Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  Returning to the present, we are approaching La Louvre, probably the most famous museum in the world. Xavier turns sharply to the right and drops us off on the Rue de L’Échelle, a street of high-end fashion shops and hair salons. Houllier knows one of the proprietors and after a brief conversation with the middle-aged man dressed solely in linen and possessing majestic silver hair, we arrive at the Hotel Normandy through its bar entrance. The venue is brilliantly raffish and brilliantly French.

  Before leaving us, Houllier’s friend whips out a Sunday newspaper magazine supplement. The weekend before, it had featured an interview with Michel Platini, which took place at the same venue. Houllier seems proud to tell me this. ‘Michel . . .’ he says, whispering as if it were a secret that he was here, ‘. . . is still God.’

  The Normandy is the type of hotel that could feature in an espionage movie where members of the French Resistance design the downfall of their captors. Or maybe it could be used for a gangster epic about the rise and fall of Jacques Mesrine. I imagine Gérard Depardieu as the criminal overlord peering between the blinds of this quiet setting, wondering who might come for him next.

  In this instance, a shard of daylight cuts across the otherwise dim room, which is furnished with oxblood-stained leather couches and mahogany tables, and has a burgundy-painted ceiling. Huge oak doors are left open, so a velvet curtain separates inside from out, and a faintly stale smell of tobacco from a different era hangs in the air.

  Next to an unplayed piano, a hostess trolley has today’s issues of L’Équipe and Le Figaro, while from behind a small horseshoe-shaped bar a Moroccan waiter named Farid serves healthy measures of Pernod-Ricard and Campari to a couple of portly local men. Anticipating Houllier might like some wine, I ask for a glass of Sauvignon but instead he has a bottle of Evian in a schooner with lime, explaining that he is entertaining his wife Isabelle this evening, having not seen her in eight days.

  When speaking of the moment he resigned from Liverpool, allowing Houllier to manage the club alone following five difficult months in a joint role, Roy Evans described his counterpart as ‘far cuter than me’, nevertheless admitting that maybe Houllier had the tools to advance Liverpool whereas he, ultimately, did not. The next few hours are proof that Houllier is an incredibly intelligent person. He is multilingual, able to switch between languages seamlessly – never to be found searching for the right words and consistently appreciating nuances. He is also passionate, emotional and brooding. To term him as knowledgeable feels like an understatement. His obsession with football – he calls it a ‘virus’ – irradiates the fug of the Normandy. He speaks with the authority of a lecturer in a university hall.

  Rather than waiting for a question to be asked, Houllier moves quickly to remind me about the achievements of the team that he built.

  ‘You see, many people appreciate entertainment but they do not understand pleasure,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Life is not just about aesthetics, the arts. It is about foundations and creating something that can last a lifetime. In football, a lifetime is only very short. You have a cycle of three years, then you change, develop and grow again.

  ‘The most important compliment I had was from David Moores after we won the UEFA Cup in 2001,’ he continues. ‘David said, “Gérard, you have put Liverpool back on the European map. You have also hauled the club into the twenty-first century.” When I look back, that’s exactly what happened. I think winning the UEFA Cup helped the players believe they could win the Champions League in 2005. They were able to draw on experiences from before. It gave them the appetite and the confidence to compete with the best teams in the world. Before, Liverpool would lose to Strasbourg.’

  He moves on to a story from the player he appointed as Liverpool’s captain, a platform that enabled him to become a legend.

  ‘Steven Gerrard told me that he believed the experience of winning the UEFA Cup four years earlier helped Liverpool win the Champions League in 2005. And this is the point. The word help is important. In football, there are always claims that person A or person B was solely responsible for achieving something. Football regularly becomes about the individual. But success is not achieved without a team. It is not achieved without help.

  ‘I would say we changed a lot of things towards the end of the nineties that were very important to the long-term future of Liverpool. David came to see me in Paris, along with Rick Parry and Peter Robinson. They wanted me to join Liverpool for one particular reason. They told me that the club needed to change but it also needed to rediscover the culture of winning trophies – silverware. Rick, particularly, was very clear about that.

  ‘We changed the habits in terms of the way the team prepared and practised. We brought a different attitude to training, demanding that the players looked after themselves in terms of diet. I personally think we also signed a group of players that went on to play together for a long time: players from different countries, different leagues and different attitudes – probably more in tune with what was happening elsewhere in football. This is not a criticism of what happened previously. But sometimes you need to change to evolve.’

  Before Houllier, time stood still at Liverpool for nearly forty years. Players would come and go but the methodology remained fundamentally the same as the baton was passed on to different managers. Success meant there was no desire for adjustment. When Graeme Souness, a former European Cup-winning captain with Liverpool, was appointed as Kenny Dalglish’s successor in 1991 following unparalleled success at Glasgow Rangers, where he oversaw the modernization of Ibrox, the training ground, diets and squad routines, he met fierce resistance amongst the Liverpool players when he tried to introduce the same ideas at Melwood.

  Houllier believes had it not been for Souness’s reign, considered disastrous by most supporters, he would not have been in a position to ‘help’ Liverpool towards the end of the decade.

  ‘As a player, I loved Graeme Souness; he was one of my idols,’ Houllier says. ‘In France, he was viewed as the ultimate British footballer: physically, technically and tactically very talented. I was aware of his problems as manager at Liverpool because I read books about him when I was appointed. He admitted trying to change things too much, too soon. So I made the decision to change things gradually. Maybe that helped a little bit when I replaced Roy in the middle of the season. As a manager, you learn that it is very important not to break the habits of the players at this time.’

  In replacing Souness with Evans, Liverpool returned to tradition. All-time leading goalscorer Ian Rush was allowed to eat his pre-match meal of beans and sausage on toast again (banned by Souness), the players were afforded a greater level of social freedom, while, like before, injuries were treated by Ronnie Moran, who made running repair jobs (Souness had wanted to develop a clinic at Melwood where conditions would be treated properly, but this request was refused by the board).

  Meanwhile, at other clubs, nutritionists and conditioning coaches were being employed, squads were becoming fitter and more professional, and young British players were benefiting tactically and technically as well as socially (by not drinking so much) from sage advice delivered by a host of experienced imports. Liverpool were trapped within a Celtic insularity and Evans spoke of not wanting to sign a ‘sexy foreigner just for the sake of it’.

  Rather than signing one, Evans ended up sharing his job with a foreigner after three successive seasons where Liverpool threatened to engage in a championship race only to puzzlingly fall away in the final months. A perception existed that Evans was too lenient with players and a desire developed to appoint a disciplinarian capable of instilling the organization and forward thought that Souness had dabbled with years earlier.

  Few in Britain had heard of Arsène Wenger before he was recruited as Arsenal’s manager in 1996. In two seasons, he not only inspired the club to the title, after they had been mid table at his point of arrival, but also transformed the way Arsenal were viewed: from defensive dullards to attacking sensations. Weng
er came from France. Liverpool’s board began to ask if they could discover someone similar.

  Houllier’s association with Liverpool began decades before, when he moved to the city in 1969 to work as a teaching assistant at Alsop Comprehensive, a one-time grammar school no more than a mile and a half away from Anfield on the Queens Drive ring road, where Walton becomes Bootle. He also studied, completing a thesis entitled ‘Growing Up in a Deprived Area’. It focused on social issues in Toxteth, an area he still refers to as ‘Liverpool 8’.

  ‘Liverpool was a port and the major trading post in the north of England,’ Houllier remembers. ‘The port goes into decline and Manchester builds an international airport. A lot of harbour masters and immigrants from the Commonwealth lived in Liverpool 8. There is a struggle and the poverty starts. The identity of the area changes completely and gradually it becomes tougher to live in Liverpool than it was before. By 1970, I think more than 20 per cent of people in Liverpool were unemployed and levels had not been that bad since the 1930s.’

  Despite the struggles, Liverpool still had its football. In the 1960s, the teams of Bill Shankly were immortalized, while Harry Catterick’s Everton were known as the ‘Merseyside Millionaires’ because of their spending power. Houllier stood on the terraces of the Kop when Liverpool beat Dundalk 10–0 in a UEFA Cup tie and there with him that night was Patrice Bergues, visiting from France, a friend whom he would eventually lean on as Liverpool’s assistant manager. Houllier submersed himself locally by playing centre-forward for one of Alsop’s old boys’ sides on a Saturday morning in the Zingari League, a competition where only the toughest survived.

  After a year, Houllier returned to the farming village of Thérouanne in north-eastern France, where he had grown up as the only son of a farmer who turned to butchery. Houllier saw a future in academia and taught at different primary, secondary and grammar schools before becoming a lecturer in a school of commerce by his mid twenties. He continued to play amateur football with Hucqueliers and then Le Touquet, and enjoyed it so much that when a job as a coach at nearby local club Noeux-les-Mines was advertised in the paper, he decided to abandon the educational path and go for it. ‘The virus,’ he says, ‘was with me. I could not resist.’

  Noeux-les-Mines’s history was in coal mining. He arrived there in 1976, initially as head coach, and was later appointed manager. In his six years at the club, Houllier – with Bergues playing in midfield – took them from the lower reaches of France’s third division to the verge of promotion from the second. It was an astonishing rise and enough to convince first-division Lens that Houllier was capable of taking charge of a bigger club.

  There were other coaches around with long careers as professional footballers behind them but Houllier used his inexperience as motivation, compensating for his shortcomings by allowing his raw obsession to take him further. His studious manner meant days were long. For six days a week, he would leave home at 6 a.m. and not return until 11 p.m. at the earliest. Houllier believes the levels of commitment as well as his innovations were the only way to make it possible for a small club like Noeux-les-Mines to compete against those with greater resources, and they also gained him respect amongst his peers.

  ‘There were more opportunities for people like myself and Arsène Wenger to become coaches – why? Because the French FA were very serious about coaching education. This attitude was there in France, Italy, Holland and Germany thirty or even forty years ago but it is a relatively recent phenomenon in England.

  ‘With my background, if I was English, I would not have had a chance at that time. As a player, you have to learn your trade, so why should it be different for coaching and management? Listen, to be a doctor you need seven years. To be an engineer, you need five or six years. To be a teacher, you need time as well. To be a coach, it should be the same. I do not think you need to have been a top player to become a top coach. To be a top jockey, do you need to have been a horse? Of course not.’

  In Lens, Houllier took charge of a small-town club that represented another coal-mining community, one that demanded its team match the diehard commitment of the fans. Cries of ‘à la mine’ would be screamed at players who did not give 100 per cent and, like Liverpool, Lens was a place not without its social problems, with many of the mines long closed for business.

  Under Houllier, though, Lens qualified for the UEFA Cup and recorded two top-seven finishes in three seasons. The success led to an approach from Paris Saint-Germain – the richest club in France – and a year later PSG achieved the first league title in their history. The arrival of Houllier was celebrated as the catalyst and on judgement day he was held aloft by the players inside the Parc des Princes.

  Argentine striker Omar da Fonseca, who played under Houllier in Paris before later clinching two titles at Monaco with Wenger in charge, recognizes similarities between the two coaches. He speaks of previous experiences where coaches tended to be former players ‘who lived and breathed the game but nothing else’. He describes Houllier and Wenger as having a more ‘futuristic approach’ than the others. Houllier was good with psychology and particularly impressive when dealing with the media. ‘Because of his background and his language ability, he was able to deal with a cross section of players.’

  Houllier’s time in Paris came to a mutually agreed end after a disappointing 1987–88 campaign, and he joined the French Football Federation, first as a coach before becoming technical director and then Michel Platini’s assistant for the 1992 European Championships. When Platini stepped aside following a group-stage exit, the reins passed on to the next man in line. At the age of forty-four, Houllier had taken twenty-two years to propel himself from parks footballer in Liverpool to the most important managerial role in France.

  Houllier describes how he made it his ‘mission’ to see his country qualify for the 1994 World Cup in the United States, and with two games to go all they required was one point each from favourable home fixtures with Israel and Bulgaria. Despite being bottom of the group, Israel sneaked an astonishing 3–2 victory in the Parc des Princes before David Ginola carelessly surrendered possession in the final minute against Bulgaria, enabling Emil Kostadinov to secure an improbable win for the visitors. France were out of the World Cup and in the aftermath Houllier infamously berated Ginola as a ‘criminal’. A feud has existed between the pair ever since.

  After being replaced by Aimé Jacquet, Houllier returned to the FA and was tasked with the responsibility of reorganizing France’s football structure at youth level. In 1996, his side, which included Thierry Henry, David Trezeguet and Nicolas Anelka, beat Spain in the final of the under-18 European Championship. Two years later, the presence of Henry and Trezeguet was crucial as France’s senior team lifted the World Cup on home soil.

  Liverpool first made informal contact with Houllier about the possibility of taking on a role at Anfield in 1997 – a full twelve months before he was unveiled as joint manager with Roy Evans. Liverpool had gone as close to the title as they would under Evans in the 1996–97 season, eventually finishing in fourth place by virtue of goal difference, having gained the same number of points as Newcastle United in second. Poor defeats towards the end of the campaign undermined Evans’ position.

  ‘There was a phone call from Peter Robinson early that summer,’ Houllier explains. ‘But I was very much involved in the preparation for the World Cup. I couldn’t leave. It would have been treason for anyone to walk away from their country at that moment. I would have appeared in France as a traitor.’

  Twelve months later, Houllier’s contract was up and he decided to try something different. Celtic, having won the Scottish title for the first time in a decade, had spoken to Houllier about replacing Wim Jansen. Sheffield Wednesday had sacked Ron Atkinson and they were even more persuasive. Houllier was tempted by England. ‘I loved English football.’ He was very close to moving to Hillsborough.

  And then Robinson called again, wishing him luck. The pair had kept in regular contact ever sinc
e Houllier, like many coaches from the Continent, had visited Anfield to study methods during France’s winter break. Arsène Wenger had made the same trip in the mid 1980s when he was at Nancy.

  ‘Peter said to me, “I would like to congratulate you on your move to Sheffield.” I was silent. “What, you haven’t agreed terms yet?” Peter made his point very quickly. “If you haven’t agreed to go to Sheffield, then I would like to speak to you.” There were a few issues with my contract in Sheffield, which delayed the appointment. So I said, “Peter, of course I will speak to you.” The following day, Peter arrived in Paris with Rick Parry and David Moores. Within ten minutes, we had reached an agreement.’

  It was unclear which role Houllier would take at Anfield. Robinson’s approach and the hastily arranged meeting in Paris had not been ratified by Liverpool’s board. Houllier would potentially become the club’s first foreign manager and the first outside appointment since Bill Shankly forty years earlier.

  Initially, the board favoured keeping Roy Evans in charge. It was suggested that Houllier should take Ronnie Moran’s job as first-team coach. But Robinson felt it would have demeaned Houllier’s pedigree. A position as director of football was also put forward but again Robinson believed that Houllier needed to have access to players and be able to instil discipline. In the end, the board agreed to make them joint managers and Houllier says he agreed it was vital that Evans should remain. ‘I thought he’d done a good job in the years before. His experience was essential.’

  It did not concern Houllier that he had not managed at club level for more than a decade, although he admits it was a different challenge compared to the national team.

  ‘Club [football] is day-to-day involvement – it never stops,’ he says. ‘With the national team, you have time to form a wider perspective but in that sense building momentum is more difficult. You have less time to prepare your team, so you have to be incisive with every decision. Personally, I prefer being with a club, because there you can build up, develop. I took great enjoyment in seeing players develop both as footballers and as people. With a club, this is possible; you know you are having a serious impact. You can prepare on a short-term and medium-term basis as well as having a long-term vision. With the national team, you prepare for the next game, always.