Bill Shankly to Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish: how the legend of Liverpool was built

EVER since the day Bill Shankly arrived with a brief to overhaul the club, Liverpool’s fortunes have exerted an almost bewildering emotional pull on fans around the world.

Anfield is heaving for another big Liverpool game.

THE walk along Anfield Road towards one of the world’s most famous stadiums is distinctly low-key, snaking past the fish and chip bar and The Arkles pub.

But as you get closer the back of one stand looms larger, until suddenly Anfield is right in front of you, and the myriad influences that make up the legend of Liverpool FC are everywhere to see.

Some of the most iconic elements have moved position slightly amid the stadium’s redevelopment, but they’re all still there — the statue of Bill Shankly, the manager who built the modern club; the Shankly Gates; the memorial to the 96 who died in the Hillsborough disaster.

Anfield is heaving for another big game

The fact the stadium is hemmed in by rows of terraced housing emphasises how locked in to the image of the city are the fortunes of the football club.

Ever since the day 57-and-a-half years ago that Shankly arrived from Huddersfield Town with a brief to overhaul Liverpool FC, the club’s fortunes have exerted an almost bewildering emotional pull on supporters around the world.

The fact that for much of the last 25 years the club has lived in the shadow of the success of Manchester United, Arsenal and latterly Manchester City and Chelsea, just makes that pull appear even stronger.

If there is guarded optimism that the charismatic management of Jurgen Klopp will translate into a first title of the EPL era, there have been too many near misses in recent years for any poultry numbering from those in red.

For Liverpool fans of a certain vintage, the EPL titles amassed in Manchester and west and north London gall because they remember what it was like to dominate the game.

It wasn’t just the sheer amount of titles procured by first Shankly and then his successors Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish, with league championships and European cups piled up.

The statue of former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly at Anfield.

There was also a romance and a mystique developed along the way. Quite how a song from a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical became one of the most iconic sporting anthems in the world would need a feature in its own right, but the mass rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone still raises the hairs of even a neutral’s neck like few others.

The fact that Liverpool’s managers for years were promoted from within created the legend of the Anfield boot room, the inner sanctum where the coaching brains trust plotted the apparently limitless success.

Shankly began fostering the growing might of Liverpool off the field and on, not least with a succession of one-liners: “Look laddie,” he once told striker Ian St John, “if you’re in the penalty area and wondering what to do with the ball, put it in the back of the net and we’ll talk about your options afterwards.”

But, of course, his most famous quip of all, about football being more important than life and death, lost its meaning during the second half of the 1980s.

First came the Heysel disaster, when 39 Juventus fans died under a collapsing wall retreating from Liverpool supporters at a stadium in Belgium; and then came the horrors of Hillsborough when 96 blameless Liverpool supporters were crushed to death in 1989.

Both are hugely emotive parts of the club’s history; Heysel led to all English clubs being banned from European competitions for years, as well as manslaughter charges for some fans.

Liverpool fans launch into a rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

But Hillsborough remains an ongoing sore for utterly different reasons, thanks to a long campaign to clear the names of the supporters who died and which only last year resulted in a coronial verdict of unlawful killing.

All of it, triumph and tragedy, is bound up in the richest possible of football club histories.

Next month Liverpool celebrates its 125th anniversary, and next season supporters will dare to dream once more that this time it really will be their year — that, to paraphrase their song, a storm of near misses and falling short will end with a golden sky, and Liverpool’s first title win of the Premier League era.

Originally published as Bill Shankly to Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish: how the legend of Liverpool was built