Celebrating Ron Yeats’s life and contributions to Liverpool Football Club after it was announced he has passed away at the age of 86…
TIMES change.
Time moves on.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new.
(That’s Tennyson but I got it from Withnail & I.)
Nine years ago I was walking through town with a fellow member of TAW discussing the Reds, as you do, when he told me that he’d recently read a comment on a piece – possibly one of mine – about Dietmar Hamann. The comment didn’t question my views on him. It asked who he was.
I mean…
It took me back to the night of the 2007 Champions League Final when, while sat in a Euston pub, a stranger asked me who Mark Lawrenson played for. The man wore a Liverpool shirt.
Lawrenson had shaken the Anfield dust from his shoes some 19 years earlier at that point. Didi a mere nine by the time this reader asked who he was.
I suppose that happens. Heroes of old slowly become eclipsed by newer legends and they fade into history. I’m equally to blame there. I’m having a chat with Jeff Goulding this week. He knows more about the Liverpool side of the 1920s than any man alive. I’d say I have more than a fair grasp on the club’s history, but I can offer nothing there. Sorry Jeff. That’s on me.
I’ve never been keen on the argument ‘I wasn’t even born then’ approach to historical ignorance. I was born the weekend The Beatles released ‘the White album’ (1968) but I still know how Love Me Do goes (1962).
I say this because it’s important for all Reds to acknowledge the passing of Ron Yeats. Yes, he played before my time, but the significance of his service can never be underestimated. He, along with Ian St John, is arguably one of the club’s greatest signings.
That sounds like hyperbole, but things would be so different without him. He was certainly Bill Shankly’s canniest. Without the Colossus at the back there’s a chance that Liverpool wouldn’t win promotion in his debut season (1961-62) and go on to subsequent enormous success. Two years later, with Rowdy as captain, they win their first league championship since 1947.
The following year … Well, it’s a benchmark year.
It’s up there with 1977, 2001, 2005 and 2020. It’s everything.
The 1965 FA Cup win was enormous for the club. Simply enormous.
The first competition win is always special, but this had so much more riding on it. It was our first and it’s hard to believe that Liverpool hadn’t won any of the previous 92 finals. Two defeats, in 1914 and 1950, were all The Reds had to show in the tournament and it had become something of a millstone around our necks.
Everton had won it twice by then. It was a huge day in the city, so much so that my nan often spoke about it and always in glowing terms. My nan had absolutely no interest in the game, but talked the city up to anyone who would listen. She loved using the final and the fans as an example of Scouse supremacy.
Ron Yeats was instrumental in that and for what was to come. Shankly adored him and told journalists to “take a walk around him”. His partnership with Tommy Smith at the back was formidable.
He left in 1971 and went to Tranmere, but later returned to become a scout. Was he any good there? Well, he found Sami Hyypia – a player not unlike himself. He should be lauded for that alone.
Ron Yeats kickstarted the modern Liverpool under Shankly’s expert tutelage. That should never be forgotten.
Rest in peace, Colossus. Many of us are here because of you.
someone at TAW honestly doesn’t know who Dietmar Hamann is?
A reader commented on an article asking who he was
I fully agree with that. A legend and hugely important player of L. F. C.
Go well Ron Yeats
Rest in peace.
Met Ron and Cally in a pub on the Isle of man in July 1985. I was young scally but they both took the time to speak to me and discuss the new season (it was a few months after Heysel) and how we would do with Kenny at the helm. They probably fancied a break from people like me but if they did, they did not show it. Legends.