JOHN TOSHACK

WITH DAN SUNG

First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2018.

First Edition

deCoubertin Books, 46B Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool, L1 0AF.

www.decoubertin.co.uk

eISBN: 978-1-909245-71-6

Copyright © John Toshack and Dan Sung, 2018

The right of John Toshack and Dan Sung to be identified as the co-authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and typeset by Leslie Priestley.

Printed and bound by CPI.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for photographs used in this book. If we have overlooked you in any way, please get in touch so that we can rectify this in future editions.

In memory of Bill Shankly.

Contents

Foreword by Xabi Alonso

Prologue: Learning more from defeat than victory

1 Beginnings

2 Liverpool and the Kop

3 Bob’s Liverpool

4 Swansea, Oh, Swansea!!

5 Sporting chance

6 Basqueing in glory

7 Real Madrid

8 Return to San Sebastián

9 ‘Super Depor’

10 Turkish delight

11 Madrid and the media

12 Sociedad, three times for a Welshman!

13 Sicily and the Mafia

14 International management

15 Father and son, Macedonia

16 Champions of Morocco

Epilogue: Iran

Extra Time

Player and managerial records

Player and managerial honours

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Xabi Alonso

I WAS SIX YEARS OLD WHEN REAL SOCIEDAD WON THE COPA DEL REY. I don’t remember watching the game and I was too young to remember the street parties but everyone in San Sebastián knows the footage of that penalty shootout like they were there in Zaragoza in the stadium themselves. Every player who stepped up to take one of the kicks against Atlético Madrid that day, and the goalkeeper Luis Arconada, are heroes to Sociedad fans, and we consider John Toshack one too.

John is a very important figure to both Real Sociedad and to the city of San Sebastián. He is very popular because of his personality. It is always noticed when John is around because he has so many different perspectives and opinions about so many things because of what he achieved. He loves it there too. As well as managing the club three times, for a total of more than eight years, he also had a column in the local newspaper and wrote a great book in Spanish about his first years in the city called Diario del galés – diary of a Welshman – which most of us from there have read. He is a very charismatic person for us.

I was lucky enough to play for some very, very good managers during my career and I would include John as one of those, for sure. He was so important for me. He gave me my first chance to prove myself and, as a football player, you need someone that first time to trust in you and to see something different that you might bring to the game. Not every manager has the ability to do that. In my case, it was John who was crucial to my career because, if he hadn’t put that trust in me, I don’t know what would have happened.

I was just 18 when I started working with John and, actually, the situation at Real Sociedad at the time was quite complex. I was on loan at Eibar along with a young striker called Joseba Llorente and the manager of Real Sociedad was my father. The team was not doing so well. My father resigned and John was called back to San Sebastián for the third time in his career with the job of rescuing the club from relegation, and his first move was to bring back Llorente and me from our loan.

John saw something in me and he put me in the team as a central midfielder, which was incredibly brave considering the importance of the position. He tried to make me a little bit quicker than I was but it really didn’t work. I was no quicker at 18 at the beginning of my career than I was at 35 at the end of it, or at any point in between, but that didn’t matter. I had other qualities and that’s what John saw. If you’re not fast, then you need to have that vision, that clear anticipation about what’s going to happen. Then you work and the routine gives you more fluidity to take those decisions and your mind becomes quick and so does what you do with the ball, even if your legs are not.

John gave me a lot of responsibility and that made me want to prove myself and improve. It was a big call for John. We stayed in La Liga and those first months were incredible for me. John was able to unite the foreign players, the Basque players and the youngsters under one banner very quickly because of his experience in football as well as the region.

John and I have followed similar paths in our careers at times and, for sure, the strong connection between Liverpool and Real Sociedad played a part in my move to Anfield. To me, Liverpool was familiar because of what John had done as a player there and because of the story of his gesture in that special game when he returned with Swansea, as a manager, just after Bill Shankly had died.

Liverpool was a different place when I was there. I was with Rafael Benítez and the long line of Boot Room managers was over by then, so I didn’t recognise the training methods which John had used when I got to Melwood. I wouldn’t have known the history of Liverpool like I did without John and he came to watch me play at Anfield some years after we had worked together. It was amazing to be there together with him in that context.

*

Prologue:
Learning more from defeat than victory

IT WAS AT THE CLIFTON HOTEL, IN SOUTHPORT, IN MARCH 1982, WHEN Peter Robinson and John Smith offered me the job as manager of Liverpool Football Club for the first of two occasions in my career. After three European Cups, four league titles and nearly seven years in charge, Bob Paisley was set to step down and, having taken Swansea City from the depths of the Fourth Division to the top of the First within four years, I was a natural choice to take charge of the club where I’d made my name as a player and won nine winners’ medals in the process.

I’d left Liverpool still a young man at just 27 years of age with what would normally be plenty of years as a player still ahead of me, but circumstances had dealt me a different set of cards, setting me on the path to management instead.

For all the work I’d done in South Wales, for everything I’d built down there, Liverpool was a very special club to me. Anyone who’d played under Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley had been very lucky. It had been a footballing education there like no other and, if I’m honest, a lot of what I did at Swansea I did with the thought at the back of my mind that one day Liverpool would come back for me. On that day in 1982, they had.

I hadn’t always gotten on famously with Bob but it was him who’d recommended me for the position and, when I walked out of that meeting, I left thinking that Bob would finish out the season and I’d take over the following year. But that’s not the way things worked out. Almost immediately, Bob woke Liverpool up from the club’s less than glittering form that season and, in doing so, I can only guess that he woke something in himself as well. With his ambition renewed, he went on to mastermind another two league titles and as many League Cups. Meanwhile, everything for me went downhill at Swansea. At the time of that meeting, my stock as a manager had never been higher. Swansea were riding high in the First Division and considered dark horses in the title race. Just eighteen months later, everything would fall apart but, to paraphrase Bill Shankly, sometimes you can get more out of a defeat than you can a victory.

Very often, I find myself repeating Shanks’s words. Anything he might have missed was more than made up for with Bob Paisley at his side; man-management and tactical nous together. They were so different and an ideal pair.

Bob knew Shanks like the back of his hand. He knew how to get what he needed from him. They never had a coaching badge between them at Liverpool but the basis of everything I’ve ever done in coaching, I learned at Liverpool between 1970 and 1978. I’ve never seen anything to change my mind since. It’s paying attention to the small things, what Shanks called ‘The Recipe’. He had a phrase that he would always come back to time and time again – the most important things in football were important fifty years ago and they’ll be important fifty years from now.

I had four good years under Bill Shankly at Liverpool. We won the league, the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup too, but that was the second great side he’d built and, after fifteen years in charge of the club, in the summer of 1974 he decided enough was enough and stepped down. It might not have been the madness you get as a coach at Madrid these days but the pressure of running a big club takes its toll. Bob Paisley, of course, stepped up from his role as number two and guided the club to an era of even greater glory, of which I was glad to be a part as well, and I was lucky to be there for much of that because, even from early on, I felt that Bob wasn’t quite on my side. He never disliked me in a personal way. I just think that maybe he preferred other players. That’s the feeling that I had.

Bob didn’t have anything to do with signings when I joined the club. He was Shanks’s number two, a physio and a coach, and I never felt like I was quite his cup of tea. Certainly for a few years, I never had his confidence, and that was confirmed when he signed Ray Kennedy from Arsenal in 1974 and subsequently tried to move me on. But I got back into the side and I scored some important goals, which endeared me a little bit more to Bob. He saw that understanding I had with Kevin Keegan and he knew it would be beneficial to the club, even if it hadn’t been his original plan. He had a good mind for the game. He was a shrewd judge of a player and he knew how to get what he wanted out of a team. Even if the two of us didn’t get on that well, I wasn’t blind to what a good manager he was.

It’s hard to say how successful I would or wouldn’t have been if I had become the boss at Liverpool in 1982. After Bill and Bob, I’d certainly have had some big shoes to fill. What I do know is that without their guidance, I’d never have got that phone call in 1984 after I’d finished at Swansea that sent me on a different path altogether, managing different clubs and countries across Europe and North Africa.

You can’t be quick on all decisions. Some take longer than others, some are more difficult, but you have to make them. If you’re in football management, you can’t sit on the fence too long or you’ll fall off. Anyone will accept it if you need another 24 hours to think, but the time comes when we all have to make decisions and, when I look back on it now, I’ve never been frightened of making them, whether it was to go to Real Madrid, to return to San Sebastián, to take the Wales job or even to leave it after just one game in charge. When you look back over my career, you can maybe say that one call or another might not have been the best idea, but I like to think I got a lot more right than I did wrong.

As it turns out, saying yes to that phone call in 1984, taking that offer to work abroad for the first time in my life – that was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I never thought about how long I’d be away or where it might lead. I just knew at that moment that working abroad was what I wanted to do. That I’d end up working across three continents, in ten different countries, winning trophies in five of them, managing Real Madrid twice and becoming the only manager to win all three Spanish cups with three different teams, it never crossed my mind that such achievements would be possible. I just knew I wanted a change. I wanted some sunshine and Portugal had all of that for me. But that was 1984; there’s plenty to tell before then . . .

*

1
Beginnings

RELATONSHIPS SHAPE THE PEOPLE WE BECOME.

My managerial career was shaped by my experiences as a player and the characters that guided me, firstly at Cardiff City and then at Liverpool. Both clubs offered the best education I could have wished for.

My father was a Scotsman, Bill Shankly was a Scotsman, and my Cardiff manager, Jimmy Scoular, was a Scotsman too. They had the same values. They came from villages. They had that same strong, proud, no-nonsense work ethic. There’s certainly something in that Scottish temperament that makes for great managers. Not all Scots are great managers and not all great managers are Scots but, if you look over the years at Shankly, Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Alex Ferguson; you’ve got four there who are right up the top. I’m Welsh all the way but maybe the Scottish influence rubbed off on me.

I’ve worked in a lot of different countries and I’ve been asked whether my sense of adventure stems from my father. It was a big decision for him to choose to leave his family and settle in South Wales, as he did, with little scope for communication with the farm where he grew up back in Dunfermline. Returning to Scotland then felt like a trip to the Arctic.

One trip a year was all he could afford. We used to go up as a family for two weeks every summer: me, my parents and my brother, Colin. We’d rent a Standard Vanguard and take it on a fourteen-hour drive from Cardiff. There were no motorways. We’d leave at four o’clock in the morning, stopping in a layby for a hot meat pie at lunchtime somewhere near Lancaster. Then it would be up over Shap in Cumbria, across the Kincardine Bridge and over the Firth of Forth, before finally arriving at the farm at seven in the evening. There was a real spirit of adventure. Motorways now make the journey a lot easier.

In 1958, when I was nine years old, the Commonwealth Games were being held in Cardiff and the city centre was decked out in ribbons with all the flags of the nations flying on the lampposts. I’d have preferred to stay to watch the sport, but my father’s holiday time was limited so up we went to Scotland where, instead, I played football with my seven older cousins.

At the age of eleven, I was fortunate enough to have witnessed Jock Stein’s first foray into management when he took the job at nearby Dunfermline and my cousin Johnny took me along to watch them play.

My father, George Toshack, was a pilot in the Royal Air Force and based at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan when he met my mother, Joan Light, who was a Cardiff girl. They were married in December 1947 and I was born just over a year later in March 1949. I don’t think they’d known each other more than eighteen months and there was never any question of my mother moving to Scotland.

My father was well respected. Before the war, he was a carpenter par excellence. He came to know everybody in the trade in South Wales and Cardiff and everyone knew him. I can see this classic photo of him wearing a tie, his carpenter’s apron and a pencil behind his ear. The people who worked for him spoke so highly of his abilities.

I worked out pretty quickly I would not be a carpenter, having hammered a nail through my own thumb. My father took me back to my mother and told her I was costing him money. He suggested it might be safer for me to do something else. That was that.

We might have had very different professions but the way my father went about his business had a big influence on me. He taught me the importance of discipline in the workplace; a pride in performance. I think this is something that has slowly ebbed away from football and maybe this explains why I’ve fallen out with a few people along the way.

For a young footballer, my father also had what I think is the perfect approach as a parent. You see a lot of parents on the touchline these days shouting away at their kids and giving them a grilling before and after the games on what they need to do and where they’ve gone wrong, but you need to let a good coach do the work. My father knew better than to interfere. He was more likely to be hiding behind a tree to make sure I was focused on my game.

My mother was very proud of me in a more open way than my father. She didn’t mind everybody knowing that she was my mother. She’d always be quick to point out to people what I’d been up to. My dad didn’t like too much fuss. My mother was a wonderful woman, she really was. The most important influence they had on me together was to give me the space to make decisions for myself. I think they were aware of the kind of boy I was and I don’t suppose I was ever going to let anyone decide anything for me. I always had a clear idea of what I wanted but, all the same, they could have got in the way of that and they never did, and that’s easier said than done as a parent.

Decisiveness is an absolutely key attribute of a football manager. When you’re in charge of people, you’ll find you’re faced with decisions virtually every minute of the day. Whether it’s about player selection, buying and selling, working with injuries, organising pre-season friendlies, anything; you need to say yes or no. Perhaps some of those smaller details are taken away from managers in the modern era but, ultimately, the buck still stops with you and you need to have the courage of your own convictions and be able to make up your mind. And, for me, from an early age, I wasn’t frightened to make a decision.

The experience you gain from making your own decisions is something that has gradually been taken away from footballers now, and that’s had a big knock-on effect for those looking to get into management. When I was playing, there were no agents telling you what they thought you should do and taking their 15 per cent. I had just my father, my mother, my brother and myself, and the final decision – and the responsibility – was mine alone.

The change began thirty years ago. Players now are so cosseted there’s a whole part of them that never grows up. I might ask a player what he thinks about the interest we’re getting from another club to buy him and he’ll start telling me what his agent thinks. I’m not interested in what his agent thinks. I want to know what he thinks.

It’s very difficult to see yourself as others see you, but if I had to define myself it’d be as someone who has never been afraid of making a wrong decision or a mistake. I just felt, from an early age, a sense of authority. Life is about making decisions. You can’t say maybe. Maybe is, for me, not a word that tells me anything. If someone answers something I ask with a maybe, I feel like retracting the question.

If I’ve been able to do that, that’s partly because I’d been making up my own mind for a long time. I was captain of the school baseball team, captain of the cricket team and captain of the rugby team too, so I grew up getting used to making decisions.

I played football all the time, whenever I could. I’d even get my mother to make me sandwiches so that I could spend the time I was supposed to be eating lunch at school playing football instead. Eventually, one of the older boys told my sports teacher about me and I was picked for the Under-11 school side at Radnor Road Juniors when I was just eight years old. My sports teacher, the late Roy Sperry, must have had a lot of confidence in me because elevating a kid by a few years to a new level wasn’t normal practice. By then, I already knew that football was what I loved most of all. I played all sports but soccer always had that edge over everything else. If I lost at those other games it didn’t really bother me but when I lost at soccer it hurt.

My parents, though, were insistent that I achieved some kind of academic grounding. I passed my eleven-plus and went to Canton Grammar School, but the problem we had there was that the school didn’t play football. It was rugby only. So on Saturdays, I played rugby for the school in the morning and soccer in the afternoon for Pegasus, the local team in the Cardiff District League; when I dislocated my shoulder playing rugby for the school it meant I missed a trial for the Cardiff Schools’ football side, which put me off rugby a little bit. When the chance came round again, I got my go at the city-wide team and I got in along with a Canton Grammar School pal of mine called Dave Gurney. That made our school think twice about playing soccer and very soon Canton was fielding a team in the grammar school tournament, the Ivor Tuck Cup.

At fifteen, I set a record in the town team and racked up 47 goals in 22 games by the end of my first season. I made it to the Welsh Boys’ side where I scored a hat-trick in my first game, a 3–1 victory against Northern Ireland at Swansea in the Victory Shield.

Suddenly, invitations to trials at Football League clubs began to arrive. A few of the lads in that Welsh Boys’ team with me – Roy Penny, Cyril Davies, the Slee brothers – and I were invited up to Tottenham for a trial in the autumn of 1964 with Bill Nicholson’s Spurs. Spurs had an ex-international called Arthur Willis who had played for Swansea and eventually settled in Wales, and he was always on the lookout for new Welsh talent for the club. Willis had been one of the key players in Tottenham’s push-and-run team that had first won the title in 1951. And, at the time, Tottenham had Terry Medwin, Cliff Jones and Mel Hopkins – all Welsh internationals who were playing in that double-winning team of the 1960s. So, Arthur took all of us young boys up to London and we spent a week training at White Hart Lane and staying in the White Hart pub itself, right on the corner of the ground. We were back home maybe four or five days before I got the letter in the post. It said thank you for your time but, unfortunately, you don’t come up to the high standards required of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. It was a real blow at the time. Every time I scored a goal for Liverpool against Tottenham, I’d remember that.

I was invited up to try out for Don Revie’s Leeds side and Stan Cullis’s Wolves as well, but I rejected both offers after that experience at Tottenham. I wanted to stay at home in Cardiff and take the extra year at college my parents wanted me to, so I signed amateur forms at Cardiff City, aged sixteen, in 1965.

Signing for Cardiff was a big deal personally. I’d stood on the top of the Bob Bank stand and watched them play every week for as long as I could remember. Football was the be all and end all right from the beginning. I’d arrive home from school and get straight out on the street. I played with a tennis ball against the side of a house across the road. It was football, football, football, and then here was this chance to make it my life for the club that I loved. It was also a chance to play alongside the man who, for me, was the very best in the game – John Charles.

I remember having seen John on television playing for Wales. I remember him going to Juventus. I had old cine film footage of him that I’d watch over and over again. I totally idolised him. And then, there I was, playing a couple of matches with him in the Cardiff City second team. I trained with him. I observed him. I observed how he headed a ball. I cleaned his boots.

Mel Charles was John’s brother and he was a fine player too. I still laugh now when I remember how Mel would get his words all muddled up. He’d have the dressing room rolling on the floor when he complained that his Hercules tendon was sore or when he crossed the Tyne Bridge for the first time and commented, ‘Look at that bridge! There’s some agriculture that’s gone into that!’

There were a lot of players who smoked in those days and they’d offer the cigarettes around, but John would only offer one to Mel and Mel would only offer one to John. They wouldn’t offer them to anyone else. John used to joke that Mel was so tight that he wouldn’t send his kids to school because they had to pay attention. When you saw the pair of them together, they were amazing specimens and, of course, my game was based around a very similar style of play to them with their ability in the air. John was at the stage in his career where he’d finished in Italy. He’d left Juventus, returned to Leeds and then headed back out for a spell at Roma, before signing for Cardiff to play professional football in Wales for the first time in his career. By this time, John had developed problems with injuries. His knees had started to cave in, but he always had a bit of time for me and I was very grateful for that. He eventually took over the Welsh Under-23 side in which I played, so he managed me a bit too.

For me, John Charles always was the greatest footballer. We talk about the likes of Cruyff, Messi, Pelé and the rest, but there weren’t and still aren’t many players who could play both No. 9 and No. 5, and still be the best in both positions. I remember whenever Wales played at home and Juventus were not prepared to release him to play, the Welsh FA would ask them not to say anything until the day of the game, because if people thought John was coming there’d be gates of 40,000. If he didn’t come, the attendance would drop dramatically. That was the pull that he had.

He made an enormous impression on me. He used to give me little tips in training sessions, like the sort of movement I should be making when the ball comes in from a cross; if the keeper follows it, you knock it back where it came from to make him change direction. It’s harder for the keeper that way. These are things I’ve since passed on as a manager to my players. John was always telling me what it was like at Juventus and what it was like living in Italy. Considering my wanderlust later in life, I’m sure John’s words had an impact on my mindset.

Another major influence on me at Cardiff was Jimmy Scoular, the manager. Jimmy was a tough customer. He’d made a career as a no-nonsense tackler with a temper to match, and he wasn’t about to change his ways now that he’d moved into management.

Cardiff had been relegated from the First Division in 1962 and Jimmy had arrived at the club just one year before I had to turn its fortunes around. He’d favoured a youth policy at the expense of some of the older stalwarts still left over from Cardiff’s days in the big league, but had quickly realised that he still needed to keep a few of those old heads around for their experience and bit more balance. I don’t feel embarrassed to say that, as a sixteen-year-old, I was frightened of Jimmy. I think it’s a good thing that players sometimes are a little intimidated by their manager. A healthy respect goes a long way. It means you can’t take liberties. You didn’t mess about with this fella. If he told me to do something, then I did it. Fortunately, Jimmy liked me. I think the fact that my father was a Scotsman, and grew up just over the Forth from where Jimmy had in Livingston, helped a little bit. Jimmy didn’t always see eye to eye with John Charles, though. He and Mel weren’t always his favourites. I think Jimmy became frustrated with the injuries that the two picked up, and it was one of those injuries that gave me my first chance.

I was sitting in technical college on a Monday morning in October 1965 when one of the junior professionals at the club, David Houston, came running in to say that John Charles and one of the other key players, Barrie Hole, were both injured and that I had to fly out to Liège for the second leg of our Cup Winners’ Cup tie against Standard. Cardiff City may not have been in the First Division but, since 1961/62, UEFA had offered a single spot in the Cup Winners’ Cup to any Welsh winners of the Welsh Cup, and Jimmy had quickly realised how important both the experience and the gate receipts could be to the club if we were playing in Europe each season. In the nine years that Scoular was at Cardiff, he made sure Cardiff City won the Welsh Cup seven times.

I was less worried about making my debut than I was thinking what Jimmy might do to me once he found out I didn’t have a passport. I’d never flown anywhere in my life. In the end, I had to go down to the post office and apply for one of those temporary versions. I forged my dad’s signature because I couldn’t find him in time but I don’t suppose Interpol are going to be after me for that one fifty years later.

I was an unused substitute in the end but there was drama for me off the pitch when, along with two other Cardiff lads, Georgie Johnston and Bernard Lewis, I ended up in the local jail for disturbing the peace. The three of us were sitting by the hotel pool eating some very overpriced sandwiches when Georgie and Bernard decided it would be a good idea to pick up one of the chairs and throw it into the water as a protest. I can’t remember which of the two it was that ended up hurling the thing in but, when I looked up at the window behind us, there was someone on the telephone to the police, who promptly came and picked us up. I thought my career was over before I’d even kicked a ball when Jimmy Scoular walked into the constabulary to get us out. Jimmy was furious on a good day, so you can imagine him at that particular moment.

There were a few rogues in that Cardiff City side; a few older ones that led me astray, and I think Jimmy knew his players and what had happened. So, he gave me another chance and a few weeks later, in a match against Leyton Orient, on 13 November 1965, I walked onto the pitch as player at Ninian Park, the ground I’d been going to all my life as a fan, not one mile from the house where I grew up. Twenty minutes in, I replaced Graham Coldrick, who’d picked up a knock to his knee, and, at 16 years and 236 days, I became the youngest player to step out as a Cardiff Blue – a record that stood until Aaron Ramsey took that honour some forty years later. Five minutes before the end, I scored my first professional goal at the Grange End. The irony is that Paul Went, the Orient lad marking me, was only just sixteen himself.

Not many managers would place so much faith in a sixteen-year-old and it’s something I’ve never forgotten in my own management career. I don’t think I really had the characteristics that Jimmy Scoular would normally want in a player, but he still trusted me. Maybe I lacked a bit of the aggression that players needed in those days to survive, but that’s normal for a teenager playing against seasoned pros looking to kick lumps out of you. I always felt it was about brain more than brawn. If I thought my way around the field with intelligence, I could overcome the more physical aspects of the game. I don’t think I’ve ever been an openly aggressive player like others might have been, but I learned to look after myself on the pitch. Jimmy had the sense to let me start to do that and I have an awful lot to be thankful to him for.

I stayed at Cardiff for five years. We never really achieved that much in the league, certainly to begin with. We only avoided relegation to the Third Division by a single place in my first two seasons and managed a mid-table finish after that, partly thanks to the strike partnership I formed with Brian Clark. He arrived at the club in 1968 after his time at Huddersfield had not gone so well. There were quite a few forwards at Cardiff when I started off – George Andrews, Terry Harkin, George Johnston. There had to be lots in those days because we were still playing very front-heavy formations. When Clarkey came in there was a change to a more defensive shape but it didn’t matter, because the two of us really hit it off and scored goals by the hatful. We had two or three good years where we looked like we were going to get up to the big league but it never quite happened. We got very close in the Cup Winners’ Cup too, which gave me a ton of European experience at a very early age – we were involved in the competition five times during the years I was there. Liège did for us that first year in the first round in 1965/66, but we were only inches from the final the next time we qualified in 1967/68.

It began with victories in the first two rounds against Shamrock Rovers and NAC Breda. Then, in March 1968, we took one of the longest ever away trips in the Cup Winners’ Cup when we played Torpedo Moscow. It was the middle of winter and Moscow was covered in snow and ice, so the venue was switched to Tashkent, now the capital of Uzbekistan, over 2,000 miles further away from the Soviet capital. We played a league match at Middlesbrough on the Saturday, travelled down to London, stayed there that evening, flew out to Moscow the next day, trained in a gymnasium underneath the Lenin stadium, and then got on the plane on the Monday for Tashkent, within a couple of hundred miles of the border with China and Afghanistan; part of the old Marco Polo run on the Silk Road.

It was one of the poorest places anyone could ever imagine. We took tins of corned beef and bread with us and we’d queue up outside Jimmy Scoular’s room for our rations. We lost the game by a single goal and then won the home leg by the same margin. This was in the days before penalty shootouts decided these things, so it went to a third game at a neutral venue – which turned out to be Augsburg in Germany – where Cardiff came out winners. So, Second Division Cardiff City found itself in a semi-final against a very good Hamburg side with West German internationals like defender Willi Schulz and striker Uwe Seeler, who scored over 400 goals for his club and 43 for his country. We fought hard and came out with a 1–1 draw in the first leg away. It looked like we were headed for another replay with the score at 2–2 at Ninian Park but Seeler fired off a bit of a nothing shot from distance in the dying minutes. Our keeper, Bob Wilson, didn’t quite get his whole body behind it and it was Hamburg who went through.

The next year we went out to Porto in the first round after receiving some pretty horrific treatment over there. I think they must have started the building work in the hotel we were staying in especially for our arrival and some of the players were attacked by Porto fans on the pitch at the final whistle. It could be very hostile away in Europe in those days but it was all part of an important learning curve for me and, it didn’t matter the competition, I was scoring goals for fun: 17, 31 and then 22 in consecutive seasons.

I’d had offers from other clubs such as Bobby Robson’s Fulham, but none of them seemed quite right. Cardiff was my hometown club. I used to walk to work; the training ground was only twenty minutes from my house. I never wanted to do anything else other than play for Cardiff City. But then you play more games, you’re involved in more big matches, and you see how professional football works. You want more of that and you want to know whether you’re good enough to play at a higher level.

Liverpool were watching me and I knew the club’s chief scout, Geoff Twentyman, had been to Ninian Park on a couple of occasions, though I didn’t take much notice of him because it was normal to see scouts around. There were scouts at all sorts of games, but when I saw Jimmy Scoular walking up the hill to our house that Sunday morning in November 1970, I knew what he was coming over to say. Liverpool had offered £110,000 for my services and that wasn’t the kind of money that Cardiff could turn down.

It was difficult because we were going really well in the league and we were in with a great chance of finally getting promotion to the First Division. Some people have since said that when Cardiff City sold me, they stopped trying. They threw away their chances of going into the top flight. I have a different view on the matter now than I did at the time, having been a manager and seen so many similar situations that I’ve had to deal with myself. But I was a player in those days. In the end, I just felt it was good for Cardiff, getting £110,000, which was a club transfer record for both Liverpool and Cardiff, and it was good for me because I was getting a chance to go to one of biggest clubs around – so everyone, in theory, was happy.

Bill Shankly was a massive draw. Shankly embodied Liverpool. I felt I could trust his judgement and it was a big confidence booster for me to think that somebody like him wanted me. So, I thought this was the right opportunity.

Dialogue with Bill was sometimes challenging, however. Everyone was so much in awe of the man. We hung on his every word. He only ever talked about football. Fortunately, he liked me. He signed me and I was one of his favourites. He was in the army, in Barry, in South Wales, and he used to box a lot. He knew I was Welsh and so he’d tell me about his time there and how he used to go up to the Rhondda Valley to watch boxing. He had an obvious affinity with the place and the people, and I think that’s probably part of the reason he took a shine to me. He was the best man-manager I ever met and later a wonderful friend and mentor during my run as manager of Swansea City. I cried unashamedly on the morning I heard he’d died.

When I made my debut for Cardiff as a sixteen-year-old, I was earning £12 a week with an extra £8 for a first-team appearance and a bonus of £4 for a win and £2 for a draw. By the time my move to Liverpool came, I was up to £40 per week. At Liverpool, I earned £80 per week plus add-ons, which included a crowd bonus of £2 for every thousand tickets sold over 48,000 spectators. Anfield held 54,000 at the time. Shanks once asked all the players to go home over the summer and come back after the break and tell him how much they thought they were worth to the club, and what their pay increase should be. It was the summer of 1973 when we had just won the UEFA Cup and the league championship – Liverpool’s first major honours for seven years. I asked for a pay rise of £70 per week. He gave me £90. I went out of his office delighted but, by the time I reached the car park, I realised he’d had me down for a rise of £100. I couldn’t turn back, though. Years later, when I was manager, I brought that incident up with him. ‘Aye, John, son,’ he said, ‘I saved ten pounds a week on you but you weren’t the only one.’

You’re not defined as a manager by your playing career or by those that you’ve previously played under. There are a lot of top managers who never played at all. Neither is it just a case of playing under a decent manager in order to become a good one. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be yourself. You can remember things that happened, you can remember training sessions and you can remember what a certain manager did in certain situations, but temperament plays a big part.

There are a lot of great players that have gone into management and haven’t been able to handle defeat in the proper way or haven’t been able to accept players with less ability than themselves when they played. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait too long as a player before I found out whether I had what it took to sit in the hot seat myself.

Roy Sperry, Jimmy Scoular, John Charles, Bill Shankly and my father: they’ve all passed away now but they are often in my thoughts and very much alive for me with the words they have said and the impact they had. I owe them so much.

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