An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  There was a further concern haunting Gerrard based on self-knowledge. He sensed if he became as major a player in this saga as he could have, and if he’d done some of the things people were asking him to do, such as make phone calls to America, he’d have become too deeply involved and wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on his job.

  When people like Rafa Benitez tried to speak to him and draw him into the civil war, he didn’t want to know because he felt if he got too heavily involved in the in-fighting he would take it on to the pitch. Plus there were people at the club telling him that to cause a public spat by letting the world know the extent of the problems at Anfield would not have been The Liverpool Way.

  ‘Never mind that what was going on wasn’t The Liverpool Way, it wasn’t my way. I’m not one for doing big exclusives, making big noises and getting pats on the back from people saying “We’re made up you said that.” For me it’s about when that whistle goes and you show the fans how much you want to be successful. That’s my job.’

  The fact that some fans accused him and Gerrard of cowardice still rankles with Carragher but, like his friend, he’s not convinced that publicly registering his anger would have been the right thing to do: ‘Maybe me and Stevie should have done more about it. Maybe we should have come out when we had the power, and said something. I don’t know.

  ‘It’s different for me and Stevie. We’re from here. We love the club and never like saying anything negative about it. Even if you’re upset with things, as we were about the owners, you don’t want to be seen to be criticising in public.

  ‘It’s what we believe in. So whatever happens, whatever is thrown at you, you feel you have to take it. It’s like if someone in your family does something wrong you’ll still stand behind them even if you want to slag them off.

  ‘But as a foreigner you can understand the frustration. Getting promises about top players coming in then seeing top players leaving and not being replaced, I can see how they got frustrated. They must have been thinking they’d walked into a loony bin.

  ‘But don’t believe that they were all thinking like that. The really top ones were but some of the others weren’t that bothered. Without wanting to criticise my own fellow professionals too much, footballers are different. Some of them would only have been unhappy with the Americans if the money wasn’t going into their bank account. As long as they were getting paid they didn’t worry.

  ‘To be fair, if I was abroad I wouldn’t be too bothered who the owners were as long as I was playing every week, getting my money and we were winning. I think the problem gets worse when the team isn’t winning. When it’s winning no one cares who the owners are.

  ‘But my attitude is whatever’s thrown at you you take and get on with it. In the 2008–9 season when we fell from second to seventh I wasn’t looking at the owners, I was looking more at us, the players, the staff, the manager and thinking, “Hang on, what can we do?”

  ‘We’ll never know if it was a good or a bad thing that me and Stevie didn’t speak out but no one could ever question our commitment to the club and the fans.’

  The pair’s major cause of worry was how the fans were suffering. They both come from big football families, have a wide circle of friends, and through being at the club since they were boys are close to hundreds of passionate Liverpool supporters. They could see how badly they were hurting.

  Gerrard found it extremely depressing to see the fans marching and having sit-ins because it just wasn’t what he was used to at Anfield. He’d seen it at other clubs but he never thought it would happen at his own.

  ‘The lowest point was doing warm-downs after games. You see the Kop is half full and you get home and see it on the news. I was thinking, “Oh, come on, let’s get these out, enough is enough, the sooner these are out the better.” I’m thinking the way the fans are thinking but from a different perspective.’

  It was during the post-game sit-ins after the last two home matches of Hicks and Gillett’s reign, organised by the Spirit Of Shankly, that Gerrard and Carragher ditched any protocol and openly sided with the fans. The first followed a 2–2 draw with Sunderland in September 2010, the second after a turgid 2–1 defeat by Premier League newcomers Blackpool the following month.

  As thousands of Kopites sang about lying bastards and Yanks Out, the two Scousers applauded as they went past during their warm-down.

  ‘We clapped them and we were always going to because we were on their side,’ said Carragher. ‘And to be fair to fans, no matter how frustrated they were, or how low they got, they were always on our side. They hardly ever vented their anger during games.

  ‘But I was thinking when I read about us applauding them in the papers, “I hope no one thinks we were trying to get out of that performance against Blackpool.”

  ‘I hated it when people used to make excuses for us after a bad game by blaming the owners. I hated that because it wasn’t about them, it was our responsibility. None of us were thinking about the ownership issue during the game.

  ‘I don’t think it helped but you can’t tell me the ownership problem takes away from our individual performances. We’ve had great performances while they were there, great wins, we even finished second in the league. So we could never use them as an excuse on the day.’

  Gerrard would never say the team was suffering because that would appear to be an easy cop-out for bad results, but he told people it didn’t help when the players were talking about it on the way to games and the papers around the training ground were full of it.

  He had to give team talks in the dressing room where he told players to forget all the stuff going on in the media, and to not let it affect their mind-set. All you can do, he told them, is go out there and get three points for the club.

  The truth was the players knew a civil war was raging around them, battles were being fought in the boardroom, in the chief executive’s and manager’s offices, on the terraces, but also that it could never be used as an excuse for dismal form on the pitch. That said, they knew it didn’t help, and it definitely got to them.

  ‘In the end I stopped reading newspapers and just switched off because everything was so negative,’ said Jamie Carragher. ‘I wasn’t reading about football, I was reading about backbiting and bitching and plots and people slagging each other off. The game wasn’t getting played on the pitch but off it. Political games. It became a bad soap opera, didn’t it?

  ‘You’re not just thinking about your game, you’re thinking, “Whose side should I be on, who said what and did you hear this?” And I probably get too involved in that side of things because I speak to people all the time about football and Liverpool.

  ‘Sometimes I wished I could just do my training and go home and think about nothing else but my game, but it became impossible. I was taking it all home with me.’

  Towards the end Gerrard just wanted to see the back of Hicks and Gillett and never hear their names again. He often thought back to how positive he’d felt after that initial meeting with the new owners and, as he did, the anger would rise over all those promises which went unfulfilled. Promises like the new 70,000-seater stadium which he was told he would one day lead Liverpool into, and which he was asked to endorse.

  ‘When I saw the design for the new stadium it looked unbelievable. I was thinking, “Wow, they’re some plans them, imagine that stadium being up in two or three years.”’

  Although Jamie Carragher was also impressed by the plans, looking back he feels he and Gerrard were being slightly used by the Americans to win Scouse approval.

  ‘We were the ones who were always dragged out to endorse things like new stadium plans, and I sensed they thought if me and Stevie say it’s OK the fans will buy it. It was just another part of being pulled in different directions.’

  But the stadium is the one area where Carragher feels a slight sympathy towards them: ‘The stadium didn’t remain unbuilt on purpose because they had nothing to gain by not building it. The stadium was t
he reason they came here in the first place because that’s how they hoped to make their money. And I don’t knock them for that.

  ‘We all knew that was what they were after. They weren’t here because they loved Liverpool, the great fans, our history, the players or Rafa. It was the stadium, pure and simple. It gave them a fantastic chance to make tons of cash and increase the value of the club.

  ‘They’re wealthy people who had worked and made money since leaving school, and realistically they were never going to come to Anfield and give us £150 million of their money to risk on the transfer market. That money was for their kids.

  ‘I just think they made a stupid press comment about the spade being in the ground in sixty days. They were Parry’s plans which they ripped up. A year later we see a new stadium which looked brilliant but then the credit crunch kicked in and it screwed them. They were never going to build the stadium out of their own money. No one does that. Look at Arsenal.’

  How would he describe his relationship with the owners? ‘I didn’t have any relationship with them. I met Foster Gillett when he had an office at Melwood and he’d chat to us at lunch and ask questions about football. He was a very nice lad, and like most people at the club, I always tried to make him welcome. But with the owners, apart from that first meeting and the time Gillett pulled me over to his mates and asked me to “do my Scouse”, I never really saw them. They just used to come to the game then get off.

  ‘If I had to choose I’d say I preferred Gillett to Hicks simply because I hated the way Hicks was always talking on Sky, and I just wanted him to button it.’

  Gerrard, too, preferred Gillett, because at least he would speak to him, ask how the team was doing and give words of encouragement.

  Both players look back at Hicks and Gillett’s reign less with outright anger than a deep sense of regret about what might have been for the club and for them.

  ‘I think some of the fans were a bit naive,’ said Carragher. ‘Maybe they were so desperate to see change that they believed everything they were told. But these were ruthless businessmen who saw LFC as a golden opportunity to make money. It wasn’t charity.

  ‘Unless you’re a Sheikh Mansour or a Roman Abramovich, when money really doesn’t matter, you’re not going to throw it around to keep people happy.

  ‘The problem with them was putting the debt on the club. They tried to run it like just another business but football is different.

  ‘At the start we couldn’t complain about what we spent in the transfer market. We were buying players for around £20 million when we’d only ever paid £15 million at the most. But where that money was coming from is the question. It turned out it was the banks’ money not theirs.

  ‘We hoped they’d do it a different way and the team would be successful and we’d have a new stadium. But the fact that they didn’t put the funds in and tried to take it out the other end really wound me up.

  ‘I was pleased they walked away with nothing because they had their chances to sell the club and make their profit but chose not to. Once the recession kicked in and the money dried up they were fighting for their lives. At that point they didn’t care about Liverpool they just cared about themselves.’

  They are sentiments you could never accuse Jamie Carragher or Steven Gerrard of. The fact that both players were paranoid about letting fans down through not taking a public stand tells you all you need to know. Few fans expected that stand to be taken. The vast majority saw it as their role to lead on the pitch and bring some hope and happiness among the gloom and despair. Plus they knew that at least one of those two was as disillusioned with the manager as he was with the owners. So it was wise, The Liverpool Way even, to not act like those above them, maintain some dignity, and concentrate on doing your job.

  There were many shades of grey in this civil war, many uncertainties and untruths, but one shines out like a beacon. Carragher and Gerrard are two of the finest players ever to wear the red shirt, and they are as much victims of Hicks’s and Gillett’s empty promises as the fans are.

  These two, the only genuine stars to come through Liverpool’s youth system since the 1990s, were the main reasons (along with Benitez’s tactical acumen) that Liverpudlians travelled to Istanbul and had the greatest night of their lives.

  Back then, in May 2005, Gerrard was about to turn twenty-five, Carragher had just turned twenty-seven. They were heading into their golden years which, after such a Champions League victory, should have meant a cabinet full of medals, including a Premier League title winner’s. But the club never built on that phenomenal triumph and when it believed it had, by selling to Hicks and Gillett, it was a cruel delusion.

  Gerrard and Carragher stayed loyal to the club, but who of those running the club stayed loyal to the promises they gave to keep them there?

  They don’t like saying that Hicks and Gillett, and by implication those who naively sold Liverpool, cost them the Premier League, in case it sounds like they’re making excuses. So let me say it for them: thanks to the combined failings of the last two sets of owners and directors, Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher were robbed of their birthright as Liverpool legends.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Blow me, fuck face. Go to hell. I’m sick of you’

  – Tom Hicks Jr.

  January 9 2010 was a typical Saturday morning in the Horner household in Loughton, Essex. Steve, a 29-year-old freelance quantity surveyor, woke up at half past eight, walked into the kitchen of his two-bedroom apartment, made a cup of tea, went into the lounge and switched on his computer.

  With his girlfriend out at work and his six-year-old daughter staying at her grandma’s, it was time for a spot of self-indulgence (this is not going where you think). He clicked on to the Liverpool Echo website for the latest news about the team whose spell he fell under when John Barnes was torturing full-backs back in the 1980s, and was drawn to the headline on Dominic King’s Blood Red column, ‘Rafa Benitez should not have to manage Liverpool’s debts’.

  He clicked again, took a slug of tea, and read a very interesting piece about Birmingham City bidding £9 million for Ryan Babel, which Liverpool had rejected because they felt he was worth closer to £12 million, despite the vast majority of Liverpool supporters thinking Brummie hands should have been snapped off at the wrist.

  As King pointed out, the reason Rafa Benitez chose not to sell him at that price was because he knew he wouldn’t have been given a penny of it to spend, as it would all have gone towards interest payments on the £240 million debt. The manager’s only chance of getting a transfer kitty that January, he argued, was to buy a Lottery ticket and cross his fingers.

  For the third window running Benitez was told to forget about quality signings and sniff around for loans or free transfers. In the end he brought in Maxi Rodriguez for next to nothing, despite raising £6.4 million by offloading flops Andriy Voronin and Andrea Dossena. The message to fans being: forget about trophies, all we want to do is pay down the debts.

  King warned that were Liverpool to miss out on qualifying for the Champions League that season (which they did) and some of the star players were sold to make up the shortfall in revenue (one was), they would struggle to keep up with the best teams in England (they have) and could end up falling off the European map (we’ll see).

  He ended his excellent and, for a local paper, brave article with this statement: ‘What is not right is a club with Liverpool’s history and pedigree being forced to rummage around for bargains with nothing other than loose change.’

  Steve Horner had nodded throughout and, although a mild-mannered man, felt his anger levels rising. He got up, walked around his flat, and thought about getting on with his day but he couldn’t. It had got to him. The Spirit Of Shankly member had been going to Anfield since 1990 but hadn’t set foot in the ground or bought any club products since 2008, in protest at the Hicks and Gillett ownership.

  He would vent his anger sporadically on the Liverpool Way website forums and ha
d occasionally sent emails to members of the Hicks and Gillett clans, striking up a dialogue with Tom Hicks’s son Mack. There was nothing abusive or aggressive in the missives, because that wasn’t his style. He just sent them critical observations about their business model and asked constructive questions about the future. This had been the last one he’d sent them on 22 December 2009:

  Gents,

  When are you going to let Liverpool fans know what is going on at the club?

  Our club is in crisis both on and off the field with the team struggling, the manager’s future up in the air, and talk of £60m repayments not met last summer coupled with £310m worth of debt loaded onto the club as a result of your leveraged buy-out.

  It is time to talk to us fans or sell up for the GOOD OF THE CLUB.

  If you love Liverpool FC as we do then be straight with us. You will gain more respect that way.

  Regards,

  Steve

  King’s column had stirred something in him and he knew what he had to do. So at 9.12 a.m. he sat down at his screen, copied and pasted what he believed to be the pertinent points of the article, with a link to the Echo website, added no comment of his own, and sent it to Tom Hicks, George Gillett and Tom Hicks Jr.

  He wasn’t expecting a response as none of them had ever replied to him in the past, but it felt good to get it off his chest. He went back into the kitchen, stared at the snow outside, and made himself some toast and porridge. At 9.30 a.m. he went back to his computer and noticed he had mail. From Tom Hicks Jr. Which surprised him, especially with it being 3.30 a.m. in America. When he opened the email surprise turned to shock. There was a single-word reply: ‘Idiot.’

  After eight minutes spent staring at the screen trying to digest the implication of this response to a fan from a member of Liverpool FC’s board of directors, and trying to work out whether it was a hoax, or if he’d sent it to another Tom Ollis Hicks Jr., he decided to email back.