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The Player

Even prodigies need a patron, and no footballer ever had a patron like Bill Shankly. Manager of Liverpool since 1959, Shankly had transformed Anfield into a powerhouse and a place to be feared. By 1970 he found the team in a slump. His star players were ageing, motivation was wanting, and in February Watford had dumped them out of the FA Cup. A rebuild was urgently required. Andy Beattie, an LFC scout, had spotted 'a boy at Scunthorpe' with huge potential, but they would have to be quick. Preston North End had already put in an offer for £27,500, and there was also keen interest from Arsenal and Millwall. Shankly's assistant, Bob Paisley, who had watched Keegan a few times, advised the boss to buy him before someone else did. The Scunthorpe manager Ron Ashman was so eager to close the deal - in May 1971 Liverpool's offer of £33,000 was a fortune - that he personally drove Keegan to Anfield. They arrived at the ground to be told that the manager and chairman would see them shortly. Time ticked by, and while they waited Keegan rested on a dustbin. A photographer happened to catch the moment, and as he snapped away Keegan joked about the 'right rubbish' the club was signing these days.

Shankly knew better. At the medical, when his new recruit stripped to the waist, he noted admiringly the lad's bantam physique (Shankly had boxed while in the RAF). At Scunthorpe Keegan had created his own maniacal fitness regime by running up and down the terraces carrying weights, and was now 'built like a tank'. The only hiccup to the transfer came when they sat down to talk money. Shankly was offering him £45 a week, but Keegan, his dad's advice tolling in his head ('Don't sell yourself cheap'), had a disappointed air. He claimed to be already on a decent wage at Scunthorpe. Shankly asked him whether £50 a week would be acceptable, and the deal was done. The raw recruit, still only twenty, knew his own worth. From that point on he would run his affairs and look after his money with a shrewdness not common among footballers.

At that time it was customary practice at Liverpool for new players to be given a turn in the reserves before they graduated to the big time. Keegan, almost unprecedentedly, was fast-tracked to the first team and made his debut against Nottingham Forest in August 1971. He scored after 12 minutes, and LFC ran out winners, 3-1. He had instantly started a buzz around the club. Shankly called him 'the inspiration of the new team'. Looking back now, one imagines he felt the way Martin Scorsese did on casting Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy in Mean Streets. The presence of a volatile and brilliant newcomer not only lends lustre to your project, it tends to energise everyone involved and makes them raise their game. Mark Hughes in his autobiography said that when Manchester United signed Eric Cantona in 1992, it gave the club more than a lift: the players were so impressed by their new star that they tried to copy his best tricks.

By the age of twenty-one Keegan was Liverpool FC's talisman and the engine of their dominance. He had also made his debut for the national team. He wasn't Britain's first-ever superstar footballer: George Best had got there before him. 'I wanted so much to have his ability,' Keegan admitted in an interview. But Best, for all his electric brilliance, never had the ambition that drove Keegan. Indeed, he became the anti-Keegan, wilfully trashing his legend in a sybaritic haze of birds'n'booze'n'betting. He didn't care what people thought of him. Best's philosophy, if it could be so called, aligned with Viv Savage's of Spinal Tap, namely, 'To have a good time . all the time.' In any event, at the point of Keegan's flourishing in 1972 Best's fortunes had peaked and he had walked out on United for the first time.

It was clear from the way Keegan played that competitiveness was his lifeblood. You could see the lightning rods crackle from his perm. His sense of self was so deeply linked to his prowess on the field you almost feared for him. There is a price to be paid for wanting something too much. Shankly once told him before a game, 'Just go out there and drop some hand grenades' - encouragement that chimed with his explosive quality as a performer.

Explosive fitted not just his turn of pace but his temperament. Ripple-dissolve to Leeds vs Liverpool in the Charity Shield at Wembley, 1974, the season's 'curtainraiser', which would now be utterly forgotten but for the spectacle of Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner being sent off for fighting. Only days before, Keegan had been dismissed in a friendly against Kaiserslautern for lamping an opponent, so you might have thought he'd be on his best behaviour for the next game. But 'Dirty Leeds' had started at their most niggly, and despite Liverpool's complaints to the referee their fouling went unpunished. Johnny Giles had already clobbered Keegan ('That looked very much like a right hook,' cried Barry Davies on TV), then doubled down with a lunging tackle on him. In the melee that followed Bremner squared up to Keegan, who took a swing at him. 'I deserved to be sent off,' was Keegan's verdict, though at the time he was so angry he tore his shirt off as he left the pitch. It was a strange, almost gladiatorial thing to do (that bantam physique!), and the incident was soon blazed across the front pages as well as the back. By accident or design Keegan had made his dismissal one of the most famous in football.

The FA decided to make an example of the pair. They were both banned for 11 games and fined £500 each. Keegan was in disgrace, and yet I wonder if deep in his psyche he might have relished his sudden notoriety. Oh, of course it set a terrible example to youngsters, had brought the game into disrepute, blah, blah . but in terms of the Keegan brand it was far from a disaster. There was a bit of devilry in the lad after all. Never one to let slip an opportunity, Keegan used the enforced lay-off to bring forward his wedding day. He and Jean got married on the sly in Doncaster on 23 September 1974, thus evading the fans and denying the newspapers a day out.

Keegan's relationship with the media was ambivalent. On the one hand, he wanted a private life for his own and his family's sake. On the other, he saw the value of keeping in with the people who shaped his public reputation. Yet he couldn't always help himself. The heart and the head were at war within him, and it was never an equal contest. It was notable that after the Wembley dismissal he kept a much tighter rein on his temper. In the three years that remained of his Liverpool career he was never sent off again. Considering how often he was targeted by defenders in the mid-1970s - and how little protection flair players were given - that counts as an achievement in itself.

It wasn't until he was playing in Germany that he next got his marching orders - in a friendly. What was it about friendlies that triggered him? A friendly is a game that doesn't matter. But every game mattered to Keegan. In December 1977 Hamburg had scheduled a match against Lübeck, who greeted Keegan with a bouquet of flowers in acknowledgement of him coming second in the European Footballer of the Year awards. The gesture proved a false flag. Within seconds of kick-off Keegan's marker, Erhard Preuss, flattened him, out of sight of the referee. Minutes later he was viciously upended by a tackle: same player, same non-intervention by the ref. The third time Preuss tried to block him Keegan stayed on his feet, and when the defender laughed, Keegan delivered a haymaker - 'the hardest I had hit anyone in my life'. Preuss stayed down, and for a horrified second Keegan was afraid he 'might have killed him'. He hadn't - but he did get sent off. As well as a fine and a three-game suspension, he was obliged to return to Lübeck and apologise to their fans, which was the etiquette in Germany.

But what he was doing at Hamburg anyway? In the summer of 1977 Keegan was the most sought-after footballer in Britain. He had just helped Liverpool clinch a famous league and European Cup double, and could have gone on to burnish his name in the golden fields of Italy or Spain. Instead he chose Hamburger SV, who had finished sixth in the Bundesliga that year. In his autobiography he admits that he knew very little about the club. In fact, he was waiting for a scheme to work itself out. A year earlier he had inserted a clause in his contract with LFC that allowed him to leave for a fee of £500,000 - a relative steal. He knew that the lower the transfer fee, the more likely a prospective club would be to bump up his money.

At the time the deal raised eyebrows - his salary would be £100,000 a year, more than four times what he was paid at Anfield. Among the fans the idea got about that Keegan was a mercenary. The man himself would argue, not unreasonably, that he was being paid what he was worth. But fans are always looking for a grievance. Some even claimed that Keegan in his last season had lost the aura of old,...