by Brian Reade
Paco Ayesteran, who had been his trusted number two throughout his managerial career and who was very popular with the players, had been put on extended gardening leave after a major fall-out with Benitez. The team made a poor start in the Champions League and, despite the arrival of Fernando Torres, were struggling in the Premier League.
Benitez’s critics, both inside and outside Anfield, were becoming more vocal, especially over his caution and his rotation. When he kept a fit Fernando Torres on the bench for Birmingham’s visit to Anfield, and drew 0–0, the rumblings of discontent were audible. When he substituted Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher with twenty minutes to go, in a 3–1 defeat to Reading, purely to keep them fresh for a trip to Marseille, the phone-ins, the letters pages and Fleet Street’s back pages were filled with anti-Benitez ire.
If that wasn’t bad enough for the manager, he was convinced the club was briefing reporters, sports editors and ex-players against him because they wanted him out. Hence the wish to put his side to the few supporters he felt he had left in the media.
‘The truth is they’re killing me. They’re killing me,’ he said, sitting on a couch, his coat still on and a leather briefcase between us, from which he would pull flow charts, fact sheets and dossiers to back up his arguments, or his statistics about how many minutes a player had played that season.
One chart he’d had made showed that statistically he was the third most successful Liverpool manager after Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish. It may have been statistically accurate, but the name Bill Shankly under Rafa’s made me wince. I didn’t need that dubious statistic pointed out to me, as in my heart no one who had stepped into Anfield since had been Shankly’s equal.
I later learned he’d shown the same charts to senior players and it had drawn the same reaction. Clearly these were the gestures of a man desperately trying to cling on to his job.
He didn’t see it that way, repeating throughout our two-hour conversation, ‘I deal in facts. Only facts.’ And the fact that Hicks and Gillett were now trying to kill him was true.
‘I know they’ve talked to Jose Mourinho, Fabio Capello and Jurgen Klinsmann about my job, but what can I do?’ he asked. At the time this wasn’t public knowledge but the following month Hicks would admit to meeting one of those men with a view to replacing Benitez.
He spoke with pride about getting Liverpool to two European Cup finals: ‘These people need to remember in a European sense we were the size of Atletico Madrid before we won the Champions League. Without that win we’d be nothing in Europe, nothing.’
He defended his transfer policy saying whoever he bought, even if it didn’t work out, he nearly always got his money back. He talked of his frustrations working with Rick Parry, where every player he tried to sign would have to go through him, and Parry would delay for days. How he could get no work done unless Parry’s secretary was there.
‘I wanted Florent Malouda last summer but Parry wouldn’t pay the signing-on fee, so he went to Chelsea. He brought in Ryan Babel and paid £2 million more than we wanted to. He paid too much for Jermaine Pennant and Yossi Benayoun and he made a big mistake with Javier Mascherano’s contract because he allowed him a get-out clause, which ended up costing the club more money.’
He said he couldn’t understand why the Americans kept Rick Parry on. He thought they were keeping him sweet for a reason but he didn’t know why.
His frustration was tangible, his paranoia rampant. He was worried the fans might believe the poison that was being spread about him from the Americans and Parry, and would lose the faith: ‘Some may believe it without knowing the facts.’ His main frustration though was over money. ‘Here is the truth: I am driving an old BMW while Ferguson and Mourinho are driving Ferraris. I have to swerve and cheat to beat them, and I can do that, but I need the money and the back-up to beat the Ferraris.’
Meanwhile, all he seemed to be getting from the Americans was flattery, which he saw through instantly: ‘I don’t like people telling me you are brilliant, you are great. I hate that. I know where I come from. I know my limitations. I wasn’t a great footballer but I worked hard on the technical side. I am proud of what I have done but I know myself. I hate these sweet words. I like actions.’
His enthusiasm for the job and his love of Liverpool shone through. As did his honesty. He spoke of money going missing in the game and people being on the take. How he couldn’t understand why people were doing this when they were so well-paid.
When I asked why he didn’t just walk away from Liverpool if it was so much hassle, and take up one of the regular offers that were coming in from Real Madrid, he replied: ‘I love the club too much and my wife loves living here. This is my home. Also, if I go, Reina, Arbeloa, Mascherano and Torres would all leave too. Xabi Alonso will go anyway because he wants to go back to Spain.’
I was struggling to reconcile the image of the cold, withdrawn perfectionist some of the players paint, and this passionate, emotional man pouring his heart out before me. I asked why his players said he didn’t show them enough love and he said that most players don’t need it, but some, like Steven Gerrard, do. He then said that throughout his managerial career he played bad cop while Paco was the good cop. It kept them on their toes. Certainly that was the Brian Clough/Peter Taylor model and at times the Bill Shankly/Bob Paisley way. But he’d effectively sacked Paco. Why? ‘Paco needed to go. He betrayed me.’
I had a horrible knot in my stomach about what was happening at Liverpool and what was about to unfold. It felt very much like the war that was then raging at the top of the Labour government. As a national newspaper reporter I’d had similar briefings from Gordon Brown’s people against Tony Blair, and vice versa, since the late 1990s.
Rafa’s words simply backed up everything I was seeing, hearing and fearing: Anfield was riddled with empire-building, poisonous briefings, distrust, disloyalty and back-stabbing. It had become a nest of vipers.
But the people who mattered most, the fans, had yet to digest this. The full force of the Athens rant, and its implications, didn’t register at the time with supporters scrapping with UEFA over who was to blame for the Champions League Final chaos.
Rick Parry was still Public Enemy Number One, over the farcical ticket allocation, not the Yanks. Indeed some felt sympathy for them over Rafa’s outburst. What had they done wrong since arriving? Was this a diversionary tactic by the manager to draw attention away from losing a final he could, and should, have won?
Hicks and Gillett had an unlikely ally at the time in Jamie Carragher: ‘I didn’t see that Athens press conference coming. Nothing about Rafa before or after the game hinted he was going to say all that. At the time I wasn’t too impressed. I couldn’t see his point.
‘I thought, ‘Give them a chance, we only lost the Champions League final last night.’ Having said that, it showed balls. There’s a basic rule in life that you don’t go into work and slag off your boss, but Rafa knew he was arguing from a position of strength after a European Cup Final and obviously thought he was doing it for the benefit of the club.
‘And looking back I suppose you could say Benitez was right because they ended up giving him the money and suddenly we were buying players for around £20 million or more when we’d never gone above £15 million.’
The full implications of Rafa’s outburst took a while to register with Steven Gerrard, who had fallen into a bout of self-critical analysis after the final defeat: ‘To be honest I was worrying more about losing the Champions League final than what Rafa had said. His words didn’t really sink in.’
It took two or three days for the full implication of what Benitez was saying to hit home to his captain. For the first couple of nights all he could think of was that another opportunity to win something big had been missed.
When the outburst sank in friends of his say he was delighted that his manager had spoken out because he was desperate for big-name players to arrive and that was only going to happen by stumping up the cash. The
final had showed, despite outplaying AC Milan in patches, that the squad wasn’t strong enough and Gerrard, like most fans, knew they were still trailing behind the biggest clubs in Europe.
But after the initial optimism that Rafa’s words might force the new owners to dig deep, alarm bells started to go off in the Liverpool captain’s head. For the first time he worried that he may be forced to take sides in a power struggle.
‘The problem I had was I was caught in the middle. I had a good relationship with Rafa and he was telling me about his frustrations with the Americans, and the more I heard this the more I worried. The relationship between them wasn’t as good as I thought it was before that final. I realised it was going to end in tears for someone.’
That the Americans flashed the cash in the first two transfer windows is indisputable. In the summer Fernando Torres, Ryan Babel, Lucas Leiva and Yossi Benayoun were signed for almost £45 million, and in the January Martin Skrtel and Javier Mascherano cost a further £24 million. Although Benitez would rightly point out that in the summer window alone, the sales of Craig Bellamy, Djibril Cisse, Luis Garcia, Mark Gonzalez and Florent Sinama Pongolle meant £24.5 million had been recouped. What also eventually became indisputable was that the banks, not the Yanks, were spending the cash, and that involved interest rates which would wipe out future transfer budgets.
To the more astute fans, however, Athens had registered. Benitez had been at Anfield for three seasons by then, and although they sensed he was driven, stubborn, liked to stir controversy and wouldn’t suffer fools, they knew something was going badly wrong behind the scenes. No Liverpool manager had ever dared to do what he did in Athens. Surely, they thought, something must be drastically awry at the heart of the club’s decision-making process for Benitez to have exploded so violently in public.
‘This was the first time I had doubts about whether the Americans had any money because, after Athens, a friend of mine who is a mate of David Moores phoned and said, ‘They’ve got no dosh, you know. There’s no dough there. Anything they’re going to do will mean debt on the club,’ said Peter Hooton.
By the autumn of 2007, Hicks and Gillett were at war, united only in one aspect – sacking Benitez. The major fall-out came over plans for the new stadium and drove such a wedge between them that Gillett, who was also sensing major problems with the money markets, started to look for an exit strategy.
Only a few months earlier, in July, the Americans’ popularity had hit an all-time high. Within one week, while the club was on tour in Hong Kong, they unveiled the record signing of Torres, and plans for a breathtaking 70,000-seater, £300 million stadium. It was a futuristic masterpiece of steel and glass which made plans for the previous one look like a tram-shed. An acoustic-friendly arena whose centrepiece would be a single-tier 18,000 capacity Kop. An environmentally friendly home with presidential-style underground bunkers plus changing rooms for Sunday League players and tennis courts. A stadium whose revenues would finally allow Liverpool to challenge Manchester United and Chelsea for the dominance in English football, regenerate the Anfield area and be ready for the kick-off of the 2010–11 season.
‘It’s spectacular and I can’t wait for everybody to see it,’ said Hicks. ‘I think our fans will love it. It’s very creative architecture, very contemporary but unique to Liverpool as it’s all centred around the Kop.’
The club claimed that Hicks had immediately decided, in a typical Texan way, the old plans were neither big nor bold enough for Liverpool, and brought in Dallas-based architects HKS with a brief to build a stadium that would be a mind-blowing statement of the new owners’ intent.
Not surprisingly, an Echo poll claimed 90.5 per cent of fans welcomed the new plans. But everything was not as rosy in the new Stanley Park garden as it seemed. Although Gillett gave his backing to the new stadium plans (he eventually backed everything Hicks told him to back), he was riddled with doubt about the cost. He could feel the cold winds of recession blowing across America, thought back to the painful days of bankruptcy when he’d over-borrowed at the wrong time, and was worried. Why extend the borrowing from £215 million to possibly £400 million with the markets so uncertain? His instinct was to stick with the original stadium and keep the costs down. Besides, he thought, who would lend that kind of money now?
In December, when the severity of the credit crunch kicked in and banks stopped lending, the super-duper stadium plans went into cold storage, only to be seen again in a frame in Hicks’s Dallas mansion, as he spoke about what might have been.
What was clear at the beginning of their first full season in charge was that Hicks was sitting on the throne and calling the shots, while Gillett was gradually realising he’d made a monumental mistake with this partnership which needed to be rectified as soon as possible. Hicks would go on to win almost every battle between the two over the coming years, and would have won the stadium one if the credit crunch hadn’t stood in his way.
But as we moved towards the winter of 2007, the future was moving out of Hicks’s control. The global recession was pulverising his strategy. Borrowing had become nigh-on impossible, shattering any chances of delivering a new stadium for the foreseeable future. Without that, the £100 million naming rights and the increased match-day revenues, there was no pot of gold at the end of his Anfield rainbow.
Added to that, their businesses back home, many built on high-risk credit, suffered badly as the US banking system went into meltdown, meaning they couldn’t free up cash to inject into Liverpool, even if they had wanted to.
It was in the midst of this growing confusion, which was yet to surface in public, that I bumped into David Moores. The opening of Jamie Carragher’s Cafe Sports England on 7 October 2007 saw a healthy turnout from past and present players plus club officials. Healthy measures of wine were also on the bill.
‘You were my predator,’ yelled Moores as he spotted me. ‘You hunted me down. You were in with Steve Morgan trying to get me out. You were always trying to bring me down. Didn’t he hurt me, Marge?’ he asked his wife, who by now was trying to usher him outside for a smoke. ‘Well you got what you wanted, didn’t you? Me gone.’
It escalated into a row as I pointed out he also got what he wanted, £88 million, but before it got nasty we were ushered away from each other. Not before Chris Bascombe tossed him a googly that almost made his reddening head burst:
‘Are you sure you’ve sold to the right people?’ Moores’ eyes widened, his face hardened and he shot back a reply laden with disgust: ‘How can you look me in the face and ask that?’
As Moores stared at his shaving mirror over the coming months and years, that question would be answered by the haunted face that stared back. He came to realise he hadn’t.
Meanwhile, when Benitez was shaving around the goatee in his Wirral bathroom he was increasingly seeing eyes filled with anger. He not only had evidence that the owners were briefing against him, he had it confirmed from his contacts that they had spoken to Jurgen Klinsmann, and if he were to lose the Anfield Champions League game against Porto, thus failing to qualify for the knock-out stages, he could be sacked. As communication lines with the absentee landlords closed down he felt he was being backed into a corner. Where they intend to kill him.
In mid-November he tried to get approval for bringing in two players during the January transfer window – one on a free. His transatlantic emails went unanswered until one flew back from a clearly riled Hicks telling him to focus on coaching and training the players he already had.
Which would have been a red rag to most bullish managers. To a proud and bristling Benitez it was a red flag. Throw into the mix the fact that Hicks had typed his command in capital letters, making Rafa feel like a child having his legs slapped, and we’re talking about a red wall being built around the bull. A wall he was always likely to leap over at the first opportunity.
To the assembled journalists it was just another routine Melwood press conference on the eve of the league game at Newcastle. Bu
t it became apparent, when Benitez didn’t show up on time, or even thirty minutes later, that something was wrong.
The reporters knew he was in the building, and a quick walkabout saw him locked in his office having an animated discussion with the club’s Head of Press, Ian Cotton.
Thirty-five minutes after he should have arrived he took his seat before the media and conducted the most bizarre managerial press conference in the club’s history:
‘How much will you have to spend in January?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’
‘Are there assurances you’ll have what you want?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’
‘So what is the long-term plan?’
‘My plan is training and coaching the team.’
‘Is there anything upsetting you?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’
‘Do you have anything to say?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’
‘Even off the record?’
‘No.’
‘It’s clear something is up.’
‘You have my answer.’
‘You’re very different from normal.’
‘You have my answer.’
‘You said after the story linking you with the Bayern Munich manager’s job that you were happy to stay here a long time. Is that still the case?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’
‘You’re not normally late. You were obviously preoccupied by something.’
‘Because as always I was focusing on the training session.’
‘Is there anything you’d like to say?’
‘As always I am focused on training and coaching my team.’