17
LEEDS, LEEDS, LEEDS!
I got home and just sat there, listless. Kerrie and I spoke and concluded it just wasn’t good for any of us if I was constantly feeling bitter and suspicious and unappreciated. The next day, I spoke to George and told him, though it broke my heart to be saying this, I felt it was in everyone’s best interests if I looked for a new club. It turned out there were two serious offers – Chelsea had been interested for ages and now Leeds United had started to make overtures, too. As often seemed to be the case where I’m concerned, there was a glorious irony in what came next.
George did his due diligence on Chelsea and a lot of people who knew the ins and outs of the club told him they were on their last cigar. They were heavily in debt, struggling to sustain themselves and gambling on qualifying for the Champions League to attract the level of sponsorship and kit deals that could help save the club. But there was a rumour that their debts were secured against the prime real estate of Stamford Bridge itself and predators were circling, waiting to starve the club out so they could foreclose on its assets and make a fortune from developing that prosperous little corner of Chelsea. It sounded unthinkable, but Chelsea was supposedly in real danger of being the first Premier League football club ever to go bust.
But, while Chelsea seemed to be hovering on the precipice, Leeds United was going from strength to strength. The club had won the Premiership in 1992 and got to the Champions League semi-final twice (in fact, if they’d have beaten Valencia in the second semi, they would have played Macca’s Real Madrid in the final!). Now, under David O’Leary, Leeds had a policy of recruiting and developing the very best young British talent available. They played the kind of fast, creative, attacking football that is a striker’s dream. I felt that, while Liverpool were once again winning trophies and making a realistic challenge for the top prizes, their football under Gérard Houllier veered towards the defensive and pragmatic. Michael Owen was top scorer that season with 12 Premier League goals. I’d never be so blinkered as to dispute the outcome of Houllier’s revolution – a club moving forward – but, for a goal-scorer, it was slim pickings at Anfield.
If I needed any confirmation that it was time to go, the feedback we were getting from Leeds and Chelsea was that Houllier had already sanctioned the sale. He flatly denied that he had put me up for a sale and maybe that’s the case, but he certainly wasn’t going to stand in the way of my departure. It came to a point where I just thought, if we were able to do a deal with Peter Ridsdale, the chairman at Leeds, that’s where I would go. I would fit in nicely there and score plenty of goals – win-win.
I’d met David O’Leary a few times and really liked him as a fella. He had that nice combination of humour, enthusiasm and a real love for the game, but you could see he was not one to be messed with, either. He spoke to me about how he’d see me playing alongside Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka, with other creative attacking players like Mickey Bridges, Jason Wilcox and Robbie Keane coming into the picture, too. I didn’t take too much persuading. So, the important things discussed, we headed on to talk terms with Ridsdale himself, then the other Leeds directors. We met up in a nice hotel by a canal, in a neglected, formerly industrial part of Leeds city centre that was all being redeveloped. The directors were warm and confident, talking up their plans to transform Elland Road into a 70,000-capacity super stadium. They had Man United in their sights and held huge ambitions for the club. It seemed to me as though the city as well as the club was on the up and I was keen to play my part. On 27th November 2001, two days after the Sunderland game, the transfer was done for £12,000,000 and I’d like to think everyone got a good deal!
I was 26, newly married and now father to three young girls. I’d seen how it could backfire for players like Stan Collymore when they make a big-money move to a new club, but don’t then commit to living in the city. When Stan arrived at Liverpool, he stayed with David James and his family for a bit, but in the main, would drive up to training every day from Cannock in Staffordshire, where his mum lived. The monotony of that can’t have been good for him or the club. Somehow, it always felt as though he had one foot in Liverpool, the other elsewhere. Looking back on my own experiences now, particularly some of the dark times I went through at Manchester City, I can sympathise with Collymore to a degree. I can see how that long drive symbolised his state of mind – he must never have really felt at home after he moved to Liverpool.
I’d signed a long-term contract and I was determined that, as a family, we should commit ourselves to Leeds wholeheartedly. We found ourselves a nice house with a big garden for the kids in a quiet suburb near the club’s Thorp Arch training facility. A few weeks after we moved in, I came down one morning to find the place had been burgled while we were asleep upstairs. It took ages for it to sink in, because they’d removed an entire glass panel in the kitchen door and gone through the house while we’d been sleeping. For anyone who has been through that, you’ll know what a destabilising shock to the system it can be – you feel violated, vulnerable and unsafe.
For Kerrie, spending a fair bit of time on her own while I was at training, or away from home playing for the team, it was a difficult, unsettling introduction to our new life. Her sisters, her family, her friends and everything she knew was back on Merseyside. With Christmas on the horizon, we agreed that she and the girls would move back for the holiday and we’d take things from there. But, over that period, we saw and fell in love with the house on the Wirral that is still the Fowler residence today. Kerrie and our three girls moved in and, secure in the knowledge that they were happy and settled once again, I got my head down and got on with trying to make a proper impact at Leeds United.
I had to smile when I found out my debut would be at Craven Cottage, where it had all begun almost eight years before. This time, however, there would be no debut goal – no goals for either side at all, in fact – and the 0–0 bore draw was one to forget. But I didn’t take too much longer to open my account, scoring the second and third goals in a 3–2 win just before Christmas – against Everton. Happy days! I then got a hat-trick in a 3–0 win against Bolton on Boxing Day and then, on New Year’s Day, scored an absolute beauty against my old sparring partner David James in a 3–0 home win against West Ham. We were top of the League, playing some beautiful football, and I was scoring goals again – the Ridsdale plan was working!
Looking back, the start of 2002 was the time when more and more rumours began to circulate that perhaps it was Leeds United, not Chelsea, who were staring the Grim Reaper in the face. There will always be whispering campaigns in football. It’s almost a sport in its own right in the British press that, when a team starts doing well, stories will emerge about some murky skeleton lurking in their wardrobe. You only have to look at Raheem Sterling at Manchester City – as fine a role model as there is in modern-day football. Yet the press spent more time obsessing about his gun tattoo than all the work he does with City’s schools and community programme, let alone the kids from the estate where he grew up. Raheem bought tickets for last year’s FA Cup Final for 500 kids from his old school – but he’s got a tattoo to show that he’s a top marksman, so clearly, he must be advocating gun crime! That’s just the way it is with football and certain elements of the press in this country – so-and-so has a gambling habit, such-and-such had a scrap with the manager in training, Club X has been holding secret talks with Player A’s agent.
Almost as soon as I got to Leeds there were rumours that Rio Ferdinand and Lee Bowyer would be leaving – to Man United in Rio’s case and, ironically, Liverpool in the case of Lee. And so we ignored all the fluff and carried on winning games – except that the winning run stuttered, then petered out altogether. We got a bit of bad luck with injuries, suspensions and the occasional dip in form, but nothing that really explains a winless run that stretched from New Year’s Day 2002 all the way into March.
A low point for me was a crushing 4–0 defeat at home to Liverpool in the February. They were brilliant – Michael Owen and Emile Heskey both scored. I didn’t get a sniff – but the thing that really got to me was the way the Liverpool support sang my name all the way through the game. You could write it off as them just being in high spirits because they were playing us off the park and about to go top of the League, but that loyalty and love from them made me think – for the first time since the move, really – that I might have made a terrible mistake.
Our form picked up again, we started creating chances and I was finding the back of the net. We beat Ipswich, Blackburn and Leicester in successive games, with goals from R.B. Fowler in each match (two against Blackburn!). But that Leicester game, in farcical fashion, summed up the way trouble had a knack of finding me and smacking me on the arse. The whole thing was reminiscent, in a way, of the non-event when I supposedly tried to take an inch off the fabled Thompson that time on the training ground. As we were warming up and kicking in before the match at Filbert Street, the Leicester mascot – a grown man, by the way, dressed as a fox – ran into the box, waving to the crowd and making funny gestures at the Leeds players to get a laugh. All good, harmless fun. As he turned to take his applause, I chipped the ball at the fox’s head. Bang, goal! The crowd laughed, one or two of them jeered and I ran over and kind of ruffled the fox’s head and mock-wrestled with him/it. It was all a bit of fun and that was that. We all trooped off for our pre-match team talk, then out we came, won the match 2–0 (Mark Viduka and I both scored), business as usual.
Try then, dear reader, to imagine my dismay when two stout officers of the Leicestershire Constabulary attended Leeds United’s Thorp Arch training facility the following Monday to file a complaint of assault against one Robert Fowler, employee of said football club. I was stunned.
‘Approximately 14:30 hours last Saturday, sir they began, unable to make eye contact.
‘14:30 hours? That’s half two! I was getting ready for a football match!’
Leicester Copper Number One looked at Leicester Copper Number Two. Each of them did a general excuse-me, inviting the other to break the bad news.
‘What exactly am I supposed to have done at approximately 14:30 hours in the Filbert Street area of Leicester?’ I enquired. Copper Two rolled his eyes, looked down and tried to spit it out.
‘It’s been alleged … well, suggested …’
He was having difficulty in finding the words. Copper Number One came to his rescue.
‘Look, Robbie, we’re genuinely sorry about this. I mean, it’s embarrassing, but we are obliged to investigate …’
‘Investigate what, though?’
It was back to Copper Two for the pièce de resistance.
‘Filbert the Fox says you assaulted him.’
Five full minutes later, we were all still rolling around, laughing.
It was genuinely hilarious, yet it summed up the more cartoonish, hapless side of my career. I’d made this big move to a new club – a brave move, in many respects, one I didn’t really have to make. It had all started well – the team was winning, we were top of the League … Then players started to be linked with other clubs. Suddenly, the momentum slowed. There was a sense of impending doom beginning to hover around the place. The things we were doing instinctively became laboured, confidence seemed to drain away – and to top it all, I found myself being cautioned for GBH against a comedy fox.
By the end of the season I was equal top scorer with Mark Viduka on 12 goals from only 18 games. Having played alongside some very special strike partners over the years, I’m often asked who was the best of them? Unquestionably, that is always going to be Rushy – simply the greatest striker I have ever known. But, in terms of pure finesse and technique, Mark Viduka is the most talented partner I’ve ever had. If Ridsdale could have steadied the ship and given David O’Leary the means and the security to push this fabulously talented squad of players on to the next level, who knows whether his new gold dream could have been delivered?
As it turned out, the 70,000-capacity stadium stayed resolutely and forever more at the planning stage – then the first departures began, in what ultimately escalated into an exit stampede. Rio went to Man United. Robbie Keane went to Spurs. Lee Bowyer went to Liverpool … Then he didn’t. I still to this day don’t know for sure what happened there. It was all around the training ground that Lee had packed up and gone, and we were reading about his £9 million switch across the Pennines when he came ambling into the canteen with his shaving bag. Didn’t say a word about it – it was one of those that quite simply didn’t work out.
We still had an outside chance of making the Champions League, which would have been a (drum roll!) godsend for Peter Ridsdale. In the penultimate game of that 2001–02 season, I picked up an injury to my hip away at Derby County. It was just a twinge, a little pull – or so I thought. I had actually torn the labrum, which is the soft tissue around your hip that allows smooth, easy movement. To me, it was just a tweak – nothing so bad that I couldn’t finish the game, though my mobility was a bit stiff, especially those little turbo-bursts you need to steal a yard on your marker and get on the end of a pull-back or a through ball.
I played on in that one, then we beat Boro in our final game of the season. Again, I felt a little restricted, but by then we were down to the bare bones of a squad. Besides that, though, after all the upheaval, rumour and counter rumour, we were once again picking up a bit of form and I was determined to see the season out. We won our last five games without conceding a goal and I think we all felt that, with a bit more consistency, we should be back with the big boys next season. We just missed out on the Champions League places, but we qualified for the UEFA Cup – still a very prestigious tournament in 2002.
I went to the World Cup finals in South Korea and Japan that summer – you might remember this as David Beckham’s broken metatarsal tournament – but, apart from the odd warm-up game, I didn’t play. By the time I got back, players were being sold and David O’Leary had been dismissed. Downer. But the good news – for me, at least – was that Terry Venables would be coming in. I had huge respect for him as a tactician, a manager and as a man.
We went on a pre-season training trip to Australia, but in our first semi-competitive game, the hip that had been giving me gyp went, big time. I knew it, straight away; I could feel it shoot through me. This was the worst possible start for me under a manager I was so eager to impress, but Venables was calm about it – he just told me not to put myself or the injury under any more pressure. The key thing, for him, was that I should take my time, get myself properly 100 per cent fit, then gradually reintegrate myself into the team. It didn’t help that more and more players were leaving what was now beginning to feel like a sinking ship, but at least I had a viable personal goal: full fitness.
When I got back home, my sister Lisa reminded me that, when I was very little, I used to have a ‘clicky’ hip. At the time it was such a common thing that the received wisdom was just to let the body compensate and adjust – in other words, give it time and it’ll sort itself out. That’s exactly what happened with me. My ‘clicky’ hip seemed to disappear as I grew and through adolescence and into my early career, I never had a problem. Now, though, Lisa had got me thinking: was there an underlying issue that was, after ten years of professional level intensity, coming back to the fore? When the specialist examined me, it transpired I was going to need a hip operation – the last thing I wanted to contemplate with everything still to prove at my new club.
Leeds started the 2002–03 season well enough under Venables, but, by the November, they started to slip down the table again. I had only just started the gentle jogging stage of my rehab. Theoretically, I wasn’t even due to make any comeback until Christmas at the earliest. Terry was brilliant. He would keep coming over to me in the gym and telling me to take my time – he wanted a fit, hungry Robbie Fowler, raring to go whenever I finally came back into the team. Whether that was weeks or months away, he was counting on me to transform our fortunes.
But then things changed, again. With a slightly resigned, hang-dog expression, Venables asked me to come into his office one afternoon towards the middle of December. This was the first season that the transfer window had come into play, so the clubs interested in tweaking their squad mid-season would be getting their chance to do business in the coming weeks. Terry told me that Peter Ridsdale had asked him to raise more, much-needed funds by selling a couple more players. He told the boss there was really only me and Mark Viduka left that he could sell for any kind of decent money, so Leeds were going to have to think about letting me go. As I let all this rattle around my head, he also mentioned that Kevin Keegan – by now the manager at Manchester City – had made a tentative enquiry about me. Venables had knocked City back, of course, but he was now saying, if I wanted to speak to them, he wouldn’t stand in my way.
Manchester City was another sleeping giant. Although the big takeover and the move to the City of Manchester Stadium was still at an embryonic stage, City was a club with almost unlimited potential, and that’s what Kevin Keegan sold to me. Keegan is one of life’s great enthusiasts, a born optimist who seems permanently immersed in the moment. There’s no doubt that everything he said and everything he promised was what he fundamentally believed. He painted a picture of a club about to rise up like a phoenix – in that, at least, he was right (just not with him, or me, at the wheel!).
With my four girls all living on the Wirral, Manchester City was geographically much more accessible than West Yorkshire, so the proposition became more and more tempting. My Liverpool team had broken Keegan’s heart when his Newcastle team were battling Man United for the League in 1997, beating them with the last kick of that incredible 4–3 game, but he’d always been great with me when he was the England manager and now he’d given me food for thought.
I went back to Leeds to mull it over, at which point one of the directors effectively made the decision for me. As I was heading into Thorp Arch, he was heading back out to his car. Barely breaking his stride, he leaned into me and whispered, ‘Take the money and run! This place is going to the dogs!’ So that was me – a homeboy for all those years at Liverpool, now ready to up sticks and move on again after barely a year at Leeds.