This season will see the fiftieth anniversary of Bill Shankly becoming manager of Liverpool FC.
It was in December 1959 that the man from Glenbuck took the reins of a club in the bottom half of the second division, a club with a crumbling infrastructure, dispirited, the younger relation of Everton, a club that had no reason whatsoever to believe that it could ever expect anything other than occasional success, at best to try to evenly compete with its neighbour for primacy in the city. The most immediate dream was to somehow regain the dignity of the red shirt and gain promotion to the first division.
We can trace two periods in the existence of Liverpool FC – pre Shankly and post Shankly.
And half a century later, we are still living in the afterglow of the man.
No other football club in the world bears the imprint of a single man so deeply. You can see it in the way that we crave a messianic figure as our manager. No other club projects its desires onto the personage of its leader with such passion and abandon. No other club craves that almost mystical connection between manager and support that our oneness with Shankly embodied. You can argue it is a weakness of ours as much as a strength. But somewhere in our soul lies a deep hunger to replicate and echo that intensity of devotion between an idealised, messianic figure of a manager and our support. And you can see it in the swagger, charisma and wit that defines us, and that we strive to achieve in our play and in our conduct.
In the half century since, we became the most successful club in the history of English football, and the third most successful club in the history of Europe, and overall, the greatest club in the world. In the year 2009 we are poised to entrench our dominance and strive to take steps to a long term pursuit of ever more titles and championships in our homeland and abroad.
I didn’t want to write a post about Shanks and what he meant to us, it is a little like a Catholic praising Jesus again and again. The stories, the sharpness of his wit, his beautiful, swaggering, joyful arrogance and self-belief. What I wanted to say is how I feel we should step back and consider how fifty years on the man still lives inside every fibre of our club and achievement, and how his inspirational shadow falls over and defines us. It has been an epic reign over us, over our imagination and sense of what is possible for a club bearing the symbol of a sometimes downtrodden and marginalised provincial city in Europe beside the Irish sea.
Most of all I just wanted to say that it is only natural to believe in symmetry and the cycles of time. Fifty is a round number, five decades, one half of a century. An empire of football was built by that man, and we now have beasts and crabs snapping at our number.
Where has all that time gone, with half a century clocked over? It doesn't matter, because there is more time to come, and there is time to pay tribute to him now.
If we were to gain nineteen in this fiftieth year of Shankly’s arrival, in December 1959, what a perfect symmetry that would be. The roundedness of it all, the reassertion of what is the natural order that he created.
Fifty years on. The emotion of it all and the resonance is irresistible.
