The Roar That Echoes Down The Decades
Posted by teine on December 24, 2024, 03:10:05 am
Around twenty minutes before kick-off, Shankly would open the dressing room door.
"Listen to them!" he would say to his players. "Just listen to them! How can you let those people down?"
It's a classic Shankly tale, told best in Gordon Milne's recent autobiography. But there's a side to the story that has never been told. Shankly's words were, in fact, an echo of an earlier age. To find out why, we need to go back to the biggest day of his own playing career.
April 4th 1938
It was all happening. A week earlier, Preston had beaten Aston Villa in the FA Cup Semi-Final. Now came the news that four of the team had been chosen for the other big Wembley occasion - the England v Scotland game:
Five days later, Shankly pulled on a Scotland jersey for the first time, making his international debut at the home of the old enemy - a home that had been invaded. At least half the crowd were Scots, and they all seemed to be wearing a tammie - the bonnet whose name comes from the poem written by one of Shankly's heroes, Robbie Burns:
Six minutes into the game, Hearts' Tommy Walker scored a famous goal:
They held on to that lead for most of the game. Then with just six minutes remaining, England were on top and pressing for an equaliser. That's when it happened. The extraordinary moment that all the newspapers in Scotland highlighted as the key to victory.
It was the Hampden Roar, transported to London.
It started as a low rumble which crept across the field and up under the roof of the stand. It was taken up by every Scots fan until it bellowed to a crescendo that shattered the ear drums and made my English colleagues register blank unbelief at the din. The effect was instantaneous and it was bewildering. They were lifted out of themselves. They stormed to the attack, and the English fellows were rocked right out of the game. Sunday Mail, April 10th.
Scotland captain George Brown said: "I never heard anything like it, and I don't think I will again. How those boys kept it up I don't know. What encouragement it was to us. The mighty roar lifted us to victory".
And the man from Glenbuck making his debut at right half said: "They pulled us out with that long, roaring cheer in the last six minutes. We could not let them down".
There it is. On the greatest day of his career so far, he speaks the words that echo down the decades. He had discovered a basic truth about the relationship between players and supporters - he knew now that if that bond is strong enough, you can create magic. You become more than a football team - you become invincible.
Shankly won just four more caps for his country but in those games too, the noise was the story.
His second cap came against Ireland in Belfast in October 1938. Three Celtic forwards were selected for that team, the first time that had happened for over 30 years, and to celebrate, thousands of Celtic fans crossed the Irish Sea to cheer them on (joined by many more who lived in Ireland).
Those fans had found a new way of making a racket - with frying pans.
When Celtc's Jimmy Delaney opened the scoring, a terrific banging of sixpenny frying pans drowned every other form of noise. Those who had been unable to obtain frying pans - I'm told the stocks in Belfast were sold out - contented themselves with saucepans, which were battered into every conceivable shape before Ireland retired from the field a tired, beaten team. (Belfast Newsletter).
Tommy Walker added a second to make the final score 2-0.
A month later, Shankly won his third cap against Wales. After Wembley and Windsor Park, this was his first game on home soil, at Tynecastle. Tommy Walker, playing on his home ground, was the goalscoring hero again. The score was 1-1 with ten minutes to go when Walker's shot from 25 yards flew into the net. Straight from the kick-off he repeated the feat from even further out, and the crowd 'went crazy with joy' as the noise 'echoed and re-echoed around the ground'.
Despite that dramatic double, reporters singled out another man as the outstanding performer:
Man of the match was Shankly. He was here, there and everywhere, keeping the celebrated Bryn Jones in almost complete subjugation (reported The Scotsman). Bryn Jones had recently been signed from Wolves by Arsenal for a world recored fee. The words that would have meant the most to Shankly, however, came from Davie Meiklejohn of the Daily Record. The ex-Rangers man had been Shankly's boyhood hero:
It was no surprise when Shankly was chosen again for the friendly against Hungary a month later at Ibrox. Scotland won that 3-1, with Tommy Walker equalling an all-time record by scoring in his fifth international in a row.
Shankly's final cap was against England at Hampden Park. Many years later, when he became Liverpool manager, Shankly would say that there was no noise in England like the Kop - 'I would say that only Celtic and Rangers in Scotland can rival Anfield', he said.
Well, if you put those Old Firm supporters together you would get something like the Hampden roar that greeted England in April 1939.
This was the era of record crowds. The attendance was 149, 269 - just a few hundred short of the crowd for the same fixture two years earlier, which is still the biggest ever for an international match in Europe.
But what happened at Hampden that day would break Shankly's heart.
With five minutes to go, the score was 1-1. Stanley Matthews had the ball on the wing, and his pass floated over Shankly's head - to Tommy Lawton. The Everton centre-forward's header found the target, and Shankly would never forget the sound. Not the roar of the crowd, but 'the swish and ripple of the soaking net. It was like a knife going through me. That moment was like doomsday'.
And so Shankly's Scotland career ended with defeat. World War Two began four months later, and by the time international football got going again properly, he was 33. He would soon find a new role.
The Manager
If there's one man who can rival Shankly for memorable quotes, it's the French novelist Albert Camus. 'All that I most surely know about morality and the obligations of men, I learned from football'. You'd swear those words had come from the lips of Shankly himself.
This one is pure Camus: 'A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened'. But it could be Shankly he's talking about.
His early days in management were a trek through the lower divisions of English football - Carlisle, Grimsby, Workington, then Huddersfield in Division Two. In 1959 he came to Anfield, where he redsicovered the power of the roar from the terraces - the roar that had been such a revelation all those years ago, giving his tiring muscles the energy to keep going on the heavy Wembley turf.
'Listen to them. Can you hear them? Just listen. How can you let those people down?'
They didn't let us down, did they? Not at Anfield, week after week, and not on that Wembley turf in 1965 when eleven exhausted men in red, one of them with a broken collarbone, kept going for another 30 minutes and overwhelmed Leeds United to bring home the FA Cup for the first time.
And still it continues. Roared on by the Kop against Fulham just a few days ago, ten men fought back and refused to admit defeat.
That's the Shankly legacy. It shows no sign of quietening down any time soon.
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