by Brian Reade
He was slightly peeved because he’d set his heart on wearing his colours on such a big night, but he agreed and thanked him for the advice. Then he took his seat in the directors’ box, only to find, standing next to him with the biggest, reddest, shiniest Liverpool scarf resting on his shoulders, Tom Hicks and a cameraman clicking away at the pair of them. Hicks with scarf, Gillett without. He wasn’t happy.
Hicks, on the other hand, never sought anyone’s advice. He would just do his own thing and not give a monkey’s cuss about tradition, taste, or anyone else’s sensibilities. How else do you explain him walking into the Anfield boardroom one match day and hitching up his suit trousers to reveal a brand new pair of cowboy boots bearing the Liver Bird crest? Worse still, he told the disbelieving directors, shareholders and guests whom he’d summoned to admire his leather masterpieces, that if they wanted a pair he could get them a good price.
When the owners rowed it wasn’t a pretty sight as Hicks swatted Gillett like a mosquito. Someone who witnessed several arguments described them as being heated but never physical. No hiking boots on cowboy boots action to report, I’m afraid. A typical scenario would be Hicks dismissing his junior partner with a put-down and Gillett playing the injured victim asking ‘What have I ever done to you?’ to which the Texan would reply ‘What have you ever done?’
An Anfield insider who saw one row unfold said: ‘Hicks looked at him like he was a sad little man. He made reference to the meat-packing deal which brought them together and said: ‘When you were a minor shareholder you acted like you were in control. Now you have parity you’re insufferable.’
But, to misquote C.J. from Reggie Perrin, Gillett didn’t get to be where he was today without having some impressive traits. One of his finest is an extraordinary capacity to digest a huge amount of complex detail and regurgitate it with a conviction that convinces listeners he knows everything about his subject.
It was that skill that convinced Moores and Parry that ‘he got The Liverpool Way’, when what he’d got was a five-star crib-sheet and recited it without error in a seemingly spontaneous manner.
Choose the ten stand-out facts about Liverpool’s history from Rome to Istanbul, Heysel to Hillsborough, Liddell to Dalglish, throw in the ten greatest reasons for supporting Liverpool and he not only had them all stored up, but he could rattle them off with more conviction than the reddest sage in the Albert pub.
Journalists saw him as a flattering fantasist who was desperate to be liked, someone who wanted to be thought of as a favourite uncle but who, underneath, was a calculating machine. He was happy to dish out harsh opinions and leak information that was favourable to him, but he would rarely go on the record. He dealt in nods and winks, nudging you towards asking questions about his enemies.
He once told The Times’ business reporter Alex Frean that there was a senior journalist on her newspaper receiving financial inducements to write nasty lies about him. As Frean could only think of one person who was constantly critical of him, the newspaper’s football editor, she asked if he was talking about Tony Evans. He gave a ‘you may say that but I couldn’t possibly comment’ look and when she told Evans about it he said: ‘As if I would ever need paying to write nasty things about him.’
Another Times journalist, Tony Barrett (formerly of the Echo) recalls an impromptu, off-the-record meeting with him at the Academy in September 2009:
‘He stood there in his trademark hob-nailed boots and told me how much money he’d put in to the club, how much more he was going to put in, how he was going to revolutionise the stadium, how the club was being let down by Tom Hicks and Rafa, blah, blah, blah. It was his standard liturgy of nonsense.’
He accused the reporter of writing falsehoods about how much interest he and Hicks were paying and said this truly hurt him because Barrett was a wonderful writer. When he asked the Times man what issues he had with him and Hicks he was told ‘You’re ruining the club.’ Which sent him off on a Walter Mitty tangent, accusing Barrett of listening too much to Benitez, who was the real destroyer of the club: ‘The disturbing thing was I think he actually believed all the rubbish he was spouting. Every time I spoke to him what he said was so divorced from reality as to be laughable. I think the fact he chose never to go on the record proved he knew he was talking bollocks. He gave out figures about Rafa’s spending which were completely ridiculous, and his theme never changed. It was always Rafa is destroying the club and so is Tom Hicks but I’m going to make it all right. I reached the same conclusion that most British journalists did: He’s barking.’
It wasn’t just British journalists who were left baffled by some of his answers though. When he finally chose to break his silence on his unworkable relationship with Hicks, he did so on a Toronto sports radio station, Fan 590. Throughout the lengthy interview in March 2008 he couldn’t bear to mention his partner by name. Not once did he say Tom or Mr Hicks, just ‘him’ and ‘others within the ownership group’ (like there were more than the two of them).
It was a classic example of how he played the victim – the affable pensioner who’d been mugged by the brutal Texan. The popular uncle figure among Liverpudlians who had become tainted by association with Hicks, not through anything he’d done or said. He talked of ‘him’ being the root cause of fans’ animosity whereas he was so popular he’d been invited on pre-match benders in pubs around Anfield (presumably just as one of those pubs was about to become a mysterious arson target).
‘I’ve had several conversations with fans who represent important blog sites and so forth and they are inviting me to come to the famous pubs to be their guest and see how they sing their songs, or get ready to sing their songs. And there’s none of the hostility that seems to have been directed at others within the ownership group,’ he said without falling off his chair in a fit of laughter, apologising for having a warped sense of humour and asking the station’s producer if he could go again.
‘We’ve gotten as many as 2,000 emails a week here and I would say that 95 per cent of them have been directed at some of the comments made by my partner and 5 per cent have been aimed at both of us, saying “Go home Americans.”
‘The thing that angers them the most is the prospect that I might sell even one share of stock to my partner. They don’t want him to have controlling interest of this club. They don’t want him to have any ownership of the club, based on what they’re saying and sending to me.
‘So as a result of that it has been a difficult time for my wife, based on the amount that I travel, because we’ve received calls in the middle of the night, threatening our lives, death threats. I would come to the office and the threats would come to the office and Foster and Lauren, my son and daughter-in-law, have received a number of them as well.
‘We’re very private people but my phone number is in the phone book, and I’m not shy and if I make a mistake then I’m prepared to take the hit for that. But private numbers and mobile phone numbers are apparently on some blog sites and we’ve received some calls.
‘And again it’s interesting that calls aren’t against my wife and my son and my daughter-in-law as much as they’re against us selling to our partner. So we’re rethinking that. Frankly I don’t think it’s fair for me to put my family in that kind of danger and, instead of thinking about selling, I don’t know, maybe we will think about buying.’
So he’s a very private person who puts his number in the public phone book. Fans ring him in the middle of the night to issue death threats, only they’re not death threats but a mixture of invites to pubs for singing practice, and pleas not to sell his share to Hicks. And despite being desperate to get out of the club, petrified about the credit crunch making him bankrupt again, and having no spare funds and no legal way of forcing his partner to sell his 50 per cent share, he’s thinking of buying Hicks out.
This interview was also worth listening to on another level. To hear how, after fourteen months in charge of a football club, he had truly mastered the sport’s ter
minology:
‘Our loss to Man U last Sunday 3–0 was a heartbreaker because we played eleven on ten. We had Mascherano thrown off when it’s unclear what happened, but clearly they sent out a referee with a no-tolerance programme and we happened to make the wrong comment to the referee at the wrong time.’ Go soccerball owner, go!
What was also worth hearing was Tom Hicks’s priceless response to the interview. When his PR people were asked for his reaction a statement was released which read: ‘Mr Hicks will be making no comment as he would prefer to allow the team to get on with the important games over the next few weeks’. Less than a fortnight later, just before the Champions League semi-final, Hicks was leaking the fact he’d just sent Rick Parry a letter demanding his resignation for being a disaster.
To be fair to Gillett he was never loathed by Liverpudlians as much as Hicks was. They knew Gillett soon realised he had made a mistake buying Liverpool with Hicks and would willingly have sold his share to Dubai if he could. They also knew he grew to hate Hicks as much as them, which was one of the reasons he wouldn’t sell him his 50 per cent. Towards the end he was definitely viewed as the lesser of the two evils.
There is also evidence to suggest he did view buying the club as more than buying Weetabix. He did take on board the unique traditions of Liverpool FC and wanted to try to maintain them as much as he could, whereas Hicks was a hard-nosed assassin who saw all that culture and history nonsense as unwanted baggage which served only one point: to add value to the brand.
Which was why Hicks hardly ever spoke to the players and never met the fans. Gillett did meet with the fans though, and not only when he was ambushed at his hotel, on visits to the training ground or in city centre pubs.
Rick Parry had begun to realise that the Spirit Of Shankly was fast gathering members and credibility. He went along to several meetings in the Cross Keys pub in Liverpool city centre where he listened sympathetically to their frank and honest assessment of both him and the club.
At first SOS members were sceptical, guessing that he was attempting to claw back credibility after the disastrous sale to Hicks and Gillett and his Athens ‘numbers game’ quote.
The early meetings were fraught with anxiety because there were fans present who wanted to rip him apart, verbally, not literally – although I can’t speak for all of them. Both sides soon realised that whatever had divided them in the past they were now united by one ambition. To see the back of Tom Hicks.
Spirit Of Shankly knew they needed allies in the boardroom and Parry realised he needed as many friends as he could muster outside it, especially with union membership climbing towards 10,000 and their spokesmen regularly articulating fan-base concerns in the national media. Eventually Parry decided it was in all of their interests to set up a meeting with Gillett, and both sides agreed. So on 13 September 2008, before the lunchtime kick-off against Manchester United, SOS members met Gillett and Parry at Anfield.
‘It was all a bit cloak and dagger, to be honest,’ recalls Paul Rice. ‘There was four of us; Peter Furmedge, myself, Nicky Allt and John Mackin. Rick was there and this guy sat at the back dressed in classic Ivy League chinos and jacket. Gillett wore a suit with what I can only describe as monkey boots on his feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I was thinking, “Is this some kind of psychological ploy?”’
Naturally, Uncle George was very pally and it was all ‘Hi, guys, how you doin’?’ In a typical attempt to show they, not him, were the most important people in the room (but also a subtle way of sizing up his opponents and finding out useful information which could be used at a later date) he said, ‘You guys know who I am so tell me who you are and what you all do.’ They went around the table and metaphorically filled him in.
‘I could tell by looking at him that he was taken aback,’ said Rice. ‘I think he was expecting us to say “hod-carrier, doorman, incapacity benefit recipient etc.,” but instead he heard “chief executive, playwright, chief executive, etc.” and you could see he was thinking, “Gee these guys might be able to string a sentence together, we could be in trouble here.”’
Gillett upped his game. Out came the passionately regurgitated LFC crib-sheet, showcasing his knowledge of, and love for, their club. When they asked about his unworkable relationship with Hicks he admitted they didn’t see eye to eye but they were looking at ways of working together (which was the same smokescreen Gordon Brown used to throw up when asked how he was getting on with Tony Blair).
Then Gillett cut to the quick by asking what their issues were with the ownership, and Rice listed the broken promises, the debt they’d thrown on the club, the lack of direction and leadership, the absence of a new stadium and the wanton undermining of the manager’s position. ‘I just gave it to him straight,’ said Rice. ‘I said, when you came into our club from nowhere you were welcomed warmly and you’ve basically gone on to shit on us from a great height, before adding that all four of us had better things to do that day than sit there telling him how appalling he was at his role of custodian of our great club. Like getting in the mood for our biggest home game of the season against the Mancs.’
John Mackin, co-author with Jegsy Dodd of the hugely entertaining book Redmen, also took his chance to lay it on the line: ‘We’ve never needed to protest or demonstrate before,’ he told Gillett, ‘because in the past we all seemed to be pulling in the same direction – players, manager, staff and fans. But that’s been ripped apart by you fellas.
‘The old relationship used to be about everyone pulling in the same direction. Us behind the club and the club behind us. The club always there for us. We were never just turnstile fodder. We were never just there to be exploited. But that’s changed and there’s a feeling now that the club doesn’t care who the fans are as long as they’ve got their money.’
They then brought up the £30 million interest being paid to keep the club afloat and the effect that was having on the strength of the squad.
A shocked and affronted Gillett hit back by launching into a speech about how the club was in ‘a very, very healthy state’ better than any other major club in Europe. ‘We’ve spent more than anyone over the past few years except Chelsea. We’ve spent more than Man U. If your problem is with the quality of players then please, Sweet Jesus, don’t blame me for that,’ he said. When the SOS men loudly challenged him he asked them to keep the voices down because Rafa Benitez and his family were in the next office.
Now that Gillett had moved the conversation on to his favourite ‘serial transactionist’ he assured them that the real problem at the club was Benitez, before launching into an attack on him with Parry occasionally nodding in agreement. He talked about Benitez’s obsession with doing things quickly: ‘Deals take a long time. Alex Ferguson is prepared to wait until the last day of the transfer window but Rafa says “we have to act now”. Well what do you think that does when we come knocking at a door. They start rubbing their hands together.’
They hit back by saying they didn’t want a debate with him about the faults and merits of Benitez as an individual. What concerned them more was how he and Hicks had undermined the office of manager of Liverpool FC, regardless of who that manager was. Which was a cue for Gillett to tell them they didn’t understand how difficult it was working with someone like Benitez.
It was at this point Paul Rice cut in to say: ‘Look, George, can I be honest with you?’
‘I would very much like you to be,’ he replied.
‘You’ve been relatively successful in business. If you were called in to study Liverpool FC, as a business, would you conclude that it’s clearly dysfunctional and that it could not possibly move forward when it’s split into two sides?’
Gillett’s response was: ‘Oh it’s far worse than two sides.’
He wrapped up the meeting with the kind of diplomatic pleasantries you used to hear when Gorbachev met Reagan to try to end the Cold War: It’s been very positive, we now both understand the other side’s position, let’s keep this dia
logue going, here’s my business card, you know how to contact me, do so at any time, my door is always open, etc.
But Gillett being Gillett, he had to top it with his own personal, empathetic touch by telling them, ‘Let’s fix this fricking club,’ then, with reference to the well-publicised march the SOS had organised before that day’s game: ‘Now you guys go and do what you’ve got to do.’
He wanted them to walk away with the overriding impression that he was Uncle George, a good guy, who was on their side.
The impression they left with was of a patronising gnome in hiking boots.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I was thinking, “Oh, come on, let’s get these out, enough is enough, the sooner these are out the better”’
– Steven Gerrard
The final straw for Steven Gerrard was watching Tom Hicks by his Dallas fireside, clutching his Liverpool mug, pretending to cheer on the Reds, while anarchy raged at Anfield.
Rafa Benitez was telling his captain of his increasing frustration, Rick Parry had been urged to resign, angry fans were protesting, poison was seeping into every pore of the media, people were persuading Gerrard to go public and demand answers, and Hicks and Gillett were nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, yet another trophyless season beckoned.
That positive meeting with the new American owners in Manchester’s Lowry Hotel, didn’t feel like it was only fourteen months ago. Gerrard thought back to how excited he’d been to hear them say they were hell-bent on returning Liverpool to their position as one of the most revered football clubs in the world. Only to drag Liverpool to a place it had never been before: a civil war battlefield.
The club’s Huyton-born captain had long realised all those promises were empty, and like the vast majority of Liverpudlians he’d been conned by their charm offensive. Hicks had told his on-field leader he would always be there for him if he needed anything, but he never had a face-to-face conversation with him again. Or one over the phone for that matter. Not even a friendly ‘how’s everything going’ bit of banter after being pulled aside at Anfield or Melwood.
