An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  If the Klinsmann story lit the dynamite that had been placed around Anfield a year earlier, news that Hicks and Gillett were attempting to refinance their initial loans by putting £350 million debt on the club saw the explosion. The FA Cup third round replay with Luton became a show of anti-Americanism, with the soon-to-be-familiar chant, ‘They don’t care about Rafa, they don’t care about fans, Liverpool Football Club is in the wrong hands’ being belted out from sections of the Kop.

  A banner ‘Dubai SOS – Yanks Out’ was unveiled which referred to the fact a Dubai-based consortium had re-emerged as serious buyers. Gillett, who had severed all but the most formal of relations with his partner after he went public over Klinsmann, wanted to sell his 50 per cent share to them, and get out of the place.

  Hicks, however, believed he possessed a precious diamond coveted by Sheikh Al Maktoum, and was holding out for his juiciest-ever piece of quick-buck making. He was bullishly claiming to be going nowhere, putting it out that he wasn’t even talking to the Arabs – he’d been talking to them for four months since pheasant shooting with Amanda Staveley in Yorkshire – and that his family just adored being custodians at this wonderful, storied club – BBC radio journalist Gary Richardson blew that out of the water when he told his Sportsweek listeners he had overheard a very close relative of Hicks say in the Anfield boardroom: ‘I can’t wait to get rid of this club, I’m sick and tired of it.’

  Any scales that had clung to fans’ eyes during the past year had well and truly fallen away. As Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year burst into life, the locals were inviting foreigners to come and enjoy The World In One City. Well, all foreigners except two: Messrs Hicks and Gillett. All one half of Liverpool wanted to invite them to was a lynching party.

  Reclaim The Kop (RTK), the group behind the pro-Benitez Porto rally, called for a mass demonstration at the Aston Villa game on 21 January. Author Kevin Sampson, who founded the RTK with another veteran Red, John Mackin, told the media: ‘The fans want George Gillett and Tom Hicks out unconditionally. It’s as simple as that. They are no good for us and no good for the club.

  ‘As the world is currently seeing, Liverpool is the most welcoming city and its people are the most generous hosts you’re going to find anywhere. But cross us and that’s that. We are enemies for life. Ask Kelvin MacKenzie, Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson. These two Americans tried to capitalise on our goodwill and our unswerving love for this club. But they underestimated us and badly underestimated our love for Rafa. The moment they admitted they had been plotting to oust Benitez, they may have well started saddling the horses. The fans despise them as passionately as they do any rival. At the moment, it’s worse. If they had a shred of common sense, they would take the money on offer from Dubai Investment Capital and gallop out of town.’

  The media observed the anger on Merseyside and spotted a big story moving from the back pages to the front. To Liverpool fans the Anfield Civil War was a harrowing saga turning fan against fan and ripping the heart and soul out of their club. To the national media it was an enthralling power battle between a George Bush ally and an Arab sheikh, with a shower of revolting Scousers caught in the crossfire.

  On 21 January a demonstration was planned for the home game with Aston Villa, and London sent its finest colour writers up to ignore the football and concentrate on the rebellious mob. That cold Monday night was a poignant and emotion-charged Anfield occasion for all the wrong reasons, but it was important and historic nonetheless.

  This was not the type of heart-pumping occasion of raw passion and glorious abandon we’d seen against St Etienne, Inter Milan and Chelsea, which had made open-mouthed viewers across the world categorise Anfield as one of sport’s great amphitheatres. It was not even a night of Kopite solidarity. Rows broke out, even the odd scuffle, as some of the older generation told younger ones who released screams of hate from twisted faces that it wasn’t part of their job description to distract Liverpool players from going about their sacred duty of winning.

  I experienced that generational gap in reverse as I went to the toilet, still chanting about ‘lying bastards’ and their need to get out of our club, when a steward in his thirties without a hint of irony said, ‘Oi, keep the fuckin’ language down will you, mate?’

  ‘What fuckin’ language?’ I replied.

  ‘That fuckin’ language.’

  ‘Would that be the same fuckin’ language you’re fuckin’ using?’

  ‘Yes it fuckin’ would, but I’m not fuckin’ shoutin’ it at the top of my voice at the fuckin’ pitch, am I?’

  ‘Neither am fuckin’ I. I’m fuckin’ shouting it at the fuckin’ directors’ box, which is my fuckin’ right so fuckin’ well fuck off.’

  It was a revelatory moment which took me back to being a nine-year-old and the school colour-blind nurse telling me the news that I was red-green deficient, which meant that when I grew up I could never be a train driver or an airline pilot.

  I may have been fifty, but I knew as I went for that leak that even if I’d fancied those big yellow coats and watching the game through the back of my head, when I grew up I could never be a steward.

  We’d never seen anything like this kind of demonstration before. Standing in the middle of all this anti-Americanism made me feel at times like Hanoi Jane Fonda. I even had an army jacket on. But it wasn’t all Yanks Out. There were banners proclaiming: ‘Taxi For Hicks’, ‘If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Hicks It’ and ‘One DIC Is Better Than Two’.

  As the game started the chant of ‘They don’t care about Rafa, they don’t care about fans’ segued into ‘Rafa, Rafael, Rafa, Rafael, Rafa, Rafael, Rafael Benitez’ and on it went for eight long minutes without a break, with its object of desire occasionally standing up in the dugout to give an approving wave back to the Kop.

  From then until the end of the 2–2 draw, it would be sporadically repeated along with that other new soon-to-be classic: ‘Get out of our club, get out of our club, you lying bastards, get out of our club.’

  By the way, special mention must go to the Villa fans in the Anfield Road End for filling the Kop’s silences with chants for their own American owner Randy Lerner and ‘You-You-You-Ess-Ay.’ Ah, if only Doug Ellis had taken up George Gillett’s offer, none of this would have happened, I thought.

  Photographers didn’t miss the chance to capture the three empty directors’ box seats beside Rick Parry and David Moores where Gillett, Hicks and Foster Gillett usually sat. They were over in America negotiating separately with the banks to strengthen their grip on the club, even if their primary motive was to put them in a stronger position to deal with Dubai.

  The hate-filled, anti-American songs and banners, the personal attacks and the blunt demands that they get out of their own club, barely registered. Back in Dallas nothing could be heard. This wasn’t yet a noise to be dealt with. It wasn’t even a whisper. But the Bill Shankly boys were coming down the road.

  Peter Hooton was conscious of a group called Liverpool Supporters Network, who were trying to bring websites and fanzines together to unite against the Americans. He contacted the men behind it, Andy Heaton and Dave Usher, and proposed that instead of everyone being a website warrior in their bedroom, they held a face-to-face meeting, and worked out a proper line of attack.

  ‘They were under the impression that this would be a group of fifteen to twenty people from fanzines and websites sitting around and agreeing on a policy,’ said Peter. ‘I, on the other hand, thought it was going to be a mass meeting for anyone who wanted to come, so there was misunderstanding at first.

  ‘We went onto a loop of about fifteen to twenty people and we began to get emails, a couple of days before the scheduled meeting on 31 January, saying: “Look, this is going to be chaos because it’s getting too big. It’s going to be like a mob and we’re not going to get anywhere. We need a small, controlled group.”’

  The idea of a mass meeting appealed to Hooton, but he feared it could get out of control and descend int
o a futile gesture if it wasn’t properly run. So he brought in Paul Rice, who was a former chair of the Broadgreen Labour Party. Hooton’s thinking was that if you could control a meeting of the Broad-green Labour Party back in the days of Militant, then you could control a herd of bulls in the red flag department of the Chinese Red Army gift shop.

  ‘I didn’t mind at all,’ said Rice. ‘After the Klinsmann story became clear I remember thinking, “Something’s going to have to be done here. Someone’s going to have to stand up to these.”’

  He felt he needed the Americans’ financial situations analysed and clarified, so he contacted Dave Elder, a New York financial expert, asked him to pick the bones out of Hicks’s and Gillett’s dealings and send him a fool’s translation. Which he did.

  ‘We circulated it at the meeting and basically it began to explain how they had structured their debt and how it was starting to come back on to the club,’ said Rice. ‘And I think that was the first time we’d actually realised the severity of the situation and had been able to put it in front of the masses. It was the first time we’d been able to explain what a leverage buyout was. And that was the thing that broadened it out from suspicion and anger about Rafa into something much more fundamental. We now found ourselves having to say: “We’ve got to do something about this; it’s no good taking the piss out of the likes of Newcastle and Manchester City because we’ve got a real crisis here.”

  ‘The meeting, actually, wasn’t that difficult to chair because what we had was a body of information that people hadn’t seen or didn’t know about. So when we started talking, in very simple terms, about how much debt was on the club, it confirmed people’s worst fears but also crystallised the issues. When we then went on to cover such areas as how the fans were treated at the ticket office, suspicions over local fans being overlooked, etc., it became obvious there was a broader need for action other than just that against Hicks and Gillett.

  ‘Yes, the Americans were the ongoing target, but there was actually an appetite out there to do something much wider and that’s really how the idea of a supporters’ union came up, rather than a single-issue protest group.’

  As 350 fans packed the back hall of the Sandon, the air crackled with anticipation. Every major fan group was there: Reclaim The Kop, The Urchins, the fanzines, the websites and the forums. It was like the coming together of the Five Families in The Godfather.

  The intention was to build the union from as wide a base as possible. Hooton, Heaton and Usher made sure that everyone who organised a coach, ran a forum or a website, or was involved in the supporters’ club was invited, and that the microphone would be passed to anyone with the balls to speak.

  ‘What fascinated me was the broad spectrum of people,’ said Paul Rice. ‘It struck me that, as well as a lot of people our age, who you would have expected to be ready to take a stand, there were all these young lads, who, and perhaps we didn’t realise this, had been disenfranchised completely. Whereas, at their age, the likes of us and the lads we’ve gone the match with over the years could go to the games, these lads were like the Sandon Wall Babies: they couldn’t get into the ground, so they watched it here on the telly in the pub. And yet they still had the passion.’

  Like most fans, inside and outside the Sandon that night, Tony Barrett’s views on the takeover had undergone a sea-change. As a devoted fan and a local lad, plus a journalist with a responsibility to see through the PR mist and deliver the truth to the fans, he was understandably beating himself up.

  ‘I’m thinking, “How badly have I got this wrong?” Well I got it so wrong that I realised I had to try to put it right. I had a guilty conscience. I had to give the fans as much backing as my job would allow. Fair play to the 350 who turned up that night because they knew there was something badly wrong within Liverpool when others were refusing to recognise it. They were fighting for their club when no one else was. Those who didn’t like the idea of fans acting like this said they were militants, and maybe some of them were. But what’s wrong with that? Everything they said back then was spot on, and Liverpool owes the Spirit Of Shankly a debt of gratitude for taking a stand.’

  At this point it wasn’t the Spirit, but the Sons Of Shankly they were calling themselves, after playwright Nicky Allt’s inspired suggestion met with warm approval – although when it was pointed out they’d be allowing in members with breasts and the Glenbuck Messiah had only sired daughters it was changed to Spirit Of Shankly, keeping the politically correct lobby happy and maintaining the SOS message. Allt it was who had organised the Sandon venue, became the union’s first chairman and, in those early months, was a key player in attracting membership and media attention.

  Sons, or spirits, you could argue about, but Shankly needed to be in the title. He was everything every Liverpudlian who hadn’t been around in the mid-1950s, and many who had, identified with. With his own unique brand of wit, his inimitable frankness, his deeply felt socialist beliefs and his unshakeable love for his adopted city and its people, Shankly was the spirit of Liverpool FC.

  As powerful brands go, his was up there with Coca-Cola, Disney and Jesus Christ.

  ‘There was a strong parallel going on between Shankly and Benitez which was crucial to what we were about,’ said Paul Rice. ‘Fans, whether they liked Rafa or not, and even at that early stage there were people who were not keen on him, felt that the role of the manager was being compromised like it had never been since Shankly arrived and told the board, ‘If you won’t let me be the manager I ain’t coming.’

  Peter Hooton explained: ‘Shankly initially refused the Liverpool manager’s job because he couldn’t pick the team and he only came back when they said, “OK, you’ve got authority over the team.” So it was inevitable that we would have some link to Shankly.’

  With a name agreed and broad aims established, word had to get out about the formation of a new fans’ alliance. A website was set up and a leaflet produced, which looked at today, seems remarkably like a page out of a 1960s programme. The paper was rough, the red ink so light it was almost pink, the typeface the same one used in headlines on the old Kop magazine and the Liver Bird looks like it was plucked off Ron Yeats’ cloth badge. But underneath a thumbnail picture of Shankly, arms widespread on the steps of St George’s Hall, were words that Liverpool fans should never have had to write or read:

  ‘An alliance of supporters and all major Liverpool fanzines and websites have come together to force the owners, the poisonous, dishonest Tom Hicks and George Gillett out of OUR club.

  ‘They want to buy our club with our money. Let’s not give it to them. Boycott ALL forms of official LFC merchandise, food and drink, starting TODAY. Buy a fanzine instead of a programme. Go to a stall rather than the club shop.’

  At the foot of the leaflet was a quote from Shankly. Or rather a pair of bullets coming out of a double-barrelled shotgun aimed at the faraway cowboys:

  ‘At a football club there’s a holy trinity – the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don’t come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques.’

  The words were fine, but to stand even the slimmest of chances of taking on the might of corporate America, SOS needed to convince a significant chunk of the fan base to join them.

  The decision was taken to form a body based on the trade union workplace model, giving all members one vote and forcing anyone who wanted to be on the steering committee to stand in a democratic election.

  ‘We were very conscious that the first meeting only had a Liverpool audience and we wanted to reach out to the club’s broader fan base,’ said Paul Rice. ‘We all knew people from other parts of the world who were coming to support the club and who bought into its values. There are others who just come to take photographs and are tourists but there are as many people from the rest of England, Norway and Ireland who understand what the club is about and are more Scouse than Scousers in that respect. And we wanted to get them involved.’

  ‘We were also consc
ious that we needed to be organised,’ said Peter Hooton. ‘For a long time I’d been watching documentaries about Boca Juniors and Lazio. Unfortunately Lazio fans are from a political persuasion that I don’t agree with, but they were organised. I remember watching those documentaries thinking, if only Liverpool fans could be organised maybe we wouldn’t have to put up with what we have put up with for years. We needed a catalyst to take us there, and inadvertently that catalyst was Tom Hicks, George Gillett and what they were trying to do to our club.’

  I love being paid to write a weekly football column on a national newspaper, which I’ve been doing since 1997. Short of being the man who picks up the laundry in the female dressing room on the Hollyoaks set or the valet whose job it is to put the paste on Prince Charles’s tooth-brush (just so I’d have one shot at putting haemorrhoid cream on and watching him crumple to the floor weeping), I can’t think of a better job.

  But there come points when big decisions have to be made. The first one was ‘Do I declare my club loyalty?’ It was a decision made redundant by the sheer volume of anti-Manchester United sentiment I was pouring on to the page which was matched only by the amount of pro-Liverpool bias.

  I was outed quicker than a Lib-Dem MP by a gay masseur, and before I knew it ‘Brian Reade is a Scouse Cunt’ websites were springing up all over the net, complete in one United case with a cartoon of Italians pushing my garden wall on top of me with the caption: ‘How do YOU like it, you murdering twat.’ Nice.

  I actually believe, and not just because I was quickly sussed, that every football journalist, analyst, pundit and commentator should be open about their club loyalties. We make our MPs declare their outside interests, so why not the people whose outpourings really make the public want to kick the lining out of their cat?