16

HOU LET THE GOD OUT?

So, the good times were back? Were they fuck!

Well, our wedding was bliss, at least. Me and Kerrie tied the knot at Duns Castle in Scotland – a proper fairy-tale wedding for two normal, working-class kids like us. For a so-called ‘celebrity wedding’ it was a low-key affair, attended mainly by our two huge families, our friends and a few of my closest teammates (including, for conspiracy theorists who are hell-bent on insisting me and him never saw eye-to-eye, my pal Michael Owen). I’ve never seen my wife look so beautiful as she did on 9th June 2001. The sun shone down, our guests danced the night away, our daughters Madison and Jaya stole the show as the cutest little bridesmaids ever and us newlyweds had the time of our lives.

And the open-top bus tour around Liverpool was spectacular. I knew that Liverpool was an absolute beast of a club just waiting to be reignited, but the scale of the parade was staggering. The city is supposed to be equally divided between Everton and Liverpool supporters, but if that’s the case, Liverpool must have a population of about 2 million! It was quite literally a sea of red, from start to finish, as far as the eye could see.

Jürgen Klopp has just been through the exact same thing and I know exactly what he means when he says that it’s being so up close to the fans that makes you realise how enormous football is in this city, to this club. You can see the adoration in their eyes, you can really see what all this means to them – it’s their life. After Liverpool won the double in 1976, the club brought out its famous pinstripe scarf, one of the first examples of a football club dipping its toe into the world of official merchandise.

Klopp said he was always aware of Liverpool as one of the great, historic teams in Europe but he’d never quite realised that we were the biggest club in the world. That’s no exaggeration – a million people lining the streets of Liverpool, with mirror celebrations taking place in Egypt, Indonesia, Australia, Nigeria – quite literally all over the world. I felt like a king as I sat at the front of that bus as it made its way through the city, past elated, euphoric faces, just as I’d been when I was a kid, dreaming that one day it would be me up there on that bus, waving to the crowd, the hero of the hour. I’d been God for a while, but that day I was a king, too.

And then pre-season started.

Often, when something inexplicably goes wrong, you retrace your steps to the point when things were still trundling along as normal. You look at what happened between then and now and try to work out what changed. For example, if you have a pint with Bill and you part as the best of mates, then Bill is weird with you next time you see him, you’d want to know what had happened in between, wouldn’t you? You’d want to find out who Bill had seen since your friendly pint and what that person might have said or done to make him change gear with you. This was the position I found myself in, scratching my head in the stands as the Charity Shield kicked off between Liverpool and Manchester United on 12th August 2001.

Our pre-season had gone well, culminating in us easily beating FC Haka of Finland in the qualifying round of the Champions League. Gérard Houllier didn’t usually announce the team prior to the day of the game, but on the Wednesday before the Charity Shield, he took the unusual step of telling me that I would be captaining the side. I was a newly married father with another child on the way, working hard at the challenge of earning (and keeping) my place in a team full of exciting attacking talent and now, I would be walking out once again as captain of the club I adored. After numerous false dawns and setbacks, I was finally beginning to find some quality and consistency, on and off the pitch.

I threw myself into training sessions, doing extra routines and practice on free-kicks and long-range shots into an empty net. One practice session, Phil Thompson came and stood behind the goal to watch. Wanting to impress him with my accuracy, I leathered a beauty, high into the net – no way any keeper, anywhere, would have got a hand to that one! But Phil Thompson jumped back like he’d been shot and started screaming at me that, with the ball travelling at that pace, I could have seriously injured him. My mistake, in retrospect, was to challenge him on this. Instead of apologising and defusing the incident there and then, I laughed at how upset he was and reminded him that there was a net between him and a potential trip to casualty. That was that. Thommo trooped off, I carried on with my shooting practice and the whole thing was forgotten.

Or so I thought. Even though Thompson was a little more remote than usual, neither he nor the manager gave me any indication that anything was amiss. We travelled down to Cardiff in good spirits, speculated about how weird it would be, playing in the first-ever ‘indoor’ game (the Millennium had a retractable roof, which was to be closed against the rainstorm forecast for Sunday’s game). But the real storm happened inside our changing room: Gérard announced the team, and I wasn’t in it. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even on the bench – I’d been bombed out completely. I was stunned. Horrified. Heartbroken. Embarrassed. All of these emotions shot through me, one after another, as the message sank in and the implications hit me.

Why? That was the question I found myself asking as the game kicked off and Liverpool raced into an early lead. Why am I not out there, captaining that side? The truth was staring me in the face, of course, but I couldn’t see it. Maybe I was in denial, but it simply didn’t enter my head that a juvenile incident on the training ground had escalated into a disciplinary matter. Houllier hadn’t even been there, so how would he know about it? How would he be able to judge the rights and wrongs of it? I sat there trying to trace things back, trying to recall any conversation or interaction between myself and the manager that might have been taken the wrong way, but I was coming up with nothing. I had no idea whatsoever why I’d been dropped.

I found out the next day, when Gérard called me into his office. As I went in, he was doing that routine of shuffling through papers, his glasses halfway down his nose, acting like he was a bit distracted – then he suddenly looked up and came out with it: he dropped me because I’d been disrespectful to Phil Thompson. Phil had told him that I had deliberately tried to humiliate him in front of the squad, by kicking the ball at him in training. Thommo was adamant that I’d been trying to hit him and that Houllier had to make an example of me. I remember standing there, thinking, who’s the boss, here – you or him? Gérard told me that, until I apologised in person, I would not be considered for selection. I told him that this was all my arse – there was nothing to apologise for. If I’d wanted to hit Thompson, believe me, I was pretty sure I could have done so.

There was a horrible stand-off for the first few weeks of the 2001–02 season, during which I missed the curtain-raiser against West Ham, the Super Cup win in Monaco (our fifth trophy in six months!) and the Goodison derby. It was an awful period, professionally, knowing I had done nothing to justify this prolonged punishment yet slowly realising, if I was to come through it, I had no option but to grit my teeth and apologise. Like I’ve said, I like Thommo a lot and given my time again, I would have just apologised for the near-miss straight away. We’re both stubborn Scousers and there’s no doubt, even after it was all over and dealt with, the spat created an awkwardness that was hard to shift.

Around this time, I started hearing and reading stories about other clubs coming in for me. At different times, Arsenal and Man United were supposed to have made enquiries, but my agent George told me the only serious offer had come from Chelsea. Clubs were getting wind of the fact that I was not starting games and having kept up my scoring ratio whenever I played, it was a back-handed compliment that I was in demand – just not at my own club.

But then the day came that put everything into perspective: another of the clubs supposedly in for me, Leeds United, were our visitors for a midday kick-off. It was an odd one – even though I wasn’t remotely sure whether I was coming or going, I was in the starting 11, possibly because Emile Heskey was injured.

We started badly and Leeds went in 1–0 up at half-time. It seems mad to say this now, but Leeds were the Man City of the era, spending big money on all the best players as chairman Peter Ridsdale gambled on returning this sleeping giant to the big time. They had brought in Rio Ferdinand for a world record fee for a defender and added Robbie Keane, Mark Viduka, Lee Bowyer, Seth Johnson, Dominic Matteo, Jonathan Woodgate, Olivier Dacourt and Danny Mills, all for top money.

At half-time, Houllier started to go through the motions of a rousing team talk, but his voice seemed to be getting weaker and weaker as he grew more and more short of breath. He just stopped talking, nodded for Phil Thompson to continue and left the changing room. We went back out, played a much better second half and – putting all modesty aside, as per – I was 95 per cent responsible for our equaliser, with Danny Murphy running in for a simple header into the empty net. I reeled away and sprinted down the touchline, still feeling I had a point to prove, wanting to remind the manager I still had plenty to give – but he wasn’t there. Even then, that struck me as highly unusual. Gérard was one of those managers who was always pitch side, analysing the game and looking for the little details that might turn a draw into a win.

As soon as we got back into the dressing room at the end of the game, Thompson explained to us why Houllier was absent: he had suffered some kind of seizure at half-time and been rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. The next 24 hours were going to be critical and we should all prepare ourselves for the worst. No matter how revered Bill Shankly may be in Liverpool, he was wrong about one thing: football is not, and never should be, a matter of life and death.

This was the start of a surreal period for me at Liverpool and it ended with me leaving the club.

Gérard had suffered a ruptured aorta – which is the main arterial valve to the heart – but an incredible medical response (starting with the first responder, our own club doctor, Mark Waller) led to the surgeon and his team placing him in an induced coma to stitch the aorta and save his life. There were differing reports coming out of the hospital saying he had been moments from death, but what was for certain was that he’d been through a serious trauma.

We flew off to Kiev for a Champions League game determined to win for the boss and, although I didn’t play, we dug in for a solid 2-1 victory. Next was an away game at Leicester – always a tough place to go – where we won 4–1. Having scored a hat-trick, I started looking forward to the next run of fixtures, but Thommo left me out for both of our next matches. Beyond gutted, all I could think was that it was my goals that had got us into the Champions League in the first place. I hated being left out in any circumstance, but seemingly being dropped at whim, with no explanation offered, was more than I could bear.

A ray of hope and perspective came with the arrival of our third daughter, Mackenzie, born on 27th September 2001. As I held her in my arms, I thought to myself, okay, football is important, but it’ll never be as important as this. I wanted to get a handle on things now and had various thoughts and plans whirling around my head – I was going to speak to George about a move. I was going to speak to the chairman or the club’s chief executive to see if either of them could get to the bottom of what was starting to feel like a prolonged Cold War. I was even going to speak to Phil Thompson – fully installed as caretaker manager, now – try to clear the air with him, see what it might take to put the past behind us and work together to ensure a better future. In the end, though, I decided just to bite my lip, keep my head down, work as hard as I humanly could and see where that might take me.

Where it took me was into the loving arms of David O’Leary and his emerging young Leeds United side – though not without one final slap in the face. Towards the end of November we’d been soundly beaten by Barcelona and with the team obviously needing a bit of freshening up, I was back in the starting line-up for our next game. Furthermore, with Jamie Redknapp still not back to full fitness, I was captain for this mouth-watering clash with Sunderland at our Anfield bastion. Sunderland were struggling, and I had high hopes of announcing my return with a few goals – but 25th November 2001 was to be significant for other reasons.

The first half was dull but – more or less – we stuck to the regular script and Emile Heskey scored, putting us at 1–0. Then came the ‘less’ part of the scenario. Didi Hamann was sent off for a high challenge; at the break, Phil Thompson went through the motions of an apology – with only ten men, we’d have to shore up the defence and midfield and try to grind out the win. This was all by way of telling me that I, the captain, would be the one coming off, which turned out to be my final act (hold your horses!) as a Liverpool player. The bare statistics for the day read Liverpool 1 (Heskey) Sunderland 0.

For me, though, it was a whole different story.