An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  Indeed the Sky News reporter, Alan Myers, whom he was now making his latest cosy film with, had more meetings with Hicks in the time he ran Liverpool than his team captain did. But as Gerrard watched that April 2008 interview in his Formby home, following as it did on the heels of the Klinsmann saga and the revelation that the Americans had shifted all their loans on to the club, even if they’d wanted to talk, they would have found their captain very reluctant to meet them.

  He was telling friends he didn’t even want to look at them. His frustrations, like those of the fans, made him wish they’d just pack up and go.

  ‘I was thinking, “When is this going to end?” Will it carry on for one year, two years because the only people who are going to suffer are the team and the supporters,’ said Gerrard.

  He witnessed the internal warfare first-hand and feared a long and heavy fall-out with devastating repercussions. Journalists were telling him the extent of the briefings and counter-briefings, he could see the story moving from the back pages to the front and he was struggling to cope with the implications both for the club and for himself.

  ‘I’d been at Liverpool since I was eight. I wasn’t really interested in the media until I was fifteen or sixteen and started getting a big interest in Liverpool, but I’d never seen the club making national front-page headlines,’ he said.

  ‘When I was doing interviews a lot of people were saying, “Can I ask you about Hicks and Gillett and the break-down with Rafa,” and I was thinking, “No, this isn’t something to get involved in as a player. Concentrate on your own game and lifting the team.”

  ‘Because this wasn’t an argument that was happening between them in an office, this was coming out in the public domain and you could see it was just going to get messier and messier.’

  In that February 2007 meeting, Hicks and Gillett had promised Gerrard they were going to spend big, invest in the Academy and back the manager, because their main intention was getting it right on the pitch. The same sentiments they took into Anfield on the day of the takeover.

  ‘I recorded the first press conference and watched it a few times and the key thing they were both saying is “we respect this club’s heritage and history and the important thing is the team competing to win things,”’ said Gerrard. ‘But that wasn’t the case. It certainly wasn’t the case when they were dragging the club through the courts.

  ‘That High Court hearing was a disgrace. The frustrating thing for me was knowing they were sticking out for more money and they were prepared to hang on to the club for a long time until they got out of it what they wanted. Because in that first meeting I thought they had our interests at heart.

  ‘But I realised then how far they were prepared to drag this club down just to get some money. I can’t find the right words to describe them. Let’s just say they had some balls to do that. I didn’t think they would drag the club to those lengths for some money. It just shows how greedy they were.’

  As Gerrard watched Tom Hicks’s video in horror in his Formby front room, a few miles away in Blundellsands, Jamie Carragher was staring at his television in total despair. Like his fellow Scouse teammate, this was the moment when any respect he had for Hicks disappeared.

  ‘That was when I thought it’s got past a joke. To fly a TV crew over to your house, and dress your kids in Liverpool tops, and make them watch the game on your home cinema, coming out with stuff like, “Everton won’t like that” I just thought, “Oh my God, what’s going on?”

  ‘Then he attacked Rick Parry, and whether you think he was doing a good job or a bad job you just don’t do that. This is Liverpool. He’s our chief executive and you’re the owner. You don’t start dishing the dirt on worldwide telly.

  ‘When Hicks implied that we’ve never won the league under Rick Parry I thought, “It’s not his fault,” and if you’re using that argument does that mean Parry won us the European Cup then? To attack him publicly was a betrayal of everything the club stood for. It was unforgiveable.’

  Carragher, the boyhood Evertonian who broke into the Liverpool team in 1996 and came to typify the pride and character of the club for more than a decade and a half, eventually became emotionally exhausted with the civil war.

  ‘It was like your mum and dad scrapping. You don’t care what they’re fighting about, you just want to scream at them to shut up,’ he said.

  ‘The manager and owners might not have liked each other but they should have concentrated on just letting us play football. I just wish they’d put their personal arguments aside for the sake of the team.

  ‘I got sick of the rowing because it just wouldn’t stop. No sooner would one fight die down, like the one between Rafa Benitez and Hicks, than another would blow up. Like Hicks and Gillett falling out. Everyone was trying to be too clever, playing politics with no regard for the damage they were doing to the club.

  ‘I blame both Rafa and the owners for that. The manager would be coming out with things before a game like ‘focus on coaching and training’ and they would hit back through briefings or interviews. It was as though they were all playing their own games instead of worrying about Liverpool winning on a Saturday.

  ‘Even when Rafa had a row with them you were put in a difficult position because the owners and the manager both wanted you on their side. But I just wanted to play football. Everything was going-off off the pitch, and I just wanted to say, “Can we forget about this and just play football.”

  ‘Sometimes Rafa would say something before a game and you’d think, “Don’t say that, forget it, get on with the game.”

  ‘Before the Europa League semi-final against Atletico Madrid he comes out and says something about another club being interested in him, and the owners not supporting him and I’m thinking, “We’ve got a semi-final here, we can win a European trophy, what are you talking about that for? Just shut up and concentrate on winning the game.”

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, it must have been hard for the manager dealing with the owners but there was too much politics being played. And we all suffered.’

  One of the most obvious ways the players suffered was through a lack of investment in the team in the final eighteen months of the Americans’ reign.

  ‘The frustrating thing was the timing,’ said Gerrard. ‘We were so close. Two European Finals, finishing second, we weren’t that far away from getting the League back. We were another two or three Torres, Reina and Mascherano signings away from competing with anyone, that was the big frustration.’

  He felt the last three or four transfer windows held the club back because it stopped them competing with the best on the pitch, and consequently the squad didn’t progress. Gerrard would never admit it in public because it would seem like an excuse, but friends say there were times when he thought that the lack of investment from Hicks and Gillett cost him medals. Certainly some of his teammates felt like that, including Jamie Carragher.

  ‘I’m an ambitious footballer who wants to win medals and if they’d been better owners who’d put their money in like they promised then I might have won more than I did.

  ‘I get very well paid but when you reach my age what really bothers you is how many medals you’ve got. You look at other players in other teams who are winning titles and it’s natural rivalry, you want to be better than them.

  ‘So when the transfer money dries up like it did with those two, because their plans went wrong, it gets you angry. It might sound selfish but I’m probably never going to win the League with Liverpool now because we’re going to need to rebuild.

  ‘I’d never come out and say they definitely cost me a League title medal because it was down to us players on the pitch, but if we hadn’t had interest payments like we’ve had we could have been spending an extra £15–£20 million in the last few transfer windows which could have made the difference.

  ‘Who knows? If the Dubai people had come in I might have won a Premier League title and I would probably have played in a new stadium. I’d have lo
ved to have played in a new Anfield, and we may get one, but I’ll never play in it. If they’d put that spade in within sixty days like they promised to, I’d be playing in it now.’

  It wasn’t just local legends like Gerrard and Carragher who felt badly let down by Hicks and Gillett’s lack of financial backing; world-class foreign players like Fernando Torres and Javier Mascherano did too.

  When Mascherano moved to Barcelona he gave an interview slamming the Americans, which appeared under the headline ‘I Quit Kop For Two Reasons … Hicks And Gillett’.

  In it he said he might still have been a Liverpool player had the pair left sooner, before giving this damning indictment on them: ‘While Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United were spending big money, Liverpool couldn’t because they had no money. The situation is clear to me. When you want to fight for big things like titles, you must have a big team to win. But, at Liverpool, that wasn’t the case.’

  Torres grew increasingly disillusioned during the 2009–10 season, when Liverpool were knocked out of the Champions League at the group stages and headed towards a seventh-place finish in the Premier League.

  He had scored the goal that made Spain European Champions and was on his way to winning a World Cup. He had been shortlisted for the Ballon D’Or and was regarded as one of the top strikers in world football.

  Here was a child prodigy, adored by fans of his boyhood club Atletico Madrid, whom he left as he approached his peak years because he wanted to win the highest honours in club football. So he joined Liverpool and won nothing.

  When Liverpool began to fall out of the Champions League places he was made promises by the owners and the management that investment was on its way, and with it big-name players to share his burden. But none of it came. After Liverpool finished runners-up to Manchester United in 2009, they went into reverse. High-class colleagues like Xabi Alonso, Alvaro Arbeloa, Sami Hyypia, Yossi Benayoun and Javier Mascherano left and were replaced with inferior players.

  To make matters worse, Atletico Madrid started winning trophies, while Liverpool looked further away from winning one than at any time for a decade.

  Towards the end of the 2009–10 season, Torres spoke out in the press about his frustrations with Hicks and Gillett, telling them they had to spend to keep Liverpool competitive. But as they say in Texas, he was whistling Dixie.

  When he flew to the World Cup in South Africa it was touch-and-go whether he would start the following season as Liverpool’s number nine. The man who brought him to Anfield, Benitez, was on his way, and he was completely disillusioned with the running of the club, fearing that with no change of ownership imminent, the one thing he had yet to own, a winners’ medal with a club side, was as distant a dream as ever.

  His agents set about listening to offers, but few came. A combination of factors were to blame: with three years left on his contract Liverpool would be asking a colossal fee but his injury problems and the poor World Cup made potential suitors think twice about breaking the bank. Barcelona, the only Spanish side he contemplated moving to, signed his Spain striking partner David Villa, and Chelsea, the one English side he privately pined to join, threw in a derisory £30 million offer, without following it up.

  As much as Hicks and Gillett may have loved to trouser such a debt-shrinking sum, Torres was deemed as not only pivotal to Liverpool’s ability to compete on the pitch, but their chances of being sold. A global superstar who shifts replica shirts by the container-load, and has a hefty sell-on fee, is a handy card to pull out during negotiations.

  So managing director Christian Purslow got to work on Torres, promising him that big things were around the corner, pleading with him to stay for at least another season, offering him more money and a clause in his contract enabling him to leave the following summer for £50 million. He agreed to give it a go.

  ‘I am really happy to stay with all my teammates,’ Torres said at the time. ‘My commitment and loyalty to the club and to the fans is the same as it was on the day when I signed.’

  As my mum used to say, ‘Try telling that to your gob, then.’ With another poor transfer window, a shocking start to the season and a new manager so out of his depth at Anfield he looked like he’d caught the bends, Torres’s face and body spent the next six months screaming ‘get me out of here’.

  When Roman Abramovich eventually threw him a lifeline he grabbed it without a second’s hesitation, handing in a written transfer request three days before the end of the January 2011 transfer window.

  His timing was almost as shocking as his words on arriving at Chelsea: ‘The target for every player is to play for one of the top clubs in the world and I can do it now, so I’m very happy,’ he said, neatly forgetting the history of the club he’d left and the fact that during his time at Liverpool, UEFA had ranked them number one in Europe, which equates to being the best in the world.

  Despite the £50 million he earned Liverpool, his exit was classless and insulting, and in the eyes of most fans he went from being a beloved legend to persona non grata. Just another self-serving, love-feigning imposter. A plastic idol heading to a stadium of plastic flags.

  Such criticism was valid, especially as Torres had spoken so passionately about his love for Liverpool, its people and its culture. How he wanted his kids to grow up with Scouse accents and how he could never think of joining another Premier League side because Liverpool were his English club.

  However, it would be naive and unfair to underplay the toll the Anfield Civil War had taken on this highly driven footballer’s ambitions. People around him cited the ‘broken promises’ made to him during the summer of 2010 at the fag end of the Hicks and Gillett reign, and when Torres faced his first Chelsea press conference he firmly fingered our friends from across the pond.

  ‘It wasn’t just last summer really,’ he said. ‘It’s the last two years maybe, especially with the old owners. They wanted to sell the club too many times and during that time the team was being weakened.

  ‘I once said I didn’t think I would play for another club because at that moment Liverpool were giving me what they promised, but not now.

  ‘I was feeling a big deception about everything that was happening with the sale of the club. There were too many things to think about, too many promises, too many false hopes.

  ‘I accept that my performances were not the best, but if the promises they made had been true Liverpool would be fighting with Man United and Chelsea now.’

  Four months after the civil war ended the casualties were still being counted.

  Steven Gerrard had total empathy with the foreign super-stars, as did Jamie Carragher: ‘You can’t blame top foreign players looking at their mates who are winning at other clubs and thinking “My career’s going nowhere at Liverpool,”’ said Carragher.

  ‘Torres left Atletico to come here for medals and that club went past us. The reality is the top players get offers from top clubs and you can’t blame then for being unsettled, especially when they’re not from this country, let alone this city. They want to win things.

  ‘Me and Stevie didn’t necessarily care more about Liverpool than them, we just had more of an understanding what was going on because we’re from here.’

  Many onlookers found it baffling that foreign players, who had been brought up with deeper passions for clubs in their own countries, should feel moved to risk their careers by speaking out, while Scousers like Carragher and Gerrard, who were far more affected by the civil war, stayed silent.

  Spanish goalkeeper Pepe Reina told the pair he was amazed they hadn’t come out and demanded the owners sort out the mess. He told them they were too respectful towards the people above them at the club, and too readily adopted a ‘whatever will be will be’ attitude. The Spain international believed that at other big clubs around the world like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and the two Milan sides, local legends who had been there since they were kids would have been issuing threats and demands, knowing they were secure
because of their iconic status.

  Neither Gerrard nor Carragher disagree with Reina. In fact, they readily admit that the dilemma tortured them at the time and still plays on their consciences today.

  ‘I totally understand why some of the fans were frustrated that we didn’t speak out,’ says Gerrard.

  ‘When I’m down at England I hear stories about what big players have said at big clubs, but when me and Jamie speak we’re worried about taking a lot of criticism like “Who does he think he is? Does he think he’s bigger than the club?”

  ‘So it’s a horrible situation because you want to come out and use your status to help but on the other hand you’re terrified of it backfiring and creating more of a mess. That’s the frustrating thing.’

  There were times when Gerrard was on the verge of going public, demanding answers and pleading with owners and manager to sort out their differences. But so murky had the waters become, and so politicised the atmosphere, he could never be certain who was in the wrong or the right. Moreover, he didn’t believe it was a player’s role to openly criticise the management and he feared the consequences.

  ‘“Should I say something, would it make any difference, and who are we to criticise our bosses?” They were the questions I kept asking myself. It wasn’t my thing but there were times it was on the tip of my tongue.’

  He had another dilemma. If he was to speak his mind, who did he speak it to, and how did he speak it?

  ‘Their honeymoon period was all good and they were around so there were people to talk to, but when the public spat hit the press there was no one here. I had fans and friends telling me to speak to them and ask when it’s all going to end, but there was no one here. So what do you do? Do you go through the press to get to them? It’s not right. There wasn’t an office here when you could speak to them because they’d gone. It was a mess.’