’s Chester contact who had drawn Liverpool’s attention to him but Rush was extremely unsure about signing and loved life where he was. He was so comfortable in his own skin in the lower leagues that he imagined a sum of money he thought Liverpool should pay him and then inflated it in the hope they might be put off and leave him alone. £100 should put them off, he concluded. Liverpool would offer three times as much. Rush didn’t know that Chester were anxious to bring some money in by selling their prime asset.

  His struggle to acclimatise at Anfield was compounded by that acute shyness, which was little less than an inferiority complex in the early days. The Boot Room discussed that at length in 1980.

  Rush survived the environment by gravitating towards the quieter ones – Whelan, Lee, McDermott and Case, who despite his propensity to fight didn’t give out so much verbal stick. Rush avoided Dalglish – he disliked him and his air of dressing-room superiority. Paisley’s inscrutability and lack of communication maddened him too. His debut and the League Cup final replay performance the previous season had seemed like breakthroughs, but he found himself quickly restored to the reserves after each match. The exclusion from the European Cup squad in Paris had been crushing.

  The finer points of Rush’s game had not been lost on Paisley, though. The qualities he had described seeing in him after the Villa Park replay had notably not included a capacity to score, and the 1980–81 season had ended for him with nine games and no goals. The 1981–82 season brought a significant change in the First Division landscape: there would be three points for a win, draws would be penalised and goals were required more than ever. After the previous season had seen McDermott top scorer with 13, Paisley could not afford to field a striker who assisted more than he scored, though it took a knock on his door to make him say so. Rush walked in, smarting about Paris and how he was back training with Roy Evans’s reserves while David Johnson had been restored to the starting line-up. His irritation emboldened him to ask for a £100 a week pay rise, in line with those given to players who made it into the first team. But he did not discover any warmth in the boss.

  ‘Ten per cent,’ Paisley told him, which equated to £30 a week more if he wasn’t earning a win bonus by actually playing.

  ‘I think I’ve done well for you in my first season,’ Rush replied. ‘Why aren’t you offering me more?’

  The words he has never forgotten coming back his way were searing. ‘Because you’re not worth it,’ Paisley said.

  Rush, like Paisley, was a man of little conversation, though it developed into one of those rare occasions when Rush actually did more of the talking. He remembers all too clearly what Paisley said next: ‘Score more goals. You’ve done OK an’ that but you’ve got to score to get in. Ten per cent. Think it over . . .’

  Rush left the room with his ego damaged, damned if he was going to settle for that. Paisley left him to stew back in the reserves, and two weeks later he was back at his door.

&
nbsp; ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. ‘Why have you left me out?’

  ‘Goals,’ Paisley told him.

  ‘I keep being told here that football is a team game,’ Rush replied.

  Paisley said he had watched him in matches and training and that he only wanted to lay passes off to teammates, not try to score. He was afraid to take responsibility. ‘When I was your age I was in charge of a tank in the war . . .’

  Rush was stung. ‘You tell us it’s about possession,’ he countered. ‘They say, “Never give the ball away.”’

  ‘Think for yourself, son,’ Paisley said. ‘Or are you afraid to do that? The great goalscorers are selfish. Lofthouse, Greaves, Law – they were all selfish in front of goal. When you see the goal, be selfish . . .’

  ‘I can score goals,’ said Rush, struggling to find anything more to say and increasingly agitated.

  ‘Then bloody well do it,’ said Paisley. ‘We bought you to score goals. Stop whinging and score some . . .’

  ‘I can bloody well score goals,’ said Rush, reduced now to repeating himself as he made for the door.

  ‘Do that or you can go,’ Paisley said.

  And with that, Rush was back outside the manager’s office. ‘I felt my legs go to jelly,’ he reflected later. ‘He was putting me on the transfer list.’

  The exchange took five minutes – a very long argument by Paisley’s standards, one which would have been beyond him several years earlier and which revealed that Rush fell into the David Johnson and Phil Thompson camp of players the manager considered worth provoking, rather than the Frank McGarvey group of those who were best let go.

  Which is not to say that Paisley’s parting shot to Rush was an idle threat. Paisley was genuinely uncertain that this conversation would make the slightest difference, as Peter Robinson knew all too well. Crystal Palace had been interested in Rush and Robinson, who still dealt with that side of the business, was sanctioned by Paisley to sell if the club had come up with the asking price. It was by a relatively small financial margin that Rush did not become the 19-year-old property of Selhurst Park in the late summer of 1981.