Ring of Fire Read online

  The home fans were merciless, the smattering of boos that accompanied his name when it was delivered over the public address system in the warm-up intensifying to a full-scale explosion when he received possession for the first time. Once Liverpool had eased their way into the lead and the gulf between the two sides had become clear, the insults were roared. ‘Where were you in Istanbul?’ slipped into ‘You should have signed for a big club’, though it was the strains of ‘What a waste of talent’ that cut Owen the deepest.

  The reception disappointed Steven Gerrard. ‘I played with Michael for several years and he’s a world-class player,’ Gerrard said. ‘He’s a legend here but the fans didn’t want to see him go in the first place. He deserves a standing ovation here for the goals he scored.’

  The memory still clearly pains Owen. He leans forward and his eyes become fixed while describing his feelings.

  ‘Going back for Newcastle, knowing that I’d done absolutely everything – trying to move heaven and earth – to get back, to then be booed, it hurt,’ he begins. ‘I’m fully aware that it wasn’t the whole stadium. If you get a hundred in a crowd of forty-five thousand you still hear it. But for one person to have booed, it broke my heart. I’ve never felt as low in my life sitting in the players’ lounge afterwards, with my family and my mum in tears. People within the club – Carra, the coaches, the staff – everyone was coming to me saying they were so sorry. Some said they were ashamed; it wasn’t how the club felt about me.

  ‘I was thinking, Liverpool fans booing me: how did it come to this? When I look at other players who have cost fortunes and given nothing back to Liverpool but they return with another club and the Kop sing their name, it’s pretty hard to take, especially when I gave my life to the club and scored all those goals, winning trophies. I cost Liverpool nothing and still made them £8 million, although I appreciate why some people think the fee wasn’t big enough. Hearing those boos, it represented the worst moment of my career, worse than the injuries.’

  In Jamie Carragher’s autobiography, the defender reasons that Owen’s bond with the Liverpool support had not been as close as someone like Robbie Fowler. While Fowler was Liverpool’s player and underappreciated by England, Owen had long seemed like England’s player rather than Liverpool’s. Even with all the achievements, any player in this position would never be as popular, for Liverpool as a city widely considers itself a separate state from England.

  ‘Listen, I know I’m not alone. I’ve spoken to homegrown players at other clubs and they have the same gripes. Someone comes from Spain for a lot of money, they score a couple of goals and all of a sudden they’re a bigger hero than the person who’s been there for years and years, doing it consistently, year in, year out. These players get a song about them and you feel underappreciated.

  ‘Carra and I roomed together for donkey’s years. We were best mates. We’d talk about problems: injuries; playing through the pain barrier; the fear of getting dropped; him being moved around by Houllier; the pair of us being caught having a drink. We shared absolutely everything: about women, about money, about football – everything.

  ‘We’d have this conversation all of the time about why I didn’t quite have the connection that someone like Robbie Fowler had with the fans. Well, the first thing is, Robbie had already been there and done that; Liverpool already had a prodigal son. He was engrained as a legend before I came along. He was in their heart, the local lad. Maybe if Robbie hadn’t been there, I’d have been the chosen one. But Robbie was still at the club and he was the fans’ first love. I came along but I was from half an hour down the road. I wasn’t a Scouser as such, although I was mentally and at heart because my dad came from Liverpool.

  ‘As Carra rightly says, I scored a goal in a World Cup for a team other than Liverpool, which then threw me to wider prominence. Some Liverpool supporters might have wanted me to rise to prominence by my achievements in a red shirt. I’d have loved that. But I was scoring goals for both club and country. I couldn’t have tried harder for Liverpool. I suppose some people forget that sometimes.’

  Liverpool’s supporters would certainly not forget Owen’s next big decision. The first six months at Newcastle had gone reasonably enough. Nowhere else in England does a centre-forward receive more adoration than Tyneside. When Owen arrived at St James’ Park, there were some eighteen thousand people in the stadium to see him sign, more than had attended Alan Shearer’s homecoming nine years earlier. He seemed to descend in a direct line from Hughie Gallacher, Jackie Milburn, Malcolm Macdonald and Shearer himself.

  And yet the supporters never had a song for him and barely ever chanted his name. They objected to his £5 million-plus salary, they objected to his helicopter flights home to Cheshire most days because he did not want to relocate to the north-east. To those on the Gallowgate, Owen was a symbol of expensively bought failure, his tally of thirty goals in seventy-nine appearances unappreciated as he struggled with injuries.

  A broken foot did not stop him from going to the World Cup in 2006 but a cruciate knee ligament injury sustained in a match against Sweden ruled him out for the rest of the tournament and beyond. Though there were spikes, from there Owen’s career was largely a corkscrew of decline. ‘Newcastle ended up being a bit of a disaster if I’m being honest,’ he admits.

  The desire to return to Liverpool remained, however. ‘At every stage – every summer – I was on the phone to Carra telling him to find a way to get me back. “Does Rafa want me?” I’d say. “Does Kenny want me? Does Brendan want me?” It was circumstance that stopped it happening. Whenever I was available, Liverpool had too many strikers. And when Liverpool wanted me, I was injured. By the end, I wasn’t the player I had been before and they simply didn’t fancy me. I wasn’t good enough.’

  Owen says his last attempt at a return came after a three-year spell at Manchester United. In choosing to move to Old Trafford after his contract expired at Newcastle, he appreciated the decision would destroy any positive legacy left behind at Anfield.

  ‘I knew Liverpool fans generally weren’t going to be happy,’ he says. ‘But I felt they’d made the first move by booing me in the first game against Newcastle and every game afterwards. I can’t emphasize enough how desperate I was to go back. In that summer after choosing to leave Real Madrid, I spoke to Carra every day of the week about it.

  ‘I couldn’t have revealed any of this publicly at the time, nobody could have, because I was signing for a club with black and white stripes. Had everyone known the details of my contract – that I could have gone back to Liverpool in a year. If they’d have known how hard I was trying to make it happen – meeting with Parry and Benítez. All of a sudden, it’s not great for Newcastle if fifty thousand people are thinking, Well, we’re his second choice. They probably knew that deep down but didn’t need me to rub anyone’s nose in it. You have to be professional and respect the people who are paying your wages. That’s the way in any walk of life.

  ‘I can only equate people booing me to a situation where your missus leaves you. Do you continue to love her? You probably do deep down and if they ever try it on again, you go back – even if they treat you like crap afterwards. Outwardly, though, you think, Sod it. If that’s how they think about me, then they’ve shown their true colours. I kept telling myself, It’s only a handful of people, it’s fine, it’s fine. But it wasn’t. It hurt me so much and it hurt my family so much.

  ‘It was 2009. I was twenty-nine. I had a few years of my career still ahead of me. There was interest from a few Italian clubs but I wanted to stay in England. I can’t even remember who they were because I just didn’t want to go abroad. So three clubs here approached me. They were Manchester United, Everton and Hull City. Hull were at the bottom of the Premier League and would probably end up in the Championship. I was left to choose between Everton and United.

  ‘It seemed to me that a lot of Liverpool supporters didn’t think very highly of me. But still, I spoke to Carra and tried to get Ben
ítez to do something. I wanted to try to put it right somehow. When it became clear Benítez didn’t want to do a deal, I spoke again with [Sir Alex] Ferguson. He was very positive about me. I was twenty-nine years old. Should I have decided to retire there and then?’

  Owen believes the decision was easier for him because he’d become immune to the emotions of football by then. This was a cold, hard choice of a careerist.

  ‘When you move club from the one you grew up playing for, you stop viewing football through the eyes of a fan,’ he reasons. ‘When I was at Liverpool, I had a red mist towards all of Liverpool’s rivals.

  ‘Once you move clubs, it changes. I went to Real Madrid from Liverpool. Being honest, how does anyone really expect me to hate Atlético Madrid in the derby? It just doesn’t happen. I wanted to win because I wanted to do well and I wanted the atmosphere in training to be good, to enjoy going to work. But I’d be lying if I said I had a deep-rooted passion for Real.

  ‘As soon as you start moving around, you lose all that. You start asking questions about what it’s really all about. When I watch football now, I watch it because I love it. I want Liverpool to do well and I like to see Everton do well because I used to support them. But with time, as you move on, you lose that one-club mentality.

  ‘I lost something when I left Liverpool. I lost my fan mentality. If you come through the ranks of a club, you have a professional-footballer mentality but you also have an allegiance. When I got sent off against Man United [in 1998 for two-footing Peter Schmeichel], I was so pumped up. I never wanted to win a game as much as that. Beating United at Old Trafford, what better feeling could there be? I was like a balloon. Once I got into the shower, stood on my own, it was as if something had popped me. All the air came out of me. I fell back down to earth. There was such rage inside me, such anger. I wanted to score a hundred goals and kick every one of their players. It was hatred.

  ‘As soon as you move, you get a wider perspective. You realize that, actually, there are nice people at other clubs and the lads are great. It takes the edge away. You begin to look at clubs because of the people there: the people you are working for. That’s why I went to Manchester United. Because I realized that Sir Alex Ferguson is actually an OK human being. The players were OK human beings as well. I never supported United; I never supported Real Madrid; I never supported Newcastle or Stoke. But I supported Liverpool. It was more than people. Liverpool was a movement, a way of thinking – my entire life. When I stopped representing that, things were not quite the same. My edge wasn’t there.’

  Owen’s story is a reminder that a footballer is not defined just by what he achieves but also by how he is remembered. It proves to be a theme I return to later in the book when I meet Fernando Torres. Owen’s career finished at Stoke City in May 2013, after he played nine games that season, scoring one goal. I remind him that twelve years ago to that month, his two strikes won Liverpool the FA Cup final, inspiring the team to an improbable victory – much like Steven Gerrard in Istanbul, when Owen was no longer a Liverpool player.

  ‘I get asked all the time, “What’s the best moment of your life? Has to be the Argentina goal, surely?”

  ‘It wasn’t, no way, I tell them. That day in Cardiff, being 1–0 down in the heat to a top Arsenal side, plunging to the depths of despair because of the exhaustion, knowing we were being outclassed for long periods. To pull us out of the fire, to be the person that scored the two goals, to do your job and to know your family are watching – it was the best day of my life. No question about it.

  ‘The coach home, seeing supporters line the streets, singing and dancing, knowing we were going to Dortmund a few days later for the UEFA Cup final, having a party with a couple of hundred people sharing an occasion, knowing that everyone in that party was looking me in the eye, thinking, Fucking ’ell Mo, you’ve done well today, it makes me feel emotional. I realize now those occasions are so rare.

  ‘If I could bottle one day and experience it again, that afternoon in Cardiff would be it. It was like poetry. I wish the moment somehow lasted for ever.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GÉRARD HOULLIER,

  The Manager

  A NAVY-COLOURED MERCEDES Benz crawls down the Rue de Rivoli at rush hour, skirting the edge of the Marais district in Paris. The classy-looking saloon halts suddenly and a person springs out, waving his hands, beckoning me across the busy thoroughfare as fierce midsummer sun beats down on his shaven head.

  My lift is Gérard Houllier. The person waving his hands is his chauffeur, Xavier Perez. Xavier is wearing a crisply ironed white shirt from Ralph Lauren, a black tie and black suit trousers. His cufflinks are golden and their reflection glints in the wing mirror of his vehicle.

  ‘Meet Xavier,’ Houllier says, after introducing himself. ‘He was a goalkeeper not so long ago,’ he explains, revealing that Xavier was first choice at Red Star in the 1980s when Red Star were the third team in the capital city behind Paris Saint-Germain and Racing Club. ‘I know he has safe hands as a driver.’

  Houllier is in his late sixties and, despite not being a football manager for five years, has a work life that remains unrelenting; hence the need for Xavier, who takes the edge off travelling by effortlessly steering him around France with all the smoothness of Alain Prost.

  Preparations for this interview afforded me an insight into Houllier’s schedule. On Wednesday morning, he was in New York on business, consulting for Red Bull’s football teams, and by early evening he had arrived in Rennes, northern France, for a Leaders’ in Football conference where he wisely informed attendees that ‘athletes of the future need more freedoms – but need to accept greater responsibility’.

  It was very generous of Houllier to agree to meet me when he did. It was planned for the Friday at 10 a.m. but when I called him upon landing at Charles de Gaulle the afternoon before to finalize the arrangement, he suggested we convene immediately – despite the arduous journeys he’d undertaken in the previous forty-eight hours.

  ‘I will see you in sixty minutes,’ he informed me moments after I emerged from passport control. It was the second hottest day of the year in Paris. The carriages on the Metro were sweaty and the tracks below hideously dry. Services were disrupted. So I arrived at my hotel seventy minutes later in a panic. As Liverpool’s manager, Houllier was a stickler for punctuality as well as appearance. I suspected that when he suggests a time – considering how priceless it is to him – he really means it.

  Upon opening my suitcase, I realized the reasonably smart checked shirt I’d brought hoping to impress him had creased. The only alternative was a short-sleeved and slightly less creased T-shirt more suited for a day at the seaside . . .

  Houllier is sympathetic towards my problems when I hurriedly explain what has happened, flicking his hand to brush away my explanations with marvellous Parisian indifference. Relief washes over me like a cool wave. He is parked in the passenger seat, discussing in French with Xavier the more pressing issue of arranging an appropriate site for our sit-down.

  And then Houllier turns slowly to me: ‘So you know Carra?’ he asks, the expensive leather upholstery creasing as he moves. It is only now I see his face fully. He looks healthy. His forehead is line-free and freckled, his hair swept back and reasonably dark, arms tanned. The sleeves on his spotty Lacoste shirt are rolled up.

  I nod in reaction to his question. ‘Carra: a fantastic person,’ he says emphatically, as though it is a fact rather than an opinion. There is a pause, which suggests that inwardly he might be thinking of the good times at Liverpool. I fill the void by speculating whether Carragher will ever become a manager, like Houllier, reasoning that he seems to enjoy working in the media. Houllier readjusts himself, sitting forward again, staring into the middle distance, arms folded. There is another long break. ‘He should try,’ he says, with what sounds like a tinge of hope beneath the words. ‘Carra should try.’

  It feels appropriate that we are navigating the Rue de Rivoli, a stately boulev
ard that bears the name of Napoleon’s victory over the Austrian army in 1797. France’s greatest leader later declared that ‘glory is fleeting but obscurity is for ever’, and it is a statement that can be applied to Houllier’s career, certainly as Liverpool’s manager. It is easy to forget just how successful and just how uncompromising Liverpool were under his guidance. So easy, in fact, that on a banner that used to be unfurled across the Kop grandstand, there was one notable absentee. The flag read ‘Success has many fathers’ and contained images of managers who have won trophies in the last fifty-five years. There was Bill Shankly. There was Bob Paisley. There was Joe Fagan. There was Kenny Dalglish. There was also Rafael Benítez. But there was no Gérard Houllier – despite the fact he added more silverware to Liverpool’s trophy cabinet than any manager in the previous two and a half decades.

  Houllier’s status amongst Liverpool supporters is, indeed, a peculiar one. He led Liverpool to the League Cup, FA Cup and UEFA Cup in 2001, as well as to the quarter-finals of the Champions League and second place in the Premier League the following year despite the season being disrupted for him personally by ill health. Suffering from chest pains at half-time of a crucial league fixture with Leeds United, Houllier was rushed to Broadgreen Hospital before undergoing an emergency eleven-hour heart bypass operation. Signed off work by doctors for a year, he returned to management in five months but things would never be the same again. In the next two seasons, he bought badly and, together with what were perceived to be overly cautious tactics, the adoration towards him steadily eroded. When Rafael Benítez was appointed as Houllier’s replacement in June 2004, the change was welcomed.