by Simon Hughes
An almost unbroken thirty-year cycle of achievement was over for Liverpool, a club where continuity had long been the key to success, where the management-selection system relied on promotion from within and teams were built on gradual evolution. It was a formula that had kept the club’s most highly valued prize in seemingly permanent residence at Anfield rather than Old Trafford.
The 1990s was an era where there were three Liverpools, each one at odds with the last. There was the Liverpool of Graeme Souness, who inherited an old squad from Kenny Dalglish and quickly disbanded it, his previous success seeming to blind him to the fact he didn’t know everything there was to know about management. There was the Liverpool of Roy Evans, who was just as quick as Souness to make changes but took the club back to its traditional values when those of the game as a whole were heading in a different direction. Then there was the Liverpool of Frenchman Gérard Houllier, another knee-jerk appointment, who represented an uneasy compromise between the Continental coaching technocrats who had flooded the British game and the older values of a different age.
It was ultimately a difficult period to be Liverpool’s manager. Anfield remained buried in a traditional backstreet setting while the club tried to haul itself into the next century. Attempts at modernization included a financially beneficial merchandising agreement with Reebok, the lucrative sponsorship deal with Carlsberg and an in-house McDonald’s complete with trashylooking ‘M’ welded to the outside of the Kop. At Melwood, the training base in West Derby, a revamped facility eventually superseded the handwritten ledgers of Ronnie Moran, who was the club’s oldest servant when he retired in 1998.
It was also a time of great transition for the players, courted not only by a different, more aggressive media but the jet set as well.
A new type of celebrity emerged. Managers and players operated in contradicting worlds but within the loose framework of a society bent out of shape by Thatcherite greed. Many see the nineties as both an inspiring decade and a scruffy clearinghouse sale of British culture – the repackaging of Britannia, with added cool, for international distribution.
The global potential of football was spotted by Sky Television. In 1992, the Premier League replaced the old First Division, heralding a prosperous future and a move away from the hooliganism and stadium disasters that blighted football in the 1980s. There were fears that the English top flight had fallen a long way behind other elite European divisions in Italy and Spain, where clubs had more money and could attract the world’s best players. Unhappy at the direction in which English football seemed to be heading, ten First Division clubs threatened to create a new breakaway competition, splitting from the Football League, which they’d been part of for more than a hundred years. It was this possibility that prompted the first steps towards the creation of a Premier League and soon a lucrative television deal with Sky, brokered by Rick Parry – a Liverpool supporter who would finish the decade as chief executive at Anfield – meant twenty-two Premier League clubs would share a pot of £304 million.
Manchester United used much of the bounty to develop Old Trafford, a stadium that today generates more income than any other in world football because of its size and merchandising opportunities. Elsewhere, the money encouraged those other clubs trying to catch up with Liverpool to be more ambitious in the transfer market. Exciting foreigners like Gianfranco Zola, Faustino Asprilla and Juninho signed for Chelsea, Newcastle United and Middlesbrough, while cheap players with European Union passports came to replace the dross at the bottom. It was good news for the Premier League’s skyrocketing international fan base but bad news for players like Liverpool’s Paul Stewart and soon enough, other-worldly characters like Zola, Asprilla and Juninho were skipping past English defenders like Neil Ruddock in a similar way to a sober man outwitting a drunken one.
And what of the actual matches? Well, they became soap operas where attractive and controversial figures secured the recognition of their names in the sport but also their notoriety in news headlines. Football became something entirely different.
All of this begs the question whether it should really be a surprise that the club built on comradeship and the strongest foundations of socialism fell the furthest when the free market began to eat voraciously into the game. Is it merely a coincidence that in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, the first cracks in Liverpool’s domination over English football began to appear publicly for the first time? Liverpool’s regression occurred when not just football was changing but the world itself. Perhaps Liverpool’s decline was ultimately unavoidable.
Liverpool’s simplicity before had been extreme. At Bill Shankly’s behest, there had been no interference in football matters from boardroom level since the mid 1960s. Training routines remained the same season after season. A chain of managers acted as ‘spokesmen’ for the club, as Roy Evans put it; success was largely achieved through a collective spirit, instigated by the senior players. Everybody involved knew their role. Winning seemed easy.
Yet it is historically proven that, unless blood is spilt in morbid quantities, empires that are only prepared to peer inside their own souls for answers eventually come to an end. As Liverpool had achieved so much success, it was believed that the club’s methods were infallible. At Anfield, the reaction to the general culture shift was unenthusiastic.
In the early 1990s, while other clubs became more professional and more competitive, at Liverpool the framework remained largely the same as it was before. Graeme Souness tried to make necessary changes only to be foiled by his own lack of diplomacy as well as resistance amongst a group he admits he could have managed better.
Under Roy Evans, some progress was made. Liverpool had the youngest average age of any squad in the Premier League, lower even than Manchester United. Yet United were always one step ahead of Liverpool and considered dreamy, a football imitation of Beverly Hills, 90210. Liverpool were crude, like Men Behaving Badly, a group of men, indeed, who were prepared to wear ostentatious white suits to the FA Cup final of 1996, a contest that featured their greatest rivals at a rare moment in history where there was not much difference in the quality between the teams.
After Souness’s fractious reign, when morale was at a low, Liverpool’s squad collective was rediscovered under Evans and, through an active social scene not too different to the one that had existed in the eighties, the players established a common bond. Unfortunately that clashed with the new expectations on footballers.
Following the bitter class war of the eighties, Britain had suddenly remembered how to enjoy itself again. Young people from working-class backgrounds were redefining social norms and this was reflected particularly in the music industry, with bands like Oasis and Blur storming the charts. In politics, Labour appointed their youngest leader since the Second World War and Tony Blair promptly won the next general election.
But it seemed that not everyone was welcome at the party. Footballers, with their new money, were often the target of resentment, especially those underachieving at a club with a history as rich as that of Liverpool. Players found their lives illuminated by the glare of the media spotlight and suddenly everyone had an opinion on their behaviour – good or bad. This, of course, was the birth of the talkSPORT age, which launched as Talk Radio in 1995. It seems normal now for callers to be in a rage by midday whenever Jack Wilshere smokes a cigarette on holiday, but back then an entire radio debate devoted to Steve McManaman’s role in drinking games while on international duty for England before Euro 96 was a novel concept. It successfully tapped into the public’s reasonably felt jealousy over disproportionate earnings while also redefining our beliefs about how footballers should act.
Liverpool’s white suits merely confirmed the suspicions of many: Liverpool were not serious about winning trophies any more. The FA Cup final felt like a big day out at the races, an opportunity to show off. Before the game, as Robbie Fowler and his best mate McManaman larked about on the pitch while being interviewed by Ray Stubbs, or �
�Stubbsy’ as they called him, live on BBC television, the sight of those white suits had the effect of pressing a mute button on Liverpool’s support. On the terraces at least, United were delivered their gift-wrapped ammunition and travelling Merseysiders were forced to listen submissively as the other end took the piss before Eric Cantona shanked a late winner, with goalkeeper David James, who had a significant role in the selection of the suits in the first place, flapping initially at David Beckham’s corner kick.
Patience ran out with Liverpool and probably Evans in the summer of 1997. It was at the same time that Labour got into power and invited Noel Gallagher – considered at the forefront of the social swing, definitely in musical terms – through the front doors of 10 Downing Street for a nauseating drinks reception. It killed Britpop. It killed Cool Britannia and the faith in the nineties as a time of cultural revival and pride. Enough was enough. Now it was necessary to prove that governmental change could represent real change. Evans’ Liverpool, whose players were known as the Spice Boys because of their ability to sell newspapers on the basis of front-page headlines rather than back, similarly needed to grow up. It was time to prove something. The League Cup in 1995 was not enough. Where were the FA Cup-winners’ medals? What about the Premier League – the stuff that really mattered? With those questions being posed, soon Evans was gone and Gérard Houllier, with his fist of iron, was enforcing a Souness-esque discipline and pushing through modernization that had been prevented from happening years earlier.
My involvement as a supporter ran in line with Liverpool’s disappointments. Over the years, I’ve been at Anfield so often that if the notion took me I could find my younger self in any corner of the stadium. If I wait long enough in the Paddock, I can see myself two weeks before a birthday celebrating giddily after Ray Houghton lashed in a shot that flew beyond the hilariously named Coventry City goalkeeper, Steve Ogrizovíc. I was nearly eight years old. It was October 1991.
In the Kop, I can catch sight of myself standing there aged ten, right up against the crash barriers, struggling to breathe while watching Swindon Town, doomed to relegation yet inappropriately wearing the colours of the Brazilian national team, take an improbable lead through John Moncur and Keith Scott before Mark Wright headed in from a corner to equalize with just four minutes to go. I realized then that supporters are insignificant as individuals but as a collective they can become mighty, generating in a moment a level of noise that can affect the players and therefore the outcome of a game.
A mate of mine’s father knew Joe Corrigan, Liverpool’s goalkeeping coach. When he got us into the players’ lounge in 1997, I remember seeing Liverpool’s squad looking like they’d rather be anywhere else following an embarrassing 1–0 home defeat to Barnsley, who like Swindon would spend just one season as a Premier League team.
Three hours before the game, we had been invited for a tour, touching the mystical ‘This Is Anfield’ sign as we passed down the tunnel and on to the touchline of the pitch. I even peeked my head into the changing rooms and was told off by a steward for my bold intrusion. It was enough to establish that the space was small, spartanly decorated and reeked of Deep Heat. A medical table with slightly ripped brown-leather cushioning stood there solemnly waiting to treat the injured.
Following Barnsley’s winner, scored by Ashley Ward, the lumbering journeyman centre-forward, the players’ lounge had the feeling of an after-show party where the gig had been a real let-down. David James lay spread on a couch, a bottle of Carlsberg in hand, the top button of his shirt undone and his tie askew. Paul Ince had not played and was wearing an inappropriate New York Yankees cap. He had a lot to say for himself. Jamie Redknapp was there with his pop-star girlfriend Louise Nurding.
On the way out, we saw Roy Evans and Barnsley manager Danny Wilson chatting outside the new Boot Room, which had been relocated from its original position in order to create a press area. Evans was putting on a brave face. I wondered how he dealt with being a Liverpool supporter and leading the team towards defeat against dubious opposition like Barnsley. Did he just go home, turn the lights off and go to bed? Wilson, arms folded, could not stop smiling. He held the expression of a provincial army general after sacking Rome.
In the Centenary Stand – long after it had ceased to be the Kemlyn Road – I can watch myself as a teenager, punching the air triumphantly and swearing a lot when Ince appeared to halt United’s charge to the title again by making the scoreline 2–2 as the game reached its conclusion. Ince had not, of course. United prevailed on the final day of the 1998–99 season, with Liverpool finishing out of contention once more.
I had not envisaged back then that I would soon be interviewing a lot of the players I grew up watching. Once I started work as a journalist, I quickly realized that while active, footballers are restricted in what they can say. This is not dissimilar to life in the outside world, where climbing the greasy pole is recommended and few people venture to say what they really think. Theirs are working contracts, which mean the thoughts of their colleagues and particularly their manager matter. Hundreds of interviews have taught me that speaking to retired players, those whose memories and passions remain fresh enough, always provides the most entertaining copy. They can look back over their careers with the benefit of both hindsight and greater life experience.
It is for this reason I did not pursue Robbie Fowler with the same enthusiasm as others in this book. Fowler was an exceptional talent and became a Liverpool legend thanks to his goals. Yet he has already released a reasonably candid autobiography and at the time of writing was employed as ambassador for the club, which I know from experience hinders the level of objectivity that makes a project like this worth starting. Steve McManaman was omitted for the same reason – he works at Liverpool’s youth academy in Kirkby.
From the feedback to Red Machine, the book I wrote about Liverpool in the 1980s, I found that fans were more interested in reading about those with lower profiles: Howard Gayle over John Barnes, for example, two black players from different backgrounds and who had contrasting impacts.
Here, I wanted to showcase characters whose life stories were thought-provoking, largely untold and would knead together while simultaneously revealing the bigger picture of Liverpool in the 1990s. I wanted to establish whether Souness was solely responsible for everything that went wrong in the early part of the decade and whether Evans was too nice to reverse the trend, so while also getting players that were best placed to offer the most relevant insight, I made sure I interviewed the pair of them. Managers are usually better talkers, mainly because they have more to consider. Players tend to concentrate on their own role. Managers tend to set about trying to assume absolute control of the clubs they run and therefore have views on everything. From the encounters with both Souness and Evans I came away feeling excited and could not wait to start writing.
There were some surprises. John Scales probably spoke the most sense about what was happening at Liverpool during the Spice Boys period. Scales, whose intelligence did not sit comfortably beside the boorish attitudes in the dressing rooms of clubs he’d been at before Liverpool, reminded me of Michael Robinson from the 1980s, a closet intellectual who could not afford to let it all come out. Players had warned me that Scales was too polite for his own good and might not even be worth meeting. Yet now, after football, he was far more confident talking about his experiences and perceptive enough to analyse better than anyone else what was happening around him.
It is always better to do interviews in person, to shake your subject by the hand and look him in the eye. It pays to make the effort of travelling long distances, to treat them as people and get a couple of rounds in when necessary. Most of the figures that feature here had a negative view of the media, so I treated their initial caution with respect and hoped they might come to trust me.
Not enough has been written about the players from the nineties, a decade that prompts mixed emotions from Liverpool supporters. There isn’t the romance or tragedy
of the eighties, nor the success of the seventies. But it was an intriguing period of turbulence and ultimately endless transition, led by fascinating individuals who feel safe enough now to go on record because it happened a while ago.
I thank each of them for their time.
Simon Hughes
CHAPTER ONE
MIDFIELD MAESTRO,
Jan Mølby, 1984–96
JAN MØLBY’S APPEARANCE has not altered much from the player you once knew. He remains broad shouldered and substantially built, still with the unmistakeable, monumental thighs of a footballer. His blue eyes are piercing and when we meet I can imagine what it must have been like to be a goalkeeper facing him in the moments before a penalty kick. Him like a bull sensing blood; me like a torero on a losing streak. Him confidently staring; me undoubtedly trembling.
‘I always took a long run-up, much longer than other players,’ Mølby explains, nodding in a way that suggests I am the person he knows he is going to score past. ‘The goalkeepers are more comfortable when there is no time to think, so they have to react instantly. A long run-up creates tension and fear. It also means you can kick it a lot harder in precisely the place you want to put it.’
He rises from a stool. He winds back as far as the patio doors that separate his kitchen from the back garden. Then slowly he ambles forward, recreating in his mind something he experienced for real forty-five times during his Liverpool career.
