Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  He would be a presence throughout the narrative anyway, just like Benítez, who similarly to Gerrard remains active in football. This complicates things because active sportsmen have more to lose by being unguarded. Benítez realizes he divides opinion and I had never seen an interview with him where he discusses his innermost feelings. After reading his autobiography, for example, I was left with the impression that he might believe that most football outcomes are a consequence of tactics rather than relationships.

  Active players and managers have a habit of telling you more when the Dictaphone has been switched off. They hope their thoughts are presented as undisputed fact, thus blurring the lines of truth. I didn’t want Ring of Fire to be that sort of book, especially when the success of the others was based around the accountability of the stories.

  I met with Benítez’s representatives to try to establish what might happen if we met and I left wondering about the benefits of including him. I arrived at the conclusion that, although Benítez’s name counts for something, in terms of core material – strong content – he might be best left alone, in the same way Kenny Dalglish was left alone in Red Machine or Robbie Fowler in Men in White Suits. Then within twenty-four hours Benítez was appointed as Newcastle United’s manager and a meeting became impossible due to his newfound responsibilities.

  I had turned to Jamie Carragher first, because he seemed like the most sensible starting point. His Liverpool career stretched across three decades, covering the whole of this one. He released his autobiography in 2008 and so much has happened since then I hoped I might establish a different reflection on the period now he is older and maybe a bit wiser.

  Carragher was incredibly generous with his time, sitting down with me on three occasions across successive weeks. These meetings required the least amount of travel. We live in the same area of Liverpool, so it involved me opening my door and walking three minutes to a modest restaurant around the corner where we sat and talked mainly about what drives him on the most, what fuels that insatiable appetite that kept him at the top of the game for so long.

  Carragher is such a humble and entertaining person it is easy to forget just how much people revere him. At the end of the third interview, upon discovering a parking ticket on his car because his time had elapsed in the throes of our conversation, he returned to the restaurant, where I was organizing myself, to tell me of his frustrations, joking that I should pay the fine. ‘But you have the freedom of Sefton,’ I reminded him. ‘If you wanted to graze wild horses on the roundabouts, nobody could stop you.’

  I went to see Houllier in Paris. Like Carragher, he was kind, insisting on picking me up from my hotel during rush hour. Houllier was magnificently French: intelligent, expressive, reflective and occasionally abrupt. As Liverpool’s manager, he prided himself on his accessibility, being there for the players if they needed it, no matter the hour of day. I wondered whether this had a detrimental effect on his health, never being able to switch off from work. He recognized I had flown out specifically to meet him and after realizing I was not leaving France until the next day, he invited me to his office the following morning in case there was anything I’d missed in the initial interview.

  More time with a subject is an offer no journalist refuses, so naturally I went along, regardless of the fact I was pretty happy with the initial outcome. Upon arriving at his hidden office on a dusty side street off a road that leads up towards Montmartre, Houllier greeted me ambivalently. ‘You came then?’ But after five minutes or so, he returned to being intelligent, expressive and reflective. Later, as I walked away back towards the banks of the Seine, I realized I quite liked him and began to understand why players did too.

  When I met with Phil Thompson, he sat with his gym bag next to him and talked for hours, reminding me of his traditional values and connecting this book with Liverpool’s past by reaching back into the 1960s and offering a description of what made the club great in the first place.

  In the book Thompson is followed by Danny Murphy, a midfielder who proved you can score three match-winning goals for Liverpool at Old Trafford and still not be remembered fondly; similarly there was Michael Owen, who proved you can score hundreds of goals for Liverpool but this will count for very little if you later sign for Manchester United.

  The chapter with academy graduate Neil Mellor is shorter than the rest because I wanted it to reflect his snapshot Anfield career and his brief but significant contribution to the first team. After Mellor is Dietmar Hamann, the untypical German midfielder – and an untypical footballer – yet someone who is more serious and perceptive than he lets on.

  From there, I thought a flavour of Spain was essential to try to explain why Benítez divides opinion. Hamann had spoken so positively about him, and Mellor had too, so I went to see Xabi Alonso and Albert Riera, players who in 2016 find themselves in very different places.

  For a change, I thought it wise to speak to someone with great influence who did not play and was not a manager. The role of the chief executive emerged as a significant feature of football in the twenty-first century and Rick Parry revealed to me the reality of what it was like running Liverpool day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year upon year. His story is a reminder that although supporters might have an opinion on the work of someone like Parry, ultimately the only opinion that gets tested is his. After I spent nearly six hours with him, Parry joked that I must have felt like Anthony Clare from the radio series In The Psychiatrist’s Chair.

  I arrived finally at Fernando Torres, realizing it is impossible to think about his breathtaking contribution towards Liverpool without considering the circumstances of his departure. You cannot divorce Torres the centre-forward who streaked across boxes and dashed past defenders as if they were not there from Torres the traitor, the one who signed for Chelsea.

  Torres had never given an interview to anyone where he detailed the reasons why he left Liverpool, so I consider his inclusion as a coup. He recognized this was a unique opportunity for self-justification, because he did not want to do it through the papers, where news headlines might detract from his reasoning. He understood there is greater room for context in a book and hoped that this might make Liverpool supporters understand why he made the ultimate decision to go somewhere else.

  It was only when Torres took breaks to compose himself, as his sentences became shorter while he spoke about his acrimonious exit from Liverpool and what happened in his career thereafter, that I realized the Spanish star is more complex – and certainly more vulnerable – than I ever really appreciated. It forced me to conclude that his expressed fondness for Liverpool and its people had always been genuine. I also discovered sadness in him, maybe even loneliness.

  Torres had flourished at Liverpool with a great midfield and Steven Gerrard pulling the strings behind him, and though he was sharing pitch space with lesser talents like Milan Jovanović and Paul Konchesky by the end of his time at Anfield, Xabi Alonso and Michael Owen had proven before him that legacies are only protected by selecting the timing of your exit and your next destination wisely.

  Liverpool had fallen some distance very quickly. In 2010, for the second successive year, the auditors KPMG expressed ‘material uncertainty’ about the club’s ability to continue as a going concern. The new chairman, Martin Broughton, appeared before the Premier League to give a guarantee, which had to be backed up by the banks, that Liverpool would be able to fulfil their fixtures.

  The seismic split between Hicks and Gillett had created a power vacuum, inspiring only a culture of paranoia at Liverpool, where the best interests of the club were not being served first by anyone consistently.

  If one story sums up the mood at Melwood by the end of the decade, it is this. It was late in the afternoon and the training ground was almost empty. Bunkered in his office up on the second floor, Rafael Benítez was looking at some papers from behind a desk. An unfamiliar member of staff knocked on the door, picking up letters to be delivered in the final post
of the day.

  Benítez seemed surprised by the sudden company.

  And then he is said to have asked, ‘Whose side are you on?’

  CHAPTER ONE

  PHIL THOMPSON,

  Mr Liverpool

  IT WAS THE second week in November 1998 and litter from the fast-food kiosks inside Anfield whirled across the pitch in strange formation. The floodlights shone, lighting up a squally winter’s night, but the gloom on the terraces intensified as the temperature and the mood plummeted. Wisecracks were made about the cardboard plates, hotdog wrappers and drink cartons forming a more effective barrier than Liverpool’s defence. The famous stadium seemed quiet and lonely, the only loud noise coming from the Anfield Road End, where the few away fans stood in a pack for warmth. ‘Are you Tranmere in disguise?’ came the muffled chorus. ‘Bye, bye, Evans,’ they continued cruelly, knowing that a 3–1 victory for their team, Tottenham Hotspur, was likely to mean the end for Liverpool’s joint manager, Roy Evans, who had served the club for more than thirty years.

  The main stand was silent, aside from the commentary area where Graham ‘Beeky’ Beecroft, an experienced presenter, was describing the scene in front of him, where John Scales had scored – a player sold by Evans to Tottenham because he was deemed past his best almost two years earlier.

  Phil Thompson was the match analyser for Radio City. When the visiting team’s third goal went in, he leaned his elbows on the table in front of him and held his head in his hands, cursing to himself. Thompson – a European Cup-winning captain with Liverpool – eventually looked up and stared at the dugout where Evans and Gérard Houllier, the person he shared a job with, were positioned at opposite ends of the seating arrangement.

  ‘I was thinking to myself, What the fuck is happening? Where the fuck is this all going? I was looking at Roy, I was looking at Gérard and between the two of them you couldn’t feel anything. Neither of them seemed to want to take control.’

  Thompson remembers the moment he picked up the microphone and began to speak, glowering dead-eyed at Beecroft, who was reduced to the role of listener for the next five minutes.

  ‘My frustrations erupted on the radio,’ Thompson continues. ‘I’ve learned over time it’s about how you say things rather than how angry you get. But I went into a rant about how I saw my football club. There was no relationship between the managers, the players and the supporters. I said that things needed to change. They needed to change right away.’

  Thompson drove home in a bad mood that night and went straight to bed without saying anything to his wife, Marg. The following morning, it was back to the day job. Pine DIY was one of his businesses in Kirkby. Upon opening the back door he found a letter left with only his name scrawled on the envelope. It was from a Liverpool fan who, after hearing Thompson the previous evening, had decided to write to him straight away, delivering the message to his door. Thompson was humbled by what he read.

  ‘It was four pages long and it began something like, “Phil, your time has come to return to Liverpool FC; your calling has arrived. We need passionate people like you; people who will set those players straight.”’

  In the afternoon, Thompson arrived at the Pitz five-a-side football facility not far from Anfield, down the hill in Kirkdale, where he was to prepare for a forthcoming masters tournament with other former players. Thompson says his trousers were ‘literally around my ankles’ when his mobile phone began to ring and on the other end of the line was Peter Robinson, Liverpool’s secretary, inviting him to a meeting at the mansion of chairman David Moores in Halsall, Lancashire.

  ‘Straight away, I thought I might have been getting a dressing-down for what I’d said on the radio – that kind of thing happens,’ Thompson admits.

  ‘But on the way to Halsall, I spoke to my brother Owen and the wife. Marg’s a teacher and she was still at work. I told her, “Love, you’ve got to get out of the classroom. It’s possible that I’ve had the call from Liverpool . . .”’

  In Halsall, Thompson was greeted by a sombre atmosphere.

  ‘David has a lovely house but it was like a funeral parlour, with everyone sitting around in silence. Peter stepped forward and explained that Gérard was going to be the manager in sole charge and that it was unanimously agreed that he needed someone by his side that was disciplined and someone who could stand up to the players and rescue the club from the Spice Boys era. They wanted a big voice. Tom Saunders stood up and began to speak: “There’s only one person we need – and that person is Phil Thompson.”

  ‘After what happened with Graeme Souness, it was a lovely moment – they were coming for me.’

  Thompson had been sacked by Souness and Liverpool seven years earlier for supposedly being too aggressive with the club’s reserve-team players, swearing at them too much. Thompson reasons he was only following what Ronnie Moran had done two decades earlier when Thompson was a teenager and Moran was coach.

  ‘It did no harm to my career,’ Thompson thinks. ‘I moulded my reserve team on Ronnie’s. He barked orders, so I barked orders. I didn’t care if I was popular or not. My satisfaction came from getting results and seeing young players get pushed into the first team. When Graeme sacked me, he said I shouted too much at the young lads in the reserves. My attitude was, if you couldn’t handle me shouting at you in front of a couple of hundred people at a reserve match, you wouldn’t have a chance with the first team, where everyone, especially the crowd, wants to have a pop at you.’

  Having dismissed Thompson’s authoritarian approach on the advice of Souness, Liverpool’s board now deemed it to be the key ingredient missing from the dressing room. Thompson didn’t leave Houllier’s home near Sefton Park till the early hours of the following morning, marking the end of what he considers the most remarkable twenty-four hours of his life.

  ‘I’d only met Gérard once before and I didn’t know the fella at all. But I said to him that evening, “Listen, mate, I’m going to be different to anything you’ve ever worked with. I’m a nark. I’m brash. I’m aggressive. I’m a moaner. But Gérard, I’ll give you 100 per cent loyalty and trust to bring the success back.’

  The mission facing Houllier and Thompson was enormous.

  ‘There was indiscipline at the club,’ Thompson says. ‘Gérard and Roy had been dragged apart by the players who had too much power. Re-instilling the discipline was a big responsibility and it was going to be an arduous task.

  ‘I became the Bob Paisley of the duo. Gérard was going to be the Shanks – the good guy. I went in there and I was like a whirlwind. I loved it. And everybody hated me, every player.’

  Before Thompson’s return was made public, he turned up at Melwood unannounced. He concedes that to some of the players it must have been like an old fearsome guard returning to the asylum after the lunatics had taken over.

  ‘I bumped into some of the lads that played under me for the reserves. Jamie Redknapp and Steve Harkness were there.

  ‘“What are you doing here, Thommo?” they asked.

  ‘“I’m your new assistant manager, lads,” I told them.

  ‘Their faces, you should have seen their faces – they dropped on the floor. Straight away, Harky warned me, “You can’t be the way you were with us, Thommo – it won’t work.”

  ‘“Oh,” I said. “In any walk of life – no matter how much money you’re being paid – you’ve gotta have discipline.”

  ‘“Mmmmm,” he goes, dismissively. “We’ll see . . .”

  ‘I thought to myself then, I’ve got to get into these straight away. So I did.’

  Houllier and Thompson quickly concluded that the presence of Paul Ince, the club’s captain, was the biggest problem at Liverpool. Ince’s influence when Evans was in sole charge was so considerable that he’d persuaded the manager to switch from an effective 3–5–2 formation to a standard 4–4–2 because it suited his qualities more and it was what he was used to at previous clubs Manchester United and Inter Milan.

  ‘Paul was a good
player, don’t get me wrong,’ Thompson says. ‘But he wasn’t what we wanted or where we wanted to go or be. So our development was going to be at his expense.

  ‘Everyone called Ince “the Guv’nor”. He was the big man, running the dressing room. A lot of the young lads looked up to him. So I made it my point to make it difficult for him. And he hated me. He hated Gérard too, writing a massive two-page article in one of the tabloid papers when he left for Middlesbrough, saying that we would drag the club down.

  ‘A couple of years later, in 2001, Gérard thought it was time to reply and he admitted that Ince was right. We had dragged the team down – to Cardiff, not once, not twice, not three times but four – winning all of those cups!’

  A smile begins to slowly spread across Thompson’s distinctive-looking face towards the end of this particular story, his eyes twinkling. It satisfies him that he was able to bring down those he thought acted like they were more important than Liverpool, the club he’d grown up supporting, the club he ended up playing for and winning a European Cup with as captain all those years before.

  Thompson admits he relished cracking heads.

  ‘If you ask any of the lads that played with me or any of the ones I coached, I know what they’ll say about me,’ he says, making a slitting gesture across his throat. ‘There was a passion burning inside of me. It was uncontrollable. It’s still there, I think. I’d say I’m a perfectionist. Others would say something less flattering.’

  Thompson reasons that his quest for perfection stems from a desire to make up for what he sees as disappointments in the past, in that he was not selected to play for Liverpool’s youth teams until he was fifteen. He wasn’t even in the Kirkby boys’ district side until the age of fourteen. His passion for Liverpool and for football became greater because his struggle to get there was greater than that of others.