Carra: My Autobiography (14 page)

I once turned up for training stinking of stale beer and he demanded to know where I'd been and who I'd been with.

'I just went for a few bevvies with my dad,' I told him.

He was outraged.

'Your dad?' he screamed. 'I can't believe that!'

Gérard, who hadn't met my dad yet, could not grasp the idea of a player drinking not only with his family's permission, but with their encouragement. After this, he took a peculiar interest in my personal life.

Most youngsters get teased by their mates or their mum and dad about finding a girl. In my case it was Houllier who was fixated with getting me hooked up and settled down. His theory was the sooner I had a steady girlfriend, the less likely I would be to go out on the lash with the lads. 'Have you met anyone yet, Jamie?' he would often enquire. I'm surprised he didn't go as far as trying to set me up. Sometimes I'd lie and say I'd been on a date so he wouldn't think I'd been out drinking after a game, only to tell him the mythical female 'wasn't my type' a few weeks later. He must have been thinking I'd gone through more girlfriends than Georgie Best by the time I met my wife Nicola, but it was all to cover my tracks.

In his defence, I gave him plenty of reasons to be worried.

The Liverpool players' Christmas party of 1998, for instance, took me from relative national obscurity to the front page of the
News of the World
. The tabloids presented it as another example of professional footballers abusing their wealth and fame. Naturally, this was hugely overplayed. It wasn't much of a story when you broke it down. A twenty-one-year-old Scouser gets bladdered on a festive work night out and ends up getting caught in a compromising position with a stripper.

OK, throw in some of England's World Cup heroes and it becomes a bit juicier.

The pictures of me in a Quasimodo costume working my way through a variety of angles with the naked woman in question didn't exactly help. And the hump wasn't just on my back, unfortunately. Overall, though, I think the newspaper's editor must have been gutted they caught only me with my pants down. Had it been Michael Owen or Paul Ince, it wouldn't have been the first five pages of the paper covering the story but the whole edition.

In fact, Mo had been concerned on my behalf within minutes of the 'incident'.

The venue was a pub called the Pen and Wig in Liverpool city centre. It has since made the most out of the notoriety of that evening by turning itself into a lapdancing bar, probably because the punters thought the stuff we got up to was a weekly occurrence. I'm surprised they didn't put a plaque up on the spot where I made my mark. Mo spotted an elderly couple in the corner acting suspiciously and figured they were either reporters or perverts – or, as is often the case with those covering such stories, both. When he went over to speak to them he found a camera. He went berserk and smashed it, but it wasn't the lucky escape we'd hoped. The paper had their spies.

'This is a set-up,' Mo said to me. He was right, and there were a few casualties as a result as suspicious fingers were wagged all over the place.

Houllier tried to pin it on my friend Willie Miller, a well-known comedian and radio DJ from Liverpool who organized our Christmas parties, but there was no way he was responsible. Willie wouldn't have done that to the lads, and if there was one player more than any he wouldn't stitch up, it was me. He could have earned far more over many years by targeting bigger names, but he never has. I felt really sorry for Willie because Houllier wouldn't allow him into Melwood for a while afterwards.

On Boxing Day we were heading back on the coach from an away game in Middlesbrough when one of the lads received a call from a mate that they had who worked in the media. It was the news we'd all been dreading. The player had heard every line of the article due to appear in the
News of the World
from his journalist friend.

'What's the story?' I asked him.

'Sorry, mate, it's all about you,' he replied.

I waited at a garage until midnight for the first edition of the Sunday papers so I could check the damage. It was bad, but also funny.

I warned my mum and dad about it, but I wonder what kind of elaborate excuses the lads used on their wives that Sunday morning. I expect every copy of the
News of the World
on Merseyside mysteriously disappeared. Though the cameras focused on me, in one shot you could clearly see another player in fancy dress lying on his back with a semi-naked girl and a smile on his face . . . in that order. Part of the article also referred to a player dressed as Ainsley Harriott getting it on with a stripper in a corner of the bar. I bet the lad responsible spent hours convincing his wife more than one of us was dressed as a big black celebrity chef. My mum, who was working in a pub the next day, took far more stick about it than I did. I felt sorry for her more than for myself, though I'm sure it was all good-natured banter.

I was still just about single at the time. Fortunately my future wife Nicola, who I'd been on a few dates with, and her family saw the funny side. It was the kind of stunt every young footballer has been 'forced' into by senior players for fifty years and more, and I can assure you such rituals still go on, even if the Christmas party at Anfield was a more sober occasion for a while afterwards.

I was dreading going into training the next morning. Predictably, Gérard and Thommo called me straight into their office at Melwood.

Any worries I had were swiftly eased. Both were laughing.

'Don't worry, son,' said Thommo, 'I've been there.'

For the sake of Phil's wife Marge, can I add at this point I don't think he meant this literally.

Houllier then told me he'd give me a lift to Anfield, where we were training. Thommo walked out of the office and the smiling stopped. In the car to the stadium, Houllier gave me one of his prepared sermons.

'There are six players at this club who I rate and who I want as part of the team next season,' he said to me. 'You, Michael, Gerrard, Berger, [Vegard] Heggem and Redknapp will stay. If you're going to be with me, you've got to be more careful.'

I'd like to say I listened to Houllier and never stepped out of line again, but it didn't quite work that way.

Privately, I was concerned a previous incident with a stripper might come to light. A couple of months earlier I'd been in a pub on the Dock Road in Liverpool with my friends Gary 'Siggy' Seagraves, John 'Pritch' Pritchard and a couple of exotic dancers. Pritch was all over a stripper with a face like a smacked arse when he decided to take off his jacket, revealing one of my 'Carragher 23' Liverpool shirts. It was funny at the time, but it wouldn't have been such a laugh if it had come to light immediately after the infamous party. I lived in fear for months that another old couple had been sitting in the corner with a hidden camera that night and were biding their time before providing the Sunday papers with a tasty follow-up. God knows how Gérard would have reacted.

Although my performances on the pitch throughout that 1998–99 season won me the club player of the year award, trouble followed me off it. When Paul Ince organized a thirtieth birthday party for his wife in the leafy suburb of Heswall on the Wirral, he didn't cater for the arrival of the lads from Bootle. We'd been watching the England versus Poland European qualifier in town and had been drinking all afternoon. I turned up worse for wear with Siggy and Pritch and instantly caused mayhem, for some reason believing it was a good idea to act like a pisshead. Inevitably we were thrown out, at which point one of the guests' luxury cars paid for our frustration and was given a bit of a kicking. The police arrived quicker than an LA SWAT team and instantly pounced on me and Siggy, but Pritch managed to do a runner.

'Name?' asked the policeman.

'Paul Carragher,' I replied.

As I spoke, Pritch reappeared, having decided bluffing was a better escape route than hiding behind a bush in the hope the police dogs wouldn't sniff him out. He approached the policeman and, for reasons only he can explain, decided to speak in the worst fake posh Wirral accent I've heard.

'Hello, officer. I hope there isn't any trouble here. I was dropping off my girlfriend and heard quite a commotion.' Unaccustomed to this new vocabulary he stumbled through his words while trying to stop his legs wobbling.

The copper didn't need to be Columbo, or the help of one of his tracker dogs, to smell the bullshit.

'Where do you live?' he asked.

As interrogations go, this wasn't the most intense in Merseyside criminal history. It didn't need to be. Unfortunately, when you've taken a taxi from Bootle to Heswall but you're under the misapprehension you're somewhere else, even this question can finish you off.

'I just live around the corner . . . in Chester,' said Pritch.

'Get in the car,' replied the copper.

Pritch wasn't finished.

'I'm not speaking to anyone else until I've seen a solicitor,' he said.

'Who do you want?' asked the copper.

'Can you get me Rex Makin?' blagged Pritch, demanding the attention of the best-known legal man in Liverpool.

We woke up with bad heads in a Wirral police cell a few hours later.

'You've got Rex Makin on the phone,' Pritch was told.

'Ah, forget it,' he said.

By now the coppers had realized I wasn't my brother. I had some explaining to do the following Monday, not only to Houllier but to the club's chief executive Peter Robinson. The club solicitor, Kevin Dooley, was an expert at keeping stories out of the papers. 'I've just come from Everton,' he told me. 'One of their star players has been caught with his pants down again. I've managed to stop the press running it.' He didn't have the same luck with me, although he tried to convince the club the story was exaggerated as part of an anti-Liverpool agenda in the national papers. Not quite. My biggest concern was explaining to Houllier why I hadn't taken my latest non-existent girlfriend to Ince's party, as promised. 'She was there but left early,' I lied.

Houllier's patience had its limits. In November 1999 he dropped me from the squad away to Sunderland in the Premiership after a fan rang the club to say he'd seen me drinking with Robbie Fowler on the afternoon of the England v. Scotland European Championship qualifier.

We were hardly inconspicuous.

We'd headed off to watch the match in the Bureau Bar with our mate James Culshaw. James had a unique party piece he liked to show off with after a few pints which ensured we'd stand out in a crowd: he'd take off his mechanical leg and put it on the bar. Given the right encouragement he would use it to kick everything in sight, including any passing lamppost. From our perspective it was an hysterical scene, but I suppose a few Liverpool fans found it all a bit too much to see two star players encouraging a disabled lad to kick streetlights, especially if they didn't know he was our friend.

'But Gérard, I wasn't the one who was legless,' I pleaded.

For Houllier, these incidents were becoming too frequent. One of my closest friends in the Liverpool squad at the time, David Thompson, was getting the same warnings as me. The more scrapes he got in to, the more he was edged towards the exit door. Eventually he was pushed through it. The implications were obvious. I was bailing myself out by performing well on the pitch, but if I lost form I was giving the manager a ready-made excuse not only to drop me but to move me on.

In February 1999 I was suspended after a harsh sending-off at Charlton, and the way the fixtures worked out I wouldn't play for forty days. Houllier was so concerned I'd hit the booze he ordered me in for double training sessions, morning and afternoon. Forty days and forty nights deprived of first-team football and drink – an appropriate number, you might say, for my period in the wilderness.

I'm sure Houllier would have sent me to a desert to keep me away from temptation at that point in my career. 'Don't go to nightclubs while you're a player,' he'd plead. 'Buy one when you've retired.' (I'm sure he's proud to know it's a healthy-eating sports café I've bought instead.) But any fears he had about regular drinking were exaggerated. I'm a social drinker only, although there's never been such a hobby as 'going for a couple of drinks' in my world. If I say I'm going out, it's for the full pelt. When I hit the ale, it's not for the taste of it, it's to wind down and get bladdered. I had a reputation as a drinker when I was younger because of the skirmishes that made the papers, but that's because when I did go for it there were no half measures, so to speak. If a supporter saw me on a genuine night out, there was a good chance I'd had too much to drink. It only needed a couple of incidents like this to create an impression, but you won't find any alcohol in my house, nor will you ever catch me having a glass of wine with a meal. I'm not a heavy drinker. Nights out on the alcohol have become increasingly rare, and I never touch a drop in the week of a game. I'm not going to say I never drink during a season, of course I do, but I'm far more sensible in my attitude to alcohol these days. Doctors may say otherwise, but it's far better for a player to go on the lash properly a few times a season than to hit the drink casually every week.