by Brian Reade
The figures, statistics and historical rewrites were coming Carroll’s way at such a speed he couldn’t digest them, so he switched to a subject he knew would embarrass Gillett. The stadium and his vow to have a shovel in the ground in sixty days.
At this point Gillett lost it slightly, coming out with words like ‘horseshit’ and denying he ever used the sixty-day phrase, claiming it was Hicks who said it. Carroll, having seen him say it on a video recording of the initial press conference, told Gillett it was him.
‘It was Hicks who said that sixty days. Bullshit. That was not me. It’s wrong. I have never talked about that,’ he replied, only for Carroll to reiterate it was. His stubborn refusal to cede ground on the issue carried on for a while but Gillett was so convincing Carroll began to question his own sanity, telling him if he was wrong, he apologised, despite being able to see him say it in his mind’s eye.
Which allowed Gillett to go on the attack: ‘I think that what happened was that Hicks was convinced we were going to start to move dirt on the foundations within a sixty-day period. In the period of time, the world credit market collapsed and he had big egg on his face, not living up to what we said. I don’t talk about absolute dates when we’re talking about credit markets.
‘When a bank issues you a commitment on a mortgage there are lots of commitments. One of those is a force majeure, which means that if the world falls apart, that commitment doesn’t mean anything. That could have been claimed to have happened to us.
‘Is that what this whole controversy is about, about Tom Hicks saying sixty days? Do you think I don’t want to build a new stadium? Nothing is going to happen, good or bad, that we don’t take credit or blame for. I want to build a new stadium as soon as the commercial markets allow. I can’t speak for Hicks, but you can tell I would love to build a new stadium.’
He then asked, ‘What’s so symbolic about the stadium?’ which completely threw Carroll.
‘I just thought, “You mustn’t have had any intention of building a stadium if you’ve just asked that question,” because that point would have been paramount when they were dealing with banks trying to get finance to back up the building of the new stadium. I think he was that used to talking rubbish about the situation that he believed his own bullshit.’
Carroll was, by then, feeling confused and uncomfortable and wanted to get out. Before doing so he warned Gillett that he may have fans queuing up to get into Anfield right now but if the team was to go through a couple of seasons of mediocrity the good-time day-trippers would soon disappear.
Inevitably Gillett put on his best understanding face and tried to reassure him that he was panicking in vain and has misjudged the owners. ‘You shouldn’t be worried. You may not like me and may not trust me, but what I have said is fact. I have never taken a cent from this club. I get no salary, no compensation. The money taken out is for the benefit of the club, not the detriment. The fact was that Hicks promised a stadium in sixty days. The cash flow, the money reinvested, etc., which came from the media were wrong. A dumping on me of vitriol, suspicion, calling me a liar on half a dozen different counts. The one thing I plead guilty to is that I have a partner promised a spade in the ground within sixty days and then credit markets collapsed. There’s no way I can deny that. But the rest of the things he and his group have got very angry with because of things reported that were inaccurate. He was charging me with taking money out of the club, but I take nothing out of the club.’
He then implied it wasn’t he or Hicks who were threatening the club’s future but groups like the Spirit Of Shankly, before issuing a plea for everyone at Anfield to live together in peace, love and harmony:
‘You’re not on the inside. Why can’t we figure out a way for you guys to understand we are better off working together? When you guys go and protest and we have a commercial interest in, they say why would we invest in that club?’
Carroll thanked him for his time, they shook hands, and Gillett had a warm smile that said, ‘Gee, sucker, thanks for the opportunity to do a little PR job in front of the Arabs.’ The American probably thought that would pretty much be that, but then Dougie Do’ins went home, transcribed the conversation from his phone, posted it on the forum and all of his bull-shit and horseshit made its way into the national media.
Fans can accept football illiteracy from their owners because they know the vast majority are only in it for kudos or profit. They can also excuse a lack of cash, if, like David Moores or Everton’s Bill Kenwright, they’re in it mostly for love. They can even live with arrogance, aloofness and a poor knowledge of the club. But they cannot accept having the truth distorted or hidden from them.
The vast majority of what Gillett had said to Carroll fell into that category. Here were five statements which didn’t stand up to scrutiny:
‘The debt on this club is very sound.’ It was £44.8million when he took over. By then it had reached £245 million and rising.
‘It was Hicks who said that [about the stadium]. Sixty days? Bullshit. That was not me. It’s wrong. I have never talked about that.’ As tens of thousands of clicks on YouTube then showed, it was Gillett. Check it out.
‘We have put £128 million in to buy players on top of what’s come in in the last 18 months.’ Rafa Benitez’s net spend during that period had been £20 million.
‘The club is in an extraordinarily good financial position.’ So how come the Royal Bank of Scotland had told him and Hicks to find new investment, sell up or they would repossess the club?
‘[The club is doing] far better than Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal.’ The Glazers may have burdened United with huge debts but the club was still an enormous money-making concern, with a vast global fan base and 75,000 fans at every home game. Chelsea had a pocket as deep as a Siberian gas field and Arsenal was the best-run club in Britain. In the previous financial year they had generated profits of £38 million and what debt they had revolved around a state-of-the-art, 60,000-capacity stadium, which ensured a golden future.
Meanwhile, Liverpool was crippled with interest payments of £35 million-plus and nowhere near starting on a new stadium three years after the Americans arrived. Plus they were run by two men who couldn’t stand the sight of each other and whose sole intentions were selling up at a profit.
Gillett’s deceit just added insult to the many injuries. Like Steve Horner, Mick Carroll had, through determination, initiative and luck, exposed the contempt felt by the American board members to the fans. Both were morale-boosting victories for Spirit Of Shankly at a time when their critics were asking if they had become just another self-indulgent talking shop. Following the early meetings with senior Anfield figures and a whirlwind of media coverage things had quietened down.
There had been leafleting at matches and fund-raising events to help free Michael Shields – the Liverpool fan wrongly imprisoned for attacking a Bulgarian waiter after the 2005 Champions League Final, who was pardoned and released from prison in September 2009. The union’s provision of cheap travel to away games was proving very successful, they were about to unleash a brilliant ‘Debts. Lies. Cowboys. Not Welcome Here’ poster campaign on billboards across Merseyside and because of SOS intelligence, Hicks and Gillett knew they couldn’t come to Anfield without unleashing chaos.
But radical members wanted to adopt a more aggressive approach by taking the fight directly to the Americans, and Spirit Of Shankly organisers knew that smarter, more lateral, thinking was called for. Blow me Fuckface and the Academy ambush, or rather how those two incidents became huge news stories, made the fans realise they had another, highly potent weapon in their armoury: the internet. Steve Horner got together with Mick Carroll, another SOS member, Alan Kayll, the Liverpool Way forum organiser Dave Usher, forum posters Simon Green, Andy Perrin, Dan Thomas, Richard White and Jon Salmon to form Kop Faithful. Their numbers would later be boosted by a group from the Red and White Kop website called Save LFC.
The idea of Kop Faithful was to build u
p a following of like-minded fans who wanted to take direct action through organised internet campaigns. They were the Provos to the Spirit Of Shankly’s Sinn Fein. A splinter group, which ended up with 15,000 recruits and could engage in the kind of swift, concerted cyber attacks the constitutionally bound union could not be seen to be condoning.
The SOS had its SAS and The Noise was about to get louder.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘What have I got to apologise for? Everyone told us they were good for their money’
– David Moores
Mick Carroll and Alan Kayll had cased the house three days after Blow Me Fuckface-gate broke, and could see no problems.
It nestled in a secluded spot on a country road leading up to Southport. Opposite were fields, to the sides and rear were scrub and woodland, and behind the electronic gates lay a green-lined path up to the front door of the large family home.
They would undoubtedly be caught on CCTV but then what offence were they committing? Was it wrong to throw 10,000 mock £10 notes carrying a cartoon of a man being handed bags of loot as two shady figures whisper ‘Come on, Dave, the club will be in good hands with me and Tom’ into that man’s garden?
Was it a criminal offence, or merely an expression of one’s democratic right to protest, to throw an 8ft x 4ft banner over his gates with the slogan ‘Hope The Extra £8million Was Worth It Dave’?
The two independent-minded Spirit Of Shankly members didn’t believe it was. So at 10.30 a.m. on a bitterly cold January Sunday morning, Mick parked his Citroën Picasso in a nearby sports field, Alan grabbed the flag from the back seat, and the two heavily dressed forty-somethings advanced on David Moores’ house to do a deed they’d been wanting to do for more than two years: shame the man who sold their club.
No sooner had they crossed the road than a thought hit them. Maybe they should give him a chance to defend himself. Maybe, before showering his manicured garden in bent notes and covering up the initialled motifs on his gates with their flag, they should ring the intercom and ask him to explain his actions and his intentions?
As long shots go it was up there with a Xabi Alonso halfway-line chip, into the wind with Petr Cech in goal, but then so was Mick’s interview request to George Gillett and that had hit the back of the net. Besides, Moores must have been aware of the growing anger towards Hicks and Gillett over their refusal to let go of their prized asset, and therefore the growing anger aimed at him.
For almost three years he had refused to break his silence. Shying away from the microphone was nothing new to the hermit-like Moores, who had even refused to do interviews the morning after Istanbul, his ultimate moment as Liverpool chairman. But he could feel the enmity all around on Mersey-side and he was crippled inside over his monumental error. He’d even stopped visiting Anfield, the focal point of his life, since resigning from the board around the same time as Rick Parry in June 2009. With skin thinner than an ultra-smooth, featherlite condom, he was buckling under the weight of criticism and guilt. A deeply unhappy man, undoubtedly.
Mick pressed the intercom buzzer. After a short silence, a well-spoken mature woman’s voice asked who it was. They said they were Liverpool fans who wanted to have a word with David. The woman, David’s wife Marge, told them politely that that would not be possible because her husband had been instructed by his solicitor to say nothing on the subject.
As Carroll and Kayll did their best to persuade her, it became clear she was worried they were undercover journalists trying to trap her husband into breaking his silence. They told her they were nothing of the sort, just a pair of lifelong fans, now in their forties, trying every avenue possible to save the club that they and her husband loved from falling into the abyss.
As she stared at the CCTV pictures, three options presented themselves to her. She could be looking at a pair of lying reporters, a pair of Crimewatch suspects, or genuine fans with innocent intentions. She took an instinctive gamble and told them to wait. If they were who they said they were, and they did only want to talk about the future, they may actually help her husband break free from the dark thoughts that must have been tormenting his peace of mind.
Minutes later, David Moores’ deep Scouse voice was heard over the intercom, asking them what they wanted. Alan replied: ‘We’re here because the club is on its knees and we think it’s time you came out and said something. You helped put us into this mess, David, you’ve got to try to get us out of it.’
As he interrogated them through the intercom, convinced he was being set up and any words he said would end up twisted in tomorrow’s papers, Mick persuaded him to come outside, speak to them face to face and discover for himself that they were just a pair of genuine fans.
So there they were on this bleak January morning, two fans talking through the railings to a broken man, as though visiting an old lag in Walton. Both Carroll and Kayll were unnerved at how fragile and weak Moores appeared and went easy on him. As they stared at a man who looked like he hadn’t found much sleep since his last visit to Anfield, both felt relieved they hadn’t forced him to confront the flag and the notes. Christ knows how ill he’d be looking now if they hadn’t rung his intercom.
The conversation was amicable. They put their point across, telling him they weren’t interested in going back over old ground and assigning blame for what had happened three years before. They were only thinking about the future and what they could do to keep the heat on the Americans. Moores was told that if he were to call for them to sell up in a reasoned and passionate way, it could hasten their removal.
They hammered home the point that he had a part to play in salvaging something from this mess and if he could do that, he might salvage his reputation. They sensed his reluctance, his fear that if he spoke out – especially during a season when they were challenging for honours – and it backfired, or his motives were misinterpreted, he would be accused of creating even more damage.
Mick and Alan told him that was impossible, because things couldn’t get any worse than they already were, and he owed it to every Liverpudlian to say something. Moores pointed out that he had emailed the Americans when he stood down from the board, telling them he was disgusted with the way they were running the club and he wouldn’t be attending any more games while they were in charge. They didn’t even afford him the courtesy of a reply.
Something that disturbed Alan Kayll, who had been scathing about the ease with which Moores had sold the family silver, was how he became offended when they told him a good first step with the fans would be an apology. ‘What have I got to apologise for?’ he asked. ‘Everyone told us they were good for their money, even the bankers Rothschild’s.’
His refusal to acknowledge personal error almost bordered on the arrogant, but what Moores did take on board was his need to speak out against Hicks and Gillett, and he told the pair he would give it serious thought. They left their contact details, told him he had nothing to lose and much to gain, and he said he’d be in touch. They shook hands through the railings, headed back home and posted details of the meeting on the Liverpool Way website.
Alan emailed another SOS member, Kevin Sampson, who had been friendly with Moores for many years, and asked him to vouch for the pair. A fortnight later a meeting was arranged in the Catholic Cathedral’s cafe with Rick Parry and Sampson flanking Moores. This time the mood was more relaxed. Moores had read about the Academy ambush of George Gillett and asked Mick Carroll if he should be frisking him for a wire. His wife had also read out some of the comments Alan Kayll had posted about him on the Liverpool Way forum, forcing Moores to jokingly ask if he was packing a baseball bat.
Once again they hammered home the message that he couldn’t just sit there doing nothing because he had a responsibility to help the fans he had sold short. They asked him why he made the calamitous mistake of selling to Hicks and Gillett, when all the available information showed that at least one of them was the opposite of a fine custodian of sports clubs. The one who had had his face
plastered all over Time magazine above the headline ‘Leverage Buyout King Tom Hicks’.
Moores wasn’t evasive and there was no scripted defence running though his head. He kept repeating the fact that the prestigious firm Rothschild had said they were good for their money. After a while spent dwelling on the past, Carroll and Kayll told him that whoever was or wasn’t to blame for Liverpool being in a hole, had become irrelevant. It was now about how they were going to get out of it. You have to make a statement, they told Moores, or the club you say you love so much will be finished.
Moores conceded the fact, but when they asked him to do it immediately he was reticent. Mr Paranoid feared if the season went badly wrong after he’d spoken, or if prospective buyers pulled out amid a media storm, fingers would be pointed at him.
All agreed that the best timing would be at the end of May when the season was over. Without any format being discussed they shook hands and went their separate ways, knowing at least one miracle had taken place in the house of God – Alan Kayll had bought a round of five coffees, two of them for Moores and Parry.
Down in London, another Liverpudlian had been chipping away at Moores to break his silence. Since the previous summer The Times’ Tony Evans had been writing letters urging him to do a piece in the newspaper aimed at putting pressure on Hicks and Gillett to sell.
Evans, who had written the excellent LFC book Far Foreign Land, heard the intensity of the criticism Moores was receiving and despaired. Not for the Littlewoods heir, whom he felt had ‘ballsed up big style’ in selling the club to the Americans, but over the destructive in-fighting that was tearing Liverpool fans apart. He thought that for all of Moores’ faults he could be a key unifying figure.