Inside Bob Paisley's Liverpool


Book Description

Many years have now passed since the greatest period of European dominance by any English football club came to an end. Between 1977 and 1984, Liverpool won the European Cup an unprecedented four times and established themselves as the number-one team in Europe. It was during the successful European Cup campaigns of 1981 and 1984 that the unlikely figure of Alan Kennedy came to dominate the headlines. Folk-hero left-back Alan Kennedy - nicknamed 'Barney Rubble' by fans after The Flintstones character due to his straightforward, no-frills approach to the game - scored the winning goal in the 1981 European Cup final against Real Madrid, as well as the nerve-twanging winning shoot-out penalty against AS Roma in 1984, a feat which secured his position in European football history. Kennedy's Way examines Kennedy's footballing career under manager Bob Paisley (and, later, under Joe Fagan) and provides a retrospective account of Liverpool's dominance during those years. Drawing on Kennedy's memories of the period, as well as those of other players and backroom staff involved with the Reds at that time, it is an irreverent, revealing account of the dressing-room culture at the club while it was at the height of its powers. The book concludes with reflections on Kennedy's post-playing life and on the trajectory of Liverpool since the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, in 1985 and 1989 respectively, right up to recent events at the club, including the exit of Gérard Houllier and the team's dramatic return to the pinnacle of European club football under new manager Rafael Benítez.




Quiet Genius


Book Description

The full story of the man who brought unprecedented – and since unmatched – success to Liverpool FC Bob Paisley was the quiet man in the flat cap who swept all domestic and European opposition aside and produced arguably the greatest club team that Britain has ever known. The man whose Liverpool team won trophies at a rate-per-season that dwarfs Sir Alex Ferguson's achievements at Manchester United and who remains the only Briton to lead a team to three European Cups. From Wembley to Rome, Manchester to Madrid, Paisley's team was the one no one could touch. Working in a city which was on its knees, in deep post-industrial decline, still tainted by the 1981 Toxteth riots and in a state of open warfare with Margaret Thatcher, he delivered a golden era – never re-attained since – which made the city of Liverpool synonymous with success and won them supporters the world over. Yet, thirty years since Paisley died, the life and times of this shrewd, intelligent, visionary, modest football man have still never been fully explored and explained. Based on in-depth interviews with Paisley's family and many of the players whom he led to an extraordinary haul of honours between 1974 and 1983, Quiet Genius is the first biography to examine in depth the secrets of Paisley's success. It inspects his man-management strategies, his extraordinary eye for a good player, his uncanny ability to diagnose injuries in his own players and the opposition, and the wicked sense of humour which endeared him to so many. It explores the North-East mining community roots which he cherished, and considers his visionary outlook on the way the game would develop. Quiet Genius is the story of how one modest man accomplished more than any other football manager, found his attributes largely unrecorded and undervalued and, in keeping with the gentler ways of his generation, did not seem to mind. It reveals an individual who seemed out of keeping with the brash, celebrity sport football was becoming, and who succeeded on his own terms. Three decades on from his death, it is a football story that demands to be told.







The Anatomy of Liverpool


Book Description

Jonathan Wilson and Scott Murray provide a forensic analysis of ten key Liverpool games that have shaped the club's fortunes over the last century: from the long-lost triumphs of Tom Watson (a 19th-century Bill Shankly) to 1970s European triumphs over the likes of Borussia Monchengladbach and the mind-blowing 2005 comeback against AC Milan. Aston Villa v. Liverpool April 1899 Wolves v. Liverpool May 1947 Liverpool v. Leeds FA Cup final, May 1965 Liverpool v. Crvena Zvezda November 1973 Liverpool v. Borussia Mönchengladbach European Cup final, May 1977 Liverpool v. Roma European Cup final, May 1984 Liverpool v. Nottingham Forest April 1988 Everton v. Liverpool February 1991 Roma v. Liverpool February 2001 AC Milan v. Liverpool Champions League final, May 2005




Red or Dead


Book Description

A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.




The Boot Room Boys


Book Description

Now also a new documentary film written and presented by Peter Hooton, The Boot Room Boys - BT Sport April 2022. The Boot Room story starts in 1959 when Bill Shankly arrived and converted a 12 x 12 storage room into a meeting place for him and his coaches, a move that had momentous consequences, both for the Club and British football. Fans on the Kop will remember the heart-stopping extra time of the 1965 FA Cup Final, and the jubilation of winning the treble in 1984. But what was the common thread during Liverpool's glory years? It was the Boot Room. Lifelong Liverpool supporter and editor of legendary fanzine The End, Peter Hooton takes us back into that old storage room, where first Shankly, then in succession Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish drank tea, analysed, strategised, selected and deselected, and built the most successful British club in Europe in the 20th Century. Illustrated throughout with over 100 powerful never-before-seen images from the Mirror's forgotten archives, The Boot Room Boys captures the story, as it unfolded, of Liverpool's conquering heroes.




61 Minutes in Munich


Book Description

In April 1981, Howard Gayle was summoned from the substitutes’ bench and sent on to play for Liverpool in the second leg of a European Cup semi-final at German champions Bayern Munich. The previous October, by filling the same role at Manchester City, he became the first black footballer in Liverpool’s 89-year history to play at first team level. Gayle’s Liverpool career proved to be short. He would pull on the red shirt only five times in total, scoring once. Yet he is remembered as a trailblazer. In 61 Minutes in Munich, Gayle takes you inside his life: bringing the shutters down on a childhood spent between Toxteth and Norris Green, two contrasting areas of Liverpool. He details life on the streets, the racism, the other forms of abuse, of which he has only told a handful of people before, and his ascent from teenage football hooligan to a player with Europe’s leading club. Gayle explains what it was like to be a black man with a profound sense of insecurity inside a Liverpool dressing room at the most successful point in the club’s history, a place where only the strongest survived. In Munich, Gayle ran Bayern’s defenders ragged and is credited by many as the catalyst for Liverpool’s progression to the final. And yet, by being substituted after 61 minutes on the pitch, he reveals his dismay at never being trusted to keep his cool in the most tense of environments. Gayle takes you to Newcastle, to Birmingham City, to Sunderland and Blackburn Rovers. He takes you back his modest home in the south end of Liverpool where it all began. Part social-history, part-autobiography, 61 Minutes in Munich is an exposition of life in the city of Liverpool during one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Above all it examines how a pioneer like Gayle has been up against it from the moment he was born.




Red Men


Book Description

In Red Men, a unique and exhaustively researched history of Liverpool Football Club, John Williams explores the origins and divisive politics of football in the city of Liverpool, and profiles the key men behind the emergence of the club and its early successes. The first great Liverpool manager, Tom Watson, piloted the club to its first league championships in 1901 and 1906 before taking the club to the FA Cup final in 1914. Watson and the key members of those early Liverpool teams are analysed in depth, as is the role of the club and its fans in the city as Merseyside balanced self-improvement and cosmopolitanism with almost unimaginable problems of poverty. Liverpool secured consecutive league titles in 1922 and 1923 with the incomparable goalkeeper Elisha Scott as its totemic star and the darling of the Kop. In the '20s, Liverpool was also the first British club to internationalise its playing staff. The club's next league title came in 1947, but, in the bleak '50s, the Liverpool board ruled with an iron fist and controlled the purse strings - until Bill Shankly arrived and won that elusive first FA Cup in 1965. The recent tragedies that have shaped the club's contemporary identity are also covered here, as are the new Continental influences at Liverpool and, of course, the glory of Istanbul in 2005. Red Men is the definitive history of a remarkable football club from its formation in 1892 to the present day, told in the wider context of the social and cultural development of the city of Liverpool and its people.




Bob Paisley


Book Description




Red or Dead


Book Description

A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.