“It's the greatest thing in the world, natural enthusiasm. You're nothing without it.”
Just one of the many truisms which sprung from the mouth of Bill Shankly and few better summed up the legendary former Liverpool boss’s outlook on the game and life itself. One of the Scot’s greatest attributes was identifying players who had the characteristics he wanted in his teams, individuals who could bring different values to the collective in a way which could blend and make it greater than the sum of its parts.
Underpinning that was the necessary passion for football and hard work which Shankly was renowned for himself. Like many managers, having his own values represented on the pitch was essential and, of all the players he brought to Anfield, no-one arguably fulfilled that criteria more than a youngster brought in almost exactly halfway through his 15-year reign, who would become one of the club’s greatest ever players and is synonymous with the glorious period in the 1970s when the Reds rose from being one of the country’s leading clubs to its dominant force as well as a European powerhouse.
Emlyn Hughes came from a family of sporting pedigree with his father Fred having been a rugby league international for Great Britain and, after being refused a trial at his local club Barrow, made his First Division debut with Blackpool at the age of only 17 in 1964 alongside the likes of England stars Jimmy Armfield and Alan Ball. Always one with his ear to the ground when it came to young talent, Shankly was in attendance for one of Hughes’s first games for the Tangerines and immediately put in a £25,000 offer which was rejected by manager Ron Suart but with the caveat Liverpool could have first refusal as and when the player became available.
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It was enough encouragement for the Liverpool manager to regularly telephone the youngster to assure him it would not be long before he would be plying his trade at Anfield. “Every Sunday morning, I’d be just about to make short work of a plate of eggs, bacon and black pudding when the phone would ring and it would be Shanks," Hughes later recalled. 'Hey, Emlyn, son, don't eat that stuff you've got on your plate there. I'll be signing you shortly. I want you lean and hungry, son. Lean and hungry!’, he would say. Decades later, I still associate the smell of bacon frying with the telephone ringing at 8.30 sharp on a Sunday morning!”
When Suart was sacked as Blackpool boss in February 1967, the Liverpool manager did not delay and, although the Reds had to almost triple their original bid to £65,000 to convince the Lancashire club to do business, within days Hughes - still six months short of his twentieth birthday - was on his way to Anfield, via an eventful journey which highlighted to the wide-eyed youngster Shankly’s famously single-minded personality and the huge faith he had in his new charge, as he later revealed to Shankly.com.
"We had to get to Lytham St Anne's to complete the signing so I could play straight away in Liverpool's next match and Shanks drove us both down there. It's only about ten minutes from Bloomfield Road, but he was the worst driver in the world. He had this old brown Corsair and just as we left the ground he half went through a set of lights and a woman shunted into the back of us and smashed all the lights in. Next thing, a police car flags us down and the young officer comes up to the car and Shanks winds down the window. 'What is it, officer?' he asked, 'I'm sorry sir you can't continue the journey in that car as you've got no lights.' said the policeman. 'Do you know who's in this car?,' said Shanks, and I thought he was doing the old 'do you know who I am routine.' 'No', said the officer, 'I don't recognise you.' 'No not me you fool,' he said, 'I've got the future captain of England alongside me.'"
Hughes’s versatility was one of his assets which most impressed Shankly and the 19-year-old - who had initially broken through at Blackpool as an inside-forward before figuring mainly at left-half - was thrust straight into the Liverpool midfield days later as the reigning First Division champions beat Stoke City to return to the top of the First Division table. He was cup-tied for the following weekend’s FA Cup fifth round defeat to holders Everton at Goodison Park - the match famously watched by over 100,000 fans with closed-circuit television screens set up at Anfield - and, although he would make ten more appearances before the end of the campaign - featuring at left-back as well as midfield with Gerry Byrne suffering injury problems as his career began to draw to a close, the Reds only managed to win two of their final 11 league matches to finish a disappointing fifth.
Though nobody at the time would have expected it with two league titles and the club’s first FA Cup having arrived at Anfield in the preceding three-year spell following promotion in 1962, Liverpool had begun what would become seven years without a trophy as the side Shankly had careful crafted to lift the Reds out of the doldrums of the Second Division back to the summit of the English game began to age and it would be some time yet before the fiercely-loyal Scot accepted the need to begin breaking it up. The acquisition of Hughes was at least an initial first step towards that - the manager’s first words to him being, “We’ve got three or four years of hard work ahead of us” - and the Kop took to him immediately, his boundless energy and all-action, committed style along with a way of running he himself described as being ‘like a bloody big daft donkey’ swiftly earning him the nickname ‘Crazy Horse’ after he rugby-tackled Newcastle forward Albert Bennett in only his fifth game before which, as he revealed in his autobiography, Shankly - as well as his own father - had advised to do something which would make the crowd notice him.
"Shanks took me to one side and said, 'The crowd are looking for a new name to take to. They need a new hero after the sixties side. They want someone to take over as their own. Go out and give them something to remember you by.’ My dad had also said I should do something so that when the fans were going out the turnstiles they’d be nudging each other saying, ‘Did you see what Hughesie did today?’ So when Bennett went past me, I dragged him down on the floor and pretended to hit him, saying ‘Me dad said I had to something’ and that’s why I got the nickname ‘Crazy Horse’, because I was barmy.”
Despite his tender years, Hughes became a mainstay in the side from the start of his first full season on Merseyside initially taking over Willie Stevenson's left-half position then moving into the centre of midfield and forming a partnership with Ian St John as the Scottish forward dropped back in a bid to elongate his career with Shankly having paid a record fee to Wolves for highly-rated teenage striker Alun Evans. The Reds were still highly competitive, narrowly missing out on the league championship after finishing third in 1968 and second in 1969, which may well have encouraged the manager to hold off breaking up the core of the side which had done so well for him, but he could avoid the inevitable no longer after a shock FA Cup exit to lower division Watford in 1970.
The likes of Ron Yeats, St John, Tommy Lawrence and Roger Hunt were all eased out with Shankly putting his faith in youngsters like Hughes along with Tommy Smith and Ian Callaghan and recruiting hungry talent like Ray Clemence, John Toshack, Steve Heighway and Kevin Keegan. Although in transition, Liverpool reached the FA Cup final in 1971 before losing narrowly to Double-winners Arsenal and the following year were only a late disallowed goal at Highbury away from winning the league, finishing a point behind surprise champions Derby County but in 1972/73, it all clicked into place. Four wins and a draw from the opening five matches took the Reds top where they stayed until a sticky six-game winless spell in January and February saw them lose the league leader's spot to Arsenal while in the thick of a four-way fight for the title, with Leeds United and Ipswich Town also within striking distance.
Shankly’s men returned to the summit with a narrow victory over Ipswich the week before a trip across Stanley Park which firmly re-established their championship credentials and Hughes’s increasing influence as the heartbeat of the team in a campaign in which managed a career-best tally of 12 goals, the midfielder scoring twice in the last ten minutes to settle a typically tight derby encounter against Harry Catterick’s Everton which helped reassert Liverpool’s belief and ensured they stayed top until a goalless draw against Leicester in the final game confirmed the title was returning to Anfield after seven long years.
“For the first three years I was at the club, the derbies were fabulous - unbelievable”, Hughes recalled in Brian Barwick and Gerald Sinstadt's 'Everton v Liverpool - A Celebration of the Merseyside Derby. “Up to 1970 we were both up at the top, always doing well in the Cups and such like, and the derbies dominated the whole outlook of the city. Right from day one of the season, never mind Europe, never mind about semi-finals and finals, it was October the so-and-so or March the so-and-so, that was all they talked about. After 1970, I’ve got to be honest and say that for me they went a bit flat. I played that many games against them without being on the losing side and we knew we wouldn’t be. Don’t get me wrong, we were desperate to win but the truth was they weren’t really opposition for us and it got almost embarrassing when you knew you were going to win every time.
“A lot of people told me that day I scored two great goals but really I’d have been a bad player if I’d missed them. The first came from a great run across the defence by Ian Callaghan who then played a brilliant through ball for me. I’d timed my run from midfield so that it took me clean through. If goalkeeper David Lawson had held his ground a bit longer than he did, he might have put me in two minds but he came out as fast in one direction as I was going in the other and that made my mind up for me, I only had to knock the ball wide of him then put in the empty net. The other was a volley after Alec Lindsay hit a big, deep ball and John Toshack went up with Lawson to challenge for it. David didn’t have any option but to punch. He got both hands to it but the ball came to me at perfect volleying height and I whacked it with my right and it fairly flew in. It looked great but it came at such a good height and angle and I was so well balanced - only a bad player would have missed or ballooned it.”
After the trophy famine came the flood, with the league title followed up weeks later with the club’s first European honour - the UEFA Cup - taking up residence in the Anfield trophy cabinet following two-legged victory over German side Borussia Moenchengladbach eight years after the Reds went close to becoming the first British club to win the European Cup. It earned Shankly another crack at the continent’s top prize but 1973/74 proved to be a watershed for Liverpool in more ways than one. With Tommy Smith suspended for the opening games of the campaign, Hughes partnered Larry Lloyd in central defence with Peter Cormack ably deputising in midfield and, although Smith would soon return to the side with Hughes moving further forward again, the Reds made a poor start to their title defence, winning only five of their first dozen league matches to fall eight points behind pace-setters and eventual champions, Leeds United.
Matter reached a head in late autumn in the period between the two legs of the European Cup second round tie against Red Star Belgrade which is widely reputed to be when Liverpool’s outlook on how to play in Europe changed, the Yugoslavs handing Shankly’s men something of a footballing lesson in becoming only the second continental team to beat the Reds home and away. The weekend before the second leg at Anfield, Liverpool travelled to Arsenal and Shankly sprang a huge surprise by leaving out his skipper Tommy Smith and dropping Hughes - who was also handed the captain’s armband - back into central defence to play alongside Lloyd. A furious Smith stormed out of Highbury and onto the first train out of Euston bound for Lime Street, with Hughes scoring the opening goal in the Reds’ 2-0 win, and, although the new set-up wasn’t enough three days later to prevent Red Star repeating their 2-1 triumph from the first leg, the principle of employing more ball-playing defenders in central defence who could build attacks from the back had been firmly sown and would become the basis of the European and domestic triumphs to follow.
Hughes continued in the heart of defence and, when Lloyd picked up a knee injury in early February, Phil Thompson - whose early years with his boyhood club had largely been in midfield - dropped back to join Hughes to begin the partnership which would become the bedrock of the coming years' successes. Smith - who had joined the Anfield ground staff at the age of 15 in 1960 and become a mainstay in Shankly’s first great team - would eventually get his place back in the side and play on with distinction for another four years but he never regained the captain’s armband he felt Hughes had lobbied Shankly for, which the former felt was the cause of the feud between them that existed thereafter and led to them barely exchanging another word for the rest of their Liverpool careers.
“Tommy Smith is a bitter person”, Hughes told the Liverpool match day magazine in 2001. “Bill Shankly dropped him and made me captain. I can’t help that. What am I supposed to say to Shanks? I don’t want the captaincy, boss? Give it to someone else? And how could anyone go to Shanks and say ‘I want the captaincy’? How could I do that?”, although he was more circumspect in his autobiography describing him as the greatest captain he played under, adding “Although I never particularly got on with him as a man, I had nothing but admiration and respect for him on the pitch. He had powerful qualities of leadership.”
Hughes would end his first part-season as captain by lifting the FA Cup at Wembley as the Reds overpowered Newcastle United 3-0 in one of the most dominant cup final performances ever seen but he was shocked as anyone at Shankly’s abrupt retirement only two months later at the age of 61, reportedly pleading through tears with the manager to reconsider when he broke the news to a stunned dressing-room. Hughes stayed close with his former boss and continued to visit him at his West Derby home after training sessions, and believed he almost found out the real reason for his sudden retirement shortly before the Scot’s death in 1981.
"We don't know what pressures were on him and it's impossible to know exactly what his reasons were”, Hughes later said. “One day he asked me if I wanted a drink, and I said 'yes please I'll have a cup of tea'. 'No' he said, 'I mean a proper drink. I want to tell you the real reason why I left Liverpool. I need to tell somebody”. I said ‘No boss you don't have to, I don't want to know', but he insisted. He asked his wife Ness to go and get us a couple of whiskies and we retired to the front room of his house. Ness brought the drinks through and just as we settled down the doorbell rang. It was his daughter with the two grandkids and that was that. The moment had gone. He never did tell me and I never ever asked."
Shankly’s reluctant successor was his assistant Bob Paisley and, after a settling-in season which saw new talents such as Ray Kennedy, Terry McDermott and Jimmy Case begin to establish themselves, the Napoleon-inspired ‘bastion of invincibility’ the Scot had always envisaged at Anfield become a reality under the quietly-spoken but fiercely perceptive north-easterner. The league championship and UEFA Cup double was repeated in 1975/76 in dramatic circumstances, the title being secured on a see-saw night at Molineux when, with the Reds needing maximum points from their last match, they trailed a Wolves side who had to win to stay up with fifteen minutes left before late goals from Keegan, Toshack and Kennedy sent the thousands of traveling Liverpudlians into raptures and Hughes and his team-mates into ecstatic celebrations inside the dressing room.
The previous week Paisley’s men had recovered an early two-goal deficit to blitz FC Bruges with three second-half goals in five minutes in front of the Kop to gain a previous advantage in the first leg of the UEFA Cup final and Kevin Keegan’s free-kick in Belgium proved enough to gain the draw required enabling Hughes to lift the trophy. But the one everyone at Anfield really wanted was the European Cup they felt they had been cheated out of by Inter Milan the previous decade and by the following spring, Liverpool stood on the precipice of an unprecedented treble.
Already closing in on what would become a record tenth league title, the Reds faced French champions Saint Etienne in the quarter-finals of the European Cup and, having lost the first leg 1-0, were staring down the barrel of elimination when Dominique Bathenay’s long-range stunner shortly after half-time cancelled out Kevin Keegan’s early opener only for Ray Kennedy and substitute David Fairclough to produce the two further required goals on one of Anfield’s most iconic nights to send Liverpool in the semi-finals where they cruised past Swiss minnows FC Zurich to reach the Rome final.
Before then though, with the league retained with a game to spare, Manchester United lay in wait at Wembley in the FA Cup final. The FA’s decision not to schedule any potential replay until 21st June due to the Home International fixtures saw Paisley leave out veteran midfielder Ian Callaghan for forward David Johnson in a bid not to prolong his side’s marathon campaign any further and may have proved costly, Jimmy Greenhoff’s outrageously fortuitous deflected winner ending Liverpool’s treble dreams with the pain of defeat written all over Hughes’s face as the skipper led his side up the steps to collect their loser's medals while wondering how he would lift his charges for their date with destiny in Rome in only four days time.
“I’m thinking what shall I do, what can I say?”, he recalled. “And then Ray Clemence jumps up and throws his boots in the bath and runs and dives in and says, ‘I’m going to get well and truly p***** tonight’. That broke the spell and I knew then we were going to win.” That sense of belief was shared by the estimated 30,000 Liverpudlians who made the long trip to Italy - many on the primitive trains of the time which had little in the way of facilities - and the sight of them massed in the Stadio Olimpico’s Curve Nord as the Liverpool players inspected the pitch before the final added a further confidence boost ahead of their showdown with old foes Borussia Moenchengladbach.
“I remember walking out onto the pitch before the game and I thought to myself, ‘Jesus Christ we’re back in Liverpool!’”, Hughes recalled in Mark Platt’s, ‘Cup Kings 1977’. “There were so many punters from Liverpool there, we were greeted by a sea of red and white. The support of the fans gave us all a terrific lift and all the lads were saying to each other there was no way we could lose the match now. It was like playing at home. I can imagine what the Borussia players must have thought when they walked out. They must have looked around and thought they had no chance against such support.”
Terry McDermott’s 27th minute opener after a sweeping move put Paisley’s men in front and, although Danish midfielder Allen Simonsen equalised shortly after half-time, Tommy Smith’s bullet header and Phil Neal’s penalty, won after surging run into the box by Kevin Keegan in his last match for the club before fulfilling his long-stated ambition to play abroad, completed the journey begun by Hughes’s mentor Shankly over a decade before. The club's long journey to ultimate European glory was not lost on the Liverpool captain as he prepared to crown an unforgettable campaign, that had also seen him voted the Football Writers’ Player of the Year, by lifting the biggest trophy in club football which had become the Reds' holy grail, BBC commentator Barry Davies describing the moment perfectly as “the smile of the season from Emlyn Hughes, the performance of the season, the trophy of the season, and won by the English champions - Liverpool.”
“I remember walking up those steps and I felt privileged to do so”, he recalled. “I was captain of Liverpool because I was a mouthy shouter, not because I was the best player - I would moan at players incessantly to try and get that bit extra out of them. When I went up to lift the cup I was not thinking about myself, Kevin Keegan or the rest of the lads who’d just won the match. The names that were flashing through my mind were the likes of Roger Hunt, Ian St John and Ron Yeats, Shanks and Rueben Bennett. These were the men who had given us the chance to win the European Cup and who had put us in the position we were in. That was the moment the club had been striving for since 1964 and we had learnt from them. As I reached out to collect the cup, I knew that it was as much for them as for us.”
The following day close to a million people lined the streets of Liverpool for the triumphant homecoming parade where Hughes allowed his euphoria to get the better of him when addressing the crowd on St George’s Plateau, launching into a chorus of ‘Liverpool are magic, Everton are tragic’. With many Blues also turning out that day in a show of civic pride, it was unnecessarily mean-spirited and caused real upset to fans of both clubs, Hughes admitting he knew it was a mistake as soon as he did it and later issuing a public apology, which read, “The day I could have bitten off my tongue... I sincerely hope that the many thousands of Everton supporters will accept my heartfelt apologies for the stupid remarks I made at the official welcome home celebrations after our European Cup final in Rome. It was said on the spur of the moment and I now deeply regret the incident. I now realise that many people, including our own supporters, took offence, and quite rightly, for it spoilt an otherwise happy occasion, and I can only say again how much I regret it.”
Twelve months later the celebrations were more restrained but no less heartfelt as, despite losing their league title to surprise new champions in Brian Clough’s newly-promoted Nottingham Forest, Paisley’s men reached the European Cup final again, helped on their way by Hughes - now nearing his 31st birthday - scoring one of the very best of his 49 Reds goals with a stunning winner in the first leg of the quarter-final away at Benfica. After seeing off Moenchengladbach again in the semis, familiar foes in Bruges also lay in wait in the final, which was played at a Wembley stadium populated almost entirely by Reds fans. A dour match was sealed midway through the second half when Scottish forward Kenny Dalglish, who Paisley had signed the previous summer for a British record £440,000 from Celtic as Keegan’s replacement, chipped home an astute pass from compatriot Graeme Souness who had arrived from Middlesbrough four months before, the new Scottish influence in the team meaning Hughes was now playing left-back with 20-year-old Alan Hansen having established himself as Phil Thompson’s centre-back partner after joining from Partick Thistle a year earlier.
"It was a very tight match”, Hughes said after making history as the first man to twice lift the European Cup. “Our fans expected us to take Bruges apart, but we couldn’t do it because they gave us a harder game than Moenchengladbach. We were at a disadvantage because everyone was expecting us to do well but it is a tremendous feeling to win it again and to do so in front of so many of our fans is fantastic. It couldn't have been written better if it was a fairy story."
The same could be said for Hughes’s Liverpool career but the following campaign would be his last at the club, with an arthritic knee restricting him to 28 appearances. It was still enough to see him secure his fourth championship medal as the Reds steamrolled their way to one of their most comprehensive title wins, conceding just 16 goals through the 42-game league campaign - only four of them at Anfield - while scoring 85 times and collecting 68 points, which under the modern-day three points for a win system would have equated to 98. Although Nottingham Forest had ended the dream of a hat-trick of European Cups by knocking Liverpool out in the first round, a league and FA Cup double was on the cards until semi-final replay defeat to Manchester United at Goodison Park, Hughes being caught out of position by Jimmy Greenhoff’s late winning goal and it proved to be the last of his 665 games for the club.
He signed for Wolves in August 1979 and the following spring lifted the League Cup - the only domestic trophy he never won with Liverpool - after skippering his new club to a surprise victory over Nottingham Forest. His performances were good enough to still win international recognition, winning the last of his 62 England caps - 23 of them as captain - against Scotland in May 1980 before making the squad for that summer’s European Championship finals in Italy although he did not play, making him the most capped England player to never feature in a major finals after also not making off the bench in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
He joined Rotherham United in 1981, initially as player-manager, and also had brief spells with Hull City, Mansfield Town and Swansea City before embarking a career in the media while also running a PR company. As well as becoming a household name for a new generation by being a team captain on BBC’s ‘Question Of Sport’ for many years, he regularly commentated for the BBC on Liverpool matches and was at both Heysel and Hillsborough, showing great kindness to the family of Andrew Devine - who eventually became the 97th victim after being left brain damaged for decades - in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s worst sporting tragedy.
In 2003, Hughes revealed he was suffering from a brain tumour for which he underwent surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy and his last public appearance was at the following year’s Grand National, Aintree always being a favourite haunt for the big horse-racing fan who was a friend of celebrated trainer Ginger McCain and once challenged Red Rum to a race when both were in their 1970s heyday. He passed away at the age of 57 in November 2004, prompting a swathe of tributes from across the football spectrum for a man who could polarise opinion even within his own dressing room but whose passion, will to win and knowledge of the game were never in dispute.
“In my time at the club there were perhaps three players who, through their consistency, epitomised the Liverpool Way more than anyone. Ian Callaghan, Kevin Keegan, and of course, Emlyn Hughes”, claimed another Shankly acolyte in John Toshack while Terry McDermott - one of the few with an engine compare to his former skipper - said, "He absolutely adored playing football. He would just give 110%. They called him Crazy Horse and that's exactly what he was. He never stopped, he was up and down the pitch, cajoling everyone. He'll not be forgotten.” Kenny Dalglish added, “Emlyn was my first room-mate when I came to Liverpool and he acted as a babysitter to me. He was also a great captain of Liverpool and a great example of everything Bill Shankly wanted the club to stand for.”
Hughes’s immense contribution to Liverpool is immortalised with a statue outside the Kop which depicts then-trainer Bob Paisley carrying him from the field after sustaining an injury, a fitting tribute for a man who despite his human flaws characterised the team-first philosophy Shankly demanded and which one of his favourite sons and chief lieutenants on the pitch summed up himself perfectly.
“The secret of our success was the team and I was a good player in a great team. I had very little ability but tons of enthusiasm and desperation by the bucketload. We never worried about the opposition. All Shanks and Bob Paisley ever worried about was how we played. They knew that if we played well we would beat 99 teams out of 100. And it had to be a hell of a team to beat us.”
