In what was turning out to be a brilliant season for me, personally, I got my first call-up to the senior England squad. Terry Venables had been to watch me a few times and the last time he’d been up at Anfield, he came to find me and told me to keep on doing what I was doing and I’d get the call-up. How many times had I heard that one before? This time, though, I was double-keen to believe him as Euro 96 was around the corner. Skinner, Baddiel and The Lightning Seeds were in the charts, football was coming home and every single one of us wanted to be a part of it. The major obstacle for me, though, was the players I was up against for a place in that squad – let alone a starting place, or a role from the bench. Absolutely nailed-on to start, and probably the first name on Venables’, or any manager’s, team sheet, was Alan Shearer – simply the best striker in the Premier League.
With England hosting the tournament, there were no competitive games for almost two years, but in the succession of friendlies leading into 1996, Shearer had struck up a great, intuitive partnership with Teddy Sheringham. They seemed more or less guaranteed to start. After that, there was a glut of hopefuls – Les Ferdinand, Peter Beardsley, Andy Cole, Stan Collymore, Ian Wright, Nicky Barmby, Robert B. Fowler … Everybody wanted to make it into that 22-man squad, but someone, somewhere along the way, was going to be left disappointed. Meanwhile I clung to El Tel’s words of encouragement. I was doing my bit, scoring screamers virtually every week and keeping Shearer in my sights, but as we left the New Year behind and headed towards Easter, I was beginning to lose hope.
As so often happens, just as I was starting to let go of my dreams of making the cut, I got my chance. I’d made it onto the bench for the friendly against Bulgaria at Wembley and spent most of the second half warming up. On 75 minutes, I got the nod to strip and get ready, and with just over ten minutes left to play, I was on.
This was it, I was about to become a full England International!
Playing for your country means different things to different people but, honestly, I was on cloud nine. I think the rejection all those years before at the England Youth trials still rankled with me on some level. It was always important to me that I achieved due recognition as being a top, top striker at every stage of my career. In public, I might have said I wasn’t that bothered about not being picked, but privately, I wanted it and thought I deserved it.
As I was waiting on the sidelines, about to come on and make my full debut, it felt like another part of the journey was complete: it was huge for me. I basically moon-walked onto the Wembley turf and if I’m honest about it, did very little other than run around and try my best. Still, we won 1–0, and Venables came and put his arm around me afterwards to reassure me, again, that he wanted to get me into the starting line-up, somehow.
True to his word, I started the very next friendly a month later, against Croatia. And I got the Professional Footballers’ Association’s Young Player of the Year for the second season in a row. With an FA Cup final on the horizon and another fine haul of goals already, the last few weeks of the 1995–96 season were starting to look tasty. An FA Cup win to go with my League Cup winners’ medal was the overriding priority – then, if I could just nab one of those last few places up for grabs in the Euro 96 squad, it would be a season to look back on with real satisfaction!
But there was a problem. No matter how well Liverpool played as a team, no matter who we beat, no matter how emphatically we beat them, we found we were dogged by name and reputation. To our utter bemusement, we had become The Spice Boys. We laughed it off, at first – in that era of Loaded magazine, it was almost a back-handed compliment. By calling us Spice Boys, the press were saying the Liverpool lads were living their lives in 3-D. At that time, in that era, you were almost expected to ‘have it large’. There was a fabricated rivalry between Blur and Oasis, the two biggest bands in the country, that was more focused on their excesses than their music. There was a whole type of telly called ‘zoo’ TV – shows like TFI Friday, where people would essentially sign up to humiliate themselves in public. The new Leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, sold himself as a future Prime Minister not by virtue of his policies, but the fact that he used to be in a band himself, and might possibly, once upon a time, have indulged in a bit of (nudge-nudge) horseplay. New Labour were keen to tap into pop culture and football’s huge nationwide profile, with Blair adapting The Lightning Seeds’ Euro 96 anthem at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, when he said the immortal line: ‘Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming. Labour’s coming home!’
Even Radio 1 – part of the BBC, remember, moral guardians to the nation – had a popular daytime strand called Bird or Bloke, where listeners had to guess the gender of some former celebrity (or nonentity) they’d plucked out of a hat. The UK was a little lairy, in truth, and this was the backdrop to the so-called Spice Boys – stars on the pitch and stars off it, too, allegedly.
And that’s the part you find hard to live down: your life away from football, blown-up in full, all over the tabloids. Full disclosure – we didn’t deserve the Spice Boys tag. If we’d won the Cup that year, things might have been very, very different. Further disclosure – we probably didn’t help ourselves, either. Not one single thing pointed to a collective breakdown in standards, but it’s fair to say Bill Shankly might have struggled with some of the choices we made. David James modelled Y-fronts for Armani. Jamie Redknapp went out with (and subsequently married) pop star Louise Nurding from Eternal. Lads like John Scales and Phil Babb would go to parties and clubs in London – but mainly after Saturday games against London teams. Jason McAteer did a shampoo commercial. Steve McManaman’s manager (say that with your mouth full!) was Simon Fulwell, who looked after – you guessed it – The Spice Girls. And, because of that connection, and because Jamie was seeing Louise and because Jamo’s fashion-world connections led to Armani supplying our Cup final suits, we became collectively dubbed The Spice Boys.
Macca and I used to go to Wade Smith, a designer clothing shop that had opened in Liverpool on the back of the craze for wearing hard-to-get training shoes and sportswear. We loved our clothes, but the Armani suits were another level up. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t want Giorgio Armani designing their suits? Did being a footballer mean that you had to wear some dowdy off-the-peg number to show how ‘grounded’ you were? I don’t mind saying it, I was made up when Armani came on board. I thought the suits were smart and, in that age of Cool Britannia, yeah, they were cool!
Of course, our light, stylish Armani outfits passed into folklore as an enduring symbol of the way footballers were turning into feckless playboys and losing sight of the game itself. Hand on heart, nothing could have been further from the truth. I’ll say it again – if we’d have won that final against United, the ‘ice cream’ suits would have become part of the folklore, the day the Liverpool cool cats outfoxed and outdressed the Manchester Steady Eddies. But we didn’t beat them, did we? Somehow, this lip-smacking final just never got going, and one of the dullest games in FA Cup history was petering out towards the prolonged agony of extra time, when the cruellest of blows was struck by … yep, Eric Cantona!
What made it worse was that the ‘assist’ bounced off Ian Rush in what turned out to be his last touch as a Liverpool player. We were gutted. For a team that had supposedly lost sight of who we were and where we came from, we were inconsolable.
I didn’t want to go up for my medal, I just wanted to get away from there – confine a very bad day at the office to history and start, as quickly as possible, to put it all behind me. But, it hurt … It hurt badly.