The Liverpool Chapter in his book.
If anybody's arsed like:
Liverpool - A Great Tradition
fifteen
FROM adversity, the really illustrious clubs return to their cycle of winning. Maybe I was lucky to have
joined United in a troubled phase of their history. The League title had not been won for 19 years and I
inherited a culture of low expectation. We had become a Cup team, and the fans anticipated a good run
in the knock-out competitions more than in League action, where their hopes were kept in check.
My predecessors Dave Sexton, Tommy Docherty and Ron Atkinson were successful men, but in
their years there was no consistent or sustained challenge for the championship. The same was true of
Liverpool in the years when United were on top from 1993 onwards, but I could always feel their
breath on my neck from 25 miles away.
When a club of Liverpool’s history and tradition pull off a treble of cup wins, as they did in 2001,
with the FA, League and UEFA trophies under Gérard Houllier, you are bound to feel a tremor of
dread. My thought that year was: ‘Oh, no, not them. Anybody but them.’ With their background, their
heritage and their fanatical support, as well as their terrific home record, Liverpool were implacable
opponents, even in their fallow years.
I liked and respected Gérard Houllier, the Frenchman who took sole charge when the joint-manager
experiment with Roy Evans was ended by the Anfield board. Steven Gerrard was starting to emerge as
a youthful force in midfield, and they could summon two sensational goal-scorers in Michael Owen
and Robbie Fowler.
The big cultural change was investing power in someone from outside the Liverpool religion. The
succession of internal appointments from Shanks to Bob Paisley to Joe Fagan to Kenny Dalglish to
Graeme Souness to Roy Evans maintained consistency of purpose. Towards the end of Kenny’s first
spell in charge, you could sense a shift. The team had grown old and Liverpool were starting to make
unusual purchases: Jimmy Carter, David Speedie. These were untypical Liverpool signings. Graeme
Souness made the right move but too quickly, breaking up an ageing team too fast. One mistake was to
discard one of the best young players, Steve Staunton. Graeme would admit that himself. There was no
need to let Staunton go. Graeme is a good guy but he’s impetuous. He can’t get there quickly enough.
And his impetuosity cost him in that period.
A virtue of dealing with Liverpool back then was that they would all come into my office mobhanded
after the game. I inherited the tradition of every member of our staff going in to see them at
Anfield and each one on their side reciprocating at Old Trafford. The Liverpool boot-room men had
far more experience in that regard than me, but I learned quickly. Win, lose or draw, there would be a
full turn-out and a rapport between the two managerial clans. Because there was such a divide between
the two cities and such competitive tension on the field, it was even more important to retain our
dignity, whatever the result. It was vital, too, that we concealed our weak points, and Liverpool were
equally guarded in that respect.
Gérard had been a visiting trainee teacher in Liverpool during his course at Lille University, and
had examined the club with an academic’s eye. He was not entering Anfield blind to its traditions. He
understood the ethos, the expectations. He was a clever man; affable, too. After he was rushed to
hospital following a serious heart attack, I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just step upstairs?’
‘I can’t do that,’ Gérard replied. ‘I like working.’ He was a football man. Heart trouble could not
break his addiction.
Expectation always bears down on Liverpool managers and I think that brand of pressure pierced
Kenny’s defences in the end. At the time he abandoned the role of iconic player and moved into the
dug-out, he possessed no managerial background. The same disparity undermined John Greig at
Rangers. Possibly the greatest Rangers player of all time, John inherited a disintegrating team that
could not be restored to an even keel. The emergence of Aberdeen and Dundee United was no help.
Playing in the glamour role up front as one of Liverpool’s finest players and then graduating to
manager almost the next day was very difficult for Kenny. I remember him coming to see me in the
Scotland camp and asking for advice about a job he had been offered in management. It was only later
I realised he had been talking about the big one.
‘Is it a good club?’ I had asked him.
‘Aye, it’s a good club,’ he said.
So I told him: if it was a good club, with good history, some financial leeway, and a chairman who
understands the game, he would have a chance. If only two of those variables could be ticked off, he
was in for a battle.
Without my intensive education at Aberdeen, I would have been poorly qualified to take over at
Manchester United. I started at East Stirling without a penny. I enjoyed that, with 11 or 12 players.
Then I went to St Mirren without a dime. I freed 17 players in my first season: they weren’t good
enough. They had 35 before I started swinging my machete. There, I would order the pies and the
cleaning materials and the programmes. It was a full education.
When Gérard started importing large numbers of foreign players, I thought the treble-winning
season offered proof that the policy might restore the club to its pomp. The likes of VladimÃr Å micer,
Sami Hyypiä and Dietmar Hamann had established a strong platform on which Houllier could build.
Any Cup treble has to be taken seriously. You might say fortune smiled on them in the FA Cup final
against Arsenal, because Arsène Wenger’s team battered them in that match before Michael Owen
won it with the second of his two goals. It wasn’t the individuals that worried me around that time so
much as the name: Liverpool. The history. I knew that if this upsurge continued they would become
our biggest rivals again, ahead of Arsenal and Chelsea.
A year after that Cup treble, they finished runners-up, but then fell away to fifth after Gérard
brought in El Hadji Diouf, Salif Diao and Bruno Cheyrou, from which many commentators drew a line
of cause and effect. Cheyrou was one we looked at when he was at Lille. He had no pace but a nice left
foot. A strong lad, but not quick. Diouf had a good World Cup with Senegal and made a name for
himself. You could understand Gérard’s antennae twitching. I was always wary of buying players on
the back of good tournament performances. I did it at the 1996 European Championship, which
prompted me to move for Jordi Cruyff and Karel Poborský. Both had excellent runs in that
tournament, but I didn’t receive the kind of value their countries did that summer. They weren’t bad
buys, but sometimes players get themselves motivated and prepared for World Cups and European
Championships and after that there can be a levelling off.
With Diouf there was a talent but it needed nurturing. He was a persistent thorn in your flesh, and
not always in a nice way. He’d be silly on the pitch, but he had a right competitive edge about him,
and he had ability. Joining an august club like Liverpool was not compatible with his rebellious side
because he found it hard to conform to the discipline you need to be successful. Gérard soon found
that out. With the number of high-intensity games you are going to play against Arsenal and Chelsea,
you need players of a good temperament. And, in my opinion, Diouf had a dodgy one. Cheyrou just
never made it. He didn’t have the pace to play in the Premier League.
The Spice Boy culture was another dragon Gérard had to slay. I would hear stories of Liverpool
players nipping across to Dublin for recreation. I felt that Stan Collymore’s arrival was hardly
conducive to stability. I nearly bought Collymore myself because there was an incredible talent. But
when I watched him play for Liverpool, there was no great urgency about him, and I began to think
what a lucky guy I had been for not buying him. I can only assume he would have been the same at
United. Instead I took Andy Cole, who was always brave as a lion and always gave his best.
Before the upswing under Houllier, Liverpool had fallen into the trap that had caught United years
before. They would buy players to fit a jigsaw. If you look at Man United from the mid-1970s to the
mid-1980s, they were buying players such as Garry Birtles, Arthur Graham from Leeds United, Peter
Davenport, Terry Gibson, Alan Brazil: there seemed to be a desperation. If someone scored against
United they would be signed: it was that kind of short-term thinking. Liverpool acquired the same
habit. Ronny Rosenthal, David Speedie, Jimmy Carter. A succession of players arrived who weren’t
readily identifiable as Liverpool players. Collymore, Phil Babb, Neil Ruddock, Mark Wright, Julian
Dicks.
Gérard bought a wide mix of players to Anfield: Milan BaroÅ¡, Luis GarcÃa, Å micer and Hamann,
who did a fine job for him. I could see a pattern emerging in Gérard’s recruiting. Under BenÃtez I
could observe no such strategy. Players came and went. There was a time when I looked at his first XI
and felt they were the most unimaginative Liverpool side I ever went up against. In one game against
us, he played Javier Mascherano in central midfield and had his back four, as usual, but played Steven
Gerrard wide left, with Alberto Aquilani off the front. He took Dirk Kuyt off and put Ryan Babel on
the left, moving Gerrard to the right. The three played in a pack through the middle. Babel was on as
an outside-left but not once did he work the touchline. I can’t know what his orders were, but on the
bench I remember saying it was a good time to bring him on, wide left, against Gary Neville. I told
Scholes: warn Gary to concentrate. But Liverpool played with hardly any width at all.
Apparently BenÃtez came to our training ground as a guest of Steve McClaren, but I don’t remember
meeting him. We received lots of visits from overseas coaches and it was hard to keep track of them
all. We had people from China and Malta and groups of three and four from Scandinavian countries.
There was also a steady flow of other sportsmen: the Australia cricket team, NBA players, Michael
Johnson, Usain Bolt. Johnson, who runs a spring training programme in Texas, impressed me with his
knowledge.
Soon after BenÃtez arrived, I attended a Liverpool game and he and his wife invited me in for a
drink. So far, so good. But our relationship frayed. The mistake he made was to turn our rivalry
personal. Once you made it personal, you had no chance, because I could wait. I had success on my
side. BenÃtez was striving for trophies while also taking me on. That was unwise.
On the day he produced his famous list of ‘facts’ detailing my influence over referees, we received
a tip-off that Liverpool would stage-manage a question that would enable BenÃtez to go on the attack.
That’s not unusual in football. I had been known to plant a question myself. Put it this way, our press
office had warned me, ‘We think BenÃtez is going to have a go at you today.’
‘What about?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, but we’ve been tipped off,’ they said.
So, on television, BenÃtez puts his glasses on and produces this sheet of paper.
Facts.
The facts were all wrong.
First, he said I intimidate referees. The FA were scared of me, according to Rafa, even though I had
just been fined £10,000 by the FA two weeks previously, and I was failing to support the Respect
campaign. The Respect initiative had started that season, yet Rafa was going on about my criticism of
Martin Atkinson in a Cup tie the previous year, before the new guidelines had come into place. So he
was wrong in the first two things he said. The media loved it, even though the facts were inaccurate.
They were hoping it would start a war, that I would launch a rocket back.
In fact, all I said in reply was that Rafa was obviously ‘bitter’ about something and that I was at a
loss to explain what that might be. That was me saying to him: look, you’re a silly man. You should
never make it personal. That was the first time he tried those tactics, and each subsequent attack bore
the same personal edge.
My inquiries told me that he had been irritated by me questioning whether Liverpool would be able
to handle the title run in, whether they would buckle under the pressure. Had I been the Liverpool
manager, I would have taken that as a compliment. Instead BenÃtez interpreted it as an insult. If I, as
Manchester United manager, was talking about Liverpool and dropping in remarks to make them
wobble, my Anfield counterpart ought to know they’d got me worried.
When Kenny was in charge at Blackburn, and they were out in front in the title race, I piped up:
‘Well, we’re hoping for a Devon Loch now.’ That stuck. Devon Loch popped up in every newspaper
article. And Blackburn started to drop points. We ought to have won the League that year but Rovers
held on. There is no doubt we made it harder for them by raising the spectre of the Queen Mother’s
horse performing the splits on the Aintree run-in.
The advance publicity had been that BenÃtez was a control freak, which turned out to be correct, to a
point that made no sense. He displayed no interest in forming friendships with other managers: a
dangerous policy, because there would have been plenty from lesser clubs who would have loved to
share a drink and learn from him.
In the 2009–10 season he did come in for a glass at Anfield, but looked uncomfortable, and, after a
short while, said he needed to go, and that was that. To Sammy Lee, his assistant, I said: ‘At least
that’s a start.’
On the day Roberto MartÃnez, manager of Wigan Athletic, was quoted as saying I had ‘friends’ who
did my bidding in relation to BenÃtez (big Sam Allardyce was one he was referring to), Roberto
phoned me and put a call into the LMA to ask whether he should make a statement correcting the
story. Roberto told me he had no connection with BenÃtez, who had not helped him in any way. I think
MartÃnez had spoken to a Spanish paper about the way BenÃtez saw us, his rivals in England, but was
not endorsing that view himself. He was merely the messenger. You would think BenÃtez and MartÃnez
would have struck up an affinity, being the only Spanish managers in England.
BenÃtez would complain about having no money to spend, but from the day he landed, he doled out
more than me. Far more. It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no
money to spend. He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside
Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable
players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality. There was no
Souness or Dalglish or Ronnie Whelan or Jimmy Case.
BenÃtez did score two great successes in the transfer market: Pepe Reina, the goalkeeper, and
Fernando Torres, their striker. Torres was a very, very talented individual. We watched him many
times and tried to sign him when he was 16. We expressed our interest two years before he joined
Liverpool, but we always felt that our contact with him would end only in him receiving an improved
contract at Atlético Madrid. We watched him in many youth tournaments and always fancied him. He
was ingrained in the fabric at Atlético, so I was surprised Liverpool were able to prise him away.
BenÃtez’s Spanish connections must have helped.
Torres was blessed with great cunning: a shrewdness that was borderline Machiavellian. He had a
touch of evil, though not in a physical sense, and he had that total change of pace. In a 45-yard sprint
he was no faster than several Liverpool players, but he had that change of pace, which can be lethal.
His stride was deceptively long. Without warning he would accelerate and slice across you.
Conversely, I’m not sure he was at his best when things were going against him because his reactions
could become petty. Perhaps he was spoilt at Atlético Madrid, where he was the golden boy for so
long. He was captain there at 21.
He had a fine physique: a striker’s height and frame. And he was Liverpool’s best centre-forward
since Owen or Fowler. Another star, of course, was Steven Gerrard, who didn’t always play well
against Man United, but was capable of winning matches by himself. We made a show for him in the
transfer market, as did Chelsea, because the vibe was that he wanted to move from Anfield, but there
seemed to be some restraining influence from people outside the club and it reached a dead end.
His move to Chelsea seemed all set up. A question kept nagging at me: why did BenÃtez not trust
Gerrard as a central midfield player? The one thing we could be sure of in my later years against
Liverpool was that if their two central midfielders won it off you they would not do much with it. If
Gerrard was in there and he won it against you, you knew he had the legs and the ambition to go right
forward and hurt you. I could never understand why Liverpool so often neglected to play him centremid.
In 2008–09, when they finished second with 86 points, they had Alonso to make the passes and
Gerrard further up the pitch behind Torres.
Another of our advantages was that they stopped producing homegrown talents. Michael Owen was
probably the last. If Michael had joined us at 12 years old, he would have been one of the great
strikers. In the year he played in the Malaysian youth finals we had Ronnie Wallwork and John Curtis
there on England duty. When they returned I gave them a month off – sent them on holiday. Michael
Owen was straight into the Liverpool first team, with no rest and no technical development. Michael
improved as a footballer in the two years he had with us. He was terrific in the dressing room and was
a nice boy.
I think that lack of rest and technical development in his early years counted against him. By the
time Houllier inherited him, he was already formed and was the icon of the team. There was no
opportunity by then to take him aside and work on him from a technical point of view. I made a
mistake with Michael in the sense that I should have signed him earlier. There would have been no
chance of him coming straight to Man United from Liverpool, but we should have stepped in when he
left Real Madrid for Newcastle. He’s a fine young man.
Of the other Liverpool players who gave us trouble, Dirk Kuyt was as honest a player as you could
meet. I’m sure he was 6 feet 2 inches when he arrived and ended up 5 feet 8 inches because he ran his
legs into stumps. I’ve never known a forward player work so hard at defending. BenÃtez picked him
every game. But then, if something happens in the opposition penalty box, will he be sharp enough or
is he exhausted from all the scuffling?
Despite my reservations about him as a person and a manager, BenÃtez persuaded his players to
work their socks off for him, so there must be some inspirational quality there: fear, or respect, or
skill on his part. You never saw his teams throw in the towel, and he deserves credit for that.
Why did he not do as well as he might have at Anfield, from my perspective? BenÃtez had more
regard for defending and destroying a game than winning it. You can’t be totally successful these days
with that approach.
José Mourinho was far more astute in his handling of players. And he has personality. If you saw
José and Rafa standing together on the touchline, you knew you could pick the winner. You always
had to respect a Liverpool side. The same goes for some of the work BenÃtez put in, because they were
a very hard side to beat, and because he won a European Cup there. There were plus points. He got
lucky, but so did I, sometimes.
His mode on the touchline was to constantly move his players around the pitch, but I doubt whether
they were always watching him or acting on those instructions. No one could have understood all
those gesticulations. On the other hand, with Mourinho, in a Chelsea–Inter match, I noticed the
players sprinted over to him, as if to say, ‘What, boss?’ They were attentive to his wishes.
You need a strong manager. That’s vital. And BenÃtez is strong. He has great faith in himself and
he’s sufficiently stubborn to ignore his critics. He does that time and again. But he did win a European
Cup, against AC Milan in Istanbul in 2005, which offered him some protection against those who
dismissed his methods.
When Milan led 3–0 at half-time in that game, so the story goes, some of the Milan players were
already celebrating, pulling on commemorative T-shirts and jigging about. I was told Paolo Maldini
and Gennaro ‘Rino’ Gattuso were going crackers, urging their team-mates not to presume the game
was over.
Liverpool won the Cup that night with a marvellous show of defiance.
After a brief spell in charge at Anfield, Roy Hodgson gave way to Kenny again and Liverpool
embarked on another phase of major rebuilding. Yet few of the signings made in Kenny’s time
haunted me at night. We looked at Jordan Henderson a lot and Steve Bruce was unfailingly
enthusiastic about him. Against that we noticed that Henderson runs from his knees, with a straight
back, while the modern footballer runs from his hips. We thought his gait might cause him problems
later in his career.
Stewart Downing cost Liverpool £20 million. He had a talent but he was not the bravest or the
quickest. He was a good crosser and striker of the ball. But £20 million? Andy Carroll, who also
joined for £35 million, was in our northeast school of excellence, along with Downing and James
Morrison, who went on to play for Middlesbrough, West Brom and Scotland. The FA closed it down
after complaints from Sunderland and Newcastle. This was at the time academies started. The Carroll
signing was a reaction to the Torres windfall of £50 million. Andy’s problem was his mobility, his
speed across the ground. Unless the ball is going to be in the box the whole time, it’s very difficult to
play the way Andy Carroll does because defenders push out so well these days. You look for
movement in the modern striker. Suárez was not quick on his feet but has a fast brain.
The boys Kenny brought in from the youth set-up did well. Jay Spearing, especially, was terrific. As
a boy Spearing was a centre-back, with John Flanagan at full-back, and Spearing was easily the best of
them: feisty, quick, a leader. You could see he had something. He was all right in the centre of
midfield, but it was hard to visualise his long-term future. His physique perhaps counted against him.
Kenny won the League Cup, of course, and reached the final of the FA Cup, but when I heard that he
and his assistant Steve Clarke had been summoned to Boston to meet the club’s owners, I feared the
worst for them. I don’t think the protest T-shirts and defending Suárez in the Patrice Evra saga helped
Kenny. As a manager your head can go in the sand a bit, especially with a great player. If it had been a
reserve player rather than Suárez, would Kenny have gone to such lengths to defend him?
The New York Times and Boston Globe editorials about the subsequent Evra–Suárez non-handshake
showed the way the debate was going. Kenny’s problem, I feel, was that too many young people in the
club idolised him. Peter Robinson, the club’s chief executive in the glory years, would have stopped
the situation escalating to the degree it did. The club has to take precedence over any individual.
The next man in, Brendan Rodgers, was only 39. I was surprised they gave it to such a young coach.
A mistake I felt John Henry made in Brendan’s first weeks in charge in June 2012 was to sanction a
fly-on-the wall documentary designed to reveal the intimacies of life at Liverpool. To put that
spotlight on such a young guy was hard and it came across badly. It made no great impact in America,
so I could not work out what the point of it was. My understanding is that the players were told they
were obliged to give the interviews we saw on our screens.
Brendan certainly gave youth a chance, which was admirable. And he achieved a reasonable
response from his squad. I think he knew there had been some sub-standard buys. Henderson and
Downing were among those who would need to prove their credentials. In general you have to give
players you might not rate a chance.
Our rivalry with Liverpool was so intense. Always. Underpinning the animosity, though, was
mutual respect. I was proud of my club the day we marked the publication of the Hillsborough report
in 2012: a momentous week for Liverpool and those who had fought for justice. Whatever Liverpool
asked for in terms of commemoration, we agreed to, and our hosts made plain their appreciation for
our efforts.
I told my players that day – no provocative goal celebrations, and if you foul a Liverpool player,
pick him up. Mark Halsey, the referee, struck the right note with his marshalling of the game. Before
the kick-off, Bobby Charlton emerged with a wreath which he presented to Ian Rush, who laid it at the
Hillsborough Memorial by the Shankly Gates. The wreath was composed of 96 roses, one for each
Liverpool supporter who died at Hillsborough. Originally, Liverpool wanted me and Ian Rush to
perform that ceremony, but I thought Bobby was a more appropriate choice. The day went well,
despite some minor slanging at the end by a tiny minority.
For Liverpool to return to the level of us and Manchester City was clearly going to require huge
investment. The stadium was another inhibiting factor. The club’s American owners elected to
refurbish Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, rather than build a new arena. To construct a
major stadium these days is perhaps a £700 million enterprise. Anfield has not moved on. Even the
dressing rooms are the same as 20 years ago. At the same time, my reading of their squad was that
they needed eight players to come up to title-winning standard. And if you have made mistakes in the
transfer market, you often end up giving those players away for very little.
While Brendan Rodgers went about his work, Rafa BenÃtez and I had not seen the last of one
another. He returned to English football as Chelsea’s interim manager when Roberto Di Matteo, who
had won the Champions League in May, was sacked in the autumn of 2012. In a United press
conference soon after BenÃtez’s unveiling, I made the point that he was fortunate to inherit readymade
sides.
I felt his record needed placing in context. He won the Spanish League with 51 goals, in 2001–02,
which suggested he was a skilled pragmatist. But I found Liverpool hard to watch when he was
manager there. I found them dull. It was a surprise to me that Chelsea called him. When BenÃtez
placed his record alongside Di Matteo’s, it would have been two League titles with Valencia, a
European Cup and an FA Cup with Liverpool. In six months, Di Matteo had won the FA Cup and the
European Cup.
They were comparable records. Yet Rafa had landed on his feet again.
