Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  ‘I appointed Bobby Robson as an advisor, and he helped me through a lot of difficult times. What didn’t he teach me? The big thing is not to get carried away when you do well and not beat yourself up when doing badly. Simple as that. And then there was his relentless enthusiasm. You only have to meet him to know that. If you show enthusiasm, it improves your players.

  ‘It was disappointing how it all ended [with Ireland]. My record stands up for itself. The most pleasing part was the number of young players that came through under me – players that have since done well under Trapattoni. I can feel very proud of what I’ve done with my country.’

  Staunton refuses to label his time in international management as a failure, adding that it only made him more eager to succeed in club management in order prove the detractors wrong. Unlike a lot of his former teammates, he never considered media work and soon returned to football as Gary McAllister’s assistant at Leeds.

  ‘A lot of the lads that were at Liverpool – they’re all pundits, aren’t they? Is it because they want an easier life? All of the lads know Kenny and saw what management did to him, so maybe they don’t fancy it. They’re all bright lads – footballing brains – and people who think about the game in depth. But management isn’t as easy as you think. It’s not like being a footballer, where you come in, have your dinner, do a bit in the afternoon and go home. You have to worry about your job 24/7, because the sack is only a couple of results away. Maybe they could see how it changed Kenny – they were all coming towards the end of their careers at that time – and maybe they thought, “Nah, that ain’t for me.” It probably put them off, whereas I was only young and had my whole career ahead of me.’

  Staunton became Darlington boss after several failed applications with other clubs in League Two, one of them being Port Vale. He soon made Kevin Richardson his deputy. Richardson, or ‘Ricco’, was a former teammate of Staunton’s at Villa and ironically a midfielder that lined up against Liverpool in the 1989 title decider at Anfield.

  ‘Mick [McCarthy] had Ricco as reserve-team manager at Sunderland. He’s from the area and knows the league, so I gave him a call. He’s a bit of the old school. He can be calling them all sorts but still have them eating out of his left hand. I’m a bit too black and white for all that. That’s why he’s a good coach and why I’m the manager. I had interviews at a few different clubs, but they weren’t taken on the idea of someone managing at the bottom having played their whole career at the top.’

  Aside from Richardson, Staunton employs a skeleton staff with a physio, a kitman and two youth-team coaches as well as one scout. Money is tight at Darlington. Problems stretch back a decade. In 1999, George Reynolds became chairman, proclaiming, ‘One day we will be in the Premiership with millions in the bank and others will be wondering how we’ve done it.’ Orphaned at eight, Reynolds had previously competed in bare-knuckle fights in his native Sunderland and in the ’50s and ’60s had dabbled in crime – namely safe breaking and drug smuggling – for which he served a six-month prison sentence. He completed another two stretches before learning to read in jail. Subsequently, he went straight and earned a £300 million fortune from a business making kitchen worktops in Shildon, County Durham. When he took over Darlington, he immediately paid off the club’s £5 million debt.

  After vainly promising to sign Paul Gascoigne, he built the 27,500-seater ‘Reynolds Arena’ at a cost of more than £25 million. Soon known locally as ‘George’s White Elephant’, fans pined for Feethams, their rustic if rather more atmospheric former home in the centre of town. It was ‘built more on personal vanity than business sense’, according to the club’s supporters’ trust.

  With administration beckoning, Reynolds departed and was soon arrested for tax evasion when £500,000 was found in the boot of his car. In 2005, he was sentenced to three years in prison but released twelve months later with an electronic tag, which remained in place until April 2007. Maybe the flamboyant Colombian striker Faustino Asprilla, who fled the UK on the day he was due to sign for Reynolds’ Darlington, had the right idea after all.

  Today, Staunton’s struggling team play at a latter-day footballing folly in front of crowds that have dipped just above the 1,000 mark. Upon my arrival, I noticed the gold taps, the escalators, the marble flooring encrusted with club badge as well as the opulence of the boardroom. That’s why the money ran out. Over the last two seasons, the club’s budget has been slashed by £2 million. The escalators have long been turned off to save cash, while the lift intercom has had the ‘Going down’ voice removed so as not to tempt fate. Inside, I walked free as if in an empty mansion and onto the pitch before an aged groundsman that looked as if he should be growing spuds on an allotment asked me what I was doing. This is life at the bottom of the bottom division.

  ‘It is quite a responsibility to be fighting for an old club’s existence with players’ livelihoods in your hands,’ Staunton says. ‘But that’s football. That goes from the top right down to the very bottom. There isn’t a problem motivating the players, because if they are fighting for their lives that is the best way of motivating them – dangling the carrot. They do not earn as much as those in the Premier League, but they have got a wonderful opportunity, a wonderful stage to progress their career. So if they are doing really well here, I hope my phone is ringing all the time because clubs are wanting to buy them.

  ‘You know, we are not daft. We are coming in with our eyes wide open. We know it is a tough job, and we have ideas to get the best out of what we have got in the squad at the moment. There are a lot of tough jobs out there in football at the moment. If you ask anyone, they are all tough. Not one manager will say it is easy.’

  New Darlington chairman Raj Singh, a care-home entrepreneur, insists the club is on a firmer financial footing than during the extravagant Reynolds era, and says 80 per cent of clubs in the lower divisions are fighting for survival.

  Staunton is settled here, living near Yarm – a well-to-do area where the glitterati of Middlesbrough reside. ‘I like it in the north-east,’ he reflects. ‘But sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. I can see now why everybody at Liverpool said you needed a good staff – people you can trust. Without that, you’re fucked.’

  ***Three weeks after this interview, I was watching Sky Sports News when a story broke about Staunton being sacked. Three years on, he has not returned to football management. Darlington, meanwhile, were relegated to the Conference National before dissolving in 2012. A reformed club known as Darlington 1883 finished the 2012–13 season as Northern League champions, while sharing a ground with Bishop Auckland, once a great name of amateur football.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DISCIPLINARIAN, Ronnie Moran

  IN THIS BOOK, RONNIE MORAN HAS SEPARATELY BEEN TERMED A ‘barking dog’, a ‘Rottweiler’ and a ‘very angry man’.

  I find none of those descriptions absolutely accurate when I meet the oldest living member of the famed Bootroom a few days ahead of his 79th birthday in the Liverpool suburb of Crosby.

  Using a walking stick to manoeuvre his hulking body through the front door of a bungalow where he lives in a luxury retirement complex, it is imaginable that, in his prime, Moran was not a man to be crossed. In his playing days, indeed, he was a fiercely competitive left-back and in an alternative life would surely have had the physique and tactical sporting mind to compete as an amateur boxer.

  Placing his paisley-patterned flat cap and heavy winter coat onto a wooden stand, he invites me into what he calls ‘the trophy room’ and presents me with one of many photographs from a magnolia-coloured wall. It includes his four closest friends in football: Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett.

  ‘Every morning, I wake up and sit looking at that crowd,’ he says, lightly grinning and pointing with thickset fingers. ‘I remind myself that I’m the only one still here. It’s very sad when you think that all that knowledge has been lost. But I also feel very fortunate to have been a
part of it. They were a good bunch. I miss them.’

  Although Moran had already served Liverpool for nearly 30 years by the start of the ’80s, I decided to interview him because he is the only person still alive with genuine inside knowledge that can contribute towards explaining why the club sustained its culture of success for so long and the mindset behind the staff that helped make the decade become Liverpool’s most dominant in terms of trophies.

  After just a few minutes speaking to Moran, you can quickly sense the intrinsic qualities in an individual that, when placed in a collective, engineered Liverpool’s greatness. His loyalty to those with whom he shared the Bootroom is admirable. His uncompromising attitude towards commitment is also evident.

  ‘Football is about character and showing balls, see,’ he says, directing a stern digit in my direction. ‘The minimum you can ask is to give your best. With that and with the right people around you, you’ve got a chance.’

  Just as Howard Gayle was a product of the environment he grew up in, so was Moran. Gayle had no option but to confront problems because he was on his own. Moran had no option but to work tirelessly and struggle through them like the rest of his family. Moran remembers the Second World War. He was five when the war began and eleven when it finished. Life was harsh.

  ‘My father worked as a binman, and he transported rubbish around the borough by horse and cart. He tried hard, you know. I valued his effort. Whenever he came down our road, I’d go out and give him a hand. When the war started, he helped the Home Front. It was his job to ring the town siren from a nearby station to alert the residents when the bombs started dropping. We’d hide under the stairs. It was a squeeze with a family of our size.’

  He continues retelling tales of his childhood using simple but effective language. I learn that he met his wife Joyce at school. They have been married for 55 years. Sadly, he is old enough to have lost a daughter and a son-in-law. They died within 18 months of each another.

  And then comes his interest in football. It began when his eldest sister’s husband took him to Goodison Park. ‘Football never bothered me in that way [in terms of rivalry]. As a kid, I wouldn’t say I had a preference. If anyone, Formby was my team because two of my brothers played for them as amateurs. One was a goalie and the other was a right-back. You’d only get 20–30 people watching. But you could hear everything that was being said. It made me realise from a very young age how important it was to not just communicate on the pitch but say the right things as well.’

  Moran grew up in an era when Billy Liddell and Dave Hickson were the undisputed heroes of Merseyside football. This was a time when abilities, though, were not readily showcased to the masses. Supporters only knew of their genius if they watched live the matches in which they performed.

  ‘Billy was the god and Dave wasn’t a bad player too,’ Moran says. ‘I could see that from just a few games. But I have to be honest, I did not know much about the people that played football, because there was no TV and nowhere near as much coverage in the papers. I just knew how to play football.’

  The path towards a professional career became clearer when Moran won a scholarship at Bootle Tech. He insists it was the most crucial moment of his life. ‘It meant that I could play for Bootle Boys, and they were a bit better at the football than Crosby Boys.’

  The decision to move his schooling just a few miles down the Mersey River displays Moran’s determination to become a footballer. It is common for children now to make the opposite journey in search of a supposedly better education in a more salubrious area.

  ‘I would have gone to the other end of the earth to become a footballer, but instead I just had to go to Bootle,’ Moran says, lightly laughing away. ‘School football was really competitive in my era. There was a real sense of pride in beating the districts around you. I got a fair amount of stick off friends in Crosby for playing for Bootle. So whenever we beat them, I made sure I gave it back to them.’

  Everton and Liverpool scouts were always about, ‘spying’. Aged 15, Moran was preparing to leave school and take up a job as a labourer when one of his performances for Bootle prompted a firm offer. ‘A teacher took me to one side and told me that a man with a hat and a long coat wanted to speak to me. So I approached him and he said, “Everton want to sign you, son.” I told him he was unlucky. “You’re seven days late, mate. I signed for Liverpool a week ago.”’

  Moran was impressed by the Liverpool manager, Don Welsh.

  ‘He was a big army bloke and into discipline. That suited me down to the ground. Within a few years, I did my national service, and I think that helped my football because it really hammered home how important it was to work hard and be focused. A lot of people my age didn’t like national service, but I enjoyed it.

  ‘I was also lucky that the year I joined Liverpool, the club bought training pitches [now Melwood] from SFX [Saint Francis Xavier School]. It was good because it meant I had somewhere to practise properly.’

  Players would park their cars if they had them at Anfield and then travel to Melwood by minibus for daily sessions every day. That process only changed during pre-season, when the squad were tasked with running the three miles as part of their training.

  ‘Some cheated, though,’ Moran remembers sharply. ‘I wasn’t one of them, because I was afraid of getting caught, but you’d get people that would park a few streets away from Anfield, pick their car up and then park out of sight from Melwood. I suppose you could say it was funny, but it benefited nobody in the long run. There are no shortcuts to success in football.’

  When Bill Shankly arrived as manager in 1959, attitudes towards training improved. In the seven years since Moran’s debut, Liverpool had languished in the Second Division for five of them, with limited sign of progression.

  ‘Bill saved the club,’ Moran beams. ‘After the first day of training under him, I knew he was going to be a success. He insisted on playing in the five-a-sides. His enthusiasm infected everybody else. He would never finish on the losing team. At first, the players thought it was funny, because he got so wound up. But after a while, we desperately wanted to beat him. These games ended up as Mexican stand-offs, because nobody liked losing. Shanks would go round kicking the young lads. He’d do anything to win. It rubbed off on everyone.’

  Shankly surrounded himself with a staff that shared a similar mentality towards defeat. Paisley, Bennett, Fagan and eventually Moran himself would form the staff team. It instilled a simple culture of winning football matches.

  ‘You saw Reuben – he was a goalkeeper and in his ’50s. But he’d take part in the pre-season and never finish outside the top ten in the sprints. Joe was that way as well. I was always a bit porky, but I could shift as well, and Bill recognised that. He knew my attitude was right. He knew I wouldn’t accept losing easily.’

  A day before I met Moran, Liverpool were beaten 2–0 at home by West Bromwich Albion. He believes that one of Liverpool’s current problems is acceptance. ‘You hear some people argue that the team played well. If it was me – Christ, son, I’d be crying my eyes out. I know there are so many matches these days, you can’t afford to get too down, but it doesn’t seem to hurt some as much as it should.’

  In 1966, after 379 games for Liverpool, Moran joined the coaching staff and continued playing in Fagan’s reserve team for a further two years, helping the club’s younger players. He admits that he was ‘sometimes harsh’ on his subjects.

  ‘I enjoyed it. I was a tough player and reacted well to discipline. I was on the staff for a reason. Everybody was different, and I brought the discipline. Players need to be kept on their toes. In my first few years as a player, Liverpool were relegated. A few years before that, the club was top of the league and won the championship. If you settle and think everything’s OK, you can get into trouble. Even during my playing days, I’d do extra training on the field near where I lived after getting home from Melwood. It used to drive the wife mad, but it was what I had to do. I’d try to be diff
erent from the fly-by-nights that came in and didn’t do the extra work. When I was the coach, I asked for the same of the lads.

  ‘It didn’t bother me who they were; how much they’d won. If they weren’t trying as they should be, I’d let them know. There was one player – I won’t tell you his name – but he was an international defender and he was making dangerous passes out of defence. It was putting us under pressure. I told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to learn how to get rid at certain times. We wanted the team to keep the possession but not if it meant conceding a goal. I shouted at the lad for weeks until he stopped doing it.

  ‘I’d bump into a lot of players that moved elsewhere and they’d come up to me and say, “Ronnie, you were a bastard to us. I wish I’d listened because I’m getting chased out of my [current] club for not working hard enough.” There was a lot like that, even from Bill’s day.’

  Moran says his direct approach extended to matches. Afterwards, he would entertain opposing coaches and managers in the Bootroom in a beguiling manner, attempting to accrue information about their teams for future reference. But during games, Moran’s voice was heard louder than anyone else in the dugout. If there was a problem, he would attempt to ‘sort it’.

  ‘You couldn’t do it now, because there are so many cameras around Anfield,’ he says. ‘Every argument would be picked up on. But back then, there was a lot of activity between both benches. It’s funny now when I hear people talk about “mind games”, because we were the first to do that. There was nothing malicious about it, but you’d try to get whatever edge you could over the opposition. That stretched to the bench too. I remember arguing many times with Alex Ferguson when he became manager of United in the ’80s. I like Fergie because he’s a football man and there needs to be more of them. But when he first started at United, we’d be bickering all the way through games. It must have been the Celtic blood in us. We were two benches made up of Scots, Irish and Welshmen. There was bound to be a bit of conflict. Fergie gave as good as he got. All I can say is, I didn’t teach him any swear words.’