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Alan Hansen
| Category: | Male Player |
| Year Inducted: | 2006 |
Profile by Robert Galvin, the author of The Football Hall of Fame, the official book of the National Football Museum Hall of Fame:
An exceptionally skilful and unflappable central defender, Alan Hansen was the one constant presence during Liverpool's unprecedented dominance of English football during the late 1970s and 1980s.
The Scot arrived on Merseyside one month before the club's first European Cup triumph, in 1977. By the time he retired, fourteen years and more than six hundred appearances later, Hansen had amassed a then record eight championship medals and finished on the winning side in three European Cup finals.
‘Alan is the most skilful centre-half I have ever seen in British football,' said Bob Paisley, the manager who signed Hansen from Partick Thistle for a fee of £150,000.
‘He has such beautiful balance,' Paisley added. ‘Carrying the ball, he never loses control and always looks so graceful. He is a joy to watch.' Kenny Dalglish would later describe the signing of Hansen for such a modest sum as ‘the shrewdest of all Bob's transfer deals'.
For his money, Paisley acquired a player who was the antithesis of the traditional, rugged, no-nonsense British centre-half. Indeed, not since the heyday of John Charles in the 1950s had English football boasted a central defender with such confidence and ability on the ball. Time and time again, one of his trademark surging runs with the ball or a clever pass turned defence into attack. ‘Build from the back' was the motto at Anfield, and Hansen, above all, was the man who made it happen.
As captain, Hansen led Liverpool to the double in 1985-86. Explaining the appointment, Kenny Dalglish, the Reds player-manager, said that his compatriot and team-mate was ‘a lucky person'.
Both trophies were won at the expense of fierce rivals Everton, whose manager, Howard Kendall, once described Hansen as being ‘in many ways Liverpool's best attacker'. Tactically, Alan made them tick. Before derby matches, Kendall's team-talk was always the same: ‘Stop Hansen.'
Rejected as a teenager following a week-long trial at Anfield, Hansen was soon established himself as an automatic choice, partnering Phil Thompson in central defence. In 1978, the two of them helped keep Bruges at bay as Paisley's side retained the European Cup at Wembley. The following season, Liverpool conceded a miserly 16 goals in 42 games – a top-flight record at the time.
Speed – of both thought and movement – shaped Hansen's game. Tall and thin, with a long, looping stride, Hansen may have given the impression at times of someone moving in slow-motion but he was, in fact, deceptively quick. Those huge strides simply eat up the ground. ‘When it came to doing sprints in training, a few of the lads could beat me over 20 yards,' he said, ‘but I'm hard pressed to recall team-mates who could do so over 50 or 60 yards.'
His style of play would change drastically, however, following a serious knee injury in the mid-1980s. The deteriorating condition of the joint curbed his mobility to such an extent that several minor clean-up operations were required to keep him fit. Eventually, in 1991, Hansen decided that he'd had enough – both physically and mentally. His knee was hurting more and more and more, and the constant demand for success at Anfield had left him exhausted.
With the benefit of hindsight, his retirement, at the age of 35, marked a watershed in the history of Liverpool. The fact is, the championship title has not been on display at Anfield since. Hansen, meanwhile, has enjoyed success in his new career as a pundit with the BBC.
In his – and, arguably, Liverpool's heyday, in the late 1970s, the team's defensive tactics involved a flat-back four pushing up as far as possible in order to compress play. ‘I reckon our defence took up a more advanced position than any other team in the history of British football,' Hansen said later. ‘Our aim was to make it difficult for opponents to give their strikers the service they wanted to give the, and to keep the ball a safe distance from our goal.'
It certainly worked: eight times during his career Liverpool had the best defensive record in the division. As Ronnie Moran, a key member of the Anfield backroom staff, once said: Hansen was a ‘one-off, a unique talent'.