Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  It was painful for Robinson to see what had happened to Paisley, the manager he had hired, helped and whom he could call an old friend. On reflection, he suspected that the Macauley call had been received by the Liverpool switchboard, who were asked for Paisley’s number and that direct contact had thus been established. ‘You’ve got to be very careful and let us know if anybody else approaches you,’ Robinson told Paisley. He encouraged him to let Tom Saunders know if other requests for interviews were made. ‘Yes,’ Paisley replied.

  Paisley was asked to attend an Anfield board meeting, at which he was told he must not give any interviews in the future. He apologised and offered his resignation. The board said that was not necessary.

  The embarrassment was compounded by the fact that a second part of the Mirror interview was published on the day of the board meeting, which stretched to three and a half hours. The second piece, headlined: ‘Be Ruthless, Kenny’, had Paisley saying that Liverpool were ‘not the team they were’, ‘not good enough’, and that it would take major investment to put them back. It was the personal nature of the attacks which ran against the grain. Paisley identified Alan Hansen and his last signing as manager, Jim Beglin, as players whose long-standing injuries means that Dalglish should sell them now, as there was ‘no room for sentiment’ and Kenny couldn’t ‘afford to let his heart rule his head’. The running style of Beglin was a problem, he believed, while ‘Hansen is 33 and time is against him’, Paisley continued. ‘He was down to play a few days ago but cried off because he was not up to it. Alan’s brother quit at 25 with a back injury and it was always in the back of his mind that it was a problem that ran in the family. I couldn’t get the fear out of his head and we sent him to specialists all over the country to put his mind at rest but [that] didn’t seem to make a difference.’

  There were also personal critiques of three others he thought were not good enough: Gary Gillespie, Barry Venison and Kevin MacDonald, who had all been signed by Dalglish.

  Some of the observations were valid. Hansen also felt that MacDonald was not up to the level. Beglin’s career was, indeed, over, and he did not come back from injury. Venison was in and out of the team and not of the old Liverpool standard. But Paisley’s comments were wild and factually wrong. It was knee trouble, not back problems, which were plaguing Hansen at the time and had prematurely ended the career of his brother, John. Hansen recovered from the problem to play a significant role in the 1989–90 season, when Liverpool won the First Division by nine points, and Gillespie remained a significant player.

  Dalglish made it clear that he could not accept what Paisley had said. ‘He was instrumental in bringing me here,’ he told journalists at the time. ‘Anyone connected with [the club] must respect his achievements, but at the same time I could not condone the articles that appeared in the newspaper.’

  Paisley’s mind was failing, though. When the replicas of the three European Cups he had won were taken out for him to be photographed with by a local photographer, to accompany an article for the Anfield match programme, he couldn’t identify their significance. ‘What are these?’ he asked.

  The Mirror episode effectively brought to an excruciating and ignominious end Paisley’s relationship with the club he had devoted precisely 50 years of his life to. The family’s first clear realisation that his mind was beginning to fray came two months after the Mirror articles, at the time of the birth of a grandchild – Christine’s daughter Kirsty – in Derby.

  Paisley drove Jessie to the Midlands, though on the way home he stopped the car and asked her which way he should go. Jessie was concerned. He had made the journey scores of times when Christine had been at college in Derby and could not understand why he had forgotten now.

  The next trip across to Derby was for Kirsty’s christening. It was arranged that old friends of the Paisleys, Jim and Edith, would drive so that he would not have to. Jim hurt his hand before they set off, so Paisley had to drive after all, though his friend sat in the passenger seat, quietly ensuring they reached their destination.

  All this brought about a greater retreat into family life, where Paisley discovered, as a grandfather, all that he had missed out on as a father by spending so much time away.

  There was an indoor slide at the Bower Road house which Paisley kept for the children to jump onto, and a rocking horse, though it was the impromptu ‘horse races’ that his seven grandchildren – Jane, Julie, Carol, Helen, Rachael, Stuart and Kirsty – also remember well. Paisley and sons Graham and Robert would get down on all fours and a child would jump on each of their backs for the race across the floral carpet, with the pair on the left needing to avoid a collision with the stool of Jessie’s piano.

  There were Mr Men books to be read to the grandchildren as they sat on Paisley’s knee – ‘Little Granddad’, they called him. Jessie had a big chess set with brass pieces that would be fetched out. There was snakes and ladders, with Paisley making them laugh by counting in Spanish, and sessions on Jessie’s electric organ, with Paisley attempting to teach the grandchildren his party piece – ‘Amazing Grace’.

  Paisley’s routines also entailed picking up Graham’s younger daughter, Rachael, from nursery. There was some hilarity when he pushed Christine and Ian’s son Stuart through the park in Derby and was recognised by a passing stranger. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you the butcher from Mansfield?’ Paisley was tickled. And there would be times, on Sunday afternoons, when Paisley, Graham and Robert would disappear to the snooker table that was upstairs.

  Paisley also returned to some of their old routines from after the war. He was once again a regular figure with Jessie at Woolton parish church. They spent time with old friends. A German schoolteacher whom Jessie had met years ago, Wolfgang, often corresponded, and though more Jessie’s friend than his, Paisley had always found him companionable. Germany interested him because he had always found something appealing about their football methodology. Wolfgang and his wife Christa visited.

  His recollections and memory were fading, though, to the point that Jessie and the children worried deeply. The reality struck Christine when he and Jessie came to stay with her in Derby, while her husband was away in America. ‘Will there be a time when he doesn’t remember me?’ Christine asked her mother. That moment came with an enormous inevitability.

  In 1993, the journalist Stan Hey, through whom Paisley had articulated so eloquently his methods and philosophy, wrote to Paisley, hoping for contributions to a piece he was writing for the Observer to mark the end of the standing terrace at Anfield’s famous old Kop. Jessie wrote back to confirm that Alzheimer’s disease had, sadly, wiped away all memory of his achievements.

  Dealing with the erratic and chaotic consequences of Alzheimer’s became very difficult and the couple’s lives became unrecognisable from those they had enjoyed in Paisley’s comparatively brief retirement.

  In early 1996, the challenge for Jessie of caring for her husband became too great and Paisley took up residence in the Arncliffe Court Nursing Home, two miles from their home. She visited every day, sometimes collected from the Bower Road house by Dick Harper, a friend of the club who had taken up the Bob Rawcliffe role of supplying cars, and the children attended almost as often. Their husband and father was almost entirely lost to them, though. While some struck down by this affliction are confused and deprived of short-term memory, Paisley’s powers of speech had gone entirely, and that made visiting a difficult and awkward experience for some. Few players, if any, visited, which was a source of occasional sadness to Jessie, though there was an understanding that it would be uncomfortable for all but the close family.

  Jessie had a photograph of him with the First Division trophy placed on the wall of her husband’s airy room there. One day early in 1996 she took a photograph, which captures him listening to music from a cassette recorder, stooped in his seat and unrecognisable from the man his many players remembered. He was smart, his hair slicked back as always. ‘A final photograph. Deares
t Bob, listening to music at Arncliffe Court Nursing Home,’ Jessie wrote in her annotation. He died at 9.30 a.m. on 14 February 1996.

  A letter from the Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev. David Sheppard, acknowledged more than any the desperate sadness of what had been an incremental loss. ‘I know that Bob has been so ill for a long time and, in a sense, you had lost him already,’ he wrote to Jessie. ‘But death makes you realise what a gap there now is. I know how patiently and caringly you have supported Bob.’

  There were perhaps 500 letters to Jessie – very many of them handwritten, hundreds from supporters, dozens more from those who followed other clubs, and some from those who saw Paisley as representative of a football era devoid of the noise and ego which had increasingly engulfed it. One arrived from the nephew of a British missionary priest, explaining an encounter with Paisley years earlier, when he had been making his way as manager. The priest, in his seventies, had made Mauritius his home and place of work and had briefly returned to Liverpool in the 1970s, prompting his nephew to write to the club, enclosing a cheque in a letter addressed to Paisley, explaining the circumstances and asking that tickets for the team’s forthcoming match against West Bromwich Albion might be found for the two of them.

  Two months later and a week before the game in question, the cheque was returned by the club’s ticket office with a standard letter explaining the match was sold out. The nephew was angry and had fired off another letter to Paisley. Two days later, Paisley called the correspondent directly, explaining that the original letter had not reached him, had probably been forwarded straight to the Liverpool ticket office and that he had secured two tickets for the game if they were still wanted. The correspondent insisted on paying. Paisley refused. So they settled on the money being paid to charity instead.

  The day after the game, the clergyman decided to deliver a letter of thanks in person to Paisley, and precisely as he reached the club car park, the Liverpool manager emerged from the main entrance. The man approached, handed over the letter with brief thanks, and turned to go. ‘You must be the priest from Mauritius,’ Paisley said, to his overwhelming surprise. He invited him into his office for a cup of tea, where they talked about the Liverpool of old, football and (the nephew thought) World War II tanks. When a stranger’s interests conformed with Paisley’s he could put his shyness aside and the warmth came through.

  The old man returned to Mauritius the following week and died before the next football season began. The letter described the same Paisley that managers and coaches had known down the decades – instinctively reserved and sometimes awkward, yet modest and self-effacing and ready to hear, converse and collect knowledge with those to whom he could relate. In that sense, Paisley was a conversationalist, though most of his players would laugh at such a notion.

  The letters to Jessie from the football community filled two scrapbooks and spilled into a third, and these were the ones which told the story of Paisley known to the world he had occupied. They came from almost all of those rival clubs who must have cursed him and his methods across the course of his nine years at the top of the game. If Nottingham Forest sent one, then it missed Jessie’s system, but there were letters from the two Manchester clubs, Everton, Leeds, Arsenal, Leicester and Coventry – and their collective sentiment provides the most powerful epitaph to Britain’s most successful football manager. ‘The most modest person I think I have ever met,’ wrote Arsenal’s managing director. Leicester’s secretary told of the ‘good humour’ they loved and of the Bob Paisley ‘smile’ amid the inestimable success. ‘His loss will be felt,’ said Leicester. ‘A great ambassador for your famous club and for us all,’ said Stoke City.

  The football community respected, acknowledged and marvelled at Paisley’s success, but it was the modesty and humility in the midst of that – proof that the quiet man can win through – which astonished them all. That’s what they wanted to say.

  Epilogue

  They gathered outside the church under a leaden winter sky, 15 years on from the days when they had thought themselves invincible. Unconsciously, they eased back into some of those old groups that they’d once established at the training ground and stadium, five miles north across the city.

  The ‘Jocks’ – Alan Hansen, Kenny Dalglish and Graeme Souness – seemed to form the same tight knot as ever. Tommy Smith and Joe Fagan – who’d first laughed and argued together in the Shankly days – walked through the churchyard in conversation. They were there to see Bob Paisley laid to rest, though not all of the old squad were present. The most prominent faces in the images and press cuttings of the day that Jessie Paisley kept were the ones he had picked for his teams again and again.

  That was no coincidence. They were the individuals who could say they felt warmth and affection for Paisley, but not so all of those who played for him down the years. The outside world remembered the modesty, humility and humour, which were all certainly abundant in Paisley. But on the inside – the place where it matters and where the winning was planned – Paisley was hard: unflinchingly, ruthlessly hard. An individual so uncompromising when it came to football that, with little or no explanation, he would drop players, or sell them or leave them looking for encouragement that never came. That’s why he remained ‘the Rat’ to many of them and why some struggled to say that they liked him.

  Attempting to piece together the story of this life has revealed those mixed feelings. In the early stages of research for this book, word came back from those who know Liverpool inside out that some people didn’t care much for Bob Paisley. Not all would want to talk. It proved to be so.

  It didn’t help his popularity that Paisley’s way with players was inconsistent, according to how well they played football. Those in whom he put most faith, like Souness, Dalglish and Hansen, could do no wrong. Others would step in when they were injured and do a good job but as soon as there was a hint that the absent player’s affliction was dealt with they would be back out in the cold again. A half-fit Souness, Dalglish or Hansen was preferable to a fully fit anyone else.

  The thread running through every selection decision was the question of whether a player was more likely to make his team win. The cap, the cardigan and the slippers were surface details. The quiet and undemonstrative exterior obscured a fiercely analytic interior mind, furiously computing how to win.

  Lawrie McMenemy, the former Southampton manager, was as enthusiastic as anyone in response to the request for a discussion on Paisley for this book. He loved Paisley’s lack of pretention and absorption in the game and his good grace when battle was done. He found a glass of Scotch and conversation awaiting him when he stepped into the Boot Room. But the most telling part of his testimony relates to the game at Anfield which Southampton won 1–0 during that hard autumn of 1981. The Liverpool bench gave him dog’s abuse. ‘I always thought they were the worst losers,’ he said. ‘We had the temerity to go there and win . . . and the abuse I got was unbelievable. I remember asking a policeman to go and tell them to calm down. And as soon as the game was over they shook hands. It was as if it had never happened. They congratulated me, praised the side and so on. Amazing. They couldn’t have been more friendly.’

  Brian Clough saw all this, too. Decent, modest, warm when the moment was right – Paisley was all of those things. ‘But he knows how to be hard without being too loud,’ Clough said, just after his adversary had retired. ‘He’s as hard as nails and as canny as they come.’

  It takes courage to be tough in the way that Paisley was tough because it does not invite the embrace of players, who will then cut you very little slack if things go wrong. There is little margin for error. You must get the decisions right. Jamie Carragher, the former Liverpool defender and one of the shrewdest assessors of the club, sees Paisley’s success through this prism. ‘You always try to get to the bottom of the secrets of success and you look at this quiet man and how’s he done this,’ Carragher says. ‘You look at how ruthless he was, making those big decisions. It’s OK m
aking big decisions for as long as you keep getting them right.’

  Paisley got them right because he spoke less and listened more. None of the greats of management incorporated the views and intelligence of others quite as he did. Boot Room companions, opponents, players, players’ teachers – if there was someone he thought might offer an angle, then Paisley wanted to hear it. It meant that he could strip away everything and look for the tactical patterns of football, the players and combinations which could best deliver success, and pinpoint weaknesses in opponents.

  He got more of the decisions right than Bill Shankly, yet because Shankly built the platform from which everything rose, he was the one they remembered. It was in early 1997, nearly a year on from Paisley’s death, that Carragher made his own Liverpool debut and even then – only 13 years after the last of Paisley’s six titles – Shankly’s was the name you tended to hear around the place. ‘You very rarely heard anyone mention Bob Paisley,’ Carragher says. ‘A lot of it was “Shanks”. It was maybe every few weeks it would come up: a laugh or a joke and maybe someone saying, “That’s what Shanks said.” You felt a lot of everything we were doing was the imprint of Bill Shankly.’

  When Brendan Rodgers became manager in 2012, it was Shankly’s work he studied and whose memory he invoked. When charismatic Jurgen Klopp arrived to take up the same seat in 2015, comparisons with Shankly almost inevitably abounded once more.

  This had something to do with the way Paisley retained what Shankly put in place. That requires modesty. Ego tells you to strip it all away and build some acclaim. Carragher found so many of the Shankly ways, though: still the five-a-sides; still the ‘no one bigger than the team’ mantra . . . the pass and move . . . the ban on bread rolls.