Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  Mansell was soon replaced and his successor, Shlomo Scharf, thought rather more of Rosenthal. In May 1984, Maccabi were on the verge of the first championship in their history.

  ‘Beitar Jerusalem were contenders on the final day with us, which meant we needed to win against a club from the outskirts of Tel Aviv who were trying not to be relegated. The coach took us to a hotel at the top of Mount Carmel, which stands above Haifa. I could see the stadium in the distance and five hours before kick-off it was already full, with twenty thousand people packed together. I realized then that we were talking about a historical moment. Nobody wanted to miss it.’

  Rosenthal recalls a nervous day, which even affected Maccabi’s groundstaff. ‘They laid a fertilizer that killed the pitch. It was really shit. I could not even describe it as a pitch.’

  Maccabi just about got the result they wanted: a 1–0 victory. ‘The fans jumped over the hoardings and joined us. It was so, so hot and I was desperate for some water, maybe a beer. One guy poured whisky down my neck from a hip flask.’

  Rosenthal won another league-winner’s medal and would have helped secure a third had it not been for a final-day defeat to Hapoel Tel Aviv in 1986, a game where he was scouted by Club Brugge from Belgium. Twelve months earlier, a week-long trial in Germany with Nürnberg was successful only for a deal to fall through because he needed to complete military service.

  ‘In my mind, I was not ready to leave anyway. The military was important. In the morning I’d be in the barracks and in the afternoon they would let me train with the team. It helped that the boss in the army was a fan of Maccabi Haifa. I wanted to do more but the corporal always said no.’

  Brugge had been alerted to Rosenthal’s potential by an Israeli agent based in the city.

  ‘Brugge agreed a deal with Maccabi for around £200,000. It was a record fee for Maccabi. It was the perfect move for me. It was the right step at that time. You see players now making the big move earlier and earlier because clubs offer a lot of money. They get swallowed in by the club then spat out. This was not the case at Brugge. I’d waited until I was mature enough to live abroad. I trusted myself. Belgium was halfway between Israel and England in terms of culture and the style of football. It was the intelligent thing to do.’

  Brugge or Anderlecht were reliably Belgian champions and both did well in Europe. In his second season, Rosenthal helped Brugge reach the semi-final of the UEFA Cup, where they lost narrowly to Espanyol, letting a two-goal first-leg lead slip.

  ‘We were a very competitive team. In the eighties, the gap between the top team in Belgium and the top team in England was not so big. Now, because of TV, the power is centralized. The TV money allows the English clubs to hoover up all of the top players. Thirty years ago, if you were a club like Brugge, which had a stadium that could hold thirty thousand spectators, plus a little bit of commercial income here and there, you are not too far removed from a club like Liverpool that has maybe more commercial income but not ten times the budget to operate with because the TV money was not there. It might be two times the budget instead. So Brugge could attract international players from Israel, the Netherlands and Denmark. It could keep top Belgian players like Franky Van der Elst, who was a wizard – a brilliant footballer – in Belgium. Now, this is impossible.’

  After two years, Brugge – under new management – wanted to sign a promising striker from Standard Liège called Dimitri MBuyu but could not agree a fee. Standard would only agree to a deal if Rosenthal was sacrificed in exchange.

  ‘Standard offered me a better contract, so I went,’ Rosenthal says flatly. ‘The money was good. It was less than in England but not much less. If a club wants to sign you and they offer more cash and a long-term future, you have to go. I became Standard’s top goalscorer and the team finished third, qualifying for the UEFA Cup ahead of Brugge, which gave me a lot of satisfaction.’

  His performances led to an offer of more than £1.5 million from Udinese in Italy.

  ‘Serie A was the best league in the world. Everybody went there. The money was there. Italy was hosting the World Cup in 1990. The stadiums were there. The weather was also good. When Udinese came in with the offer, I was dancing around the room. We agreed the deal and my contract was due to start on 1 July. Then I went on holiday to Israel for the summer and was watching TV when the news station said that I had failed a medical and Udinese were cancelling the deal. Apparently, they preferred the Argentinian striker Abel Balbo to me. I was twenty-five and he was twenty-two. Balbo also had an Italian passport, which meant he would not be considered a foreign player in Italy.’

  Rosenthal returned to Standard to find Urbain Braems had been replaced by Georg Kessler as coach. Believing Rosenthal was already another club’s player, Kessler had made alternative plans and it became clear that Rosenthal’s future lay elsewhere.

  ‘A representative from Luton Town got in touch with me. They’d won the League Cup against Arsenal a few years before and I’d read about it in the newspapers. So I went there for a trial. They had a plastic pitch and the ball was bouncing really high. The manager was Jim Ryan, who later became Alex Ferguson’s assistant at Manchester United. He explained that my pace would be an asset on this surface. Luton played with two wingers and I was tempted. While Luton made a financial proposal, I went to Hibernian in Scotland, where Alex Miller was the coach. I have to say, I was very surprised when Liverpool were the next club to make an approach.’

  Ron Yeats, Kenny Dalglish’s chief scout, had seen Rosenthal score four goals in a friendly match for Luton against Cambridge United. During a ten-day trial at Liverpool, Rosenthal played in three reserve games, scoring against Manchester United, and it was enough for Dalglish to sign him until the end of the 1989–90 season.

  ‘It was the beginning of March and the contract was only short. I did not have an ego and Liverpool was the biggest club, so of course I was going to accept any offer they made me. Kenny explained to me the club believed in me as an impact player but wanted me to develop a level of consistency that meant I could start games.’

  Rosenthal was introduced as a substitute for the first time when Liverpool were losing 2–1 at home to Southampton.

  ‘I changed things around. I didn’t score but made the corner for the equalizer within three minutes and really added something to the game. Ian Rush scored the winner. I was feeling the pressure but the other players were so relaxed. They knew Liverpool would score late, as they always did. I was naive. I thought I did enough to play the following week but I didn’t get off the bench against Wimbledon then was left out of the squad for the FA Cup semi-final with Crystal Palace. This was strange for me because whenever I’d played well before, like I did against Southampton, I was rewarded by the coach.’

  The defeat to Palace, which is seen as a watershed moment in Liverpool’s history, triggered changes three days later when the squad travelled to London to face Charlton Athletic. Rosenthal was selected in a starting eleven that also included another debutant in Nick Tanner and left-back Steve Staunton wearing the number 7 shirt.

  ‘Kenny was disappointed with Peter Beardsley and told me an hour before the game I’d be playing. After twenty-five minutes, I scored with my right foot, then again immediately after half-time with my left and finally with my head after combining with John Barnes. It was the perfect hat-trick.’

  Four goals in the last six games followed and Rosenthal’s contribution to Liverpool’s last league triumph was marked. His form saw Standard’s asking price rise considerably but that did not deter Liverpool from securing a permanent deal in the summer.

  ‘I was one of the most expensive foreign players to join an English club from abroad at the time,’ Rosenthal says proudly. ‘The fee did not bring an unreasonable pressure. I think I gave back to Liverpool what they paid. When I analyse my career, I would admit that I was not a prolific goalscorer. But I was someone who could change the game at any time. Now I see things from the other side [as a scout] and I would say
that if I was a manager, I would pay a lot of money for an impact player like me. You need one or two: players that will find solutions when the game is tight. Every manager wants this but there are not a lot of them around.’

  In many of the photographs taken in the dressing room after the 2–1 victory over Queens Park Rangers at Anfield that sealed the First Division title, Rosenthal is pictured sitting there with his short red shorts, his socks around his ankles, with beers in both hands, flanked by Kenny Dalglish and Roy Evans.

  ‘We had some champagne also and there was a bit of singing. But there was not a night of massive celebration. We had a meal with our families. Hey, we were expected to win. Had I known then that it was going to be Liverpool’s last title, I would have made more of it.’

  Rosenthal enjoyed the culture of English football. He would choose to drink white wine over lager but ‘would act like one of the boys when I needed to’. He also relished playing in the atmosphere of the stadiums, where the stands were much closer to the pitch than in Europe.

  ‘I’d never experienced anything like it before. In England, the crowd is very powerful. It can have an impact on the result of a match. Most games, there was a capacity crowd and the energy it created was unbelievable. I had played against Panathinaikos and Red Star Belgrade for Brugge with seventy or eighty thousand inside the stadium. In England, half that number of people could make the same noise.’

  Rosenthal insists he never suffered racist abuse in his career. Yet he feels that foreign players in England were blamed when results were not meeting expectations.

  ‘When the team is not doing well, the first players that suffer are always foreign, although it’s not xenophobia,’ he explains. ‘It’s a natural reaction of managers. They think it is easier to correct a problem by passing their message on to players who speak the same language. It happened at Liverpool. It happened at Tottenham. But it also happened at Brugge.’

  Rosenthal was frustrated when Dalglish omitted him regularly from match squads the following season, especially when results were indifferent and he could not ‘help the team get back on track to the levels of before’.

  One of Dalglish’s last tricks as Liverpool manager was to sign David Speedie.

  ‘We had the same attributes: strong, direct, aggressive and quick; only I was quicker,’ Rosenthal says. ‘I was disappointed because it felt like Kenny had lost faith in me. I realize now, though, that maybe his judgement was not correct. He resigned soon after because of the stress.’

  Under Graeme Souness, Rosenthal’s role was a continuation of before: best used from the substitutes’ bench when other teams were tiring. Yet results for the team were not of the expected standard.

  ‘Graeme had absolute control of the transfers, so he bought his own players,’ Rosenthal continues. ‘Liverpool did not win enough. Sure, some players wanted to leave. But he was given the finances to replace them. The players he bought were like him. As a player, Graeme was one of my favourites to watch. He had everything: technique, he was aggressive and a leader. But as a manager, this is not enough. You can have a few players like this but not every player. If you have eleven players doing the same thing, it does not work.’

  Rosenthal noticed that a lot of Souness’s signings were not quick enough to implement Liverpool’s traditional passing game.

  ‘Liverpool always had fast players – dynamic right-backs and left-backs. Barry Venison and Steve Nicol were like this. Not many teams in England wanted the full-backs to attack but Liverpool did. It was the same in midfield. There were players who could do a bit of everything: passing, tackling and moving. Suddenly, we had Paul Stewart, who was a good player but not a good Liverpool player. Paul was not the only problem, though. It was a combination of all the transfers and the jigsaw not working.’

  Rosenthal does not solely blame Souness for Liverpool’s decline.

  ‘I liked Graeme then and I like Graeme now. I sometimes worked with him when he was manager of Blackburn and I offered him Peter Odemwingie for £150,000 when he was playing for La Louvière in Belgium. Graeme rejected the opportunity and Peter instead moved to Lille for the same fee. Within two seasons, he’d signed for Lokomotiv Moscow for £10 million.

  ‘Graeme understands better than anyone that a manager lives and dies by his transfers. When he was at Liverpool, I believe the structure around him wasn’t as stable as it should have been. The club was naive in thinking its methods would be successful forever. The game remains the same but everything around football was changing. Scouting was improving at other clubs, who were looking a lot closer at Europe for new signings. At Liverpool, there was one scout – Ron Yeats. Other clubs – Manchester United, for example – were appointing full-time scouts in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Liverpool missed out on these players.’

  In Souness’s first full season, Rosenthal played in twenty-seven games and scored just three goals. One came during a victory over Notts County in the League Cup and the two others could not prevent Liverpool from losing at home to Chelsea and Wimbledon.

  ‘I remember this game against Wimbledon because the attendance inside Anfield was very low [26,134]. It was April and it became my last game of the season. When the team won the FA Cup a month later, I was not even in the squad. We won the cup but it was the minimum we should have been achieving. There was no sense of celebration.’

  Rosenthal’s goal ratio improved in the next campaign, with six being registered in twenty-seven league appearances. Yet it is his miss at Aston Villa that is best remembered. From a David James kick, Villa’s centre-back Shaun Teale misjudged the ball’s flight and Rosenthal nipped in to round goalkeeper Nigel Spink. Free of any opposition player, Rosenthal took another touch and honed in on the Holte End. With his left foot, Rosenthal struck from nine yards out but just as the connection was made, he leant back. With Jan Mølby fifteen yards behind and turning, veering off towards Liverpool’s supporters in anticipation of the goal, the shot crashed against the crossbar, allowing Teale to clear. Mølby realized nobody on the terraces was celebrating. Rosenthal would later score but Liverpool lost 4–2.

  While Danish defender Torben Piechnik struggled on his debut and would not improve, Dean Saunders – who Souness had sold to Villa just two weeks before, after listening to teammates who did not want to play with him – scored twice to compound a miserable afternoon. The pressure on Souness was telling and he cancelled a planned dinner with Villa’s manager, Ron Atkinson, and drove home up the M6 in tears, wondering whether it was time to resign.

  ‘I get asked about this game a lot,’ Rosenthal says, offering an ironic smile. ‘With pleasure, I always answer,’ he continues, although not too convincingly. ‘I always say, you need to have the confidence to miss otherwise you should not be playing. I am not making excuses but there was a little bounce. Teale was getting closer and closer, so I put a little bit more power into the shot than usual. Instead, it lifted. I have seen this happen in training before with other players and everyone laughs. Of course, this is not acceptable in a real match. I can say, though, that it never affected me in the way you might think. When people ask, I say, “Hey, I am happy that I am still on the map.” It even helps with my work now. When I speak to struggling players, I tell them it could be a lot worse. They could be me! This cheers them up.’

  A sixth-place finish and early exits in all cup competitions represented one of Liverpool’s worst seasons in living memory. It was made worse by the fact Manchester United won their first title in twenty-six years, with Liverpool’s future chief executive Rick Parry presenting them with the trophy at Old Trafford. Rosenthal, though, could see some positives. While several of the United youth team that won the FA Youth Cup in 1992 made their first-team debuts, Souness was promoting from within as well. Jamie Redknapp and Steve McManaman had emerged as first-team regulars, while Rosenthal was feeling the pressure from a seventeen-year-old Robbie Fowler.

  ‘In training, this player [Fowler] was ruthless,’ Rosenthal recalls. ‘I
t seemed like he scored with every single chance. He had a lot of confidence and mixed well with the boys. There was the swagger of a typical Liverpool lad. I remember him telling me he wanted to replace Ian Rush as Liverpool’s number 9. This is quite a thing to say when you have not made your debut. Graeme must have been very tempted to use him. The fans might have been more patient. But I think Graeme realized if things went wrong, as they did, it might kill the player’s progress. So he was quite selfless in that respect.’

  Liverpool began the 1993–94 season by securing three wins in a row. Within a month, however, Souness’s team failed to score in four successive games, a run that included defeat in the Merseyside derby where McManaman and Bruce Grobbelaar started fighting on the pitch.

  It was enough to make Souness use Fowler, and against Fulham in the League Cup the striker scored all of Liverpool’s goals in a 5–0 victory in front of just 12,541 people – the lowest attendance at Anfield in decades, another marker of attitudes and fortunes. Fowler remained in the team and was swiftly ordained by the Kop as ‘God’. Yet even divine intervention could not prevent Souness’s exit, which finally came in January 1994, and Rosenthal was the last player to be sold before his departure.