by Simon Hughes
Berger believes he was ‘thrown’ into that group purely because of his appearance. He marked his Liverpool debut by scoring two goals a few months earlier at Leicester City. During that game, he sported an Alice band. ‘Every decade has its seminal moment of football fashion,’ The Independent wrote:
The first time George Best wore his shirt outside his shorts, when Nobby Stiles took to the pitch without his teeth in, when Kevin Keegan walked into his barber’s and said, ‘I can’t do a thing with it – can we try a perm?’ Ever since the first Saturday afternoon that Eric Cantona pulled on his jersey in a hurry, Sunday footballers all over the land have been cavorting around with their collars up in homage. But now there is a new contender for the fashion detail that takes football into the new millennium.
The report mentioned Berger’s stunning footwork:
But had anyone glanced upwards they would have noticed the little black item with which the Super Czech kept his flowing locks in place … Is Berger mad? Is he brave? Or is he at the cutting edge of soccer style in a sport in which in ten years’ time, Nike twinsets and Diadora pearls will be commonplace? By then, of course, they will have changed the name from Alice band to something more in keeping with the culture that will have so slavishly adopted it.
‘Because I did not speak English and could not read English, I did not know what was being said or written about me,’ Berger says. ‘My understanding was very poor but people like Jamie [Redknapp], Jason [McAteer] and Robbie [Fowler] liked to keep me up to date with affairs in the media.
‘I was playing and my hair kept on getting in the way. I’d just moved from Germany and did not know or trust any hairdresser. So my wife suggested I try the band. After scoring in the first game, I decided to keep it. When you are playing well, nobody seems to care. But when you or the team plays badly, it becomes an issue.
‘The Spice Boys consisted of six or seven players and the press changed the names of those individuals to fit the story they wanted to print. I wasn’t a drinker at all but because I looked a certain way and happened to be at certain events I was viewed as part of the group even though I was living exactly the same life as I did when I was in Germany. There is a saying here: “guilty by association”. I had my wife. I had my first baby. When the training session was over, some players would leave Melwood and go for a pint. Some might go to the golf course or for a coffee. All I wanted to do was go home. That’s what I did. I did not lead an exceptional life.’
Berger had been in Germany when Dortmund’s closest rivals Bayern Munich first earned the dubious nickname FC Hollywood. Spawned during Giovanni Trapattoni’s tumultuous first spell as manager, which ended in 1995, it was a reaction to the infighting and the club’s ability to drive soap-opera storylines, not always entirely related to the football. This was a club so concerned by the off-field antics of star midfielder Mario Basler that it hired a private detective to monitor his movements. Later, the wife of Thomas Strunz left him for teammate Stefan Effenberg, the same Effenberg who was once asked about his €5 million salary. ‘Five and a half million,’ he interjected, by way of correction. Effenberg loathed Lothar Matthäus, the Bayern midfielder, and Matthäus loathed him – their public battle was a feature of the 1990s.
From afar, Berger quickly became wary of what he says basically was ‘too much socializing’.
‘I hear people in this country [England] say that you should always look after number one. Now, I am not sure whether that is the right thing to do because eventually you always need someone else’s help. It’s a selfish outlook. But in a working environment, sometimes I think it is a good thing to keep a distance. It is very important that you generate a spirit for the benefit of the team. But sometimes it goes too far. You have to find the balance between professionalism, comradeship with your teammates and family time.
‘When you compare Liverpool’s supposed problems to those that existed at FC Bayern, you realize maybe our team was not so bad. Again, that Bayern became front-page news was a reflection of the changing time in football. Both Bayern and Liverpool were the biggest teams in their country. Yet in the nineties you see both Bayern and Liverpool getting beaten by the likes of Norwich in important games [Liverpool in the final game in front of the freestanding Kop and Bayern in the UEFA Cup]. Both clubs aren’t doing as well as in the past. The media is more powerful, more aggressive. There must be a reason for this. The team’s players not being quite as good as before is just not sexy enough. It has to be for another reason. So they hunt for stories. They find players doing things they have always done. But they do not understand the routines of a footballer. Conclusions are made. So this must be the reason for the failure.’
In his first months, Berger’s bravura performances inspired Liverpool. After the two goals against Leicester, he scored another two in a 5–1 victory over Chelsea the following weekend – his full home debut. The Anfield crowd fell for this tall, elegant, skilful and powerful attacker whose shots were released like missiles. Berger says the power generated was due to the hours spent on the road in front of his apartment block as a child, blasting the ball against a wall. ‘I’d do it again, again and again. There was no teaching. Just repetition. I had strong legs.’
At the end of September, Berger was named the Premier League’s player of the month. ‘I felt really good. It couldn’t have started any better. I was flying. The team was flying.’
Typically, this Liverpool team soon crash-landed. After a defeat at Old Trafford, the Reds were overwhelmed at Blackburn Rovers, losing 3–0. Suddenly, Berger was on the substitutes’ bench. From November onwards, only two more goals were scored. His manager Roy Evans seemed to lose faith very quickly. After such a blistering start, Berger’s fall was puzzling.
‘I really don’t know why,’ he answers unconvincingly on the issue of his non-selection. ‘Probably he [Evans] was not happy about the way I was playing.’ Berger then mentions the presence of Collymore. ‘It always felt like there was a straight choice: me or him. Stan was his record buy. I was not.’
I asked Evans why he signed Berger, ‘a natural talent and a leftfooter’, and, indeed, why he decided so quickly to stop playing him. Again, Collymore came up.
‘Patrik may have thought it was a straight pick between himself and Stan but really I wanted an alternative to Steve McManaman. That was something levelled at us for a while: what happens when Stevie doesn’t play? Patrik was the solution. Initially, we pushed him up as a centre-forward alongside Stan, because Stevie was performing well. Then Robbie came back. The team lost a few games. I had to put Robbie in.’
By the end of the following season, Berger was ‘bored’ of waiting for a sustained run.
‘Under Roy, I was not happy, because I wanted to play,’ he says. ‘I tried to force a move away and Benfica were very interested. So were AS Roma. I spoke to their president on the phone, who told me about big plans for the club. Fabio Capello was going to be the manager. There were going to be other signings like Gabriel Batistuta. But when it was all set to happen, Peter Robinson said no. He explained to me that changes were happening at Liverpool too. They planned to replace Roy with a new manager, a manager that wanted me to stay.’
I suggest to Berger that his situation was a classic case of being the right player at the wrong time. After Evans’ departure in 1998, Gérard Houllier initially appeared to be his saviour but in the long term Berger never really fitted with his functional, more direct style of football. Berger could have been brilliant for Liverpool. Despite nearly a double century of games, a feeling remains that he suffered from mismanagement.
Berger, though, speaks highly of Houllier, a person, he says, who ‘understood the ethics of Liverpool’.
‘My impression was that the club accepted Roy’s time was over but did not really know how to deal with it. The solution was to recruit Gérard as a joint manager. He had time to evaluate the strength of the squad and plan for the future before Roy’s inevitable departure. Football history teaches you
that when new managers are appointed, players come and players go. I considered it fortunate that I was one of those Gérard wanted to keep.’
Berger retired as a professional in 2010 after returning to play for Sparta Prague following spells at Portsmouth, Aston Villa and Stoke City. He now lives in his home city and at the time of writing played amateur football for Dolní Chabry, a team in the sixth tier of Czech football, one that is based a ten-minute drive away from the area he grew up in, District 8. The club is owned by his long-time friend Vladmir Šmicer, someone who remains a teammate despite his administrative position.
‘We usually get seventy people watching us. On a good day, we might get a hundred. There are a lot of young boys playing and they do all of our running. The standard is high.’
I wonder what the incentives are for a forty year old with fortytwo international caps to play at a low level.
‘Winning, of course,’ he smiles. ‘When that happens, Vladi serves us beer and plates of sausages as a reward.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
MIGHTY ATOM,
David Thompson, 1993–2000
‘I HAD TO smack him in the face. If I didn’t, I’d look like a tit,’ David Thompson reasons, as he recalls the incident where he punched David Hopkin, the Leeds United midfielder, during a reserve game in front of 917 people at Knowsley Road, St Helens’ old rugby league ground. It was the moment that led to his relationship with Gérard Houllier crumbling.
‘Hopkin had red hair like yours, only shorter,’ Thompson continues, lifting his substantial right bicep and jabbing it in my direction. ‘He was a Scottish midfielder with no front teeth, giving the impression that he was tough. But he’d made a coward’s challenge.’
Thompson says he’d been ‘bang-on his game’ that night, setting up Liverpool’s goal scored by Richie Partridge during a 1–1 draw.
‘Then Hopkin – a seasoned pro – absolutely annihilated me off the ball. I was angry because I thought he was trying to deny me an opportunity to impress Houllier.
‘It was freezing cold and I spun up in the air, landing face first with a mouthful of grass. Immediately, I felt embarrassed. Then suddenly I felt lucky, because he could have broken my leg. I was never going to let him get away with it. I could see him running away, looking back with a smirk on his face.’
This was not an occasion for ‘handbags’, as Thompson puts it.
‘I chased him across the pitch. Rather than just a bit of pushing and shoving, I smacked him. Then I went again. He didn’t like it, so we started brawling.’
The referee sent the pair off.
‘I could see Houllier’s expression in the stand as I walked down the tunnel. He was sitting there with his arms folded initially, then started waving them all over the place. He was open-mouthed, looked like an angry fish.’
Having already been red-carded in two reserve matches earlier in the 1999–2000 season, as well as once for the first team, this incident led to a four-game ban for Thompson, with the suspension landing during a period when Liverpool were attempting to qualify for the Champions League. Thompson was banished to train with the youth-team players at the club’s academy in Kirkby and Liverpool’s manager issued a warning in the press that, at twenty-one, Thompson risked jeopardizing his career unless he learnt to govern his temper.
‘David let himself down and the team down. It is awful, really,’ Houllier said. ‘If a tennis player argues with the referee or whatever, then he is the only one to suffer. But football is a team game and it is the club and his teammates who are suffering from his silly behaviour.
‘I think players can confuse commitment with a selfish attitude sometimes and if he wants to make it at the top he has got to control himself. When you don’t control yourself, you cannot be tactically aware or team-minded.’
As I read this quote to Thompson fourteen years later, his wince turns into a smile.
‘Typical of Houllier, that,’ he says. ‘I needed someone to have confidence and to trust me. I had the ability. I could create. I could spot a pass. I could keep the ball. I could tackle. I could do it all. I just wanted the chance to express myself. Don’t ask me to conform too rigidly, because it bores me. You’re blunting me. Houllier blunted me.’
Thompson tells another story about a game for Liverpool’s reserves at St Andrew’s in Birmingham twelve months earlier.
‘We won 3–0 and I was the best player on the pitch. Dave Sexton was heavily involved with England’s under-21s and he was waiting on the touchline. He shook my hand and said, “You know what, you were absolutely sensational there. You dominated the match for ninety minutes from start to finish with your passing and skill.” It was an occasion where I’d been allowed to express myself. Within a few months, Houllier was appointed full-time and a lot changed at Liverpool.
‘Houllier ostracized me after the incident with Hopkin. It was the wrong thing to do. It put a wedge between me and him. He obviously didn’t understand me. Rather than trying to channel that desire and energy into something positive, he punished it. I was never going to allow someone like Hopkin to bully me. That was the way I reacted.’
Thompson was in the middle of what would appear to be his best season for Liverpool’s first team. Yet beneath the surface, he was not happy. He was not happy out of position on the right side of Liverpool’s midfield, unable to play his natural game. He was not happy with the defensive style of football. He was not happy being substituted regularly. Even though Thompson had appeared in thirty-one games, Houllier had substituted him on fourteen of those occasions and in seven Thompson’s number was up first, leaving him unable to contain his frustration. It contributed towards an outpouring of juvenile angst and anger.
‘I’d been brought up by managers that had preached the “Liverpool way”. Houllier was different. Steve Heighway had always taught us to prepare properly and drill our own game plan: let the opposition worry about us. Suddenly, this manager comes in and he’s worried about the opposition. I was thinking, “We’ve got fantastic players here, I’m not used to not going forward”; instead, we were camping out and parking the bus.
‘I could see the impact it was having on my game. I felt like my legs had been cut off. Sammy Lee used to use that term a lot when Houllier sent him to reason with me. “We’re not cutting your legs off, lad …” I felt they were. I felt like my creativity had been stifled. We were being asked to nullify the opposition. In the past, I’d nullified the opposition using my strengths. To me, this new way was shithouse tactics.’
Thompson believed he was being singled out when it went wrong for the team. In the 1999–2000 campaign, Liverpool finished fourth, having failed to score in thirteen of their thirtyeight league games. With a place in the Champions League possible for the first time since it ceased to be the European Cup and after UEFA decided to extend the number of entrants, Liverpool did not register a single goal in the final five fixtures and missed out on qualification to Leeds United, with a 1–0 defeat at relegationthreatened Bradford City on the final day proving crucial. By then, Thompson had been left out of the squad altogether, along with Robbie Fowler – another player Houllier did not really get along with.
‘I’d never go all guns blazing to him with an issue in front of other players,’ Thompson says. ‘But If Houllier made a comment to me at half-time and I did not agree with it, I’d answer back. If I felt he was out of order, I’d fight my corner. I wouldn’t just sit there and bite my lip. Others did and went further.
‘He shoved me out on the right of midfield on what me, Danny Murphy or Stevie [Gerrard] would call the graveyard shift. None of us wanted to play there because it meant you were getting hauled off after an hour. It pissed me off. The other lads were able to hide their emotion but I wore my heart on my sleeve. If I was ever upset, it showed. So when I was walking off, I’d shake my head. It was impulsive. I couldn’t hide it.
‘I’m not a charlatan. You always know what’s going on with me. What you see is what you get. Houllier d
idn’t like that. He saw it as disobedience. He’d call me into his office like a head teacher does at school. Then I’d tell him straight that I didn’t feel I was being given the right platform to perform to the best of my ability. I wasn’t reaching my maximum potential. I was being honest. He didn’t understand where I was coming from.’
Thompson lives in Knutsford, the prosperous Cheshire town, where we meet in an Italian restaurant. He insists he is now a wiser version of the shaven-haired scallywag who, despite the relatively short period of time he spent playing for Liverpool, managed to harness the passion and spirit from the Anfield terraces with displays of enthusiasm, cleverness and atomic aggression. Our encounter is an intense experience. He regularly engages with the waiting staff and other customers. His phone rings constantly. Many of the calls are from his bikini-model girlfriend, Nina. He is well mannered, explaining that he likes it this way – being busy and, significantly, in demand.
‘I appreciate that some of the stuff I’m going to tell you here might make it sound like I was a spoilt brat,’ Thompson begins. ‘What you have to remember is, Houllier was a grown man who should have had the ability to see beyond my bluster. I wasn’t a bad kid. He just came in with the idea that all young British footballers were tearaways. That couldn’t have been further from the truth with me. I wanted it so badly that when it didn’t happen, I reacted impulsively.’
To understand Thompson, you do indeed need to understand where he came from. It becomes obvious that Thompson’s career was influenced by his childhood as one of the smallest kids on the Ford Estate in Birkenhead, Wirral. To avoid confrontation would be to betray everything he had known.
Thompson was eight years old when, in 1985, Howard Parker, then a reader in social-work studies at Liverpool University, wrote a book called Living With Heroin: The Impact of a Drugs Epidemic on an English Community. Many of the case studies came from Ford, a concrete settlement of avenues, maisonettes and council flats. There was a small shopping precinct, a school and a notorious pub called the Buccaneer, a centre for beer swilling and fights. Parker claimed that Ford in the eighties was one of the toughest estates in the country. ‘We monitored the Multiple Deprivation Index done by Wirral Council, and Ford was right at the top,’ he said. ‘Unemployment was high, there was a lot of crime, vandalism. There were gangs, tough men. I think that there was quite a lot of dumping of problem families on to Ford. Certainly it got into a mess for a while.’ Other writers spoke of a ‘lost generation’, where ‘there was no purpose for those kids, no point’.