‘It takes a lot of thinking to keep things so simple’

He approached one of Liverpool’s coaching staff and whispered in his ear: “Joe, how do you want me to play?”

Joe Fagan took a step back and roared: “F*** off! We’ve taken a lot of time and effort and spent a lot of money to sign you and now you are turning around and asking me how to play football? Do us a favour, son . . .”

The story serves as a sharp lesson in how Fagan and Liverpool went about their business. “It takes a lot of thinking to keep things so simple,”’ says Andrew Fagan, the grandson of the former Liverpool coach and manager who recollects the Souness anecdote in Joe Fagan: Reluctant Champion.

His grandfather managed Liverpool for only two seasons, but was central not only to the success of the club but its very ethos. He arrived at the club just before the irrepressible Billl Shankly and was part of an organisation that slowly began to do things in a certain way.

Shankly, Bob Paisley, Fagan, Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans would all come and go, but they sought to make the Liverpool way a regular route to success. They succeeded.

Fagan, shamefully, is almost forgotten as the club’s manager. He was at the helm for two seasons, reaching the European Cup final in both, and winning one. The other, being Heysel, did not matter in sporting terms. He won three trophies in that first year and walked off with dignity in 1985 after the European Cup final won by Juventus.

But, perversely, this stellar two-year tenure as manager is not his finest hour. Fagan’s greatest contribution to Liverpool was that he invested himself in the club, subsumed his interests in its concerns, and became an original part of the organism that forced the club to grow from the second most important in an English city into the greatest in the world.

Organism, of course, is just a fancy word for ‘The Bootroom’, particularly when it started life as a place for Fagan to store the Guinness products sent in gratitude from the brewers after he had allowed some of the players of their amateur side to come to Anfield for treatment.

It was fitted with some plastic chairs and a bit of carpet. And the coaches -- Shankly, Reuben Bennett, Paisley, Fagan and others -- would sit to talk football and, almost inadvertently, create a club that dominated football in England and in Europe.

“It is strange to hear people talk about the Liverpool ways in those days as being crude because they were simple,” says Andrew Fagan. “Yes, Shankly had his way and it was his way that was taken. But these were all men who had spent their lives in football and learned from it. Look how Paisley and my grandfather took the club on.”

Liverpool, rather than being cussedly individualistic, were taking on lessons from other sports, other clubs. “For example, it is well-known that ‘The Bootroom’ did not fancy the FA coaching badges. But they went on the courses. If there was just the glimmer of chance there would be something useful, then they would spend the time on it.”

Fagan, who arrived as a coach at Anfield in 1958 after a playing career spent mostly with Manchester City, was quietly studious about the game. With Paisley, he reckoned that a steady 4-4-2 shape, invigorated by the principle of pass and move, and filled with the best players that the club’s money could buy, could go a long, long way. He played a part in bringing 27 trophies to Liverpool.

“Kenny Dalglish says in the book that much of what Liverpool were doing then was not really being recognised. Today it would be called sports science,” says Andrew Fagan. This included fast-track treatment for injuries, warm-downs and periods of rest for top squad players.

Fagan’s influence was even stronger in developing the Liverpool way. “He was conscious that there was a right way to speak about opponents, a proper way to speak publicly. For example, as a Liverpool supporter, some of Rafa Benitez’s outbursts were exasperating,” says his grandson.

“My greatest impression of him is the way he related to people. Everybody deserved time and respect,” he says. Fagan, who died in 2001 at the age of 80, lived just a five-minute walk from the stadium.

“After he retired, people would knock the door on matchdays and he would go and chat to them and answer every reasonable question. He did not see this as anything big, just reasonable,” says his grandson.

This humility coursed through his professional life. After playing out his career in non-league football, he coached at Rochdale for two years and became convinced that he could make players better.

However, he always knew he could know more. “We found a batch of his diaries in the loft of his house,” says Andrew Fagan. “There are full of bits of data and detail.”

Fagan always had an eye on precisely what was happening in front of him. “Joe was Mr Liverpool during the club’s golden age,” Souness tells the book’s authors.

It is a worthy tribute from an impeccable source.

Fagan may just have preferred to have been remembered as a Bootroom pioneer.

Or perhaps with this:

In December 1982, Watford visited Anfield and ‘The Bootroom’ hosted its most exotic visitor. Elton John, the Watford chairman, was asked what his poison was.

“I’ll have a pink gin, please,” replied the pop star. “You can have a brown ale, a Guinness or a Scotch, lad, and that’s yer lot,” said Fagan.

He could keep it simple in any circumstance.

• Joe Fagan: Reluctant Champion, by Andrew Fagan and Mark Platt, is published by Aurum at £20.