“I went to a very good school, believe it or not. A grammar school. We had Spanish lessons, but I didn’t take Spanish. I thought: ‘What’s a hairy-arsed kid from the Liverpool ghetto going to need that for?’ And lo and behold …”
It’s late in Bilbao, back in the country that changed him, and a glass of wine rests on the table in front of Sammy Lee, who is grinning again. It’s been an emotional evening and a long night: a lot of laughs, some tears too, talking life at Liverpool and the life that came next. “For me, it’s about coaching even more than playing,” the European champion and former England assistant says. “And that started here.”
It also started with friendship, where the conversation keeps going. So take us to Osasuna. “Oh, please,” Lee says. It was 1986 and he had left Liverpool, the club he supported and represented for a decade, winning everything. He had also lost his way when Michael Robinson suggested joining him in at the Pamplona-based club, 90 miles south-east of where he sits now, and no sooner had he met them than Lee knew. “You can tell with people, good people,” he says. “It smelled right, felt right. Everything about it.
Sammy Lee with Michael Robinson at Osasuna. Photograph: CA Osasuna
“Michael would always have my back. He was very supportive when I wasn’t doing well. He facilitated me going to QPR but I didn’t adapt: it wasn’t QPR, it was me. When you leave Liverpool … I was in such a low place. Michael wasn’t just a colleague, a friend, he was family: loyal, loyal, loyal to the day’s end. Until 1986, my path was set; he charted a new path for me, came to the rescue. Going to Spain with Michael was the best thing that happened to me after joining Liverpool. Osasuna started the book.”
Another chapter, at least. There are so many stories to tell and, boy, does he tell them well: with humour and humility, a warmth and joy all the greater for getting the chance to return. He is in northern Spain, where he played from 1987 to 1988, invited to Athletic Bilbao’s Thinking Football film festival to speak at the screening of Andy Wells’ moving documentary Two Tribes about Everton and Liverpool in the 1980s.
It isn’t always easy: voice breaking, in Spanish, Lee tells the audience how proud he is of his city; he tells them that he sees a connection to here, something similar in the clubs and their cities, a shared sense of community and identity that reconnects him to his experiences playing for Osasuna. Every time he says here, it is soon apparent, he means there too. And, he explains looking back in a quiet corner of a hotel bar later, in Pamplona he found a new purpose.
Lee celebrates winning the First Division title with the Liverpool fans on the Kop in 1980. Photograph: Harry Ormesher/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Lee’s first game at Anfield was as a fan against Ajax in 1966; his final game as a player came 30 years later. He joined at 17 but wasn’t a regular for four years. Captain of England Under-21s, many of his international colleagues were playing first-team football but then, he says, “they were at clubs, not Liverpool” and Liverpool were “worth waiting for”. When he left, he was a legend, winner of five league titles and two European Cups. Seven years on, he was back as a coach. By then things were different at a club where he says “they didn’t have a kit man until Gérard Houllier came”, the gear washed once a week by the coaches and stinking. He was different too, another calling found.
“As a player I didn’t really appreciate it all. I understood everything a lot more, the process, when I became a coach. You have a whole squad of players to think about and I like that. Nothing can ever replace playing but I prefer coaching and now appreciate all they did for us: people like Ronnie Moran, Joe Fagan.
“It kills me when people say we weren’t coached. Yeah, Bob Paisley was the ‘grandad’ with the slippers and the [flat] cap, but an example: 1981 [European Cup] semi-final. We’re lining up, ready to meet Bayern [Munich] in the tunnel. And Bob goes: ‘Listen, we’re going to change one thing tonight: [Paul] Breitner. We’re going man-to-man.’ This hasn’t been talked about. ‘What the fuck are we going man-to-man for? And, even worse, it’s Sammy: we’re putting him on Breitner?!’ Fantastic man-management. If I’d been told the night before, I would have been shitting myself and there would have been a mutiny. But I never had time. I went out and he never got a kick … and neither did I. Howard Gayle comes on and runs them ragged.
Bayern Munich’s Paul Breitner under close attention from Lee during the European Cup semi final 2nd leg in 1981. Photograph: Harry Ormesher/Popperfoto/Getty Images
“Bob would stand at Melwood, one leg cocked on the radiator, watch the two-lap warm-up and could tell if someone had an ailment. No kidding. He had a great backroom: Ronnie Moran, Roy Evans, Tom Saunders. I loved them. They were so astute; they coached, but lightly. Football is a simple game, made complicated by people like me: coaches trying to justify our existence. I know coaches who’ve said: ‘I made him …’ Ah-huh? Seriously? The managers I’ve worked with understood you can over-coach, stifle. In the end, it’s about the best players in the best positions.”
And Liverpool had them. The list is long and Lee is keen not to leave anyone out but Graeme Souness stood above: “A leader, captain, mentor, who even smelt better than us. You see him now and he could swim the channel every morning.”
Leaving was hard, all Lee had ever wanted behind him, or so he feared. “When your sell-by date is there, Liverpool know,” he says. “I get that. In 1984 I played 67 games. That takes its toll and, if I’m honest, professionally I took my eye off the ball, let standards slip. You’ve won the European Cup twice … Until 1986 everything was smooth, local kid playing for Liverpool, but I lost focus. The writing was on the wall. They tell you, in different ways: Steve McMahon was Kenny [Dalglish]’s first signing and he was brilliant. I didn’t really want to leave but I had to. It’s hard to accept. I wanted to play.
“I went to QPR with Jim Smith, but I wasn’t right. Michael told me about Osasuna. Pedro Zabalza was the coach, a lovely, lovely person, who wanted an English style, which goes down better in the north. It’s an honest club, modest but fantastic. Going abroad helps draw a line under that [low]. A different culture, football, different spotlight. It was wonderful. It enhanced me as a person.
“Back home, we wait until we get injured or our career ends [to consider coaching], although it’s changing now. When I was here, at Osasuna, there were young lads studying their badges already. I was like: ‘What’s that all about?’ Later I became reserve team coach at Liverpool under Souness. After about four, five weeks, he says: ‘Now, listen …’ I thought I was getting sacked. ‘Oh, here we go.’ He said: ‘You should get your FA coaching qualifications.’ I shit myself. But you know what? Best thing that ever happened to me.”
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Lee worked at Bolton, Everton, West Brom and Crystal Palace under Sam Allardyce: “Sam’s brilliant, brilliant. There are a lot of misconceptions about him. He’s very innovative, very forward-thinking. He’s a diamond.” Could it have worked for England with him? “It would have worked. Some of my best times were working with him.”
Lee with his Bolton boss Sam Allardyce during the FA Cup fifth-round replay with West Ham in 2006. Photograph: David Cannon/Getty Images
There were others. Southampton with Ronald Koeman, where he came across Virgil van Dijk, a defender who “led with a velvet glove”, he says. “Ronald and I spoke Spanish, and later I worked with Rafa Benítez. So much for not needing Spanish at school.” Was Koeman’s English not that good? “My English,” Lee replies. Then of course there was England, first with Peter Taylor and next with Sven-Göran Eriksson. Eriksson even suggested Lee could be his successor; the FA, he said, should promote from within.
“Should be me?!” For a moment there’s silence, shock. “I didn’t know that,” Lee says. “Wow. That’s news to me. Honestly, that is humbling. I was with him at two World Cups. He was so warm, so warm. He was lovely. When we got knocked out in Baden-Baden I knocked on his door. I had tears in my eyes. I said: ‘I can’t thank you enough.’ The players loved him.
“The debriefing is: we’ve been knocked out, we’re going home. But sometimes you have to respect the opposition. You lose to Brazil in 2002, Portugal in 2006. People think we should win it. I get that: we have aspirations, we’re England. But it’s not a gimme. Those guys couldn’t have given us more. Sometimes the expectation is a bit much, the critique aimed at players. We were knocked out by [great teams]. I don’t get being termed ‘failures’. I would never consider what England have done a failure. There is a big, big pressure put on our boys; we seem to bask in criticising them.”
Lee takes part in a training session with Wayne Rooney during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Photograph: Andy Hooper/Shutterstock
The coach too. Did appreciation for Eriksson come too late, not until he fell ill? “What disappointed us,” Lee admits, “was that they didn’t talk about Sven’s prowess as a coach; they talked about [the stuff where] the tabloids got involved.”
In Baden-Baden, he had seen it up close: the intrusion, the pressure, the relentless noise. He didn’t like it, that much is clear, but nor would he let it affect him, he says, and the idea that playing for England is more chore than honour, is dismissed. It must be hard not to be dragged down by it, though? At times, it must weigh upon you? “No,” he says, because in the end it’s about the game, the people. And there it is again: the enthusiasm that Souness saw in him, that Taylor and Eriksson did, that he found in Pamplona, that makes him such good company.
“But,” Lee adds, “I wouldn’t compartmentalise it. You can’t enjoy the camaraderie and not the competing. I enjoy trying to get the best out of players and to my knowledge whenever I’ve been involved, they’ve always been very, very well prepared, very passionate. ‘It’s all about the craic’? No. It’s not a big laugh, a joke, a jolly: the joy comes from seeing these young guys work ever so hard to be the best versions of themselves. There were pressures of course. And I don’t like being beaten. I don’t like coming home from Japan early. I don’t like losing in Germany. But I loved it, mate. I loved it. And it started here.”
