Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  ‘I was friends with Mario [Basler] and we’d enjoy a few shandies now and then. The club would know because they have a rein on what is happening. Even if it were five days before the next game, they would not be happy. [Uli] Hoeness found out and we’d be in his office explaining ourselves. Does that happen in England, where the ownership groups are based in America or the Middle East?

  ‘The loyalty of players is questioned all of the time in football now, whereas the loyalty of the club is never an issue. A player might sign for a manager who is sacked within a few months or the owner might change. It happened to me at Newcastle, two games into the season. Suddenly the person that signed me was gone, and in a new environment – no matter how much you are paid – you feel vulnerable. You think, Why did Newcastle allow Kenny [Dalglish] to buy me for so much money when he was clearly under pressure? Where does this leave me? It gives you an excuse not to perform. There are fewer people to be loyal to.

  ‘In Germany, Spain, Italy and France, there isn’t a desire at academy level to recruit the best young players from all over the world. They largely focus on the talent in the region of the club. It means clubs like Bayern can implement a pay structure, which is one third basic pay, one third on appearances and one third on bonuses. In effect, more than 50 per cent of wages is based on performance.

  ‘Here, in England, that isn’t the case. Young players get paid a lot of money no matter what their performance; they don’t know any different, so they grow up with a sense of entitlement. It results in a mentality issue – that it is OK to lose.’

  He continues, ‘In England, the attitude is: if you lose and something bad happens to you, we have sympathy for you. In Germany, the attitude is less sympathetic. For example, in the 1990 World Cup final, Lothar Matthäus could not take a penalty because the stud in his boot had broken off. It was 0–0 with five minutes to go against Argentina, so he asked his best mate of twenty years, Andy Brehme, to take the kick instead. Brehme tucked it away, Germany won the World Cup, but people still have a go at Matthäus for supposedly bottling it – even though the goal was scored.

  ‘In England, there is a message that it’s OK to fail. You can see Paul Gascoigne as another example – again at the 1990 World Cup. He was booked in the semi-final and, knowing he would miss the final, was too upset to take a penalty in the shoot-out that followed. If that happened in Germany, he would not have been allowed back in the country. Gascoigne would have been accused of letting the team down and the whole nation.

  ‘Compare Gascoigne’s response to the reaction of Michael Ballack, who received a second booking in the 2002 World Cup semi-final, meaning he would miss the final. Michael was arguing with Carsten Ramelow, who’d given the ball away leading to the foul. I know because I was standing next to Carsten!

  ‘Michael said, “Come on, lads, we’ve still got twenty-five minutes left to play.” Rather than feeling sorry for himself, Ballack’s reaction was to go and score the goal that got Germany to the final. He celebrated too. Like Gascoigne, Ballack cried but he did it in the changing room once he’d completed his job. In my view, Ballack was a hero for this but in Germany nobody talks about it because we see what he did as normal. The attitude is, You miss a final – so what? It’s a team game . . .’

  Hamann describes himself as an individual with the capacity to express his personality without disturbing the balance of the collective.

  ‘I liked to do things my way but without harming the performance of the team. If you knew how to handle me, which I don’t think was particularly challenging, then you would have a performance on a Saturday.’

  His father was a policeman, so the rules at home were clearly defined and he understood boundaries. Having excelled at science and mathematics in school, he completed national service, where he learned to shoot a gun. He refers to his emergence as a professional footballer as a ‘drift’. It helped that his school was next door to the Wacker München football club.

  ‘Wacker had some decent kids: Turks, Serbs, Croats,’ Hamann remembers. ‘My father was the coach and he wanted us to play quick and direct, using only two touches. If you went one on one with the goalkeeper and there was another guy next to you and you didn’t square it so he has an open goal, even if you scored yourself you would get substituted. The idea was: always pass the ball to the person better placed. I think in the long term it made me more of a team player. And in Germany, if you are not a team player at heart, you do not get very far.’

  Aged sixteen, Hamann received proposals from 1860 Munich and Bayern Munich. The decision was swayed in Bayern’s favour because the training ground was fifteen minutes away by bus. He was placed in a team two years above his own age group and his goals as an attacking midfielder pushed him towards the first team. For the first time as a footballer, he smashed into a wall of unhappiness, admitting that he was too young and naive to deal with the forceful personalities he encountered inside Germany’s most successful football club.

  ‘There was no togetherness whatsoever,’ he says flatly. ‘I came through with Christian Nerlinger, and Markus Babbel, who later played for Liverpool, and that helped to some extent because we suffered from similar anxieties. It was impossible to fit in when there was no common bond. The dressing room was divided between the young German players, the older superstars – many of whom didn’t like each other – and then the Italian- and French-speakers. The biggest problem was Matthäus and [Jürgen] Klinsmann – the biggest personalities – never got on. It wasn’t a nice environment to play in.’

  Matthäus believed that Klinsmann had plotted to replace him as captain of the German national team and the enmity was cemented when Klinsmann won the European Championships of 1996 without Matthäus being part of the line-up. Back at Bayern, Matthäus apparently had a bet with Bayern’s general manager against his teammate scoring a certain number of goals in his second season, and, although he lost the bet, the season culminated with Klinsmann being vilified in a tabloid when he refused to grant the paper exclusive interviews, and then his sexuality was questioned by a television host.

  When Bayern coach Giovanni Trapattoni substituted Klinsmann with a debutant amateur player for what would prove to be his only appearance for the club, Klinsmann reacted by kicking an advertising board on the side of the pitch and the moment was played again and again on German television.

  In the dressing room, Hamann can remember how the bad mood between the pair was magnified by a culture already present where each person was looking after himself – a culture far removed from the team ethos pressed upon him from an early age.

  ‘Everybody made it difficult for each other,’ he says. ‘The old players were suspicious of the young players. Nobody gave you a helping hand or made you feel comfortable, enabling you to express yourself fully. They made their feelings clear: that you were a kid who did not belong in first-team training. They recognized too that if you did well, there was a chance that they might get removed from the side. I wouldn’t say it was bullying. But it was borderline. For a while I wasn’t able to show my ability because I was too nervous and too insecure about myself.

  ‘It reached the point where I was playing for the second team and scoring goals but as soon as I became involved with the first team my form disappeared. I thought that my future might be away from Bayern: in the second division at another club. Maybe success elsewhere would earn me the necessary respect to go back to Bayern and prove all of them wrong.’

  Gradually, Hamann grew in confidence. He began to appreciate that players need not have the same outlook on life but fundamentally must be motivated by the same things.

  ‘At Bayern, it was drilled into you from an early age that first is first and second is last,’ Hamann says. ‘German players are pragmatic. There are some who purposely tackle certain teammates harder in a training match because their presence is a threat. These aren’t deliberate attempts to injure but if they get injured, then so be it. We had training sessions where the coach had to stop the
game because it was getting too feisty. But at least the intensity was the same on a Saturday. I liked this because it is better than playing eleven versus eleven and fannying around at half pace in a training session. It gives the players in the B team a chance to show the manager that they should really be playing on the other side by tackling really hard.

  ‘In England, the attitude was completely different. You aren’t allowed to tackle your teammates in training. This surprised me because in England the game was supposed to be more physical. It made me wonder whether it is all for show; beneath the anger maybe the players are too nice.

  ‘You need a balance, of course. At Bayern, a lot of the players didn’t like each other and at times it took something away from our performances. Other times, it possibly added to our performances because some players were desperate to prove others wrong. I would say there were a lot of alpha males with their own agendas but fundamentally we wanted the same thing in a sporting sense when it came to the match. The results and the trophies proved that.’

  Hamann recognizes that learning to deal with the politics of the dressing room helped to build his self-confidence. He chose to move clubs at the age of twenty-four because he felt he wasn’t getting the recognition he deserved at Bayern.

  ‘That showed I had overcome my confidence issues,’ he says. ‘As I got older, I found it harder to score goals. I did not have the necessary acceleration to move away from opponents and get a shot off. I’d love to have been an attacking midfielder but an attacking midfielder who doesn’t score goals is not going to be selected very often. The progression was to go further back, because it suited me. At Bayern, I was asked by Trapattoni to fill in the space behind Mario Basler. Mario was one of the most gifted players but he wouldn’t run backwards. We played with a unique 3–3–3–1 formation and it meant that I, quite often, was a wing-back. Although it wasn’t natural for me, it improved my understanding.

  ‘I’m not a precious person. But Bayern supplied six players for the 1998 World Cup squad and I was one of them. Even though I was playing for Bayern every week and a German international, I knew I could do an awful lot more and take on greater responsibility, become regarded as a senior player.’

  Hamann explored options abroad because he considered any other German club to be a step down.

  ‘The first team to make an offer was Real Betis in Seville. They were really ambitious and had just signed the Brazilian player Denilson for a world-record fee. Seville is a beautiful city. I liked the sound of it. But Newcastle came in and they were keener. I was 50/50 and had Betis been as keen as Newcastle, I’d probably have gone there. Kenny [Dalglish] met with my agent and had a really persuasive argument. He made me realize that my game would suit the Premier League more. I saw Newcastle’s players too – legends. They had John Barnes; Ian Rush had been there the year before. Then there was [Alan] Shearer, Shay Given and Gary Speed. I saw the heartbeat of a successful side.’

  After Dalglish was sacked, Hamann was pushed again into a more attacking role by his successor, Ruud Gullit. Gérard Houllier was bold in spending £8 million to take him to Liverpool the following summer.

  ‘I met Gérard and liked him straight away. He told me that he wanted to build the midfield around my experience. He had sold Paul Ince and needed another leader in there. Nobody had really spoken about me as a leader before and, considering I’d left Germany to find more responsibility, this was music to my ears. I really felt wanted and the fact he used so much money to sign me gave me huge confidence.’

  Hamann was less keen on Phil Thompson, however. He responds swiftly when asked whether he’d previously encountered someone like the assistant manager with a notorious temper.

  ‘Er, no . . .’ he says, pausing. ‘There is no doubt, on occasion, it helped get results. But maybe Thommo got angry too often. Gérard was always quick to intervene if he was going too far. “Leave it, Phil. We’ll speak Monday.” The number of times he said that in the changing rooms . . .’

  Hamann’s mind wanders to a match at Southampton in 2000 when Liverpool let a three-goal lead slip in the final twenty minutes.

  ‘Thommo went so mad at Markus Babbel that Markus reacted and threw a boot at him, and it all kicked off big time. Is this approach healthy? Probably not. Having said that, hard feelings were not held for too long. A lot of the boys didn’t take Thommo’s rants so seriously. You realized it was best to take your medicine and laugh about it later. It became another part of the routine in that period.’

  Hamann found the enthusiastic personality of Sammy Lee, the first-team coach, even more annoying to deal with than Thompson’s rage.

  ‘Sammy was relentless with his enthusiasm with every other player but me,’ Hamann explains. ‘I have to admit I couldn’t be assed training at 100 per cent all of the time. That wasn’t my style. Sometimes I had to say, “Sammy, do me a favour and leave me alone.” I knew my own body. I was twenty-five when I joined Liverpool and I appreciated what I had to do to perform on a Saturday.

  ‘In pre-season, I’d never miss a session. I did everything I was told. I was a good runner and I’d be towards the front. During the season, I would know when to get a sweat on and when not to. Other players are different, of course. Carra and Paddy Berger – they needed to be on it all of the time to have the confidence to execute their competitive game.

  ‘Me? I’d try to find a space on the pitch to hide during full-scale training matches because I learned that going crazy in training did not improve my levels on a Saturday. If I tried like Carra or Paddy, I would have been fucked, too tired.

  ‘You have to trust the players. I’m not sure Sammy trusted me all of the time and it got on my nerves. He wanted everyone to make sure they were warmed up, for example. “Sammy, I’ve warmed up in the car with the heaters on and I’ve never pulled a muscle in my life.” These conversations happened all the time. He would encourage everyone else and if someone gave the ball away five times in a possession game, he’d encourage them, being positive. If I did it once, I’d get a bollocking.’

  There were other people inside Liverpool’s dressing room whom Hamann took to straight away. Jamie Carragher was one of them.

  ‘At the beginning, it is fair to say that Carra was a bit of a lad. He liked a joke. He liked a night out. But when he played, he played hard. He wasn’t someone who cracked jokes and then disappeared on a Saturday. He backed everything up.’

  Carragher came from Bootle, a modest area a few miles north of Liverpool’s city centre. A few weeks after Hamann signed, Carragher invited the German to join him in Bootle for a night out. They entered a bar known locally as Cornelius’s Place, a dive with a jukebox and a small selection of draft lagers.

  ‘It was so dark in there, I remember walking out a few hours later and my eyes beginning to hurt because of the light,’ Hamann says. On another occasion in the early days, Carragher remedied a bad defeat by suggesting a few drinks in Liverpool city centre. ‘We ended up in Flares and the lads got down to “Super Trouper” from Abba. It wasn’t the type of thing Houllier liked us to do. But Carra knew better. The night out helped us recover from our disappointment. Everything went wrong against Leicester. There was no point in dwelling.’

  Hamann cannot stop laughing when he recalls a scene outside the team bus before a European away game in Valencia.

  ‘Michael Owen spotted Carra’s dad, Philly, in the crowd. He was dancing in the street, singing – shouting – Liverpool songs. Everyone leaned to one side of the bus to see what was going on. If it was my dad, I’d have probably hidden in the toilets but Carra reacted by banging on the window, encouraging him. “Go ’ed, lad,” he shouted.’

  Hamann says the spirit under Gérard Houllier was the best he’s experienced at club level.

  ‘Any successful team has the right blend. If you want to win, you firstly need players you can rely on. That’s the bottom line. In that group, you need young and old – a mix of stamina and pace – and players who can put their foot on t
he ball. I played in twelve finals for Liverpool and we only lost three. I think that shows Gérard chose the right players, players who could respond when the chips were down, players who did not get too hyped up or nervous. Markus [Babbel] was one of them, and Stéphane [Henchoz] was the same, Sami too. They were all defensive players and each one of them had a good temperament. In attack, we had players who could make a difference. In 2001, Michael Owen won a lot of games for us.’

  Houllier transformed Liverpool in less than two years from a team with a reputation for throwing everything away to one skilled in methods of recovery. Hamann credits the manager’s perception for judging moods as the main reason why Liverpool won three cup competitions in less than four months.

  ‘I remember driving to Melwood and thinking, I can’t be assed training today. I walked in and Patrice Bergues, Gérard’s right-hand man, was waiting for us. “Don’t get changed yet, lads. We’re going to the David Lloyd gymnasium for a swim and a sauna.” He read my mind and, probably, a lot of the boys’ minds. Nearly everything Gérard did in that period was right.’

  For Hamann, though, one decision stands above the rest as a sign that Houllier’s time as Liverpool’s manager was somewhere near an end. In 2002, soon after Houllier’s return from his heart scare, Liverpool were 2–1 up on aggregate against Bayer Leverkusen with half an hour or so of the Champions League quarter-final remaining. Liverpool were protecting a lead but by replacing Hamann with Vladimir Šmicer, an attack-minded player, Liverpool’s midfield was left wide open.

  ‘There was so much confidence amongst the players that we genuinely believed we’d beat Man United in the semi and Real Madrid in the final,’ Hamann says. ‘Real Madrid didn’t scare us one bit. We were bouncing, really bouncing.’

  After Hamann’s substitution, though, Leverkusen scored three goals and knocked Liverpool out.

  ‘Earlier that month, Houllier had told me that in all his time as manager, we’d never conceded more than three goals when I was on the pitch. We were in command before Houllier took me off. I couldn’t understand the decision. I was fuming and totally gutted.’