‘IT WAS BETTER than any other natural high,’ Danny Murphy reveals, his expression remaining serious.
‘Even sex?’
‘Oh yeah, even sex – an out-of-body experience. Indescribable.’
Murphy is attempting to convey the sensation of scoring a match-winning goal for Liverpool against Manchester United at Old Trafford, a feat he achieved three times.
‘The first one was a free kick past Fabien Barthez,’ he remembers, citing how silence fell across the stadium as he approached the ball to strike it. ‘They were the champions and we needed to prove ourselves under Gérard Houllier, prove that we could compete with them.
‘I’d given possession away a few minutes earlier and I was really angry with myself,’ Murphy continues. ‘I needed to make amends. I took quite a straight run-up, to try to deceive the keeper. Barthez stood still. It curled right in the bottom corner. I could see the faces of the United supporters in the Stretford End. Closing my eyes, I can see a fella with a black hood with his mouth open going, “Oh no!” After that? There was white noise. A blur of colour. Look at my arms right now – you can see the hairs standing on end.
‘A lot of people have tried to put into words the euphoria of scoring a winning goal. None of them do it justice. You lose yourself. There’s a huge adrenalin rush of emotion that takes you to a place you didn’t know existed. Afterwards comes the contentment. When you’re sitting on the bus in the car park, seeing all the United fans walking home with glum faces, hearing all the Liverpool supporters in the distance, still locked inside the ground. Only then does it sink in – what it means to you personally.
‘I used to drink in the Oaklands Pub on New Road in Chester. Normally, my brother and a couple of mates would be there after the game. We’d have a pint, a chat and unwind. This time when I walked in, there was uproar. The place was packed. It went off. It was mental. It was brilliant. Loads of singing. Only then did I really realize the impact a goal and a win had on everyone else. It defines weekends. It can define seasons.’
Liverpool completed a cup treble that year. A second clinching moment against Liverpool’s greatest rivals came the following campaign, though circumstances this time were different.
‘Some Liverpool supporters cheered in the game before against Southampton when I was substituted,’ Murphy explains, frowning, reflecting his difficulty with the memory by blowing out his cheeks. ‘It was only a few of them. But hearing that negativity – god, it was probably the lowest point of my career.
‘Phil Thompson was filling in as manager for Gérard Houllier, who was recovering from his heart problems. Thommo called me into his office and tried to reassure me. “I know you must feel a bit shit. I trust you. I’ll play you all day long. Don’t worry about it – I know the Liverpool supporters better than anyone.”
‘But I did worry about it. Never believe a player who says they don’t hear the heckling. It was like a dagger through the heart. I felt like crying. When you care about the club you play for, you crave acceptance.
‘So the following Wednesday night at Old Trafford, Steven Gerrard gets the ball. What a pass. What. A. Pass. It gets overlooked just how good that pass was – maybe it was the pass of the decade.’
Murphy saw Barthez again. This time the French World Cup winner had strayed a few yards from his line.
‘So I chipped him. It was a difficult one to execute, because Stevie’s pass was as forceful as ever and it had some curl on it. With the chip, I had to change the trajectory and slow the pace of the ball down, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone over the goalkeeper.
‘How did I feel when it went in? Initially, there was joy. Then there was a bit of relief. Then the feeling of fuck you came along, if I’m being honest. A fuck you to the doubters.
‘At the end of the game, I ran from the Stretford End towards our supporters with Stevie and Thommo. I don’t know where Carra was. Five thousand of them were singing my name. The turnaround in just a few days. Here, see my arms again . . . uncontrollable.’
The instinct to get into position to score was down to Murphy’s own ability, yet he believes the platform to perform confidently and not buckle under the immense pressure was given to him by Thompson, the temporary manager.
‘Thommo changed immensely when he took over the reins from Gérard,’ Murphy says. ‘Six months before, maybe he wouldn’t have been capable of being so subtle, knowing how to deliver a boost, knowing exactly what was needed. On the touchline, he was a raging bull. He’d have argued with his granny, probably. Some of the foreign players weren’t used to it. They thought he was mad. But I didn’t mind a kick up the arse. I’d grown up around that type of aggression at Crewe. I reacted well to it. I benefited from it.
‘Suddenly, Gérard became ill and a Zen-like quality took over Thommo. He wasn’t shouting and screeching in training any more. Sammy Lee became the enforcer. Thommo became the observer. Bob Paisley had to change when he got the job from Bill Shankly in unexpected circumstances, didn’t he? Thommo had witnessed this when he was a player.
‘Thommo was in charge for a lot of the 2001–02 season when we came second: the highest in the league Liverpool had finished in more than a decade. People saw him as the aggressive number two. But I think he would have been a bloody good manager if he’d tried elsewhere. He had more managerial qualities than I think he realized. We had our moments where we rowed – he rowed with everyone. Sometimes, though, I think he was just playing a role: the sergeant major.’
Murphy dispatched a third winning goal away at United in April 2004.
‘Michael [Owen] was the team’s penalty taker. He was the best penalty taker I’ve ever seen in training. He never missed. He’d drive the keepers crazy. One after another. Then the games came along and he’d shit his pants! Before United, he’d been on a bad run, missing quite a few. So he picked up the ball and went to me, “Go on then . . .”
‘I meant to put it lower. Instead, I leaned back a bit and it flew in the top corner. It looked cool as. I couldn’t believe I’d done it again. You shouldn’t be blasé about scoring the winner at Old Trafford. It was the third time!’
It is coincidental that I meet Murphy less than a mile away from Old Trafford, the site of his greatest moments in a Liverpool shirt. It is a typical day of weather in Salford when he walks through the revolving doors of a hotel next to the BBC studios having driven through the morning from his Surrey home, with the rain beginning to batter his car windows both vertically and horizontally as soon as he got near Greater Manchester.
Murphy is small and stocky, wears jeans, trainers and a heavy black jumper. He is two hours away from the start of his working day as a pundit on Match of the Day. Having lived in London since leaving Liverpool a decade ago, his accent has strayed curiously south. He grew up in Chester but can vividly remember watching his first game at Anfield.
‘It was against Man United in 1985 and Frank Stapleton got the winner,’ he recalls ruefully. ‘It was a present for my eighth birthday. Liverpool were way off the pace behind Everton in the league that season. None of that bothered me, though. It was £1.80 to get in and kids had to go through different turnstiles to adults. It was absolutely rammed outside with people queuing to get in.
‘You know when people speak about how a football club grabs you? Well, Liverpool really got me that day. Everything about it: the Kop, the green pitch, the noise. I’d never experienced anything like it before. It got me.
‘My dad came from a big Irish family in Cork. They’d settled in Chester. Although my mum and dad were separated, he was a huge Liverpool fan and that filtered down to me and my brothers. I was the youngest and smallest of them. I always had something to prove.’
Murphy joined Crewe Alexandra when he was twelve years old.
‘I’d already been to Wrexham’s academy for eighteen months, I’d been up to Liverpool to train a couple of times, I’d been down to Aston Villa in the school holidays, I’d gone to Sheffield Wednesday too. I never felt particularly comfortable at any of them, although they’d all asked me to sign schoolboy forms.
‘I was in demand and started to realize I was a decent player. I was selected to play in the district side a year above my own age group – that’s when it really started to hot up, with scouts knocking on my door. One of them was a fella called Alex Gibson and he was really persistent, asking me to go to Man United, god forbid. Suddenly, Alex moved jobs and went to Crewe.
‘The first training session there was on the old AstroTurf pitches under the floodlights beside Gresty Road, Crewe’s ground. Dario Gradi, Crewe’s first-team manager, took the session. I’d never met a first-team manager before at any of the other places. The session was different to anything I’d experienced. Dario was years ahead. The standard was also a lot higher. I looked at the other players and thought, Wow, these are good. Everybody made me feel welcome. I wanted to be at Crewe.’
Since arriving there in 1983, Gradi had transformed the small club from the small Cheshire town famed for its railway station. Milanese, Gradi had been born in Italy during the Second World War, moving to live in London with his English mother in 1945. He combined a career in non-league football with grammar-school teaching before turning to coaching, where his most significant break came as an assistant at Chelsea, aged just twenty-nine. Wounded by relegations at Wimbledon and Crystal Palace, Gradi arrived at Crewe when it was lodged in a rut, with the club’s future hinging on whether it could secure re-election to the old Fourth Division.
Gradi’s vision was for Crewe to develop its own young players, sell the best of them to earn the finances necessary to survive and then produce some more players through academy investment, in a continuous virtuous circle. Before Murphy’s introduction to the system, Gradi had proven that he possessed the talent-spotting and coaching genius that his proposed strategy required to be successful, with David Platt, Geoff Thomas, Robbie Savage and Neil Lennon all securing lucrative moves away while the club simultaneously rose up the leagues.
Murphy says the atmosphere was key to his emergence.
‘Because of the small pool of players compared to the bigger clubs, each player had the intimacy of knowing everyone who worked for the club and, similarly, the first-team manager – Dario – knew which fifteen year olds were doing well and which ones were falling behind, which ones needed attention,’ Murphy says.
‘I remember going to Melwood to train aged twelve and fifty kids were there; many of them had signed forms for the club already. I might have made it at Liverpool but the system at Crewe felt better to me. The club wasn’t being greedy, recruiting aggressively. They recruited selectively and made the small details count with the players they had.
‘Dario was a pioneer. He had similar traits to the two other managers that had the biggest influence on my career: Gérard Houllier and Roy Hodgson. They were all a bit old-school in terms of their temperament, being gentlemen. Gérard wasn’t a coach in the same sense as Dario and Roy but they were all teacher-like and father figures. I clashed with some of the younger managers I worked for because I can be gobby when I’m not happy. When my dad separated from my mum, Dario filled the void.’
Training sessions at Crewe were focused on developing technique.
‘The emphasis was on ball-work, making you comfortable in possession. Sessions began with half an hour of passing drills. There was no running. As you got older and closer to the first team, it was more about developing game intelligence – common sense. Whereas Liverpool and Man United had had a first team, reserves, an A and a B team, at Crewe it was first team, reserves and a youth team made up of players aged sixteen and under. It meant that as a youth player, you were performing against older boys, sinking or learning how to swim very quickly.
‘Dario had an influence on every decision at the club. He looked at the development of every player. For the reserves, Dario decided I should play as a sweeper when I was sixteen years old. Two big lads played at centre-half and they stopped me getting whacked because I was still at school and probably only 5 ft 6 in. tall. The idea was for the goalkeeper to roll the ball out to me and for me to build up play from the back. I could move forward into midfield and join in attacks. I had been a sweeper but now Dario told me I was going to play some games as a right-sided midfielder, then on the left wing, centre-midfield – where I wanted to be – and finally up front. It helped my understanding of all positions and in the end made me a better centre-midfielder.
‘Dario was light years ahead of other coaches. I used to play against other teams in the lower leagues and wonder why they were so bad. I realized that, actually, we were so good. We worked on the basics like positioning. But it was the attention to detail that set Dario apart and gave us the advantage. The number of hours we spent on quick short corners and quick free kicks – getting the opposition on the back foot before they can settle. Throw-ins – oh my god, we spent hours on them. How many clubs have I been at since where players don’t know how to take throw-ins and receive a ball? I watch Premier League games now and see players run fast at throw-in takers and close the space down. Did nobody ever teach them what to do?
‘Dario was the first manager to use scenarios in training sessions. He’d say, “Right, it’s eleven on ten, there’s five minutes left, the team with ten are winning 1–0, let’s go . . .” He wanted intensity and to see the players switch on straight away. If we couldn’t figure out what to do, he’d let us know that he wasn’t happy.
‘I suppose Dario was fortunate in that he was working at a small club and his job was safe. He had a place on the board. It meant that he could follow his passion. He was more interested in player development than team development and success. Of course, he wanted success – and the fact that Crewe stayed in the Championship for so many years was a miracle, considering the size of the town, the size of the fan base and the money at the club. Work was never a chore and Dario made football enjoyable. We passed teams to death. It was really good fun.’
Murphy scored the winner as a substitute in his second appearance for Crewe, a 4–3 win over Preston North End. He was sixteen years old. Successive promotions were earned, taking Crewe into England’s second tier. Murphy’s presence in attack with Dele Adebola helped achieve the feat.
‘Dele was a big lad and took a lot of my buffeting from the big centre-halves. I was playing a lot with my back to goal and I was better when the ball was in front of me. When I got smacked in one game, the lad told me he was going to do it; I’ll never forget it. I’d nutmegged him in the first minute and set up the first goal. “I’m gonna do you,” he said. And fair enough, he did. I was out after that for six weeks with a knee-ligament injury. When I came back, Dario decided to switch the system to a 4–3–3. I had more freedom in midfield. I could go and have a wander without being that disciplined.’
Gradi held a tight rein on Murphy’s behaviour off the pitch. He peers back at his teenage self and cringes sometimes.
‘I was precocious and there was a period where I’d answer back to anyone who was critical and have an argument with people that didn’t agree with me. I had a tendency to be overdramatic whenever I misplaced a pass, throwing my hands up in the air and berating myself, cursing. It really annoyed Dario because he thought it was stopping me from going and putting it right, winning the ball back. It felt like months but it probably only happened for a couple of weeks where he’d stop training sessions. Dario would say, “OK, let’s see the drama, everyone can stand and watch you throw your hands in the air . . .” Then he’d say, “How about when you give the ball away, you just bloody run back and don’t let everyone know how disappointed you are? We all know it’s a crap pass . . .”
‘It took a while for me to get out of the habit.’
Had it not been for Gradi’s guidance, indeed, Murphy wonders whether he’d have become a professional footballer.
‘There was a spell before I went full-time at Crewe where I was late for training a lot. I was still at school. I remember calling Dario up, telling him that I wasn’t going to make it in the following day for a youth-team match. I wanted to go to a party with my mates the night before and it would have meant getting up at the crack of dawn to get a bus before catching the train to Crewe. He said, “Danny, I’m not stupid, I know what’s going on. You will get here. You’ll be on time. If you make the effort to get here, I’ll make sure you get home, whether I drive you myself or put you in a taxi.”
‘A lot of the lads at Crewe were being dropped off by their mums and dads. My mum was trying to look after four boys. I had to make my own way to Crewe and it was a bit of a trek and quite expensive. I wasn’t a rebel but I was starting to experiment with things as you do when you’re a teenager, drinking and chasing girls.
‘In the end, Dario guilted me into showing up that morning. I realized he was making such an effort for me. His attitude wasn’t like, “You little twat, you get here,” it was more, “I’m helping you here, come on and give me something back!”
‘I had problems at home but I knew I could go to him. This isn’t a violin story; it’s just an example of Dario helping out. After I left school, Crewe put me on their YTS scheme and I was earning thirty quid a week. It meant that my mum lost her benefits for me, which were worth more than thirty quid a week. You’d get expenses for your travel to training but I was giving my mum a lot of my income so she could pay for food. She didn’t have enough. I had a great relationship with my dad but he didn’t have a pot to piss in either.
‘I told Dario that I wanted to continue with my education and go to sixth form and play for Crewe at weekends. It worried me what might happen if I didn’t make it all the way. It was the only option that I thought would work in the short term from a financial point of view. Dario said, “You’ll fall behind if you do that. You won’t make it as a footballer.” Crewe had players before me who chose to do the same thing and had fallen behind. I suppose it makes sense, because if you’re in training five days a week, you’ll improve more than if you are there for just two.
‘Dario’s solution was to pay my mum dig money. It meant that my mum got forty quid a week for looking after me and then the thirty was mine. All along the way, any time there was a hurdle, Dario helped me cross it. He was a great judge of a situation. Gérard Houllier was very similar.’
Gradi trusted Murphy and gave him responsibility. One of his duties before he’d even made his first-team debut was to watch first-team games and offer opinions on what he saw.
‘I’d sit in the stand and sometimes Dario would let me go in the dugout. He even asked me once during the half-time team talk to say something. “What do you think, Danny?” he asked in the dressing room when Crewe were losing. Can you imagine what the first-team players must have thought? Who is this little shit? Dario knew that I saw things that other lads my age didn’t see. So he encouraged me to have an opinion on formation, performances and the way the game was going. When Crewe weren’t playing, I’d go and watch Chester City because their ground wasn’t far away from my house. Again, he’d ask me what I thought of rival players. Maybe he was thinking of signing them.’
Once in the Crewe first team, some of the more experienced players did not warm to Murphy due to his withering assessments.
‘I figured that if Dario was asking me to highlight problems, I might as well go for it – let my voice be heard. The problem was, some of the older fellas saw me as one of Dario’s pet projects. Looking back now, I can see why a senior player would have a problem with a youngster in this situation, especially when you consider that some of these players needed to play every week to earn their match bonus and the wages weren’t very high anyway. They had families to feed, just like my mum.
‘It meant that I had to grow up quickly and learn how to fight my corner. I took some shit. Luckily, there were some good guys there who realized I was a decent footballer and could actually help their financial outlook by playing well, scoring goals and improving the results of the team, therefore earning them a win bonus!’
Despite his own initial teething problems, Gradi was creating a culture based on collective responsibility.
‘Every single player in that dressing room wasn’t scared to give an opinion. If things weren’t going right, each person would have their say and get issues sorted out pretty quickly. You couldn’t afford to hide. That manifested itself on the pitch.
‘If you’re a manager who doesn’t encourage questions and opinions, you’re screwed,’ Murphy continues. ‘The best players have an opinion on the way the game should be played. If you don’t allow these players to express themselves, they won’t come to you. What happens then is, they talk behind your back and create a clique. Good managers know the trick: they listen without taking everything on board.
‘Under Houllier in one pre-season, he set up a suggestion box. We had twenty-four players in the squad and he split us into groups of six, although not necessarily putting people with their friends. Each group would go into a room for half an hour and discuss the mood and atmosphere. Then, anonymously, we made suggestions on a piece of paper. If the same issue came up amongst the six, we’d then offer that suggestion to the manager. It was simple things like wearing tracksuits over suits to away matches because we felt more relaxed in them. The biggest issue was staying behind in foreign cities after away matches in Europe. We usually waited to fly back until the next day and most of the players hated it. We wanted to fly home straight after the game.
‘Houllier gathered us all together and discussed the merits of each suggestion. We reached the issue of staying in Europe – in Prague, Kiev, Moscow or wherever it may be. It turned out that every group had raised it. So surely he had to fold? Instead, Houllier produced a flipchart – he loved flipcharts – and he showed our points tally immediately after European trips compared to Arsenal and Man United. We were pissing it, performing something like 25 per cent better than the other two.
‘Houllier wanted the Liverpool squad to have a proper meal within two hours of each match. He explained it was particularly important in UEFA Cup fixtures late at night. By flying home immediately, players would have resorted to unhealthy airport food, delaying the recovery process and possibly resulting in a more lethargic performance in the next game a few days later. Although players were still wired after a night match, a six- or seven-hour block of solid sleep was better than flying and disrupting natural sleeping patterns. It might sound boring but his was a bloody strong argument. There was no chance of anything changing. And the lads understood. Next . . .
‘That’s an example of good management: listening to the players’ needs and concerns. Instead of going, “I’m the manager, it’s my way or the highway,” he addresses issues properly,’ Murphy concludes. ‘Someone like Martin Jol would have reacted a different way. I quizzed Jol on a pre-season trip when I was at Tottenham as to why some lads were doing more running while others were spending more time in the Jacuzzi and spa. It seemed a bit weird to me, so I asked the question. He seemed shocked and it really got his back up. It said to me that he wasn’t equipped to deal with big-personality players. And there were certainly bigger personalities than me.’
Murphy did not originally sign for Liverpool from Crewe because of Gérard Houllier, however. The first option was to join Newcastle United, who were managed by Kenny Dalglish.
‘Kenny was my hero. I had a Liverpool shirt and my mum ironed the old number 7 on to the back. I was desperate to go to Newcastle because it was him – the hero, Kenny Dalglish. I’m grateful to Dario, because it would have been easy for Crewe to take the money.
‘Dario had already been having conversations with Liverpool and we were going for promotion. Dario said, as a matter of fact, “You’re not going. I didn’t want to tell you but Liverpool want you and I know they’re your team. They’re happy for you to stay here until the end of the season too and the other clubs that want you won’t. So that suits us as well.” He told me to relax and enjoy my football.
‘I took a call at home the day after from someone claiming to be Kenny Dalglish. I put the phone down on him because I thought it was a wind-up. He tried again and I put the phone down for a second time. The next night, he finally got through and this time I listened to him. I couldn’t believe it – I put the phone down on my hero twice and then I rejected him.’
Tottenham Hotspur were pushing hard to sign Murphy as well. Although he appreciated that competition at Liverpool would be the fiercest, it was an opportunity that ultimately he could not refuse.
‘I knew Michael [Owen] and Carra from playing for England. Around the time I was making my decision, we all went to the Under-20 World Cup in Malaysia together. I scored twice against the United Arab Emirates and was on for my hat-trick when the referee gave us a penalty. Michael being Michael was desperate to take it – even though he was the youngest in the team – and we started arguing about it. In the end, Carra had to intervene and made Michael realize he was being unreasonable considering we were already 2–0 up. Michael was fuming. He was even gobbier than me!
‘We had a great time over there in Malaysia, though. There were some real lads in the squad, including Kieron Dyer and Jody Morris, and others like John Curtis, John Macken and Ronnie Wallwork from United. Argentina beat us in the knockout stages. Juan Román Riquelme and Pablo Aimar were in their side.’
Riquelme would later become a legend at Boca Juniors. At Melwood, Murphy would train with one of his own legendary heroes.
‘John Barnes,’ Murphy says suddenly, as if the surname Barnes is awe-inspiring to him. ‘Suddenly, I was around players that I’d worshipped for so long. It was surreal. John was on his way out. Newcastle were signing him. But he did the pre-season with us. I’d had a season ticket at Anfield. I wanted to be John Barnes. Now – briefly – he was my teammate. Weird. It took me a few months to relax and begin to enjoy it. I was a chirpy little character. But I struggled to express myself.’
Murphy remembers his full debut against Aston Villa, a game screened live on a Monday night by Sky Sports in September 1997. Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman were at their best and Murphy felt ‘ten-feet tall’ being in such company. Yet he admits now the environment at Melwood was not conducive to sustained success.
‘Although you don’t realize that at the time when you’re young,’ Murphy interjects. ‘Senior players, recognized internationals, boys like Razor Ruddock or Robbie [Fowler], were wandering out two minutes before training was due to start with a bacon sandwich in their hand. I’m sure that happened at many other training grounds. But the clubs like Arsenal and Man United – where they’d clamped down on player freedoms – were the clubs winning the trophies. Bacon butties never happened at Crewe, for example.
‘The old ways were on the way out. That included training too: no more small-sided possession games, which were famous at Liverpool. They were all a bit too fun and not particularly relevant to the real games, which were becoming more about power and speed over touch and possession. Let’s be honest, the intensity at Melwood was nowhere near where it needed to be for players to reach peak levels of fitness. I’m not saying it was easy, because we did fitness sessions that made you blow. The day-to-day stuff was quite lax, though.’
Roy Evans had signed Murphy for Liverpool.
‘I got on well with him,’ Murphy says. ‘I thought he was a proper guy: very honest, straight and loved his football. But he came from an era when people did not know any better. Young people were changing, their motivations becoming different, not just in football but in society as well. It was only when Houllier started to achieve success by running the club a lot more professionally that everyone realized Liverpool had fallen behind because they hadn’t moved with the times.
‘In the late nineties, it was a joy for me to be at the club I’d dreamed of joining, experiencing things I thought were beyond me growing up in Chester: going to a Liverpool game in a team tracksuit, travelling abroad, being recognized in the street. But in terms of it being an environment that was really productive for young players? No.’
The Liverpool board’s solution in the summer of 1998 was to appoint Gérard Houllier as joint manager with Evans. It proved to be an unhealthy compromise. Murphy made only four appearances during his second season at Anfield and one of them was in the last game where Evans was involved, the 3–1 home defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in the League Cup when John Scales, a player Evans had sold, scored for the visiting team.
‘Even if you appoint two people who are great friends and have similar views on football to be in charge of a team, a decision still needs to be made and there will be disagreements. Everyone has different opinions on one player, never mind eleven players or sixteen players. So I can’t imagine the amount of time Roy and Gérard must have spent picking a team or a squad. It must have been a nightmare. I could imagine Gérard saying, “Let’s go defensive; we’ll hit them on the break.” Then Roy, “No; let’s have a go here.” It was an impossible working situation. Gérard believed in another way to Roy. That started with discipline, hard work and intensity. He didn’t care what had happened at Liverpool in many ways. Yeah, he educated himself in the history of the club, but the way it worked previously? It didn’t matter. It was only a matter of time before a split. The people running the club must surely have known that. They’d been in charge long enough.’
Houllier was left in sole charge. Things were about to change.
‘There was a gentle approach when Roy was still around but as soon as he went, boom, Gérard was like a sledgehammer. “He’s gone . . . he’s gone . . . this is what we’re going to do: we’re training at these times, wearing these clothes.”
‘His methods were not particularly outrageous when you think about them. Quite often in football, common sense is the obvious route to success but people overcomplicate it by overlooking the most basic things. In pre-season, we did two sessions: one in the morning and another at 5 p.m. Everyone was like, “What are we going to do in between?”
‘“Rest!” Houllier would say.
‘Gérard was a disciplinarian. You’d get fined for wearing the wrong clothes on match days. If you were meant to wear a black T-shirt and you wore a white one – even by accident – on the bus to an away game, it would be taken out of your wages. There were no mobile phones in the main building at Melwood. That became standard rather than a punishment. The same on a match day: no phones. It led to greater focus. And then the French lads would get fined if they spoke French amongst the British lads.’
Houllier’s methods were met with resistance. David Thompson, a young midfielder from the tough Ford council estate on Wirral, found Houllier’s methods punitive and admitted to relishing the challenge of pushing the boundaries as far as he could before he was offloaded to Coventry City. Robbie Fowler was installed as the team’s captain but eventually Houllier became tired of his mischievous behaviour and sold him to Leeds United.
‘No matter how big or important you appeared to be, Houllier would get rid of you if you didn’t buy into his ideas,’ Murphy says. ‘He did it all for the benefit of the club. It was never personal. Paul Ince was the captain before Robbie, and Houllier got shot of him because he thought he had too much power in the dressing room even though he thought a lot of Incey as a player.
‘Houllier gave a couple of lads a lot of opportunities to change, possibly more than other managers would have. Now they might say, “Danny Murphy – well, he’s agreeing with Houllier because he played him.” But there has to be some framework of discipline at a club. If a manager keeps allowing someone to step outside it – even if it’s for daft things like turning up late – the indiscipline spreads quickly. Houllier was a fair man. There comes a tipping point. I disagree with some people who might claim they were pushed out of the door unfairly. They were pushed out of the door for a reason.’
At the beginning under Houllier, the progress made by Murphy at Crewe had halted at Liverpool.
‘I was a young lad who didn’t know any better: parties, drinking and girls. Carra would admit that he was the same, I’m sure. He turned that off, calmed down and became really professional quickly. It took me longer. I wish I had been as quick as him. When I eventually followed suit, I earned the rewards.
‘I wasn’t an important player when Houllier came in. I wasn’t playing well enough and I wasn’t fit enough. It was my second season as a Liverpool player and I’d got a bit comfortable. I was probably thinking without realizing, Yeah, I’m a Liverpool player now; I’m made. I’ve seen it happen to so many other players since. You think you’re the man without having enough experience or ability to be the man. You forget that you need to continue to work. When you don’t, you fall behind. Eventually, you begin to doubt yourself because a cold reality hits home if you’re bright enough. I wasn’t sure whether I was good enough for Liverpool. I wasn’t sure whether I was good enough to even play in the Premier League.’
George Burley was in charge of Second Division Ipswich Town. He made Murphy a loan offer.
‘I went to Gérard and told him that I wanted to go. Gérard told me about an opportunity to go back to Crewe. “Yeah, but they’re bottom of the league, getting smashed every week,” I said. “They’re shit – how is that going to do me any good? I’ve already been there, done that.”’
Houllier was insistent that Murphy move back to Crewe temporarily – and to the womb of Dario Gradi.
‘He probably thought the value of a hard day’s work and the strain of a relegation battle would show whether I was truly up for a fight at Liverpool.’
With Seth Johnson in midfield and Rodney Jack up front, Murphy helped Crewe stay up.
‘Houllier told me the following pre-season that had I not agreed to go to Crewe, he’d have got rid of me. “I’ve seen your ability – you’re a clever player, you see the bigger picture,” he said. “I wanted to see that you still had the passion.”’
Murphy was placed on a strict fitness regime. In October 1999, he was handed his first start in the league for Liverpool in more than eighteen months against Chelsea, helping the team to a 1–0 victory.
‘Little Thommo [David Thompson], for example, had all of the passion in the world. But he channelled it in the wrong way. He kept having arguments. He’d argue with the manager, he’d argue with senior players, he’d argue with anybody – even himself. Houllier knew he was passionate about the club and was desperate to win. But he kept seeing red, kept getting sent off. In the end, Houllier probably came to the conclusion that he couldn’t rely on Thommo to keep his cool. Ultimately, it was about ability and passion and harnessing the two to produce performances. That’s why players like me and Jamie Carragher got along. We played all across the pitch. Sometimes we got frustrated filling in for other people, not playing centrally where we wanted to be. But we never let the frustration get the better of us. Thommo was like me and Carra: he wanted to play in the centre. We went through the same cycle of being the first player to be substituted. Whereas Thommo went mad – finger pointing at Houllier in the dressing room afterwards – I’d accept the decision because I appreciated it wasn’t personal. It was only for the benefit of the team.’
Murphy relates Houllier’s desire for controlled passion to results in the Merseyside derby, a fixture Liverpool had failed in previously. Under Roy Evans, despite Everton’s clear inferiority in terms of talent and league placing, Liverpool had managed to beat them only once – a dire run stretching back to 1994. In the eleven derbies when Houllier was involved, Liverpool triumphed in six of them.
‘In the dressing room before every derby – especially at Goodison Park – one of the last things Gérard used to say was, “Keep eleven men on the pitch and we’ll win.” Again, the message was clear: controlled passion. It felt like we scored a lot of winning goals late on, when Everton had someone sent off and they were tired. Everton wanted it to be a fight. We were up for the fight. But we became cleverer with our aggression, finding a way to wind them up.’
Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher later became the axis of the Liverpool team under Rafael Benítez and they developed a close bond. Under Gérard Houllier, though, Murphy was closest to Gerrard and the pair roomed together, while Carragher’s best friend in the squad was Michael Owen.
‘Because Houllier signed a lot of foreign players at the beginning, there was a perception on the outside that Liverpool’s soul was being stripped away. There’s no doubt the setting of standards was helped by the signing of foreign players like Sami Hyypiä, Markus Babbel, and Didi Hamann to a degree. But the heartbeat of the team was English: Stevie, Carra, Michael, myself, Robbie, Jamie Redknapp and Emile Heskey.
‘Houllier realized that he needed British players. He realized that some sense of local pride is something any Liverpool manager needs to get into his side. Although the foreign lads were on board just as much and gave their all, because he bought well in the early years and they were the right type of characters, it still can’t mean quite as much to them as it did to us. I’d been to cup finals as a kid and seen Liverpool win the league. I was desperate to emulate what I’d seen, absolutely desperate. I sometimes think the top foreign players get a team close to the line but the local ones help you cross it. Maybe I’m being too simplistic.’
During the 2000–01 season, which ended with Liverpool winning a cup treble, Murphy was often stationed on the left side of midfield, a role referred to by anyone who filled it as ‘the graveyard shift’. A solid midfield four was Houllier’s priority. It came at the expense of expansive wing-play; creative midfielders were required to be extremely disciplined, taking care of their defensive responsibilities first. Murphy believes that it was due to his education under Dario Gradi that he was able to perform the role without becoming irritated.
‘At Crewe, we didn’t have a big squad, so every player ended up filling in for someone else at some point. Young players got all the plaudits and the club sold them on but the real strength of the club was the collective mentality. For example, I learned quickly that if I was playing as a centre-forward, even though I didn’t have the pace to beat defenders by running in behind them very often, I still had to make those runs because it created space for others behind me. Equally, I knew that if I played on the sides of the midfield, I wasn’t Linford Christie. But sometimes I’d have to push out wide and get chalk on my boots from the touchline just to create the space for someone else to move into. Crewe helped me appreciate space: how to expand it, how to fill it.’
Though Murphy played plenty of times under Houllier on the right of midfield, the left defined him. When the team did not perform as well, he became a scapegoat for the crowd, the jeering after his substitution during the 1–1 draw with Southampton at Anfield in January 2002 ahead of the fixture with Manchester United being an example of the feeling towards him.
‘On the right, I was able to get myself into a position where I could put a cross in with my right foot because it was a more natural thing to do. On the left, I became trapped, because I had to cut back on my right foot, slowing the game down. By then, Emile Heskey – the type of player who thrived on service from wide – was already marked. The crowd could see it.
‘The reason why Houllier played me on the left more often than not was because he felt I offered more of a goal threat from that position. Houllier being Houllier proved this to me statistically. I was like, “Bollocks! He’s got me again here!”
‘First and foremost, Houllier was a defensive coach. He wasn’t adventurous and didn’t encourage us to play a high-pressing game. We had Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Emile Heskey and later Jari Litmanen: four top-quality strikers he felt would score enough goals to win us games. Then there was Steven Gerrard, who was afforded more leeway in an attacking sense from midfield than anyone else. The rest of the midfield, the defence and the goalkeeper acted as a block. This isn’t a criticism of Houllier in any way, because it was successful. But the reality was – as a right-sided midfielder, or especially on the left – my role primarily was to help the full-back defend. I was often asked to double up on a good wide player in the opposition. I remember playing the League Cup final against Manchester United in 2003 on the left and Houllier told me I was playing there to help John Arne Riise out, who was up against David Beckham and Gary Neville. I did very little going forward that day but played very well defensively and, ultimately, Liverpool won the game, so everyone celebrated. The same thing had happened in the UEFA Cup final in 2001. Carra was left-back and I was left-midfield. Houllier wanted to stop Cosmin Contra, the Alavés right-back, from raiding forward. Neither me nor Carra were left-footed and neither of us really wanted to play there but Houllier knew that both of us would die trying to stop him.
‘The problems happened when Liverpool didn’t win the game, especially against teams at Anfield who were lower down in the league. I could play well and execute the role Houllier was asking of me but if the team didn’t win, my role became an issue. The crowd wanted to see flying wingers obliterate the opposition. Cristiano Ronaldo was coming on the scene. I was diligent and tidy, but you’d never see me fly past a full-back. Likewise, flying full-backs were coming into vogue. Carra couldn’t really do that, so he got stick as well.
‘I was older when I played for Tottenham and Martin Jol used me on the left. The crowd got annoyed. As I had more experience then, I was able to reason with Martin and he let me play in the centre, and when I did I was able to influence the game positively. The difference at Liverpool, of course, was that I was just happy to be in the team. I wasn’t Steven Gerrard. I was younger then; at the time, I couldn’t do what Didi Hamann did and hold the midfield together, be that authority figure in the centre of the park. If it meant that in some games I’d have to sacrifice myself, I didn’t really care because I knew one thing: I was playing for Liverpool, for god’s sake. I had the best job in the world.’
Murphy emerged as a full England international, earning nine caps, with Houllier citing his versatility as a reason for his progression. Yet when Houllier left Liverpool, Murphy says his successor viewed such flexibility as a negative.
‘When Rafa Benítez became manager, in one of his first training sessions he called me and Steven Gerrard over and said, “I’ve watched a lot of videos of you two.” He pointed at Stevie and said that he needed to be more like me and then pointed at me and said that I needed to be more like Stevie. What he meant was, Stevie needed to be more tactically aware instead of bombing everywhere trying to do everything, while I needed to run about more because I appeared a bit too worried positionally. I would argue that perhaps I created that perception because of the players around me. When I played on the left at Liverpool and Stevie and Didi were in the middle, Stevie would attack and I’d fill in for him. Didi was an experienced guy and he’d shout over, “Oi, Danny – get in here . . .”’
On the pre-season tour of the United States in summer 2004, Murphy believes Benítez decided that Murphy, Gerrard, Carragher and Owen had formed a clique, which concerned the new manager.
‘The four of us were quite strong willed. When I heard that Liverpool had hired Benítez, I was absolutely delighted. He’d won La Liga twice and played the type of football I like. Valencia had battered us in Europe.’
But now suddenly Murphy was told something he did not want to hear. Benítez was happy for him to leave Liverpool. He concedes it was a mistake that he agreed to do so.
‘People who tell you they have no regrets are speaking bollocks. I regret leaving when I did,’ Murphy admits. ‘Even though Benítez made it clear that I wasn’t going to be his first choice, I should have given it a year to prove him wrong. The problem was, quite simply, it is very hard going from playing for Liverpool – the club you love – to being told you are not part of the plans. You picture yourself being in the stands, not being involved at all. These are nightmarish thoughts. You think, I’ll lose my head here. Carra was the same – that’s why he retired [in 2013]. I wish I’d stuck it out, though. Maybe I’d have changed his opinion. Maybe I underestimated the strength of my own character.’
Murphy moved to Charlton Athletic. He signed for Tottenham Hotspur and then Fulham, where he became captain under Roy Hodgson. In 2010, Hodgson became Liverpool’s manager, a move that Murphy backed publicly. Hodgson lasted six months in the role. His sacking was largely down to poor results but beneath that there was the joyless style of football as well as the perceived attempt to sink expectations at a time when the club was in danger of going into administration under American owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Hodgson described the challenge of Northampton Town from the lowest tier of professional football in England as ‘formidable’, before losing on penalties in embarrassment. Murphy, who had previously flourished under Hodgson, was considered as a Hodgson sympathizer in some quarters for his earlier commendation and, though no Liverpool manager endures such a dubious reputation, Murphy has not changed his opinion.
‘Roy reminded me of Houllier in his methods and in the way he wanted the team to play,’ Murphy maintains. ‘He gave me a lot of responsibility and being straight with you even now – with what has happened since – I really enjoyed playing for him. Just because it didn’t work out for him at Liverpool, it doesn’t change the fact that at Fulham he took the club from the relegation zone to a European final in two years and made me a massive part of it.
‘I look back on that period very fondly. It was more recent, for starters. When I achieved success at Liverpool, we played final after final. We got results at amazing stadiums like the Nou Camp. But when you’re young, the experience passes you by. At Fulham, I realized I mightn’t have too many chances left. I was also a central figure in the team and the squad. There was a tremendous satisfaction in what we achieved.’
Murphy recognizes that he continues to divide opinion amongst Liverpool supporters.
‘My memories are positive, though,’ he insists. ‘The general feedback I get is good. I had more good games than bad. I contributed well when I was at my best. I look back and think about my dreams at the beginning, reflecting on what I eventually achieved: Oh my god, seven years at Liverpool, trophies, goals – just give me one in front of the Kop, just one. I scored the winner at Old Trafford three times. I scored the winner in the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park.
‘These are the memories you take to the grave.’