The wonder left wingers of Liverpool

We badly needed new players and the ones that were signed by George Kay, in his later years, by Don Welsh and later by Phil Taylor were, frankly, not good enough.

Our years in the second division were miserable except for the contribution of Billy, who gave everything (and more). He would have been well within his rights to have asked for a transfer to enable him to play in the top division but that wasn’t Billy’s way. Although a Scot, he was truly an adopted scouser and he devoted the rest of his career to the vain pursuit of getting Liverpool back into the First Division. At times his displays bordered on the superhuman.

He had been selected to play in the first ever Great Britain team against the Rest of Europe at Hampden Park in 1947 and, although he didn’t score, he was instrumental in Great Britain’s 6-1 victory in front of 135,000 spectators. Eight years later another Great Britain v Rest of Europe fixture was arranged to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Irish FA. The game took place at Windsor Park, Belfast and Billy was one of only two players selected who had played in the first game (the other was Stanley Matthews). This time the result was different, Europe winning 4-1 but Billy was always justifiably proud of being selected for both games.

Throughout the dark days of the second division he never gave less than his best and his forays down both wings and, later in his career, his battering ram performances as centre forward gave us hope that we would rise again. It would not happen during his playing career but he was able to retire knowing that he had done more than any player could possibly be expected to have done and he spent his retirement sitting just in front of me in the Main Stand watching his successors taking the team on to glories that would not have been possible without his massive contribution.

In my opinion Billy was the greatest player ever to pull on a red shirt.

When he retired (shortly after the arrival of Bill Shankly) there was a void on our left wing even though Billy had not played there for several years. We always considered him to be an outside left even when he was playing centre forward but the truth was that Alan A’Court had succeeded Billy on the left wing so successfully that he played for England in the 1958 World Cup Finals.

As Shanks started his rebuilding programme he did it by trusting in the ability of several players who were already on the club’s books when he arrived. He felt that they lacked motivation and he was right. If anybody could motivate a player it was Bill Shankly. He resurrected the careers of players like Tommy Lawrence, Gerry Byrne and Ronnie Moran and he built a side that was to metamorphose into the first ‘great’ Liverpool side.

In those days (the early sixties) there weren’t squads, there were teams. When you got a team together that was it. The team played every game so long as they were fit (and sometimes when they weren’t) and Shanks was a great exponent of that philosophy. Gradually he constructed the team that would get us out of the second division and he did so without replacing the seemingly irreplaceable Billy Liddell. Our first season back in the top flight was more than respectable and we finished 8th.

This wasn’t good enough for Shankly and he went back to the club for whom he had played, Preston North End, and bought Peter Thompson for a reported £40,000 – a huge fee in those days. The signing proved to be the final piece in the jigsaw. Once again we had a left winger who was capable of taking on defenders and supplying crosses for the likes of St John and Hunt to convert. Let nobody think that Alan A’Court was a less than capable winger – but he lacked the drive that Billy had supplied and which Thompson was to produce over the next 10 years or so.

If Thompson had a fault in his armoury it was that he never scored the number of goals that his ability warranted. In 415 games for the Reds he scored a paltry 54 goals (none more valuable than the first goal against Chelsea in the semi final of the 1965 FA Cup victory over Chelsea).

The fact that he didn’t produce the goals that his illustrious predecessor had done had little impact on his reputation among the fans. His surging runs down the wing brought the Kop to life much as Billy had done during the preceding 15 years.

His almost unblemished reputation with the fans was not shared unequivocally by all of his teammates, some of whom privately criticised his contribution to the cause in some dogfights away from home. They felt that he enjoyed the benefit of playing before adoring supporters at Anfield and turning on the style more than the less glamorous defensive duties that were sometimes required in away games against doughty opponents who were not prepared to be out-muscled by a team who were relative newcomers to the top table.

Not many supporters would agree with that criticism and any who only followed the Reds during the sixties would be hard pressed to name a player who provided more sheer entertainment than Peter Thompson.

Thompson’s last meaningful contribution to the Red’s cause came after he came on as substitute for Alun Evans in the 1971 Cup Final against Arsenal and set up Steve Heighway’s opening goal in the first minute of extra time. Unfortunately it was all in vain as Arsenal equalised with what, to this day, remains a phantom goal which has never been truly attributed to any player, although George Graham claims the credit, and Charlie George hit a deflected winner late on.