I was gutted that Ian Rush had gone. It wasn’t just the advice and encouragement that he gave me as a young player trying to break into the first team, there was also something reassuring about having players like him and John Barnes around. They were the sort of players that gave you confidence. You’d look to your left and see Digger (Barnes), look to your right and see Tosh (Rush), and even if you were a goal down you’d think, ‘We can win this.’
But the baton had now been well and truly handed to the next generation and I was more than ready for the responsibility, as well as the challenge. As a gesture of his belief in me (and, I’m sure, there was an element of the boss throwing down the gauntlet), Roy Evans gave me Rushy’s prized Number 9 shirt. Finally, it had happened! The shirt that Phil Thompson told me I would never be fit to wear was, for the time being at least, mine. It was a big, big moment for me. That jersey had been worn by legends like Ian St John and Steve Heighway, before Rushy became synonymous with both the shirt and the countless goals he scored in it. No player ever owns Liverpool’s Number 9 jersey of course, we’re all just part of a dynasty – but boy, was I proud!
Almost as soon as I was given Number 9, The Kop had a new song for me, too – that simple chant based on a 60s hit called ‘Let’s Go’ by The Routers. It would only work if you have a two-syllable surname, and the chant was only ever bestowed upon true Kop idols. It started with ‘St John’, then when Kenny was at his height, it was his turn – you know, the simple clap, clap, clap intro, kind of ‘1, 2 … 1,2,3 … 1,2,3,4 – DALGLISH!’ Well, now it was my turn to inherit the shirt and the song. Kenny, Rushy and Steve Heighway had all played a part in getting me to this point and I promised myself I would do the shirt justice and score bucketloads of goals.
Like every other club in the wake of Euro 96, we splashed out on overseas talent. Up until this point, Liverpool had only occasionally looked abroad for signings – players like Jan Molby and Ronny Rosenthal being the exception rather than the norm. But we were now looking towards Europe for the value and quality that certain markets offered. In Patrik Berger, I felt we’d landed a proper, international-class midfielder. I would have loved his compatriot Pavel Nedved alongside him, too, but Paddy was class. He fitted in straight away and we started the season well enough: a goal for me in a 3–3 draw at Middlesbrough, followed by the usual home win against Arsenal. We were consistently inconsistent, yet, by December, we found ourselves top of the League.
On the Saturday before Christmas we faced Middlesbrough again, this time in a reverse of the opening day fixtures. We leathered them 5–1 – satisfying enough in itself, and also solidifying our position at the top. But, for me, that win was extra special for another reason: I scored with virtually the first kick of the game and managed to rile their players by consulting an imaginary watch as if to say: ‘How quick was that one?’ (It was 23 seconds, by the way.) They treated me to a few extra-special tackles, digs and elbows, after that, though nothing that would deter me from bagging my all-important second goal of the game on the half-hour mark. Not that the goal itself was particularly outstanding, it was what it symbolised – my 100th goal for Liverpool in just 165 games.
This was extra satisfying as I brought up my century in one less game than Rushy. I wish he’d have been there on the pitch to celebrate it with me because even though every one of us desperately wants to be the best – and strikers are worse than anyone, in that respect – Ian Rush was always the ultimate team player. He would have been over to me like a shot to ruffle my hair and remind me that, however many goals I went on to score, he would always have a much bigger nose than me! I went on to score four in that 5–1 win and celebrated the 100-goal landmark by taking off my shirt at the end of the game to reveal a cheeky T-shirt saying; ‘100 Up. Job’s a Good ’Un’ – a popular phrase at the time, coined by Bez from my namesake Shaun Ryder’s band, Happy Mondays. Unofficial T-shirts were to loom large over the next few months.
In the New Year we were back in European action and, once again, I found myself in the news for reasons other than kicking footballs into goal nets. I might have mentioned once or twice that both myself and Steve McManaman are proud Liverpool lads. Neither of us considers ourselves flash – far from it – and we have always tried to stay connected to the communities we come from. One of Macca’s uncles was a docker and by the winter of 1996–97, the dispute between the dockers and the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board was entrenched. It all started in September 1995, when the dockers came out in support of colleagues who had been dismissed without warning. The Liverpool dock workers found themselves, too, being sacked and, by March 1997, the detente was showing no signs of any kind of settlement being reached.
From our point of view, the dockers and their fellow workers had been denied basic civil liberties under new antiunion legislation. Their families had suffered two successive, very harsh Christmases, but worst of all, their plight was starting to be taken for granted. The support would always be there in a city like Liverpool, but it was becoming all too easy for people, no matter how well intentioned, to forget about the strike altogether. But Macca came up with a very effective plan to make sure the dockers stayed in the public eye.
Someone had designed a T-shirt, initially to raise awareness as well as much-needed funds. It was red with a message of support and the word DOCKERS prominently highlighted in the middle, using the Calvin Klein CK logo at the centre of the word. We had the second leg of our Cup Winners Cup tie against SK Brann coming up, which was guaranteed to be shown on TV. The idea was that Macca and I would wear the doCKers T-shirts under our LFC shirts so they would be seen by a TV audience as well as those inside Anfield on the night. Even though we both wore the shirts, I was first to score so, naturally, I lifted up my Liverpool top to show the Dockers message to the TV cameras that were honing in on me. We won the game 3–0 and all seemed to be well.
Next day, Roy Evans called me in – not to discipline me, but to tell me he’d had a call from Glenn Hoddle to say I’d be leading the England attack against Mexico in the forthcoming friendly. Happy days!
Before that though, we had a night match against Arsenal and controversy followed me to this game, too. It seems funny, looking back on this incident now, when Liverpool are known to many as ‘Penalty Pool’. The inference is that Liverpool go down too easily in an attempt to win penalties. Biased as I am, I just don’t see that at all. I can clearly remember incidents where Mo Salah, who is seen as the chief offender, has stayed on his feet when he’s being clipped and impeded and could very easily have given the referee a decision to make. I don’t think Liverpool have one single player who is consciously looking for a foul. I certainly never went to ground deliberately myself and this Monday night game against Arsenal towards the end of March 1997 was the living proof of that.
Both ourselves and Arsenal were still just about involved in the title race – we were third, they were fourth. The game at Highbury (remember Highbury?) was billed as a clash of the purists as the country’s two most attacking teams came up against each other. The first half was anything but – two unadventurous teams, each of them scared of losing, cancelling one another out. Then David Seaman had a ten-minute spell he’d rather forget. Firstly, Macca squared a ball to Patrik (Paddy) Berger, who sent in a hard, low shot that Seaman could only parry. Stan Collymore followed up and slotted the rebound to give us a 1–0 lead. Then Mark Wright sent a speculative ball for me to chase after and I found myself leaving Tony Adams in my wake, with only Seaman to beat.
I slightly overran the ball, giving Seaman a sniff of a chance, and he rushed out to try to smother it. But I got there first, nicked the ball past him and, in so doing, my momentum (and the change of direction) unbalanced me and I went sprawling in the box. Seaman hadn’t touched me and had no intention of doing so. Gerald Ashby, the referee, was chasing the play from behind and from his point of view, it probably looked a stone-cold foul by the keeper. I’ve watched the incident countless times since and I can understand the ref’s perspective. The speed Seaman came out, he would have clattered me if I hadn’t jumped out of the way and we would have both ended up hurt.
On the night, though, Ashby caught up with play and immediately pointed to the spot. Straight away, I jumped up and went over to the ref, waving my hands to say, ‘No contact, no contact.’ I assured him that David Seaman hadn’t touched me, but he’d already made his decision. A couple of our players arrived, telling me to shut it, the ref had already given the pen. I made one last, slightly more muted attempt to tell him Seaman hadn’t touched me. The ref muttered something like, ‘Maybe not, but the intent was there.’ This turned out to be a little-known but technically accurate reading of the penalty laws that came back to us again, much later in my Liverpool career, when the referee gave us a penalty at Sheffield United after their goalkeeper ‘intended’ to scythe down Stevie Gerrard! Anyway, the penalty was given, the Highbury crowd was baying for blood and while I didn’t, and would never deliberately miss the spot kick, I didn’t exactly put my bootlaces through it, either. Seaman got down to it and pushed the ball out, but Jason McAteer followed up to smash the ball underneath him into the net. It was Jason’s 60th game for Liverpool and his first ever goal. Understandably, he went potty with his goal celebration!
So potty, in fact, that clearly still on a high from his debut Liverpool goal, he made the gloriously ill-advised decision to accept an offer to film a shampoo commercial in Dublin. Jason was by now a well-established Republic of Ireland international, care of the Irish heritage that just about every single person born in and around Merseyside can trace. He was also the recipient of a new nickname – Dave – let’s just say it was a tribute to his often slow responses to everyday situations. It just sounded right for him, especially when you said it in a certain way: ‘Oh Day-ave!’ Anyway, Jason – Dave – was offered a well-paid gig to shoot an advert for Wash & Go shampoo, to be screened exclusively on TV, exclusively in Ireland. Not that he discussed the matter with us lot, but anyone could have told him that things like that tend not to stay secret. Understandably, however, Dave kept the deal along with his gorgeous, flowing locks – under his hat. He would have been better advised consigning that deal to the bin, though. However much Wash & Go paid Jason, nothing could compensate for the absolute mullering he got when the advert inevitably made its way across the Irish Sea. It featured a pouting McAteer, walking in slow motion towards the camera, shirt off, tossing his hair like a horse shaking its mane. As he gets nearer the camera, a voiceover goes:
‘One thing Jason will NOT tolerate is dandruff!’
A-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Brilliant. Priceless. As one would imagine, indeed, as one would demand, Dave was massacred for this indiscretion. It went on for weeks. The poor lad would turn up for training and the likes of Neil Ruddock would come jogging towards him in slow motion, arms out like he was greeting a long-lost friend and the rest of us would shout: ‘One thing Jason will NOT tolerate is dandruff!’
Over a period of a few weeks, dandruff was replaced by whatever we found amusing. Cheese. Pointed shoes. Farting. ‘One thing Jason will NOT tolerate is yellow! He simply will not have it!’ It all added up to a great camaraderie, though. We were a happy camp and that translated to our performances.
The Arsenal non-penalty game was on the Monday night, 24th March 1997. On the Wednesday, the club received a fax, addressed to me, from Sepp Blatter – the President of FIFA. He was basically telling me how refreshing it was that I’d tried to get the penalty decision overturned. The very next day, I received a letter from UEFA, telling me they were fining me £1,000 for displaying a political slogan on my T-shirt at the SK Brann game. All these years on, and I still wasn’t sure whether I was a Scally or a Saint!
But a season which had promised so much fizzled out into disappointment. In one of the most wretched displays of my time at Liverpool, we were beaten 3–0 by Paris Saint-Germain in the semi-final of the European Cup Winners Cup. The final was in Rotterdam that year and we felt we’d got the easiest draw, avoiding Fiorentina and Barcelona. This was an era before Paris Saint-Germain were a force in European football. It was a game we were expected to win and so we collectively approached it as though we expected to turn up and roll them over, just because we were Liverpool. We were awful that night in Paris, and we had more than just our pride to play for in the second leg at Anfield – we owed the supporters a proper Liverpool performance.
As always happens in these games, the crowd was right behind us – the noise was incredible and it really did feel as though we could turn the three-goal deficit around. We started well enough, too. Stan Collymore won a loose ball in the box, turned it back to me and I hit it first time, right across their keeper and in at the far post: 1–0 after ten minutes, game on! The Kop had this song based on ‘Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)’ by The Beautiful South and they were belting it out as we surged forward, attack after attack, chance after chance. Mark Wright got up above their defence to smash a header in from a corner: 2–0, with ten minutes left. We laid siege to PSG’s goal, but there were to be no fairy-tale heroics this time and, in spite of the song, no final in Rotterdam.
At the end of the 1996–97 season, Roy Evans came to the decision that his Collymore gamble hadn’t worked. Stan was a gifted, instinctive, often brilliant footballer but a very complex man. The fact that he never committed to a full-time home base in Merseyside should have set the alarm bells ringing, but if anything, Roy veered too much towards the Terry Venables school of nurture. He worked around Stan’s needs to a degree that, I think, pissed off the rest of the squad in the end. Stan was a home-loving lad and, ultimately, it suited all parties when Liverpool got £7 million for him from Aston Villa.
Since Roy Evans had come in as manager, he had gradually eased out the older players – John Barnes being the latest to leave in that summer of 1997. Roy brought in the promising young midfielder Danny Murphy from Crewe, a local lad and a die-hard Liverpool supporter from childhood. We also had a couple of highly rated kids coming up from the Academy, Jamie Carragher and David Thompson, plus a promising little striker called Michael Owen. Roy had already brought in Patrik Berger the previous summer and he now added Paul Ince and Oyvind Leonhardsen to inject a bit of energy and drive into the midfield, as well as the experienced German striker Karl-Heinz Riedle to replace Collymore. There was never any big announcement from the directors, but it was widely understood that we had to finally deliver on our promise this next season, or Evans would be out, too.
Looking back on all the ups and downs of my career, there were things that didn’t seem too significant at the time that, on reflection, turned out to have a huge impact. One horrible example of this syndrome happened right at the end of pre-season, in August 1997. It was a tradition, up until then, for Liverpool to step up the pre-season conditioning programme with a trip to Norway, the rugged terrain being good for endurance work. The range of opposition we could play against varied from rank amateur to a good standard of highly competitive European-level teams too. And there were Liverpool fans literally everywhere you went, so the welcome was always abundant.
As players, we weren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of the Norway tour. There was a feeling that a few too many of the players we came up against went in that little bit too enthusiastically against us – either because they supported Man United (the other huge team in Norway) or maybe they wanted to leave a lasting impression. Either way, we thought they were a bit keen and we made our feelings clear to the management – tell them not to kick us this year! But, that year, my demise had nothing to do with being kicked. I’d lined up against Oslo FC alongside that little striker from the Academy, Michael Owen, and we clicked straight away. Both of us played well and each of us bagged a brace. Michael went off first, then Roy Evans signalled across to me that I’d be the next to be subbed and I should get myself ready to come off. No matter that this was a low-key workout against a part-time team, there is always a part of any striker that wants to get a hat-trick.
Knowing I’d be coming off any second, I made a run into the box, attempted to get on the end of a cross, jumped, landed awkwardly and tried to carry on. But there was this huge stab of pain right through my knee up to my thigh, and straight away I knew it wasn’t a ‘shrugger-offer’. I managed to hobble off and get the knee wrapped in ice, but by God, it hurt! When they got me back to Liverpool, our worst fears were confirmed: I’d jarred my knee ligaments and only rest and physio would get me back to full fitness. In all, I missed the first seven games of the new season, by which time Owen had seized his opportunity to be the main man, scoring against Wimbledon in the first game of the season.
Over the next few weeks, both Michael and Karl-Heinz scored important goals and, even though I immediately got right into the scoring groove as soon as I returned, I always felt as though as I had some catching up to do. It was as though I still felt the need to prove to myself and the manager that the Liverpool strike force should always be a case of Robbie Fowler +1. I reckon I conned the medical team, rushed my comeback by at least a fortnight and put myself under unnecessary pressure. In my first three games back, I scored then stupidly got myself sent off at Bolton – a game I’d scored in during the first bloody minute! That meant I was out in the cold again, waiting to get back and, belatedly, get this ‘new’ season on track. Meanwhile, we were the same old Liverpool we had been since I broke into the side as a kid – beating teams like Leeds and Arsenal at their own grounds (Steve McManaman’s goal at Arsenal that November is one of my all-time favourites!), then coming unstuck at Anfield against a team like Barnsley. It was so frustrating, but I had only myself to blame.
We had a better run of form over Christmas, winning six out of seven and drawing the other – then it was Everton next up. Thinking back to that original break against Bristol City – the way I’d rushed back to face Everton and the way I had always rushed myself back from injuries ever since – it’s no great surprise that I did myself in that night. It was a bitterly cold night and with the score at 1–1, with Liverpool throwing everything at them, I was as desperate as ever to get that derby-winning goal. A ball came over from the right and I remember thinking to myself, this is it! It’s on! As I focused on the ball and where I was going to guide my header, I felt two sharp pains – one in my head as Everton’s keeper, Thomas Myhre, tried to punch the ball clear. The other, sharper pain ripped through my thigh, just above the left knee.
I’ll never know for sure whether Myhre did me with his knee as we both went up for the ball, or whether Gavin McCann came across me as he tried to block my run. Two things I am certain of, though: firstly, if I’d come off in that pre-season game in Norway a minute earlier, if I hadn’t jarred those knee ligaments and rushed myself back from injury, I doubt the impact that night would have been anything like as serious.
But it was serious – as I landed from the challenge, I knew it was a bad one. And that’s the second thing I know for sure – that I have never, ever known any pain like it. It was horrific, like a nuclear bomb going off in my brain, thousands of stabbing pains rippling right through me as my knee gave way as I landed. I went down on the pitch, tried to sit up, barely able to take in what was happening. It’s funny, the protocol of getting injured: you’re conscious of the cameras and the opposition fans and you don’t want to make yourself look stupid, crying and writhing on the grass, but that’s exactly what I felt like doing. What’s worse is that you lie to yourself. By sitting up and trying to come across as though it was just another knock, I was already plea-bargaining with myself, trying to tell myself it wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe a bit of rest and a bit of physio and I’d be back in action for the climax of the season.
Then another panicky thought – what about the World Cup? It was still four months away. I’d be fine for that, wouldn’t I? I had just about worked my way into Glenn Hoddle’s trust and I reckoned I stood a great chance, not just of making it to France 98 as a squad player but actually being in his starting 11. Maybe I’d be out for a month or two with this, but I’d be okay for the World Cup, wouldn’t I? Our physio Mark Leather’s face told another story: he could barely look at me. All I wanted to know were those two basic, but definitive things – how bad? And how long?
But my season was over and, deep down, I knew it.