Kevin Keegan was my first football hero, the absolute epitome of what it meant to play for Liverpool. He was full of what Shankly, the man who signed him from Scunthorpe, called ‘natural enthusiasm’. Idolised by the Kop, he was brave, dynamic, and undoubtedly a superstar. He was of course, perhaps uniquely, worshipped not just by those in Red, but by those in Newcastle, a club whose colours he also graced and went on to manage, even after helping to demolish them in the 1974 FA Cup Final.
I was just six years of age when I was utterly transfixed, for the very first time, by football. I was watching from Huyton, in Liverpool, as the team I fell in love with faced Newcastle at Wembley. Keegan scored twice as Shankly’s second side to lift the FA Cup famously ‘undressed’ Malcolm Macdonald’s team 3-0. From that day, I was obsessed with Liverpool Football Club, and Keegan in particular. I later got his autograph when my mum, who worked in the city centre, queued for hours for both him and Emlyn Hughes to scrawl their names on a scrap of paper, long since lost.
My mum met him a second time and regaled her football-mad son with how Keegan had come into ‘Jays’, a DIY store on Bold Street where she worked. He’d sat on her desk apparently, swinging his oh-so-precious legs, before buying a new kitchen. Those precious legs were famously ripped to shreds when he fell from his bike on Superstars. The footage of what looked like a horrific accident can be found on YouTube, but in watching it again very recently, it struck me that it’s impossible to contemplate any multi-million-pound athlete being allowed to take such a risk with their future these days, just as being so visible and accessible to the public is hard to imagine today. Yet, in the 1970s, when the divide between those who paid to watch and those lucky enough to be top-flight professional footballers adorning the shirt was so much narrower, it was common.
Being so approachable to the public demonstrated a humility in Keegan, a trait he maintained both in his playing days and whilst a manager. Whether it was pleading with Newcastle fans to trust him when selling Andy Cole, or admitting that he felt out of his depth as England head coach, he understood the disgust that many fans now have for the greed of modern-day owners and players. He famously walked away from Newcastle United when he rightly concluded that those running the club cared more about money than success on the pitch.
Of course, he was well aware of his own commercial value, instantly becoming one of the highest-paid footballers in the world when leaving Liverpool for Hamburg in 1977. He signed off his LFC career by winning the penalty that led to Phil Neal securing the European Cup in Rome. Others will remember him ‘splashing it all over’ with Henry Cooper when advertising Brut on TV, whilst his proclivity to take the road less travelled was cemented when he returned to England to play for an unfashionable Southampton. He finished his career at Newcastle, where he famously left the pitch in a helicopter immediately following his testimonial against Liverpool in 1984.
Going on to manage Newcastle and coming so close to bringing them the Premier League trophy, he infamously lost his composure when calling out Sir Alex Ferguson. His ‘I’d love it’ rant became one of the most-watched clips in the history of the Premier League. It perfectly encapsulated what a minority might call naivety or an unsuitability to the pressures faced by top-flight managers, with those same critics citing his later departure from the England job as further evidence. To fans, and to those of us who fell in love with football for all the same reasons as ‘Mighty Mouse’, it demonstrated his passion, his willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve, and his determination to maintain an authenticity. To be one of us.
As I look back at that six-year-old boy today, who fell in love with both his hometown club and Kevin Keegan, I shed a tear. I felt the same way on hearing of the death of Bill Shankly, who, when giving Kevin Keegan his debut, simply instructed him to ‘drop some bombs’. Perhaps I shed a tear for a loss, not just of someone who never gave less than everything, whether playing or managing, but for a far less polarising era. It was an era when players really did perform for those on the terraces, but were never performative. An era when players were certainly well paid, but never felt out of reach to those who cheered them on. It was an era, indeed a decade, the 1970s, that is so often derided by critics, but one in which so many more of us felt a genuine connection to our community, an empathy with others, and had something, or someone, to believe in.
So, RIP Kevin Keegan.
He dropped some bombs.
