We had got to the semi-finals of the Carling Cup, too, losing narrowly to Manchester United over two legs but we kept our league form going. We won our last three games of the season, away to Charlton and at home to the champions, Chelsea, and Manchester City. It wasn’t quite enough to catch Arsenal, who had recovered after we beat them. Arsene Wenger’s team finished fourth.
But we had ended the season only four points off a Champions League place. Spurs were fifth and we finished sixth, in the final Uefa Cup spot. It felt like a great achievement considering where the club had finished the previous season and I felt as though I had rebuilt my reputation. I scored 13 league goals that season and 17 in all competitions. It was a delight playing for Mark Hughes. He helped me believe in myself again.
I felt open-minded about what might happen in the summer. I loved it at Blackburn and I knew I was on to a good thing. They loved me, too. I was voted the club’s Player of the Year and Sparky had plans to make me captain the following season. But I had a get-out clause in my contract that meant if a club bid £6m for me within a certain time period before the start of July, then Blackburn would have to release me. They soon opened negotiations with me about buying that get-out clause out of my contract and extending and improving my current deal. They were willing to pay £2m just for me to void the clause.
But then everything changed. My representative phoned to say that Liverpool were interested in buying me. Djibril Cisse had broken his leg playing for France in a warm-up game before the 2006 World Cup and he was going to be out for a long time. They needed a replacement and Rafa Benitez had identified me as the main target.
I loved Liverpool. I’d loved them since I was a kid. They were big in South Wales and they were still the top team when I was growing up in the 1980s but that wasn’t the only reason I supported them. I loved the kit for one thing, that brilliant crispy, shiny red kit that always looked so beautiful against the green of the turf with its big Liver Bird emblem. The first kit I owned was the yellow away kit they wore for the 1985-86 season.
My dad was a Cardiff City fan and I love Cardiff because it’s the club I went to watch as a kid. I don’t care who you are, wherever you are born, you have an affiliation with that club like no other because that’s your club and it represents you and the community you grew up in. That can never change.
But you were on a bit of a hiding to nothing being a Cardiff City fan in the 1980s. They were a Fourth Division club. You couldn’t even buy their kit in the local sports shops. None of my mates supported them. Being a Cardiff fan wasn’t going to give you any bragging rights in the playground.
And there was something about Liverpool that caught my imagination. All their success helped, obviously. But even as a kid, I loved the history. I read all about Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. I looked at all the stats and the old players. I devoured everything about the history of the club and I stayed true to it.
I am a Liverpool fan and will always remain one. I have lived in Liverpool. I know what it means to come from there. It can be a hard, hard place and it breeds tough, resourceful people. I’ve always been proud to be a supporter. A few years ago, I had ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ tattooed on my side.
The way things worked out, it felt as if I was meant to follow them.
The first game I ever saw at Anfield was the match against Arsenal on May 26, 1989, when Liverpool lost the league title to that late goal from Michael Thomas just a few weeks after the Hillsborough Disaster.
On the day of Hillsborough, I was watching my dad play football for his team, Fairoak, like I did every Saturday. He was a sluggish right-back who played for the seconds but I loved those afternoons at Pontcanna. The pitches seemed to go on for as far as the eye could see and you’d hear cheers go up every so often whenever anybody scored a goal.
I was running round the pitches on April 15 that year, asking if anyone knew the score from the Liverpool-Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final. People kept shaking their heads. They said there was a delay of some sort. There were rumours of riots. All the early propaganda about crowd trouble had begun. I didn’t find out what had really happened until I got home. I couldn’t really understand it.
But I understood it when we arrived at Anfield for that game against Arsenal. There were signs asking for help, there were scarves and wreaths, tributes and poems written to those who had been lost. I was only a nine-year-old kid but even I could grasp the enormity of the horror that had happened. There was so much emotion around. And you know what, the main thing that stayed with me from that day was nothing to do with Michael Thomas scoring, even though it was at the Anfield Road End where we were standing. My memory is of the emotion and staring in wonder at the Kop, seeing it moving and swaying like a living thing.
So when I found out Liverpool were interested in signing me, it was bound to turn my head. The easy thing would have been to stay at Blackburn. Mark Hughes had restored me as a player and I knew that if I stayed, I would become the focal point of the club even more. I would have been comfortable. It was a really good club with really good people. But the prospect of playing for Liverpool was something I knew would be hard to resist if they maintained their interest.
I got married that summer. We went on honeymoon to the Seychelles. While we were there, I got a call from my representative who said that Liverpool had made a bid big enough to trigger the release clause in my contract. Blackburn couldn’t stand in my way. My representative asked me what I wanted to do. I said I’d think about it for a week. It was my honeymoon. I didn’t want to abandon that for the sake of football.
But inevitably, thoughts about what might lie ahead started rushing around my head. Liverpool had finished the previous season like a train. They had won each of their last nine games, including a victory over us at Ewood Park. They had players like Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Xabi Alonso who I had always admired. They looked like a side that was really going places.
They were in the Champions League, too, of course. They had won it in 2005 and with a manager as clever as Benitez in charge, I thought there was no reason why they could not win it again. I knew it would be tough to break into the first team, that I would have to win people over again at the age of 27, but that didn’t concern me too much. My confidence was back.
The main consideration was simple though. I knew that if I didn’t go to Liverpool, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. How can you support a club and then turn them down? It went against everything I believed in as a player. I knew it was going to happen. I knew I had to do it. I didn’t even think about where I was going to fit in.
I was sad about leaving Blackburn. I saw Mark Hughes before I went to Liverpool to do my medical.
“I don’t think you’re going to play as much as you need to play,” he said. “I know the type of person you are and you need to play. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it.”
I thought that was just him trying to keep me at Blackburn. I respected him immensely and I was straight with him. I told him I had to do it. I asked him to imagine what would have happened if the club he had supported as a kid had wanted to sign him when he was a player. He said he still believed Blackburn would be better for me.
But when I went to speak to Liverpool, he knew I was already gone – and I did too.
19
The Rafa Way
When I walked into Melwood, the Liverpool training ground, I felt as though everything in my career had been leading to this moment. It was the first time I had ever been there and it was like being in a dream. This was where Bill Shankly had worked. This was the turf that Bob Paisley had walked on. This was where Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Robbie Fowler had trained. The facilities might have been new and state-of-the-art but the place reeked of glorious history.
A lot of things went through my mind. It was only a year ago that my name was mud and everybody had been branding me a troublemaker and saying I was untouchable.
I had undergone f
our operations on my patella tendons and two on my cruciates. I had suffered from episodes of depression. I even thought of sitting in my garage in Norwich on Christmas Eve, doing my leg presses. This is why I did it. To get here. To get to Melwood. To sign for Liverpool.
I did my medical stuff and then I went upstairs to see Rafa Benitez in his office. I sat down. He was business-like. He produced a cutting from a newspaper. The page was dominated by a picture of me with a snarl on my face. Most of the time back then I’d have a snarl on my face. It was nothing unusual.
“Why are you looking like this?” he said.
I told him I couldn’t remember.
“You can’t play like this,” he said. “This kind of aggression is not what you need as a player.”
I told him I understood. The memory of the game where the incident had happened started to come back to me. It was a match against Sunderland the previous season. Sunderland’s goalkeeper, Kelvin Davis, had shoved me in the back. I had a bad back anyway at that time. I didn’t take too kindly to being shoved in it.
I didn’t mention any of that to Rafa. I could sense it probably wasn’t the right time.
Then he got a board out and started quizzing me about footballing systems. What did I think about this formation or that formation, the positives, the negatives, the benefits of playing between the lines. Where would I run if a teammate had the ball in a certain position. He asked me about every scenario under the sun. And every answer I gave, even if it was correct, was twisted into another answer.
“When you play up top,” he said, “if this player has it, where would you go?”
It was like a multiple choice test.
“I’d run to the left,” I said.
“Yeah, but run right first, then go left,” he said.
The other players told me later that was just typical Rafa.
We had a good chat for about half an hour in his office. Rafa disappeared after a while and left me talking with the club’s chief scout. My solicitor was somewhere else, going through the fine points of the deal. Suddenly, Rafa came back in to the room looking angry.
“Do you want to play for this club?” he said.
I was startled.
“Of course I do,” I said. “I would have thought the fact that I’m here tells you that.”
“Well, tell your solicitor to stop messing about then,” Rafa said.
“That’s what he’s here for,” I told him. “I could get much more money if I stayed at Blackburn. I’m taking a wage cut to play for this club, so of course I want to play here.”
I was a bit taken aback by his attitude. It was like being in the presence of an unsmiling headmaster. The atmosphere at the club seemed strange, too. It was a place of business and a place of work. There weren’t very many people smiling. There wasn’t a lot of laughter around the place. Even the physios were on edge when they were doing the medical. Everyone seemed uncomfortable and wary.
I felt unsettled. The way Rafa was talking, it was worse than the experience I’d had with David Moyes. It was Liverpool, sure, it was the Champions League, it was everything I’d ever wanted. But it was the first time I’d met Rafa and he wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting. ‘This is going to be interesting,’ I thought.
The next day, I met Pako Ayestaran, Rafa’s assistant and the fitness coach. The fitness routines were not that imaginative. It was army style, really. Long, plodding runs mainly. It was very professional with heart monitors and fitness belts but there was no camaraderie while they took place. It was all double sessions, tactical work, standing in position, walk-throughs of tactical play. Rafa oversaw it all.
A lot of Rafa’s tactical work was very, very good. He was impressively astute and I learned a lot from him in that area. But he could not come to terms with the idea that some players need an element of freedom and that we express ourselves on the pitch in different ways. He was very rigid. He worked on specific moves over and over again. It was a bit like American Football in that respect.
Rafa wanted people running designated routes when the ball was in a certain place, just as he had been explaining the first time I spoke to him in his office. The winger comes inside, the full-back overlaps, the forward has to run near post every time. There was no allowance for the fact that your marker might have worked out what you are doing after a few attempts. You had to keep doing it because it might make space for someone else. I felt like a decoy runner half the time.
But I did learn a lot. Defensively, Rafa was exceptional. He was very good on the opposition and how to nullify their threat and stifle their forward players. He would use video analysis to go through the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses. Our preparation for games was extremely thorough. Nothing was left to chance. He was the first foreign manager I worked under and I learned quite a bit.
But there was no scope for spontaneity. None. He distrusted that. Of all the managers I have worked with, he trusted his players the least. That’s just how he was. There was not much enjoyment. There were no small-sided games or anything like that. Everything was tactical with timed drills and routines.
It was a bit like Groundhog Day. You came in and did the same stuff over and over again. Sometimes strikers like to do finishing at the end of a session but once the whistle was blown at the end of training, Rafa would personally collect the balls and put them in the bag and no one was allowed to do any extra work. He was a total control-freak. He’s not alone in that, of course. I think Fabio Capello used to work the same way with England.
I actually felt my fitness went backwards during that pre-season. I am a fast-twitch fibre player and I was plodding around the perimeter of the training complex on the track that had been marked out around the outside of the pitches at Melwood. There were pole markers here and there to indicate how many metres we’d run. I felt like I was being trained to get a decent time in a marathon, not to sprint away from a central defender.
Pako said my speed was very good but my endurance wasn’t. I knew my endurance was fine but Pako said they wanted to take some of my speed off and bring my endurance up. I knew if they did that, they would lose me as a player. The effect it had on me was that I never felt more unfit in my life. I felt slow, I didn’t feel I could drop the shoulder and go.
Pako just looked at the data but he didn’t seem to be able to understand they were taking my strengths away from me. I spoke to them about it and they wouldn’t have it. They were set in their ways. On a Friday before a game, we would be doing heavy lifting squats and that took a lot out of my legs.
I was actually being detrained. I wasn’t built for that. By the time the season started, I was nowhere near the player I had been. That was the price I paid to play for Liverpool.
I enjoyed elements of it, too. There were big compensations. One of them was playing day-in, day-out with Steven Gerrard. Gerrard was everything I expected and more. He was a cut above anyone I’ve ever played with. He had so much in his locker. His passing even from five yards away was just crisp and clean. He was on another level to everyone.
The club asked a lot of him. He is captain and a cult hero at one of the biggest clubs in the world and there were times he had to carry the team. As a Liverpool supporter, I’m glad he didn’t go anywhere else but he should have won titles whether it was at Real Madrid or, dare I say it, Manchester United. For me, he was one of the best players in Europe for a good three or four years.
But he’s a Liverpool fan. So it’s easy for me to say he should have played here or he should have played there. Playing for Liverpool was always his dream, so maybe he didn’t want to play anywhere else. He won the Champions League with the club, which only a select few can say. He became a club legend. I just feel he has so much ability that it feels wrong he did not win more.
In terms of temperament, there were some similarities between the two of us. He would be in a good mood one day and then the next his head would be down and he wouldn’t talk much. I could be like that too. Some days, I
would come in and didn’t want to look at anyone.
Some days, I was very bright and in a good mood but people knew when I wasn’t. People stayed away from me on those days. But Stevie wouldn’t have a go at anyone. He would just be quiet. He was a great guy.
He is an immense player but because he was streaks ahead of everyone – even someone like Alonso – he put too much onus on himself to do everything. The club relied on him. There were days we knew that if we were going to win, Stevie was going to have to be at his best. He knew that, too, and that is a lot of pressure to carry around on your shoulders.
What makes him so good? Well, there is nothing he can’t do. He is clever. He sees the game quicker than anyone else. He sees the picture. He can play the ball first time round corners that aren’t even there. He has got intelligence. He has got physical attributes. He can bomb past people. He is quick. He is a powerful, proper athlete. Give him a header, he will score. He can play in behind the front man. He can get the ball off the back four and control the game from the quarterback position. He is just an immense all-round footballer. I have never seen anyone put it all together like him, never seen someone with so many qualities. I have been very fortunate to play with a lot of talented players but he was better than any of them.
It mystified me that Rafa didn’t seem to trust him to play centre midfield. Stevie was sacrificed to Rafa’s tactical plan. Rafa was ahead of his time in that he liked playing with two sitting midfielders in front of the back four. He usually played Alonso and Momo Sissoko there in the first spell I was there and, later, Javier Mascherano. He didn’t want Stevie in there, bombing forward. He wanted discipline, discipline, discipline.
Stevie would play on the right and he played well there. But why would you want one of the greatest central midfielders of the last 10 years playing on the right? I think Stevie created a problem for Rafa. It was obvious that the best player in the team has got to play but because Stevie didn’t fit his idea of one of the two sitting midfielders, he couldn’t play him at the heart of the team. Maybe Stevie was a victim of the fact that he could play anywhere. Look, he could have played centre-back and he would have run the game from there as well.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 19
