To my shame, I nearly missed marking the 25th anniversary of the death of Bill Shankly on the blog. A truly great man whose stock in football seems to grow with each passing year that the pigs at the sponsored trough get fatter and fatter.
I was actually surprised to read in the linked article from the BBC Sports the number of trophies that he won in his time as Liverpool manager.
I guess it's a measure and force of his personality that I somehow presumed that he had would have won more than the seven trophies that he did during his 15 year reign at Liverpool - which obviously pales into comparison with the number of trophies that his successor, Bob Paisley, went on to win for Liverpool in a shorter period of time - but rather than that giving off the impression that he was a blowhard, it has to be acknowledged that the Liverpool football club that ruled the roost for about twenty odd years between the mid seventies and early nineties was languishing in the old second division when he took over in '59, and - sparing the jumpers for goalposts Ron Managerisms - whilst Shankly was laying the foundations of the great club that Liverpool was to become he also had to duke it out week in week out with such great managers as Matt Busby, Bill Nicholson, Don Revie, Harry Catterick, Bertie Mee and Joe Mercer. Who did Paisley have to cross swords with? Dave Sexton. Keith Burkenshaw, Gordon Lee, Terry Neill and John Bond. It's not really the same, is it?
As I've probably already my exhausted my stock of Bill Shankly as populist socialist quotes on the blog, I'll settle for this witty Shankly quote from the aforementioned BBC article:
"At the funeral of Everton legend Dixie Dean, he said: "I know this is a sad occasion, but I think Dixie would be amazed to know that even in death he could draw a bigger crowd than Everton can on a Saturday afternoon"."
I think you'll agree that wit like that is a cut above the mean-spirited blandness of Mourinho, Ferguson, Wenger and co?
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