The dressing room in Paris was doing what dressing rooms do after a European Cup final. Champagne, television cameras, noise. Liverpool had just beaten Real Madrid 1–0, Alan Kennedy had scored late, and their goalkeeper had kept a clean sheet in his third European Cup final. He sat in the corner and looked around. “I sat in the dressing-room with a paper cup full of champagne and the feeling that it was just another game,” Ray Clemence told Brian Viner of the Independent in 1999. “I made the decision there and then. I thought, ‘If you can’t be on the ceiling after winning the European Cup, it’s not the place to be.'”
That’s a strange thing to feel at 32 with a paper cup in your hand and the biggest trophy in club football somewhere in the room. It is also the most Clemence thing in the whole story. For most of his career he did a job that someone else wanted, or that someone else had. He waited two and a half years behind Tommy Lawrence. He spent a decade swapping the England shirt with Peter Shilton, under managers who were never quite sure which of them they preferred. Football history has filed him as one half of a pair. But the half that kept goal for Shankly and Paisley won five league titles, three European Cups, two UEFA Cups, an FA Cup and a League Cup, as the Guardian’s obituary listed them, and the decision about when to leave was always his.
He died six years ago today, on 15 November 2020, aged 72. If you like your coincidences neat, England’s own records give you one: his first cap came at Ninian Park on 15 November 1972. He died 48 years to the day after it.
Deckchairs at Skegness
Clemence did not want to be a goalkeeper. He grew up in Skegness and started as a centre-forward at nine, then played centre-half and left-back. “I never really played in goal until I was 15 years of age,” he told LFChistory in a 2005 interview. “And just by chance one day we were short of a goalkeeper and the sportsmaster at school nominated me to go into goal. When I went into goal it was just natural for me to do. I still didn’t really want to be a goalkeeper.” To Viner he put the prejudice more bluntly: “Goalkeepers tended to be the little fat fella with glasses who couldn’t play anywhere else.”
He kept playing at left-back for Skegness Town, where, as Matt Lawton noted in a 2013 Daily Mail interview later reproduced by LFChistory, the manager was George Raynor, the Englishman who had taken Sweden to the 1958 World Cup final. Even Raynor could not have made a left-back of him. “Had I stayed there I never would have progressed beyond non-League football,” Clemence said. Goalkeeping found him through the back door instead. His youth club side, the exotically named Skegness Cosmos, won a cup final 4–3 at Scunthorpe’s ground, and the Scunthorpe coach liked the skinny lad in goal. There had already been a brush with Notts County, six or seven games as a schoolboy before, in his own words, “they threw me out because they thought I wasn’t good enough.” For a while he wondered whether his maths might be better spent on accountancy.
Scunthorpe signed him on his 17th birthday in August 1965, according to Tottenham’s obituary, and he made his league debut the following April. Scunthorpe’s own tribute adds the sort of detail clubs don’t usually print about legends: he took the green jersey early the next season and, despite conceding seven at Grimsby in his next game, kept it for the rest of the campaign. The money was not life-changing. He was on £9 a week, “nearly half of that went on my digs,” and his parents drove up from Skegness to watch and take him home.
Then came the scene everybody tells, because it’s too good not to. The last game of the 1966–67 season was a derby against Doncaster. As they pulled into the car park, Clemence saw Bill Shankly. “I thought, ‘S**t, he’s here to see me’, and I had an absolute nightmare,” he told Lawton. “We lost 3-0, two of the goals were my fault and I remember telling my parents my big chance had just gone straight out the window.” That summer, still only on £11 a week, he took a job on the deckchairs on Skegness beach. A man from the council came running across the sand. His mother had phoned the council to send someone to find him. Scunthorpe had agreed a fee with Liverpool. “My life changed at that moment, as I’m standing there stacking deckchairs.”
The fee was £18,000. LFChistory’s player record dates the move to 12 June 1967. The Scunthorpe chairman drove him to Anfield in his Rolls-Royce. There was no agent, and “there was no negotiation either,” Clemence said, laughing. “To be fair, Shanks could have offered me less than I was getting at Scunthorpe and I still would have signed.” Shankly came back to the same club four years later for Kevin Keegan, which suggests Scunthorpe’s scouting was rather better than their bargaining.
Tommy Lawrence is past it
Shankly sold him the job before he sold him the contract. He gave him the tour of Anfield, explained the Kop, took him to Melwood to see where Hunt, Callaghan, St John and Smith trained, and then offered two years on £30 a week. “He told me that I’d be in the big team within six months. He told me Tommy Lawrence was now in his 30s and past his best.” Clemence went home and told his parents he would soon be playing first-team football. “Of course, we start pre-season training a couple of weeks later and I discover Tommy Lawrence is actually 27 and at the peak of his powers. I was in the reserves for two-and-a-half years!”
LFChistory’s headline for the story is “Shankly tricked Ray Clemence into signing for Liverpool,” which is fair. Shankly’s own public line at the time was more measured and much funnier: “He’s a nicely-built lad, with one or two mannerisms, and maybe a wee bit cocky. But we’re getting him in plenty of time to work on him.”
The apprenticeship was real work. Joe Fagan ran the reserves, and Clemence remembered him as “a fantastic man who was brilliant at making you feel important, playing in the Central League. We won it both years I was in the reserves, with the rest of my time watching and learning from Tommy. He was the first sweeper keeper.” His first-team debut came in a League Cup tie against Swansea on 25 September 1968, a 2–0 win on a night of rain and gale-force wind. His kicking was poor, and he heard about it. “I remember one soul shouting out from the Anfield Road end… ‘Clemence, take an early shower.’ Obviously he didn’t realise what was to come in the next 14 years.” By the last six months he was, he admitted, getting frustrated: if he had not broken through that season, “maybe at the end of that season I would have certainly asked a question.”
He never had to. In February 1970 Liverpool lost an FA Cup quarter-final at Watford, then struggling near the foot of the Second Division, and Shankly decided his great 1960s side had grown old together. “He took out Tommy Lawrence, Ron Yeats and Ian St John, and replaced them with me, Larry Lloyd and Dougie Livermore,” Clemence told Viner. The understudy was now the first choice, though it didn’t feel like it at first: “For the rest of that 1970 season I was wearing Tommy’s jersey, which was a bit big for me. When it was wet it came down to my knees.” Lawrence, a bigger man, was known on the Kop as “the Flying Pig.” His successor started his Liverpool career quite literally in his clothes.
A decade behind the best defence in England
What followed is the part of the story where the numbers do the talking, and they talk in a monotone. Clemence missed only six league matches in the next 11 years, according to LFChistory. In 1970–71, his first full season, he conceded 22 goals in 41 First Division games. Between 9 September 1972 and 4 March 1978 he played 336 consecutive matches. In 1978–79, behind Phil Neal, Alan Kennedy, Phil Thompson and Alan Hansen, he let in 16 goals in 42 league games, kept 28 clean sheets and conceded four goals all season at Anfield. He finished with 665 appearances for Liverpool and 323 clean sheets. Only Ian Callaghan and Jamie Carragher have played more often for the club.
None of that tells you what kind of goalkeeper he was, and the people who knew insisted it wasn’t a showy kind. Paul Wilson in the Guardian called him “one of those goalkeepers who read the game so well he did not always need to fling himself about the goalmouth.” Shilton, writing in the Daily Mail the day he died, said much the same: “Ray was totally reliable and unfussy. He was not showy or extravagant but of his era there were very few better.” Clemence’s own description of the job at Liverpool was nearly a joke at his own expense. “When you play behind Liverpool’s defence over 12 years, I didn’t have lots to do. If you had one or two saves to make in the game, it was all about making those saves.”
He was not quite as quiet in training. At Melwood he finished sessions up front in the small-sided games. “I was known as The Assassin because I did have a bit of a reputation for clattering people,” he told Lawton. Shankly, as Phil McNulty recalled for BBC Sport, would not hear a word against his goalkeeper and insisted he was the best in the world. Anyone who has ever played five-a-side against a goalkeeper who thinks he’s a centre-forward will recognise the type, though most of them haven’t got three European Cup medals as an alibi.
The silverware started in 1972–73: the league title and then the UEFA Cup, in which Clemence saved a penalty from Jupp Heynckes in the first leg of the final against Borussia Mönchengladbach at Anfield. It looked like a footnote at 3–0. “We went out to Germany two weeks later for the 2nd leg and we were 2-0 down in 20 minutes and finished up losing the game 2-0,” he said in 2005. “If I had conceded the goal at Anfield they win the UEFA Cup on away goals.” The FA Cup followed in 1974, a 3–0 win over Newcastle. “We played Newcastle off the park, won it 3-0 and could have won it by far more,” he said. His first FA Cup final, the 1971 defeat by Arsenal, he hardly remembered at all. “I’ve seen the goals a million times and I still don’t know how the first goal went in to this day. I think the cap fell over my eyes or something.”
In 1976 there was another penalty save, at Dynamo Dresden, which LFChistory credits with preventing a UEFA Cup quarter-final exit. Liverpool won the competition again, against a Club Brugge side that FBH has already followed from Ernst Happel’s side of the story. The goals that went in against him were rarer and stuck in the mind for longer. Aston Villa once put five past him before half-time at Villa Park. “Actually, it was the kick up the backside we needed, and we went on to win the title,” he told Viner, which is the most Liverpool sentence ever spoken.
Rome, and the save off his knee
The first European Cup came in 1977, at the end of a run that Clemence described as three months of “one massive game after another.” Liverpool won the league one Saturday and lost the FA Cup final to Manchester United the next. McNulty’s tribute recalls Clemence leading a defiant sing-song straight after the Wembley defeat. Four days later they were in Rome against Gladbach, with 26,000 Liverpool supporters who, he said, “had sold things, pawned things, just to be at Liverpool’s first European Cup final.” FBH has already reconstructed the night. His part of it came soon after Allan Simonsen had equalised.
“Stielike broke through. Him against me. I did what I always did. I tried to make myself as big as possible, spread myself at his feet and luckily he hit me with the ball,” he told LFChistory. “5 or 10 minutes later Tommy Smith headed into the net and we went on to win the game. I am not sure in the mental state we were in, if we had gone 2-1 down having just lost to Manchester United on the Saturday as well, we could have come back from that.” To Lawton, years later, he added the detail that only a goalkeeper would bother to correct: “It came off my knee, but it was 1-1 in a European Cup final.”
That is how he ranked his own saves, by importance rather than by how they looked on Match of the Day. “People tend to think that you would say, ‘It was the one when I flew into the top corner and tipped it over the crossbar’. I tend to look at the saves in terms of how important they were to the game.” Liverpool beat Bruges 1–0 at Wembley in 1978 to retain the cup, and the Guardian’s obituary singles out his performance that night and again in Paris in 1981. Between those finals he was the goalkeeper in perhaps the best defence an English club has had. The man who arrived to be an understudy had become the fixed point everyone else was measured against.
The job share
England is where the second half of the title comes from, and where the job really was shared. On 15 November 1972, at Ninian Park, Alf Ramsey gave debuts to two Liverpool players in a World Cup qualifier against Wales: Clemence and Keegan. The match record has Bobby Moore at centre-back, winning his 98th cap, and England winning 1–0. “I was a baby and I was so nervous it was untrue,” Clemence said. “But I had Bobby Moore in front of me and he just made it so easy for me.” He and Keegan, he told Viner, “got dropped together, too, a couple of games later.”
The vacancy existed because of a car crash. Gordon Banks had won the last of his 73 caps in May 1972, as the FA noted, and then lost the sight of one eye in a car crash. Shilton had already won five caps by then. The decade-long argument over which of them should replace Banks has been told on FBH from Shilton’s side, in the piece on his 125 caps, and from the side of the next man in the queue, Chris Woods. Clemence’s own ledger fits in one sentence, and it shows what kind of shared job it was. Englandstats has Ramsey picking him twice, Joe Mercer three times, Don Revie 25 times, Ron Greenwood 29 times and Bobby Robson twice. Revie, in other words, made a choice. Greenwood, as McNulty put it, preferred “a policy of alternation that actually disguised indecision.”
The two men shared rooms as well as the shirt, although even that depends on which goalkeeper you ask. “We were room-mates for seven years,” Clemence told Lawton in 2013. “And we helped and supported each other. In those days you didn’t have goalkeeping coaches.” Shilton’s tribute made it ten years, and added the detail that “we never talked about football.” Clemence’s view of the rivalry was generous, mostly. “It was great for the English team to have two goalkeepers of almost the same ability,” he told LFChistory, before adding, with what you suspect was a straight face, that he had been playing for one of the best teams in Europe, “where as Peter had his success at Notts Forest but apart from that didn’t win an awful lot.” Room-mates are allowed that sort of thing.
There were good England nights. He won his 50th cap at the 1980 European Championship in Italy. Against Spain in Naples, England Football Online’s penalty records show, Dani beat him from the spot after half-time, was ordered to retake a second penalty that he had also scored, and saw the retake saved. On 12 May 1981 Clemence captained England against Brazil at Wembley, the first goalkeeper to do so since Frank Swift, and told Lawton it was his proudest moment. England lost 1–0. There were bad ones too. Kenny Dalglish’s shot went through his legs at Hampden in 1976. “Wherever I go, there always seems to be at least one Scot who brings it up,” he told Viner. “Gordon Banks is remembered for his save against Pele and I’m remembered for that.” When Dalglish arrived at Anfield a year later, he shook his new goalkeeper’s hand and said, “Keep those legs closed.”
The alternation ended at the 1982 World Cup, and it ended against him. “Ron decided that only one of us would play and he sat us down and told us that it was going to me,” Shilton wrote. “I know how I would have felt had I been Ray’s position but he never let that disappointment or upset show.” Clemence sat on the bench for all five of England’s games in Spain, and Robson used him only twice more, both times against Luxembourg. The last, a 4–0 win, came on 16 November 1983, when he was 35. That made 61 caps and 27 clean sheets. Fifty-six were won as a Liverpool player and five at Spurs.
Leaving at the top
Which brings us back to the paper cup in Paris. On his return from England’s World Cup qualifier in Hungary, less than a fortnight after the final, he went to see Bob Paisley. The Daily Express reported it on 8 June 1981 as a bombshell. Clemence, Paisley said, “has given me some reasons why he feels he should move on.” Clemence insisted: “I’d like to stress that this has nothing to do with contracts or money. The last thing in the world I want is to cause Liverpool any trouble. Whatever happens I want it done right.”
Liverpool had paid £250,000 that March for a 23-year-old from Vancouver Whitecaps called Bruce Grobbelaar, and the obvious conclusion was drawn. Clemence spent the rest of his life swatting it away. “At the start of my career, I had Tommy Lawrence underneath me once I got into the side so I had the pressure of him,” he told LFChistory. “Frankie Lane came from Tranmere, McDonnell came from Oldham, Ogrizovic came from Chesterfield so I always had somebody putting pressure on me… Bruce was no different to any other goalkeeper I had underneath me before.” There were wilder rumours too, which he dismissed as “one hell’uva fairy story.” His real reason was the one he gave Viner. “I had seen players stay and stay and then move to clubs with no chance of winning anything. Roger Hunt went to Bolton. Stevie Heighway went to America. I didn’t want that.”
So the understudy who had waited two and a half years left the job before the job could leave him. Southampton and Tottenham both offered terms. He chose Spurs, managed by Keith Burkinshaw, his former team-mate at Scunthorpe, who paid £300,000 for a 33-year-old. Paul Wilson noted that many thought the fee “a little high for a swansong.” It turned out to be a seven-year swansong.
White Hart Lane, and the Kop
He played 61 matches in his first season at Spurs, Tottenham’s obituary records. They retained the FA Cup, reached the semi-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup, finished fourth, and lost the League Cup final to Liverpool. FBH has told the story of that season elsewhere. For Clemence it contained one afternoon that mattered more than any medal.
On 15 May 1982, Spurs went to Anfield on the last day of the season with Liverpool needing a win to clinch the title. Clemence spent the first half in front of the Anfield Road end, which was “still chanting: ‘England’s number one’ to me,” he told the Liverpool Echo. Glenn Hoddle’s long-range shot had Spurs ahead at half-time. “I could never have envisaged when I came out at half-time and ran down to the Kop, the reception I would get. The whole stadium stood up and every single one in the Kop. It’s probably the most emotional I have ever been at a football ground. It definitely brought a lump to my throat.” Liverpool scored three times in the second half and won the league. He had left a club that was about to win the title without him, and the Kop stood up for him anyway.
Twelve days later he won the FA Cup. The 1982 final against Queens Park Rangers went to a replay, and Hoddle’s sixth-minute penalty won it, but the Thursday night belonged to the team that lost. Frank McGhee’s report in the Daily Mirror, reproduced by the QPR fan site Independent Rs, said Rangers “completely outplayed” Spurs: “They hit the bar. They had a shot cleared from the line. They brought Tottenham’s great goalkeeper Ray Clemence as close to panic as he has ever been in his distinguished career.” As close to panic as he ever got turned out to be a 1–0 win and a clean sheet.
The rest of his Spurs years had the same mix of reward and bad luck. He was injured and an unused substitute when Tony Parks won the 1984 UEFA Cup in a shoot-out against Anderlecht. He played in the 1987 FA Cup final against Coventry, his fifth FA Cup final, which went the way FBH described from the Coventry end. His 1,000th senior appearance came against Newcastle in September 1985. In April 1987, Spurs say, he overtook Pat Jennings’s British record of 1,098 senior games. His last appearance was at Norwich on 10 October 1987. The BBC and the Guardian say an Achilles injury ended his career and Spurs say a knee injury did. Either way, he was 39, and he had played for longer than almost anyone. He was made an MBE in 1987, the same year.
The coach who knew what it felt like
He went straight onto the Spurs coaching staff in 1988. He became reserve-team manager the following year, and in 1992–93, the first Premier League season, he worked alongside his old Liverpool team-mate Doug Livermore with the first team. In 1994 he went to Barnet as joint manager with Gary Phillips, took sole charge after six months, and finished 11th and then ninth in the Third Division, the Guardian’s obituary records. One of his signings there, Dougie Freedman, later married his daughter Sarah, which is one way of keeping a promising striker in the family.
“I enjoyed being a manager,” he told Lawton. “But when Glenn [Hoddle] invited me to join England I couldn’t turn that down.” He joined England as goalkeeping coach in 1996 and stayed with the FA for 17 years, through Hoddle, Keegan, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Steve McClaren and on into the Hodgson era. He was discreet. Asked by Viner in 1999 about his work with David Seaman, he said: “Even if I thought David Seaman had a weakness, I wouldn’t tell you.” Eriksson told Sky Sports after his death that at the beginning Clemence sometimes chose England’s goalkeeper, “and I was sure he was right, I trusted him 110%.”
The years with England gave the 1970s job share an odd afterlife. Shilton, working for Sky at an England game, once watched Clemence put Paul Robinson through one of Shilton’s own drills. The Shilton piece has that story. The part that belongs here is what Clemence said about the goalkeepers he coached who had their bad nights in public. “Paul Robinson had that one that bounced over his foot against Croatia,” he told Lawton. “It could have happened to anyone, but he was so heavily criticised he was never the same goalkeeper again.” And on Scott Carson, after England’s final qualifier against Croatia: “I followed him for six weeks after that, and at every ground the fans would chant… You could see his body language.” This was a man whose most famous England moment was a ball through his legs at Hampden. He knew exactly what a goalkeeper carries round afterwards.
He injured an Achilles tendon in a warm-up with Joe Hart at Euro 2012, moved into running England’s development teams, and retired at the end of October 2013. The players gave him a Rolex with an inscription on the back. “It was very touching,” he said.
15 November
He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005. The prostate was removed and he went straight back to work coaching England’s goalkeepers. A year before Lawton met him in November 2013, he found a lump on his neck, and a scan found a tumour at the base of his spine. When they met, it was at a hospital cafeteria in Boston, Lincolnshire, where Clemence had brought his 92-year-old father, Bill, for an eye operation. He was in remission and talked about the illness the way he talked about goalkeeping. “As Joe Hart’s finding out now, you have to have a thick skin, a strong personality. You have to be strong to come through the difficult times as a goalkeeper and that’s the way I’m approaching this. I was right in the middle of the woods but now I’m on the outside of the woods. I’m not out completely yet.”
He became an ambassador for Prostate Cancer UK and, Scunthorpe noted, “worked tirelessly to promote the dangers of the disease.” He died on 15 November 2020. “After fighting so hard, for such a long time, he’s now at peace and in no more pain,” his family said in a statement reported by the BBC. England were due to wear black armbands that night against Belgium.
The tributes, gathered by the Guardian, were mostly about the man, not the medals. “Clem was a fantastic teammate and great to be around,” Kenny Dalglish wrote. “I will never forget how he helped me to settle in at Anfield.” Phil Thompson called him “my eyes and ears as a teammate, And oh what a keeper.” Jürgen Klopp called him “one of the foundation stones that so much of this club’s success was built on.” Ossie Ardiles wrote of “Raymondo”: “He was a great goalkeeper, wonderful companion, friend.” And Shilton, who had spent ten years being compared with him, wrote the line that should go on any account of the job share: “We were rivals but good friends.” A year later Scunthorpe, the club that had sold him for £18,000, sent their goalkeeper out against Salford in a shirt with his signature printed into it. “Scunthorpe United always had a special part in my dad’s heart,” said his son Stephen.
So is “the other half of the job share” fair? The England half is accurate, and he never pretended otherwise. But the phrase leaves out the part where he picked the moment to go. He did it in a Paris dressing room with a paper cup, and then again on an Anfield pitch with a Spurs badge on his shirt and the whole Kop on its feet. When Lawton asked him in 2013 how he would look back if the time came, he gave a goalkeeper’s answer, all importance and no showing off. “Well, I did most of the things I wanted to do.” Not bad for a left-back who was only in goal because the school was short.
