Shankly loved his working class hero

HIS nickname was ‘the Anfield Iron’ and Bill Shankly contributed to the sense that there was not much light and shade about Tommy Smith when he said: ‘He wasn’t born, he was quarried.’ What Smith’s uncompromising reputation obscured was a football brain and an ability on the ball as good as it came but Smith’s natural energy sometimes needed reining in. When Liverpool were beaten in the 1965 European Cup semifinal in Milan and the referee’s performance left the impression that he intended to ease the home team’s safe passage, it was an incensed Smith who manhandled the official and kicked out at him as the sides trooped off. Shankly quietly approved. After Bob Paisley succeeded Shankly in 1974, he wanted ballplaying defenders and within a year, younger and more mobile individuals such as Phil Neal and Joey Jones were edging Smith and Alec Lindsay out. Paisley’s captain Emlyn Hughes had suggested to the manager that new personnel were in order, which Paisley managed to blurt out in of front of the team. ‘I’ll knock the living daylights out of you,’ said Smith, who never forgave Hughes. But it was he who prevailed. By the time of the 1977 European Cup final in Rome — still the night of all nights for Liverpool fans of a certain age — Smith was in the side. His headed goal, putting Liverpool 2-1 ahead, was actually part of a planned strategy in which Smith played his part to perfection. Paisley wanted him to be in the 1978 team which successfully defended the trophy against Bruges at Wembley but Smith had dropped a pickaxe on his foot in the process of doing improvements to his home. He built his own house and had carried out ground repairs at Anfield with Paisley during their first summers together at the club in the 1960s. Different days. His insight into the tactical improvements Paisley brought after Shankly left were shrewd, especially in European competition. Smith discerned, perhaps more than others, how fearful Paisley was about the job he had been handed. He also understood as much as any the rules and hierarchies of the fabled Boot Room — a place where, as a player, you did not trespass. He always remembered how he had one day put the Boot Room carpet out for sweeping and been told in no uncertain terms to put it back. Liverpool mourns a man who was the soul of the working class city, its working class supporters and its changing times. The little aphorisms about him did him an injustice in so many ways yet he fed upon them and loved them still. ‘Merseyside mothers kept his picture on the mantelpiece,’ a beaming Shankly once said of him. ‘To keep their kids away from the fire.’