Episode 4 : This Is Anfield - The Peak and the Farewell Duration (1966–1974)

At some point in the late 1960s, the sign appeared above the tunnel at Anfield. Four words: THIS IS ANFIELD. It was Shankly's idea. He wanted the opposing players to feel it as they walked out — the weight of the place, the history of it, the crowd waiting above. It worked. It still works.

Episode Four covers Shankly's second great era — the rebuilding after the first team aged, the arrivals of Kevin Keegan, Emlyn Hughes, and John Toshack, the UEFA Cup and league double of 1973, the 3-0 FA Cup final demolition of Newcastle in 1974. And then, on 12 July 1974, the announcement that no one believed: Shankly was retiring. The aftermath — his regret, his semi-exile from the club he had built, his death in 1981 — is one of football's most painful stories.

Player of the Era: Kevin Keegan — £33,000 from Scunthorpe; grew into one of Europe's finest players; the embodiment of what Shankly could see in people before they could see it themselves.

Research Sources

Dave Bowler, Shanks: The Authorised Biography of Bill Shankly (Orion, 1996) — essential for the retirement decision, the aftermath, and Shankly's own statements about what happened; the most authoritative account of the final years at Liverpool

Kevin Keegan, My Autobiography (Little, Brown, 1997) — Keegan's account of his time at Liverpool, the culture under Shankly, and the specific detail of the 1971 signing and its aftermath

Stephen F. Kelly, The Boot Room Boys (1999) — for the coaching staff's perspective on the transition from Shankly to Paisley, and the institutional culture that made it possible

Brian Pead, Liverpool: A Complete Record — season results, scorelines, and European match details throughout this period

Nessie Shankly, various interviews (ITV, BBC) — Nessie's accounts of her husband's state of mind in retirement are the most candid available source on the psychological cost of his departure

John Williams, Red Men — social and cultural context of the early 1970s Anfield

Transcript

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At some point in the late 1960s, no one can pin the exact date, and perhaps that is fitting. A sign was bolted to the wall of the tunnel at Anfield. Players from both teams walked beneath it on their way to the pitch. The home team saw it going out. The away team saw it coming in. Four words, white letters on a green background. This is Anfield. It was Shankly's idea. He wanted the opposing players to feel the weight of the place as they walked out, the history in the walls, the crowd gathering above, the knowledge that they were entering somewhere that had been made through a decade of absolute conviction into something formidable. It worked. It still works. Players still touch the sign as they pass beneath it. It still functions. Fifty years later, as a piece of psychological architecture, the statement of a club that knows exactly what it is. Welcome back to Reds Through the Ages. This is episode 4. This is Anfield. Today we cover the years from 1966 to 1974. The end of Shankly's first great side, the rebuilding of his second, the UEFA Cup and the title, the FA Cup at Wembley in 1974, and then the announcement that nobody in English football saw coming. The announcement that Shankly himself almost immediately seemed to regret. This episode ends where episode three began, with a man standing in front of Anfield, reconsidering everything. But the emotion, this time, is entirely different. This is episode four, this is Anfield. The Britain that Liverpool Football Club inhabited between 1966 and 1974 was a country in the middle of an argument with itself about what it was and what it wanted to be. The optimism of the early 1960s, the sense of a society loosening, opening up, moving, had not exactly curdled, but it had complicated. The industrial North was beginning to feel the first pressures of the de-industrialization that would define the 1970s and devastate the 1980s. Liverpool's docks, still a major employer, were under pressure from containerisation. A technological shift that would, within two decades, make much of the labour-intensive dock work redundant. The city that had built itself on the waterfront was starting to understand that the waterfront was changing. English football in this period was at a particular crossroads. The 1966 World Cup, hosted in England, won by England, with Roger Hunt in the squad, had given the domestic game an enormous burst of pride and attention. Attendances were high, television coverage was expanding, and Europe was becoming central to English football's ambitions in a way it had not been before. The European Cup, which had been the preserve of continental giants since its founding in 1955, was now something that English clubs believed they could win. Manchester United proved it in 1968, beating Benfica at Wembley. Liverpool, watching from a near-miss distance, understood that the continent was where their ambitions had to point. At Anfield, the specific world of the late 1960s was shaped by the COP. Now fully formed as a cultural institution, not just a terrace. The singing, the wit, the collective identity of 50 or 60,000 people on a European night under the floodlights. These were the years when Anfield became Anfield in the fullest sense. Not just a ground where Liverpool played, but a place that had a character of its own. Intimate and vast simultaneously, intimidating and welcoming, depending on which side of the touchline you were standing. The sign above the tunnel was an expression of something that already existed. Shankly put it in words. The cop had been living it for years. The back-to-back champions of 1964 and 1966 were, by the standards of top flight English football, an old team. St. John was 28 when the second title was won. Yates was 27. Roger Hunt was 25. Still physically capable, but the side that had swept the second division, and then the first, was built on a collective energy that could not last indefinitely. Shankly knew this better than anyone. The art of football management, the part that separates the great managers from the merely good ones, is knowing when to rebuild before the evidence becomes undeniable. Shankly was not always perfect at this, but in the late 1960s, he at least saw it clearly. The three seasons between 1966 and 1969 were years of transition, competitive enough, with top five finishes, strong European runs, and the kind of performances that reminded opponents that Liverpool remained formidable. But without the trophy return that the supporters had come to expect, there were European semi-finals, a 1-0 aggregate defeat to Ajax in 1966-67, when a Johann Cruyff barely out of his teens gave Liverpool's defence a glimpse of a kind of football they had not encountered before, and a narrow exit to Feyenoord in 1970 that stung Shankley considerably. Europe was tantalisingly close and kept retreating. The domestic picture was similarly frustrating without being disastrous. Liverpool finished third in 1967-68, second in 1968-69, fifth in 1969-70. Affairs Cup final defeat to Arsenal over two legs in 1971. The trophies were not coming, and the reason was clear. The first great team was past its best, and the replacements were not yet ready to take over. Shankly, characteristically, had begun to address this problem even before it fully announced itself. The new Liverpool that Shanckley built in the early 1970s was different in character from the first. Where St. John and Yates and Hunt had been direct, physical, relentless, a side that wore teams down through organization and intensity, the second great team was more varied, more tactically sophisticated, with players who could do things the first side could not. Emlyn Hughes arrived from Blackpool in 1967 for £65,000. A young, ferociously energetic midfielder whose enthusiasm occasionally outran his positioning, but whose commitment was absolute and whose leadership instincts Shankly identified immediately. Hughes would eventually captain England and become one of the most recognizable footballers of the decade. At Liverpool, under Shankly, he grew from a raw, slightly undisciplined talent into a genuine leader. Steve Highway, signed in 1970, a winger of genuine pace and intelligence, a graduate of Skelmersdale United and the University of Warwick, which made him something of an oddity in the professional game of the early 1970s. John Toshak arrived from Cardiff City for £110,000 in the same year. A tall, intelligent Welsh striker whose aerial ability and link play complemented the player Shankly had already identified as the most important signing of this rebuilding phase. Kevin Keegan, from Scunthorpe United, for £33,000. Keegan was 20 years old when he arrived at Anfield in the summer of 1971. He had played one season in the 4th Division. He was short, quick, and relentlessly determined. A player who seemed to function on a different energy source from ordinary people, who trained harder than anyone else, and played with a concentration that was almost frightening in its totality. Shankly saw in Keegan what he had seen in St. John a decade earlier. Not what the player was, but what he could become. And what Shanckley believed Keegan could become was one of Europe's finest footballers. He was right, he was spectacularly exactly right. The 1972-73 season was Shankly's greatest as a manager in domestic terms. And that is saying something, given what came before. Liverpool won the first division championship, Shankly's third title, and the first for seven years, and the UEFA Cup, defeating Borussia Monschengladbach over two legs in a final that showcased exactly what the second great team could do. Keegan was electric across both legs, particularly in the first at Anfield, where he scored twice in a 3-0 win that effectively settled the tie. The UEFA Cup was Liverpool's first European trophy. It would not be their last. The final at Wembley on 4 May 1974 was a performance of such controlled, emphatic quality that it felt almost too good to be real. Liverpool beat Newcastle United 3-0. Keegan was irresistible, scoring twice, tormenting Newcastle's defenders, playing with the kind of ease that comes from absolute confidence in a system and in the people around you. Highway got the other, 3-0. It was not close. Shankly lifted the cup. He walked around Wembley with it. He spoke to the supporters in that particular way of his, as if the victory belonged entirely to them and he was simply the vehicle through which they had claimed it. And then he went home. And something happened that no one who knew him has ever fully been able to explain. On 12 July 1974, Bill Shankly called a meeting with the chairman and chief executive of Liverpool Football Club and told them he was retiring. He was 60 years old. He was in good health. He had just won the FA Cup. His second great team was in its prime: Keegan 23, Hughes 26, Highway 27. The squad was deep enough, well organized enough, experienced enough to compete for everything. There was no obvious reason to stop. There was no illness, no falling out with the board, no sense that the job had become unmanageable. There was simply a decision that Shankly made, perhaps impulsively. Perhaps after long private deliberation, we cannot know, because he was never fully able to articulate it himself, to walk away from the thing he loved most in the world. The announcement was made public on the 26th of July 1974. The reaction across English football was one of genuine disbelief. The press did not credit it immediately. Supporters refused to accept it. Players who heard the news were, by their own accounts, devastated. Not because they didn't understand retirement, but because Shankly and Liverpool Football Club had seemed, to everyone who watched them from the outside, entirely inseparable. The club without the man was not a thought anyone had been asked to entertain. Now they had to. What followed was, by any measure, a painful coda to a great career. Shankly had imagined he would remain involved with the club in some capacity, would still train with the players, would offer guidance, would remain connected to the place he had remade. The board, conscious that his presence would undermine his successor's authority, discouraged this. He was not formally excluded, but the message was clear enough. The new manager needed space, and Shankly's continued presence at Melwood made that space impossible to create. He took to training with Everton's players instead. He was spotted regularly at lower league grounds around Merseyside, places where he could watch football without anyone making a fuss. His wife Nessie said in later years that he had never truly known what to do without the daily structure of football management. And that the years after 1974 were, despite the public warmth and the continued adulation, genuinely difficult for him. He missed it. He missed it the way some people miss a part of themselves they have had removed. Bill Shankly died on the 29th of September 1981. He was 68 years old. He had attended a Liverpool match at Anfield three days before his death. The club had been transformed, in the seven years since he retired, by his successor Bob Paisley into something even more successful than the side Shanckley had built. More European trophies, more league titles, a dynasty that extended far beyond anything Shankly had managed. He knew this, he was proud of it, but there is no version of the story in which leaving when he did, in the way he did, was not one of the great miscalculations of a brilliant life. The man who had never entertained the possibility of failure had, in the summer of 1974, made a decision that he could not undo. And he lived with it, with characteristic dignity and privately considerable pain for seven more years. In episode 5, we follow what happened next, which is the most remarkable thing of all. How a club that had just lost its founding genius was taken over by the quiet man in the corner of the boot room, who didn't want the job and turned out to be even better at it. That's next time. Each episode of Reds Through the Ages features one player whose story illuminates the spirit of their era. For the years covered in this episode, the transition, the rebuilding, and the trophies that followed, there is really only one candidate. Not because he was the most decorated player of the period or the most statistically dominant, but because Kevin Keegan, more than any other player of his generation, embodied what Bill Shankly believed football was for. The transformation of raw human material into something genuinely extraordinary through work and belief, and the refusal to accept limitations that others had imposed. He was born in Armthorpe, a mining village in South Yorkshire, in February 1951, the son of a miner like Shankly himself, raised in a culture where physical toughness and communal loyalty were the baseline assumptions of life. He had shown ability as a teenager, but nothing to suggest the career that was coming. No top club had wanted him. He signed for Scunthorpe United in 1968 and spent three years in the 4th Division, learning the game at the unglamorous level where most professional footballers' stories begin and end. When Shankly signed him in 1971, Keegan had made 44 league appearances for a club that finished 14th in the 4th Division. He had cost £33,000. What happened at Liverpool was a function of both Keegan's own extraordinary dedication and Shankly's extraordinary eye. Within a year of arriving, Keegan was a first-team regular. Within two, he was one of the most dangerous attacking players in England. He was not the most elegant footballer. He was compact and slightly angular in his movement. Without the aesthetic grace of the great continental players, but he had pace, two-footedness, a hunger for goal that expressed itself in the way he attacked crosses and through balls with his whole body, and an athleticism that seemed to increase rather than diminish the longer he played. He scored 100 goals in 323 appearances for Liverpool. He won two UEFA Cups, a European Cup, a League title, and an FA Cup with the club before leaving for Hamburg in 1977. That departure, for a fee of pound 500,000, which was itself a statement of how far Keegan had come from Scunthorpe's 4th Division, was handled with the same directness that characterised everything about him. He had decided he wanted a new challenge. He told Liverpool, they sold him, reluctantly. He went to Hamburg and won the Bundesliga, and then won the Ballon d'Or, twice. The player who had cost £33,000 from the 4th Division was voted the best footballer in Europe, two years running in his mid-twenties. Shankly had seen all of it coming. That is the thing about this particular story. The manager and the player illuminate each other perfectly. Keegan needed someone who could see past what he was to what he could be. Shanckley needed someone who could embody his belief completely. They found each other in 1971, in the way that great partnerships in football occasionally do, not through sophisticated scouting or data analysis, but through one man's absolute conviction that another man was worth betting on. Shankly bet £33,000 on Kevin Keegan. The return on that investment in trophies and in the story it told about what Anfield had become was beyond calculation. There is a story, told often enough that it has passed into the folklore of the club, but rooted, as far as anyone can establish, in something that actually happened, about the day Shankly's retirement was announced. A supporter, a middle-aged man, who had been going to Anfield since the 1940s, heard the news on the radio and sat down at his kitchen table and cried. His wife came in and asked what had happened. He told her. She said she was sorry. Did he know Bill Shankly personally? Had they met? He said no. He had never met him. He had seen him at the ground, at a distance, many times. That was all. That story captures something that is genuinely difficult to explain to anyone who has not experienced it. The relationship between a football manager and the supporters of the club he runs. It is not rational. It does not follow from any normal logic of human connection. Shankly had not done anything for that supporter personally. He had not spoken to him, helped him, or known he existed. But he had, for 15 years, been the living proof that the thing the supporter cared about most deeply was in safe hands, that the club was being run with the absolute seriousness it deserved, that someone at the centre of it understood, without having to be told what it meant. When Shankly left, that certainty went with him, and the supporter at the kitchen table was mourning not a man he knew, but a feeling of security he hadn't realized until it was gone that he had entirely depended on. The feeling came back. It came back with Bob Paisley, and then with Joe Fagan, and in a different but equally powerful form with Kenny Dalglish. But it is worth pausing here at the end of episode 4 on what it cost, briefly, sharply, when it disappeared. Grief is not too strong a word, and understanding that grief is the beginning of understanding why Liverpool Football Club means what it means to the people who love it. So, Liverpool Football Club, 1966 to 1974, a sign above a tunnel, a second great team assembled from a scrap dealer's eye, and an absolute faith in young men others had overlooked, European trophies, a cup final demolition, and then in a July that nobody wanted to arrive, a retirement that nobody was ready for. Shankly built two great teams at Liverpool. He built the boot room, he built the culture, he built the relationship between the club and the cop that still exists, in mutated but recognizable form, today. And then he walked away and discovered, too late to undo it, that he had made the one mistake his entire career had seemed designed to prevent. He had left something that mattered more than anything else, and he could not get it back. Next time, on episode 5 of Reds Through the Ages, the quiet man who never wanted the job, Bob Paisley takes over in the summer of 1974, describes the task as like steering the Queen Elizabeth in a Force 10 gale, and then proceeds to win in nine seasons, six league titles, three European Cups, and 20 trophies in total, making him, by any measure, the most successful manager in the history of British football. A man in a cardigan, a man who refused to take credit for any of it. Episode 5 is called The Reluctant Genius, and it is the most extraordinary story in this series. Until then, thank you for listening. You'll never walk alone.