Shankly was the original modern manager... he even changed the clutch on Keegan’s Capri to help cure an injury
HE recalled there were two roads leading from the village carved into a wind- smacked Ayrshire hillside: one was red and one was white.
The colours meant everything to Bill Shankly. The roads of Glenbuck stayed with him so that, 63 years after his birth, Shankly mentioned them in the opening sentence of his autobiography. For the man who founded a modern sporting colossus, red and white signified Liverpool Football Club, Anfield and Bill Shankly’s destiny.
There is scant trace of either colour today. As Anfield, and beyond, prepares to mark the centenary of Shankly’s birth on Monday, Glenbuck is all but gone. It is a lost world, literal and metaphorical.
There is some red shingle up the slope from the small Shankly memorial stone that once stood as the entrance to Glenbuck, but there is no mining village any more. There is no village.
As Shankly reconstructed a Liverpool club that was in the old Second Division when he arrived in 1959, which had never won the FA Cup and which was in the midst of a 17-year wait for a League title, Glenbuck was rusting into the dirt.
Eventually it became an opencast mine, a scar. The deep pits, where Shankly went to work at 14, were closed down, the people left. Finally the houses were bulldozed. Today there is one wooden shack remaining; even the village sign that said ‘Glenbuck, birthplace of Bill Shankly’ has gone, its two grey poles standing pointless.
On a warm August day, there was an eerie cold. Shankly would not recognise much of this moonscape compared to the busy community he and his nine siblings were born into. The pitch of the famous Glenbuck Cherrypickers could not be found. But he would understand the desolation.
‘No disrespect to Glenbuck,’ Shankly wrote, ‘but you would have been as far away from civilisation in Outer Mongolia... but we had our pride and our characters, who made the world their own, the best of a bad lot, the best of isolation.’ BILL SHANKLY made the world his own. From isolation and cold came sparkle and warmth. Shankly possessed a magical energy expressed in a voice of lyrical Scottish tenacity. ‘An irresistible mixture,’ as Ian Callaghan once put it. ‘Like James Cagney,’ said Roger Hunt.
Shankly teemed with ideas, knowledge, enthusiasm — and with colours, more than simply red and white.
‘The affection went beyond Liverpool and it went both ways,’ said Ian St John, whom Shankly referred to as a ‘cornerstone’ signing.
‘Shanks loved other fans, other players, and they all loved talking to him. Players liked to come to Anfield to speak to Shanks. Everyone wanted to speak to him. He was a man of the people.’ final statement- victory over Newcastle. It also involved him changing Liverpool’s shorts and socks from their previous white. It was November 1964 and, after promotion in 1962, Liverpool had just won the League for the first time since 1947. The kit would now be all red.
‘Big Ronnie Yeats was modelling the shirt with the new red shorts,’ St John remembered. ‘Real Madrid were all white, so I mentioned changing the socks, too. I planted a seed, that’s all. Shanks got the socks changed. Liverpool were all red.’
It was one of numerous changes Shankly made. Some would outlast him: Liverpool, for example, went into Europe in ’64 after that League title and stayed there for 21 seasons. That altered their approach and, because they were successful, that altered English and European football.
It all began in 1959 when Shankly left Huddersfield Town for Anfield.
‘ When Shanks arrived he described Liverpool as the biggest toilet in the world — the pitch, the training ground,’ said St John. ‘The club was antiquated. But he’d tell you that he had played there and knew what the crowd were like: ‘‘They’re like Glasgow people and if we get a team here and stimulate them, then…’’ When he signed me he just walked into the Motherwell dressing room after a game and said: ‘‘Hello, Bill Shankly, Liverpool Football Club. You’re coming to Liverpool.’’
‘Can you believe it? All the lads say the same: ‘‘Hello, Bill Shankly, Liverpool Football Club.”
‘I was going to join Newcastle — they’d tapped me up — and Shankly obviously knew. The next morning I was in the car on the way down to Liverpool. You couldn’t turn him down.’
That makes it sound straightforward but Shankly’s internal battles with directors at Anfield meant he was still complaining more than a decade later about them not raising the £18,000 offer — ‘not a lot more’ — for Jack Charlton that would have made him Shankly’s first signing. He offered his resignation in 1967 when Howard Kendall joined Everton instead of Liverpool.
Shankly’s relationship with directors was very different to that with players and fans. His charismatic wit was fundamental to his personal and national appeal. As he said to Tommy Smith: ‘Take that bandage off. And what do you mean about your knee? It’s Liverpool’s knee.’
But Peace may be right that remarks such as this and the famous ‘matter of life and death’ have been ‘stripped from their context’.
It downgrades Shankly’s achievement, his attention to detail, even if it verged on the eccentric. Before the historic 1965 FA Cup final against Leeds, this entailed Shankly ordering ‘an empty bus to follow us to Wembley from our hotel in Weybridge just in case there was a breakdown’.
Then there was Kevin Keegan’s new Ford Capri. It coincided with Keegan having a foot injury. As Keegan has recalled: ‘Shanks told Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley that it was the clutch that was the problem. So three of the best football brains in English football history went out into the car park and refitted my clutch.’
Or the ‘strength and fitness’ — a phrase Shankly was using 50 years ago — that Glenbuck’s residents
THE novelist David Peace, author of The Damned Utd, has just published
a 714- page, loving autopsy of Shankly’s Liverpool years and sad retirement, called Red or Dead.
‘People all around the country identified with Shankly because he was the manager you’d want at your club,’ said Peace. ‘He didn’t speak at people, he spoke for people. Look at the way he spoke for the Kop, the communal self-belief.
‘Part of my reason for writing the book was that I felt Shankly had been reduced to this collection of witticisms, when he meant much more than that. My son is 16 and he knows who Bill Shankly is but I look around and wonder where those figures are today. Shankly was a man who believed in a different way and who behaved in a different way.’
Stylistically, Peace’s book is challenging, but the appetite for Shankly means it is already on to a third reprint. Tomorrow at Anfield, Liverpool will stage a minute’s applause before kick- off against Manchester united.
‘ The reaction has been overwhelming at times,’ added Peace. ‘The grandchildren of Shankly have been very supportive and that’s a real Shankly quality: thinking the best of people and bringing out the best in people.’
Peace recalled that, when Shankly died in September 1981, the Labour Party conference in Brighton held a minute’s silence ‘because he was a national figure’.
He was old Labour. Shankly’s Red-ness extended to him talking about socialism on the pitch at Wembley after the 1974 FA Cup
said had fascinated him even back then. Peace notes in his book that, when Liverpool beat Leeds 1-0 in March 1974 — a Steve Heighway goal — it was the 13th time that season Liverpool won a match with a goal in the last 10 minutes.
‘He had an obsession with fitness that is now taken for granted,’ said Peace. ‘He was also very keen on diet, he was like an Arsene Wenger before his time. Goals in the last 10 minutes come from that, but also from his sheer bloody determination.
‘Memory is so short-term, people now think of Sir Alex Ferguson’s teams winning late on, but it was happening before him. And Ferguson basically worshipped Shankly — he played tape recordings of Shankly on the Aberdeen team bus.’ YOu could go on about Shankly’s impact upon football and Liverpool — the ‘This Is Anfield’ sign was a Shankly installation — because an entrancing man ripples still.
ultimately his sudden retirement in 1974, aged 60, led to a bitter aftermath and what looks now like a premature death at 68.
Shankly felt overlooked and unwanted by the club that he, more than anyone, rebuilt. In Peace’s book there is a moving passage on Shankly in Rome in 1977 among Liverpool fans in the car park after they had won a trophy that had eluded him — the European Cup. It feels as poignant now as then.
The issue burns on in men like Keegan who, on several occasions, has said that the Shankly Gates at Anfield are ‘not enough’.
But, as Shankly said in retirement, regretfully: ‘Whilst you love football, it is a hard, relentless task which goes on and on like a river.’
If this tone clashes with the inspirational memory of a once-ina-lifetime man, the smiles Shankly spread across Britain and his sheer goodness, which Peace emphasises, it was still a pertinent analogy.
The Ayr River has its source in Glenbuck. From there flowed Bill Shankly all the way to Anfield — red, rousing and, 100 years on, forever.