RONNIE MORAN Farewell to the ast of the Boot Room legends
ON the wall of Ronnie Moran’s home in Crosby hung a photograph of football’s most famous cabal. Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett, the heart of the Liverpool ‘ Boot Room’.
‘Every morning, I wake up and sit looking at that crowd,’ Moran told
The Independent four years ago. ‘I remind myself that I’m the only one still here. All that knowledge has been lost but I feel very fortunate to have been a part of it.’
Now Moran, too, has died and another link to Liverpool’s golden age has gone. All we can hope is that we remember the lessons.
The popular narrative of the great Liverpool creed of the 60s, 70s and 80s is one of unparalleled simplicity. Pass to a man in red. Be available. Work hard. ‘Socialist football’ as somebody commented yesterday. There is truth to that. There were no iPads on the touchline as Liverpool conquered Europe.
As Moran sent on David Fairclough to change the 1977 European Cup quarter- final against Saint-Etienne 40 years ago last week, he did so with a pat on the backside and an instruction to ‘make a nuisance of yourself, son’. Fairclough scored and two months later Liverpool were champions.
Moran was fundamental to a culture of winning, though. It is that which, in many ways, bridges the gap between his era and the great coaching teams of today.
Anfield in the 1970s was not a sophisticated place and the Boot Room itself was born almost by accident. Coaching staff working for Shankly and then Paisley had nowhere else to sit and talk.
There was method, though. Paisley was a poor communicator but his assistant Fagan was not. Moran, meanwhile, quite readily slipped into the role of bad cop to Fagan’s good guy. As former Liverpool captain Graeme Souness said: ‘I had more rows with Bugsy than anyone. He was deliberately antagonistic to motivate players. No pats on the back. But it cannot be a coincidence that he has overseen all those great teams. Every club could do with a Bugsy.’
Moran, who died aged 83, spent 49 years at Liverpool as player and coach, winning 44 trophies. A biography includes copies of his detailed training dossiers, something started by Shankly and passed down the line by Fagan.
Moran was obsessed by players’ diets and would stand at the front of the bus taking the squad to training trying to spot any who had been drinking the night before. An open window was often a clue.
But it was his almost natural, intuitive use of psychology that best links his methods to those of today. In many ways, he inhabited a different world but in others it was just the same.
Nobody at Liverpool ever got ahead of themselves, for example, and after they clinched the 1979 First Division title it was Moran who dished out the winners’ medals from a cardboard box in the dressing room.
‘There’s yours, there’s yours,’ said Moran, unsmiling, ‘ and remember, pre- season starts in two months and six days.’
According to left back Alan Kennedy that was ‘typical Moran’ — designed to motivate.
Meanwhile, Moran carried his club’s honour into battle without pause. The Australian midfielder Craig Johnston tells a story of Moran chasing Brian Clough up the touchline at the City Ground after the Nottingham Forest manager called the player a cheat, and Sir Alex Ferguson wrote candidly of him in his first autobiography.
‘Some of the arguments I had with that baldy head old bugger were enough to make the dug-out catch fire,’ wrote Ferguson. ‘Of the rich variety of descriptions he attached to me, the only printable part was big-head. But I had to respect a man whose passion for his club was boundless. On the sidelines, he fought for every ball. And argue? You have never heard anything like it. But after — smiles, and the banter was terrific.’
Ferguson, more than anyone, understood what the Boot Room stood for. Us against the world.
Moran, meanwhile, took his lead from Shankly, playing for him in the 1960s before joining his coaching team. ‘I learned more in my first three months under him than I had in the previous seven years,’ he later reflected.
After Shanks retired in 1974, Moran became first-team coach and, five years later, chief coach. At Anfield, however, titles meant little. The Boot Room was a state of mind, the staff working as a collective and encouraging the players to be the same.
There were big characters on the books. Souness, Jimmy Case, Ray Kennedy. It was not always a fun factory but Moran believed in inhouse competitiveness, almost encouraging the odd dust-up amid the routine of five-a-sides.
‘Joe Fagan told me never to go in too early to break it up as you may catch one yourself,’ Moran once said. ‘Good advice, that.’
There was another face to Moran, of course. He would pick up new players from their digs and drive them to training to help them settle and, with Fagan, left the party after the 1977 European Cup win to share a bottle with defeated Borussia Monchengladbach captain Berti Vogts in a Rome hotel room.
After victory Moran would often deadpan: ‘That’s us safe in our jobs for another week,’ and his training would change only if he sniffed complacency.
Alan Hansen, another Liverpool captain, said: ‘The only time it would get hard was if you had a bad run, maybe no wins in four. Then they would run you.’
In the days before he was troubled by poor health, Moran would visit Melwood to walk around the training pitches. Fernando Torres once asked who he was, prompting coach Sammy Lee to direct the Spanish striker to a corridor of photographs telling the story.
Torres always made sure he said hello after that.
“My rows with that baldy old bugger set the dug-out on fire”