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Liverpool’s unforgettable 1983-84 season
by Tony Evans
Penguin, £9.99
Reviewed by Jonathan Paxton
From WSC 343 September 2015

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On paper Liverpool’s 1984 treble winners were a surprisingly ordinary side. Even with Graeme Souness, Ian Rush and an occasionally fit Kenny Dalglish, this was a team in transition under new manager Joe Fagan, one that could lose 4-0 at Coventry and in which Michael Robinson could hold down a regular place. Tony Evans, a Liverpool fan who attended nearly all the games that season, holds them in higher regard than the statistically superior and more skilful sides of either 1979 or 1988 and his adoration shines through, if sometimes a little too brightly.

An experienced journalist, at the Times until recently, Evans writes from the perspective of an ardent fan of both club and city. The book’s title (an obscure Chris Rea track, apparently popular only in the Anfield dressing room) and the cover artwork suggest a nostalgic, feel good story but despite the team’s success, attendances are low and the city is struggling economically. Some interesting social and political asides featuring Derek Hatton and Margaret Thatcher are touched upon but the book’s focus never strays far from football.

Through interviews with team members, we find a mainly happy squad but a social group with a heavy drinking culture that new signings and reserve players find daunting. The much eulogised bootroom is presented as dingy with paint flaking off the walls and around the training ground there is an atmosphere of intimidation that sometimes approaches bullying. New boy Craig Johnston is ridiculed for his diet and fitness regime and, in one of the book’s most interesting sections, his failure to hold down a first-team place pushes him close to a breakdown.  Meanwhile, Alan Kennedy’s happy-go-lucky attitude seems to be what cements his position in the side and Fagan struggles to shape a midfield to cover the clumsy defender without ever considering a replacement left-back.

Fagan himself remains an elusive enigma, mainly because the manager was so private and reluctant to speak to the media. His is clearly respected by his players and a good motivator, yet we don’t get the impression he had the wit or tactical insight to compare with his predecessors Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. Even through quotes from his diary we struggle to get to know Fagan the man. Entries such as “Well the lads did it, each one deserved a medal” suggest that he was dull and unimaginative.

Evans does tell a good story and undoubtedly loves his subject. Sometimes though rambling quotes from players can be overlong and struggle to explain a point clearly, and when the squad travel to Denmark the journalist in Evans can’t resist a Hans Christian Andersen/fairytale analogy. At points it reads like a hagiography of the team, particularly Souness who kicks and punches his way through matches but is lifted to the status of demi-god by the author. Like Souness, this book may not be universally popular outside of Anfield but it stands as an interesting if rose-tinted review of what was a very successful team.

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A history in ten matches
by Jonathan Wilson with Scott Murray
Orion, £18.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 325 March 2014

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As author of Inverting The Pyramid and The Anatomy Of England, both of which cast a clinical eye over the cultural shifts in football tactics over the past century, Jonathan Wilson is well placed to take the same approach to Liverpool. This insightful, highly readable book attempts to map the evolution of the club through ten specific matches. The idea, he points out, is to choose games that aren’t necessarily the most memorable. Instead they’re the ones that “lie on the faultlines of history, marking the end of one era or the beginning of the next”.

Thus, we have the European Cup second round defeat to Red Star Belgrade in November 1973. Already trailing 2-1 from the first leg, a similar reverse at Anfield becomes the catalyst for a change in Bill Shankly’s philosophy. The realisation hits that traditional English attributes such as pace and power are no longer enough when it comes to playing continental teams with superior technical know-how. Shankly began refining his pass-and-move principles as a direct result of being booted out of Europe that year, resulting in a style that placed greater emphasis on patient build-up play and possession.

It was a method that paid dividends in the 3-1 defeat of Borussia Mönchengladbach in the 1977 final, by which time Bob Paisley was in charge. He is often painted as a more avuncular version of hardman Shankly, but Wilson posits the idea that both men were actually the exact opposite of their public personas. There’s little sentiment with Paisley, even banning Shankly from the Melwood training ground. If Shankly’s brand of football was an extension of his socialist principles, Paisley was far more prosaic. All that mattered was winning football matches.

Elsewhere, Kenny Dalglish’s sudden abdication after the 4-4 draw with Everton in February 1991 is seen as especially pivotal. Entertaining as it may have been to the neutral, the manner of the opposition goals exposed the cracks in a rapidly ageing Liverpool team whose last signing was the spectacularly ordinary Jimmy Carter. Dalglish had simply drained himself of all energy. With no readymade successor in the wings, Wilson makes a valid claim that this game (and the manager’s decision to resign straight after) “was a blow from which Liverpool have arguably never recovered”.

There’s also room, predictably, for the Champions League final in Istanbul. Much has been made of the Liverpool fans’ stirring rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone as the pep for their side’s improbable second-half comeback. But Wilson instead points at key moments on the field of play as the triggers, not least Sami Hyypia somehow escaping a red card after hauling down Kaká when the Brazilian was clean through to make it 4-0 just after the break.

Above all, The Anatomy Of Liverpool is an engrossing account of a sporting institution forging its identity through the post-war years. Some of the detail is priceless too (Shankly playing his Desert Island Discs show on the coach to the 1965 Cup final; Berti Vogts seeking out Kevin Keegan to buy him a drink in recognition of the Liverpool man giving him the complete runaround). Highly recommended.

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King and country
by Alex Gordon
Arena, £17.99
Reviewed by Archie MacGregor
From WSC 323 January 2014

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It’s easy to understand why Denis Law was, and still is, idolised by so many Scotland fans. As this chronicle of his international career reminds us, he just loved pulling on the navy blue jersey. There’s a palpable sense that he was just as excited and proud about his last cap – in Scotland’s opening 1974 World Cup group match against Zaire – as he was when he made his debut against Wales in 1958.

He could play a bit too, which helped of course. Law remains, alongside Kenny Dalglish, his country’s record goalscorer with 30 to his name. Twice he scored four goals in a game and he put a few in the back of the net against England. No doubting the iconic status of “the Lawman” then, but the trouble is this book just about goes right off the scale with the adulation. Superlatives are served up by the trowel – there’s just about a different one for every goal that Law scored in his entire senior career and he got 325 of them. So it’s not only the constant references to games from the Home Internationals and Scotland appearing in World Cup finals that evoke a bygone age. In an era where the warts-and-all biography laden with tales of compulsive behaviour disorders and dysfunctional relationships within dressing rooms is now the accepted norm you are left craving more gritty insight.

While the idiosyncratic Aberdonian seems nothing other than a down-to-earth type there are still a few aspects of his international career that would surely have justified some considered scrutiny. It’s widely accepted that spanning the 1960s the Scotland team, blessed with talents such as Law, Jim Baxter, Jimmy Johnstone and others, underperformed by quite a margin in World Cup and European Championship qualifiers, failing to reach the finals of either between 1958 and 1974. Just how much did the obsession with giving the English a right doing, personified by Law, distort and distract the national side’s focus?

Even when Law was part of the squad that was taken to the 1974 finals there was a fair bit of hullabaloo about his inclusion which is only lightly dwelt upon here. It’s pointed out that then manager Willie Ormond robustly defended the decision – however the fact that he was immediately dropped after the Zaire opener is surely a pointer that this was an issue worthy of more thoughtful examination. The trials and frustrations that Law faced with his lengthy injury woes and loss of form from 1967 onwards is another facet barely touched on.

Still, if as a kid like me you went around parading the trademark clenched cuff salute every time you scored a goal in the playground, there is probably more than enough here for you to enjoy wallowing in the nostalgia. It’s just a shame we don’t learn as much about Law the enigma as Law the legend.

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My life in football
by Howard Kendall
De Coubertin Books, £20
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 323 January 2014

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There is a lovely anecdote in Howard Kendall’s new autobiography about the day he signed Dave Watson for Everton from Norwich City. It was two days before the start of the 1986-87 season and Kendall’s attempt to complete the deal by five o’clock, so ensuring Watson’s availability for the opening fixture, had failed. Undeterred, he had the clock on the wall turned back an hour and got Watson to pose for a photo beneath it. “The Football League accepted it and Dave made his debut,” he writes.

Timing is a recurring theme in this recounting of Kendall’s career. He was ahead of his time as both a player and manager. He became the youngest player in an FA Cup final when, at 17 years and 345 days, he appeared for Preston against West Ham in 1964. At 20 he was wanted by Bill Shankly but joined Everton instead. He entered management with Blackburn at 33, winning promotion immediately. With Everton, he won the League, FA Cup and European Cup-Winners Cup before his 39th birthday.

So much so young, yet Kendall’s timing was out in one crucial respect: the post-Heysel ban denied Everton European Cup football and he cites this as the reason he left for Athletic Bilbao in 1987 (as a 45-year-old Alex Ferguson was still settling in at Old Trafford). Familiar stuff but what is new here is the revelation that an unnamed “Liverpool executive” had recommended him to Athletic after blocking their move for Kenny Dalglish – a “grim irony” indeed for Evertonians.

Written with James Corbett, who collaborated on Neville Southall’s autobiography, Love Affairs & Marriage: My Life in Football is very much what the second part of the title tells us. As befits an old-school gentleman, Kendall barely mentions his private life and dwells only briefly on potential controversies such as his departure from Notts County amid “ridiculous allegations” (unspecified here but drink-related). Yet there is much to enjoy nonetheless, not least the account of how he assembled his great Everton side in an era when a manager could create something special with a combination of homegrown talents, astute transfer dealings (he recalls the gambles taken on the injury-prone Peter Reid and Andy Gray), a trusting chairman – and morale-building Chinese dinners.

Kendall, with his man-management skills and love of the training pitch, differed so much from his own Everton boss Harry Catterick – from whom, he notes, he learned just one football lesson in six and a half years – yet the big question mark of his career is why after so much early success, his only subsequent trophy was an Anglo-Italian Cup with Notts County in 1995. Kendall reflects on his two less happy spells at Goodison in the 1990s, noting the lack of boardroom support and arguing that the influx of big money into the game meant it was no longer possible to build success on a budget. “Players were harder to sign,” laments the man whose first Everton buy, Southall, was recommended by a friend who ran a Llandudno pub. The end result is he was effectively finished as a manager at just 52 – a man out of time once more.

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From the other end of the ground Nottingham Forest fans looked on as the disaster unfolded in front of them, recalls Ian Preece

Pretty much every account of Hillsborough seems to mention the weather. The truth is it was an incredibly beautiful morning: blue skies, fluffy white clouds, just a bit chilly in the shade – but the forecast was great. Winter was over and if there was a morning to put the proverbial spring in your stride, this was it.

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