Carra: My Autobiography (39 page)

Neither of us had reason to doubt that DIC or Hicks and Gillett would be good for the club. We trusted the chairman and Rick to make the right decision; they knew far more than Stevie or me about why they'd changed their minds on DIC. Like the fans, if the club hierarchy was sure the Americans offered more chance of success and stability, we had to back them. We had no choice.

As is often the case in such circumstances, Liverpool's website rushed out quotes from us saying how enthusiastic we were about the future under the Americans, no doubt hoping we'd put the supporters' minds at ease. But what else would we say? We'd met them once, they said what we wanted to hear about buying players and building the stadium, and that was that. Privately, as I listened to their guarantees, that definition of 'The Liverpool Way' which I cling to was at the forefront of my mind: 'Actions speak louder than words.' You can put as much faith in the inspiring pledges of chairmen, chief executives, managers and players as you want, but there has to be something to show for these assurances. We were compelled to be as positive about the takeover as possible. There was no reason for me to be negative, but there was bound to be a certain amount of caution about whether promises would be delivered. I'd delay my real judgement until a later date.

Of the two new owners, I knew more about George Gillett. I had been aware of his interest in Liverpool longer than most courtesy of a conversation he'd had with Michael Owen the previous summer. Mo travelled to America for cruciate knee surgery following the World Cup in 2006; he was treated by renowned surgeon Dr Richard Steadman, a friend of Gillett's. Mo told me how keen Gillett was to buy Liverpool. His first bid was rejected because he didn't have deep enough pockets to assure the Anfield board he was the right option. This changed once he'd made a second offer backed by the Texan Tom Hicks, whom the club knew less about.

We have to acknowledge the supporters were guilty of a certain amount of naivety in their initial reaction to the takeover. The Americans' first press conference when they spoke in glowing terms about understanding the traditional values of the club played well to the fans, but from day one I was more realistic. For richer or poorer, we'd sold Liverpool to two ruthless businessmen who saw us as a money-making opportunity. They didn't buy Liverpool as an act of charity; they weren't intent on throwing away all the millions they'd earned over fifty years. If I had £500 million and decided to buy an American baseball team, do you think I'd just give away £100 million for players? The fact Gillett didn't have enough to complete the deal on his own was revealing in itself. It showed there wasn't the bottomless pit of funds the more optimistic of our fans believed. Anyone with a financial brain recognized they'd want a return on their investment. They were never going to pump money into the club they didn't expect to get back with interest.

Liverpool wasn't an attractive purchase because of the fans, the players, the manager or even our illustrious history. They wanted to buy us because the planned stadium offered a chance to generate tons of cash and increase the value of the club. DIC were criticized and had their bid seriously undermined when this information was revealed as part of a seven-year exit strategy. They'd buy Liverpool for £200 million, build the stadium and keep the team strong, and seven years on sell it for a handsome profit. Some fans didn't like the crudeness of such a scheme to exploit Liverpool's economic potential, but in reality everyone would have been a winner. The only way to treble Liverpool's value within seven years was to enjoy success on the pitch and build a new ground with a bigger attendance.

I doubt Gillett's and Hicks's plans differed, other than the fact they were less blatant about saying it and cleverly appealed to the fans' romantic idea of Liverpool remaining a 'family club' by announcing their sons, Foster Gillett and Tom Hicks Jr, would be on the board. Supporters wanted to believe the owners would embrace the club's mottos and traditions. Hicks and Gillett insisted they would.

This is why the months that followed left The Kop feeling so let down. It's hard enough for people outside Liverpool to understand our fans' mentality, let alone those from another country, and Hicks and Gillett badly misread it. You won't find a more loyal set of supporters, but try to kid them and you're in trouble. When serious mistakes were made in the running of Liverpool, the fans felt they'd been misled in order to win their support.

Some mistakes are worse than others, but in the history of Anfield none will be recalled more than the claim by Hicks and Gillett that 'we won't put any debt on the club'. Breaking this vow set the first alarm bells ringing; the embarrassing continual changing of the stadium plans was irritating too. It felt Stevie and I were being asked to endorse a new arena every month, looking at drawings and saying, 'Yes, it looks great.' I'm not an architect so I haven't got a clue which stadium should be built, only that it needs to happen, preferably before I retire.

The former chairman told us the reason he sold the club was to prevent it falling into too much debt when he paid for the Stanley Park project. It begged the obvious question: what had the new owners done that the old board couldn't?

It was an issue the fans rightly wanted to explore further. We'd spent heavily on Torres and Babel, but was this the club's money or the bank's? I'd read we'd won as much as £25 million from the Champions League in 2007, and the new TV deal was worth a fortune too, so why did we have to borrow so much? I couldn't understand it. Was it possible we were taking financial risks in the hope of immediate success on the pitch? If that was the case, the pressure for the manager to achieve annual progress in the Champions League and keep collecting the UEFA winnings was much greater than we'd imagined.

Not that Rafa or the players needed to be bothered by this. If I was a manager in Spain and I was told I could bid £21 million for a striker and £11 million for a winger, I'd take the cash and spend it without questioning where it came from. I don't believe many managers care where they're getting the financial backing as long as they're getting it. It's more understandable if fans, board members or journalists question the wisdom of such a spending policy because they're looking longer-term. As a local player who cares deeply about the future of Liverpool, I was interested in this information too. But managers have so little time to make an impact at a top club I'm amazed any would take a moral stance about their funds. Can you imagine it if I was a boss at a La Liga club?

'You can have as much as you like to buy what you believe to be the best striker in Europe, Carra.'

'Er, is it the club's money or have you got it from the bank?'

'We've taken a loan because we believe in your judgement.'

'No thanks, mate, I'd rather be skint.'

If breaking the promise about taking the club into debt and growing rumours of disagreements between Hicks and Gillett on the subject of the stadium and its funding caused only mild ripples of concern, what happened next led to chaos.

Another strange press conference on 22 November ended the uncomfortable ceasefire between Rafa and the board since Athens. Rafa sat for forty-five minutes answering questions with the same response: 'As always, I'm focusing only on training and coaching.' He broke off from this routine to declare himself interested in the vacant England job. He must have been really desperate to do that (although it still wouldn't have brought me out of international retirement). As usual, I was watching this on Sky television, shaking my head at the screen and texting friends to gather as much info as I could because I had no idea what was going on.

The reasons for this performance were explained later. Having sought assurances about his transfer plans in January, when he wanted to sign the centrehalf Kakha Kaladze from AC Milan, he'd received a message from the board telling him to focus on coaching the side until a planned meeting in December. I believe Rafa suspected a plan was already in place to sack him and the owners were playing for time, holding back funds for his replacement. This prompted his bizarre but undoubtedly brave reaction. He must have felt if he didn't make his concerns public he'd lose his job anyway, so what did he have to lose?

As if to underline the point, he wore his tracksuit at St James's Park in Newcastle two days later for the only time I can recall in a Premier League fixture, and repeated criticisms of the hierarchy. He was effectively daring the Americans to arrange his funeral, especially when Hicks ended the dignified boardroom silence by telling Rafa to 'shut up' on the front page of the
Liverpool Echo
.

Within twenty-four hours, the
News of the World
back page was announcing Hicks's and Gillett's intention to sack Rafa because of his continual outbursts against their reign. Usually such a story would immediately be denied, but it wasn't. Instead, the club made a statement saying 'nothing had changed' despite the 'speculation'. This was more than rumour now, and Rafa must have known how close he was to the sack. There was an immediate change of tone from him after it was made public he was getting the bullet, no doubt sparked by the lack of support he was receiving from the owners.

I couldn't believe what I was reading from one day to the next. I picked up the
Echo
on Monday expecting to discover the club was dismissing the story about his imminent sacking, but there was nothing of the sort. Instead I saw quotes attributed to a 'source close to the manager' saying how grateful he was for the backing he'd had from the owners and wanted to talk to them. That made me more angry. I've grown up reading the
Echo
and it's always been the most reliable source of information regarding Liverpool FC. It's like the bible for the fans in the city. You read stories in other papers and you take them or leave them. If it's in the
Echo
, the first presumption is it's 100 per cent right. I expect to see 'sources close to' someone being quoted in the Sunday papers, not the
Echo
. It showed me how out of control the situation had become when people at Anfield weren't prepared to attach their name to such important words. Now, even the
Echo
– the closest paper to the club – was being used in the same way as one of the Sunday papers. What was going on here? Everyone was trying to be too clever, playing politics with little regard for how much damage it was doing. They were making it worse. The saying goes, 'Don't wash your dirty linen in public.' Anfield was starting to look like a launderette.

It must also be acknowledged that, although he'd been at the club for over three years, Rafa's education in the business of running a football club was exclusively Spanish. What seemed to many of us to be an unusual approach to getting what he wanted wasn't as much a departure for him. In La Liga, political battles have always been played out in public. It's the nature of their system because club presidents need the ongoing support of their fans when summer elections are held. This makes them as vulnerable to being shoved out as managers, so the coaches in Spain are cuter about exploiting situations to their advantage.

Rafa, like all Spanish managers, had experience of boardroom battles at his previous clubs so he was well equipped to handle himself at Anfield. His fall-out with a director at Valencia enabled Liverpool to recruit him in the first place. 'I wanted a sofa and they bought me a lampshade,' he was famously quoted as saying during a disagreement with the Valencia board about a signing he didn't want. We knew what a clever operator we were getting.

You have to admire his mental strength and courage, especially as he continued to focus on preparing the team for tough fixtures while coping with the prospect of dismissal. He also knew no matter what the owners were planning he had a powerful ally in the form of The Kop. The fans instantly rallied behind Rafa, demanding the owners publicly support him.

As the story developed, it became clearer why they'd refused to do so. In the same week as Rafa's 'training and coaching' press conference the board had met Jurgen Klinsmann in America to discuss him becoming our next manager. The daily morning papers claimed an offer was made to Klinsmann prior to the German taking the Bayern Munich job. Incredibly, Hicks then backed up the stories with an admission to the
Echo
's Liverpool FC correspondent Tony Barrett a couple of days later. With one sentence to the local paper, Hicks turned what most fans were happy to dismiss as an outrageous rumour into an astonishing fact. They went ballistic.

My Evertonian mate Seddo took great delight in the ongoing shambles.

'Go and buy the
Echo
, ha, ha, ha,' he texted me.

'Typical Blue,' I thought. If you want to know what's going on at Liverpool, ask an Evertonian. They're more interested in our club than their own.

Hicks said he was being honest in his answer, replying truthfully in the hope it might earn him some credit. But, like many of the decisions around this time, it showed a lack of understanding of English football. There are times when such admissions are counter-productive, especially as the story appeared to be dying a death.

Supporters expected me to come out and immediately condemn what was happening at the top of the club, but I found myself in an incredibly awkward position. You have to remember, like Rafa, the players are employees of the football club. I've never shied away from saying what I believe, but I'm not stupid. If Rafa Benitez can be sacked for speaking out of turn, so can Jamie Carragher.