18
The summer after I lost the league with Celtic, I took a month’s holiday in Majorca with my family. I didn’t know where I was going to be playing at the start of the following season. I knew I wasn’t going back to Newcastle and it was clear to me that even though Celtic would have liked me to stay, they couldn’t afford me.
A couple of days before I went away, I met David Moyes at the Celtic Manor hotel just outside Newport. I really enjoyed talking to him. I had always liked the way Everton played under Moyes. I loved their work ethic and their attitude.
The fans are right on top of you at Goodison Park, too. It is a difficult place to go and play when you are in the opposing team.
Moyes was very persuasive. I felt a bid odd about the prospect of joining them because I had been a committed Liverpool fan since I was a young kid. But a lot of Evertonians end up playing for Liverpool and I thought it would be typical if I ended up doing it the other way round.
I spoke to David O’Leary at Aston Villa a couple of times and there was interest from Benfica and Fiorentina but Moyes had sold me on Everton.
The more I thought about it while I was in Majorca, the more I liked the idea of going to Goodison. I agreed terms with them and when I got back from holiday I went up to meet Moyes at his house near Preston. I took my suitcase with me so I could move into a hotel that night and start pre-season training the next day. I was excited about it.
But when I got to his house, I could tell straight away that something had changed. It was like talking to a different bloke. He seemed tense and hostile.
He presented me with a list of rules. They were very detailed and exact. They tried to imagine certain scenarios and dictate how I would react. “If I ask you to move to the right in the 60th minute, I don’t want you shaking your head” or “If you have got something to say, do not speak to anyone else about it, come and see me.”
They went on and on. I thought ‘where are we going with this?’ It was a completely different individual to the guy I was speaking to a month ago. It was as if he had spoken to someone who had changed his mind about me. He seemed to have got cold feet. It felt like he was looking for a way out. It was bizarre. If we hadn’t had a second meeting, I would have signed anyway. Now I couldn’t.
It was awkward. Bill Kenwright, the Everton chairman, was on the phone saying that all the arrangements were in place for the medical once the formalities had been completed with Moyes. My representative didn’t go into details. He just told Mr Kenwright I had had a change of heart. It was a real blow to me. I had to get in my car and drive back to Cardiff.
A few weeks later, Moyes rang my representative and apologised. I don’t hold a grudge about it. I’ve got a lot of time for him and he tried to sign me a couple of times subsequently. I don’t blame him, really. My guess is that someone had told him I would be trouble and he panicked a bit. It did leave me in limbo, though. Newcastle had begun pre-season training but even though I was still their player, that chapter was over. They told me to stay away.
A few days after the Everton deal broke down, my representative rang to say he had spoken to John Williams, the Blackburn chairman. Mark Hughes had left the Wales job in September 2004 to take over at Ewood Park, which was a big plus in my thinking. But even though they had reached the FA Cup semi-final in his first season, they had flirted with relegation and finished 15th. I wanted more than that. I said ‘no’.
I thought it was going to be another tough year for them and my confidence was low. I thought they needed someone better than me. I didn’t think I would be good enough to give them the lift they needed and to make them a top half team. After what had happened at Newcastle and the disappointment of missing out on the Scottish title, I felt worthless again.
My representative urged me to go and meet Mark Hughes anyway. At least hear what he had to say. He kept stressing that Sparky was the manager who knew me best and valued me the most. He would look after me. He would breathe life back into my career. He would get my confidence up again. I was still reluctant but I agreed to meet him at the Vale of Glamorgan hotel just outside Cardiff. I owed him that.
After about 10 minutes in his company, I was ready to sign. He said all the right things. He played to my vanity. He said he knew that in the normal course of events, a player of my ability would be beyond Blackburn’s reach. He said he realised I was too good for Blackburn really but that they would give me a platform to show what a player I could be and then I could move on to one of the top clubs.
Sparky said I had been made to look a troublemaker and that I needed to repair my reputation. He reminded me he had known me since I was 15. He knew how I worked. He knew what I needed. He said he would put me on a pedestal and before I knew it, there would be a whole queue of clubs after me. It was a clever pitch. The next day, I went up to Blackburn for the medical.
I was impressed by everything at the club. It was only 10 years since they won the Premier League and the place was still full of class. John Williams was great, the staff were lovely and warm and welcoming and the training facilities were unbelievably good. I realised that this was actually going to be a great opportunity for me. I began to feel more confident even before I had kicked a ball.
I wanted to find out who I was as a player. I was at a crossroads. Was I the player who had struggled to step up a level at Coventry or was I the player who had excelled at Newcastle? Was I capable of moving upwards from here and becoming a genuinely top player?
The same kind of themes were whirring round my mind about my personal life. I knew that Claire had reached the stage where she wanted us to get married and if we didn’t, she was going to leave. That was fair enough. She wanted commitment and I wanted to try to put the way I had behaved in Newcastle behind me. I wanted to try to prove to myself that I could become a decent husband and a better father.
I didn’t want her to leave. Partly, I suppose, that was because I was desperate not to spend any more time away from my kids than I was already spending. I wanted the kids to have the same surname as their mum, too. I needed to become a man for the first time in my life. So on my 26th birthday, July 13th, 2005, I proposed to Claire at The Lowry hotel in Manchester and she accepted.
We bought a house in the countryside just outside Cardiff and decided that this would be our base. No more moving the family around from city to city, trailing around after me when I moved. We wanted the kids to have a settled school life. The plan was for me to come home as often as I could. We knew it would be difficult but we thought it was the best option.
Things didn’t start well at Blackburn. I played in the first game of the season, a 3-1 defeat at West Ham, but then I picked up a thigh injury and missed the next four games. Inevitably, my first game back, in the middle of September, was against Newcastle at Ewood Park. We lost 3-0. Shearer scored. The result left us in the bottom three.
I got plenty of stick from the travelling Newcastle fans at that game. That was fine. I had to suck it all up. I felt some of the Newcastle players were gloating at the end of the game, rubbing the result in for my benefit. Souness came out on to the pitch, applauding the fans and milking it. I went out of my way to make sure I shook his hand. I wanted to show there were no hard feelings.
And there weren’t. Sure, we fell out at Newcastle. He bore some of the responsibility for that. But I accept that it was my fault, too. And I have never lost sight of the fact that the man is one of the best footballers the English game has ever seen. He is a legend, someone who was at the core of the great Liverpool teams. I remember that about him more than anything else.
I didn’t feel too downhearted at the end of the game. It was my first match back after injury. I knew I was going to play a lot better before long. And even though we were heavily beaten, I felt even then that we would have climbed above Newcastle at the end of the season. I knew that we had a better work ethic than them and players who were more hungry for success.
I was right about that. Newcastle’s season quickly went downhill and by the time we played them at St James’ Park at the end of January, Souness was under a lot of pressure. I missed that game with a hamstring injury but we won 1-0 and the crowd was chanting for him to be sacked. A few days later, after a defeat to Manchester City, Freddy Shepherd fired him.
If Newcastle declined after that September victory over us at Ewood Park, we went in the opposite direction. We began to turn things around. The next match was against Manchester United at Old Trafford, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Paul Scholes pitted against us. We won 2-1 with a couple of goals from Morten Gamst Pedersen and that result was the springboard for our season. We won the next game against West Brom, too, and climbed the table steadily.
We had a decent team. We were hard-working and there was a lot of talent in the side, too. Tugay was a magnificent player and David Bentley is a lad who should have achieved more in his career. We had Lucas Neill at the back and Brad Friedel in goal and I played with a variety of players up front. Paul Dickov, Shefki Kuqi and Florent Sinama-Pongolle all played a number of games but, just as Mark Hughes had promised, the team was focused around me.
We had characters, too. Robbie Savage was at the heart of the team. He was not a particularly talented player but he was honest and he would work himself into the ground for the team. I admired that in him. He was still the insecure lad I knew from the Wales set-up and he could be very loud. He tested my patience at times but I liked him. How he never got battered by some of the other boys, I’ll never know. But I had a lot of time for him. Andy Todd was a good lad, too. He has got a bit of a fearsome reputation after a couple of bust-ups he has had with people. I heard that he gave Dean Kiely a good hiding once when they were teammates at Charlton. He was one of the hardest players I have ever played with and you certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him but I always thought he was a lovely man. I guess we all have a switch.
By mid-season, I was in great form and scoring plenty of goals. Between mid-December and the beginning of March, we won seven times in 10 games, including another victory over Manchester United and a win against Arsenal. We were playing so well that the win over Arsene Wenger’s side moved us above them into fifth place in the table, three points off a Champions League spot with 11 games to go.
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.