LIFE, DEATH, AND FOOTBALL
‘THE PASSION THAT GOES WITH FOOTBALL IS WHAT MAKES IT THE GREATEST SPORT ON EARTH’ The legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly produced perhaps the most re-produced quote about the beautiful game: “Football is not a matter of life and death - it’s much, much more important than that”. It is, as with many of Shankly’s, a brilliant line. It is also, as events continue to remind us, not true. The Liverpool icon was being tongue-in-cheek, of course. Raised one of nine children in a poor family, Shankly grew up in the mining village of Glenbuck in Ayrshire, Scotland, a desolate and unforgiving place where the wind rips down off the hills and would have chilled the bones of the Shankly family in the days before central heating or even running water. Bill,…
