This is the best Liverpool team I’ve ever seen, but you can’t just give them title now
Ian Rush on how he was shown door by Paisley, his part in football’s first ‘press’ gang and why this season must finish
THE cardboard box story is the one Ian Rush summons up for the possibility, unthinkable though it still is to him, that the 2019-20 football season might actually be over and that Liverpool will be stranded up there for posterity, six points from glory. It is the story of how the club’s great drill sergeant coach Ronnie Moran would tell the players, within minutes of a league title being won, that the medals were in the box he had just thrown on a bench in the dressing room, if anyone really wanted to indulge themselves with a mere trinket like that.
‘It was my first year,’ says Rush. ‘Ronnie Whelan and I were s **** ing ourselves. Should we go? What would Kenny Dalglish and Graeme Souness say? When we’d collected them, Ronnie told us that pre-season training started in three weeks, four days. You never looked back at Liverpool. That was the point.
‘Of course we should finish the League and win it. This Liverpool team is the best I’ve seen. But if it doesn’t happen, you have to say what’s past is past; gone. Don’t let it affect you.’
Now 58, he is speaking via Zoom from the Algarve, where he and his fiancée Carol Anthony are in lockdown at their holiday home. Though the climate offers compensations, he should have been at Anfield today with his old friend Kenny Dalglish where, before playing Aston Villa, Liverpool could have been celebrating a league trophy won at Manchester City last weekend.
Dalglish was in hospital last night, having tested positive for coronavirus after being admitted for treatment of an infection on Wednesday. Rush expects ‘a full recovery’ for the 69-year-old but it has brought the current crisis close to home.
They would have been absorbed with the Villa match like all the others they have watched, side-byside, in Anfield’s Main Stand down the years. Rush says: ‘He talks about things, the opposition, which defender we should be playing on. About 80 per cent he’s the one who’s talking! I just listen.’
This Liverpool and the one he and Dalglish knew so intimately are not entirely comparable. Bob Paisley, to whom Rush says he owes everything, was a taciturn, sometimes gauche individual whose Wearside accent and sayings were impenetrable to many who played under him. In the press conference arena, Paisley would not have held a candle to Jurgen Klopp. It is the way players do their own thinking which make this team more reminiscent of the old Liverpool than any Rush has seen in the 24 years since he left the club.
The way Klopp’s front three interchange and find space, cognitively and instinctively, reminds Rush of that philosophy, somehow lost down the years, which said you did not need to be told how to play.
‘Of course they look with Klopp at the opposition, look at how the opposition defence plays,’ says Rush. ‘But at the end of the day, on the field, [Sadio] Mane, [Roberto] Firmino and [Mo] Salah will say: “You told me to do that but I’m not going to do it. I’m going where the space is”.’
That is certainly how Paisley’s players remember it. Before Souness’s home debut against Birmingham City in 1978 after signing for £350,000, the Scot had the temerity to ask Moran what was expected of him. ‘Christ, son,’ Moran told him. ‘We didn’t pay all that money to answer questions like that.’
The transmission of knowledge was subtle back then. It was Steve Heighway,
alongside Rush in Liverpool’s reserves in 1980, who told the young forward about something that is all the rage these days.
Heighway noticed Rush taking up positions which gave the opposition goalkeeper or full-back options when they were playing out. He told him to make life harder for them. Rush began standing marginally nearer the full-back so the goalkeeper would have to play it to the centre-back.
‘Then, as soon as he started kicking the ball out, I would close the centre-back down. Steve taught me that,’ recalls Rush, for whom it became a trademark.
‘They talk about Barcelona starting it,’ he remarks. ‘We were doing it in the Eighties. We did it as a team. If the ones behind me weren’t ready, I would get the shout from Dalglish or Souness, “Don’t go. No”. Because all the energy I’d put into pressing would go to waste and the defender would push it past me. We only go if we go together. I never pressed by myself.’
Gegenpressing without the exotic name, you might say.
That Liverpool collective seemed highly impenetrable for Rush when he arrived from Chester City in 1980 as a diffident teenager in a team of hardened pros. The banter was unremitting.
‘How many polyesters died to make that shirt?’ was one of Souness’s memorable jousts at the fashion-conscious youngster who, on account of his pastel clothes and pencil moustache, was christened ‘Omar’ — as in Omar Sharif.
Paisley was tough — a man of his time — though one of the less appreciated aspects of his management style was that Klopp-like capacity to know what made a player tick psychologically.
‘He knew I was a quiet person so he’d always pull me aside, whereas he would have a go at Terry McDermott in front of everyone,’ says Rush. Paisley worried in the early years about Rush’s predilection to pass and be busy rather than take on shots himself (Rush saw something similar in Robbie Fowler, 13 years later).
He had yet to score for Liverpool when a defining exchange between the two took place in Paisley’s office, after Rush, then 19, asked for the same £100-a-week pay rise as other first-team players in 1981. Paisley refused the offer.
‘Have you actually scored yet?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you take responsibility? When I was your age I was in charge of a tank in the war (Paisley was fond of invoking his war service).’
Rush lost his temper when a second meeting went the same way and was told, as he left the room, that he was being placed on the transfer list. Crystal Palace, the team of the moment, were thought to be interested.
‘I was playing to leave Liverpool after that,’ says Rush. ‘It was “f*** you”. I didn’t pass to anyone. All the weight went off my shoulders. I scored my first goal for Liverpool
in a European Cup tie seven days later. I scored something like 10 in five days.
‘Bob called me in and said: “Now I’ll give you that rise”. I said: “Does that mean I’m off the transfer list?” He said: “You were never on it”.
‘They talk about the psychology of managers now. Bob Paisley was 20 years ahead of his time.’
No one taught Rush how to shoot at goal. ‘When I missed, Ronnie Moran said “Don’t worry about that. It’s the next one that counts. Be ready”. They knew I had it in me.
‘You had to sink or swim and there was no in-between. You look at today’s world and maybe think some of these people wouldn’t have survived. There was no messing about. You had to decide for yourself what you wanted. You had to do it your own way.’
The world had changed by the time Gerard Houllier asked Rush to go back to work with his strikers.
‘For some of the younger ones, it was “Teach me, teach me”,’ he says. ‘I remember a time with Jamie Redknapp when Roy Evans was manager. Ronnie Moran told him to stand on the goalpost and the opposition scored a header from just inside the six-yard box.
‘When we were looking at the video on the Monday, Ronnie said: “Why didn’t you go and deal with that?” Jamie turned around and said: “Because you told me to stand on the post”. Ronnie said: “See that big building out there. If I told you to jump off it, would you do that?”’
Rush’s immutable place among Liverpool’s greatest was built on knowing where and when Dalglish and Souness would play a ball for him to run on to, though it was never the same after he joined Juventus for a British record fee of £3.2million in 1986. When Rush pressed in Turin, he did it alone.
‘I’d look behind me and my teammates were all in their own half,’ he says. ‘I had an argument with the manager, Rino Marchesi, about it. He said: “Listen. It’s easier for one person to adapt than 10 to adapt”. I stopped pressing but I got bored. I was waiting in my own half for the ball.’
The move was financially motivated, though more successful than his goal tally of eight in 27 games suggests. It ended early when Juventus, having been forced to reduce their foreign player quota, failed to move Michael Laudrup to PSV Eindhoven.
Rush has long since put to bed the most repeated quote attributed to him — that moving to Italy ‘was like playing in a foreign country’. He did not say it, suspecting the source was Dalglish enjoying a quip with a reporter, after bringing him home to Anfield.
‘He’s got a lot to answer for!’ said
Rush in his autobiography. What ensued in his second Liverpool spell was more than most players experience in a lifetime: the events of Hillsborough in 1989, the lost title decider against Arsenal at Anfield that year, one League title and two FA Cup final victories.
Never did he imagine, when scoring in a 2-1 win over QPR to clinch a record 18th Liverpool title on April 28, 1990 that the club would still be waiting for their 19th 30 years later.
Rush believes it is simply that the world became a more crowded, competitive place. ‘Liverpool set a standard and teams always wanted to beat them; simple as that.’
When a 22-year playing career was behind him — including a brief reunion with Dalglish at Newcastle following a spell at Leeds United — he found himself trying to help others score goals like he had done. Just like coaches who guided him, he did not obsess over technique.
‘You are not going to make an £80m player into a £180m player but you can make a £5m into a £10m player,’ he says. ‘If you improve them by two or three per cent you can make that difference. It’s all about giving them confidence.
‘I’d coach strikers who, once they missed, wouldn’t be seen near goal again. But if I miss five goals and score the sixth, everyone forgets about the five.
‘I worked with Michael Owen. You’d always start with him in the team because if you give him 10 shots, you know he’s going to score five. He never worried about those he missed. Fowler, who came through in my last years as a player, had even more of that mentality. He was an incredible finisher and the more skilful of the two.’
The coaching, through the ‘Ian Rush Finishing School’ network established in Australia while he played out his career at Sydney Olympic, and which Liverpool asked him to merge with their operation, could not entirely resolve the vast emptiness which accompanies a career’s end.
‘When you finish playing, it’s very difficult because you are going back to normality,’ he says. The right management opportunities never materialised, though there were offers ‘including national jobs’. There was a notion he would become Howard Wilkinson’s assistant at Leeds. A return to manage Chester City, who were broke, proved brief.
What has transpired instead is remarkable, considering how overwhelmed Rush was to be allocated a changing room peg between Alan Hansen and Ray Clemence and, by his own admission, ‘I didn’t speak for eight months’.
He has grown into a role model as an ambassador for Liverpool and UEFA and, working in the past few years with the Avalon Sports consultancy, developed a huge social media profile, with half a million followers on Instagram. He is also a director of the FA Welsh Trust, which develops future talent.
His own foundation, which focuses on education and training, has grown exponentially. One of the more extraordinary trips with his fiancee, saw him deluged by locals in a suburb of Karachi, Pakistan, on a visit to a local youth team devastated by the suicide of their coach.
‘I was wearing a bulletproof vest and travelled with the army,’ he says. ‘It was a bit terrifying at first but the army kept things secure. Eventually we were all playing football in the street. It wasn’t until I finished that I really saw the world.’
His work for UEFA saw him present the Champions League trophy to Real Madrid’s Sergio Ramos after the 2017 final in Cardiff and then to Jordan Henderson in Madrid last summer.
Mane’s celebration with Rush on the Wanda Metropolitano pitch — he initially makes to drop-kick Rush — went viral.
‘I’m just telling myself “Don’t drop the European Cup!”’ says Rush. ‘Incredible experiences.’
Home is where he wants to be, though, watching his club win that elusive 19th title. ‘They deserve it,’ he says. ‘But you can’t just give them the League because it wouldn’t feel right for them. Hopefully, the season will start again.
‘We all hope that. But if they have to put it behind them, they’ll be all right. Their time will come.’
When I was your age I was in charge of a tank in the war, Paisley told me