I THOUGHT THE LIVERPOOL JOB WAS MINE. IT LEFT A SOUR TASTE WHEN I DIDN’T GET IT
IT’S a little more than 40 years since John Toshack left Liverpool and the small details of how the club later broke his heart still linger, yet he does not try to disguise the significance of his time there.
‘Managing Real Madrid. Great. Ten years in the Basque country. Great. But Liverpool?’ he says. ‘The best days of my life.’
He’s been a trail-blazer and a nomad, just as his old striking partner Kevin Keegan was, managing 11 clubs and two national teams in 13 countries in the 41 years since he left Anfield and took Swansea City straight through the four divisions.
Yet it’s hard to avoid the impression that he would have swapped it all for the chance to manage Liverpool, where his partnership with Keegan was so deadly in the 1970s that regional TV even tested the pair for powers of telepathy.
Toshack (below) would score nearly 100 goals for the club, though his first — in the 1970 Anfield derby — is the one he cherishes most. And there was that partnership with Keegan, of course. ‘I’d see him run past me, a flash of red,’ he says. ‘And then I’d hear him calling for it: “Anywhere Tosh, anywhere”.’
The Granada TV telepathy test entailed the two of them holding up a card with a symbol on it which the other could not see.
‘We kept calling each other’s symbol right. No one seemed to know we could see each other’s card in some reflected glass,’ says Toshack, grinning at the memory.
His mentor and inspiration Bill Shankly, who signed him from Cardiff, told him that Liverpool would have him back as manager if he succeeded at Swansea and you sense that everything he accomplished in South Wales had Anfield as an end point. ‘You do your stuff son and there’ll be a job back here for you,’ he says, launching into Shankly-speak to relate the Scot’s prophecy, which is as vivid to him now as it was then.
A telephone call came in the winter of 1981, proposing a meeting with Liverpool secretary Peter Robinson and chairman John Smith, to discuss what at that time seemed to be the impending departure of Bob Paisley.
‘We met at the Clifton Hotel in Southport and I thought it was on, you know. I thought, “Yeah, this is it”,’ Toshack says.
‘Liverpool were struggling and Bob had said he wanted to leave at the end of the season. Nothing was agreed and I may have been naive but I left the place feeling it would happen and expecting another call.’
It never came. Paisley’s side rallied that winter, winning 10 successive games to claim the First Division title, and word came back that the then 63-year-old wanted to complete a further year ‘for his pension’.
The lid has always remained on this story, which emerges in an engaging new autobiography by Toshack. Liverpool announced at the end of the 1981-82 season that Paisley would do one more year and it is feasible that Robinson and Smith may have been taking early soundings. A period of mixed health for Paisley did begin with a bout of pleurisy around the time Toshack says he was approached. Paisley’s family were aware of their father needing to complete payments into a pension pot before retiring.
The outcome devastated Toshack. ‘It was a bit embarrassing, to be honest, as I’d told a few people it would be happening. At the time it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. I couldn’t feel quite the same way about them after that and it affected what happened at Swansea I’m sure. It didn’t help.’
Swansea began to run out of money and steam that spring. The side, which had flourished with ex-Liverpool stalwarts like Tommy Smith, Ray Kennedy and Ian Callaghan in the ranks, began to fail. Toshack resigned in October 1983, returned eight weeks later but left for good in March 1984.
He would never manage a British club side again. As Liverpool promoted Joe Fagan from within, their one-time No10 embarked on a managerial odyssey through continental football and, after over six years and two spells in charge of Wales, out into the outposts of Morocco, Azerbaijan and Iran. It is testament to how British managers who blaze a foreign trail are overlooked that the scale of his success on foreign fields has perhaps never been appreciated. The autobiography reminds us that Toshack twice managed Real Madrid and shattered
the Spanish
status quo with Real Sociedad, to no less a degree than Diego Simeone has done with Atletico Madrid.
The Liverpool philosophy was at the heart of it all. He says: ‘It was what Shankly called “the recipe” and was about not complicating things. He always said that the most important things in football were important 50 years ago and they’ll be important 50 years from now. The basis of everything I’ve done in coaching I learned at Liverpool between 1970 and 1978.’
An eye for young talent was a part of it. Xabi Alonso relates in the foreword he has written for the book, how Toshack gave him his first chance to prove himself, calling him back from loan at Eibar.
‘He put me in the team as an 18-year-old, which was incredibly brave considering the importance of the position,’ Alonso writes. ‘You need someone that first time to see something different that you might bring to the game. Not every manager has that ability.’
SoME of Toshack’s own strategies materialised more by accident than design. As player-manager after Swansea’s promotion to the Third Division in 1978, Toshack began operating as a sweeper.
But since he was short of pace he put two centre halves around him and pushed the full backs on. So began the system which became known in Spain and at Sociedad as the ‘sistema Toshack’.
He always felt that immersion in the countries where he alighted was important. In San Sebastian, where Toshack managed Sociedad three times, he had a column in the local paper and wrote a book in Spanish about his years in the country: Diario del Gales, ‘Diary of a Welshman.’ He went armed with a B-grade ‘o’ Level in French — one of only two he passed. Not much use in the Basque country but signs of an ability with languages, perhaps.
In the book, he wonders whether David Moyes might have done more to immerse himself during an unhappy 12 months as manager.
‘Moyes spent his whole year living in quarters at the Maria Cristina, the most expensive hotel in the city,’ he writes. ‘I don’t think the Basques found that very respectful. He made noises about going for walks every night and having Spanish lessons every week but he didn’t endear himself to the locals in any real sense. In fairness to Moyes, I was 36 when I got stuck in at Real Sociedad. He was 51. But he didn’t do any favours for the reputation of British managers in Spain.’
Toshack also feels Gareth Bale could do more at Real Madrid. ‘It’s what disappoints me a little bit with Gareth,’ he says. ‘The time he has been there, he should be able to do an interview now in Spanish. It’s nothing to do with the goals he scores, but if you go to work at these places, you owe it respectfully to the people.’
It’s fair to say that Toshack does not take prisoners. His time at the Welsh helm ended with a public conflict with Craig Bellamy.
‘What he brought you on the pitch could be complicated by his attitude off it,’ he writes of Bellamy. ‘You always felt there was a possibility that he could upset the applecart. The positives just about outweighed the negatives.’
He also fell out with Robbie Savage, whom the book paints as a disruptive influence. With the excellent Under 21s manager Brian Flynn a key influence, Toshack was able to bring into the ranks a young Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen. But the Welsh camp was not a happy place when he left it.
Liverpool were back at his door in the late 1990s, the notion being that he and Evans would comanage. He says: ‘I met Peter Robinson and Roy at Heathrow and I could see Peter was still a little bit embarrassed by what had happened first time. I didn’t quite see it. I thought, “There can only be one boss”. I also spoke to (Manchester City’s) Francis Lee in Barbados and Rupert Lowe at Southampton. But something just held me back a little bit. I was out on the road by then.’
The last five years have been the hardest, managing Azerbaijan club side Khazar Lankaran and Tractor Sazi in the Iran league.
And at 70, he has felt the years catching up. But the nomadic life is the one he has attached himself to. He has no house in Britain. Swansea, where his son Cameron is a coach at the Liberty Stadium, is the nearest he has to a base.
As always it is Shankly, the man with whom it all started and to whom the book is committed, who has the last word on what happens next. ‘Retirement? It should be struck from the dictionary,’ Toshack says, bursting into Shankly-speak again. ‘When they put you in the coffin and bang the lid down, then you’ve retired.’ Toshack’s Way: My Journey through Football is out now, Coubertin Books £20.