The Old Man - 'If Everton were playing at the bottom of your garden would you pull the curtains?'

My Old Man reminisces about one of Football's great men, Bill Shankly.

"It’s good to see Bill Shankly’s life and death quote in the main header for this blog. His famous phrase encapsulates all that you need to know about football in my humble opinion – it really is that serious, it really is more important than life or death, but you also need to approach it with a sense of fun, or else what is the point? First and foremost is it an entertainment.

As, perhaps, one of the... how shall I phrase this... more durably matured readers of this site, I thought it might be worth telling some of the younger whippersnappers out there a little more about Shankly. (How durably matured? Well, I wasn’t old enough to acknowledge his arrival as Liverpool manager but I was certainly in awe of the man by the time he left in 1974 – do the maths.)

The legendary Bill Shankly

Born in Glenbuck, Ayrshire, Bill Shankly had a pretty illustrious career as a player long before his world fame at the helm of Liverpool FC. He played for a number of clubs but is probably best known for his time at Preston North End. Was it notable? Preston thought enough of it to name one of their stands after him in the 90’s, so need I say more? However, his legendary status really took flight from the moment he joined Liverpool as manager in 1959.

His record speaks for itself and I don’t intend just delivering a parcel of facts about that; it is all too well known to require microscopic analysis. Instead I shall take as my cue the aforementioned life and death quote and turn my attention to some of his other dictums. 

Bill was once asked to compare a 1970’s star with his own old Preston teammate Tom Finney. He replied, ‘Aye, he’s as good as Tommy, but then Tommy’s nearly 60 now’. Mischievous at the very least, but perhaps not as much as when he responded to a reporter’s question by saying ‘When I’ve got nothing better to do, I look down the league table to see how Everton are doing’. 

Shankly was surely Liverpool’s greatest manager. Bob Paisley was more successful, indeed he is to this day the most successful British manager of all time, winning 19 trophies during nine years in charge. Joe Fagan won the first ever English double. Raphael Benitez, perhaps not a favourite to win a vote on the matter of best ever manager, won the European Cup, which was more than Shankly ever did, but that is not the point; the point is that Shankly arrived at Liverpool when they were at a very low ebb.

Having had peaks of success in the first half of the twentieth century, the club were in the doldrums by the 1950’s. Shankly got them promoted from Division 2 (now the Championship) within 2 seasons and went on to win the league three times (also managing runner-up position twice), won the FA Cup in two out of their three finals and paved the way for their phenomenal European glory years to follow. He retired with considerable regret in 1974. He was their greatest manager because he did for Liverpool what Abramovich allegedly did for Chelsea much later and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is allegedly doing for Manchester City most recently, except that he did it without ownership or the luxury of personal financial input or even the millions showered down from hte gods in television land. 

Using only the tools of belief (‘A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are’), arrogance (‘Me having no education, I had to use my brains.’) and a deep-rooted love of the game (‘What a great day for football, all we need is some green grass and a ball’), Shankly re-invented football in the 60’s and 70’s and probably began the process that paved the way for what we now see as the greatest top-flight league in the world.

He was tactically sound when he said to Ian St.John, 'If you're not sure what to do with the ball, just pop it in the net and we'll discuss your options afterwards' and he was wonderfully disarming about the fundamentals of the game when he delivered the immortal line, ‘A football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing’.

And yes, he did say something that prompted the title of this piece, but it was no question.

My own personal favourite? Like my music or film choices there are a great many more than ten in my top ten but I do like his response to being asked if it was true that he took his wife to a local match as an anniversary present. He replied, 'Of course I didn't take my wife to see Rochdale as an anniversary present. It was her birthday; would I have got married during the football season?’

I am sure that all those people deserve the recognition whose contribution to the game warrants the existence of a statue in their memory outside the relevant stadium of choice, but I doubt if anyone merits it quite as much as Shankly.

By the way, before you ask, I don’t support Liverpool; however, I do support football and it would be a much diminished game if characters like Bill Shankly had never graced its stage."