Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  In one sense, Rush had a point. Paisley’s orders did seem to run against the collectivist grain of Liverpool. But the manager saw room for a ruthless, goalscoring individual within the collective. With nothing to lose, the striker set about proving Paisley wrong. He scored as heavily as possible in Evans’s reserve team, reasoning that doing so would increase the chances of getting a good move when Paisley sold him. Rush netted twice in a 6–0 win over Blackburn Rovers in the first game of the season, repeated the feat in a 4–1 win over Derby County and scored again in a 1–1 draw against Aston Villa. Within three weeks, Liverpool had drawn Exeter City in the first round of the League Cup, which they were defending, and David Johnson was injured again. Paisley approached Rush as he left the training field the day before the first leg. ‘Johnno’s out,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a selfish bastard to play up front.’

  It was a 5–0 win for Liverpool and Rush scored twice. He retained his place to face Leeds United and scored twice more.

  ‘Well done, lads,’ Paisley said after that one. Rush tried to catch his eye but got nothing.

  He scored another two in the second leg down in Exeter, and a subsequent run of 14 matches brought six more goals. Against his own expectation, Paisley began forming the opinion that the little strategy might have worked. He regularly confided his thoughts on this subject to Souness and Bob Rawcliffe and told Souness that he believed he was getting through to Rush. ‘Keep on top of him,’ Paisley told Souness. ‘Keep telling him he needs to score more.’

  Rush, however, was the least of his problems that autumn. Paisley liked to keep the changes incremental but he had been confronted by one which had been unexpected.

  Ray Clemence – the vanguard of the Liverpool defence throughout his time as Liverpool manager – announced he wanted to leave for Tottenham. It was his uncompromising response to teammates falling short of the team’s standard that many would remember him for. He would let defenders know his opinion if he was unhappy and could do so because of his own consistency – a far cry from those early days, struggling with confidence and his kicking. Paisley reported this to Peter Robinson. He was prepared to offer an improved contract to Clemence, who was then about to turn 33. Yet it was clear that the player’s mind was set.

  The development was so unexpected that there were rumours that the goalkeeper needed to leave Liverpool after making an enemy of someone in the city. Robinson says he simply felt that Tottenham had been making persuasive overtures behind the scenes. Paisley would have preferred to keep Clemence, but was not a passive bystander in the process. The absence of a meaningful successor for the goalkeeper had been something he wanted addressing. He had followed up a recommendation from Crewe Alexandra to monitor the Zimbabwean goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who had been on loan to the Cheshire side from Vancouver Whitecaps but had returned to Canada. Saunders and Paisley flew out there together to watch the goalkeeper. They were looking for someone who could operate in the Tommy Lawrence–Ray Clemence ‘sweeper keeper’ role but Paisley was most taken with seeing one of Grobbelaar’s teammates blast a ball at him from the edge of the six-yard box before the warm-up. ‘He not only stopped everything but caught it,’ the manager later related. ‘I could have left before kick-off.’ Liverpool made him a ‘tax deductible’ on 17 March 1981.

  Grobbelaar wasn’t for hanging around, either. He had joked in training sessions that Clemence was too old and had to ‘make way for a younger man’. He then declared through the newspapers that he wanted Clemence’s place. Clemence says he felt that after Paris there were no mountains left to climb with Liverpool. ‘I was sitting in the dressing-room and thinking, “We’ve just beaten Real Madrid. It’s not going to get any better than this.”’ But Paisley felt Clemence was rattled. Years later, he described Clemence asking of Grobbelaar, ‘Who does he think he is?’

  Paisley liked that. He wanted Clemence on the edge, like everyone else. The legendary indifference to training displayed by ‘Nozzle’ – as he was known by dint of his large nose – was borne of the lack of competition, and suddenly there was some. Yes, Paisley and the Boot Room were happy with that.

  There was a need for defensive addition, too. Colin Irwin and Avi Cohen had failed to convince Paisley the previous season, as the defence had looked far less secure in the absence of Thompson and Hansen. Irwin was sold to Toshack’s Swansea; Cohen returned to Maccabi Tel Aviv. The Boot Room had been taken with the Irish defender Mark Lawrenson’s performance for Brighton against Dalglish at Anfield two seasons earlier. He was one of the most sought-after players in Britain by the summer of 1981, with an ability to play on either flank, anywhere across the back four, even midfield. It was his tackling that impressed Paisley most, though.

  Lawrenson also happened to be available. Liverpool had the profits of the European Cup to spend, and buying him prevented Liverpool’s rivals strengthening. Lawrenson, like many players before him, was enamoured with the Paisley signing-on routine. It was a doorman at his Liverpool hotel who informed him that the manager was waiting for him in his car outside. ‘When I got in the car I saw that Bob was wearing slippers and a cardigan,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. They’d just won the European Cup and there was this fellow, who everyone in football thought was an absolute god, driving me to the ground in his slippers! I thought, “You’ll do for me!”’

  Case, who had been losing a grip on his Liverpool career for the past year, was quietly eased off to Brighton as a makeweight in the Lawrenson deal. Though he would build a career and life beyond his home city of Liverpool, Paisley’s decision broke the midfielder’s heart.

  In footballing terms, the decision to release him was questionable, as Case demonstrated in an eventual six years at Southampton from 1985: there were the same ferocious tackles, supreme passing skills and a vision for patterns of play that saw him blossom with age. Nearly a decade after leaving Anfield he was still regarded as one of the First Division’s best midfielders – and a more adventurous one than Lee, who scored half as many goals as Case in more matches for Liverpool than his predecessor. Paisley’s side was less flamboyant without Case who, like Joey Jones three years earlier, had become a player whose temperament had breached the limits of Paisley trust – and the manager was unflinching about the sale in such circumstances. ‘He didn’t sell Jimmy for football reasons,’ says Souness. Yet Paisley’s doubts about a player could derive from something far less dramatic than a night behind bars.

  The manager remained unconvinced by Howard Gayle, despite his heroic role in Munich, and the forward did not help himself by questioning the £30-a-week pay rise Paisley offered him at the start of the 1981–82 season – a smaller lift than fringe players Ronnie Whelan and Kevin Sheedy, whose salaries were brought into line with his own. Gayle took the new contract document away and it was only when Paisley asked if he was going to sign it that he declared to the manager his belief that a European Cup semi-final player deserved more.

  A 23-year-old player, giving the impression that he thought he had cracked it: nothing would impress Paisley and the Boot Room less. ‘OK, son, go away and have another think about it,’ Paisley said and Gayle disappeared back into the reserves, never to surface in the Liverpool first team again. The player had not spoken to Paisley for months before encountering him when boarding the team bus back to a hotel after playing in a pre-season friendly with Malaga in the summer of 1981. Gayle had missed one of the kicks in a penalty shoot-out and was listening to jazz music on one of the Walkman devices which were becoming increasingly fashionable. Paisley leaned forward and in his distinctive strains told Gayle, ‘You shouldn’t have had them headphones in last night . . .’

  ‘He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t joking,’ remembers Gayle. ‘He was telling me to remove them and I did, without saying anything. I should have signed the contract. Looking back, I think my actions at that time just strengthened Bob’s mistrust of me.’ Gayle left on loan for Newcastle that winter.

  Just six months after that l
egendary European Cup semi-final win in Munich, a quarter of the side selected had been shipped out of Anfield by the start of the 1981–82 season. The squad for the first game of the new campaign, at Wolves, revealed a manager more concerned about the failings of the previous domestic campaign than the European triumph that had come at the end of it. He fielded three debutants – Grobbelaar, Lawrenson and Craig Johnston, who had been signed from Middlesbrough as Terry McDermott’s long-term replacement. The shake-up was so substantial that even the Paris match-winner Alan Kennedy was dropped. There was no explanation from Paisley. ‘Of course, I found that very hard to take,’ says Kennedy. ‘Bob didn’t even come up to me to talk about it.’

  Despite Ian Rush’s goal riot in the League Cup, it was an autumn in which Liverpool’s winning quality vanished like never before, and the poor previous season, perhaps papered over by the win in Paris, came to be seen as symptomatic of a deeper malaise. The side lost at Wolves, trailed at home to Middlesbrough before equalising with a penalty, and after a 2–0 defeat at Ipswich in early September had picked up only four out of a possible 12 points. The Ipswich game saw Paisley dispense with his usual gentle humour and deliver a rare public rebuke: ‘They have got to be professional, not playboys or fly-by-nights. I am talking about the attitude. The players seem to be saying sorry and think it’s over and done with. They will have to change their attitude.’

  For a squad infused with the principles of modesty and unpretentiousness, that was about as substantial an insult as any Paisley could level at them in public, and it was intended for that effect. Phil Neal was so piqued by the manager’s choice of words that he confronted him and asked which players he had in mind. Paisley, as Neal remembers, ‘. . . waved his hands in the air, said something incomprehensible and wandered off.’

  The words didn’t work. By December, Liverpool had won five, drawn six and lost four – an indifferent return which, with money rendered tight by the anti-inflationary industrial policy of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and unemployment at a 50-year high of three million by January 1982, left fans voting with their feet. A full 13,000 tickets had remained unsold for the defeat at home to Leeds United on 10 October.

  Paisley was uncertain of how extensively to blood Lawrenson, his expensive new defender. He decided it would be a risk to play him at AZ 67 Alkmaar in an early European Cup tie and that the 24-year-old must therefore be on the bench for the visit to Brighton, his previous club, four days earlier. But though he wanted Lawrenson to ‘have a look’ at how the team worked away in Europe – an expression he liked to use – he seemed uncharacteristically concerned that this would represent loss of face for the Irish international. This may have stemmed from Lawrenson’s decision to reject the overtures of Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson and Arsenal’s Terry Neill and sign for Liverpool.

  ‘Do you want me to say you’re injured?’ Paisley asked Lawrenson, before kick-off in Brighton.

  ‘You don’t need to do that, boss,’ replied Lawrenson, confident enough in his own ability to countenance the demotion.

  Liverpool drew 3–3 at Brighton, where an injury to Alan Kennedy saw Lawrenson play at left-back in Alkmaar anyway and acquit himself well in a 2–2 draw.

  ‘I made a mistake. You were ready,’ Paisley told Lawrenson after the players left the field in the Netherlands. He did not doubt the defender again.

  Grobbelaar was a major problem, though. Signed as a goalkeeper in the Clemence mould, his predecessor’s departure to Tottenham removed all the defenders’ certainties about where their goalkeeper would be positioned. Souness thought Grobbelaar ‘had a nightmare’ in those autumn months. The goalkeeper was annihilated in the newspapers – something which, he reflected later, had depressed him. He struggled with the usual Liverpool expectation that players simply sort out their own problems. He knew the former Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg and called him to ask for advice. Gregg said he was busy but could talk him through a few things on the phone. None of which sounded promising.

  It was Grobbelaar’s predilection for showmanship, rather than his frantic rushes from the goal-line, which bothered Paisley. The handstands he performed during games were not helping. Continuing the thread of suspicion for practical jokers which Joey Jones had known at times, Paisley told Grobbelaar to ‘Stop clowning around.’ Unpredictability always made him anxious.

  It was after a 2–2 draw against Toshack’s Swansea at Anfield in October which left Paisley’s side 13th that the city of Liverpool was plunged into a period of sorrow and collective memory of the man on whose platform Paisley had built. On 26 September 1981, Bill Shankly suffered a heart attack and was rushed to Liverpool’s Broadgreen Hospital. He was a 68-year-old who neither drank nor smoked and who exercised daily. ‘When I go, I’m going to be the fittest man ever to die,’ he had once said, and there was a desperate irony to the fact this would come to pass, just as those perennial threats to step down as Liverpool manager had, back in July 1974. Three days after his first heart attack, he suffered a second and was dead before the morning of 29 September was out. For Liverpool, a city already in the grip of Thatcherism, it was a huge blow.

  The Liverpool Echo had published its last interview with him just a few weeks earlier, providing a melancholy reminder of how his decision to retire in 1974 was something he had never come to terms with. The piece was headlined ‘The Seven Wistful Years’ and revealed the peripheral role he had experienced at Melwood after stepping down, calling in at the training ground occasionally, though only to use the sauna. Paisley knew it had been a different story, of Shankly assuming his usual sentry position inside the players’ entrance before home games, standing on the platform when a trophy had been won, and though not a presence on the Liverpool team coach, a passenger on the opposition’s more than once. He would never have ventured to say this, though.

  ‘It was a privilege and an honour to have been allowed to work with him,’ Paisley reflected two years later. ‘People showed what they thought of him when he died. The church was packed for his funeral and then weeks later the Anglican Cathedral was packed for a memorial service.’ But genuine though his tribute was, there was an implacable sense in what Paisley said after Shankly’s death that he – the man who had stepped out of the shadows – felt the achievements after 1974 warranted recognition. ‘To walk out, as he did, and then for things to turn out as they did was enough to make the most placid man envious,’ Paisley said. ‘He was the man who had started it all off and laid the foundations. He had to take a lot of the credit for what happened at Liverpool afterwards. But, on the other score, there is a bit of credit due to me and the staff because we changed the whole team over. Of the 12 players who created history by becoming the first British club to retain the European Cup with our win over Bruges, only four – Ray Clemence, Emlyn Hughes, Phil Thompson and Steve Heighway – had played in the Liverpool first team under Bill.’

  In the aftermath of Shankly’s death it was the last of the players the Scot had signed – the complex, brooding Ray Kennedy – who became Paisley’s concern. He was missing his friend and soulmate Jimmy Case and was now rooming with Sammy Lee, the young midfielder who had displaced Case. Kennedy felt adrift and melancholy and his complicated mind was not disposed to calm reflection on how to rediscover the form that had bought Liverpool their win in Munich back in April. Frustration set in. He had been sent off twice in three months early in the season and was suspended for the game against Manchester City, which Liverpool went into in tenth.

  In the circumstances, Ronnie Whelan felt his own frustrations. He was struggling to get a run in the side but was the retiring sort and not inclined to confront the manager.

  A few days before the Manchester City match he finally found the courage to do what Rush had done: put his inhibitions aside and arrive at Paisley’s door to ask when, if ever, he would get a decent run in the team. He’d been a part of Liverpool’s brightest moment that autumn – the 3–1 win over Everton at Anfield –
but, Rush-like, had been consigned right back to the reserves.

  Whelan remembers Paisley had the Racing Post spread over the table when he stepped inside and spilled his anxieties out. How could he prove himself without playing? When would he get a run? What was the story?

  The conversation was shorter than Rush’s. Why hadn’t Whelan been to see him earlier? Paisley asked. Whelan got the sense that Paisley was actually pleased he had knocked on the door. He fell into that category of player whom Paisley wanted to see doing so and perhaps it was the deference he had shown which provoked a different reaction to the one experienced by Rush. The manager was also more convinced of the Irishman’s potential than of Rush’s. It was only his strength of character that remained to be tested, and this encounter suggested he might have it. Whelan struggled to muster any kind of reply and the few words Paisley uttered by way of a follow-up were fairly incomprehensible, too. The next minute Whelan was back outside in the manager’s secretary’s office.

  ‘He was probably waiting to find out from me if I really believed I was ready for the first team,’ he reflected later. ‘He knew I was a shy lad. He probably knew I wasn’t the type to go banging on a manager’s door, and the fact that I did go to him maybe convinced him that I was ready.’ Whelan played against Manchester City, not knowing as he ran out to play on a crisp Anfield pitch showing evidence of the week’s snowfalls that it would represent the low point of Liverpool’s winter. The match, in which Liverpool lost 3–1, was a disaster from start to finish. City goalkeeper Joe Corrigan was struck with a glass bottle. City manager John Bond instructed his players to take to the floor when their bus was attacked with missiles as it pulled out of Anfield. And Paisley’s team were humbled.