England Legends - Kevin Keegan

As a festive treat, TheFA.com has a series of seven articles with England Legends, one from each of the match programmes in 2007, today it's Kevin Keegan;

“Have you ever thought about being a boxer, son?” - Bill Shankly

Spurred on by rejection as a boy, Kevin Keegan went on to become the best English footballer of his generation

You’d be hard pushed to find a prouder Englishman than Kevin Keegan. “I believe that the players should sing God Save The Queen,” he once said. “I love to see some of the foreign teams holding a clenched fist to their hearts and facing their flag as they sing their national anthem, and I think our players are too reserved in that respect. I liked the way Don Revie reintroduced singing Land of Hope and Glory at Wembley.”

It’s a shame, then, that this most valiant – and talented – of English players found his pomp coincided with what can only be considered English international football’s leaner years. The team didn’t make it to the World Cup in 1974 and 1978, or the European Championship in between.

For Keegan, undeniably England’s best player – and frequently Europe’s best for much of this period – it was a frustrating negative in an otherwise impeccably successful career. While he clocked up league championships with Liverpool and bagged two European Player of the Year awards at Hamburg, his match-winning ability was not always enough to get the Three Lions through to a place in the big tournaments.

“There aren’t any excuses,” says Keegan today, with his familiar candidness. “England weren’t good enough as a nation at the time. It doesn’t matter if I thought we were unlucky or whatever, we just didn’t have enough good players. And I obviously wasn’t good enough, either.

“Yes, we did get to the World Cup in Spain in 1982 – and people say myself and Trevor Brooking were the main reason we got to that tournament – but both of us got injured, and we only played about 20 minutes each.”

Nevertheless, Keegan’s boundless energy and enthusiasm lit up English football both domestically and internationally. As little as three weeks after signing for Liverpool from Scunthorpe United, aged 20, Bill Shankly had told the young Yorkshireman that he would go on to represent his country.

“Just go out and drop a few hand grenades all over the place, son,” he told his charge. The advice clearly worked: little over 12 months later, Mighty Mouse played the first of his 63 international games after being picked by Sir Alf Ramsey.

“I made my full international debut against Wales in Cardiff in a World Cup Qualifier in November 1972,” he remembers. “My second match for England was also against Wales, and the third was in 1974, again in Cardiff.

“We won and I scored my first goal. By that time, I was wondering if I was Welsh or English. I was living in North Wales and other players started calling me Taff Keegan!”

Keegan was a breath of fresh air for England. He had both speed and skill, keeping the ball under control even while running flat out, but it was his attitude that set him apart. He ran round the pitch tirelessly from kick-off to the final whistle and was absolutely fearless in the box, possessing a bravery that won him many headers despite standing just 5ft 8in. He was fuelled by the will to prove people wrong: when he was a boy, both Coventry City and his hometown club, Doncaster Rovers, had told him he was too small to make it as a footballer.

The first time he met Bill Shankly, Keegan was sat on a dustbin in a makeshift office at Anfield. The Liverpool manager took one look at the young player and said, “Have you ever thought about being a boxer, son?”

“Rejection drove me on,” says Keegan. “A few people close to me said: ‘Now you’ll have to concentrate on your school work.’ They didn’t think I was good enough, and I used it as a spur. I think most of the top players have been rejected somewhere along the line, and most top business people have problems before they get to the top. Edison had failures before he got the lightbulb going!”

Ramsey went in 1974 and the extremely popular Joe Mercer stepped in as caretaker, cementing Keegan’s place in the national side. While Mercer was only in charge for six games in May and June, the new boss made an immense impact on his young forward.

“Under Joe, England played a type of football they have not seen before or since,” remembers Keegan. “Joe just told us to go out and enjoy ourselves. It was a game of pleasure, he said. I learned a lot from that philosophy. I probably carried into my own management career more of Joe Mercer than of any other manager I knew, including Bill Shankly.”
England often came agonisingly close to qualifying for major tournaments during this time, but Keegan would have to wait until the 1980 European Championship in Italy to actually experience one himself. It was disappointing and short-lived. In a tournament marred by rioting from the fans, England drew 1-1 with Belgium and lost the second game to Italy: they were out.

Better performances at least were to come at World Cup 1982, where England opened with a magnificent 3-1 win over France, although Keegan missed the game through injury. The defining image of the tournament, however, would be Keegan’s point-blank header sailing wide in the match against host nation Spain (the game ended 0-0, although England would have needed to score two goals to make it through to the Semi-Finals).

“As I headed it, I thought ‘Goal!’ because I didn’t usually miss from there,” remembers Keegan.

“In people’s memories, it cost us a World Cup! In reality, I was put on as a sub with 20 minutes to go, and we needed to score two to get through to the next round. I’d been injured, and it shows that, even if you’re a great header of a football, if your preparation is not 100 per cent, you can catch yourself out. I don’t think we’d have won the World Cup if we’d gone through, either. We weren’t the strongest side. But the sad thing is we were knocked out without losing a game.”

There was one silver lining. “The highlight was hearing in Spain that I was to be awarded the OBE. That was a great boost,” says Keegan.

In reality, nobody had done more for English football. Keegan had blazed a trail abroad by signing for a Bundesliga club in the 1970s, helping Anglo-German relations. He had bust a gut for his country, scoring 21 goals in 63 matches. And his impeccable attitude to the game and its fans – he famously never refused to give an autograph – had made him one of football’s first icons and celebrities.

Recognised by both fans and housewives worldwide, his marketability opened commercial avenues for footballers (from boot endorsements to aftershave adverts) that had previously been simply unthinkable. His heyday may have coincided with a tricky era for the international side, but nobody could ever point the finger of blame at Kevin Keegan.

Born: February 14 1951, Armthorpe, Yorkshire

Clubs: Scunthorpe, Liverpool, Hamburg, Southampton, Newcastle United

England: 1972-82, 63 appearances, 21 goals

First cap: Wales, 15 November 1972

Final cap: Spain 5 July 1982