by Simon Hughes
‘I’ve realized that you have to deal with attacking players differently to the way you deal with defenders. With strikers – or creative types – you have to treat them like you’d treat your daughter. With your son, you can be a bit more forceful – liven yourself up – but with your daughter you have to check they’re OK and make them feel valued. Going back to Torres, that’s what I tried with him.’
It is fascinating listening to Carragher open up about his relationship with Benítez. He credits the Spaniard with helping him establish himself as one of the most consistent high-performing defenders in Europe. Despite what critics think, Carragher believes Liverpool’s run to the Champions League final in 2005 would not have been possible without Benítez in charge. And yet, within twelve months of his appointment at Liverpool, their bond had loosened. By the time Benítez departed in 2010, it had broken. They have not been in contact since.
‘When Rafa came in, it was like Houllier all over again – he took to me straight away. He’d won two La Liga titles with Valencia, a team I knew all about. I’d played against them twice and watched them loads on TV. When Rafa was appointed, I thought, Yes! What a team, and he was the manager of it. I was made up. It was really bold of Liverpool to go and get him.’
Benítez’s first hurdle was convincing Steven Gerrard to stay at Anfield.
‘It quickly became clear that Rafa’s not the type of fella you have a laugh and a joke with. He’s not like the father figure that Houllier was. He was serious about football and that’s where conversations ended.
‘Stevie needed a bit of persuading that Liverpool were moving in the right direction, because Chelsea had made an offer. Rafa was very straightforward. He’d just met him for the first time and started going through the way he viewed his game, saying that he ran around too much. I was thinking it wasn’t really the time for a breakdown of our best player’s game. We really needed to get him to sign a new contract.’
Gerrard remained but a rapport never developed between him and Benítez beyond discussions about training sessions or games. In his autobiography, Gerrard said that Benítez did not like him as a person but that he never understood why, calling him ‘emotionless’ and ‘distant’. Gerrard wrote that he could pick up the phone to any of his other managers but not Benítez. Like Carragher, he has not spoken to him since 2010.
At the beginning, the dynamic was slightly different.
‘Rafa probably used me to try to get through to Stevie,’ Carragher explains. ‘I was in Rafa’s office once a week at the start of that first season. He was trying to put his thoughts and beliefs into me. “This is what we’re trying to do; this is what we did at Valencia. We’re struggling because of this and we’re going to sign this player.” I’ve never had more information out of a manager. He’d tell you a lot of things. It made me feel great because it suggested that he fancied me as a player.
‘It was only over time that I realized he was trying to influence me a bit by getting me on side. Most of the conversations led back to Stevie. He knew Stevie and I were mates. He probably wanted to know what he was thinking and saying about him.’
Benítez needed Carragher as an ally in those early months in charge. In the 2004–05 season, Liverpool lacked the physicality to convince in the Premier League and stumbled through the Champions League group stages, winning two from five games until the final fixture came along. The victory over Olympiacos was settled by a Gerrard blockbuster in front of the Kop as injury time approached.
Liverpool steamed through the knockout rounds, a process where Carragher says Benítez’s influence was defining, despite what rival managers and critics like Sam Allardyce claim.
‘Allardyce said in his book that winning the European Cup had nothing to do with Benítez. I mean, come on! How can you win a European Cup without the manager playing a major part? Sam embarrassed himself saying that. Anyone who says Rafa was lucky probably hasn’t won a European Cup before, because along the way of course you need a bit of luck, especially if the team isn’t as talented. If Rafa’s lucky, then that makes me lucky too.
‘Liverpool won the European Cup for a number of reasons: Benítez’s tactics on the way to the final and for the final itself, Stevie’s brilliance and the contribution of other key players. Then there was the crowd. We fed off the crowd. You can’t quantify how important the crowd was, because there are no statistics. That’s not me paying lip service because the supporters might like it. Against Chelsea [in the semi-final], the crowd inspired us as players but it affected Chelsea’s players too. You could say the same against Juventus and then Istanbul.
‘In the final, we were 3–0 down at half-time. Rafa was brilliant here. We were getting battered, everyone was panicking and two players had had to go off injured. We could have lost our heads completely but Rafa remained cool. Rafa’s a thinker. He’s not a motivator. Yet his finals became emotional occasions. We probably ended up winning because you had Rafa being a pragmatist on one end of the scale and me and Stevie playing like kids in a schools’ cup final at the other. I started the move that led to the equalizer, didn’t I – how many times has that happened?
‘People then say Rafa made a mistake with his team selection in the first place by choosing Harry Kewell and not Didi Hamann. I’ll admit, I thought to myself, That’s bold. But if he’d brought Didi on and kept the formation the same, I think we’d have lost. It was the tactical change – going three at the back – that made the biggest difference in the end.’
In the aftermath of Istanbul, Carragher returned to Melwood to see the club’s doctor. An unscheduled meeting with Benítez, who was there planning for the following season, proved to be the moment where the reality of their relationship was exposed.
‘I was told Rafa was upstairs, so I thought I’d go up and see him and say hello. We spoke about the players he was trying to sign and everything seemed great, I was really encouraged. “About your contract,” he said. I immediately thought it was strange that he was bringing up the subject, because I’d only ever dealt with Rick Parry about contracts. None of my previous managers had got involved.
‘Rafa goes, “We can’t lift your wages, because I’m trying to buy other players.” I was shocked. The last time I was due to sign a contract, I broke my leg at Blackburn but Rick still honoured the agreement, so I signed it when my leg was still in plaster while I was still a left-back. Now, I was a centre-back and we’d won the Champions League a few weeks before. Then I felt like he was taking me for granted. I was imagining him going to Rick Parry, “I’ve got Carra on side here. He trusts me. I’ll sort this one out, Rick. It’s only Carra.” He even asked me, “Are you thinking about money or football?” as if I wasn’t the sort of character to focus on football for the next four years. It was the first time it hit home that with Rafa, football was business.’
Carragher eventually committed himself to Liverpool but two years later a similar impasse developed.
‘Five players had contracts that were due for renegotiation. Liverpool usually handed out four-year contracts to their best players and would discuss terms again halfway through. I knew I’d sign. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Some of the others might have been looking at what was on offer elsewhere.
‘Rafa calls me into his office and says, “We’re going to sort yours out last.” I asked why that was. “Because I know you won’t leave.” So, I was the most loyal in Rafa’s eyes but I was getting put to the back. Now listen, it was probably the right thing for the club, as obviously you don’t want people who are more likely to leave to go. But again it felt like he was trying to capitalize on my closer links to the club.’
Graeme Souness had attempted to follow the same path as Benítez in dealing with player contracts before appreciating he had taken too much on and realizing that the process only led to resentment between player and manager.
‘People reading this interview might say, “Yeah, well, Carragher, he’s paid lots of money, so it shouldn’t matter.” Others will
realize that it’s an issue of fairness and respect that would affect any person at any work place.’
Carragher was driven by torment, self-reproach and a daily churn of fear. Steven Gerrard drank from the same reservoir of insecurity. Carragher thinks again about all those hours spent together in hotel rooms, sharing their impressions.
‘Stevie’s more high profile than me, yet he’s more introverted than I am,’ Carragher says. ‘I was louder. He’s a little bit of a worrier, although we all are; it’s how you hide it. No matter who you are, you have insecurities. I’ve listened to him in the room thinking, Stevie, you’re one of the best players in the world.
‘In the periods where I wasn’t playing well, I’d be more nervous going into a game. You put an act on, whether it’s in the changing room or with the press. People might see Stevie and I as players who can blank it all out but I can say 100 per cent that neither of us ever took our place in the team for granted. I remember when Kenny [Dalglish] bought Charlie Adam and Jordan Henderson. We were already well stocked for midfielders. Stevie was injured and he goes to Kenny, “’Kin ’ell, where am I playing?” He said it as a joke but, knowing him well, he really meant it.’
To a large extent, the success of Carragher’s and Gerrard’s careers was driven by fear: the fear of losing, the fear of letting people down, the fear of being dropped.
‘It’s a good thing to have, fear. You should never lose it. Because when you do, that’s when you start getting complacent. We never took anything at Liverpool for granted. When I retired, Alex Ferguson wrote a letter to me. Michael Owen got in touch, asking for my address. So I wrote back to Ferguson, thanking him. We ended up meeting over a meal. You have rivalries with these clubs and people but once you stop playing, they go. Look at me with Gary Neville [as Sky pundits]. I used to go away with England and didn’t really bother speaking to the United players because a few weeks later we’d be kicking shite out of each other. But when you finish, it’s like two boxers at the end of a fight.
‘Ferguson was top class to be honest. I enjoyed his company. He told me he wrote another letter to Brendan Rodgers when he earned promotion with Swansea. The one piece of advice he gave him was not to lose the fear. I thought then, You know what, I’ve had that my whole career. This was coming from a manager who has won everything there is to win. It makes you think. What he probably meant was, “OK, Brendan, you’ve got Swansea promoted but don’t think you’re the bees’ knees now.” It always makes me laugh when a player says he’s got nothing to prove. You’ve always got something to prove. Every day in training you have to prove to your manager that you’ve still got it. You’ve got to embrace the fear. I had that without ever really thinking about it until it was over.’
Carragher is a man driven by passion. That does not mean he was a rebel of the dressing room. Pepe Reina, Liverpool’s Spanish goalkeeper, mentioned in his autobiography that he was surprised both Carragher and Steven Gerrard acted in such a dignified way when the club’s financial future seemed in peril towards the back end of the decade under American owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, a period where Benítez’s politicking accelerated.
‘It wasn’t the Liverpool way to speak out against the club,’ Carragher reasons. ‘It bothered me deeply that things weren’t as they should have been. I thought a lot about the future of the club, the direction it was going in, the way it was run and how it was perceived from the outside. There were things that Liverpool should have been doing in a certain way, the correct way. You associated class and dignity with Liverpool. Everybody else was fighting. If the players got involved, what’s left?’
Carragher had already released his own compelling autobiography by then. In the nicest possible way, he’d likened Benítez to a ‘pub bore’ – a man with an answer to everything. It was a bold statement for Carragher to make, considering Benítez was still his manager.
Outwardly, Benítez’s and Carragher’s relationship continued to work: Liverpool won the FA Cup in 2006, reached another Champions League final in 2007, a semi-final in 2008, before mounting a title challenge in the Premier League in 2009.
Yet behind the scenes, a feud between Steve Heighway, the academy director, and Benítez had resulted in an impracticable situation where nobody benefited. It was symptomatic of the dysfunctional working relationships at Liverpool.
‘When personalities don’t like each other, they hope the other person doesn’t do well. Do I think Rafa wanted Liverpool to win the FA Youth Cup? Probably not. Did people at the academy really want Liverpool to be flying under Rafa? Probably not. When a relationship breaks down like that, the club suffers. At the end of the day, who’s really missing out? The kids.’
The 2009–10 season proved to be Benítez’s last. Results at the beginning were bad and after a home defeat to Aston Villa, a summit was called at Melwood.
‘Rafa had said in the press that some senior players needed to start taking more responsibility. He later said it wasn’t aimed at me and Stevie but I thought it was a careless thing to say bearing in mind Stevie and I had probably taken more responsibility than any of the players in the league since Rafa had taken over, not in terms of performance or playing really well, but in terms of being available week in, week out – never hiding. I didn’t even miss the Carling Cup games. I was thinking, I’m there every single game.
‘It was the only time in my career where I felt like I could have done with a bit of reassurance. I knew I wasn’t playing well and I looked towards the manager and thought, You know what, I’ve done all right for you for five years, just pull me to one side and, rather than going through what I’ve done wrong, say something positive.
‘We had a meeting and, in fairness, most of the squad had their say. It reflected the bad feeling that had built up after Xabi Alonso left, because Xabi was a really popular character. I don’t think Rafa ever really recovered from that meeting. I’m surprised it never got out in the press, because it was quite eventful. Even [Javier] Mascherano spoke out, though I’m pretty sure he was angling for a move to Barcelona at the time. Like a lot of the South Americans, Mascherano had been really close to Rafa.’
There is an overriding feeling that Carragher respects Benítez the coach, but Benítez the human being not quite so much.
‘Yeah, I thought Rafa was a brilliant coach,’ he says. ‘I realize he was managing Liverpool at a difficult time when the owners were at war but he rubbed too many people up the wrong way and it caught up with him in the end.
‘It didn’t stop me going into work every day and trying to learn from him, though.
‘I was like a sponge under all of my managers. I listened to every word a manager said to me. Sometimes I saw other players and they weren’t concentrating. They weren’t even looking at the manager. I’d have hit them for that if I was the manager. I put myself in the manager’s shoes and made sure I always looked at them in the eye, even if I thought what they were saying was bullshit.’
There is a common narrative that runs through Carragher’s career, one which says he would not have emerged as a top-class defender had it not been for the intervention of Benítez.
‘Yeah, Rafa had a big role in my development, there’s no question about it,’ he says. ‘But what I hate is a manager or a coach taking total credit for players doing well; I hate it with a passion.
‘You hear scouts claiming glory for spotting someone. Yet ultimately it’s the player that has to go and play. Don’t get me wrong, Houllier took me to a certain level, then Rafa took me to another level by playing me in my best position.
‘OK, Rafa takes a lot of credit. Fair enough. But when we were doing defensive sessions and I was picking things up and carrying out exactly what he wanted, Josemi was involved in those sessions too. He didn’t improve. Kromkamp was doing them too. Where did he go? It wasn’t as if the coaching was one-on-one training. The manager put a session on for the defenders and because I was clued up, listened and took things in, progress was made. OK, thank you for
the information but I had to take it off you and implement it into the game. It’s not all about me and you’ve been a great help, but don’t tell me otherwise.’
He continues. ‘You hear coaches at academy level take all the credit for a player’s development. “They came through with me,” they say. Well, if it’s all about you, why didn’t twenty-five other players come through in that year as well? That kid’s got ability, you helped him – that’s it.
‘I don’t want this to be misinterpreted as me criticizing Rafa, because I’m not,’ Carragher concludes. ‘I have huge respect for what he’s done in his managerial career and especially what he did at Liverpool. He just wasn’t a manager you could have a long-term relationship with. Many are like that now, partly out of circumstances, because management is a tightrope. When I really think about it, I don’t particularly want to have a relationship with any manager anyway – just pick me every week, which he did. Sound.
‘What I will say is, Rafa knew lots about defending and he helped my game enormously. He wasn’t the type to crack a joke but he got results. In the end, the results dried up and that’s why he left the club.’
Mention of Benítez’s legacy returns Carragher to where he is now: away from the club, and not as a manager anywhere else. Has the game lost something?
‘People say, “Have a go at management, go ’ed, have a go!” Then I look at someone like Rafa and see how successful he’s been, look at what he’s won. Very few managers can match that. But even he – with all of the big clubs he’s been at – is having to justify himself. You see every manager who has lost his job and they’re talking about what they gave to a club. It must be going around their heads all of the time.’
There is a sense almost that Carragher loves football too much to become a manager, a job he realizes can make a person become ‘bitter and twisted because it eats them up’. He wonders whether managers ever find a way to relax: ‘I see them and think, Just go and have a bevvie!