The Bill Shankly Story, Part 3

The Fallow Years, 1966-72

Shankly’s great sixties side had gained promotion from the Second Division, won the League twice, the club’s first ever FA Cup, and reached a European Cup final and a European Cup Winners’ Cup final, all in the space of four years, as was covered in Part 2 here. After all that, there followed a longer period of - well, not very much. I call them the fallow years, between 1966 and 1972, before the next great Liverpool team emerged. Years when we didn’t really challenge for the title, years when we were in the Inter Cities’ Fairs Cup (which became the UEFA Cup, which became the Europa League …) rather than the European Cup, years when we went without trophies. Against that, we were never lower than 5th, and always in Europe.

We did get something, though, from our last season in the European Cup before that long absence, in the form of a very painful lesson from Ajax of Amsterdam. On a foggy night in Amsterdam in December 1966 we lost 5-1 to a Dutch side featuring an exciting young tyro called Johann Cruyff. Liverpool didn’t get beaten and outclassed like that very often, and had not been for a long time. It was to be an acute learning experience for Shankly and the Liverpool Boot Room. Ajax played a brand of football alien to the English League’s way, and Shankly and co. realised that to succeed in Europe, perhaps Liverpool needed to adapt the way they played, to become more possession-based, with a good first touch and clever movement off the ball. But that took time. In the meantime there were successive defeats in Europe’s lesser competition by some of Europe’s lesser clubs, like Ferencvaros, Athletic Bilbao and Vitoria Setubal, as well as Leeds United in the semi-final of the 1971 Fairs Cup, and Bayern Munich the following season.

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