TH
BOB IN BRONZE
Club CEO Peter Moore ahead of the unveiling
diference, as club CEO Peter Moore explains: “I was chatting one
day about the football club with a close friend of mine, Emma
Rodgers, herself a hugely talented sculptor.
“I’ve always had this photo of Bob in his physio/trainer days,
carrying Emlyn Hughes of the pitch. It’s the irst minute of the
second half and you can see that Emlyn is not only bleeding from
the knees but he’s done some damage to his hand.
“I’ve always loved this photograph and I showed it to Emma
and thought nothing of it. Then she asked me a few days later to
send her the digital version, which I did, and next thing I get a call
from her saying can I come down to the Baltic Triangle [district
in Liverpool city-centre] to Castle Fine Arts foundry, to meet
somebody and see something.
“So I went down there and met Andy Edwards, an incredibly
talented sculptor. He did the Beatles statues on the waterfront,
and the ‘Christmas Truce’ soldiers in the ‘Bombed Out Church’.
He showed me this maquette that he’d speculatively developed,
based on the photo, a scale-model of what the statue would be –
and it took my breath away.
“It’s everything that I think we owe Bob Paisley as a football
club. We have the Paisley Gates, we have Paisley Square, but fans
will tell you they’re always a little disappointed that we never had a
Paisley statue, given what this man has done for this football club
as a player, as a trainer, as a manager.
“Our great partners at Standard Chartered, who have been
doing a lot to honour Bob this year, said, ‘We’re in – we love
the idea of having something that is a permanent legacy to this
incredible man’s work’. So they have funded the statue.”
Potteries-born Andy, who previously worked upon a triple-
igured statue of Stoke City legend Stanley Matthews, calls it “an
amazing image that takes football statuary to a diferent level.”
He read up on the subject to refresh his memory of Paisley and
Hughes “and the characters they were.”
He continues: “I started thinking about the enormity of this job
and I felt a lot of pride as I put the irst clay on. The anniversary is
