THE FORGOTTEN HERO
Phil Neal – who won 23 trophies with Liverpool – on selling his medals, dealing with Heysel and losing top job to Dalglish
ground,’ says Neal. ‘It meant Alan Kennedy could go forward down the other flank and we all know what happened.’
Kennedy’s legendary 82ndminute winner in the Parc des Princes clinched the side’s third elite European crown.
Paisley also introduced Neal to the finer points of what is now called ‘wing-back’ play — part of a defensive set-up which was ahead of its time. There were ball-playing centre backs — Alan Hansen and Phil Thompson — and encouragement not to tackle unless absolutely necessary. Paisley and the Liverpool Boot Room always felt a team risked injury and loss of possession.
But Neal tackled, when the occasion required it. He asked Tommy Smith for instructions on how to deal with Everton’s John Connolly when Paisley had made him a debutant in the Goodison Merseyside derby of November 1974. ‘Kick him,’ said Smith. The full back duly did so. ‘Kick him again,’ said Smith when Neal, newly arrived from Northampton, sought the Liverpudlian’s approval.
Paisley sold many of those players he signed, in the end. He always smelt a shelf life. But Neal played on and on.
A fractured cheekbone sustained against Derby forward Roger Davies in 1976 was a rare risk to his unbroken run. The surgeons ‘aligned it and mended it from the inside,’ Neal relates. Despite being given an estimated six-week recovery time on a Tuesday, he played at West Ham the following Saturday.
‘You’re only marking the little fella Alan Devonshire and you’ve marked him in England training sessions,’ Neal remembers Paisley telling him. ‘The one you’ve got to avoid is Billy Bonds. He’s the ruffian.’ Liverpool won 4-0.
Forty years ago next weekend, Neal scored a penalty which sank Manchester United — one of the 59 Liverpool goals which earned him the nickname ‘Zico’ down the years. But it was in keeping with the collectivism Bill Shankly and Paisley wanted that he went by on the quiet side, delivering with such subtlety that some hardly seemed to notice him at times.
His goalkeeper and room-mate Ray Clemence certainly noticed. ‘It’s easy to see when you’re playing with him, that he’s got a tremendous awareness of every other player in the side and what their job is,’ Clemence said.
There was positional sense, and capacity to create and score. Neal always put the latter down to the fact that he’d played in advanced midfield roles for Northampton.
He was appointed captain when Graeme Souness had left for Sampdoria in 1984 so it fell upon him to deal with the indescribably grim night at the Heysel stadium in 1985, when 39 fans, mainly supporting Juventus, were crushed to death and yet a UEFA match delegate insisted Neal lead the team out to play.
The small details remain so vivid for him — tears streaming down Sammy Lee’s face, addressing the crowd from the stadium control box when it was clear there were fans lying dead — that he clearly finds this difficult territory to venture on to. But it certainly remains a source of eternal regret to him that he led out the Liverpool team for that game. ‘They asked me to take the team out and I said “No”,’ Neal relates. ‘Then they came back to me and said, “If you don’t, more people could die”. It was a UEFA official who told me that. I only wish now I knew who he was.’
The role Neal was pressed into that night only made it harder when Liverpool selected Dalglish — and not him — to succeed the broken manager Joe Fagan, Paisley’s successor, five days after the side returned from the horrors of Belgium. Though he makes light of this now, Neal reflected in his 1986 autobiography, Life on the
Kop, how devastated he was to hear Dalglish had been appointed player-manager.
‘It was the most devastating week of my life,’ he wrote. ‘In the space of five days, the dreams and ambitions I had striven for over a decade had been shattered. Realistically, I could never now hope to manage Liverpool.’
He went to Bolton, instead, managing the club for six-and-ahalf years and taking them to Wembley three times in pursuit of promotion and trophies, before managing Coventry City for 16 months in the Premier League.
It’s a measure of the brutal place football can be that Neal’s time working as assistant to Graham Taylor in the England set-up during the 1994 World Cup qualifiers is the managerial work he is best remembered for. Or, more precisely, his walk-on role in the fly-on-the-wall documentary,
The Impossible Job, in which Neal was characterised as the yes-man on the bench as England’s qualifying campaign crashed.
In his own autobiography, posthumously published last year, Taylor defended Neal. The assistant had agreed with him that Ian Wright should run on in a game because of ‘pre-match planning and preparation’. Taylor insisted: ‘Phil wasn’t blindly going along with what I said.’ Neal, not surprisingly, feels that the documentary misrepresented his role. ‘Absolutely, yes,’ he replies. ‘I got slaughtered for being this yes-man but no I wasn’t.’
He adds that the part of his England role the documentary didn’t mention was the unenviable task of trying to keep Paul Gascoigne on the straight and narrow.
‘Nightmare,’ he says. ‘You don’t realise what me and Lawrie McMenemy were up against with Gazza. You’d pick up a coffee mug and it would stink of brandy. You’d still be there at 11.30pm trying to get him to go to bed.’
Neal speaks with remarkable affection of the night the team arrived in the dressing room to find that Gascoigne had cut off the toes of every player’s socks. ‘He even cut up mine. I loved him to bits. But it was difficult,’ he says.
In truth, there would never, ever, be any place like Anfield.
The young people walking the stadium might be oblivious to Neal but their parents are not. ‘This is one of the greats,’ says one of at least 10 parents who stop him, in the two hours or so we are together for this interview. A tentative request for a photograph always follows and is always granted.
The museum staff are swamped with visitors in this holiday week, so Neal is also approached to ask if he he’d mind fetching the replica European Cup out of a store cupboard, for our photograph. He willingly takes the key.
‘Big handles,’ he says when he emerges with it. ‘We always liked the big handles. It helped us lift it high, all those times we won it.’
‘I loved Gazza to bits . . . but you’d pick up a coffee mug and smell the brandy’