Brian Reade: I thought Graeme Souness would chin me!

It has been a lifelong romance - and like any love affair, it's had its moments of joy and misery. Here we publish extracts from Daily Mirror columnist Brian Reade's brilliant new book on his life as a Liverpool fan...

2003 GRAEME SOUNESS - THE DAY I FEARED HE WANTED MY BLOOD
The hotel cellar bar, an hour after the filming of the Daily Mirror's Pride Of Britain Awards, is a mass of sozzled luvvies, daytime TV celebrities, and journalist execs.

From out of the scrum of backs a stocky figure in a dark suit turns to show me his bronzed face and moustache, gives me a steely glare, grabs my hand, crushes it, then mutters in a sinister Edinburgh drawl: "Ah, the bast**d who got me the sack. I've waited 10 years to meet you."

Oh no. It's Graeme Souness. Now I really need a drink. Because if his memory is as good as it seems, pretty soon I'll be lying on a hard bed with the signNIL BY MOUTH hanging above my head. Me and Graeme Souness had history.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I got him the sack when he was Liverpool manager. He made a good fist of that himself. I just tried, very hard, to ensure it happened.

In fact, I tried relentlessly in my Liverpool Echo column for 20 months, from the day he hoovered up blood money from the Sun on the third anniversary of Hillsborough until the day he walked out of Anfield in January 1994. A walk that lifted my soul more than Nelson Mandela's stroll from Victor Verster prison four years previously. "You two bast**ds at the Echo. You and Tommy Smith. You made my job impossible," he said, still crushing my hand and moving his face closer to mine, making me think he was about to do an impression of his doppelganger, Yosser Hughes, and lay the head on me. Then he smiled and offered me a drink. And we talked. A decade had passed and he'd mellowed considerably. Until I told him that whatever I thought of him as a manager, he was one of the greatest players ever to wear the shirt. That's when the charmer vanished and the snarler came back out.

"Awhh, do me a favour, will ya? Don't patronise me. Every time I meet a Liverpool fan they tell me I was a fantastic player but a sh*te manager. And it p*sses me off no end."

I said nothing. I didn't need to because my eyes said it for me: "But you were, Graeme. You were."

If I became a bin-man tomorrow, I'd have Liverpool the cleanest city on Earth

I realised I'd never heard such clear footballing logic in my my life. He had clinical authority

It triggered relieved laughter from sycophants in the Press pack as he stared at me triumphantly

If his memory is as good as it seems, I'll be lying on a hard bed with the sign NIL BY MOUTH

1975 BILL SHANKLY
When he spoke of Liverpool it was as though he were talking about a love he had rashly abandoned. As though he'd jilted a woman for all the right reasons, but then realised she was the irreplaceable passion of his life and he would never have her back. His soulmate gone for ever.

"You see Melwood," he said when I asked him what the club was like when he arrived in 1959. "It was a wasteland. I built it with these hands. Every blade of grass. Every single brick."

I could tell he was beating himself up for retiring too soon, searching for something to fill the great void in his existence, and failing woefully.

He had no other interests. He hated holidays, didn't have the patience for books, cinema or theatre and all he'd watch on the TV, apart from the occasional old film, was football.

Football was his drug. And he had sentenced himself to a life of cold turkey.

But he still had the fire of socialism burning in his soul. It was of his essence. "If I became a bin-man tomorrow," he told me, "I'd be the greatest bin-man who ever lived. I'd have Liverpool the cleanest city on Earth.

"I'd have everyone working with me, succeeding and sharing out the success. I'd make sure they were paid a decent wage with the best bonuses and that we all worked hard to achieve our goals.

"Some people might say, 'ah but they're only bin-men, why do we need to reward them so well for a job anyone can do', but I'd ask them why they believe they are more important than a bin-man.

"I'd ask them how proud they'd feel if this dirty city became the cleanest in the world? And who would have made them proud? The bin-men."

1989 BOB PAISLEY - AFTER INTERVIEWING HIM I FELT LEFT I'D JUST HAD AN AUDIENCE WITH GANDHI
Bob Paisley was a few months short of his 72nd birthday, six years into his retirement, and living in a Woolton semi with his wife Jessie.

Due to the onset of Alzheimers it turned out to be one of the last times he would be capable of sharing his memories in public with any real lucidity.

He appeared to be struggling with the most basic of questions, mumbling back in broken sentences, looking away, going off on what appeared to be disjointed tangents. But as the conversation went on I realised I'd never heard such clear footballing logic in my life.

There was a calm but clinical authority to his words. At the end it felt like I'd just had an audience with Gandhi.

He gave me a story I'd never heard before. A Paisleyism to treasure: "Shanks was always encouraging all sorts of lads to come down to Anfield and get treatment for injuries. One day I was in my room and I heard him in the corridor telling this lad: 'What you've got there is no problem, son. Bobby Paisley will sort you out. He can fix anything. There's his room. Tell him I sent you'.

"And this poor young fella comes in in a wheelchair. Just sitting there looking up at me, believing I could cure him because Bill had told him I could. It was so sad. The lad was crippled. That was Bill. He'd think just by telling someone something it would make them believe in themselves." Two of his most telling utterances shed light on how Liverpool maintained their supremacy for so long. When he went to judge a player one thought was uppermost: "The first few yards are all in the head."

When asked to define the essence of Liverpool, he replied: "If you're lost in a fog you stick together. That way you don't get lost. If there's a secret to us, that's it."

1990 KENNY DALGLISH
"What's that? I don't understand you," growled Kenny Dalglish, leaving me feeling lower than a flea on a pile on a limbo-dancer's bum.

At a press conference ahead of Liverpool's 1990-91- season opener at Sheffield United, I'd asked a harmless question: "Is it a problem facing a newly promoted team like Sheffield United because they're an unknown quantity?" not out of any concern for the answer, but because, at 33, I still got a stalker's thrill talking to Kenny.

The problem was he didn't want to talk to me. A few days earlier I'd written a piece saying Liverpool might struggle to retain their title, which gave him further evidence that I was an impertinent little toe-rag.

My punishment was complete when he asked what type of club doesn't have the opposition watched and what kind of football reporter thinks Liverpool would sack all their scouts? It triggered relieved laughter from sycophants in the Press pack as he stared at me triumphantly.

You have to have been publicly shamed by a man you've idolised for years to know how crushed it leaves you. I didn't blame Dalglish. He held a view, always had, that the thoughts of journalists who have never played the game professionally should be treated with contempt.

And maybe he's right. Who are we, who sit ample-girthed before laptops, to tell those who have done it at the highest level where they are going wrong?

But I knew then that I had to get out of this job before it destroyed my faith in football. They say if you get too near to the flame, you get burned. I walked out of Anfield that day like Joan of Arc seconds after sparks licked her tootsies.

43 Years With The Same Bird by Brian Reade, published by Macmillan on July 4 at £12.99. Available by special offer to Mirror readers at £10.99 inc p&p by calling 01256 302699 and quoting code Z58