There is very little Graeme Souness does not understand about the modern game. There are elements that bemuse or irritate him. he is no fan of the jargon, the technical cages, and expected goals that would have brought chuckles from old football men like Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley.
But, at 65 next birthday, Souness’s insights from the confines of a Sky studio are every bit as sharp as the mind that helped drive Liverpool to three european titles and five league championships during his time at Anfield.
‘But there’s one thing I don’t get,’ says Souness, his brow furrowing, although not entirely quizzically, because he’s making a point, not asking a question.
‘I don’t know how Jose Mourinho gets that message across to his players. You know the one I mean. At the final against Ajax; at Anfield last week. “We’re not good enough to take them on in a game of football. So we’re going to go long and stay behind the ball.”
‘I don’t know how you say that to players — because when I played at Liverpool, it was the opposite. We were made to feel unbeatable.’
Souness had a German shepherd called Jock during his time at Anfield. his friend, Bob, was a dog handler at Walton prison. Souness used to run for Bob’s dog, with a sleeve, to train it to attack, and Bob repaid the favour.
‘And at Liverpool we were like that dog,’ he explains, ‘because at the end of the training, it was essential that you walked away, as if you had lost. The dog had to win, because it had to be trained to believe it was invincible. every time. It could never be beaten.
‘And that was us. Before each game we were told, “In that dressing-room across the corridor, it’s the biggest game of their season. It’s not the biggest game of your season, but if you are at it today and play, there is nothing in this game for them”.
‘There were no tactics, no fear of the opposition. It was all about us, what we did and what we were going to do. There was one game, against Bayern Munich in the european Cup, when Sammy Lee was asked to mark Paul Breitner, and we were all laughing about it because it was unheard of.
‘Mind you, we’d had two weeks to work on it and Sammy got told in the tunnel, as the buzzer went for us to go out. Can you imagine that today?’
There are a lot of Souness’s memories that would be unimaginable today and he has revisited them for his autobiography Football: My Life, My Passion. Some argue modern coaching and sports science have made the old ways obsolete. Souness disagrees. There is little that is new, he argues, just a lot of spoofing and bluffing.
he has a way of cutting through the bluster, of pointing out that if attacking full- backs are so modern, how did Phil Neal, Tommy Smith and Alan Kennedy score three of Liverpool’s five goals from open play in their european Cup final appearances between 1977 and 1984? It is why as a Sky analyst he is not just some old- stager talking about the glory days, but remains every bit as insightful and relevant as the younger men surrounding him. he gets it. he just doesn’t have to agree.
‘everything is statistics-based these days,’ he says. ‘I was doing a Brighton game recently and we had figures on Pascal Gross, the German guy who plays in midfield. The statistic was he had created 95 chances for Ingolstadt last season, the most in the Bundesliga. And four assists. how the f*** is that possible?
‘I hear fans talking. how did we not win today, we had 64 per cent possession? Yes, but 44 per cent of it was in your own half. They’re all kidding. expected goals. high press and a low press. What the f***’s a low press? A couple of years back we had figures on who had completed the highest rate of passes of any Premier League player. It turned out to be Per Mertesacker. Five yards this way, five yards that way. So what?
‘ We give statistics about the number of kilometres players cover. here’s my argument. At Blackburn I had two central midfielders. robbie Savage would cover every blade of grass — 12, 13 kilometres a game. Tugay would stand in the centre circle, the ball was like a magnet to him. he made cute and clever passes and probably covered seven kilometres. Who influenced the game more?
‘ I got injured with Liverpool once. I was returning from a bad back. Joe Fagan said to me, “Today, son, obviously your fitness won’t be where it should be. Try just standing still occasionally”. I don’t think I ever got as many touches. how did he know that? Years and years of experience.
‘ When you’re a player or a manager, you’re too involved for it all to sink in. Now I do the punditry thing I remember more of what these guys told me and I realise they were just the most fabulous football people.’
LeAvING the funeral of ronnie Moran earlier this year, it dawned on Souness who had been the greatest influence on his career. ‘You know, there has never been a watershed moment with a coach when I’ve gone, “Wow, I learned something today”,’ Souness explains.
‘No coach has done that for me, no single piece of information. But coming back from ronnie’s funeral I realised the effect he had on me as a player. his attitude, his message, which was always — “Yeah, you’re a good team. Yeah, you might be a good player. But you’re not like the players we’ve had here in the past”.
‘ he always left the feeling there was room for improvement, that every game was vital, that you showed no mercy, but stayed humble when you won. he was ruthless, but he had a way of making you strive to be better.
‘Three or four days into preseason he would come in with any old box he had found lying around, dump it in the middle of our dressing-room and say, “right, there’s your medals. If you’ve played enough games and you think you deserve one, have one”.
‘And he’d walk out. And we’d all be counting in our heads: one, two, three, four… Then his head would pop back round the door. “And by the way, you’ll get f*** all this season for what’s in that box!” And exit.
‘I can see him now, sharing a whisky with Joe after we’d won the league title again. “Well, Joe, looks like we’ve got a job next season, then”. “Aye, ronnie — up to Christmas, maybe”.
‘If they were about now, those guys, they’d be chuckling about this modern stuff. The false No 9s, technical cages — all of this terminology. They wouldn’t buy into that. I can remember Bob, in his Geordie accent, asking what was meant by leading the line. And blindside runs. “What the f***’ s a blindside run?” ‘ Bob’s background was player to physio to trainer to manager. he could diagnose an injury sitting in the directors’ box. A player would go down a certain way and Bob would say, “That’s a six-weeker” and nine times out of 10 he’d be right.
‘So what he would make of today’s sports science departments I’m not quite sure — taking players off in the 68th minute because the stats say this. ‘I’m not sure men like Joe Fagan or Bob Paisley could even be managers today. They wouldn’t have the personality for it. But their knowledge — you’d have them around your football club every day. I joined Liverpool in 1978. I was the record signing between english clubs. Manchester United bought Joe Jordan from Leeds for £350,000, so Liverpool paid Middlesbrough £352,000 for me.
‘First week, Monday to Friday, we did the same thing. Walk round the perimeter at the Melwood training ground, then jog round it, few stretches, six-a-side, some sprints, and home. every day with a day off in the middle.
‘First game, West Brom. I’m in the dressing room and I’m looking around — John Toshack, Steve heighway, Ian Callaghan — all these great players.
‘I ask Joe Fagan if I can have a word. “Yes, son,” he says. “What is it?” And Joe always spoke in a quiet voice, so you had to lean in. I said, “Joe, I’ve been here a week and nobody’s spoken to me. how does he want me to play?” And he leaned in, so I leaned in, and then he just said, “F*** OFF!” in this big booming voice. “We’ve spent all this money on you and you ask me how to play football!” and he walked away shaking his head.
‘Imagine saying that to a player today. he’d be straight on to his agent. Do you think I ever asked a question again? And it was ronnie and Joe we were with in training every day. The boss was in the background.
‘ If anyone new asked a daft question, you could see all the players wincing because they knew what was coming next. “Joe, can you believe what this fool has just asked me? Work it out for yourself, son. And if you don’t — you won’t be here very long”.
‘My final game was the 1984 european Cup final, against roma in rome (left). Nobody went to look at our training ground, so when we turned up it was a ploughed field, unplayable.
‘We went back to the hotel to have lunch on the day of the game and at the end of the meal Joe Fagan tapped a glass with his spoon for attention, and stood up. he asked all the waiters to leave the room.
‘We were all wondering what he was going to say. So he gets up, and it’s like he’s talking to himself. “Big game tonight… going to
be a big crowd, too, I’d think. These must be a good team... they’ve got people who’ve won a World Cup, I think, is that right, Ron, people who’ve won a World Cup?” And Ron nodded and said yes. “They won the league too last year... but I’ll tell you what, they can’t be as good as us, right the bus leaves at five...”
‘And that was it. Joe’s team talk. He never mentioned a single Roma player.
‘ You couldn’t do that today. Players want to be guided through it all. I was at Blackburn and we drew a Turkish team, Genclerbirligi, in the UEFA Cup. We went over there and lost 3-1. Came back and drew 1-1. We should have won by 10 but it was one of those nights, nothing would go in, and we went out.
‘Afterwards, Dwight Yorke said to me that we didn’t prepare properly. “At Manchester United we would have had pen pictures, watched videos, seen their strengths and weaknesses”. I said to him, “Dwight, this is Genclerbirligi. Surely you can beat them without all that preparation?”
‘We’d had them watched, we knew what they were about. I just didn’t think we needed to build them into a big thing, to go into every last detail.’
Souness describes the great Liverpool team as being able to go to war against Derby at a muddy Baseball Ground on Saturday, then outplay Bayern Munich on a perfect surface four days later. He was the epitome of that. If it was a fight, he could be the nastiest piece of work on the field, if it was a game he was the best player.
His aim, he says, was to find the forwards with his second touch — an urgency and immediacy that is increasingly lost to the game.
‘The way we were taught at Liverpool was that nobody matters except the guys who put the ball in the net,’ he continues.
‘They might not have said that specifically, but the message was there. The forwards are the ones who need time to get their head up and score, so we were just there to facilitate them. Now it’s about midfield players having 60 touches and not giving the ball away. What’s wrong with sticking someone in early?
‘If I had a kid who was going to be a footballer, I’d tell him: don’t be a striker in the modern game. It’s the worst place to be in most teams these days. Manchester City are probably the exception.
BUT, ask yourself, would you have liked to be Romelu Lukaku at Anfield last weekend? Lukaku’s a centre forward you don’t want to play against right now. He can out-muscle you. He can get in a race with you. He can outjump you. And he was feeding on scraps.
‘As a striker, you rely on it coming early. You make a run — it goes square. You make another run — it goes back a bit. You make a third run, but it’s all about him, the midfielder, having time on the ball. Striker is the last position you want to play now. A striker wants me to have one touch and hit him with my second.
‘We even had a name for it at Liverpool. We used to call it doing a [the name of this player, an England international, has been withheld at Mr Souness’s request. He may be a hard man, but he is not without feelings]. The midfielder went into the back four, took an easy pass, and passed an easy pass.
‘How many do you see do that now? Get the ball off the back four, get their head up and face 11 opposition players. He’s got five of his own behind, plus him. So it’s five versus 11. I see the boy at Newcastle, Jonjo Shelvey, and at least he’s looking for it, looking to put you in. He won’t always get there. But at least he tries.
‘ It can’t be tip- tap, tip- tap. There are so many myths about what is important these days. We’ve got to go back to the strengths of being British. Instead, we look at France, we look at Spain, we look at Germany. We’re like the Chinese. We’re trying to make copies of Louis Vuitton handbags.’
Souness’s last managerial position ended at Newcastle in 2006. The late Freddy Shepherd notified him of his dismissal by letter. Soon after he was working with Johnny Giles for RTE in Dublin. ‘He said to me, “Give it a year and you’ll wonder why you ever did that job”,’ Souness recalls. ‘And that’s exactly what happened.’
Souness may have been too intense for management. He was once described as a man heading
Striker is the worst position now — Lukaku lives on scraps
for a fire with a bucket of kerosene and that took its toll.
From Craig Bellamy to Tommy Smith, he was never one to duck confrontation — another facet of his personality that wouldn’t play well in today’s game.
Managers are bypassed now, he says, by agents who deal directly with chief executives. Even on those days when a return appeals, the feeling soon passes.
‘I’d be a better manager today because I’ve calmed down a bit,’ he says. ‘ There are times when I’m loving the atmosphere and thinking about being on the touchline, then I’m going home hearing the results and thinking of all the poor buggers who will be having a miserable week ahead.
‘By the time I stopped, the good times weren’t compensating for the bad times. The way I was with my family, my wife, nothing else in life was important. And in terms of my health, it wasn’t good for me.
‘If I went out socially, the minute there was any lull in the conversation I’d be thinking of the aggro I’d have to deal with on Monday. That’s not good for any relationship. I’m not sure anyone really enjoys managing.’
So, not tempted? Not even by Scotland? ‘No, definitely not,’ he concludes. ‘ I haven’t got the personality for it. The exploding head is still in there deep down, and I don’t think I could deal with young footballers today. I get my fix by talking about the game.
‘ I never want to go back to football, so I don’t care who I upset. And if people are upset, I won’t apologise. All I can say is that I say it as I see it and I try to be totally unbiased.
‘I’ve never courted popularity. I don’t go looking for managers, I don’t go to functions where the players go. I don’t really socialise in the football world. And I don’t think the modern footballers have any interest in players from my generation. Zero. None.
‘Half the players today will have no idea I even played the game.’
But he did play the game. And he did so quite magnificently. If any bluffers really don’t know who they are dealing with, they could always read the book.
