It’s often said that the key to Liverpool’s seemingly never-ending era of success in the 1970s and 80s was the club’s ability to replace key players just before their powers began to wane.
Perhaps motivated by Bill Shankly’s fierce loyalty which saw the iconic Scot initially reluctant to break up his first great side and led to a seven-year trophy drought between 1966 and 1973, his successor Bob Paisley gained something of a reputation for the ruthless way he would move players on and refresh his Liverpool team in a bid to keep them at the top.
It was largely a highly successful ploy with the quietly-spoken but canny north-easterner plundering a remarkable twenty major honours - six league championships, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup, one UEFA Super Cup, three League Cups and six Charity Shields - in nine seasons at the helm but it was not always entirely fool-proof.
Paisley’s achievements make him in the eyes of many still the English football’s greatest manager by virtue of the volume of silverware won in such a short space of time but his stellar career ended without ever winning the FA Cup, his last chance to get his hands on the world’s oldest cup competition being ended by a man who many felt had been jettisoned from Anfield too soon.
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Like most people born in Liverpool, Jimmy Case was football-mad from as early as he could remember and was taken by mum Dorothy to watch her brother Ronnie playing for South Liverpool at Holly Park while he was still in a pram. Growing up in a Reds-supporting Allerton family, he followed the time-honoured route from the Boys Pen to the Kop and attended matches whenever he could but, despite being small in stature, displayed the fierce characteristics he would become famous for from an early age, as an 8-year-old being entrusted with taking goal kicks for his school team as nobody else could kick the ball as hard as he did and showing his distaste for losing by giving the Garston Church Choir goalkeeper a hefty kick when his Allerton Scouts team were losing 23-22.
“Even in those days I wouldn’t hold back”, he wrote in his book, Hard Case. “I didn’t take any prisoners. It didn’t always go down well with other parents but that didn’t deter me from the way I thought the game should be played. I got used to being called a dirty little bugger.”
After the disappointment of not being taken on after a trial with Liverpool Schoolboys, Case began an electrician’s apprenticeship at 16 while keeping his football going for dockers’ club Blue Union in Garston (where Reds striker John Aldridge would later cut his teeth) before a year later moving on to South Liverpool where the combative midfielder’s talents were soon spotted by Liverpool scouts Tom Saunders and John Bennison. "They asked me to go for a two week trial”, he recalled to LFCHistory. “I took two weeks off work because I was an apprentice electrician as well. At the end of the two weeks, they asked me to sign full-time, but I actually turned them down because I had done two years of my electrician's apprenticeship which is a four-year term and I wanted to continue that which in the end I did. Liverpool took over my semi-professional contract at South Liverpool and I did that for two years until I was twenty, signed full-time pro and by the time I was just short of 21 years of age that's when I made my debut."
Despite being Liverpool’s only semi-professional player for a lengthy period before being handed his first-team chance, any doubts over Case’s commitment had been long laid to rest due to his whole-hearted approach to training and unwillingness to be intimidated, which rapidly became evident on the pitches of Melwood.
“I made it my goal to take everything in and do everything that was needed to become a Liverpool player. Although a quick learner, I was still a semi-pro, still nowhere near a spot in the first team, not sure if I was good enough. I sometimes wondered if they didn’t put me in the side earlier because there was a chance in their eyes I might just walk away but that was never going to happen. I was there for as long as they wanted me, although there were a couple of occasions when I thought it might be a short-term relationship.
“The coaches used to like getting their boots on in practice matches and one time we were playing when the ball bounced up between Ronnie Moran and me. I went in hard for the ball and we clashed, shin to shin, bone on bone; no pads. Anyone who has played the game will tell you that hurts. Pain didn’t bother me but it certainly hurt Ronnie. He jumped up and suddenly we were eyeball to eyeball. ‘You’re not playing f****** alehouse football now, you know!’, he yelled and I just did my usual thing, turning my back on him and walking off, but with the nagging thought that perhaps he would have it in for me and might even turn the other coaches against me. It’s time like that when you need a bit of something about you, a bit of steel to take the criticism, shrug off the rollockings and carry on. I’ve always had that, the mental strength to face disappointment and challenges. That’s the kind of player I was and I couldn’t change.
"Then came the day I clashed with Alec Lindsay, another stalwart Liverpool player who could be a bit tasty in the tackle, and it proved to be a turning point for me. He had played more than 150 games for Liverpool but I was determined to beat him. First time the ball came to me, I turned to go past him and he gave me a little nudge, just to let me know that he was the man and he wasn't interested in putting it all on the line in some practice match against a raw reserve. The next time I took Alec on he went in a bit harder, as if to say, 'right, that's enough, don't come again'. Anyway, third time I came at him he whacked me and the old red mist descended. I picked myself up off the floor and chinned him with a good right-hander and suddenly all the players were pitching in to hold us apart. The next day I was called into Joe Fagan's office and I really thought I was in for the chop. It was the worst b*****king I had ever had and I felt like a piece of s***, especially as it came from someone like Joe Fagan, for whom I had the utmost respect. Many years later I was talking with Roy Evans about the old times and Roy said, 'do you remember the time you chinned Alec Lindsay?' I laughed and told him I thought I would get the sack for that one. 'Not a chance, son,' he said. 'Joe said, 'that Case boy, he's got some aggression, hasn't he? I think we'll have some of that’.”
Having signed on full time in May 1974, Case’s first match day involvement came the following September as an unused substitute in Liverpool’s record ever victory, an 11-0 romp over Norwegian’s Stromsgodset in the European Cup Winners Cup, but he would have to wait until the final game of the season - Bob Paisley’s first and only trophy-less campaign in charge - before being handed his full debut during which he won a penalty and provided an assist for John Toshack in a 3-1 home victory over Queens Park Rangers. He didn’t feature when the Reds were beaten at Loftus Road on the opening day of the following season but was back in the team the following weekend and scored his first Reds goal, thumping an equaliser past Pat Jennings as Paisley side’s fought back from two goals down to beat Tottenham at Anfield.
In time honoured tradition he would be eased into the first team gradually and had to make do with intermittent starts for much of the first half of the campaign but a hat-trick against Poles Slask Wroclaw in the UEFA Cup and another strike days later in a 4-0 victory away to Spurs shortly before Christmas cemented his place in the side and he barely missed another game as Liverpool’s season built to an exciting climax. A 3-0 triumph over Manchester City at Anfield meant victory in the final league fixture away to Wolves would bring the championship trophy back to Merseyside for the first time in three years but before then the Reds had to face Belgian side Club Brugge in the first leg of the UEFA Cup final. The visitors stunned Anfield by going two goals ahead in the first quarter of an hour but Case, left on the bench initially, was thrown on at half time in place of John Toshack and grabbed the vital equaliser with the 12th goal of his debut season as three goals in an epic five minutes in front of a seething Kop turned the match round in Anfield's first great European comeback and gave Paisley’s men a crucial advantage to take into the the return leg.
"It wasn't that Tosh was playing badly but Bob Paisley and the coaches felt something had to be changed, the pattern had to be altered”, he recalled. “I thought they were going to hit me with all these tactics but in the tunnel Bob Paisley just grabbed me by the tracksuit and said, ‘Go and cause bloody havoc’. My mate Ray Kennedy got us back into it with a great shot from outside the box and then two minutes later I scored when Ray's shot after Kevin Keegan’s brilliant turn came off the post back to me. I thought for a split second the shot was going in, but suddenly the ball rebounded and was coming my way. It could have hit my thigh and run out of play, but I jumped instinctively and side-footed the ball into the net. Kevin put us in front with a penalty a couple of minutes later but the Kop and the supporters were magnificent that night. Throats must have been red-raw with cheering. But you know what? I believe those fans liked to see us with our backs to the wall because they knew we could win.”
Liverpool were up against it again at Molineux a week later when Wolves - themselves needing to win their final match to avoid relegation - led the title-chasing Reds with less than 15 minutes to play but late goals from Keegan, Toshack and Ray Kennedy sealed a 3-1 victory which clinched Paisley’s first trophy as manager, the second arriving little over a fortnight later when Keegan’s free-kick in Bruges secured the 1-1 draw which won the UEFA Cup 4-3 on aggregate.
Having repeated 1973’s league and European double, twelve months later Paisley’s men found themselves chasing an unprecedented Treble with Case again displaying his knack for grabbing important goals, grabbing a brace (which included a thunderous free-kick) in the European Cup semi-final second leg romp against Swiss minnows FC Zurich and a week later firing home the crucial second goal as Liverpool saw off Merseyside neighbours Everton in the FA Cup semi-final replay at Maine Road.
With the league championship retained with a game to spare, attention turned to two cup finals within four days and the Reds’ shot at immortality. Manchester United lay in wait at Wembley but - despite Case scoring one of the great FA Cup final goals, chesting down Joey Jones’s pass on the edge of the box before swivelling to rifle home an equaliser into the top corner to cancel out Stuart Pearson’s opener moments earlier - there would be heartbreak as Jimmy Greenhoff’s outrageously fortuitous winner three minutes later, Lou Macari’s wayward shot deflecting off the striker’s chest past the helpless Ray Clemence, ended Liverpool’s Treble dream.
Revitalised by a Clemence-inspired boozy sing-song on the train home, Case and co shrugged off their disappointment and four days later in Rome completed the mission first begun by Bill Shankly a dozen years earlier by bringing the European Cup to Anfield for the first time after defeating Borussia Moenchengladbach 3-1, much to Case’s relief after his error let the German champions back into the game following Terry McDermott’s first-half opener.
“Standing on the pitch at the Olympic Stadium that night was one of the proudest moments of my life”, he recalled. “Before kick-off, we went for a walk onto the pitch and we were totally surprised by how many fans there were. We knew how many planes and trains were going out, but that was it. I knew the type of fella who would quite happily sell his car to be there, and plenty did, but we didn’t think one end of the stadium would be like that when we walked out. I remember thinking back to the days when I used to catch two buses, number 86 and then the 27, to stand in the Boys Pen and watch Peter Thompson, Ian Callaghan and Tommy Smith. Did I ever think then I would be part of such a mind-blowing occasion? As a supporter almost certainly, but as a player… don’t be bloody daft!
“It was a cracker for a final which are all too often dull matches, end to end, with loads of chances and could have gone either way. Our opener was a beauty from Terry Mac, we sliced Borussia up like a piece of bratwurst, but I have to admit I played a part in their equaliser just after half-time because it was my back pass to Phil Neal that was intercepted by Allen Simonsen and he hit a beauty from the corner of the box. I would have been proud of that one. Phil blames me, but I don’t know what he was doing overlapping me, because he shouldn’t have been there. I had turned around and I went to give him the ball because that’s where he should have been, so it was all his fault. Whatever, it threw us out of our stride for a while and they could have scored again if it hadn’t been for Clem, who went down at Stielike’s feet to smother his shot. A brilliant, brave save, and it turned the game.”
Tommy Smith’s bullet header from Steve Heighway’s corner put Liverpool back in front and Phil Neal’s penalty finally killed off the Germans to spark wild celebrations among the 30,000 Liverpudlians who had travelled to the Italian capital as well as the legions of Reds back home, where the following day hundreds of thousands turned out to welcome back their heroes for the victory parade. The eagle-eyed among them spotted Kevin Keegan - whose announcement at the start of the season it would be his last at Anfield before leaving to pursue his career abroad had caused some disquiet - was sporting a black eye with rumours persisting for years it had been Case who had inflicted it on the England striker.
“This is probably a good time to put to bed a popular myth from that period”, he wrote in his book. “The story was that I had had a go at him for not trying his best in the FA Cup final a few days earlier because he was saving himself for the big European game. Well, as my dad once said, ‘That was a rumour that was started on the number 86 bus to Penny Lane.’ It was all based on other people’s perceptions of how they thought I would feel and how I would react because, top and bottom of it, Kevin didn’t have a particularly good game at Wembley.
“But I would never have thought of Kevin not trying, and I would certainly never have dreamt of accusing him of not doing so. No, I had nothing to do with his black eye. The truth is, it was an accident. The morning after the European Cup final some of the press lads were milling around the hotel pool. We didn’t always get on with the press, especially the London boys, because they only ever came to see us get beat. Anyway, some of the lads grabbed hold of one of them, it might have been Jeff Powell or Steve Currie, I can’t really remember, and they decided to throw him in the swimming pool and, as it was kicking off, Phil Neal’s elbow came up and caught Kevin in the eye. It was as simple as that.
“Looking back, that was about as good as I could ever hope my football life could be. Two seasons into my career as a Liverpool first team player I had two League Championships, a UEFA Cup and now a European Cup. And that win over Borussia will always rank as the pinnacle for me. We had just lost at Wembley yet we picked ourselves up to win the big one.”
The trophies kept flowing after Rome, Case being in the Reds side which retained the European Cup at Wembley against Brugge after scoring a trademark thunderbolt which sealed the semi-final fightback against old foes Borussia Moenchengladbach and the following year he was part of what is regarded by many as Liverpool’s finest ever midfield alongside Graeme Souness, Ray Kennedy and Steve Heighway as Paisley’s side recorded one of the club’s most dominant ever championship triumphs, conceding just 16 goals throughout their 42-game league campaign - shipping just four at Anfield all season - while scoring 85 times and collecting 68 points, which under the modern-day three points for a win system would equate to 98.
Along with their undoubted ability, the strong team spirit which ran throughout Paisley’s squad was a major factor in their consistent success and a fair degree of it was formed in drinking sessions which strengthened the bond between them. Case was regularly involved with best pal Ray Kennedy but as the new decade began, their exploits began to cause concern within the Anfield hierarchy - an incident at a north Wales hotel which saw the pair of them arrested and breathalysed creating unsavoury headlines - and, although another league title would follow in 1980, the following season would be Case’s last at Anfield, the last of his 269 appearances for his boyhood club being as a late substitute for Kenny Dalglish in the 1981 European Cup final win over Real Madrid in Paris.
"There was something of a drinking culture at Liverpool in those days”, he admitted. “Ray Kennedy and me were usually at the heart of it, along with Terry McDermott, Phil Thompson, Emlyn and Smithy - everyone, really. The coaches knew all about the drinking - it went on at all the clubs - and my thinking was that because we trained all week, played a hard game on a Saturday, to go out and have a few drinks afterwards was something we had earned. In my view, we were just letting our hair down a bit, but the club in those days didn't like that type of thing. I wasn’t looking to leave at all but suppose they must have thought I was a bit of a bad lad.
"After I left the club, attitudes changed and certainly after Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan had left there would be incidents of players getting into a few scrapes, and still they were kept on at the club. One player terrorised half the Wirral, with about four police cars chasing him, but the club kept him on. Let's put it this way, I'm not the only No 8 in the history of Liverpool FC who has been arrested, but my punishment was to be eased out of the club. Without a doubt in my mind they made a mistake in letting me go. I could still have done a job for Liverpool until I was 32 or 33. They lost five years of me when I was at my best but I wasn't bitter then, and I'm not bitter now. I accepted it as part and parcel of the game.”
Case joined Brighton & Hove Albion as a £450,000 makeweight in a deal which saw defender Mark Lawrenson move the other way in a club record £900,000 transfer, the midfielder scoring in his first appearance against his old club the following October in a 3-3 draw at the Goldstone Ground before helping his new side to a 1-0 victory in the Anfield return six months later but it was the following season when he really came back to haunt Paisley.
The 63-year-old had announced ahead of the 1982-83 campaign it would be his last in charge before retirement and - having never won the FA Cup as manager nor as a player, having been dropped for the 1950 final against Arsenal after scoring in the semi-final victory over Everton - his players were desperate to help him get his hands on the one major honour to have eluded him in almost half a century of devoted service. By mid-February, the Reds were already cruising towards yet another league championship and had just seen off Burnley to reach a third successive League Cup final, which they would go on to win against Manchester United at Wembley.
Having beaten Blackburn Rovers and Stoke City in the opening rounds of the FA Cup, Paisley’s men - 15 points clear at the top of the First Division - were paired with bottom-of-the-table Albion in the fifth round in what was the first ever match to be played at Anfield on a Sunday with Everton also having been drawn at home to cup holders Tottenham playing the day before, the club getting round archaic trading laws dating back to the 1780 Sunday Observance Act, which prohibited charging money for admission to a building on 'the Lord's day', by allowing free admittance in exchange for payment for a team sheet which was handed to all fans going in to the ground.
Despite their lowly league position, the visitors defied the odds by withstanding Liverpool’s early attempts to take control and went in front shortly after the half hour mark when Michael Robinson, who would sign for the Reds that summer, rampaged into the box and drew Bruce Grobbelaar before setting up Gerry Ryan to score in front of a shocked Kop. Liverpool were not at their best and eventually equalised midway through the second half when substitute Craig Johnston acrobatically hooked home after Ian Rush flicked on a Kenny Dalglish free-kick but only a minute later Case of all people scored the winner, striking a shot from the edge of the penalty area after a cross was only half-cleared which looped over Bruce Grobbelaar with the help of a deflection off Ronnie Whelan and into the net.
The home side were handed another chance to equalise when Tony Grealish was adjudged to have fouled Alan Kennedy but Phil Neal struck the penalty wide and the Seagulls - managed at the time by former Reds midfielder Jimmy Melia - held on inflict Liverpool’s first home cup defeat in 63 matches dating back to 1974 and ensure Bob Paisley’s career would end without him ever getting his hands on the FA Cup.
“Scoring the goal that knocked Liverpool out was a bizarre feeling”, Case admitted. “There wasn’t long left in the game and after taking a battering we were holding on for a replay. I hit this shot from the edge of the box and it clipped Ronnie Whelan’s shoulder and looped over Bruce Grobbelaar. I didn’t celebrate. I just turned around and the other lads jumped on me. As I was walking off the pitch after the final whistle what hit me was that the Kop were singing my name. I had just wrecked their hopes of winning the FA Cup and they chanted my name. You can’t buy those type of moments.
“As I came off the pitch this TV reporter shoved a bloody big microphone into my face and said, 'Jimmy, do you realise that you just knocked Liverpool out of the FA Cup and robbed Bob Paisley of his last chance to win it before his retires, the only trophy he’s never won?’ I just gave him a stare and said, 'Well what about me, I’ve never won it either. Bob Paisley wouldn't have lost any sleep thinking about me if we would have lost so I won’t either, that's just the way it goes.’”
Case - who hastily abandoned plans for a night out in Liverpool and soon afterwards received a postcard from an old friend which read simply, ‘You b******’ - scored the only goal of Albions’s quarter-final over Norwich and then belted home a trademark free-kick in the semi-final victory against Sheffield Wednesday at Highbury to send Albion to their first ever FA Cup final. Despite being relegated after finishing bottom of the First Division, they gave Manchester United an almighty scare at Wembley - taking an early lead and going close to winning it in the last minute only for midfielder Gordon Smith to infamously fail to beat goalkeeper Gary Bailey with the goal gaping - before losing the replay 4-0.
Remarkably Brighton would knock Liverpool out of the FA Cup again the following season, winning 2-0 at the Goldstone Ground to condemn Joe Fagan’s side - who would go on to win a league, European Cup and League Cup treble the following May - to another shock exit although Case would miss the match through the suspension and the following March he joined Southampton for £30,000. He would enjoy six seasons at The Dell, helping the Saints to the 1986 FA Cup semi-final where his chance to become the first player to take part in three FA Cup finals for different clubs was scotched by Kenny Dalglish’s Double-chasing Reds and four years later he scored another memorable goal against Liverpool at Anfield which briefly threatened to derail his boyhood club’s title bid before Ronnie Rosenthal on his debut helped inspire a late fightback.
Case continued his tour of the south coast by moving to Bournemouth in 1991 and, after spells with Halifax Town, Wrexham, Darlington and non-league Sittingbourne, returned to Brighton in 1993 initially as player-coach before taking over from Liam Brady as manager in November 1995 and calling a close on his playing career at the age of 41 when at the time he was the oldest registered player with any Premier League or Football League club. He later briefly managed non-league Bashley before embarking on media work for both Radio Hampshire and Radio Merseyside where he can still occasionally be heard passionately giving his views on the Reds.
“It meant everything to me coming through the ranks and getting to play with the likes of Ian Callaghan, Tommy Smith and Kevin Keegan”, he reflected. “A lot of the players were better than me but you just get in there yourself, score when you can and help out. Coming from Liverpool, I knew every time I went out on the pitch I had to give 100 per cent. I knew I could never pull out of a tackle, even if it was 60-40 against and I was likely to get hurt because I was representing them and they were my people. When I trained, I trained hard and I drank when we were allowed to drink with the lads and I enjoyed myself. I didn’t want to leave but I will be forever grateful to Liverpool for giving me the opportunity to make all my dreams come true and for providing me with memories I will cherish for the rest of my life."
