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Paul Walsh Autobiography

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This one surprised me :

“In the 1986 Double-winning team, people forget I was in the side for a lot of that season. But there wasn’t the footage there is now, and then I picked up a bad injury against Manchester United and missed practically the rest of the season. Now everybody remembers the iconic image of Kenny scoring the winner at Chelsea. “I have to justify myself in that team to people, but the fact is I was in the PFA team of the year and neither Rushy or Kenny were. That says what my fellow pros thought of me.”
 
“On one occasion, Ronnie Moran was treating my ankle with an ultrasound machine and all of a sudden I could feel he was halfway up my shin.
“I looked at him and he was reading the back page of the paper, lost in his own world. I said, ‘Er, Ron, the ankle’s a bit lower down, mate.’

hahahaha
 
This one surprised me :

“In the 1986 Double-winning team, people forget I was in the side for a lot of that season. But there wasn’t the footage there is now, and then I picked up a bad injury against Manchester United and missed practically the rest of the season. Now everybody remembers the iconic image of Kenny scoring the winner at Chelsea. “I have to justify myself in that team to people, but the fact is I was in the PFA team of the year and neither Rushy or Kenny were. That says what my fellow pros thought of me.”


It's true. Walsh was essentially bought as Kenny's successor and, despite the size of the boots he had to fill, he started that season like an express train. Had his career not been spoiled by that injury (he did come back afterwards but was never the same again), goodness only knows how far he could have gone with us when we were still winning everything in sight. One of the great might-have-beens in the club's history IMO.
 
“On one occasion, Ronnie Moran was treating my ankle with an ultrasound machine and all of a sudden I could feel he was halfway up my shin.
“I looked at him and he was reading the back page of the paper, lost in his own world. I said, ‘Er, Ron, the ankle’s a bit lower down, mate.’

hahahaha

I like the bit at the end of the article, when Kenny comes into the dressing-room after Walsh has been sent off for lamping Bond and says "You know you were wrong" then adds "But if there's one person I don't mind you hitting it's that tit". :D
 
It's a bit perturbing how amateurish we seemed on all the technical and medical stuff.

He wonders if it was somehow the secret of our success. But what if other, unrelated, things were, and this kind of laxness (which undoubtedly reared its head in the business side come the 90s) was more like the secret of our downfall?
 
That's the impression you get from reading, 'Men in White Suits'. John Scales was particularly surprised by what he found when he moved to Liverpool.
 
It's a bit perturbing how amateurish we seemed on all the technical and medical stuff.

He wonders if it was somehow the secret of our success. But what if other, unrelated, things were, and this kind of laxness (which undoubtedly reared its head in the business side come the 90s) was more like the secret of our downfall?
It's a fine line because we also had a brains trust that was beyond compare. There are all of the legendary tales of Paisley being able to diagnose an injury just by watching a player walk. And then there were the books in which every single day was documented in minute detail for future reference. You can't win all we won by being amateurish. The staff at the club, with the obvious exception of Shankly, were also very unassuming so they gave the impression of innocent amateurism despite being some of the greatest and most innovative thinkers in the game. That was the ethos throughout the boot room years so if there's a link with our demise in the 90s, maybe it's that we tried to move away from all of that too quickly.
 
It's a bit perturbing how amateurish we seemed on all the technical and medical stuff.

He wonders if it was somehow the secret of our success. But what if other, unrelated, things were, and this kind of laxness (which undoubtedly reared its head in the business side come the 90s) was more like the secret of our downfall?

You think that's bad - Have you heard of the Razor Ruddock/Spice Boys pound game they used to play during an actual match in the mid nineties!? :rolleyes:
 
It's no wonder we won fuck all about that time with those bloody chancers. Given the talent in the squad the lack of professionalism displayed was shocking.

In fact to some degree the same shoddiness exists to this day. For anyone who has had the 'happy' privilege of dealing with LFC on a corporate level would know. The club and how it's run is somewhat of a laughing stock. Cheap, tacky and massively sub-standard. Compared to Arsenal, Chelsea and City they are a bit of an embarrassment unfortunately. Apparently FSG recognised that early doors and hence the corporate heavy extension to Anfield.
 
The problem wasn't with the management, it was the fact that John Scales and Neil Ruddock were in the team.
 
The problem wasn't with the management, it was the fact that John Scales and Neil Ruddock were in the team.
Yep.
It's a real shame as we had fantastic talent in attack.
We played some sensational football going forward under Evans.
Shame about having Bjornebye,Scales and Razor in defence though.
Absolute fucking hippos trying to turn.
 
Its been the case for years with us, except temporarily under Rafa, where there has been a part of the team that was really deficient and failed to be addressed which has ultimately held us back. Its no wonder our best players have got fucked off.
 
Yep. Let's pore over memoirs from bit players to sneer at teams who won everything in sight. And next week: we laugh at Einstein for not being more proficient at typing.


Or let's close down every interesting line of enquiry into why we went from from the best team in the world to also-rans in the space of about 5 years.
 
Or let's close down every interesting line of enquiry into why we went from from the best team in the world to also-rans in the space of about 5 years.
That's not what we're doing though. During our pomp, when you say we were amateurish, we were in fact run by a group of ruthless professionals who knew exactly what they were doing. As they left the club, to be replaced by lesser men, their knowledge left with them and so hastened our demise.
 
Peter, whilst I understand your line of enquiry, & even as far as your point of view, I think you seek to try to define things too much.

In everything you seem to try to define things in order to understand them. Whilst I appreciate that, I don't begin to understand how Shankley or Paisley judged players so quickly & effectively, nor even how Ferguson did so at United, some people have the ability to build a team around them to complement their natural ability to do so, & defy convention whilst doing it.

As you often do, I suspect you're trying to quantify an individual influence, which isn't always possible.
 
That's not what we're doing though. During our pomp, when you say we were amateurish, we were in fact run by a group of ruthless professionals who knew exactly what they were doing. As they left the club, to be replaced by lesser men, their knowledge left with them and so hastened our demise.
But that ruthlessness wasn't easily quantifiable, so Peter doesn't understand it.
 
I confess to loving Ruddock, if only for the equaliser in the 3-3

I'd also give him an extra half-mark for a great long ball forward to Bjornebye who then passed to Robbie for that absolute worldy against Brann Bergen.

There were occasions when Razor showed he could actually play. Ditto Scales and a number of others around at the same time. Unfortunately it didn't happen nearly often enough, not least because our managers at the time (Souness and then Uncle Roy) were out of their depth.
 
I find it tiresome when they hark back to how the medical side was handled at the club back about 40-odd years ago. Because it was primitive at every club. The positive thing back then was you had medical people who came from the game, and often had played it at a high level, so they had common sense; the negative side, of course, was that they often had pretty basic technical knowledge. The opposite is true now, which is, all things considered, far preferable, although, as the clashes between the football and sports science staff show, it still isn't ideal.

It's also quite tiresome with the stuff about the technological changes. Of course most people at most clubs were crap at using it when it first arrived, because it was never designed for people who weren't trained alongside it. The club was hardly going to sack Ronnie Moran because he didn't immediately know what a box that went 'ping' was for. And I really find it rich that Scales, who came from fecking WIMBLEDON, was 'shocked' at how backward Melwood was. That really beggars belief. The more banal point about such players is that they were part of the generation who witnessed the slow and awkward modernisation of football's attitude to medical knowledge, technology and expertise, going from ex-pros with a bucket and a sponge to speccy specialists with all the teccy paraphernalia within a decade or so. They seem to be unaware of that fact, and believe they 'rumbled' clubs who were simply clueless.
 
Or let's close down every interesting line of enquiry into why we went from from the best team in the world to also-rans in the space of about 5 years.


Really, going from one specific point to 'let's close down every interesting line of enquiry': it's hardly Pericles, is it? You really need to be more subtle than that if you're going to misrepresent someone else's argument. I think the drubbing you've had on the marriage/divorce thread must have left you a bit dazed and bitter.
 
Isn't Wenger considered one of the "pioneers" of introducing healthy eating etc to players? I remember Ian Wright saying during an interview he made the players change their diets, everything was grilled including the broccoli.

I think the game in England generally, was a bit slow in the uptake of advances compared to other countries.
 
Yes, it was very slow, and even when some took it up, because they had little or no solid understanding of what they were now doing, they were horribly prone to wacky fads and dubious medication. Hoddle was the classic example of that: absorbed a bit of info from Wenger and off he went. It didn't help that Wenger himself was way too confident about using stuff he didn't really understand. Take creatine, for example: he heard that it could boost energy levels legally, so that was enough for him to get everyone using it, in spite of the fact that, for a long time, he remained ignorant of the point that with the wrong dosage it puts on fat and atrophies the muscles. Hoddle followed suit with England, as well as becoming obsessed with injecting vitamins instead of taking them orally, to the point where many players were ending up like pin cushions. There was not much difference with all of this and his Eileen Dury faith healing experiments, because both were based on reckless amateurism.
 
I've worked with people, specifically my last boss, who thought they were experts on something after reading one article.

It can create a horrible working environment!
 
That's not what we're doing though. During our pomp, when you say we were amateurish, we were in fact run by a group of ruthless professionals who knew exactly what they were doing. As they left the club, to be replaced by lesser men, their knowledge left with them and so hastened our demise.


I didn't say we were amateurish. I said there were perturbing signs that we might have been.

The point is that could there have been a general pattern of us being incredibly good at some very important things that led us to success that encouraged complacency in other areas? Might that have been a corrosive influence over time?

It's a question I'm asking, not even an assertion.
 
Peter, whilst I understand your line of enquiry, & even as far as your point of view, I think you seek to try to define things too much.

In everything you seem to try to define things in order to understand them. Whilst I appreciate that, I don't begin to understand how Shankley or Paisley judged players so quickly & effectively, nor even how Ferguson did so at United, some people have the ability to build a team around them to complement their natural ability to do so, & defy convention whilst doing it.

As you often do, I suspect you're trying to quantify an individual influence, which isn't always possible.


Not really sure where to start with this. I'm just wondering whether even during our greatest success there might have been some seeds of our demise. Why that merits a miniature psychological profile I'm not sure.
 
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