A Look at the Secrets of Liverpool's Glory Years

Book Review: The Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout by Simon Hughes

Now this is an intriguing book. Whilst most of the key architects of Liverpools's lasting success over the four decades after Bill Shankly took over avtively shunned publicity, most were still pushed into the limelight.

Even so, a book looking at Liverpool's chief scout doesn't exactly spring to mind as a plausible idea.

Yet that is what Simon Hughes has done with 'Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout' in which he takes a look at the life of Geoff Twentyman. A task rendered all the more complex by the facts that Hughes never actually met the man about whom he is writing and Twentyman having died five years ago.

Strangely, however, the book works extremely well. Much of the merit for that is down to Hughes himself who has intelligently threaded together the various aspects of Twentyman's life to ultimately show both how he worked and also his genius.

Fittingly he does so in a manner that mirrors that adopted by the man he is writing about: a large deal of legwork. For Hughes has tracked down not only most of Twentyman's best picks but also those players he looked at but who ultimately ended up elsewhere.

The latter are often revealing as it emerges that most of these players have a genuine respect for Liverpool and most are left wondering about what could have been.

Aside from that, perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is the uncanny similarity in the limitations imposed on both Bill Shankly and Rafael Benitez.

“The brief was to find the best young players Liverpool could afford and with the potential to develop in the future.” Sound familiar? Of course it does: it is what Benitez has been doing in recent years. In reality, however, is that this is what Twentyman had to do at Liverpool where there simply wasn’t enough money to spend to buy the most promising youngsters in the country. So Liverpool and Twentyman had to be sharper than the rest by spotting players with potential rather than those that were clearly set to do very well.

Which raises the question as to whether it is still possible to achieve success in this manner. Possibly but would the fans be as patient with the players as they were back then? Would they accept not seeing the club linked with big names? Somehow, I doubt it.

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