Thought it might be a good idea to start a thread on the quotations of Bill Shankly:

1. "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

2. "If Everton were playing at the bottom of the garden, I'd pull the curtains."

3. "The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they don't know the game."

4. "A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe that you are the best and then make sure that you are. In my time at Liverpool we always said we had the best two teams in Merseyside, Liverpool and Liverpool reserves."

5. "Liverpool was made for me and I was made for Liverpool."

6. "Of course I didn't take my wife to see Rochdale as an anniversary present, it was her birthday. Would I have got married in the football season? Anyway, it was Rochdale reserves."

7. "If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing."

8. "With him in defence, we could play Arthur Askey in goal." (Bill Shankly talking about Ron Yeats)

9. "The difference between Everton and the Queen Mary is that Everton carry more passengers!"

10. "At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques". Bill Shankly on boardroom meetings

11. "I'm just one of the people who stands on the kop. They think the same as I do, and I think the same as they do. It's a kind of marriage of people who like each other."

12 "It was the most difficult thing in the world, when I went to tell the chairman. It was like walking to the electric chair. That's the way it felt." Bill Shankly on the leaving of Liverpool

13. "If you can't make decisions in life, you're a bloody menace. You'd be better becoming an MP!"

14. "My idea was to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility. Napoleon had that idea. He wanted to conquer the bloody world. I wanted Liverpool to be untouchable. My idea was to build Liverpool up and up until eventually everyone would have to submit and give in."

15. "I don't think I was in a bath until I was 15 years old. I used to use a tub to wash myself. But out of poverty with a lot of people living in the same house, you get humour."

16. "It's there to remind our lads who they're playing for, and to remind the opposition who they're playing against."

17. "I know this is a sad occasion but I think that Dixie would be amazed to know that even in death he could draw a bigger crowd than Everton can on a Saturday afternoon." (at Dixie Dean's funeral)

18. "The problem with you, son, is that all your brains are in your head." (to a Liverpool trainee)

19. "I was the best manager in Britain because I was never devious or cheated anyone. I'd break my wife's legs if I played against her, but I'd never cheat her."

20. "No one was asked to do more than anyone else...we were a team. We shared the ball, we shared the game, we shared the worries."

21. "Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple."

22. "You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are. In my time at Anfield we always said we had the best two teams on Merseyside, Liverpool and Liverpool reserves."

23. During one match, Tommy Lawrence, the Liverpool goalkeeper, let the ball go through his legs. "Sorry, boss, I should have kept my legs together," said Lawrence. "No, Tommy, your mother should have kept her legs together!," replied Shankly.

24. "Son, you'll do well here as long as you remember two things. Don't over-eat and don't lose your accent." (to Ian St John on the day he signed him)

25. "He's worse than the rain in Manchester. At least God stops the rain in Manchester occasionally." (comment on Brian Clough)

26. "I've been a slave to football. It follows you home, it follows you everywhere, and eats into your family life. But every working man misses out on some things because of his job. "

27. "A football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing."

28. "The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's how I see life."

Excellent stuff! You can read more of the same at the following Bill Shankly tribute site
http://www.shankly.com/random.htm

I have done a page on Shankly as part of my football encyclopedia. It is amazing that Preston never signed him as manager. He did a fantastic job there as a player. Preston was full of Scotsmen. In the 1938-39 season, Preston provided virtually the whole of the Scotland team: Bill Shankly, George Mutch, Andrew Beattie, Tom Smith, Francis O'Donnell, Jimmy Dougal and Robert Beattie.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRESTONshankley.htm

Truely a remarkable man.
I wonder how many premiership managers today could be meaningfully classified as socialist?
Shankly of course proved that the best way to be successful in a team game was to play in an unselfish and simple way. If one of his players had a weakness he placed others around who could compensate - everything was done for the good of the collective and all his players were inculcated with the same values.
This is why Liverpool were the dominant force in English football for 30 years.
My favourite Shankly quote:
"The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's how I see life."

My favourite, and it may have been to Tommy Smith (not certain). Smith was a sub and Liverpool were 2-0 down at half time when Shankley laid into the team for their performance. He turned around to see Smith smirking and yelled " I dunno what you find so funny son, this team's s*&t and you can't get on it".

If it wasn't Smith it was definitely a noteworthy 'Pool legend.

Alex Ferguson and Paul Jewell claim they are socialists. When he played for Liverpool, Jewell was a member of the local SWP branch.

There is a good article on football and socialism in the Guardian today:

http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...2064827,00.html

Extract from the article:

Bill Shankly is probably still British football's most celebrated socialist. Wisecracking, dapper and a charismatic orator, Shankly was a hugely successful manager of Liverpool through the 60s and early 70s. What seems most remarkable about him now is his insistence on talking politics, even while talking football: "The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."

Shankly traced his political beliefs to his upbringing in the Ayrshire mining village of Glenbuck. A childhood spent in areas dominated by heavy industry and trade union influence has been a common theme among football's senior socialists. Sir Alex Ferguson was a Govan shipyard shop steward before he became a player with Rangers. His backing for the Blair Labour leadership is well documented. At the last general election he posted a message on the government's website praising "two brilliant barnstorming speeches from Tony and Gordon". Ferguson, with his fine wines and his multi-million pound racehorse ownership disputes, has frequently been subjected to the familiar jibe of "champagne socialism". Football is fond of this kind of reasoning, based on the idea that those with socialist beliefs are expected to live exemplary altruistic lives, whereas rightwingers can pretty much do whatever they want. Nottingham Forest legend Brian Clough, a sponsor of the anti-Nazi League and a regular on picket lines during the miners' strike, had his own riposte. "For me, socialism comes from the heart. I don't see why certain sections of the community should have the franchise on champagne and big houses."

There was a great television programme about Bill Shankly last week. If you missed it here is a review by Martin Kelner in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/...ankly-liverpool

I love football stories from the old days but normally you have to eat a seafood starter, chicken breast with duchesse potatoes and garden peas, and watch some comedian do his Geoffrey Boycott impression to enjoy them. Now, though, Sky Sports has had the smart idea of bringing the best of the after-dinner circuit into the comfort of our own living rooms in Time Of Our Lives, a six-part nostalgia-fest featuring legends of the game.

The term legend, of course, is a fairly flexible one in sports broadcasting, but The Shankly Years, the first in the series, boasted a font of great anecdotes about the eponymous genuine article.

Ian St John, Chris Lawler and Ron Yeats, who between them played 1,200 games for Bill Shankly's Liverpool in the 1960s and early 1970s, gathered in a studio under the tutelage of Jeff Stelling to share memories of the great man (Shanks, that is, not Stelling), only occasionally straying into Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen territory, mainly on the topic of the former Liverpool boss's cavalier attitude to health and safety.

Yeats told the story of the defender Gerry Byrne, who had to be careful not to take throw-ins after he appeared in the second half of a cup final with a broken collarbone (you tell the youngsters that these days, they'll crash their Ferraris), and all three guests agreed that Shankly's attitude to injuries was what you might call a touch old-school.

He feared any player carrying an injury might infect the others, so his solution was to banish him to the far corner of the training field adjacent, apparently, to a pigsty. If Shanks saw a player on the treatment table — even one of his trusted lieutenants — he would shun him.

This might explain why Lawler missed only three games in seven seasons. When Shankly once saw Lawler wearing a crepe bandage on the advice of a physiotherapist, the manager barked: "What's wrong with the malingerer?" The full-back was pretty sure he was not joking.

There was little more to the programme than the three former players sitting in armchairs telling their stories — no archive footage, no expert views and only a brief clip of Shankly himself — and yet the hour flew by for those of us not overly familiar with the material. If the current Liverpool manager, Rafael Benítez, may appear mildly paranoid of late, he has nothing on his illustrious predecessor, who believed all foreigners were "cheats and liars" according to St John.

When Liverpool played at Internazionale in the semi-final of the 1965 European Cup, said St John, they stayed by Lake Como. Shankly was so convinced the bells at the little church up the hill were being deliberately rung to keep his players awake that he walked to the church with his assistant Bob Paisley, and asked if the ringing could be stopped.

When the Monsignor told him they had rung like that for centuries, Shankly asked if Paisley could muffle them. "He wanted Bob to climb up into the tower and bandage the bells," chuckled St John. Shankly was also deeply suspicious of coaching manuals, said St John ­— "He said if you need to read a book to know about football, you shouldn't be in the game" — and yet, according to the former Liverpool forward, he introduced the flat back four to British football.

To say Shankly was singleminded is rather like saying Oscar Wilde was a little flamboyant. He would turn up at the training ground for five-a-side games (Shankly, that is, not Oscar Wilde) even after his retirement in 1974, when Paisley took over. Eventually he had to be asked to stay away to avoid confusing the players as to who was the boss.

‘The Shankly psychology’

Kevin Keegan:
I’m playing in my first season for Liverpool FC against West Ham at Anfied.
Shank’s comes over to me and says:-
A Son I’ve just seen that Bobby Moore getting off the West Ham bus. What a wreck, He’s limping and He’s got bags under his eyes. He must have been in one of those London clubs all night Son!
So instead of playing England’s Captain & World Cup winner, I’m playing an aging playboy with a limp. Anyway we win 3-1 and I manage to score although Bobby play’s to his usual high standard.
After the match Shank’s comes and sits next to me in the dressing room and says
A Son that Bobby Moore is some player isn’t He. Son you’ll never play against a better footballer than him!

No one is 100% sure exactly why Shankly retired. Bob Paisley did say in an interview that Shankly may have mistakenly believed he wouldn't get his pension if he didn't retire...but he wasn't certain of it.