Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  ‘Boss, this is my third gin and tonic,’ said Souness.

  ‘How about sub, then?’ replied Paisley.

  By half-time Liverpool were 2–0 down, and, on the side’s arrival in the dressing-room, Paisley told Craig Johnston to ‘have a bath’. Souness went on in his place and was integral to Liverpool recovering and drawing 2–2.

  ‘In a way I think it showed that he felt a vulnerability – even then, after all he’d achieved,’ says Souness. ‘He’d missed a few games and he wanted to stamp his authority.’

  Liverpool had reached the top of the table on 2 April with a 1–0 home win over Notts County. They wrapped up the title with a game to go, by beating Tottenham 3–1 at Anfield, in the near immediate Anfield return against Keith Burkinshaw’s side. They’d trailed at half-time in that match, too, and Paisley said he was concerned about Lawrenson standing too close to Souness and getting in his way. Lawrenson shifted his position after the break, scored the equaliser and set up Dalglish for Liverpool’s second. ‘A magic wand’ is how Whelan later described Paisley’s contribution in that particular interval. ‘At half-time Joe and Ronnie would generally do the talking,’ Whelan said. ‘But if Bob spotted something he would usually pass it on.’

  Liverpool took the title by a four-point winning margin. In the space of five months they had reached such ascendancy that they could treat their final match, at Middlesbrough, with extraordinary indifference.

  The agreement had been that they would dispense with the overnight stay if they had already won the league, saving the club £300. When the Daily Mirror’s Frank McGhee arrived to interview Peter Robinson, moments after Tottenham had been beaten, he found him on the phone to the Middlesbrough hotel, relating the change of plan.

  When they set off by coach on the Tuesday morning of the game, it was the quantity of cider stashed on board which surprised the more peripheral members of the entourage. Rooms had been reserved from lunchtime to allow the players to get some sleep for a few hours before the game, against a side which had already been relegated. Paisley, Moran and Fagan sat downstairs in the hotel lounge, drinking tea and talking football. Rush was about to turn in for those few hours when Hansen and Souness arrived at the room he shared with Whelan.

  Paisley and his assistants were having ‘a good lunch’ in the hotel restaurant, Souness informed the pair, so they should both report to the hotel lobby. They did so, finding the entire squad there too, and Souness then suggested that they all might ‘go for a walk to a nearby park’. They were heading in that general direction when Souness, with his Middlesbrough knowledge, mentioned a pub tied to the local Cameron brewery. Had they sampled Cameron? No? Then they should. The players broke into groups of four to buy rounds. A quarter of an hour of football discussion ensued before the second arrived. Two hours had elapsed, and substantially more rounds, before Souness suggested they should head back to the hotel, where Moran would be making his rounds of the rooms at 4 p.m. to wake the players up.

  Liverpool played dreadfully. David Hodgson was playing up front for Middlesbrough. ‘I remember receiving the ball to feet and pretty much running past Alan Hansen like he wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what day it was. We still couldn’t win, though. They were so far ahead of everyone else they could still get a draw when the whole team was steaming.’

  Paisley must have known about the caper, yet he could reflect on the transformation of the season and what he always declared to be the most satisfying of all his domestic titles. ‘I’m proudest of this one because there was so much still to do,’ he said at the end of the season. ‘Our most difficult job is to decide when to introduce new players. Any clown can bring in youngsters, but if you do it at the wrong time you can crucify them. When we were struggling early on, people were shouting for us to get rid of this player and bring in that one. But you can’t do it like that. You don’t throw out a man who has served you loyally. There has to be some sentiment.’

  That was not an entirely honest assessment. There was never room for sentiment. A further five players would be on their way out of Anfield within a few months. But the wisdom of waiting for Rush and Whelan had been borne out. They played when they were good enough to deliver and that was necessary. With their early frayed self-confidence, their paths in 1980 and 1981 could have taken different courses.

  The turnaround owed much to the captaincy of Souness – whose demands for intensity and commitment other players feared. Grobbelaar had also heeded Fagan’s demand for fewer high jinks – a fact reflected in the defensive record after the turn of the year. By the time Liverpool lost at home to Manchester City they had conceded 19 goals in 17 games. They shipped only 13 more in their remaining 23. But it was the rapid emergence of Rush – the predatory goalscorer Paisley had not possessed since Kevin Keegan had departed – which made the biggest difference. Liverpool scored 56 goals in 23 games after the City defeat, with other sides surprised by the newfound pace which Paisley’s Liverpool had not generally been known for.

  Though it was selfishness in front of goal that Paisley had demanded from him, Rush would develop a reputation for working phenomenally hard. He pressed defenders, squeezing possession out of them, and was also extremely unpredictable. Defenders generally knew what they were up against when John Toshack or Steve Heighway were supplying Keegan. Rush brought a surprise component.

  Whelan knew what he had seen in the early months of 1982. ‘It’s not an exact science and never can be because you are dealing with human beings, after all,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to pinpoint exactly when a player who has given good service is in decline and when a young player is ready to step up – or if he’s good enough. I’d imagine that at the start of 1981–82 Bob wasn’t sure either. But he would have monitored us closely. He’d have been scrutinising the veterans for sign of age catching up on them. He’d have been picking up clues, because Bob knew players inside out.’

  With the old Liverpool qualities restored, Paisley called Rush into his office and told him he decided that the striker had earned the £100 rise he had asked for right back in August. Rush – buoyed by what was unfolding on the pitch and not, as he put it wanting to appear the manager’s ‘patsy’ by accepting – declared that he wasn’t sure he wanted a new contract now and would like time to ‘think it over’. He returned two days later, suggesting that the £100 rise plus 10 per cent were what he was entitled to.

  ‘Been giving it some thought, have you?’ Paisley said. He didn’t commit. A few days later, he called Rush back into his office. ‘Been doing some thinking,’ he said. ‘The £100 and 10 per cent it is. Think you’re about worth it.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Rush.

  ‘An’ how’ll you justify it?’ Paisley asked.

  ‘By scoring goals,’ replied Rush.

  ‘I thought you’d already started,’ said Paisley, poker-faced. ‘That’s why I’m giving you the bloody rise.’

  Rush told the newspapers all about the secret of his goal-scoring. ‘People sometimes ask if I worry when I miss a sitter,’ he said. ‘But that’s pointless, because you don’t have the same chance again. You don’t think, “I wonder what would happen if I’d missed that goal” so why should you start wondering about the ones that got away? You’re on a worldwide stage out there, and to grab one of the goals is something most people never achieve in a lifetime.’

  There was no mention of who had first dispensed such wisdom, but Paisley would have been all right with that.

  13

  End of the Road

  There were moments as the years rolled on when Bob Paisley looked an older man than most other First Division managers. Sometimes he seemed to belong to a different world from those who occupied his stage – Clough, of course, and Manchester United’s ‘Mr Glitter’, Ron Atkinson, who was 20 years younger than him.

  Paisley was born when the horrors of World War I were still fresh, had seen the field of conflict through his own eyes, and yet here he now
was, working in a place where £1 million would exchange hands for a footballer. Though he still held his players’ professional lives in the palm of his hand, and they looked for the slightest clue as to how he viewed them, there were times when he seemed a slight anachronism.

  On one flight to Israel in the early 1980s, Terry McDermott decided to lead a few of the senior players in placing food on the top of the head of a passenger sleeping in the seat in front of them. Mash made it onto the said pate, then carrots and peas. When the victim awoke, he was incandescent. Paisley, who was in conversation with Peter Robinson and Souness at the time, heard the commotion, saw what had unfolded and leapt to his feet to give the players a piece of his mind. Souness put a hand on the older man’s shoulder and persuaded him that he would intervene to smooth things over. The world had turned since Paisley had boarded that cruise liner to the United States with Liverpool, 37 years earlier, politely playing deck quoits and speaking to the party of GI brides on board.

  But the club was still run in a way alien to many others, which felt like a throwback to simpler, quieter days, when one favour earned another. Bob Rawcliffe, the mechanic and second-hand car dealer, had become a part of the club’s fixtures and fittings, and so had others. They were unobtrusive, uncomplicated working people who gave freely and willingly of their time and were drawn into the Liverpool FC family. They did not come with a sales proposition. They simply had a role to play – sometimes for the Paisley family, as well as for the club. They all looked after their own. They didn’t put food on the heads of sleeping passengers.

  Neither did they indulge in some of the other new stunts being practised by Liverpool’s class of 1982–83, such as Bruce Grobbelaar’s ‘fall-down’ routine. This entailed the goalkeeper standing, hands behind his back, before falling straight to the floor whereupon he would get his hands out at the last minute to break his fall – except on the occasion when he left the hand movement a little late, smacked his face on the floor and needed six stitches in his chin.

  Paisley’s was a different world from this, occupied by such individuals as ‘Alan the painter’ who would sometimes double as a driver to bring out one of Bob Rawcliffe’s cars to Christine Paisley when she needed one. There was ‘Cyril the insurance’ and ‘Alf Smith the plumber’, who took 11 weeks to install the Paisleys’ central heating and, Jessie recounted, recited poetry in his lunch hours. There was ‘Godfrey the policeman’; ‘Bill and Bob the accountants’. Alf the plumber’s daughter had joined the Paisleys on their trip to Paris for their 1981 family holiday. They received a few tickets here, a club dinner or a trip there, either for themselves or those who were close to them. Liverpool and Paisley had the comfort of knowing that when a problem occurred they would be covered. There would be someone they knew who could help.

  Intentionally or otherwise, Paisley could be as much a source of the comedy as ever. A boiled sweet was lodged in his Brylcreemed hair in the press room at Queens Park Rangers but no one liked to point it out. Not all journalists appreciated that the quiet man was a wise one, with accomplishment meriting respect. Journalist Paul Newman, of The Times, detected after one game at Anfield, where the post-match discussion took place in the back corridor, that a few poked fun at his homespun, rather clichéd way with words. ‘Game of two halves, wouldn’t you say, Bob?’ he was asked, or words to that effect. Paisley either ignored this or was oblivious to it.

  By 1982 it had been a little time since he had granted an interview, but to the London listings magazine Time Out he explained very effectively that the days of motivating the players with exploits with magnetic figures on the tactics board had long gone. Time Out was a curious choice of title for him to speak to, but there was a very Bob Paisley kind of connection. His interviewer, Stan Hey, who would go on to become an accomplished journalist and author, could relate in his letter to the Liverpool manager that his father was a Saturday bet-setter in a betting shop to which Paisley would often adjourn. ‘They’re too old and wise for me to come in and tell them bedtime stories,’ Paisley told Hey. ‘Shank would come in, set up the little figures on the tactics board and say, “You’re playing against a side with Best, Charlton and Cruyff in the forward line,” or whatever, and then he’d sweep the little figures off and put them in his pocket and he’d say, “That’s their forward line gone . . .” But you can’t do that any more, because the players would just laugh at you. So now I’m glad when someone – the press or another player or manager – has a go at us. I can use that. I’m always picking my brains at home to find something new, searching for the little straws . . .’

  The team was on one of the many money-spinning friendlies in the summer of 1982 when Paisley told them that the next season would be his last and he would be calling it a day in a year’s time.

  A health problem formed part of the decision, he said, soon after stepping down. It occurred on tour and appears to have been a severe infection of the medial, or middle ear. A ‘virus’ is how Paisley described it. Symptoms of such an infection can include fever, sickness, loss of hearing and loss of balance, and it was the latter which startled Paisley. ‘I was just off balance for a few weeks and at the time it was frightening,’ he said later.

  It was a Granada TV documentary presented by none other than Paisley’s old adversary Brian Clough which provided the clearest sense that a health issue might have pushed Paisley towards retiring. ‘I thought, well, you know, if you’re going to be [having problems] like that . . .’ he told the programme’s interviewers, initially trailing off. ‘If you are ruthless enough to change players, then you’ve got to look at yourself and say, “Don’t go beyond your limits.”’

  Peter Robinson and the board received no sense from Paisley that health was the motivating factor, though – the pleurisy episode that spring notwithstanding. The manager told Robinson that there were simply other things he wanted to do in his life. A lot of them revolved around horse racing. His achievements had widened his circle of racing friends and, in 1981, he had made his first visit to the Derby with his old accomplice Ray Peers. They travelled by train from Liverpool Lime Street to Epsom station and then walked more than two miles over the Downs to the course together. Paisley was also never happier than at Frankie Carr’s place, at Malton.

  Robinson tried to persuade him to stay until the end of the 1983–84 season, which would have helped the club groom a successor. Paisley was 64 and Liverpool told him they thought he could have gone on for another two years and enjoyed the success of the new young team he had built. He was not to be persuaded this time, though. ‘He was absolutely determined and we could see he was determined,’ says Robinson. ‘He said he wanted to do other things with his life for a year or two.’

  The decision to go was certainly not borne of the self-doubt which had plagued him when he had knocked on Robinson’s door back in 1974. The seven-year contract he had signed after weathering that early storm was due to expire at the end of 1982–83 and the board reluctantly accepted his decision not to extend. ‘He gave us good notice,’ says Robinson, who ensured Paisley had financial advice in place. There was talk in the family home about a sufficient sum of money having been paid into a pension fund.

  Paisley received an offer of help with the speech revealing his decision to journalists, which he intended to make at a dinner staged in his honour by the north-east branch of the Football Writers’ Association at the Three Tuns Hotel in his native Durham. One of his Liverpool reporters’ group, the Sun’s Mike Ellis, drove up to Durham with Paisley and said he was willing to deliver a speech of his own about him, thus limiting the time the 63-year-old would need to address the audience. Paisley said that wasn’t necessary. When the moment arrived, he got to his feet and spoke for half an hour. This reflected a change Graeme Souness saw in Paisley during his final year at the helm, when the captain would be asked to accompany the manager on speaking engagements. Paisley was more self-confident and funnier in his delivery, the captain felt. ‘Not funny – very funny,’ Souness s
ays. ‘His timing was very good as well. I think that was closer to the true character hidden by the shyness, which could be painful.’

  The confident public exterior remained something he had to work at, however. After his death, his family found copies of the speeches he had given, painstakingly prepared in capital letters on the typewriter. A report of the Three Tuns Hotel gathering revealed that Paisley told his audience: ‘Another 12 months would see me complete 44 years at Liverpool and then I’ll hand it over. We’ve come through a transitional period and once I’m certain things are running smoothly it will be time to go.’

  Wanting to look out for the journalists who had helped him along, Paisley called the Daily Express’s John Keith on the morning of the dinner, Sunday 9 May 1982, and told him that he would be making public his decision to finish at the event. He thought Keith and the others may want to write their reports in advance, for the following day’s papers. He had travelled a long way in his relations with journalists.

  His talk touched on what he had tried to achieve, though it was in the seclusion of his interview with Hey that he best captured his ethos: a game of football based ‘on simple things’, as he said. ‘It’s all about control and movement performed at pace and about each player knowing his strengths and those of his teammates. It’s all about control of the ball – without that you have no foundation for anything else. After that it’s a question of encouraging players to think for themselves and each other. You don’t see a Liverpool player give a ball and then stand still . . . Basically we’re about good, sound passing and cutting out the chancy ball, which you sometimes have to try, to create something. But we try and do four safe balls for every chancy one. And you can also make things happen by good movement. I can give you a negative pass, but I’ve then got to have a positive thought by making a positive run, so that you in turn don’t have to give a negative pass. If someone’s giving a negative pass, you shouldn’t look at him but at what the other players are doing. The perfect player hasn’t been born, so you have to ensure that you can cover people’s weaknesses within the framework of the team.’