Source: Liverpool_Echo
Liverpool FC 12 days of Christmas - The holy trinity
As the festive season approaches, we have put together a special online 12 days of Christmas with a Liverpool FC twist. A new installment will be online at www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/lfc and www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lfc each day up to the 25th[LNB] 'At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques.'[LNB]The words of Bill Shankly when summing up what he felt was the heart and soul of Liverpool FC.[LNB]Beauty is of course in the eyes of the beholder but has there even been a more influential collaboration between the three than in the alchemy Shankly, his team and the Kop helped forge when the modern Liverpool was taking shape in the early 1960s?[LNB]Liverpool FC is arguably as famous for the Kop and You'll Never Walk Alone as for its unprecedented success on the football field - down in no small part to the bond the infectious enthusiasm Shankly and the denizens of the Kop found reciprocated in each other, transmitted by their representatives on the pitch.[LNB]Football culture, along with many other types of culture, was changing in the 1960s with swaying crowds and intuitive, inventive chanting finally starting to catch on in England the way it had on the continent - what was happening at Anfield however accelerated the process. BBC's Panorama programme, agog, reported on the growing phenomenon on the day Liverpool clinched the 1963/64 league title.[LNB] The old patricians of English football were gradually being phased out - it was not so long before this era that teams were picked by a committee of directors - but Shankly was among those who began to emphasise the responsibility players had to supporters, perhaps never better summed up by his speech to the legions of fans who packed out Liverpool city centre after the Reds (now five years without a trophy of any kind) had LOST the 1971 FA Cup Final to Double winners Arsenal.[LNB]
