Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  Evans does not name names. But it is clear who he is referring to. Julian Dicks was the first to go: too fat and too slow. Then Torben Piechnik: just not good enough; Don Hutchison: too much trouble; Bruce Grobbelaar, Ronnie Whelan and Steve Nicol. In getting rid of the last three, it shows Evans was prepared to remove the old guard if he felt they were past it.

  In his early years as reserve-team coach, Evans had worked closely with Fagan. Later, he spent more time with Moran. He says both had a knack of being able to pass on their knowledge without being overbearing – to teach a player to take on his responsibilities with confidence but to be true to his own personality. Their example of a more hands-off style led Evans to take a step back from coaching during his time as manager.

  ‘It was a bit of advice every now and then. I’m a great believer in encouragement. I hear people saying that Fergie liked throwing cups but he probably only did that once every blue moon to shake things up. You get more out of people in any job in any walk of life if you say, “Hey, good job, you did well today.” You have to treat people fairly and as human beings first. On the flip side of that, when things aren’t right you have to let players know too. You have to go for them no matter how important they are to the team. It doesn’t matter if you’re Kenny or a young lad, you have to meet the level. If you let a bad performance slip and say nothing, it’s an unhealthy precedent.’

  What infuriated Evans most was a player being unable to make a decision on the pitch. He’d rather someone had the courage to make a mistake and even someone who was then prepared to argue with him about it. ‘I expected the team to win every week but if they didn’t have an opinion about how the game should be played, then we were the daft ones, asking for the impossible.’

  In training, Evans kept things simple – the Liverpool way.

  ‘Players need to enjoy what they’re doing in the long term. OK, in the short term there would be sacrifices in terms of fitness but you have to look forward to your work. Usually one unit of a training session would involve running and the rest would be with the ball. Sessions would be longer earlier in the week then shorter but more intense as you got closer to the match. The emphasis was always on the ball. We’d mix the rules up. The most important thing was to get a good tempo. There’s nothing worse than watching a game where everything is slow. If you play passing football at speed, it frightens the opposition. You can’t play against it. So the intensity of training was important. I wanted it to be intense, so the players didn’t have to flick a switch on the Saturday to get it right.

  ‘If you enjoy yourself, you play well. Now, kids see a lot of the antics that go on. I ask them why they want to become a footballer. It scares me how many say, “Big car.” I’ll tell them it’s the wrong answer. Fewer are saying it’s because they love football. Those that do are the ones you want. They’ll go further. For me, life isn’t about material things. It has always been about enjoyment.’

  He concedes that maybe the players were ‘too free’ to make their own decisions in an era where wages meant any ‘material thing’ was available to them by outlaying only a small percentage of their weekly wage. These young footballers were different to the ones Evans had managed before. In an interview with Goal magazine in 1997, Evans gave some insight into the mindset at the time:

  Week in, week out, our team talk is, ‘It’s great when you’ve got a talent but the most important thing is how the team plays and how you play for the team.’ Trying to get that into their minds [is tough], because the younger ones are all a bit Roy of the Rovers. Someone like Jason McAteer is always playing up to the crowd, and sometimes it distracts him. Yeah, he’s Liverpool daft but he’s got to concentrate on the game.

  Undeniably, however, there were distractions. Due to the influx of television and revenue streams for the newly revamped and globally marketed Premier League, footballers were earning more money than ever. Lifestyles were being portrayed as more significant than jobs. Look back through the autobiographies of players from the time and many of them read like guides to the London club scene. In his, Dominic Matteo – not even one of the stars – admits he thought nothing of following an all-night drinking session with a 10 a.m. champagne breakfast, or waterskiing across Lake Windermere while still drunk. On becoming Liverpool’s most expensive player, Stan Collymore recalls being invited to Liverpool’s end-of-season do, meeting up in a London hotel near Lord’s Cricket Ground and walking into the room of a new teammate without knocking only to find him being treated to oral sex by not one but two mystery blondes. This was before the night had even started. He considers it a moment that summed up the attitude of the players at the time: partying before there was anything to party about. Managing these players was Evans, a man who blushes at the racy recollection of placing a Playboy calendar on the Boot Room wall.

  The Spice Boys label had not been invented when Evans won his only trophy as Liverpool manager in April 1995, beating Bolton Wanderers in the Coca-Cola Cup final 2–1 at Wembley largely thanks to an inspired performance by Steve McManaman. Progress was marked by a final league placing of fourth, a jump of four positions from the previous season. A year later, Liverpool finished third and memorably beat Newcastle United 4–3. It was the type of spectacle that Rupert Murdoch must have dreamed of televising when Sky started pumping money into the game.

  Liverpool’s football was sometimes breathtaking, with Fowler, Collymore and McManaman as a three-pronged attack, capable of scoring at any moment. Yet while this was happening, the players were being written about for their off-field antics. Jamie Redknapp married a pop star from Eternal. He and David James were on the front of magazines and involved in modelling for Armani. The photogenic duo jetted to Milan for catwalk shows and fashion shoots. Jason McAteer was the first footballer since Kevin Keegan to appear in a hair shampoo advert. His work with Wash & Go led to an appearance in the Top Man catalogue. It might seem a normal thing for footballers now but this was a brave new world.

  Fowler and McManaman gave interviews to raunchy magazines like Loaded, where their faces appeared under such headlines as ‘BIRDS, BOOZE AND BMWs’. In February 1996, the pair were invited to the Brit Award music ceremony by McManaman’s agent, Simon Fuller, who also represented the Spice Girls. Surrounded by magnums and balthazars, Fowler was pictured with Emma Bunton, perhaps the most understated of the pop group. Even though Fowler claims Bunton was just a friend, the Daily Mail was the first on to the supposed nonstory, labelling Fowler, McManaman and the rest of the players featuring regularly in the newspaper’s gossip columns as the ‘Spice Boys’.

  Evans admits he was not prepared for any of this. Previously, Liverpool’s footballers had drunk themselves silly, gotten in fights and even ended up in prison. But, Jan Mølby aside, it had never affected the actual football: the appearances; the performances; the results.

  Evans admits that some of their ‘behaviour’ was ‘a bit daft’. But he remains adamant that in the 1990s, the focus was always present when it came to matches.

  ‘Football was changing and I chose to embrace it freely rather than take a tight rein,’ he says. ‘They were young lads; Christ, they were young lads with a life to live. I wanted them to selfgovern and that involved the staff too. I didn’t want to hear about every single little indiscretion. If someone comes in five minutes late for the first time, I didn’t want to deal with it, even hear about it. I had bigger things to do. I trusted the staff to deal with it, dole out the discipline. Give them a bollocking and then move on. But, hey, if it happened time and time again then I wanted to know, of course.’

  Self-governance had always been one of the Liverpool squad’s greatest strengths. There was a rank and file. Any player had to work his way up the chain. Barely a few months after first signing, Ian Rush considered moving to Crystal Palace due to a lack of first-team chances as well as the remorseless nature of verbal stick that came his way for speaking in a Welsh accent and wearing the wrong clothes. He was persuaded not to leave by Joe Fagan.
In the 1990s, Rush stood as Liverpool’s all-time leading goalscorer. By traditional Liverpool standards, the responsibility was on him and others like John Barnes and Mark Wright to pull their juniors into line if necessary. That they did not appear to might be considered a neglect of duty, although Evans does not see it the same way.

  ‘First and foremost those boys were there to do their own job,’ he says firmly. ‘They wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t felt they were capable of that. In a team situation, they tried to help the younger lads as much as they could. But the lads have got to listen too. It’s not as simple as saying, “Hey, you, control that.” The lads are who they are because they’ve got personality. You try not to quash that. I didn’t want robots. Sometimes I see the players in modern football and I want to hide behind the couch. You want personalities, people who are streetwise. But you also want people who are accountable – people who will admit when they’re wrong. I have no regrets at all about the way we went about our business. The only regret I have is that we never won the league.’

  Evans believed the signing of Collymore for £8.5 million from Nottingham Forest had the potential to capture the title for Liverpool. Six months earlier, Andy Cole had moved from Newcastle to Manchester United for a British record. The Collymore deal suggested one of two things: a) Liverpool were capable of competing with their greatest rivals in the transfer market at least, or b) Liverpool had panicked and felt it necessary to respond. Had Frank Clark, Nottingham Forest’s manager, replied to Alex Ferguson’s telephone call quicker than Kevin Keegan’s – who had fallen out with Cole at Newcastle – there is a chance Collymore could have ended up at Old Trafford and Cole at Anfield. ‘We liked Cole,’ Evans says. ‘We realized Rushy was nearing the end and we needed to find a replacement. We eventually got Stan but it was nothing to do with United spending money. I felt we really needed him.’

  Collymore was twenty-four and still a few years away from his prime. His path towards Liverpool had not been easy. He was brought up by his single-parent white mother as the only black kid in a ferociously Caucasian working-class area of southern Staffordshire. Aged eighteen, he’d asked to be released from Walsall because he didn’t like the pugnacious coach Ray Train – a person he still blames for his aversion to training. Soon, despite scoring eighteen goals in twenty youth-team games, he was given the boot by Wolverhampton Wanderers for an inconsistent attendance record. Collymore then found a home at Stafford Rangers in the GM Vauxhall Conference, where John Griffin, Steve Coppell’s chief scout at Crystal Palace, remembers seeing him for the first time after initially travelling north to check out a goalkeeper. ‘The keeper didn’t impress me but the 6 ft 2 in lad built like a brick outhouse playing up front certainly did,’ Griffin told the Mirror in 1997. Collymore was substituted at half-time due to an injury but by then Griffin had seen enough. ‘I went back to Palace and told Steve I had just seen the best non-league player ever. He had two great feet, super skill and great strength. I couldn’t find a fault.’

  Palace had taken Ian Wright from park football and the plan was to eventually replace him with Collymore. Yet Collymore never felt a sense of belonging at Selhurst Park, where the Palace squad was split equally between black and white players and he was the only one from a mixed-race background. At Southend United, first-team opportunities were there straight away and in the 1992–93 season Collymore scored fifteen times to keep the seaside town club in the old Division Two. Those feats earned him a move back to the Midlands with Forest and over the next two campaigns his development was marked by another fortyone goals. Forest, meanwhile, won promotion before finishing a place above Liverpool in the Premier League during their first campaign back in the top flight.

  Evans claims Collymore’s ability was equal to that of Ronaldo, who, having been part of a Brazilian World Cup-winning squad, had finished as the top goalscorer in Holland during his first season at PSV Eindhoven after moving from Cruzeiro.

  ‘On the face of it, there wasn’t much of a difference [between the players],’ Evans says. ‘They both had power, pace, skill and a great finishing ability. I’d considered Ronaldo, just as I’d considered a lot of players at home and abroad. But it boiled down to Stan being English and knowing the demands of the country and the Premier League.’

  For the first eighteen months, Collymore was successful without being prolific, developing an understanding on the pitch with Fowler, be it an understanding that did not extend off it. Collymore tells a story where he and Fowler argue in their first game together, a 5–0 friendly defeat by Ajax. It ends with Fowler telling Collymore to ‘fuck off’. After that, Collymore states he chose never to speak to Fowler again, perhaps illustrating what a sensitive and complex individual he was and probably still is: the type who would have either had all of his insecurities exposed and then flourished in his earliest days as a Liverpool player under the old dressing-room regime based on one-upmanship; or simply not have fitted in and gone elsewhere sooner rather than later.

  Evans’ explanation is rather more superficial than that, suggesting Collymore had an ego. ‘Stan had always been the big fish in the small pond elsewhere. When he came to Liverpool, he was just another player. After eighteen months, I hoped he’d get his head around it. It was a waste of his talent, because he had loads.’

  Evans is more open about Collymore than he is about any of the other players that represented him. The striker has been scathing in his assessment of Evans too. In his autobiography, Collymore pins many of Liverpool’s failings on the manager of a club that he suggests was stuck in a time warp.

  At Forest, Collymore admits he was the focal point of the team. At Liverpool, he claims Evans used him improperly, asking him to drift wide and drop deeper. He insists that Liverpool clung on to its links with former glories. He is critical of Rush and Barnes, stating that they were not worthy of their places but remained because nobody had the courage to tell them to go (Evans did, in fact, during the summer of 1997, just before Collymore’s own departure). He saw Melwood’s four wooden training boards as a metaphor. The boards were ‘rotting away’ but, acting as monuments to a time when Liverpool ruled English football, they remained in use as well.

  Then there was the lack of discipline in the squad. Players could walk on to the training pitch eating toast and on one occasion after a quip, Fowler allegedly got Evans’ head in an arm-lock, messing his hair with the free hand. Collymore asks what would have happened if Gary Neville had tried something similar on Alex Ferguson.

  Most significantly, perhaps, Collymore recalls how Ronnie Moran took to calling him ‘Fog in the Tunnel’ because of the number of times he was either late or did not turn up for training. Collymore lived in Cannock, a one-and-a-half-hour drive down the M6 on a morning without traffic. It was a journey he made most days.

  Evans understood that, for a period, Collymore’s mother was not well. He was prepared to make allowances. But then the pattern continued. He asked him to move to Merseyside on numerous occasions. The request was ignored. Collymore continued to be late.

  It is at this point that Evans suspects his own future began to unravel. Collymore was not the most popular player in the Liverpool squad anyway. Living far from Merseyside, he was not a regular on the social scene. He was not really one of the lads. Now Collymore wasn’t turning up for work while others were and resentment built up towards him for, as one member of the team puts it, ‘taking the piss’.

  There is a feeling from Evans that he felt lumbered with Collymore. Because of his financial outlay, he had to be patient with him. But it prompted a spiral of problems. There are other stories: of players taking shortcuts at training and not taking the football seriously enough. It has been said that David James once missed a session for one of his Armani photo shoots, although James himself denies this.

  As for Collymore, he eventually found himself in the reserve team. ‘Stan was one of those who raised his nose,’ Evans says. ‘“I’m not doing that,” Stan would say. But I’m not sitt
ing having a go at Stan. I think we’d blame Stan for everything if we could. He wasn’t the only one with that attitude but he may have been the first. He argued that he didn’t sign for Liverpool to play in the reserves. I told him that we didn’t sign players to play in the reserves. I felt he needed to be sharper – match sharp. It would have helped him. I can’t understand why players complain about playing in the reserves. It was only for their benefit. It was never a punishment. You can’t punish someone by asking them to play a game of football. You punish someone by leaving them out altogether.

  ‘Stan let himself down in the last six months, when I felt he lost his concentration. It’s sad because he was one of those guys you feel could have gone on to be a really great player. His ability was natural: pace, power, technique – everything. But for some reason, he started making things difficult for himself. The other players would ask where he was when he didn’t turn up. You can only make excuses for a short period of time. It starts causing problems within your camp. I’d like to sit down with him one day in private, now we’re both a bit older, and discuss what really went wrong.’

  Under Evans, Liverpool were becoming predictable and relied too heavily on Steve McManaman. And when he was absent, there was criticism that Liverpool had five defenders and a huddle of midfielders who played too deep and passed too short, missing a vital link with the forwards and instead feeding the play to the overworked wing-backs.

  Evans wanted to sign either Jari Litmanen (who later joined Liverpool under Gérard Houllier) or Teddy Sheringham.

  ‘The Finnish lad [Litmanen] was a very, very clever player. We had people who could score goals and needed a few more who could create chances. We were playing in a friendly against Everton and Peter Robinson flew out to Amsterdam to speak to him. Again, he wanted the Champions League and went to Barcelona instead.