THE MUSCLES IN Dietmar Hamann’s body eased and slowly his brain began to relax. Pulling hard on a cigarette, he stared past the person who’d supplied it and into a place beyond the walls in front as he contemplated the magnitude of what had happened.
Liverpool were Champions League winners on penalties, having been 3–0 down to AC Milan at half-time – a moment when Hamann’s introduction to the game was deemed necessary. It later transpired that Hamann had scored Liverpool’s first penalty in the shoot-out with a broken foot. The occasion had taken him to a platform where there was no pain. He had not felt a thing.
Now, in the early hours of the Turkish morning, when all was somehow settled in Liverpool’s favour, the winning team’s dressing room was strangely quiet. Hamann’s teammates lay around in disbelief. Some drank bottles of beer. Others blew into their bottle tops, creating a nervous whistling sound.
‘We’d left the dressing room two hours before, dead and buried,’ Hamann remembers. ‘Yet we’d come back and the cup was in our dressing room and not theirs, shining brightly on a treatment table, all alone. For a short period of time, everyone seemed too scared to touch it. It hadn’t sunk in that it was ours.’
Hamann had smoked since he was a teenager, usually Marlboro Lights. He approached David Moores, the chairman, and the only other smoker at the club.
Moores’ entire body was trembling, his clothes drenched in indeterminate liquid. His face was reddened and tears were falling uncontrollably from his eyes. Moores had been in control of the club for fourteen seasons and had already decided to sell it to someone else. He must have appreciated this would never happen again. It had never happened before.
‘David liked Marlboro Red cigarettes and they are a bit stronger than Lights, let me tell you,’ Hamann continues, amused. ‘I thought to myself, This is the perfect time to sit back, take it all in and kick back. So I said to the chairman, “David, come into my office,” and led him by the hand to the showers, which hadn’t been turned on yet. “David, can I have a cigarette?” I asked him.
‘He always called me Kaiser: “Kaiser, what if the manager finds out?” he said, the strain showing even more. “Just tell him you own the fucking club,” I told him.
‘Rafa had asked me on his first day in charge about the rumours, whether I smoked. It was best to be honest. “Yes I do, boss.” He showed no expression and walked away.
‘David took ages to open the packet because his hands were shaking so much. I think both of us needed that drag to settle us down. We stood there for five minutes in the dry shower saying nothing to each other, me in my full kit and David in his suit. Ash had fallen all over the floor. It felt like that cigarette you have after sex.’
Hamann’s Liverpool career seemed to be over after six years. Rafael Benítez had offered him a new contract at the start of 2005, before unceremoniously withdrawing it. Hamann decided that the next few days should be spent partying. He partied in the hotel in Istanbul. He partied on the flight back to Liverpool. He partied in the Sir Thomas Hotel after the parade around the city was completed, singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with John Aldridge on a stage. And then he partied with his family and friends. He did not expect to be summoned by Benítez to Melwood for what seemed to be a debrief. Hamann was unshaven and very tired indeed when the call came.
‘Rafa had a reputation for being quite strict but I saw him differently,’ Hamann says. ‘Rafa was straightforward rather than strict. As a German, I appreciated that approach because I’d grown up around it. I don’t think any player could claim he did not know what was expected of him under Rafa when they went out to play. He was very organized and very clear. He was not a control freak. He did not insert himself into your private affairs. But when you were at Melwood on football duty, you were his property.
‘Of course, he could change his mind too. And that shows you, perhaps, that he isn’t quite so stubborn as some people make out. When I walked into that office after Istanbul, I thought he might want to thank me for my efforts and say goodbye, although I figured that would be an unusual thing to do, because he wasn’t one for goodbyes. Instead, he offered me a new contract for another year. I didn’t expect him to perform the U-turn. But that was Rafa: he made big decisions and didn’t care too much about what people thought about them.’
Hamann was an unusual breed of footballer in the twenty-first century – perhaps unique to his working environment. He expressed himself socially and did not make much of an effort to hide it, potentially risking the scalding of his manager or his club. He did not train particularly well either. Yet all his managers, including Benítez, trusted him to perform with extreme tactical discipline on the pitch.
Hamann’s recruitment by Gérard Houllier for £8 million in 1999, along with six other foreign signings during the same summer, was supposed to herald a new dawn of professionalism at Anfield. The Spice Boys era was over, yet in Hamann, Liverpool were getting a midfielder who knew how to enjoy life away from the stresses of his occupation. Jamie Carragher recalls, with surprise, how Hamann marked the end of a night out with his new teammates by hailing a taxi early one morning in Liverpool’s city centre. His unusual method was to lie on the tarmac of Castle Street and wait hopefully for a car to spot him and brake.
‘This is absolutely true, of course,’ Hamann admits. ‘The English dressing room is very different to the German dressing room. You go in and you hear the music. It’s like a nightclub sometimes. In Germany, there is peace. We control the rage. Yet in England . . .
‘I have always enjoyed a beer with the lads,’ he continues. ‘In Germany, my big buddy was Mario Basler. We had some great times together. I understand why clubs – Bayern particularly – try their best to control players. Sometimes you need control but not always. I am convinced that if you share a common bond socially, it will show itself on the pitch too. But you mustn’t go too far. As a footballer, it would be easy to take advantage of your position and wealth. So I guess you have to find a balance. I drank mainly in the Everton pubs around Liverpool. I could relax there. The Evertonians didn’t want to have anything to do with you.’
Hamann is already eating a late breakfast of bacon and eggs, using heavily buttered toast to mop up the runny yolk when I arrive at a greasy-spoon café in Alderley Edge, the prosperous Cheshire town where he lives. The skies are oily and sunken but the rain cannot be seen due to the heavy condensation on the windows.
‘Today is football weather,’ he announces, shaking my hand and grinning earnestly. ‘I loved playing in these conditions. It was faster – more unpredictable.’
Hamann is an Anglophile. As he slurps through two mugs of steaming hot coffee, he speaks in an accent that can drift wantonly from Liverpudlian to native Bavarian in the course of a single sentence. He uses slang terms like ‘different gravy’, when analysing the abilities of Benítez, and ‘fannying around’, when describing the pedestrian football he loathes. Hamann recognizes he is neither a typical German nor a typical footballer, considering the acceleration towards vanilla professionalism that he witnessed in the later stages of his career. He misses little about the mundane routine of a footballer’s life in the modern age.
‘I finished playing nearly five years ago and there have only been a couple of occasions where I’ve wished I was active again,’ he says. ‘I had the best time. Nothing could have worked out better than it did. If you gave me the chance to be twenty-five, I wouldn’t take it because my memories are happy.
‘I had a spell [as manager] with Stockport County but I can’t really see myself as a manager or a coach in the future,’ he reveals. ‘I found it hard to be on time for training as a player. I paid my fair share of fines. As a coach or a manager, you have to be there even earlier. To get in the car at seven in the morning and spend the next ten hours every day for at least six days a week over the course of eleven months a year in the same intense routine doesn’t really appeal to me.
‘As a manager, you have to sacrifice a lot. You have no private life and a limited social life. Someone else is always waiting to take your place. You’ve got to be focused and 100 per cent prepared to give every second of your life to it. If you are not, you shouldn’t do it. You’ll fail.’
Hamann’s favourite pastime involves lying on the couch in front of his television and watching cricket. During an important Test series, he stays up late into the night and through into the morning. He did not even know what cricket was when he first arrived in England. He admits to blowing vast sums on spread betting, especially early in his retirement, when he was removed from that word he uses again and again, the ‘routine’. An Australian batting collapse against South Africa once cost him nearly £300,000.
‘Cricket is a sport I could talk all day and all night about,’ he says. ‘I sat in the Long Room at Lords last year. What a place that is: the history. Some great cricketers have had lunch there. I could name a lot of them if you wanted me to. When I came here, I did not know who Beefy Botham was.’
Hamann insists Jamie Carragher, his former teammate, likes cricket too, joking he might not talk about it too much because of his working-class roots.
‘Carra is like me: he enjoys strategy sports, where you have to use your brain,’ Hamann continues. ‘Especially in Test matches, there is so much to think about. It’s a game over five days, so you have to consider the quality of the pitch and the predictability of the weather: how many spin bowlers to play, whether you play a spinner at all; the batting line-up, who should bat in what order, who opens the batting with Alastair Cook [the England captain], who I think is one of the great modern leaders of sport.’
It is possible to imagine Hamann as a number 3 batsman standing wearily at the crease, repelling the fiercest bowling attacks for days on end, though not registering a necessarily impressive amount of runs. He played football that way: a subtle but reliable presence in the middle of midfield, missed when he was not there.
‘There is a solitude at number 3,’ he says. ‘You have more to think about than an opening bat. Staying in for as long as possible has to be the aim usually. Although I’m not sure whether I’d like to face the new ball.
‘I know Freddie Flintoff pretty well and I’ve had a knockabout with him in the nets,’ Hamann carries on. ‘Some of my friends turn out for Alderley Edge Cricket Club and when they’re one short I play for the third team. It’s hard to pick up a new sport the older you get. If I could make a 50 or a century for the over-forties, it would rank as high as winning the Champions League for me. I really mean that.’
He reasons that both his upbringing in conservatively minded Bavaria and his emergence from Munich’s most illustrious football club explains why he can simultaneously respect authority and be rebellious. There are also his strong opinions.
Hamann was four weeks old when his family moved from the quiet town of Waldsassen to a middle-class suburb called Solln in the gravel plain to the south of Munich. Yet Solln, Hamann says, is not a beery place of leather-clad, thigh-slapping bonhomie, where men sit in Oktoberfest tents singing songs while wiping foam from their moustaches. ‘Some nice houses and some grey tower blocks, with enough sports facilities to keep the kids busy,’ is his memory of childhood. ‘Unremarkable, basically.’
Further out from Munich and into the countryside, the mood changes and a patently wealthy region opens up. There is a famous German movie telling the story of a group of Bavarians that win the Olympic bobsledding medal in the 1950s. Asked where they are from, they reply, ‘We are from Bavaria. That’s near Germany.’
Bavaria might have the money of Hertfordshire but it also has the attitude of Yorkshire. And like Texas, it is one of the areas in the world where rural rather urban life defines the way things are.
A poll in 2013 showed that 25 per cent of Bavarians would be in favour of leaving the Federal Republic. That is only 5 per cent less than the number of people in Scotland who, before the No Campaign set about its business, said they wanted independence from the United Kingdom.
‘The Bavarians are a bit like the Scousers,’ Hamann says. ‘You either love them or you hate them. Both have had a big influence on the cultures of the countries they exist in but don’t really feel a part of the country necessarily. Within the country they polarize opinion. Bavaria is the biggest region in Germany. I wouldn’t say we claim to be better than the rest of Germany. But we certainly claim to be different.’
It becomes apparent there is more to Hamann than funny stories and eccentricities. There is a pleasant directness about him, an occasional abruptness, which might explain why he relates to Rafael Benítez the straight-talker, though Hamann can recognize he did not play for Benítez as long as others who are not so positive in their recollections, nor was he at Liverpool when off-the-field issues with ownership began to influence what happened on the pitch.
There is nevertheless a confidence in Hamann’s analysis, which is delivered in a matter-of-fact way. He begins this interview by speaking about how his first professional club, FC Bayern Munich, lead as Germany’s most successful team both in sporting terms and financially, relating his thoughts to experiences in England. The day before, Bayern had flattened Wolfsburg, from northern Germany, 5–1.
‘Bayern’s evolution has been natural and the club cannot ever be accused of being in the middle of a revolution,’ Hamann says. ‘The discipline is clear and consistent, and it is administered by people you respect because of their standing in the game. In England, it has always been very different. Where are the former players on the FA board? Where are the former players involved at the biggest clubs – clubs like Liverpool?
‘I was friends with Mario [Basler] and we’d enjoy a few shandies now and then. The club would know because they have a rein on what is happening. Even if it were five days before the next game, they would not be happy. [Uli] Hoeness found out and we’d be in his office explaining ourselves. Does that happen in England, where the ownership groups are based in America or the Middle East?
‘The loyalty of players is questioned all of the time in football now, whereas the loyalty of the club is never an issue. A player might sign for a manager who is sacked within a few months or the owner might change. It happened to me at Newcastle, two games into the season. Suddenly the person that signed me was gone, and in a new environment – no matter how much you are paid – you feel vulnerable. You think, Why did Newcastle allow Kenny [Dalglish] to buy me for so much money when he was clearly under pressure? Where does this leave me? It gives you an excuse not to perform. There are fewer people to be loyal to.
‘In Germany, Spain, Italy and France, there isn’t a desire at academy level to recruit the best young players from all over the world. They largely focus on the talent in the region of the club. It means clubs like Bayern can implement a pay structure, which is one third basic pay, one third on appearances and one third on bonuses. In effect, more than 50 per cent of wages is based on performance.
‘Here, in England, that isn’t the case. Young players get paid a lot of money no matter what their performance; they don’t know any different, so they grow up with a sense of entitlement. It results in a mentality issue – that it is OK to lose.’
He continues, ‘In England, the attitude is: if you lose and something bad happens to you, we have sympathy for you. In Germany, the attitude is less sympathetic. For example, in the 1990 World Cup final, Lothar Matthäus could not take a penalty because the stud in his boot had broken off. It was 0–0 with five minutes to go against Argentina, so he asked his best mate of twenty years, Andy Brehme, to take the kick instead. Brehme tucked it away, Germany won the World Cup, but people still have a go at Matthäus for supposedly bottling it – even though the goal was scored.
‘In England, there is a message that it’s OK to fail. You can see Paul Gascoigne as another example – again at the 1990 World Cup. He was booked in the semi-final and, knowing he would miss the final, was too upset to take a penalty in the shoot-out that followed. If that happened in Germany, he would not have been allowed back in the country. Gascoigne would have been accused of letting the team down and the whole nation.
‘Compare Gascoigne’s response to the reaction of Michael Ballack, who received a second booking in the 2002 World Cup semi-final, meaning he would miss the final. Michael was arguing with Carsten Ramelow, who’d given the ball away leading to the foul. I know because I was standing next to Carsten!
‘Michael said, “Come on, lads, we’ve still got twenty-five minutes left to play.” Rather than feeling sorry for himself, Ballack’s reaction was to go and score the goal that got Germany to the final. He celebrated too. Like Gascoigne, Ballack cried but he did it in the changing room once he’d completed his job. In my view, Ballack was a hero for this but in Germany nobody talks about it because we see what he did as normal. The attitude is, You miss a final – so what? It’s a team game . . .’
Hamann describes himself as an individual with the capacity to express his personality without disturbing the balance of the collective.
‘I liked to do things my way but without harming the performance of the team. If you knew how to handle me, which I don’t think was particularly challenging, then you would have a performance on a Saturday.’
His father was a policeman, so the rules at home were clearly defined and he understood boundaries. Having excelled at science and mathematics in school, he completed national service, where he learned to shoot a gun. He refers to his emergence as a professional footballer as a ‘drift’. It helped that his school was next door to the Wacker München football club.
‘Wacker had some decent kids: Turks, Serbs, Croats,’ Hamann remembers. ‘My father was the coach and he wanted us to play quick and direct, using only two touches. If you went one on one with the goalkeeper and there was another guy next to you and you didn’t square it so he has an open goal, even if you scored yourself you would get substituted. The idea was: always pass the ball to the person better placed. I think in the long term it made me more of a team player. And in Germany, if you are not a team player at heart, you do not get very far.’
Aged sixteen, Hamann received proposals from 1860 Munich and Bayern Munich. The decision was swayed in Bayern’s favour because the training ground was fifteen minutes away by bus. He was placed in a team two years above his own age group and his goals as an attacking midfielder pushed him towards the first team. For the first time as a footballer, he smashed into a wall of unhappiness, admitting that he was too young and naive to deal with the forceful personalities he encountered inside Germany’s most successful football club.
‘There was no togetherness whatsoever,’ he says flatly. ‘I came through with Christian Nerlinger, and Markus Babbel, who later played for Liverpool, and that helped to some extent because we suffered from similar anxieties. It was impossible to fit in when there was no common bond. The dressing room was divided between the young German players, the older superstars – many of whom didn’t like each other – and then the Italian- and French-speakers. The biggest problem was Matthäus and [Jürgen] Klinsmann – the biggest personalities – never got on. It wasn’t a nice environment to play in.’
Matthäus believed that Klinsmann had plotted to replace him as captain of the German national team and the enmity was cemented when Klinsmann won the European Championships of 1996 without Matthäus being part of the line-up. Back at Bayern, Matthäus apparently had a bet with Bayern’s general manager against his teammate scoring a certain number of goals in his second season, and, although he lost the bet, the season culminated with Klinsmann being vilified in a tabloid when he refused to grant the paper exclusive interviews, and then his sexuality was questioned by a television host.
When Bayern coach Giovanni Trapattoni substituted Klinsmann with a debutant amateur player for what would prove to be his only appearance for the club, Klinsmann reacted by kicking an advertising board on the side of the pitch and the moment was played again and again on German television.
In the dressing room, Hamann can remember how the bad mood between the pair was magnified by a culture already present where each person was looking after himself – a culture far removed from the team ethos pressed upon him from an early age.
‘Everybody made it difficult for each other,’ he says. ‘The old players were suspicious of the young players. Nobody gave you a helping hand or made you feel comfortable, enabling you to express yourself fully. They made their feelings clear: that you were a kid who did not belong in first-team training. They recognized too that if you did well, there was a chance that they might get removed from the side. I wouldn’t say it was bullying. But it was borderline. For a while I wasn’t able to show my ability because I was too nervous and too insecure about myself.
‘It reached the point where I was playing for the second team and scoring goals but as soon as I became involved with the first team my form disappeared. I thought that my future might be away from Bayern: in the second division at another club. Maybe success elsewhere would earn me the necessary respect to go back to Bayern and prove all of them wrong.’
Gradually, Hamann grew in confidence. He began to appreciate that players need not have the same outlook on life but fundamentally must be motivated by the same things.
‘At Bayern, it was drilled into you from an early age that first is first and second is last,’ Hamann says. ‘German players are pragmatic. There are some who purposely tackle certain teammates harder in a training match because their presence is a threat. These aren’t deliberate attempts to injure but if they get injured, then so be it. We had training sessions where the coach had to stop the game because it was getting too feisty. But at least the intensity was the same on a Saturday. I liked this because it is better than playing eleven versus eleven and fannying around at half pace in a training session. It gives the players in the B team a chance to show the manager that they should really be playing on the other side by tackling really hard.
‘In England, the attitude was completely different. You aren’t allowed to tackle your teammates in training. This surprised me because in England the game was supposed to be more physical. It made me wonder whether it is all for show; beneath the anger maybe the players are too nice.
‘You need a balance, of course. At Bayern, a lot of the players didn’t like each other and at times it took something away from our performances. Other times, it possibly added to our performances because some players were desperate to prove others wrong. I would say there were a lot of alpha males with their own agendas but fundamentally we wanted the same thing in a sporting sense when it came to the match. The results and the trophies proved that.’
Hamann recognizes that learning to deal with the politics of the dressing room helped to build his self-confidence. He chose to move clubs at the age of twenty-four because he felt he wasn’t getting the recognition he deserved at Bayern.
‘That showed I had overcome my confidence issues,’ he says. ‘As I got older, I found it harder to score goals. I did not have the necessary acceleration to move away from opponents and get a shot off. I’d love to have been an attacking midfielder but an attacking midfielder who doesn’t score goals is not going to be selected very often. The progression was to go further back, because it suited me. At Bayern, I was asked by Trapattoni to fill in the space behind Mario Basler. Mario was one of the most gifted players but he wouldn’t run backwards. We played with a unique 3–3–3–1 formation and it meant that I, quite often, was a wing-back. Although it wasn’t natural for me, it improved my understanding.
‘I’m not a precious person. But Bayern supplied six players for the 1998 World Cup squad and I was one of them. Even though I was playing for Bayern every week and a German international, I knew I could do an awful lot more and take on greater responsibility, become regarded as a senior player.’
Hamann explored options abroad because he considered any other German club to be a step down.
‘The first team to make an offer was Real Betis in Seville. They were really ambitious and had just signed the Brazilian player Denilson for a world-record fee. Seville is a beautiful city. I liked the sound of it. But Newcastle came in and they were keener. I was 50/50 and had Betis been as keen as Newcastle, I’d probably have gone there. Kenny [Dalglish] met with my agent and had a really persuasive argument. He made me realize that my game would suit the Premier League more. I saw Newcastle’s players too – legends. They had John Barnes; Ian Rush had been there the year before. Then there was [Alan] Shearer, Shay Given and Gary Speed. I saw the heartbeat of a successful side.’
After Dalglish was sacked, Hamann was pushed again into a more attacking role by his successor, Ruud Gullit. Gérard Houllier was bold in spending £8 million to take him to Liverpool the following summer.
‘I met Gérard and liked him straight away. He told me that he wanted to build the midfield around my experience. He had sold Paul Ince and needed another leader in there. Nobody had really spoken about me as a leader before and, considering I’d left Germany to find more responsibility, this was music to my ears. I really felt wanted and the fact he used so much money to sign me gave me huge confidence.’
Hamann was less keen on Phil Thompson, however. He responds swiftly when asked whether he’d previously encountered someone like the assistant manager with a notorious temper.
‘Er, no . . .’ he says, pausing. ‘There is no doubt, on occasion, it helped get results. But maybe Thommo got angry too often. Gérard was always quick to intervene if he was going too far. “Leave it, Phil. We’ll speak Monday.” The number of times he said that in the changing rooms . . .’
Hamann’s mind wanders to a match at Southampton in 2000 when Liverpool let a three-goal lead slip in the final twenty minutes.
‘Thommo went so mad at Markus Babbel that Markus reacted and threw a boot at him, and it all kicked off big time. Is this approach healthy? Probably not. Having said that, hard feelings were not held for too long. A lot of the boys didn’t take Thommo’s rants so seriously. You realized it was best to take your medicine and laugh about it later. It became another part of the routine in that period.’
Hamann found the enthusiastic personality of Sammy Lee, the first-team coach, even more annoying to deal with than Thompson’s rage.
‘Sammy was relentless with his enthusiasm with every other player but me,’ Hamann explains. ‘I have to admit I couldn’t be assed training at 100 per cent all of the time. That wasn’t my style. Sometimes I had to say, “Sammy, do me a favour and leave me alone.” I knew my own body. I was twenty-five when I joined Liverpool and I appreciated what I had to do to perform on a Saturday.
‘In pre-season, I’d never miss a session. I did everything I was told. I was a good runner and I’d be towards the front. During the season, I would know when to get a sweat on and when not to. Other players are different, of course. Carra and Paddy Berger – they needed to be on it all of the time to have the confidence to execute their competitive game.
‘Me? I’d try to find a space on the pitch to hide during full-scale training matches because I learned that going crazy in training did not improve my levels on a Saturday. If I tried like Carra or Paddy, I would have been fucked, too tired.
‘You have to trust the players. I’m not sure Sammy trusted me all of the time and it got on my nerves. He wanted everyone to make sure they were warmed up, for example. “Sammy, I’ve warmed up in the car with the heaters on and I’ve never pulled a muscle in my life.” These conversations happened all the time. He would encourage everyone else and if someone gave the ball away five times in a possession game, he’d encourage them, being positive. If I did it once, I’d get a bollocking.’
There were other people inside Liverpool’s dressing room whom Hamann took to straight away. Jamie Carragher was one of them.
‘At the beginning, it is fair to say that Carra was a bit of a lad. He liked a joke. He liked a night out. But when he played, he played hard. He wasn’t someone who cracked jokes and then disappeared on a Saturday. He backed everything up.’
Carragher came from Bootle, a modest area a few miles north of Liverpool’s city centre. A few weeks after Hamann signed, Carragher invited the German to join him in Bootle for a night out. They entered a bar known locally as Cornelius’s Place, a dive with a jukebox and a small selection of draft lagers.
‘It was so dark in there, I remember walking out a few hours later and my eyes beginning to hurt because of the light,’ Hamann says. On another occasion in the early days, Carragher remedied a bad defeat by suggesting a few drinks in Liverpool city centre. ‘We ended up in Flares and the lads got down to “Super Trouper” from Abba. It wasn’t the type of thing Houllier liked us to do. But Carra knew better. The night out helped us recover from our disappointment. Everything went wrong against Leicester. There was no point in dwelling.’
Hamann cannot stop laughing when he recalls a scene outside the team bus before a European away game in Valencia.
‘Michael Owen spotted Carra’s dad, Philly, in the crowd. He was dancing in the street, singing – shouting – Liverpool songs. Everyone leaned to one side of the bus to see what was going on. If it was my dad, I’d have probably hidden in the toilets but Carra reacted by banging on the window, encouraging him. “Go ’ed, lad,” he shouted.’
Hamann says the spirit under Gérard Houllier was the best he’s experienced at club level.
‘Any successful team has the right blend. If you want to win, you firstly need players you can rely on. That’s the bottom line. In that group, you need young and old – a mix of stamina and pace – and players who can put their foot on the ball. I played in twelve finals for Liverpool and we only lost three. I think that shows Gérard chose the right players, players who could respond when the chips were down, players who did not get too hyped up or nervous. Markus [Babbel] was one of them, and Stéphane [Henchoz] was the same, Sami too. They were all defensive players and each one of them had a good temperament. In attack, we had players who could make a difference. In 2001, Michael Owen won a lot of games for us.’
Houllier transformed Liverpool in less than two years from a team with a reputation for throwing everything away to one skilled in methods of recovery. Hamann credits the manager’s perception for judging moods as the main reason why Liverpool won three cup competitions in less than four months.
‘I remember driving to Melwood and thinking, I can’t be assed training today. I walked in and Patrice Bergues, Gérard’s right-hand man, was waiting for us. “Don’t get changed yet, lads. We’re going to the David Lloyd gymnasium for a swim and a sauna.” He read my mind and, probably, a lot of the boys’ minds. Nearly everything Gérard did in that period was right.’
For Hamann, though, one decision stands above the rest as a sign that Houllier’s time as Liverpool’s manager was somewhere near an end. In 2002, soon after Houllier’s return from his heart scare, Liverpool were 2–1 up on aggregate against Bayer Leverkusen with half an hour or so of the Champions League quarter-final remaining. Liverpool were protecting a lead but by replacing Hamann with Vladimir Šmicer, an attack-minded player, Liverpool’s midfield was left wide open.
‘There was so much confidence amongst the players that we genuinely believed we’d beat Man United in the semi and Real Madrid in the final,’ Hamann says. ‘Real Madrid didn’t scare us one bit. We were bouncing, really bouncing.’
After Hamann’s substitution, though, Leverkusen scored three goals and knocked Liverpool out.
‘Earlier that month, Houllier had told me that in all his time as manager, we’d never conceded more than three goals when I was on the pitch. We were in command before Houllier took me off. I couldn’t understand the decision. I was fuming and totally gutted.’
Hamann’s phone rang at the team hotel later that night.
‘It was Gérard. “Didi, I want to speak to you, will you come downstairs?” I wasn’t the only one there. He told the whole squad that nobody should speak to the press about his substitutions.
‘Although I agreed to go along with his idea, it said to me that, deep down, he knew he’d got it wrong. Houllier had never chosen to hold a team meeting so soon after a game before. Usually, he’d take a day to collect his thoughts then run through things.’
Back at Melwood, Hamann was summoned to Houllier’s office.
‘I was planning to really have a go at him but as soon as I entered the room he looked up at me in the same way a headmaster does to a pupil and asked me straight why I underperformed in Leverkusen. That threw me off course. He explained that he was disappointed in my role in Leverkusen’s first goal but I tried to reason with him that I’d got caught out of position because Steven Gerrard had dived in on Michael Ballack and that I had to try to recover the situation.
‘When I look back now, I can think of Thommo sitting there beside Houllier and saying nothing. That just wasn’t his way. If I was responsible for a mistake, he’d have laid in to me. His silence said a thousand words.’
Houllier kept his job for another two seasons. It proved to be a long farewell and by the time of his departure the groundswell of opinion was against him amongst Liverpool’s febrile supporter base. Hamann, though, is defensive of his former manager when reflecting on the legacy he left behind.
‘He [Houllier] is definitely underrated in this country,’ Hamann says. ‘Critics talk about the players he bought who didn’t perform at Liverpool but he also bought Sami Hyypiä for £2.5 million and built a team inside twelve months that was capable of winning trophies.
‘He used to be a teacher, so he was very good at communicating with people and creating team spirit. You saw that in how many finals we played and won even when we were under pressure for a lot of the time. We won the Champions League after he left and so many of the players were his signings. He deserves credit for the team he left behind.’
When Liverpool won the Champions League twelve months later, Houllier appeared in Liverpool’s dressing room, much – supposedly – to the annoyance of Rafael Benítez, the winning manager.
Like Houllier, Benítez’s modest career as a player did not warn of his rise as a coach. His high point had been at Parla, a fourth-division club from the Madrid suburbs, where he first showed signs of the path he wanted to follow by making notes of everything that happened during the course of a season: scores, scorers, injuries, cards and details about set pieces.
Benítez began as a player at Real Madrid and went back there, aged twenty-nine, as a coach, serving a four-year apprenticeship in the youth set-up. Raúl would become an icon at the club and a week before his debut he’d been under Benítez’s wing with the second team, missing a couple of easy chances in a game at Palamós.
Like Houllier, Benítez had a reputation for building teams with strong defensive units while recognizing the importance of match-winners within the block. Unlike Houllier, Benítez suffered the whiplash of a few failures early on in his career, which are likely to have had a significant effect on the way he approached management.
Benítez was sacked from his first senior position at Valladolid after clashing with Aljoša Asanović, the creative midfielder, over his tendency to break from position. From the moment Asanović carelessly gave away a penalty, the Croatian became a part of the problem rather than the solution. Such was Benítez’s determination to instil tactical discipline that when he was involved in a car accident where he skidded on a sheet of ice, the Valladolid forward joked, ‘Boss, we’re glad you’re all right and that nothing happened to you,’ he said. ‘We were worried that the video recorder would miss you.’
Benítez then lasted just seven matches in charge of Osasuna, which scarred his morale. Knowing his reputation was under threat, the next job had to be the right one and eighteen months later he was carried around the pitch shoulder-high at Extremadura after sealing promotion into La Liga.
Like Houllier at Lens, Benítez made up for the things he didn’t have by going to the extreme in the basics to achieve impressive results. The players at Extremadura trained until they were physically exhausted and Pako Ayestarán, the assistant whom he met at Osasuna, was nicknamed ‘the pain in the neck’.
Benítez banned chewing gum because he wanted his squad to appear more professional. He tried to instil instinct through repetition in training patterns, and in his team talk before matches he would ask players for details about their opponents, checking whether they’d been listening. On away trips, teammates were paired off in rooms according to their positions on the field.
His relationship with the Extremadura chairman, however, gradually eroded because of disagreements over the facilities at the club, which Benítez deemed unsuitable. The chairman did not see them as a priority considering the small resources at Extremadura, and though Benítez eventually got his way, he left after suffering relegation back to the second division in spite of a good fight against the odds.
From there Benítez went to Tenerife, where upon his arrival he overcame a division between old and young players in the squad to seal promotion again. In the Canary Islands, he learned to deal with a more inquisitive media, giving time to those who’d been critical of him and a bit less to his supporters.
When Valencia needed someone to replace Argentine Héctor Cúper, three other coaches were approached first before chairman Pedro Cortés thought of Benítez, asking him, ‘Have you got the guts to manage Valencia?’
The appointment was viewed as a gamble considering Valencia had lost the Champions League final twice in the seasons before, while Benítez, at best, was knocking about in the lower reaches of La Liga. And yet Benítez displayed courage immediately by replacing the popular Santiago Cañizares as captain and offering shared duties to midfield duo David Albelda and Rubén Baraja.
What followed was Valencia’s first La Liga title in thirty-one years, toppling the Barcelona and Real Madrid monopoly by creating a wonderful team based around his hallmarks: an organized defensive base, aggressive full-backs, ball-playing midfielders, fast wingers and a hard-working centre-forward. Two years later, when he achieved the same feat, Benítez also won the UEFA Cup, easily beating a Marseille team in the final that had earlier knocked out Liverpool.
Benítez became restless, though, and wanted more control in order to make his position safer. He wanted to sign Samuel Eto’o from Mallorca when the Cameroonian centre-forward was approaching his peak. When he ended up with Mohamed Sissoko, a young midfielder from Auxerre, he commented publicly, ‘I’ve asked for a table and they’ve bought me a lamp.’ In the summer of 2004, there were offers to join Roma, Tottenham Hotspur and Besiktas.
At Liverpool, Hamann liked Benítez from day one. Others were less impressed.
‘Rafa reminded me of Trapattoni at Bayern,’ Hamann says. ‘His English wasn’t very good at the beginning and sometimes the players would have to fill in the gaps. But I knew the Italians and Spanish put a greater emphasis on tactical strategy than coaches from other nations. I knew straight away Rafa was class. Trapattoni made training sessions incredibly long and Rafa did the same, so I was used to this. He would go over and over what he wanted for two to two and a half hours. It did not impress some of the lads who were used to training off the cuff a bit more. We were in the States for the pre-season and on the bus some of them were complaining, saying, “This is shit.” But I thought the opposite. Just you wait. This fella’s a different gravy.
‘I was in a later stage of my career by then and I thought I knew everything there was to know. But Rafa introduced new methods and made me think differently about the way the game was played. He also had a way of letting the players know where they stood while keeping them guessing at the same time.
‘This, for me, is very important because it keeps egos in check. His message was clear from the very beginning: the player who plays two or three games a season is as important as the one that plays forty or fifty. What happened in 2005 proved that, because Florent Sinama Pongolle and Neil Mellor scored two of the most important goals in the season yet didn’t play as much as some of the others.’
Hamann cannot remember a conversation with Benítez about anything other than football.
‘He would say, “This is what I’m like, this is what we are going to do; if you are not on board, then do one, go somewhere else.” He didn’t care about individuals; all he cares about is the team. In my eyes, that’s the way it should be and I also think this is why he has a track record of success.’
In his second autobiography, Steven Gerrard revealed that his relationship with Benítez was cooler than it had been with any of his other managers. Hamann is not being critical of Gerrard when he explains how a relationship between manager and player usually works on the Continent. Hamann says as long as a manager helped him achieve success, he didn’t care what his style was like, or, indeed, how he appeared to be as a person.
‘Do you want a manager you can call when your missus has the flu or do you want a manager who wins the Champions League?’ Hamann asks. ‘I don’t care whether I can phone the manager; I want him to get the best out of me and the team. I think some players expect managers to be like Alcoholics Anonymous: there on stand-by for twenty-four hours a day. But this is a professional game. Rafa’s honest and doesn’t bullshit. Maybe that’s too much for some people.
‘He treats the players like adults. You see now, some managers like to say they are strong man-managers when the reality is very different. I thought that Rafa’s man-management was very strong, because you knew exactly what he expected of you on the football pitch. And, usually, he stuck to his convictions. When you are Liverpool manager, so many people are looking to knock you down. If you start listening, you fall. That’s probably what happened to Gérard Houllier.’
Hamann is confident enough to say publicly what he has said privately to both Gerrard and Jamie Carragher – two people he considers friends.
‘Before Rafa’s arrival, Carra was a utility player. Gérard always found a place for him but it was never at centre-back. Rafa put him in the middle and made him one of the best English centre-backs. If it wasn’t for Ferdinand and Terry, Carra would have eighty England caps. It was the same with Stevie: Stevie was a very good player before but Rafa took him to the next level.
‘OK, some things happened between both of them after I left, things I should probably not tell you because it is their story and not mine. But I think what he did do is improve players. He brought an even tougher mentality to the club. Nobody really believed Liverpool could go and win the Champions League. Rafa believed it could happen and that helped the players.’
Whenever Benítez revealed Liverpool’s team to the squad one hour and ten minutes before kick-off, Gerrard’s name would reliably appear last.
‘Rafa would refer to the rest of the players by their first name or nickname. So, it would go: “Jerzy, Steve, Carra, Sami, John; Vladi, Didi, Xabi, Harry; Milan and finally Gerrard.”’
Hamann can understand why that might have annoyed Gerrard.
‘OK, Rafa did things a certain way. He was very particular. But history only judges managers by what happens on a Saturday and a Wednesday night. And Stevie played his best football in his career by a mile under Rafa. He doesn’t need to love him. But he must acknowledge this surely.’
Hamann defends Benítez even though he was not selected to start the Champions League final. Benítez, in fact, went through the team with Gerrard and Carragher the night before.
‘So it wasn’t as if they never spoke, not at the beginning anyway,’ Hamann says. ‘Carra only told me this information a few days later and I’m glad he didn’t tell me before because my head would have been scrambled. There was nothing to be gained by saying I was dropped. In those first two years, Rafa would pull Stevie to one side almost every day and run through things with him. It wasn’t as if he thought Xabi or Sami were more important to him, he was interacting with Stevie more than anyone else.’
Hamann says he cannot remember being 3–0 down at half-time in any other game during his career other than in Istanbul.
‘I’d always played for good teams,’ he explains. ‘Yes, maybe Rafa made a mistake in not selecting me from the start. But a big part of success is rectifying your mistakes and making decisions that change the course of events.’
In the dressing room, Hamann’s only specific instruction was to try to stop Kaka and Clarence Seedorf, Milan’s attacking midfield pair, from running the game. Benítez reminded Hamann of his responsibilities at set pieces.
‘The general idea was to give Stevie more space to play in, because the midfield was very crowded. Rafa, even though he was only forty-five at the time, was a successful, experienced manager. I would have felt slightly insulted if he told me what I needed to do, because it was pretty obvious what the plan should be from a defensive point of view: stop Milan’s attacking players.’
Somehow, Liverpool won on penalties.
‘I would put any trophy I won abroad above the best trophy I won with Bayern Munich,’ Hamann says. ‘You have so many obstacles to overcome in England: the language, the culture, making sure the wife and kids are settled; then there’s the football, the pace and the massive expectations.
‘With Liverpool, you have to ride the emotion of the club and the city. You have to use that emotion to your advantage and not let it undermine your game. Gérard Houllier always said, “Warm heart, cool head.” I never had a problem with delivering that, because I didn’t think about playing until two minutes before the kick-off.’
Though Benítez relented after the Champions League final and gave Hamann a new contract, his Liverpool career was over twelve months later and he joined Manchester City. His playing days finished at Milton Keynes Dons before a few months in charge of Stockport County. Though he does not wish to take on the role again, the art of management fascinates Hamann. He considers himself fortunate to have played under a few of the greats. There was Franz Beckenbauer, then Otto Rehhagel, Giovanni Trapattoni, Kenny Dalglish, Gérard Houllier, Rafa Benítez and Sven-Göran Eriksson.
‘I liked Trapattoni a lot,’ Hamann says, before offering a story. ‘At Bayern, we’d lost a home game two days before and in the next training session he was trying to tell us that it wasn’t possible to apologize to the fans by showing up at the stadium and saying sorry. His German was OK but it wasn’t the best. He told us that we had to show some balls. He was searching for the word cojones in German, so one of our South American players told him the word for fanny instead, mushi. “Yes, yes, we’ve got to go out there and show the fans that we have a fanny,” he kept saying over and over again. The lads tried not to laugh because it was a serious situation. Eventually, the whole room erupted. Thankfully Trapp joined in when he realized the mistake.’
Hamann lived near Rafael Benítez on the Wirral peninsula. The pair keep in touch.
‘I remember going round to his house and Barcelona were on the TV. The whole world was going crazy about their style of football, so Rafa grabbed hold of salt and pepper shakers and began to try to explain to me how to beat them. The guy never stops. That’s why he’s one of the best in the business.’
On a social level, Hamann details why he could relate to Sven-Göran Eriksson the easiest.
‘City were taken over by Thaksin Shinawatra, who was the [former] prime minister of Thailand. The season had finished and Mr Shinawatra decided that the squad should travel to Bangkok for a trip. Sven knew that he was being replaced as manager. All of the players did too. I was relaxing on a sun lounger out by the pool when Sven appeared holding two champagne glasses. He handed me one, so I asked, “What are we celebrating for, boss?”
‘Sven just turned to me and said, “Life, Kaiser, we’re celebrating life.”
‘That was Sven for you. He was my kind of guy.’