Carra: My Autobiography (40 page)

At this stage, I had more sympathy for both sides than people imagined. I should clarify that I completely disagreed with their decision to consider Rafa's position when they did. It made no sense to me at all, particularly given the timing. We were near the top of the table, and although we'd endured a difficult start to our Champions League group after defeats to Marseille and Besiktas, we knew we could still progress with a few wins. I didn't agree with Klinsmann as a replacement, either. He was too inexperienced at club level and his CV is no match for Rafa's, at least at this stage of his career. In fairness to Klinsmann, he's one of the few to emerge from the sorry episode with any credit. He's not said a word about the controversy, and I respect him for this. He must have been livid that details of his private meetings were leaked.

Where I disagreed with many supporters was in their outrage that a manager had been approached while another was still in charge. It was wrong to think about replacing Rafa a few weeks into a new season, but once a decision had been taken it was inevitable a plan had to be put into operation and other candidates explored. Let's not plead innocence about this. Anyone who thinks representatives on behalf of Liverpool FC never spoke to Rafa Benitez while Gérard Houllier was still the boss must be very naive about how the football world operates. It's a nice idea to think Liverpool sacked Gérard and then asked themselves, 'I wonder if Benitez will be interested in the job?' but somehow I doubt it was like that. I'd be greatly concerned if it was. If Rafa had left and Liverpool had had no one else lined up, the board would have been accused of incompetence for leaving us in the lurch at a key point of our season.

There were also claims Klinsmann had been approached in case Rafa decided to leave Liverpool in the near future. This might have washed the previous summer, but not in November 2007, although it did explain why Hicks and Gillett were eyeing other candidates. Rafa had been linked with Real Madrid on at least two occasions during his three and a half years at the club, and had never distanced himself from those stories.

The sense I got was of a series of factors colliding to create a mess of everyone's making. There should have been guilty consciences all over the club as the situation spiralled out of control.

I avoided answering questions on the subject because it's not in my nature to compromise. I was 100 per cent behind the manager, but I understood why the owners were unhappy with him too. They'd been undermined by Rafa and now they were undermining him. It was a political rather than football battle, and although the fans wanted to see it in black and white terms, with the owners the bad guys and Rafa their hero, I saw far more shades of grey.

Steven Gerrard and I were constantly asked questions about the situation, and when we swerved the issue fans began to approach me and say they'd heard 'Rafa has lost the dressing room'. This is a phrase you often hear when a manager is under pressure, and it's one of the biggest myths in football. I've never known a manager to 'have the dressing room', never mind lose it. Whether it was Steve Heighway, Roy Evans, Gérard Houllier or Rafa Benitez, I've always played foremost for Liverpool Football Club and my own sense of pride, and never given less than 100 per cent in all circumstances. We're one of the biggest clubs in the world and the manager is under pressure from day one. Any player who doesn't give his all, whether we're going through a good or bad spell, shouldn't be here. My relationships with all those managers have been professional. It's the badge that comes first. Rafa has defined that professional relationship more than any boss I've known, and he knows as much as anyone where loyalties lie in a dressing room.

Look at the results we achieved in the biggest games after it became public Rafa's job was under threat. They speak out much more than any hard-hitting interview. On 24 November, when it was believed he was forty-eight hours from losing his job, we beat Newcastle away, 3–0. Just four days later we trounced Porto at Anfield in the Champions League. Our 4–0 away win in Marseille in mid-December to reach the knockout stage of the Champions League also arrived amid speculation a defeat would have brought the axe. Victory over Inter Milan in the last sixteen was achieved in similar circumstances. If you want to know how the dressing room felt, look at those results. The damaging headlines had no effect on how we played. Stevie and I talked about it every day. It was increasingly annoying seeing Liverpool's image being dragged through the mud, but it didn't stop us performing when it mattered. No circumstances exist where I wouldn't give my all for Liverpool.

We got sick of everyone around us fighting and wanted an immediate resolution rather than to get dragged into it. Some hope. No sooner had one issue died down as the results improved and Rafa remained in his job than the attention shifted elsewhere. Now Gillett and Hicks were arguing with each other. Foster Gillett, who'd been based at Melwood for a couple of months, returned home. It was a sign of how serious the situation had become. Until then, Foster was the one we had most dealings with. He made every effort to understand the club, joining the players in the canteen to discuss tactics or games he'd watched. I could see he wanted to be well informed about English football. When statements were made in the papers which inflamed the situation, it wasn't his father who was quoted, but Tom Hicks. As the only new member of the board actually based in the city, though, he must have felt more vulnerable to the fans' anger.

Liverpool should have known better after the joint-manager debacle at the end of the 1990s. You can only have one boss at a football club.

With DIC talking to Gillett about buying his share in the club just a year after he'd bought it, it became obvious he recognized the damage that had been done and was ready to sell. Hicks saw things differently. Once Hicks and Gillett began to air their grievances with each other publicly, the situation worsened.

Every idea I had of what 'The Liverpool Way' meant was contradicted by one particular interview conducted by Hicks on Sky Sports News on 17 April, 2008. If this phrase wasn't in danger of receiving the last rites, it was certainly in need of urgent medical attention afterwards. I thought of my cousin Jamie's John Smith quote again as I watched. 'We're a very, very modest club . . . we don't boast . . . we're very professional.' The interview began with a boast: 'Everton won't like that,' he commented after we beat Blackburn to secure an unspectacular fourth place in the League. The owners had arrived pledging funds to take on Manchester United and Chelsea; now we were rubbing Everton's nose in it simply because we'd finished fourth.

Then, after earlier telling Rafa to shut up and admitting a plan to sack him, Hicks announced the manager would get a oneyear contract extension. It was clearly intended to be a vote of confidence, but any seasoned football observer will tell you a oneyear deal isn't seen in such positive terms.

Hicks continued with a series of contentious statements, deflecting blame for our problems elsewhere, and accusing Gillett of the approach to Klinsmann. Hicks said he hadn't heard of Klinsmann. How could he have considered a man he didn't know becoming Liverpool's manager?

After the takeover was complete, I'd argued to friends there needed to be a greater Anfield connection on the board to balance out what Hicks and Gillett openly accepted was their limited understanding of our game and Liverpool in general. I'd have loved them to appoint a figurehead such as Kenny Dalglish to offer advice on key issues. The fans would have trusted Kenny to make the right judgements on such matters. He'd certainly have urged Hicks and Gillett to think twice about replacing Rafa mid-season, and would have been able to fill them in on the credentials of future managerial candidates. Looking to the future, I firmly believe a man of Kenny's stature should be on our board – and I'm not just saying this because he agreed to write the foreword to this book! It makes perfect sense. Manchester United have successfully operated with Bobby Charlton as a director throughout the Ferguson era.

What worries me about Hicks saying he'd never heard of Klinsmann is this: what happens when we
do
need to appoint another manager? Liverpool fans will shudder at the idea of names being checked on the internet. If Kenny was on the board, the owners would be able to ask his advice in the knowledge he has a grasp of what the supporters here expect. There's been a lot of talk about placing a fans' representative on the board too, but for me, appointing someone such as Kenny – a fan with experience of the ins and outs of football on and off the pitch – would be more appropriate.

The Klinsmann admission was just one of many concerns raised by the Sky interview. Attacking Rick Parry – he called his period as chief executive a 'disaster' – was not the Liverpool way, and to use such a word just two days after the anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy was insensitive.

Hicks raised broader issues about how Liverpool had been run over the previous decade, particularly in the area of commercial development. Whenever I've heard criticism of this aspect of the club I've felt there's been a large dose of hypocrisy from the fans. If you compare us to Manchester United, there's a massive gulf in what they earn from merchandise or tickets that has developed over twentyfive years. That's why we're talking about a new stadium. The only reason supporters make an issue out of this now is because they've belatedly realized how far behind we are and accept that if you haven't got mega-money, you can't compete.

If you go back to 1990 when we won our last League title and United were often linked with unpopular takeovers such as those by Robert Maxwell or Michael Knighton, our fans were laughing at theirs. We were the family club that didn't have to sell its soul to win the title, whereas they were always focused on exploiting their brand name across the world. There's an inevitable inconsistency here. On the one hand we're a proud working-class club, but on the other we want our board to behave like ruthless capitalists and think it's great if American and Arab billionaires want to give us lots of money.

I've heard our supporters complain, rightly, about increased season ticket prices and regular kit changes, but then they say the club should be doing more to fleece supporters living in Malaysia or Thailand. We have supporters' groups who admirably wish to protect the Scouse roots of Liverpool FC and ensure there's always an affiliation between the club and the community. Some are resentful of what's often referred to as the 'out of town' influence at Anfield, where coaches from the rest of the country and flights from Ireland and Norway invade the city on a match day. At the same time, some of the same people will accuse Liverpool of being too slow to follow United to areas of Europe and the Far East to attract a wider fan base and raise money.

We can't have it both ways. If Liverpool really wants to be like Manchester United off the pitch as much as on it, sacrifices will have to be made to our identity – and we do want it, as proved by the fact we were so accepting of the American takeover and held SOS DIC banners on The Kop. Finding the right balance between how the traditional fans want us to be seen and becoming a 'brand name' across the world is tricky, but there's no point rewriting history to attack the old board for having difficulty coming to terms with these contradictions. It's only in recent times the fans have accepted we have to change and think in a more global sense about the club's future. If you'd have said we needed to pursue this path while Kenny was lifting the League title in 1990, there would have been a supporters' backlash. For Hicks to use the argument about our lack of commercial development as another stick with which to beat Parry was too simplistic and demonstrated a limited view of our recent history.

All the Sky interview achieved was to expose how deep the divisions at the club had become. As players, there was no possibility of publicly backing one side over the other, you simply had to make your mind up on the basis of what you read, saw and heard. I fail to see how the interview served any positive purpose, especially as at the time we were concentrating on the vital Champions League semifinal against Chelsea.

The owners told us they wanted the best for the club. Couldn't they see that what was happening was the opposite of what we needed? DIC were said to be ready to pay £400 million to buy the club off the Americans. That's what the fans wanted, but these figures disgusted me too. Liverpool had been bought for around £200 million a year earlier, but was now double its value. Think how many worldclass players that £200 million could have brought to the club. Instead, if Gillett and Hicks did sell, they or their banks would make a huge profit. I felt ill thinking about it.

As far as I was concerned, there was no other conclusion: everyone at Liverpool had to get together urgently to sort out the situation, and that included Rick and the former chairman, who inevitably took criticism for selling to Hicks and Gillett instead of DIC. They said they had concerns when DIC didn't complete their first takeover attempt as quickly as expected, and after Gillett and Hicks made a bigger offer many shareholders said the board was obliged to rethink their options. Few opposed the deal at the time, largely because Rick and the chairman said they were convinced of the Americans' credentials. But if they could turn back time, maybe they'd act differently. In the meantime, all everyone involved can do is try to heal the wounds, if it's possible.

As I write this, the ownership of Liverpool remains uncertain. Hicks claimed he wouldn't sell to DIC and Gillett retaliated by insisting he wouldn't sell to Hicks. If Hicks took full control he'd replace Rick Parry and David Moores, but they were working to ensure Hicks left first. In the biggest twist of all, the only man at the club who felt safe in the knowledge he would still be at Liverpool at the start of 2008–09 was Rafa Benitez. When he thinks back to his press conference in Athens and how it's played out since, maybe he's the one who wouldn't act any differently. He took major risks, but he's still the manager, which as far as Liverpool fans are concerned is the main thing. If you're reading this and there's been no progress in the boardroom battle, it must still be a difficult time to be a Liverpool fan.