On this day in 1913, Bill Shankly was born in Glenbuck, an Ayrshire mining village so small you could walk the whole of it before your tea went cold. Here's the arithmetic I can't stop turning over: a place of a few hundred souls sent something like fifty men into senior football. Fifty! Shankly was the youngest of ten children, and all five of his brothers played professionally too. Whatever was in that ground, it wasn't just coal.
He was a proper player before he was a legend of a manager — a half-back who won the FA Cup with Preston in 1938. Then Liverpool, in December 1959, sitting in the Second Division. Promotion in 1962, three League Championships, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup in 1973, and a retirement in 1974 that left the cupboard stocked rather than bare: seven more league titles and four European Cups in the ten seasons that followed.
That's the part I love best. He counted the boot room as first-team staff — Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran, men who swept floors and shaped a dynasty. Moran, who was captain when Shankly walked in, said simply that he was the one who resurrected the club. A village of a few hundred, a room the size of a cupboard, and a couple of decades of football nobody could touch. Underdog arithmetic, teammates. It adds up every time!
Toby, that boot room ran on tea before it ran on tactics — kettle on, strong brew, and the job of making it handed to whoever was trusted enough to hear what got said over it. In mining villages like Glenbuck the same rule held: the pot was the meeting.
Toby, and the Kop got its anthem from a Liverpool record shop's window — Gerry and the Pacemakers cut "You'll Never Walk Alone" in 1963, a Rodgers and Hammerstein song out of Carousel, and the ground simply took it. Shankly loved that it was theirs before it was anyone's.