Liverpool FC Forum

Heighway: I turned down chance to manage Liverpool
Alyson Rudd

Steve Heighway, the head of Liverpool's highly successful academy who is leaving the set-up after 19 years, says that he has been formally asked to take over the management of the club but was not tempted. “I was asked several times by Peter Robinson, the previous club secretary, if I would be interested in managing the club. I said straight away no. The players would have got fed up with me pretty quickly because I am pretty obsessive. The challenge would have been to be like that and get the respect. I have had the opportunity, but I don’t think I would have been able to have slept at night after a bad result. It would have mattered so much to me. I don't think I would have been able to retain my health because I am pretty obsessive about what I do.”

Heighway's loyalty is remarkable. He always maintained that he would never join another British team after Liverpool and he did not, choosing to move to the United States when he was no longer a first-team regular Anfield.

“My definition of being a professional footballer was being a Liverpool professional footballer," he said. "The same goes for being an academy manager. So if Chelsea come along and offer me £1 million a year to run their academy it wouldn’t mean anything to me. I’m not a professional, I’m a Liverpool employee. I work for Liverpool.”

Not surprisingly, it was the Anfield roar and Bill Shankly that forged that loyalty. Heighway believes that the unique quality of the club is under threat, but “I’m not sure how important that is any more. We now have new owners, a new manager and Spanish members of staff. I’m not being critical of any of this - change has to happen and maybe their values will be different and better, who knows?
Related Links

"I’m not against this change. If we won the Premier League, I don’t think the fans will be saying, ’Are we playing the football that Shanks would have liked?’ Shanks was inspirational, public, said outrageous things.”

And because Shankly was larger life, when he left, the players felt insecure because they wondered if he was behind it all, not them. When, in the FA Youth Cup final last month, Liverpool were 1-0 down against Manchester United at Old Trafford, some of the young players “wanted to go hell for leather” to grab a goal, but Heighway took a leaf from the Shankly manual and told them, as Shankly had told him, to do the same things when you are losing as when you are winning.

Shankly’s departure in 1974, after 15 years in charge, rocked the players and Heighway played a key role in preventing them from falling apart when Bob Paisley was appointed.

“Bob Paisley was totally different," Heighway said. "When he first took over, the players wondered how he was going to cope because he just seemed to be lacking confidence. I called a team meeting. I wasn’t the captain, but in many ways I was the one who kept the players together. I said, 'Look, if we don’t support Bob everything is going to fall apart here.' His team talks were hopeless initially. In the early days it was, ’Jesus Christ, we’re going to have to do this.’ He really didn’t know what to do in the early stages, but he had great players. The great teams do it themselves a lot of the time and we were a well-oiled machine.

"The first thing Bob said to us was, 'I didn’t want the job, but I’ve got the job. I didn’t want the bloody thing, but they’ve given it to me.' That was the first team meeting, with Shanks walking up and down the corridor outside, so it was all very strange.”

Whenever I watched Heighway in action I always wondered why he did not celebrate his goals. Was he too clever? Too aloof? It turns out he was simply embarrassed. So how does he cope when the Kop sing Fields of Anfield Road and the line “Stevie Heighway on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing."

“I feel very privileged," he said. "I’ve been very lucky. I go into a daze sometimes wondering 'why me?' because I never considered myself a great player. I considered myself a good player surrounded by great players. A lot of great players helped me to have a career. It’s a humbling experience, very weird. I feel very self-conscious about it and I look to see who is sitting next to me. I’ve never been given a hard time here. I wasn’t the most confident of players and people, and I think if I had ever received stick off the crowd it would have damaged me. I feel very grateful that, through 11 years as a player, I was never singled out either here or away from home.

“I’m an anomaly. I can play cricket in front of ten people and be scared, but then I could play in front of 100,000 at Wembley no problem. I always took my strength from the team. It was like being in a cocoon, free from criticism, free from stress.

“I’m nobody’s blueprint of a typical Liverpool player, I’ve never had a fight in my life. I would never kick anybody, but I always desperately wanted to win. And I had to learn to give up some of my own individuality and learn to be a team player. I’m about relationships and I don’t think a lot of other managers are. I think they are frightened of relationships because they know they will have to drop players or get rid of them. My job can only work if you do develop a relationship, an unbelievable trust with a player where you can be tough and hard but the players trust you for life. It’s like being a parent.”

The toughest part of his job is telling youngsters that he has to let them go, which can kill their dreams. But he says that because they have been nurtured properly, “they always come back and thank you for what you have done. Twenty-five, 30 years ago there wasn’t seen to be a need for a youth programme. They just believed players would emerge from kicking a football around in the street, that there would just be this constant flow of great players. We had to persuade people that young players have a talent and potential, but then they have to have that nurtured.

"I’m always really chuffed when I hear Michael Owen speak or Jamie [Carragher] speak or Stevie G [Steven Gerrard] speak or Robbie Fowler - they all say they are so grateful for the nurturing process that we did here. None of them say we made them players, but I don’t say we made them players either - but we played a massive role in their lives.”

The key to his success, he said, is that he did not use his job with the youth team to plot a career move, whereas youth-team coaches traditionally had an eye on becoming the reserve-team coach and then the first-team manager.

“I will admit we [the academy staff] were fairly resistant to the idea of the influx of young foreign players because we were protective of the need for young kids to grow up on Merseyside or the extended area knowing that if they support Liverpool, there is a chance they could play for Liverpool. We’ve always believed that - from me, through the chairman, through the chief executive. We have always believed there is uniqueness about developing a boy who has come from this area, has come into the club young and then ends up playing for this club. That is an amazingly unique situation. We believe that when you come to the crunch, with two top clubs playing in the Champions League, this club has a bunch of boys who were born half an hour from the stadium whose families just love the club, that when it comes to the final crunch you will see that difference.

"And maybe the Champions League final in Istanbul would be a classic example where people are fighting for their lives rather than just fighting to win a game. So we’ve always protected that process as a priority, so I will admit we were a bit perhaps slow to come round to the view that it has to be augmented with some foreign young players as well.

“There will always be a bias. If you’ve got a foreign manager I think there will always be a bias towards players that they brought in. What matters is that the best players in a club get the chance wherever they are from, that’s the way it should be.

“I’ve only ever known two players that I knew would make it. One was Michael [Owen] and one was Steven [Gerrard]. At 16 you never know. At 18 or 19 it’s a little bit easier. I know we’ve got some very good players, but we won’t know how good until they get a chance and most of them won’t get a chance. There are 26 first-team squad players, most of them are internationals, then there are 18 reserve-squad players and then there is our lot. It’s an indictment of English football, but that’s the way it is.”

He says the academy system has reached a log jam and the Champions League is partly to blame. “It is great for the fans, but I don’t think it has helped the development of young players because when can a manager take a risk with a young player? When does he throw him into the first team? When can he do it? He can’t throw him into the league because they are playing for Champions League places, he can’t throw him into the Champions League. The League Cup has become the only place where occasionally somebody gets bunged in, to be given a chance.

“The great players will always be obvious selections. A Gerrard, a Rooney, a Lampard or a Terry, it's easy with those - no manager can deny their talent. I remember when Michael Owen was coming through, I was telling the first-team staff about this fantastic 16-year-old, but they really weren’t interested particularly. But then they saw him play in the Youth Cup and I remember sitting behind Ronnie Moran and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing and then six months later he was in the first team.

"It was just so obvious, it just had to happen. But not all talents are that obvious. In fact, very few are. Defenders are never that obvious because they have a different set of skills, a different talent. Michael Owen had blistering speed, so it was obvious."