Carra: My Autobiography (10 page)

When I was later promoted to Liverpool's 'A' team, the side below the reserves, I noticed another leap in class. My debut ended at halftime. I was subbed against Everton because the pace of the game was beyond me, but I never felt down about this, knowing once I filled out my natural capabilities would stand me in good stead. One of my enduring qualities has been my capacity to adapt. None of these early experiences made me doubt my ability, only how I'd adjust to the physical demands.

By the 1994–95 season, I'd forced my way into the reserves. My first appearance for them was against Blackburn Rovers at Southport's Haig Avenue, and although again the transition took time, positive signs were there. I was man of the match that day.

Had I been judged on those 'A' team displays, I might have been written off instantly or sent out on loan. I needed more than one chance at reserve level to fine-tune. It took me a full season before I felt comfortable. The difference then was that manager Roy Evans and Ronnie Moran were in constant contact with Heighway, monitoring my progress. There seemed less pressure or inclination to make instant verdicts, and you also felt everyone from the manager down was willing you to get there and making assessments with an open mind. Players were given time to bed in and develop physically before decisions were taken on their future.

In my case, by the time I was seventeen I'd turned the corner, assisted by a pivotal change of position. My days as a striker were over.

As a schoolboy, the further up the pitch I played, the more impact I had. As I edged closer to the first team, I began to retreat further towards my own goal, until eventually I was established as a defender. The 'A' team and reserve games made me realize I wasn't a forward. I didn't have the speed to stay upfront. Initially I was moved into a central midfield role, but during the FA Youth Cup run of 1996 a series of events gave me a taste of a different future.

Through the course of that competition I played in the centre of the park, keeping a younger and not quite up-to-the-mark Steven Gerrard out of the side, before finally being used at centrehalf. By the time we met Manchester United in the quarterfinal, the forward role I'd once made my own was earmarked for another.

'We've a player returning from Lilleshall to play in the game,' Heighway explained. 'His name is Michael Owen.'

I didn't know much about Mo other than his impressive schoolboy reputation. Ninety minutes later I came off the pitch believing I'd seen one of the best strikers in England, and he was still only sixteen. United absolutely battered us that day, playing us off the park in every area except one. Mo tore their defence apart singlehanded. It wasn't just his blistering pace that caught my attention, but the ferocity of his tackling. He was an animal. For a small, slightly built lad, his strength was phenomenal. I'd never seen a striker tackle like him. When he suffered injuries later on, he toned down this aspect of his game.

Mo scored a hat-trick in a 3–2 victory, assisted by the iron will to win of what I'd call the 'team of scallies' around him. In fact, I have no shame in describing that 1996 Youth Cup winning side as a team of little fuckers. Whoever we came up against knew they were going to have the fight of their lives to beat us. We looked like a gang of street urchins from the toughest areas of the city, and we mixed our Sunday League nous with the professionalism and coaching the School of Excellence training drilled into us.

Even those who didn't go on to make it at Liverpool have forged careers elsewhere – striker Jon Newby played for a succession of Championship clubs, and Gareth Roberts was a success at Tranmere Rovers – but it's fair to say it was a team packed with more character than skill. I was part of a foursome with David Thompson – Little Thommo the Birken-head-the-ball – Jamie Cassidy and Lee Prior. 'This is a team which has got spunk,' Heighway would tell us. We were as tight a unit off the park as we were on it.

Lee was from Scotland (Scotty) Road, one of the most famously tough and charismatic areas of the city. 'If you want any knock-off gear, go and find Lee,' was often heard around the training ground. He's the only player I've worked with who forced a coach to fine himself. Sammy Lee gave him a clip round the ear one day on the pitch, and twenty-four hours later apologized for losing his rag. I dread to think what would happen if a similar incident happened now. If Sammy had hit a foreign lad, he'd probably have spent the next week in crisis talks with the player's agent. We simply got on with such matters, considering it a part of growing up. Prior got stick from the lads for a day or two, and then it was forgotten. It was character-building.

I saw Cassidy and Thommo as certainties to make the grade, but both were victims of the fragile nature of our profession. Injuries halted their otherwise inevitable rise. Like me, Thommo would never tell anyone he was injured, so determined was he to feature in every training session. I remember him playing one practice match using one foot for the whole game. I'd often do the same if I felt a hamstring strain. The competition was so intense, we'd never want to allow others a chance to push ahead of us. In Thommo's case, the price was paid longer-term. A knee injury he suffered as a teenager caught up with him in his mid-twenties and he was forced to retire early. That was the end for 'Beardo' – my nickname for him. It goes back to a game against Sunderland in the late nineties. We were warming up when one of their fans shouted, 'You look like Peter Beardsley!' Thommo was gutted. I couldn't contain my laughter and sprinted back to the dug-out to let the other subs know. Suffice to say, the more it wound him up, the more it stuck.

Gérard Houllier's arrival at Liverpool in the summer of 1998 led to Thommo's departure from the club. Whereas some of us compromised, Thommo's character never fitted in with the new boss who couldn't understand the ultra-Scouse sensibilities and characteristics. As a teenager, Thommo would walk up to first-team players like Jason McAteer and brazenly inform them, 'I should have your place.' It was seen as lightening the mood, not causing tension, but Houllier was looking for maturity and responsibility on and off the pitch. Thommo became expendable. He was given one final warning too many.

In 1996, however, he was still a symbol of everything that was right about Liverpool Football Club. With Mo as our lethal weapon, there was no stopping us in the Youth Cup, even though United and West Ham, who we beat in the final, were technically superior.

We beat Crystal Palace over two legs in the semifinal to set up that meeting with West Ham, whose stars were Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand. During the course of those games my career took another twist. Our centre-back, Eddie Turkington, was sent off in the second leg against Palace, leaving a hole at the back. Ronnie Moran and Hugh McAuley suggested to Heighway he move me to centrehalf for the final. They saw me developing in the same way as Phil Thompson years earlier. He'd also been switched from central midfield, where he'd learned to read the game and see it from different angles before establishing himself at the back.

Moran's intuition set me on a new course. This shows, yet again, the value of having the youngsters mixing with the senior coaches and professionals. Could one of the Melwood staff make such a suggestion today? Would he know the local players well enough, or even be listened to?

Without Michael, we won the first leg of the final at Upton Park 2–0. He returned for the second leg, played in front of twenty thousand at Anfield. Although Lampard struck first, Mo underlined his class to secure a 4–1 aggregate win and a trophy I still rate as highly as others on my Liverpool honours list. The senior side lost at Wembley to Manchester United that summer, so our performance offered consolation and the hope of a new generation of local players to assist Robbie and McManaman in the first team.

We were on £250 a week at the time, but within a few weeks this was increased to a whopping £750. There were no agents or long-drawn-out contract negotiations. Roy Evans called a few of us in, asked us if we'd sign, and we walked out with the ink on our hands. Today, I hear ex-Liverpool players from the sixties and seventies lamenting the passing of simpler days when players weren't multi-millionaires and appreciated what they had at Anfield independent of financial reward. For some of us, those times passed more recently than the older generation might think. As I said, money was and is secondary to me. No matter what Liverpool had put in front of me in the summer of 1996, I'd have signed it.

As Michael, Thommo and I headed off to put a dent into our new wage packets, Steve Heighway must have felt he'd secured a lifetime of appreciation at Anfield thanks to his remarkable success in providing the players who'd flourish in the Liverpool first team. In 2007, accepting the Youth Cup again while announcing his Liverpool exit, I could sense the tears in his eyes. No matter how highly he rated those players he was leaving behind, he knew the odds against his prodigies enjoying similar triumphs with the Liver Bird on their chest were long. Like so much at Anfield during his era, the blame lay elsewhere. The forces of time were undermining traditional aspirations.

The Anfield bootroom is as much part of Liverpool legend as the greatest players or managers. It's become a mystical place, presented as a symbol of the era when the club dominated domestic and European football. Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran welcomed opposing managers into little more than a glorified cupboard near the Anfield dressing room, shared a glass of whisky, then sent them packing having seen their team deliver another football masterclass. Supporters still embrace the romanticism of this humble history, and it's easy to understand why. Four or five working-class heroes were the inspiration for eleven others in red, who in turn put the fifty thousand watching spectators into a fiery trance for ninety minutes.

'The Bootroom' wasn't just where the footwear was kept, it was where 'The Liverpool Way' was born and where the modern institution of Liverpool FC formed its identity. Shankly didn't merely transform the football club, he embodied it, creating an unwritten Anfield code of practice that has been stringently followed ever since. He imposed the style in which the club played; the modest but confident manner in which players conducted themselves on and off the park; the mentality of the staff and supporters.

Generations of Liverpool players, managers and fans have tried to follow Shankly's traditions with a sacred passion, myself included. Over the last two decades there's sometimes been confusion because there's a conflict between respecting the past and being stuck in it, but when the big moments arrive, like cup finals or major European nights, we're still able to summon the ghosts of our unprecedented history and be stirred rather than haunted by them.

Every new Liverpool manager is introduced with the shadow of thirty years of unbroken triumph hanging over him. Replicating that sustained period of success is a daunting prospect, but we will always strive to learn from those enduring influences. For all our recent problems, we have maintained the club's stature.

I never met Shankly, but from what I've read I know he was a modernizer and a visionary who challenged old ways to drag Liverpool to the peak of the English game. If he'd been a Premiership boss, I doubt he'd have been looking to the 1960s and 1970s for inspiration; he'd have been thinking up fresh ways to get ahead of the opposition. He'd have been just as much an innovator and forward thinker. More than any other manager, I wish I'd been around to play for him. I'm proud to think I'd have been his type of player.

Such was the strength of Shankly's legacy, Liverpool never had to look outside the club for a successor in the decades following his departure. After his arrival in 1959, every Liverpool manager had some connection with Anfield, either coming through the ranks as a coach in the case of Paisley, Fagan and Evans, or as former players like Dalglish and Souness. It was a policy others envied, creating a seamless transition from one glorious decade to the next. Promoting from within has never yielded such consistent results as it did at Anfield during the 1970s and 1980s. As a rule, it's a risky strategy. Players find it difficult to see former assistants as 'the boss'. Liverpool showed the world it could work.

With eighteen titles and regular European Cups, Liverpool justly believed their methods were foolproof. But the ticking clock meant sooner or later the club was going to have to look beyond its past for inspiration in the dug-out. Sadly, this was a lesson we would only learn through painful experience after Dalglish's resignation in 1991, when a period of sterility without a League title began. By the time I made my first-team debut in January 1997, there was a vast gulf between how the club and fans perceived us, and the reality on the pitch. Our claim to be a club based on Shankly's principles and what I insist is one of the most essential commodities in football, 'character', was sounding like an idle boast. Even our fans thought we had too many egos promising much but delivering little.

That this decline should become more obvious under the leadership of Roy Evans, the manager dubbed 'the last of the bootroom boys' when he took the job in 1994, was especially ironic. Evans was seen as the safe pair of hands who could restore the old ways. A thoroughly decent, hard-working and honest man, he learned his trade from Paisley, Fagan, Moran and Dalglish and fitted the bill as a Liverpool manager-in-waiting, coming through the ranks like his mentors. Liverpool were craving stability after Souness's reign, during which he'd tried to impose the more continental methods he'd picked up in Italy but had alienated the players and fans. It was during Souness's reign that the goahead was given for the bootroom to be demolished. There was no use for it any more other than for museum tours, but getting rid of it to build a press room was criticized in some quarters like it was an act of sacrilege. Evans would be the link between the past and the future. Less brash and outspoken than Souness, he'd try to use the quiet wisdom of ex-managers to bring the title back. But the pursuit of a 'new Shankly' or Paisley was forlorn. Roy was fighting a losing battle, even though he came closer than any Liverpool manager since Dalglish to winning the Premier League.

Sir Alex Ferguson once said every team reflects the manager's personality, and I agree. Perhaps if Roy had inherited a fantastic squad and was building on solid foundations he'd have had more of a chance, but he had to try to start afresh. Having been at the club so long, it was impossible for him to change the image he had among the older professionals as a 'good guy' but not a tough one, and at the same time he couldn't get a grip on the signings who came in and badly let him down. Between 1994 and 1998, Liverpool were respected and 'nice' to watch, but they didn't have the steel needed to take the step to a higher level. The philosophy that had made the club so strong and proud took a pounding. The new wave of 'celebrity' footballers plagued the club, threatening the most important bond of all – the respect between players and fans.

Our slide didn't begin under Roy, but it reached a point where the dressing room was beyond the manager's control. The responsibility for this fell on the players as much as the boss. A visit to Stamford Bridge sticks in my mind, and throat, more than any other for exposing our strengths and weaknesses under his reign. For me, Roy's management career was depicted in those ninety inconsistent minutes. We were dazzling and then woeful, strolling through with seemingly effortless class when things went well but caving in like gutless cowards if the going got tough.

It was only a couple of weeks after I'd made my League debut, and I was an unused substitute for this fourth round FA Cup tie in London. There couldn't have been a more painful venue to expose where we were going wrong. Chelsea's King's Road is perceived as the opposite to everything Liverpool represents. Recent epic battles between the clubs have been presented as a clash between football tradition and the arrogant rich. While we celebrate our working-class roots, the Londoners love nothing more than to wave £20 notes at our visiting fans. Their players are granted the luxury of behaving like celebrities and superstars. Ours are expected to abide by a different set of values – the Shankly laws – and to show humility in a city where being flash is frowned upon. This tie proved to be a role reversal: our players looked like the prima donnas, Chelsea's the street-fighters.

The first half was an exhibition in 'pass and move' football which lived up to the finest Anfield traditions, and which was common during Evans's tenure. I've never played in a more naturally gifted Liverpool team. John Barnes was pulling the strings in midfield, Steve McManaman was linking attack and defence in his roaming role, and Robbie Fowler was at his clinical best, assisted by the enigmatic talent of Stan Collymore. Liverpool raced into a 2–0 halftime lead with goals from Robbie and Collymore. We were cruising.

Out came the cigars and deckchairs and strutting arrogance our supporters despise. Chelsea boss Ruud Gullit sent on Mark Hughes at the start of the second half. Within minutes he'd pulled a goal back, and the next forty minutes were among the most torturous in the club's FA Cup history as Chelsea ran riot.

The manner of the surrender was worse than the defeat itself. We were watching a domino effect in full force. Hughes was able to intimidate the Liverpool defence to such a devastating degree that once one wilted under the pressure, the rest buckled. Chelsea played with the character, courage and skill that were supposed to be Liverpool's trademarks; Liverpool looked like the fancy dan southerners we'd seen submit so often on trips to Merseyside – not prepared to go in where it hurts.

After Gianluca Vialli wrapped up a 4–2 win, the vibes from the Chelsea fans' celebrations making our dressing-room walls shudder, furious Liverpool coach Sammy Lee turned to where I was sitting.

'I never want to see you bottling it like some of the fuckers out there today,' he said.

Evans lasted another eighteen months in sole charge, but this was the beginning of the end for him. He saw the values he held so dear being betrayed by players he'd brought to the club. The second half at Stamford Bridge proved there were no leaders and there was a lack of mental toughness. We didn't have enough winners, which was a crime at Anfield. Only the local players like Robbie and McManaman were consistently performing. Every humiliating defeat that followed made calls for a clear-out louder.

It's no coincidence to me that the most successful players since 1990 have been those who've come through the ranks, or who want more than simply being part of the team. Our best buys have always been, and will continue to be, those who share our sentiments. Players like Sami Hyypia, Didi Hamann, Xabi Alonso, Pepe Reina, Javier Mascherano and Fernando Torres have come to Anfield showing the hunger I can relate to, embracing the culture and mentality of the supporters. Plenty of others have walked through the door and I've known within a few months they didn't have what it takes. Many we have signed didn't see a move to Anfield as the beginning of their ambitions but the completion of them. It's as if being a Liverpool player was in itself a winners medal. The process of trying to collect cups often seemed a secondary concern. Too many arrivals turn up and spend the next couple of seasons patting themselves on the back because they've made the 'big time'. Instead of seeing a multi-million-pound move as a stepping stone to fulfil their potential and win titles, they see the extra possibilities of securing advertising contracts or commercial endorsements, of living the celebrity lifestyle. What happens on the pitch is a bonus.

All the top clubs in Europe are vulnerable to this, not only Liverpool, which is why leadership from the top down is the only way to make sure every member of the squad knows the real priority.

To the supporters, it's all about perceptions. If they hear about Liverpool players on a night out hours after a woeful home performance, as often happened during Evans's reign, they're immediately going to question the desire of those they put so much trust in. When our fans are with you, there are none better. Once you lose them, you struggle to get them back.

If I become a manager, I won't just want players scouted properly before I buy them, I'll want to know what they're like as individuals too. That's where Souness, Evans and later Houllier went wrong. I'm sure they did assess every aspect of a player's background, but perhaps not always as thoroughly as they later wished. Signing a player shouldn't merely be a case of weighing up how good he is, but also if he's capable of performing consistently and blending into a club's culture. It should be like a job interview. I had a chat with Clive Woodward once, who told me he not only considered players' performances but their character profiles. He wanted to know the kind of person he was putting into his squad, whether they were disruptive, temperamental and moody or inspirational and intelligent. If Liverpool had taken this approach, they'd have saved a lot of money wasted on players who looked great when they arrived but failed miserably to cope with the pressure. They could also have signed players who were more in tune with the ideas of the club and the manager, or at the very least more willing to learn and embrace them.

No one typifies this more than Stan Collymore, the flagship signing of the Evans era. No sooner had he joined Liverpool in the summer of 1995 than he was given the traditional Melwood nickname 'Fog in the Tunnel' by coach Ronnie Moran. 'That's always the excuse when players are late for training,' Ronnie explained, and Collymore's ninety-mile road trip every morning meant his kit was often still in the dressing room when we were on the Melwood pitch.

I was staggered that Liverpool paid a club record £8.5 million for a player and never asked him to move house, let alone looked further into his personality.

Within a matter of weeks, Collymore was mouthing off about the club not playing to his strengths, which instantly caused tension within the dressing room. At Liverpool, the idea of 'no one being bigger than the club' was being threatened by expensive signings who thought they commanded higher status before they'd kicked a ball.

A few snotty words in
Four-Four-Two
magazine were one thing. Smashing a chair over the head of our popular reserve keeper Tony Warner took matters to a different level.

It was my first preseason trip with the senior team, in Ireland in 1996. Warner was trying to wind me up, flicking water on my seat after I stood up in the hope I'd sit down and get a wet arse. I spotted the trick and swapped my chair for Collymore's, who threw a wobbly when he returned, demanding Warner swap seats. When the keeper refused, there was mayhem. Warner reacted to the smashed chair with a couple of punches, the rest of the squad joined in to try to break them up, and once it all calmed down only peacemaker Roy had a blow for his troubles.