by Simon Hughes
The following Saturday, he was selected as Liverpool’s centre-forward in the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park, an occasion he describes as ‘scarring’.
‘We met at the Suites Hotel in Kirkby beforehand and one of the staff said he had a bet on me as first goalscorer. I went into the game thinking, I fancy myself today. Steven Gerrard had a free kick on the right-hand side and he whipped it in. I had a diving header from six yards in front of the Gwladys Street End. Somehow, I’ve ended up in the back of the net and Nigel Martyn has saved it. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine scoring in front of the Gwladys Street End, seeing the faces of all the disappointed Evertonians.
‘I stood in the showers for ages afterwards wondering what might have been. The atmosphere was different to anything I’d experienced before. You could sense the real dislike for Liverpool. You could sense we really weren’t welcome. Scoring against Everton would have eclipsed Arsenal and Olympiacos. But I didn’t. And we lost 1–0.’
The next Sunday, Mellor scored against Newcastle United during a 3–1 win. It was the weekend before Christmas.
‘I went out celebrating at the club’s party and probably drank too much,’ he says. ‘I got tonsillitis. We played West Brom on Boxing Day and beat them 5–0, and I couldn’t play. Another missed opportunity.’
Mellor never recovered. He played once in the January, a League Cup semi-final victory over Watford.
‘I got dragged off at half-time and Rafa said, “That’s not good enough.” I said, “Rafa, I can’t move because of my legs; I’m in bits.” My knee was swollen. But Rafa told me to play for the reserves the following day. I said, “If I can’t play for the first team, how am I going to play for the ressies?” In the end, I lasted forty-five minutes. That was me: done. I was having an operation. Season over.’
The surgeon told Mellor his knee was so damaged that he had only a 50 per cent chance of playing professionally again. The Champions League final in Istanbul came and went, and so did the start of the new season. He went to Wigan Athletic on loan, where he scored the winner on his debut against Middlesbrough. Yet the knee problem had not disappeared and after two more games he was ruled out for the rest of that campaign as well. Mellor signed for Preston North End but did not make his debut until February 2007 due to further complications. By then, twenty-six months had passed since he last completed a competitive game of football.
In Alan Irvine he found a manager who believed in him and when the Scot was appointed at Sheffield Wednesday, Mellor followed him on loan, a move that set him on the same path as his father thirty years before.
‘I wanted to feel trusted by the managers I worked for and I felt the trust from Alan. Why? He was making me a better player. I would drive into training every day looking forward to what he had in store for us. I knew I would enjoy it and there would always be a variation. He created an atmosphere that everyone wanted to be part of whether you were in the team or not.’
Mellor retired in 2012 and now lives with his wife, Rebecca, their two kids and dog near the affluent western coastline of Wirral, where the views stretch across the River Dee into Wales. He encourages his seven-year-old son to play football in the back garden but struggles to join in because the pain in his knee remains. At weekends, he covers matches for Sky Sports, having taken a media course at the University of Staffordshire. It satisfies him that his name will remain in stone for the goalscoring contributions against Arsenal and Olympiacos. Then comes the ‘but’.
‘I did the maximum I could with the body in the condition it was,’ he says. ‘I’m fortunate that I experienced moments in my career that are unique and historical. Some players, they make four or five hundred games and people say, “Good player, but, er, what is he remembered for?”
‘I feel I didn’t fulfil my potential, which is frustrating for me. Whether it was lack of opportunity, injury or lack of ability, I’m not sure. Deep down, I think I had more to give. It’s something I have to deal with and accept. Otherwise, I know I’d probably go crazy. So many footballers do in retirement because there’s a long time to think about the way your career has gone, good or bad.
‘That’s why you’ve got to keep busy.’
CHAPTER SIX
DIETMAR HAMANN,
Kaiser
THE MUSCLES IN Dietmar Hamann’s body eased and slowly his brain began to relax. Pulling hard on a cigarette, he stared past the person who’d supplied it and into a place beyond the walls in front as he contemplated the magnitude of what had happened.
Liverpool were Champions League winners on penalties, having been 3–0 down to AC Milan at half-time – a moment when Hamann’s introduction to the game was deemed necessary. It later transpired that Hamann had scored Liverpool’s first penalty in the shoot-out with a broken foot. The occasion had taken him to a platform where there was no pain. He had not felt a thing.
Now, in the early hours of the Turkish morning, when all was somehow settled in Liverpool’s favour, the winning team’s dressing room was strangely quiet. Hamann’s teammates lay around in disbelief. Some drank bottles of beer. Others blew into their bottle tops, creating a nervous whistling sound.
‘We’d left the dressing room two hours before, dead and buried,’ Hamann remembers. ‘Yet we’d come back and the cup was in our dressing room and not theirs, shining brightly on a treatment table, all alone. For a short period of time, everyone seemed too scared to touch it. It hadn’t sunk in that it was ours.’
Hamann had smoked since he was a teenager, usually Marlboro Lights. He approached David Moores, the chairman, and the only other smoker at the club.
Moores’ entire body was trembling, his clothes drenched in indeterminate liquid. His face was reddened and tears were falling uncontrollably from his eyes. Moores had been in control of the club for fourteen seasons and had already decided to sell it to someone else. He must have appreciated this would never happen again. It had never happened before.
‘David liked Marlboro Red cigarettes and they are a bit stronger than Lights, let me tell you,’ Hamann continues, amused. ‘I thought to myself, This is the perfect time to sit back, take it all in and kick back. So I said to the chairman, “David, come into my office,” and led him by the hand to the showers, which hadn’t been turned on yet. “David, can I have a cigarette?” I asked him.
‘He always called me Kaiser: “Kaiser, what if the manager finds out?” he said, the strain showing even more. “Just tell him you own the fucking club,” I told him.
‘Rafa had asked me on his first day in charge about the rumours, whether I smoked. It was best to be honest. “Yes I do, boss.” He showed no expression and walked away.
‘David took ages to open the packet because his hands were shaking so much. I think both of us needed that drag to settle us down. We stood there for five minutes in the dry shower saying nothing to each other, me in my full kit and David in his suit. Ash had fallen all over the floor. It felt like that cigarette you have after sex.’
Hamann’s Liverpool career seemed to be over after six years. Rafael Benítez had offered him a new contract at the start of 2005, before unceremoniously withdrawing it. Hamann decided that the next few days should be spent partying. He partied in the hotel in Istanbul. He partied on the flight back to Liverpool. He partied in the Sir Thomas Hotel after the parade around the city was completed, singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with John Aldridge on a stage. And then he partied with his family and friends. He did not expect to be summoned by Benítez to Melwood for what seemed to be a debrief. Hamann was unshaven and very tired indeed when the call came.
‘Rafa had a reputation for being quite strict but I saw him differently,’ Hamann says. ‘Rafa was straightforward rather than strict. As a German, I appreciated that approach because I’d grown up around it. I don’t think any player could claim he did not know what was expected of him under Rafa when they went out to play. He was very organized and very clear. He was not a control freak. He did not insert himself into your privat
e affairs. But when you were at Melwood on football duty, you were his property.
‘Of course, he could change his mind too. And that shows you, perhaps, that he isn’t quite so stubborn as some people make out. When I walked into that office after Istanbul, I thought he might want to thank me for my efforts and say goodbye, although I figured that would be an unusual thing to do, because he wasn’t one for goodbyes. Instead, he offered me a new contract for another year. I didn’t expect him to perform the U-turn. But that was Rafa: he made big decisions and didn’t care too much about what people thought about them.’
Hamann was an unusual breed of footballer in the twenty-first century – perhaps unique to his working environment. He expressed himself socially and did not make much of an effort to hide it, potentially risking the scalding of his manager or his club. He did not train particularly well either. Yet all his managers, including Benítez, trusted him to perform with extreme tactical discipline on the pitch.
Hamann’s recruitment by Gérard Houllier for £8 million in 1999, along with six other foreign signings during the same summer, was supposed to herald a new dawn of professionalism at Anfield. The Spice Boys era was over, yet in Hamann, Liverpool were getting a midfielder who knew how to enjoy life away from the stresses of his occupation. Jamie Carragher recalls, with surprise, how Hamann marked the end of a night out with his new teammates by hailing a taxi early one morning in Liverpool’s city centre. His unusual method was to lie on the tarmac of Castle Street and wait hopefully for a car to spot him and brake.
‘This is absolutely true, of course,’ Hamann admits. ‘The English dressing room is very different to the German dressing room. You go in and you hear the music. It’s like a nightclub sometimes. In Germany, there is peace. We control the rage. Yet in England . . .
‘I have always enjoyed a beer with the lads,’ he continues. ‘In Germany, my big buddy was Mario Basler. We had some great times together. I understand why clubs – Bayern particularly – try their best to control players. Sometimes you need control but not always. I am convinced that if you share a common bond socially, it will show itself on the pitch too. But you mustn’t go too far. As a footballer, it would be easy to take advantage of your position and wealth. So I guess you have to find a balance. I drank mainly in the Everton pubs around Liverpool. I could relax there. The Evertonians didn’t want to have anything to do with you.’
Hamann is already eating a late breakfast of bacon and eggs, using heavily buttered toast to mop up the runny yolk when I arrive at a greasy-spoon café in Alderley Edge, the prosperous Cheshire town where he lives. The skies are oily and sunken but the rain cannot be seen due to the heavy condensation on the windows.
‘Today is football weather,’ he announces, shaking my hand and grinning earnestly. ‘I loved playing in these conditions. It was faster – more unpredictable.’
Hamann is an Anglophile. As he slurps through two mugs of steaming hot coffee, he speaks in an accent that can drift wantonly from Liverpudlian to native Bavarian in the course of a single sentence. He uses slang terms like ‘different gravy’, when analysing the abilities of Benítez, and ‘fannying around’, when describing the pedestrian football he loathes. Hamann recognizes he is neither a typical German nor a typical footballer, considering the acceleration towards vanilla professionalism that he witnessed in the later stages of his career. He misses little about the mundane routine of a footballer’s life in the modern age.
‘I finished playing nearly five years ago and there have only been a couple of occasions where I’ve wished I was active again,’ he says. ‘I had the best time. Nothing could have worked out better than it did. If you gave me the chance to be twenty-five, I wouldn’t take it because my memories are happy.
‘I had a spell [as manager] with Stockport County but I can’t really see myself as a manager or a coach in the future,’ he reveals. ‘I found it hard to be on time for training as a player. I paid my fair share of fines. As a coach or a manager, you have to be there even earlier. To get in the car at seven in the morning and spend the next ten hours every day for at least six days a week over the course of eleven months a year in the same intense routine doesn’t really appeal to me.
‘As a manager, you have to sacrifice a lot. You have no private life and a limited social life. Someone else is always waiting to take your place. You’ve got to be focused and 100 per cent prepared to give every second of your life to it. If you are not, you shouldn’t do it. You’ll fail.’
Hamann’s favourite pastime involves lying on the couch in front of his television and watching cricket. During an important Test series, he stays up late into the night and through into the morning. He did not even know what cricket was when he first arrived in England. He admits to blowing vast sums on spread betting, especially early in his retirement, when he was removed from that word he uses again and again, the ‘routine’. An Australian batting collapse against South Africa once cost him nearly £300,000.
‘Cricket is a sport I could talk all day and all night about,’ he says. ‘I sat in the Long Room at Lords last year. What a place that is: the history. Some great cricketers have had lunch there. I could name a lot of them if you wanted me to. When I came here, I did not know who Beefy Botham was.’
Hamann insists Jamie Carragher, his former teammate, likes cricket too, joking he might not talk about it too much because of his working-class roots.
‘Carra is like me: he enjoys strategy sports, where you have to use your brain,’ Hamann continues. ‘Especially in Test matches, there is so much to think about. It’s a game over five days, so you have to consider the quality of the pitch and the predictability of the weather: how many spin bowlers to play, whether you play a spinner at all; the batting line-up, who should bat in what order, who opens the batting with Alastair Cook [the England captain], who I think is one of the great modern leaders of sport.’
It is possible to imagine Hamann as a number 3 batsman standing wearily at the crease, repelling the fiercest bowling attacks for days on end, though not registering a necessarily impressive amount of runs. He played football that way: a subtle but reliable presence in the middle of midfield, missed when he was not there.
‘There is a solitude at number 3,’ he says. ‘You have more to think about than an opening bat. Staying in for as long as possible has to be the aim usually. Although I’m not sure whether I’d like to face the new ball.
‘I know Freddie Flintoff pretty well and I’ve had a knockabout with him in the nets,’ Hamann carries on. ‘Some of my friends turn out for Alderley Edge Cricket Club and when they’re one short I play for the third team. It’s hard to pick up a new sport the older you get. If I could make a 50 or a century for the over-forties, it would rank as high as winning the Champions League for me. I really mean that.’
He reasons that both his upbringing in conservatively minded Bavaria and his emergence from Munich’s most illustrious football club explains why he can simultaneously respect authority and be rebellious. There are also his strong opinions.
Hamann was four weeks old when his family moved from the quiet town of Waldsassen to a middle-class suburb called Solln in the gravel plain to the south of Munich. Yet Solln, Hamann says, is not a beery place of leather-clad, thigh-slapping bonhomie, where men sit in Oktoberfest tents singing songs while wiping foam from their moustaches. ‘Some nice houses and some grey tower blocks, with enough sports facilities to keep the kids busy,’ is his memory of childhood. ‘Unremarkable, basically.’
Further out from Munich and into the countryside, the mood changes and a patently wealthy region opens up. There is a famous German movie telling the story of a group of Bavarians that win the Olympic bobsledding medal in the 1950s. Asked where they are from, they reply, ‘We are from Bavaria. That’s near Germany.’
Bavaria might have the money of Hertfordshire but it also has the attitude of Yorkshire. And like Texas, it is one of the areas in the world where rural rather urban life defines the way th
ings are.
A poll in 2013 showed that 25 per cent of Bavarians would be in favour of leaving the Federal Republic. That is only 5 per cent less than the number of people in Scotland who, before the No Campaign set about its business, said they wanted independence from the United Kingdom.
‘The Bavarians are a bit like the Scousers,’ Hamann says. ‘You either love them or you hate them. Both have had a big influence on the cultures of the countries they exist in but don’t really feel a part of the country necessarily. Within the country they polarize opinion. Bavaria is the biggest region in Germany. I wouldn’t say we claim to be better than the rest of Germany. But we certainly claim to be different.’
It becomes apparent there is more to Hamann than funny stories and eccentricities. There is a pleasant directness about him, an occasional abruptness, which might explain why he relates to Rafael Benítez the straight-talker, though Hamann can recognize he did not play for Benítez as long as others who are not so positive in their recollections, nor was he at Liverpool when off-the-field issues with ownership began to influence what happened on the pitch.
There is nevertheless a confidence in Hamann’s analysis, which is delivered in a matter-of-fact way. He begins this interview by speaking about how his first professional club, FC Bayern Munich, lead as Germany’s most successful team both in sporting terms and financially, relating his thoughts to experiences in England. The day before, Bayern had flattened Wolfsburg, from northern Germany, 5–1.
‘Bayern’s evolution has been natural and the club cannot ever be accused of being in the middle of a revolution,’ Hamann says. ‘The discipline is clear and consistent, and it is administered by people you respect because of their standing in the game. In England, it has always been very different. Where are the former players on the FA board? Where are the former players involved at the biggest clubs – clubs like Liverpool?