by Brian Reade
Something else that had been missed, or rather gone undetected as Liverpool sailed proudly towards what it felt would be its sixth Champions League title, was the fragile state of relations between key personnel. It wasn’t just Benitez having reservations about the men he had to work with. Tensions were appearing between the Americans and Parry, and crucially between Hicks and Gillett.
A senior football executive, and Liverpool fan, who met both Americans individually in April 2007 said: ‘There were lots of characteristics shown that as a Liverpool fan I didn’t want to believe. It was only two months into their joint ownership of the club but George was talking about his view versus his partner’s view. It was already ‘I think this and my partner thinks that’ kind of thing.
‘When I later had lunch with Tom and some of his American associates I asked about the dynamics of their relationship. How his partnership with Gillett worked. Tom shrugged and said, “You’d better ask him,” pointing at a senior figure from Inner Circle Sports Ventures, who had brought the two together for the deal.
‘I was gobsmacked. Either they hadn’t sorted out how their professional relationship was going to work, there wasn’t a relationship, or there was a relationship and it wasn’t working. The fundamental problem was, as I later discovered, that apart from the first two or three months in charge they absolutely loathed each other.’
Journalists were also amazed that a clearly negative vibe existed between Parry and Hicks, with Parry letting it be known that he didn’t agree with everything the Texan said. And vice versa.
The Athens ticket fiasco blew into a storm when thousands of season ticket holders who had qualified for previous finals found they had lost out in a ballot. There were reports of groups of up to twenty season ticket holders (all of whom had booked flights and hotels) where none had got lucky in the ballot. Fans, many veterans of countless cup finals, smelt a rat lurking between the chief executive’s office and the ticket office and demanded answers.
Parry did an interview with the Echo in which he was asked for a breakdown of the ticket allocation. He famously replied: ‘I won’t play the numbers game.’ So the fans played the numbers game for him. Literally. Season ticket holder and IT expert Danny Nicolson did a forensic analysis of the allocation and through computer formulation worked out that only 9,579 fans had qualified for tickets out of the 16,779 Liverpool had received. Which meant 7,200 were being held back for former shareholders, sponsors, corporate clients and staff, or as sweeteners for fans when the tickets scandal hit the media.
Supporters were enraged. Not only were they missing out on seeing Liverpool in a Champions League Final, and being forced into the hands of touts, but no explanation was being offered as to why so many were being kept by the club for internal and corporate distribution.
So, for the first time in its 115-year existence, Liverpool supporters held a protest march on their own ground. Around 500 of them met at the Sandon pub, before the last game of the season against Charlton, with banners carrying such slogans as ‘Parry – Any Spares? I Know You Have.’
It was a spontaneous response to the ticket scandal organised via the internet, but the problem was, Liverpool fans had never marched before and no one was quite sure what to do, or even who was going to tell them how to do it.
The general consensus is that a fan called ‘Windows’, who probably wasn’t a relative of Bill Gates, but was anti-everyone and everything, came forward and channelled the anger towards Rick Parry. There were already accusations among fans about Parry advising Moores to go with the Americans to save his job, so when he dismissed the thousands who were unable to get Athens tickets with ‘let’s not play the numbers game’ he virtually elected himself Public Enemy Number One.
‘It was probably the first time since Hillsborough that Liverpool fans felt “we don’t matter here”,’ said lifelong Red Paul Rice. ‘And the whole thing about the numbers game was, “That’s all we are to you isn’t it? A number.”’
While Parry took the rap for it, fans were starting to peek behind the curtains and wonder if that was what the owners thought of us too, because they were making absolutely no comment about the tickets.
They probably couldn’t believe their luck. They probably thought to themselves, ‘We can get away with anything with these dozy limeys because they’ll believe anything we tell them.’ This story was getting interesting on a personal level, and not just because I’d missed out in the ballot along with my son Phil, but because it was the first time I’d written anything critical about the Americans in the Daily Mirror.
Under the headline ‘Hicks’ clan final insult’ I wrote: ‘It probably wasn’t the best of weeks for Liverpool’s official website to tell thousands of season ticket holders who have been to all six Champions League home ties that they had not been selected in an electronic ballot for a ticket for the final.
‘Especially when those same devastated fans, many of whom had already paid up to £800 for packages to Greece, could read a story below it headlined: ‘Whole Hicks clan will be in Athens.’
‘The article proudly boasted, on Texan Tom’s behalf, that eight members of his family will have seats at the final.
‘Bearing in mind his fan-card registers two Champions League games – Barcelona and Chelsea – whereas the disappointed fans have six, where’s the justice in that?
‘Oh, I see. He liked the brand so much, he bought the franchise.’
The hostile reaction to it took me by surprise. Some fans on the Liverpool Way website were disgusted with what they deemed a cheap shot and condemned me for having a go at Hicks and his family. One poster, called Section 31, went so far as to say ‘I reckon Reade wrote that when he was pissed’, which just shows how solid the backing was for the owners when the honeymoon was still in full swing. I’d love to tell you that I wrote it because I’d decided before anyone else that Hicks was the evil spawn of Kilroy and Rose West. In fact I’d love to tell you why I wrote it. But as Section 31 said, I was probably pissed at the time.
The protestors marched from the Sandon to the main stand car park chanting ‘Parry, Parry, Parry, Tout, Tout, Tout’ and a new song, unheard of before, which over the coming years would be sung at every protest, with different words but similar hostility, towards Hicks and Gillett: ‘We don’t care about Parry, he don’t care about fans, all our tickets are in the wrong hands.’
Had those fans known the dark road the club was headed down and how many of those tickets had gone to former shareholders who had set them down that road, some of the protestors may have been aiming more than words at the men in suits shuffling through the directors’ entrance.
Certain positives emerged from the fans’ first-ever protest march. Parry vowed to look again at the distribution and insisted there would be no repeat in future, and those who took part actually enjoyed it and felt better for getting the anger off their chest. Tellingly, on the day after the protest, a member of the Hicks camp rang the Echo to brief against Parry, saying, ‘Trust us, we’ll make sure this never happens again.’
Athens was a grave disappointment on many levels. Despite the 17,000 ticket allocation, at least 40,000 fans tried to get into the Olympic Stadium, which was so unsuited for such an occasion it didn’t have any turnstiles. Pandemonium reigned outside the ground, with police unable to control the numbers. Hundreds of fans with genuine tickets never reached their seats while thousands who showed forgeries, cigarette packets or fresh air reached someone else’s.
On the pitch AC Milan gained revenge for the 2005 final, winning a highly forgettable game 2–1, thanks in no small part to a fluked handball by Filipo Inzhagi. Disappointingly, Liverpool had enjoyed more possession but lacked the adventure and cutting edge to beat an ageing Italian side that was there for the taking.
But the week of that final was relevant on another level. We caught, for the first time, a glimpse of the Madness of King George. In the build-up to the game Gillett’s flattery went into overdrive. Watching Liverpool h
e said ‘was like attending the greatest sports event you can ever go to … on steroids. Nothing can compare to that.’ This from a man who’d owned basketball and ice-hockey teams, who until four months ago had never seen Liverpool play, and who kept using the wrong terminology to describe a football game.
As he showed on the morning of the final when Five Live’s Nicky Campbell interviewed him from his Athens hotel room, and he predicted the score would be ‘two to one’.
Why ‘two to one’? Campbell asked Gillett, mocking the American jargon. Because, Gillett replied, he’d consulted a ouija board. ‘It did come up two to one and we certainly hope it to be in our favour.’
Stunned silence. Was he joking, or was he serious? Three days later we would be asking the same question as he sat before the cameras, stuffing dollar notes in his jacket pocket saying: ‘If Rafa said he wanted to buy Snoogy Doogy we would back him.’
To Jamie Carragher, and many others, the weirdness of Gillett, and thus the alien territory Liverpool found themselves in, was becoming apparent: ‘It cracked me up when I saw him doing that with his cash. I’m like “Oh no, what’s that about?” He just sat there chuckling away looking like one of the Muppets. It only needed Hicks next to him and we’d have had Waldorf and Statler.’
But the flakiest moment for many came when Gillett entered the Olympic Stadium before the final and paraded in front of the Liverpool fans like Caesar returning to Rome after conquering a foreign land, holding up his hands in a triumphant clinch, soaking in the adulation flowing back to him from a crowd so dense in some places it was three to a seat.
As I looked on from the stands I was thinking, ‘Why is he glad-handing the fans when he hasn’t had anything to do with Liverpool reaching this final? Why is he walking before us, acknowledging our gratitude like Bill Shankly after we’d won the League in 1973, when he’s done nothing to deserve any love rolling down towards him?’
Peter Hooton was similarly bemused: ‘I thought it was inappropriate for him to do that. It was showbiz, wasn’t it? For him to be there, it was as though it was his achievement and it started to become obvious that him and Hicks were seduced by the adulation.
‘They gave it all that spin: ‘We love the passion of the fans … I’ve never seen anything like the Spion Kop’ and anyone standing back from that with an ounce of healthy cynicism in them is thinking: ‘What a load of rubbish.’
It turns out similar doubts and questions were going through Rafa Benitez’s troubled head. The man who in the run-up to the final had been repeatedly referred to as a ‘genius’ and a ‘brilliant tactician’ by Hicks and Gillett, was tiring of being patronised.
A post-match meeting between the owners and Benitez had been scheduled for midnight at the Pentelikon hotel in Athens, where the team was staying. Win or lose they would sit down and finally hammer out plans for the summer transfer window, aware that their rivals who hadn’t had to focus on the Champions League Final were already doing business. But it was cancelled due to the Americans flying straight home by private jet.
Benitez, already drained and deflated after losing football’s biggest club final, was incandescent with rage. In meeting after meeting he’d had to put up with their false promises and said nothing. Now they had added insult to injury by cancelling the last chance they had to sort out a budget and targets before the summer holidays.
Inconsolable and depressed, he started to walk the streets of Athens, a trek which lasted all night, even when the rain began to fall. He saw no point sitting in the hotel bars with the players talking about what might have been, or with his staff about what might be next season, because he didn’t know the answers. And there was no point going back to his room because due to a cock-up he didn’t have one. The hotel Liverpool had booked became too small when partners of the players and staff turned up on the night of the game, so he let the wife of chief scout Eduardo share his room with his wife Montse.
Occasionally he would return to the hotel and leave again with one of his assistants who listened to him open his heart about his fears for the club and how the mistakes that were made last summer through indecision and lack of money would be made again. How this time he couldn’t put up with it.
‘I can’t get hold of them,’ he told a confidant. ‘Which means I will have to go through Rick, who won’t give me a straight answer and will be off on his holiday to Barbados. So how am I going to do business? I have to buy players and sell players. But there is no one running the club to do the business.’
On he walked, the turmoil growing in his mind, until breakfast. A few hours later, after some snatched sleep, sitting before the world’s media who expected the usual post-match litany of hard-luck stories, he let out all the frustrations that had been building in his head. No one above him escaped. Not Parry, not Hicks not Gillett. All were told in a brutal, withering delivery, that their lack of structure, cohesion and backing for him was killing the club they kept telling the world they loved. The boil had been lanced. And nothing would be the same again.
‘I’m tired of talking, talking. We talk and talk but we never finish,’ he told the media. ‘I’m worried about talking to players, for one or two months or even six months, and then losing them. I want things to be done.
‘Now is the moment to take decisions and not just talk about doing things. If we don’t change right now, understand how crucial this moment is, we will waste one month, two months, two or three targets and then we’ll start having to sign third-choice players and we’ll have to be only contenders to be in the top four. Nothing else.
‘We need to react to make things easier. We can’t work any harder, so if we want to progress, then we have to change these things.
‘The owners know, clearly, they need to make big changes. We’ve been talking about these things. But maybe they need to understand this is the right moment. Not just waiting and talking.
‘They need to invest in the squad. When you see Manchester United have paid £20 million for a midfielder and you know how far we are away, we need to spend money and improve the squad.
‘It’s clear we need lots of money. United can pay £20 million for a midfielder. OK, if we want to sign a striker? What will be the price if you want to sign a striker? If you go early, you might have an opportunity to sign someone. If you spend two or three weeks waiting, then talking and talking, either you can’t sign the player or you’ll have to pay more.
‘We know how we need to improve if we’re to compete in this market. Sometimes if you spend big money for a player it’s still cheap because they are really good players.
‘This is a crucial time if you want to do something. It’s not about working in August – forget it. You’ll lose your targets then.
‘In cup competitions we can beat anyone. But we don’t have enough quality in the squad for playing nine months on the same level as Manchester United and Chelsea in the Premiership.’
Bang. Over. Dozens of bloodshot, slack-jawed hacks who’d allowed their minds after the last game of a long season to drift to Mediterranean sunbeds, pinched themselves to see if they were having a bizarre dream where Rafa had morphed into Jerry Maguire and was screaming to be shown the money.
What he was really doing was attempting to live out the message on the Liverpudlian banner which had been hanging in Athens Syntagma Square the previous day: ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it – Rafa B.’
Five thousand miles away, Hicks and Gillett were sleeping, but an earthquake that started somewhere near the Acropolis would soon shake them from their slumber. The first shot in a very uncivil American war had been fired.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Are you sure you’ve sold to the right people, Mr Moores? … How can you look me in the face and ask that?’
– Chris Bascombe and David Moores
We met in the house of a mutual friend on a cold, dark early-December night. I wasn’t sure why Rafa Benitez wanted to see me but within minutes of staring at his pale, dra
wn features and listening to him bare his soul it was clear he was feeling besieged, betrayed and isolated. He was fighting for his professional life.
Hours after lobbing his Athens hand grenade, the PR wheels had started grinding into motion. A transatlantic conference call was hastily arranged after which the Americans claimed peace, love and understanding had been restored to Anfield.
It prompted Gillett’s Snoogy Doogy pledge and a typically bizarre, boot-licking eulogy: ‘Rafa’s feeling is we need more depth because of the rigours of the schedule to be competitive. In every sport I participate in there is a difference between a league season and the play-offs. That’s where the genius of the manager is so essential and that’s where Tom and I have to defer to his background and genius.’
What play-offs?
As usual, Hicks was more blunt: ‘We had a long call and agreed on actions to be taken with our own players and with possible new players and we are all comfortable with our plan.’ When asked to comment on Benitez’s Athens outburst his diplomatic reply was, ‘He’d been very upset the day after the match.’
But that was all show. Privately they were seething. Especially Hicks, who classed Rafa’s very public act of insubordination as a call-to-arms. His instinct was to throw on his Stetson, pull a Colt .45 out of his holster and pump Rafa full of lead. The problem was, with two European Cup finals reached in three years, and a fan base that still overwhelmingly saw him as the man who would bring back the title, he was about as unsackable as a panda in a Chinese zoo with a secret stash of Viagra.
Nevertheless, Hicks and Gillett made a decision to get rid of him as soon as he appeared vulnerable. Fortunately for them, that autumn the team’s poor results and some of his own eccentric actions – and I’m not even referring to the new goatee beard – left Benitez increasingly exposed.