Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  Hamann’s phone rang at the team hotel later that night.

  ‘It was Gérard. “Didi, I want to speak to you, will you come downstairs?” I wasn’t the only one there. He told the whole squad that nobody should speak to the press about his substitutions.

  ‘Although I agreed to go along with his idea, it said to me that, deep down, he knew he’d got it wrong. Houllier had never chosen to hold a team meeting so soon after a game before. Usually, he’d take a day to collect his thoughts then run through things.’

  Back at Melwood, Hamann was summoned to Houllier’s office.

  ‘I was planning to really have a go at him but as soon as I entered the room he looked up at me in the same way a headmaster does to a pupil and asked me straight why I underperformed in Leverkusen. That threw me off course. He explained that he was disappointed in my role in Leverkusen’s first goal but I tried to reason with him that I’d got caught out of position because Steven Gerrard had dived in on Michael Ballack and that I had to try to recover the situation.

  ‘When I look back now, I can think of Thommo sitting there beside Houllier and saying nothing. That just wasn’t his way. If I was responsible for a mistake, he’d have laid in to me. His silence said a thousand words.’

  Houllier kept his job for another two seasons. It proved to be a long farewell and by the time of his departure the groundswell of opinion was against him amongst Liverpool’s febrile supporter base. Hamann, though, is defensive of his former manager when reflecting on the legacy he left behind.

  ‘He [Houllier] is definitely underrated in this country,’ Hamann says. ‘Critics talk about the players he bought who didn’t perform at Liverpool but he also bought Sami Hyypiä for £2.5 million and built a team inside twelve months that was capable of winning trophies.

  ‘He used to be a teacher, so he was very good at communicating with people and creating team spirit. You saw that in how many finals we played and won even when we were under pressure for a lot of the time. We won the Champions League after he left and so many of the players were his signings. He deserves credit for the team he left behind.’

  When Liverpool won the Champions League twelve months later, Houllier appeared in Liverpool’s dressing room, much – supposedly – to the annoyance of Rafael Benítez, the winning manager.

  Like Houllier, Benítez’s modest career as a player did not warn of his rise as a coach. His high point had been at Parla, a fourth-division club from the Madrid suburbs, where he first showed signs of the path he wanted to follow by making notes of everything that happened during the course of a season: scores, scorers, injuries, cards and details about set pieces.

  Benítez began as a player at Real Madrid and went back there, aged twenty-nine, as a coach, serving a four-year apprenticeship in the youth set-up. Raúl would become an icon at the club and a week before his debut he’d been under Benítez’s wing with the second team, missing a couple of easy chances in a game at Palamós.

  Like Houllier, Benítez had a reputation for building teams with strong defensive units while recognizing the importance of match-winners within the block. Unlike Houllier, Benítez suffered the whiplash of a few failures early on in his career, which are likely to have had a significant effect on the way he approached management.

  Benítez was sacked from his first senior position at Valladolid after clashing with Aljoša Asanović, the creative midfielder, over his tendency to break from position. From the moment Asanović carelessly gave away a penalty, the Croatian became a part of the problem rather than the solution. Such was Benítez’s determination to instil tactical discipline that when he was involved in a car accident where he skidded on a sheet of ice, the Valladolid forward joked, ‘Boss, we’re glad you’re all right and that nothing happened to you,’ he said. ‘We were worried that the video recorder would miss you.’

  Benítez then lasted just seven matches in charge of Osasuna, which scarred his morale. Knowing his reputation was under threat, the next job had to be the right one and eighteen months later he was carried around the pitch shoulder-high at Extremadura after sealing promotion into La Liga.

  Like Houllier at Lens, Benítez made up for the things he didn’t have by going to the extreme in the basics to achieve impressive results. The players at Extremadura trained until they were physically exhausted and Pako Ayestarán, the assistant whom he met at Osasuna, was nicknamed ‘the pain in the neck’.

  Benítez banned chewing gum because he wanted his squad to appear more professional. He tried to instil instinct through repetition in training patterns, and in his team talk before matches he would ask players for details about their opponents, checking whether they’d been listening. On away trips, teammates were paired off in rooms according to their positions on the field.

  His relationship with the Extremadura chairman, however, gradually eroded because of disagreements over the facilities at the club, which Benítez deemed unsuitable. The chairman did not see them as a priority considering the small resources at Extremadura, and though Benítez eventually got his way, he left after suffering relegation back to the second division in spite of a good fight against the odds.

  From there Benítez went to Tenerife, where upon his arrival he overcame a division between old and young players in the squad to seal promotion again. In the Canary Islands, he learned to deal with a more inquisitive media, giving time to those who’d been critical of him and a bit less to his supporters.

  When Valencia needed someone to replace Argentine Héctor Cúper, three other coaches were approached first before chairman Pedro Cortés thought of Benítez, asking him, ‘Have you got the guts to manage Valencia?’

  The appointment was viewed as a gamble considering Valencia had lost the Champions League final twice in the seasons before, while Benítez, at best, was knocking about in the lower reaches of La Liga. And yet Benítez displayed courage immediately by replacing the popular Santiago Cañizares as captain and offering shared duties to midfield duo David Albelda and Rubén Baraja.

  What followed was Valencia’s first La Liga title in thirty-one years, toppling the Barcelona and Real Madrid monopoly by creating a wonderful team based around his hallmarks: an organized defensive base, aggressive full-backs, ball-playing midfielders, fast wingers and a hard-working centre-forward. Two years later, when he achieved the same feat, Benítez also won the UEFA Cup, easily beating a Marseille team in the final that had earlier knocked out Liverpool.

  Benítez became restless, though, and wanted more control in order to make his position safer. He wanted to sign Samuel Eto’o from Mallorca when the Cameroonian centre-forward was approaching his peak. When he ended up with Mohamed Sissoko, a young midfielder from Auxerre, he commented publicly, ‘I’ve asked for a table and they’ve bought me a lamp.’ In the summer of 2004, there were offers to join Roma, Tottenham Hotspur and Besiktas.

  At Liverpool, Hamann liked Benítez from day one. Others were less impressed.

  ‘Rafa reminded me of Trapattoni at Bayern,’ Hamann says. ‘His English wasn’t very good at the beginning and sometimes the players would have to fill in the gaps. But I knew the Italians and Spanish put a greater emphasis on tactical strategy than coaches from other nations. I knew straight away Rafa was class. Trapattoni made training sessions incredibly long and Rafa did the same, so I was used to this. He would go over and over what he wanted for two to two and a half hours. It did not impress some of the lads who were used to training off the cuff a bit more. We were in the States for the pre-season and on the bus some of them were complaining, saying, “This is shit.” But I thought the opposite. Just you wait. This fella’s a different gravy.

  ‘I was in a later stage of my career by then and I thought I knew everything there was to know. But Rafa introduced new methods and made me think differently about the way the game was played. He also had a way of letting the players know where they stood while keeping them guessing at the same time.

  ‘This, for me, is very important because it keeps eg
os in check. His message was clear from the very beginning: the player who plays two or three games a season is as important as the one that plays forty or fifty. What happened in 2005 proved that, because Florent Sinama Pongolle and Neil Mellor scored two of the most important goals in the season yet didn’t play as much as some of the others.’

  Hamann cannot remember a conversation with Benítez about anything other than football.

  ‘He would say, “This is what I’m like, this is what we are going to do; if you are not on board, then do one, go somewhere else.” He didn’t care about individuals; all he cares about is the team. In my eyes, that’s the way it should be and I also think this is why he has a track record of success.’

  In his second autobiography, Steven Gerrard revealed that his relationship with Benítez was cooler than it had been with any of his other managers. Hamann is not being critical of Gerrard when he explains how a relationship between manager and player usually works on the Continent. Hamann says as long as a manager helped him achieve success, he didn’t care what his style was like, or, indeed, how he appeared to be as a person.

  ‘Do you want a manager you can call when your missus has the flu or do you want a manager who wins the Champions League?’ Hamann asks. ‘I don’t care whether I can phone the manager; I want him to get the best out of me and the team. I think some players expect managers to be like Alcoholics Anonymous: there on stand-by for twenty-four hours a day. But this is a professional game. Rafa’s honest and doesn’t bullshit. Maybe that’s too much for some people.

  ‘He treats the players like adults. You see now, some managers like to say they are strong man-managers when the reality is very different. I thought that Rafa’s man-management was very strong, because you knew exactly what he expected of you on the football pitch. And, usually, he stuck to his convictions. When you are Liverpool manager, so many people are looking to knock you down. If you start listening, you fall. That’s probably what happened to Gérard Houllier.’

  Hamann is confident enough to say publicly what he has said privately to both Gerrard and Jamie Carragher – two people he considers friends.

  ‘Before Rafa’s arrival, Carra was a utility player. Gérard always found a place for him but it was never at centre-back. Rafa put him in the middle and made him one of the best English centre-backs. If it wasn’t for Ferdinand and Terry, Carra would have eighty England caps. It was the same with Stevie: Stevie was a very good player before but Rafa took him to the next level.

  ‘OK, some things happened between both of them after I left, things I should probably not tell you because it is their story and not mine. But I think what he did do is improve players. He brought an even tougher mentality to the club. Nobody really believed Liverpool could go and win the Champions League. Rafa believed it could happen and that helped the players.’

  Whenever Benítez revealed Liverpool’s team to the squad one hour and ten minutes before kick-off, Gerrard’s name would reliably appear last.

  ‘Rafa would refer to the rest of the players by their first name or nickname. So, it would go: “Jerzy, Steve, Carra, Sami, John; Vladi, Didi, Xabi, Harry; Milan and finally Gerrard.”’

  Hamann can understand why that might have annoyed Gerrard.

  ‘OK, Rafa did things a certain way. He was very particular. But history only judges managers by what happens on a Saturday and a Wednesday night. And Stevie played his best football in his career by a mile under Rafa. He doesn’t need to love him. But he must acknowledge this surely.’

  Hamann defends Benítez even though he was not selected to start the Champions League final. Benítez, in fact, went through the team with Gerrard and Carragher the night before.

  ‘So it wasn’t as if they never spoke, not at the beginning anyway,’ Hamann says. ‘Carra only told me this information a few days later and I’m glad he didn’t tell me before because my head would have been scrambled. There was nothing to be gained by saying I was dropped. In those first two years, Rafa would pull Stevie to one side almost every day and run through things with him. It wasn’t as if he thought Xabi or Sami were more important to him, he was interacting with Stevie more than anyone else.’

  Hamann says he cannot remember being 3–0 down at half-time in any other game during his career other than in Istanbul.

  ‘I’d always played for good teams,’ he explains. ‘Yes, maybe Rafa made a mistake in not selecting me from the start. But a big part of success is rectifying your mistakes and making decisions that change the course of events.’

  In the dressing room, Hamann’s only specific instruction was to try to stop Kaka and Clarence Seedorf, Milan’s attacking midfield pair, from running the game. Benítez reminded Hamann of his responsibilities at set pieces.

  ‘The general idea was to give Stevie more space to play in, because the midfield was very crowded. Rafa, even though he was only forty-five at the time, was a successful, experienced manager. I would have felt slightly insulted if he told me what I needed to do, because it was pretty obvious what the plan should be from a defensive point of view: stop Milan’s attacking players.’

  Somehow, Liverpool won on penalties.

  ‘I would put any trophy I won abroad above the best trophy I won with Bayern Munich,’ Hamann says. ‘You have so many obstacles to overcome in England: the language, the culture, making sure the wife and kids are settled; then there’s the football, the pace and the massive expectations.

  ‘With Liverpool, you have to ride the emotion of the club and the city. You have to use that emotion to your advantage and not let it undermine your game. Gérard Houllier always said, “Warm heart, cool head.” I never had a problem with delivering that, because I didn’t think about playing until two minutes before the kick-off.’

  Though Benítez relented after the Champions League final and gave Hamann a new contract, his Liverpool career was over twelve months later and he joined Manchester City. His playing days finished at Milton Keynes Dons before a few months in charge of Stockport County. Though he does not wish to take on the role again, the art of management fascinates Hamann. He considers himself fortunate to have played under a few of the greats. There was Franz Beckenbauer, then Otto Rehhagel, Giovanni Trapattoni, Kenny Dalglish, Gérard Houllier, Rafa Benítez and Sven-Göran Eriksson.

  ‘I liked Trapattoni a lot,’ Hamann says, before offering a story. ‘At Bayern, we’d lost a home game two days before and in the next training session he was trying to tell us that it wasn’t possible to apologize to the fans by showing up at the stadium and saying sorry. His German was OK but it wasn’t the best. He told us that we had to show some balls. He was searching for the word cojones in German, so one of our South American players told him the word for fanny instead, mushi. “Yes, yes, we’ve got to go out there and show the fans that we have a fanny,” he kept saying over and over again. The lads tried not to laugh because it was a serious situation. Eventually, the whole room erupted. Thankfully Trapp joined in when he realized the mistake.’

  Hamann lived near Rafael Benítez on the Wirral peninsula. The pair keep in touch.

  ‘I remember going round to his house and Barcelona were on the TV. The whole world was going crazy about their style of football, so Rafa grabbed hold of salt and pepper shakers and began to try to explain to me how to beat them. The guy never stops. That’s why he’s one of the best in the business.’

  On a social level, Hamann details why he could relate to Sven-Göran Eriksson the easiest.

  ‘City were taken over by Thaksin Shinawatra, who was the [former] prime minister of Thailand. The season had finished and Mr Shinawatra decided that the squad should travel to Bangkok for a trip. Sven knew that he was being replaced as manager. All of the players did too. I was relaxing on a sun lounger out by the pool when Sven appeared holding two champagne glasses. He handed me one, so I asked, “What are we celebrating for, boss?”

  ‘Sven just turned to me and said, “Life, Kaiser, we’re celebrating life.”

  ‘That w
as Sven for you. He was my kind of guy.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  XABI ALONSO,

  Maestro

  IT IS WINTERTIME and snow gently begins to fall on Säbener Strasse, the affluent tree-lined residential boulevard that runs south from Munich’s centre. On one side, the low-rise chalet homes of middle-class families sit quietly, as elegantly dressed men stroll by during their morning walks accompanied by their elegantly dressed partners. Over the road is the training complex of the city’s most famous football club. Above a glass-plated front of clinical German design, a sign reads with awesome confidence: ‘FC Bayern’.

  Space is used sensibly here. I wait at one entrance sponsored by Audi, which leads underneath the training pitches and into an intensely lit car park. At 9.30 a.m. on the dot, the automobiles of that particular manufacturer begin to arrive, their engines smoothly purring. Each Bayern player gets issued with the same car when he signs and while on club duties the player is contractually expected to be seen driving it.

  The companies Bayern work with are obvious, because the logos of Adidas, T-Mobile and, indeed, Audi are plastered everywhere. Bayern thrives because of these alliances but also because of success on the pitch. The smell of freshly cut grass slices through the freezing air, reminding me that Bayern exists because it is a football club first.

  ‘I’m over here, mate,’ Xabi Alonso calls, poking his head out from behind the wall of an alternative access point, the use of the word ‘mate’ a reminder that five years living on Merseyside can have a long-lasting influence on a foreign player’s vocabulary.

  The training session on this specific Thursday does not start for another hour and a half, yet a group of workmen in their luminous jackets are waiting expectantly at the highest point above the facility. Alonso is already in full training kit, his flip-flops belying the weather. It is easy to believe that at Bayern, while Pep Guardiola is manager before his next move to Manchester City, most things begin on time, that the Bayern machine waits for no person.