Ian St John
Key member of Bill Shankly’s great Liverpool side of the 1960s and popular TV pundit
IAN St John, who has died aged 82, was a key member of the great Liverpool team built by Bill Shankly and will be remembered at Anfield for scoring the goal that brought the club its first FA Cup; later, he had a long career as a television presenter for ITV, notably in tandem with Jimmy Greaves.
Together with the giant centre-half Ron Yeats, St John was regarded by Shankly as the most important signing he made. He saw the pair as the missing pieces of the jigsaw he had been trying to solve since being appointed Liverpool’s manager two years earlier in 1959, with the Merseysiders seemingly mired in the Second Division.
St John’s principal assets were an ability to read the game that made him both a creator and finisher of chances, and a combativeness that allowed him to outmuscle defenders often much larger than he. St John was just 5ft 7in, but he attributed to his youthful training as a boxer the strong legs that enabled him to leap unexpectedly high for headers and his refusal to be intimidated by brutal challenges.
At Liverpool, he rapidly forged a lethal partnership up front with Roger Hunt. This paid immediate dividends when the side swept to the Second Division title in 1962. The next season, they gave notice of the force Shankly had harnessed when reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup.
The year after, however, they won the league title for the first time in nearly two decades, making up 17 points on Manchester United and with St John scoring 19 times in 40 matches. Then, in 1965, came the Cup, with St John sealing the 2-1 victory over Leeds near the end of extra-time with a snapped header from Ian Callaghan’s cross.
It was St John who suggested the addition of red socks to what became the famous all-red strip. By the end of the 1960s, St John, who had scored 118 goals in 424 appearances, was increasingly troubled by an old knee injury, yet even so he was shocked to find himself dropped from the side.
He especially resented discovering it from Jackie Milburn, the Newcastle great who had become a reporter, rather than from Shankly himself, and his bond with his fellow Scot was never fully repaired.
Ian St John was born in Motherwell, near Glasgow, on June 7, 1938. One of six children, he was the son of a steelworker who died of pleurisy when St John was six.
Accordingly, he grew up in some hardship, in a cold-water tenement block, helping his mother to make ends meet by taking on odd jobs from an early age.
He left school at 15, first for a job at the local coachworks and then for one as an engineering apprentice.
Football was his first love, and at 16 he was taken on by his home town club. After leaving Anfield, St John saw out his playing days in South Africa and briefly at Coventry, before hanging up his boots in 1973. A largely unhappy spell in management followed before he moved to TV in 1977.
He worked initially as a pundit, and then with the former England striker Greaves presented ITV’s Saturday lunchtime football preview show Saint and Greavsie from 1979 until the era of Sky dawned in 1992.
The programme attracted audiences of more than five million and helped to confirm that ITV had broken the stranglehold over the sport held for so long by the more formal style of the BBC.
Away from football, he relaxed on the golf course, often playing with his wife, Betsy. They had married when he was 20, and she supported him loyally in all he did. He is survived by Betsy and their daughter and son. Another son died in infancy.