by Simon Hughes
‘Johan ran the team. If there was something he did not like, he would knock on Aad’s door and, rather than ask him to change it, he’d tell him to change it. He always had a say on tactics.’
Mølby was switched to midfield. Ultimately, it proved successful, as Ajax swept aside everything that lay in front of them domestically.
Mølby was surrounded by a group of supremely talented teenagers. Despite being a defender, Ronald Koeman practised shooting for hours after the rest of the squad had left the training ground.
‘He honed that technique of hitting the ball so hard and so sweet. That free kick he whacked in for Barcelona during the 1992 European Cup final against Sampdoria, it was a technique perfected at Ajax.’
Then there was Frank Rijkaard. ‘A monster,’ Mølby says. ‘There was nothing he couldn’t do. We used to do 150m runs on a slight incline. Our coach had trained the Dutch Olympic athletics team. Frank was my partner. Jesus Christ, I was absolutely flat out just to be ten metres behind him and he wasn’t trying. He was so laid-back. Maybe it was his downfall as a manager. You see people like Guardiola on top of the players every day. Frank wasn’t like that. He was relaxed.’
Marco van Basten was also there. ‘He was sixteen and only allowed to train with us during the school holidays. In the second season, the club decided to sell Wim Kieft to Pisa. We were looking at each other, wondering who they’d sign to replace him. Marco came in and scored thirty-eight goals in the first year. He was a teenager. Cruyff had gone by then but I always remember him saying that Marco was as good as he’d seen. Cruyff wasn’t a million miles off.’
It all started to unravel for Mølby in Amsterdam when he fell out with de Mos after a 3–0 defeat to Den Bosch.
‘We were called in on the Sunday and fined 500 guilders. Then the following day we were sent out to the woods for a running marathon in the morning before another session in the afternoon. The coach walks in and reels off a couple of names: “Van’t Schip [the Canadian-born winger], Rijkaard and Mølby – you’re all playing for the reserves tonight.” None of the first-teamers ever played for the reserves. In Holland, it wasn’t the way: once you were in the first team, you never dropped down. They were parttime, training every day at five o’clock. We never saw them. But on this occasion, we were told we had to.
‘Afterwards, there was tension. I was in the bath. The coach [de Mos] comes in and hangs up his towel. The reserve keeper decides to throw the towel at me and it flies into the bath. I move out the way and leave it there, floating. The coach walks through into the changing area with his soaking wet towel. He thinks that I have an issue with playing for the reserves. He looks at me and wrings the towel all over me. By this point, I was fully dressed with jeans on. The whole dressing room fell silent.
‘The coach walks slowly back into his office. He’s a big boy – 6 ft 3 and 15–16 stone, much burlier than me. So I got my own towel, threw it in the bath and chased after him. His suit was hanging over the chair. There was only one thing to do. After drenching his suit, I turned round and the vice president was standing there. The coach and I squared up to each other like two stags, head to head. Frank [Rijkaard] separated us. Although I get on very well with Aad now and we can laugh about it – he knows I wasn’t responsible – it was the beginning of the end for me at Ajax.’
Mølby insists his departure was in many ways a natural exit. Only a select few players have remained at Ajax for their entire careers.
‘The club never looked to keep young players for more than two or three years. At that point, they’d sell them on then bring through another group. I also think it’s impossible to play for Ajax for fifteen years because of the intense training demands. You can’t keep it up. I think the only player who managed to do it was Danny Blind. They surely must have made concessions for him as he got older.’
By comparison, training methods at Liverpool were relaxed. Mølby says it is as much a myth that Ajax only focused on technique as it is that Liverpool trained harder than any other team in England.
‘The sessions at Liverpool were short and sharp. The intensity was there and while you were in the midst of a five-a-side game, no corners were cut. But once the session was over, you went home. There were no designated fitness sessions like at Ajax, which sometimes went on for hours even during the season.
‘I could not say one method was better than the other, because they were both designed for specific reasons. Liverpool’s approach suited me more. But Ajax trained so hard because there were only thirty-four league matches a season in Holland. We’d cruise through the majority of them. At Liverpool, there were forty-two First Division games and usually a lot of cup matches. Although we regularly made it look easy, I can assure you it wasn’t. Opponents would never give in, because their fans demanded the effort. If Liverpool had trained to Ajax levels, there wouldn’t have been enough energy to see out a season successfully.’
There were other differences. Until Mølby joined Liverpool, he’d rarely drunk alcohol.
‘I lived in an apartment block on the outskirts of Amsterdam, close to the De Meer Stadium. Seven of us were there. But we spent very little time socializing. There was no drinking culture. We only went fishing together. They were orange-juice-andsandwiches sort of occasions. Alcohol was so far from our minds. There was never any drink on the coach coming home from away games. People thought we were running around Amsterdam partying all the time but it couldn’t have been further from the truth.’
This soon changed. Mølby spoke to Howard Wilkinson about moving to Sheffield Wednesday in the summer of 1984. Then Liverpool approached. The call came from Tom Saunders, the club’s youth-development officer. A ten-day trial was arranged.
‘The directors put me up in the Moat House along with Paul Walsh and John Wark. After the uncomfortable introductions, we decided to go for a drink. It was Sunday night. I was on trial. I wanted to make an impression the following morning, so I asked for an orange juice and lemonade. Paul and John looked at me as if I’d fallen out of a tree. I wasn’t judging them at all, but it was so foreign to me.’
The culture of match preparation at Liverpool was also different to Ajax.
‘I made my debut against Norwich City at Carrow Road. As we filed into the dressing room, I asked Ronnie Moran what I should do. “Just get fucking changed,” Ronnie growled. Then I asked him what time we go out to warm up. “We don’t warm up. Save your energy.” I was astounded by this; at Ajax we spent half an hour doing shuttles.’
Mølby then fell victim to a prank.
‘The boys told me that the staff liked players to have a massage before the game instead. So I approached Ronnie for a second time. “Er … Ronnie. Can I have a massage?”
‘“Fuck off!” he shouted. “You earn the fucking right to have a fucking massage. Go out and play some games and then maybe I’ll think about it.” I’d only been at the club for a couple of weeks and I started to wonder whether I’d come to the wrong place. Then I saw all the lads pissing themselves. That was my introduction to the Liverpool dressing-room humour.’
By 1990, Mølby had contributed to three First Division titles, two FA Cups and three Charity Shields. Had Liverpool not been banned from Europe after Heysel and had Mølby not spent time in prison for drink-driving, more honours surely would have followed.
As the eighties became the nineties, Mølby noticed that the young players Liverpool were signing were taking a lot longer to adjust to the standards at Melwood, although it did not seem to really matter initially, as the first team kept winning.
At face value, the new recruits were classic Liverpool buys: under the media radar, plucked from obscurity. In 1988, Nick Tanner, aged twenty-three, and David Burrows, nineteen, arrived from Bristol Rovers and West Bromwich Albion. In 1991, Jimmy Carter, twenty-five, was bought from Millwall. Meanwhile, those with more experience were also brought in. Glenn Hysén was a few months short of his thirtieth birthday when he moved from Fiorentina in 1989, while Ronny Rosent
hal, aged twenty-six, came from Standard Liège a year later. Chelsea’s David Speedie, nearly thirty-one, became Kenny Dalglish’s last signing.
‘It is possible that football was changing even before we realized it. Previously, Liverpool had been in a strong position; they’d been able to bring in totally unknown players, such as Rush, [Steve] Nicol and [Ronnie] Whelan, knowing they could watch them over a long period, safe in the knowledge that eventually, if you wanted them, they’d come to you, no question. Other clubs wanted Rush, for instance, but Liverpool could afford to wait and usurp everyone else’s plans because of its history and status.
‘That began to change as early as the late eighties. As players, we were hearing that other clubs were paying bigger wages. Liverpool missed out on Ian Snodin to Everton, for instance. There were others: Tottenham signing Gazza and Gary Lineker. Now, I’m not sure whether Liverpool ever went in for those players but I know they were getting paid a lot more than we were. I think that it possibly turned the heads of potential signings. Maybe they thought the higher wages elsewhere reflected the ambition of the club.’
Mølby believes Dalglish fell into the trap of overcomplicating the system at Liverpool. ‘Post-1990, there was too much tinkering. He chose certain players for home games and others for away games. The inconsistency did not help us.’
Mølby was used to this strategy – different sides being picked according to the opposition – having been brought up like that at club and international level in Denmark and with Ajax. Others, however, were not.
‘It was very different for any British team to do it, particularly Liverpool, who always followed the idea of letting the opposition worry about us. I’ve always believed that it’s players that win you games rather than systems. The system should always be led by the players. If you don’t have the players to fit a system, you don’t play that system.’
Dalglish had thereby alienated several key players before his departure and Souness’s arrival. Peter Beardsley – probably the least short-tempered player in the Liverpool squad – had asked for a move after being left out of the squad by Dalglish.
Beardsley departed under Souness and Mølby believes that in the position he played, Beardsley’s best years were ahead of him. Beardsley was only thirty when he left for Everton. He continued a top-level career until he was nearly thirty-seven.
‘For me, that’s when the decline really started, when we lost that link-man,’ Mølby says forcefully. ‘For the previous ten to fifteen years, we had Kenny then Peter. They were essential between the lines of midfield and attack. Suddenly, we had Rush and Saunders: two goalscorers. It became a totally different game. We lost a lot when Peter left.’
By the end of 1990, Liverpool’s future had begun to unravel. Despite starting the 1990–91 season fourteen games unbeaten with twelve wins and two draws, and although Arsenal had been docked two points by the Football League as punishment for a brawl at Manchester United, Liverpool headed into the Christmas period just six points ahead of George Graham’s team after losing at Highbury in the first week of December. In a conservative move, Dalglish named defenders Gary Ablett and Barry Venison in midfield and the result was a 3–0 defeat. It was the first real indication of misdirection.
Quickly, problems were laid bare. In playing terms, Hysén was not good enough to replace Alan Hansen; Hansen’s replacement as captain, Ronnie Whelan, was injured; Ablett and Venison continued to be used in midfield; then Carter and David Speedie were signed. Carter arrived for a considerable fee of £800,000 from Millwall and would play only eight games for Liverpool, while Speedie was most certainly a panic buy: a striker five years past his best, whose best was – at best – never greater than average.
Dalglish was regarded as Liverpool’s greatest post-war player. He had made management look easy since his appointment in 1985. Yet the questions over his decision making were becoming more audible. A year earlier, he had briefly considered quitting the club due to the strain he had been put under following the Hillsborough disaster. There was a period where he had been attending funerals every day and, though he was always professional and dignified in public, Dalglish was beginning to show some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Before Hillsborough, he had witnessed the stadium disasters at Heysel and Ibrox. There is only so much human tragedy one man can take.
A classic symptom of mental stress is the inability to make simple decisions. This, perhaps, was reflected in some of his unusual team selections. As an FA Cup derby with Everton approached, Dalglish had made one decision that he was absolutely certain about. He was quitting football.
Against Everton, Liverpool took the lead four times before surrendering the lead four times – the only time this has happened in the club’s history. After the final whistle, as the last of the players were trudging into the dressing room, an argument was brewing, ready to explode. ‘It was the worst one I can recall,’ Mølby says. Mølby remembers the showers being turned on only for nobody to go in. It was winter outside and cold. Steam enveloped the space quicker than usual.
‘The defence was bearing the brunt of it. Both Ronnie and Roy were having a go about the conceding of two late goals. The forwards were doing the same. “How many goals do we actually have to score?” they were saying. Ronnie and Bruce [Grobbelaar] went eyeball to eyeball. It was getting out of control. I thought it was going to end in a fight.’
Dalglish was standing against a wall, staring at the floor. For fifteen minutes, he said nothing. Post-match inquests usually waited for a team meeting the following day. This was a Wednesday night. Mølby recalls Dalglish informing the group calmly that they’d speak on Friday morning.
‘We got changed and went for a beer with the Everton players at the bar, where the discussions continued, only without any of the hysterics. Never in a million years did I reckon Kenny was about to walk.’
Mølby spent Thursday playing golf. He arrived at Anfield on Friday as scheduled. Liverpool were due to play Luton Town away on the Saturday.
Arrangements had been made to travel down twenty-four hours before the game to enable one training session on Luton’s plastic pitch, a surface where Liverpool had previously struggled. Mølby spotted an unusual number of journalists in the car park. After the run Liverpool had been on, he figured that Dalglish had signed someone and therefore a press conference had been arranged.
‘Every person I spoke to that morning thought the same, from the players to the receptionist. There had been some strange results but we were still there, fighting for the title with Arsenal. I was quite excited about the prospect of a new signing, because it usually helped kick all the players on.’
After changing, the squad gathered in the players’ lounge, as they always did, waiting to be greeted by their manager for a debrief. Instead, Moran walked in. ‘Dressing room,’ he ordered. There was nothing unusual in that.
‘We didn’t wait very long. Kenny appeared and within twenty seconds he’d told us he was resigning and that was that. He looked like he’d had a rough night. His face was a bit swollen. Had it not been for his appearance, I would have thought it was a wind-up. There was shock. It was a bit like when Craig Johnston revealed on the morning of the 1988 FA Cup final against Wimbledon that it would be his last game. Nobody really believed him – that he’d walk away from Liverpool and a football career aged just twenty-seven. We all thought he’d change his mind and be back at Melwood on Monday. But he wasn’t.
‘We all figured that the board had turned down a request for funds towards a new signing. Surely there had to be more to it. Kenny couldn’t just leave like that.’
Liverpool lost 3–1 at Luton with two goals by Iain Dowie doing the damage. In the short term, Ronnie Moran was placed in charge.
‘Even though a lot of players were unsure about Ronnie because he was so aggressive, I thought his appointment made sense. You could never question his commitment. He was as unselfish as they come. Everything he ever did professionally was for the benefit o
f Liverpool. He had a remarkable ability to keep both feet of even the biggest personalities firmly on the ground. He wasn’t impressed by status. It did not matter to him.’
Under Moran, the unusual results continued. There were four wins, including chaotic 5–4 and 7–1 victories away to Leeds United and Derby County. But they were offset by five defeats, one of which included the replayed FA Cup tie with Everton. Liverpool were shaking. Moran was unable to prevent Arsenal regaining the title.
Upon Dalglish’s departure, the Liverpool board had hoped to install a full-time and long-term replacement at the end of the season. But on-field disappointments forced a decision to rush forward the appointment process.
‘At one point, we all thought it was going to be Alan Hansen,’ Mølby recalls. ‘Before training one day, Jocky walked into the dressing room and told us that he was taking the job. Swiftly, he outlined all kinds of changes he was going to implement. There were going to be double training sessions, no days off on a Sunday, a ban on drinking ale after matches. It was all the stuff the lads hated. He even told Ronnie [Whelan] he was replacing him as captain. Ronnie was all red in the face, fuming.’
That Hansen was still at Anfield was significant. In the past, ageing players with an injury record like his would have been sold off and replaced. For sentimental reasons, he was still there. Moments after closing the door of the dressing room, the squad could hear Hansen laughing and it transpired his rousing talk had been a ruse. Instead, Hansen was retiring, and soon Graeme Souness – a European Cup-winning captain – was brought in and he attempted to impose the sweeping changes that Hansen had joked about.
‘John Toshack was rumoured to be coming but I wanted Graeme,’ Mølby admits. ‘He’d tried to sign me for Rangers a few years earlier and he was a highly impressive individual.’
Souness’s relationship with Mølby would illustrate just how impulsive he could be. Mølby was out of the team. Mølby was in. Mølby was out again. They would dine at restaurants together. They would not talk for months.
