ront-runner ...
Liverpool are hoping for a better season under club captain Steven
Gerrard, whom John Williams selects in his Anfield All-time XI.
Photograph: Jason Cairnduff/Action Images
English football is not strong on awareness, either of itself or
its history. The new season can be counted on to supply, despite
conclusive World Cup evidence to the contrary, claims that England's
Premier League is the best in the world, and historical perspectives
extending no further back than the creation of the EPL in 1992.
This double barrage demands countervailing voices to supply
more historically informed perspectives. The extent to which John
Williams does this is demonstrated in his variation on what, in other
hands, can be one of the most hackneyed devices in football writing –
the "All-time XI". Williams's selection from Liverpool's rich history gives this book a conclusion in keeping with its scope and ambition.
His team places the one contemporary choice, Steven Gerrard, in midfield alongside Alex Raisbeck, a Scotsman whose career with the club ended in 1909, and ranges so widely across the time in between that only two short spells, 1934 to 1939 and 1991 to 1995, go unrepresented.
This is a football history that wants to look beyond legend and living memory – in Liverpool's case much the same thing, given the massive shadow cast by the extraordinary achievements of teams built by Bill Shankly, manager from 1959 to 1974, and his immediate successors. The easy option is to focus on the years between 1963 and 1990, which brought 13 league championships, six European trophies and eight domestic cups – as many trophies as authentic giants such as Arsenal have won in their entire history – which many readers will know already.
Happily, Williams is more interested in telling them what they don't know. Shankly is vividly recaptured, but appears for the first time around two-thirds of the way through. The years since are certainly done justice, with acerbity about the failings of players such as the solipsistic Stan Collymore reflecting judgments born of personal observation as well as historic understanding.
Williams, though, knows that these years have been well worked over, not least by himself in four earlier books. His main concern is to rescue the club's earlier history from potential oblivion and cast it against a background of what was happening in sport, society and popular culture and in Liverpool as a community. He recounts the fluctuating fortunes of the city, its seaport and other industries, its people and the places where they lived, worshipped and shopped. It is striking to learn that only the intransigence of the Tory city council cost Liverpool a branch of Harrods in 1920, and entertaining to speculate about the long-term impact of a different outcome – but these digressions never obscure the central, football-based narrative that always foregrounds the club, its players, officials and supporters.
The story emerges through a lively year-by-year account, brought so up-to-date that it incorporates the appointment in June of the new manager, Roy Hodgson. It is told with a sharp eye for anecdote, colour and personality, rescuing from obscurity figures such as "the first great Liverpool manager", Tom Watson – nominated by Williams as assistant to Shankly in coaching the All-time XI – and interwar defender Jim "Parson" Jackson, who was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. A vital low-profile contributor such as Geoff Twentyman, the stalwart player-turned-chief-scout whose astute talent-spotting underpinned Liverpool's great years, gets his due too.
Williams is, refreshingly for a sociologist, more concerned with telling the story than drawing sweeping conclusions, although several lessons emerge. One, which has contemporary resonance, is that there is little new in current concern over a Liverpool squad almost entirely composed of bought-in talent. That early line-ups were so heavily populated by Scots they were known as "the team of the Macs" is, admittedly, not unusual among English clubs, but that interwar Liverpool teams often included as many South Africans as 21st-century England cricket XIs do certainly is.
The perspective of 118 years shows that the period 1963 to 1990, as deep purple a patch as has been contrived by almost any club in any sport, is exceptional in its history. But the other 91 years have still furnished 13 major trophies. However, as Williams explains, Liverpool spent much of their earlier history fruitlessly pursuing the FA Cup, a trophy not won until 1965, and playing second fiddle to local rivals Everton. He also reminds us that, despite their colours and Shankly's personal politics, the club could often have been characterised as "both conservative and Conservative".
Every club should have a chronicle like this, giving other fans who would kill for Liverpool's achievements – if not their current debt-bringing American ownership – one more reason for envy.
Huw Richards's The Red and the White is published by Aurum.
- Red Men: Liverpool Football Club - The Biography
- by John Williams
-
- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
His team places the one contemporary choice, Steven Gerrard, in midfield alongside Alex Raisbeck, a Scotsman whose career with the club ended in 1909, and ranges so widely across the time in between that only two short spells, 1934 to 1939 and 1991 to 1995, go unrepresented.
This is a football history that wants to look beyond legend and living memory – in Liverpool's case much the same thing, given the massive shadow cast by the extraordinary achievements of teams built by Bill Shankly, manager from 1959 to 1974, and his immediate successors. The easy option is to focus on the years between 1963 and 1990, which brought 13 league championships, six European trophies and eight domestic cups – as many trophies as authentic giants such as Arsenal have won in their entire history – which many readers will know already.
Happily, Williams is more interested in telling them what they don't know. Shankly is vividly recaptured, but appears for the first time around two-thirds of the way through. The years since are certainly done justice, with acerbity about the failings of players such as the solipsistic Stan Collymore reflecting judgments born of personal observation as well as historic understanding.
Williams, though, knows that these years have been well worked over, not least by himself in four earlier books. His main concern is to rescue the club's earlier history from potential oblivion and cast it against a background of what was happening in sport, society and popular culture and in Liverpool as a community. He recounts the fluctuating fortunes of the city, its seaport and other industries, its people and the places where they lived, worshipped and shopped. It is striking to learn that only the intransigence of the Tory city council cost Liverpool a branch of Harrods in 1920, and entertaining to speculate about the long-term impact of a different outcome – but these digressions never obscure the central, football-based narrative that always foregrounds the club, its players, officials and supporters.
The story emerges through a lively year-by-year account, brought so up-to-date that it incorporates the appointment in June of the new manager, Roy Hodgson. It is told with a sharp eye for anecdote, colour and personality, rescuing from obscurity figures such as "the first great Liverpool manager", Tom Watson – nominated by Williams as assistant to Shankly in coaching the All-time XI – and interwar defender Jim "Parson" Jackson, who was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. A vital low-profile contributor such as Geoff Twentyman, the stalwart player-turned-chief-scout whose astute talent-spotting underpinned Liverpool's great years, gets his due too.
Williams is, refreshingly for a sociologist, more concerned with telling the story than drawing sweeping conclusions, although several lessons emerge. One, which has contemporary resonance, is that there is little new in current concern over a Liverpool squad almost entirely composed of bought-in talent. That early line-ups were so heavily populated by Scots they were known as "the team of the Macs" is, admittedly, not unusual among English clubs, but that interwar Liverpool teams often included as many South Africans as 21st-century England cricket XIs do certainly is.
The perspective of 118 years shows that the period 1963 to 1990, as deep purple a patch as has been contrived by almost any club in any sport, is exceptional in its history. But the other 91 years have still furnished 13 major trophies. However, as Williams explains, Liverpool spent much of their earlier history fruitlessly pursuing the FA Cup, a trophy not won until 1965, and playing second fiddle to local rivals Everton. He also reminds us that, despite their colours and Shankly's personal politics, the club could often have been characterised as "both conservative and Conservative".
Every club should have a chronicle like this, giving other fans who would kill for Liverpool's achievements – if not their current debt-bringing American ownership – one more reason for envy.
Huw Richards's The Red and the White is published by Aurum.
