Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  ‘The best teams are always a reflection of the manager,’ he continues. ‘Look at Mourinho – Chelsea had a winners’ attitude. People say Roy Evans was too nice, his team were too nice. Ferguson – he was a gambler, wasn’t he? He backs the horses. Well, his team were gamblers, weren’t they?’

  And Benítez’s teams? ‘Defiant . . . or stubborn. Stubborn – really, really stubborn.’

  It is impossible to see another player in Liverpool’s history being like Carragher or, indeed, Ian Callaghan: one-club men; men carved out of hard stone from the Mersey riverbed. Carragher never became the PR-moulded, bland character we now expect – but loathe – of our Premier League stars. His searing honesty is the reason Anfield identified with him more than any other player of his generation.

  And yet, because he stayed at Liverpool his entire career, it was difficult for him to enjoy the moment. Bill Shankly referred to the quest for success when the responsibility is with you as being like a river, ‘Something that goes on and on.’

  ‘You can’t take a break because if you have a break, you’re fucked,’ Carragher says. ‘Someone else would try to take your place. Winning wasn’t really a joy, it was a relief. Sometimes you weren’t even happy you’d won. You were happy you’d stopped someone else winning. I remember beating Everton in the FA Cup semi-final in 2012. It wasn’t a case of, Great, we’re in the final. It was, Christ, I’m made up they never won. Can you imagine the build-up to the cup final if Everton had beaten us? A whole month of it in the Liverpool Echo and on the phone-ins; the reminders being there day in, day out; flags and scarves hanging out of car windows.

  ‘Honest to god, it terrified me.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  RICK PARRY,

  The Chief Executive

  ‘ON THE ODD occasion, you’d come across people you hadn’t seen since school. They’d inevitably say, “Blimey, you’ve got the best job in the world.” You’d pause for a minute and only then would it dawn. “I suppose I have, actually. Thanks for reminding me!” It didn’t always feel like that.’

  Rick Parry was Liverpool’s chief executive for twelve years. He was a supporter of the club and therefore felt it more when times were bad. He appreciates that it was ‘far from a hardship or the type of drudgery others experience’. Yet for Parry, seasons were seemingly everlasting. His years mirrored those of the football manager; breaks – time to stop and think – were rare. There was the day-to-day running of Liverpool, with a planning cycle geared towards the following game, where transfers and commercial deals fitted in somewhere. Then there were long-term projects: the prospect of a new stadium, which he believed would shape Liverpool’s prosperity for the next twenty-five years, as well as the potential sale of the club, a choice made by chairman and owner David Moores in 2004, the magnitude of which Parry describes as a ‘for ever decision’.

  Parry tried to run Liverpool on good faith. A handshake meant something. He still believes it’s possible to build a football club and make it thrive around the best intentions, care and consistency even if the money is not as readily available as it might be elsewhere.

  ‘Yes,’ he says forcefully, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘It’s challenging but I think it’s absolutely possible and far more rewarding. That’s the model that interests me the most rather than simply throwing unlimited funds at it and buying success. For me, it’s about sticking to your values and principles no matter what the situation. There were a lot of testing times.’

  A perception now exists of the business people that run football clubs as uncaring types, self-preservationists – ruthless vipers whose sole intention is to look after number one, not stopping at anything as they climb to the top of the greasy pole. But it is hard not to like Parry when you meet him. He does not use new-fangled corporate language to describe his work. He clearly understands the mechanics of football. While his successor Ian Ayre boasted about the shirt sales of a failed player being a reflection of his decent work, Liverpool won almost everything there was to win while Parry was in place.

  Parry talks with authority but is nevertheless quite shy, delivering his thoughts quietly, almost secretively – taking you into his confidence. You begin to understand that he is left-thinking as he speaks about Liverpool being a community and that ‘everyone should have the opportunity to bask in the glory when it is almost in sight’. When Liverpool reached the Champions League final in 2005, Parry insisted that all staff at the club had access to tickets and was then criticized because the following morning nobody was present at the Anfield megastore to capitalize on sales following the most remarkable of victories. He admits that the claim he should have done otherwise annoys him.

  ‘Is that what football is supposed to be about?’ he asks sharply. ‘The sale of a few shirts that morning was never going to determine the future of the club. That was the ethos of Liverpool: everybody shares. The Cardiff cup finals, we took everybody there too. Just because Istanbul was a long way, we didn’t decide to say no because it was more expensive. Are we saying that because the shop was closed the morning after, people would never come back again? If it meant we deferred a few sales, it was worth it. I would do the same thing a thousand times again. Is it the right thing to say to a group of people, “We’ve got to capitalize on the success and therefore you’re not coming to share in the glory?” Or do you maintain your values and say, “We’re in a final, so everybody is on board”? For me, it’s an easy answer. Besides, if you look at our retail sales from that year, they were pretty impressive. The glow of Istanbul has lasted for ten years. And it will continue for a while yet.’

  For nearly a decade, Parry made many of the biggest decisions at Liverpool. His signature would be on every significant contract: from the steel purchase that was supposed to create a new Anfield to the finest details of a signing, whether it be a manager or a player.

  Perhaps he was defined by the conclusions he did not reach. In the final months of the 2003–04 season, Liverpool had again been close to qualifying for the Champions League under Gérard Houllier. Yet the mood had slumped inside Anfield, mainly because Liverpool were more points behind the Premier League’s first-place team than they had previously ever been at that stage of the campaign while Houllier was in charge.

  Parry can recall the day when there was an unexpected knock on his office door at Anfield. It was late morning on Tuesday, 9 March 2004 and he did not have any meetings scheduled until the afternoon. A Portuguese agent had been on Merseyside discussing potential transfers with Houllier.

  ‘Porto were playing Manchester United in the Champions League quarter-finals that night,’ Parry remembers. ‘The agent represented a lot of players as well as José Mourinho. He asked whether he could have thirty minutes with me in private and, although I thought it was unusual because it was completely unannounced, I agreed.’

  The point of the meeting was made quickly.

  ‘The agent told me that José Mourinho was very interested in managing Liverpool and asked whether Liverpool might be interested in appointing him for the following season.’

  Parry was surprised by the suddenness of the approach.

  ‘It tasted badly,’ he says. ‘The agent had been to meet Gérard trying to sell him players with one hand but then moments later was ostensibly trying to get him fired. It was classic football. There has to be a more dignified manner, surely?

  ‘I said, “Look, we do things a certain way and we are not going to make an appointment behind Gérard’s back, a) out of respect to him, and b) because we are still in contention for the Champions League and we do not want to make a decision in March.” Had we done so and it had derailed the campaign entirely, we might not have qualified for the Champions League that season and twelve months later we mightn’t have had Istanbul under Rafa Benítez.’

  Later that evening, Porto beat United and Mourinho reacted to Costinha’s equalizer, which secured progression to the next round, by running down the touchline to join in the celebrations with his pl
ayers.

  ‘We all share the euphoria of beating United and nobody [feels it] more than me. But one of our core values was respect and that includes treating other clubs and people with respect,’ Parry says. ‘There are limits and ways of doing things. Seeing Mourinho celebrate like that reinforced my initial belief. The way he behaved sewed another seed of doubt. Of course, I’m sure he’d have been a great manager for Liverpool – there is no doubting his qualities. But was he really a Liverpool manager – did he characterize the club’s values?’

  Ultimately, Parry chose not to pursue Mourinho because the timing wasn’t right.

  ‘Simply, we did not want to be railroaded into a quick decision about something so important. We hadn’t decided to get rid of Gérard at that point, so how could we advance talks?’

  Parry and Houllier shared the strongest of bonds. Parry says his and David Moores’ happiest moments in football were spent in what they called ‘the bunker’, the night before an away game in the team hotel after the players had gone to sleep. Houllier would join Parry and Moores at the bar, where they would discuss the possibilities of the following day with the rest of the staff over bottles of wine. Moores would pay for the round.

  ‘It was David’s big thing, the only thing he ever wanted to do. The payback for his commitment to the club was to travel with the team, to be around the players in those hours – never to interfere. Gérard embraced that completely and made him part of it. They were great times.’

  For Houllier in 2004, his era at Liverpool was near an end. Parry now underlines his memory for detail as well as his aptitude for making the toughest of calls if the circumstances needed it.

  ‘The season 2002–03 was a massive disappointment,’ he explains. ‘The year before, we finished second with an exciting young squad that should have gone further in the Champions League. Yes, in 2002–03 we had the lift of beating United in Cardiff in the League Cup final. But we finished nineteen points off top position and outside the Champions League on sixty-four points. Twelve months later, we got back into the Champions League but finished on sixty points, a huge thirty points behind the champions, Arsenal. We were winning less than one game in two.

  ‘For all the good in terms of the legacy you create and the values you instil – and Gérard certainly achieved that – Liverpool will always be about winning. Finishing thirty points off the top wasn’t where we wanted to be. Separating with Gérard was cruel. But football is demanding and there is a stark reality that has to be recognized. That’s why the change was made.

  ‘When you arrive at Liverpool, the excitement is the expectation. Yet it’s also the millstone around your neck. But hey, why would you want to have it any other way? Why would you aim for mediocrity? The price you pay when you don’t achieve is a heavy one.’

  Parry organized meetings with captain Steven Gerrard and his deputy Jamie Carragher to discuss Houllier’s successor. The initial instinct was to appoint an experienced British coach with a track record of reasonable success. But neither Charlton Athletic’s Alan Curbishley nor Southampton’s Gordon Strachan compared to the ultimate candidate.

  ‘The process was relatively straightforward,’ Parry explains. ‘We wanted to win the league. So the first credential we looked for was someone who’d won one. There were only two people around with experience of winning the Premier League: Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger. Neither of them were going to come to Liverpool. So we then looked further afield, at people who had experiences of winning leagues in Germany, Italy and Spain. That brought us to Rafa Benítez. If you analyse what he’d achieved in Valencia, there were parallels with Liverpool in terms of not having the riches of the clubs they were competing with for trophies. Valencia had played against us in Champions League games as well as in pre-season and they’d played us off the park. They were very attractive to watch, despite the limited resources. There wasn’t much else to it. Rafa ticked all the boxes. He stood out.’

  In the next five years with Benítez in charge, success followed. Yet in that period, Parry and David Moores made the decision to sell the club to new American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. While Moores took a backseat, Parry continued in his role at the club and the relationship between chief executive and manager would be tested in the most extreme circumstances. It is a common belief that the pair did not get along. Parry admits it wasn’t easy.

  ‘A lot of the stuff with Rafa has been overplayed because of the situation Liverpool found itself in,’ Parry says. ‘The bottom line is, the five years I shared with Rafa included a Champions League win, another Champions League final, a semi-final, a quarter-final, an FA Cup win and finishing second place in the league. Upon my appointment, I was told that the most important thing was to make Liverpool as competitive as it could be both on and off the pitch. I’m not trying to take any credit away from Rafa whatsoever, because the biggest pressure was on him when it came to the matches. Yes, we had our ups and downs but the ultimate concern for everyone involved at Liverpool was the results of the team. That’s the way it should always be. When I was there, I think they were pretty commendable.’

  I meet Parry over breakfast twice, once in Liverpool’s city centre and again in an Italian restaurant in Chester, the historical walled town he grew up in. As a child, many of his weekends were spent with his grandparents, who worked as doctors across the River Mersey.

  ‘They lived on St Domingo Grove in the shadow of Anfield,’ Parry remembers. ‘Some of my earliest memories are of being in a pram listening to the sound of the Kop, and then wondering why every Saturday we couldn’t find a parking space. I was fascinated with Liverpool Football Club even before I understood what football was.’

  Parry smiles at the thought. He explains that his father, a lecturer in physical education, warned him away from following the same path. ‘I wanted to be a footballer but I wasn’t good enough. Teaching PE seemed a natural compromise but my dad told me regularly about the drain of the job – being on muddy pitches at the age of forty wasn’t so good for the old knees.’ Instead, after progressing from Ellesmere Port Grammar School, he obtained a degree in mathematics at the University of Liverpool.

  Parry’s subsequent career path did not happen by design. But it did not happen by accident either.

  ‘It was a combination,’ he continues. ‘I had aspirations and dreams. You try to make the connections and try to create opportunities, although the chance of reaching your goal can seem pretty remote. I was never focused on becoming the chief executive of Liverpool. But I always wanted to work in sport. I tend to think that the more connections you make, the more things fall into place. It certainly wasn’t a linear path, though life never is, I guess.’

  Parry trained as an accountant and progressed from there. He became involved in Manchester’s Olympic bid for 1996, which was eventually awarded to the city of Atlanta in the United States. It was a role that nevertheless ‘opened up doors across the north-west’. In 1986, he was taken on as a consultant for the Football League, which led to relationships being made with its management committee, including Graham Kelly, secretary of the Football League, who progressed to chief executive of the FA in 1989.

  Parry remained with the Olympic bid committee until 1990, a role he describes as ‘great fun’, despite Manchester losing in the process by a considerable voting margin.

  ‘I was at a crossroads and needed to reflect. I could have remained with Manchester, who wanted to bid again for the 2000 Olympics, which eventually went to Sydney. A friend of mine had been made redundant by ICI [the chemical company] and he recommended I read a book called What Colour is Your Parachute?, which focused on self-analysis. So I spent three days filling in A3 sheets. What it essentially does is match your skills to what you enjoy. The charts concluded that my ideal job was running the Football League. I figured that was ridiculous, as only one person could do that and the job certainly wasn’t available. So I chucked all the charts away. I then went and spoke to another friend who was in TV. I e
xplained that I’d completed this exercise that was a monumental waste of three days. He’d done the same thing. He told me the day he stopped worrying, he quickly found a new job that he loved. So I decided to take that approach and the next morning the phone rang. It was Graham Kelly, who wanted me to work as a consultant for the embryonic Premier League.’

  It is not too dramatic to suggest that with that phone call, football probably changed for ever. Parry, though, was not initially convinced the Premier League would get off the ground. ‘I thought I’d do it for three months and it would be over. But we were on to something.’

  Today, the Premier League is seen as a slickly run beast that stops for nothing. At the beginning, however, it was a completely different story.

  Despite the significant success of English football clubs in European competition during the 1970s and 1980s – especially Liverpool – the era marked a low point for the game in the country. Stadiums were crumbling, supporters endured poor facilities, hooliganism was rife and English clubs were banned from European competition for five years following the Heysel disaster in 1985. The English First Division fell behind rival leagues such as Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga both in terms of revenues and attendances, and it resulted in an unprecedented number of top English players moving abroad.

  ‘Football was tarnished,’ Parry says. ‘It certainly wasn’t flavour of the month with Mrs Thatcher, with the membership schemes and ill-thought-through measures that were played around with under her governance. The idea that football would in the future be talked about at the dinner tables of the chattering classes was ludicrous.’

  The year 1990 was crucial. The Taylor Report, published in the aftermath of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, where ninety-six Liverpool supporters died, proposed expensive upgrades to create safer all-seater stadiums. England’s run to the semi-final of the World Cup in Italy then injected the game with a feel-good factor.