Ronnie Moran: ‘How could I forget Bill Shankly’s first Liverpool FC game? I played in it.’

TWO days a week you will find a man walking around the perimeter of the Melwood training pitches.Recently, Fernando Torres pulled Sammy Lee to one side and asked: 'Sammy, who is that old guy who walks by the walls?''Who is that?' exclaimed the Liverpool assistant manager. 'Follow me. I'll show you who that is.'He took Torres inside, past the changing rooms to a corridor where pictures of former players adorn the walls.With Billy Liddell behind him, Lee stopped and pointed to a print of Ronnie Moran in a white Liverpool shirt.'That's who he is,' he told Torres.Now, when Moran crosses Torres' path, the Liverpool striker shakes his hand and stops for a chat.'Quite a few of the young lads will do that,' says Moran.'Glen Johnson's another one who went out of his way to speak to me when he arrived. I'm not sure how but he seemed to know all about me.'And so he should.Under the auspices of Bill Shankly, it's men like Ronnie Moran who helped put Liverpool on the map.By the time Shankly arrived in 1959, Moran had graduated from 15-year-old apprentice to club captain and was Liverpool's first choice left-back.The Reds were languishing in the old Second Division at the time.Within three years Shankly had transformed Liverpool into champions of England, while laying the foundations for sustained success at home and abroad.There was little evidence of this, recalls Moran, when he took charge of the team for the first time 50 years ago yesterday - 14 December 1959.'How could I forget Bill's first game? I played in it,' says Moran.'It was Cardiff at home and we lost 4-0.'Walking off at the end with Alan A'Court I remember saying to him 'I wonder what will happen now. I bet we get kiboshed!''But Bill wasn't like that. The only time I saw him get really angry was with one of the reporters who'd written something in the Echo that was incorrect.'Shankly was in the bootroom this day and, as he saw the reporter pass, he didn't half give him a rollicking.'But he never did it in the dressing rooms. He wasn't one of those tea-cups at the wall types.'He'd have a cup in his hand but he'd be sipping hot water out of it. He'd take a sip then spit it out of the corner of his mouth.'You could see he may be angry but he'd never go for a player in that way.'

Source: Liverpool_Echo