Steven Gerrard: My Liverpool Story (18 page)

Champions at Last

The scene still takes my breath away. Sometimes I sit and think: ‘How did that team win that trophy?’ We had six or seven players who were up there with the best in Europe, but without being disrespectful to anyone else, there were others who were not quite as good. I knew straight away what a massive achievement this was. It was the best night of my life and I doubt it will ever be bettered. With the amount of money that is in football now with the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City, Paris St Germain and Real Madrid, it is going to get a lot harder for Liverpool to win this trophy again. Not least because it is a lot harder for Liverpool to even qualify for the Champions League nowadays.

Happy Scousers

I have grown close to Jamie Carragher in recent years, probably since Michael Owen and Danny Murphy both left the club in the summer of 2004. We share a room together on away trips and as captain and vice-captain we feel a lot of responsibility on us. He was magnificent in Istanbul, defying cramp, putting his body on the line, repelling wave after wave of attacks from Milan after we had come back to 3–3. For two homegrown lads to stand shoulder to shoulder on one of the best nights in the club’s history is special. Carra is a Liverpool legend and a good friend.

Planting a Smacker on the Trophy

Alex, my wife, says I kissed that Cup more than her. After the joy came relief. I had grown up knowing what European football meant to Liverpool Football Club. I had seen the tapes of Emlyn Hughes, Phil Thompson and Graeme Souness lifting the European Cup and I wanted that for myself. I wanted to deliver that trophy for all the Liverpool fans out there.

The Red Sea

You could feel the bus literally rocking as we snaked our way through Liverpool City Centre the night after Istanbul. Police horses were banging into the bus as they tried to hold the fans back. It was mayhem, but glorious, brilliant mayhem. I just don’t think you would see this scene anywhere else in the world. When have you ever seen that before? It is a majestic sight. Wow. Mind-blowing. We crawled through the streets of Liverpool and every player on that bus took away memories that they will never ever forget. Afterwards, we had a party in town. That was a late night!

UP FOR THE CUP AGAIN

Just 49 days after our season had gloriously ended
, and with the miracle of Istanbul still uppermost in everyone’s thoughts, we stepped back out onto a football pitch again.

No one at Liverpool could complain too much. UEFA had ripped up their own rule book to allow us to defend our Champions League trophy because we had finished fifth in the Premier League and outside of the criteria for entry into Europe’s élite. Not allowing the Champions League winners back into the competition would have defied logic and the morning after our win over AC Milan, the pressure began to snowball on the authorities until they had no option but to cave in. So stepping out against Welsh part-timers Total Network Solutions (TNS) at Anfield on 13 July did not seem like a hardship.

On a personal note, I started the campaign as I meant to go on. I grabbed a hat-trick against TNS that night and in total scored seven goals in my first four games of the season.

I was up and running, my confidence pepped by what had happened in Istanbul, and I finished the campaign with 23 goals, which was by far the best goals return of my career up to that point.

Collectively, Liverpool were much more competitive as well. Our Champions League success had masked what had been a disappointing Premier League campaign and we couldn’t rely on conquering Europe every season. Something had to change.

One of Rafa’s great strengths around this time was that he would never make the same mistake twice.

Liverpool weren’t physically strong enough the season before so he rectified that in the transfer market. The revolving door at Anfield spun faster than I had known. In came Pepe Reina, Momo Sissoko, Peter Crouch and Bolo Zenden along with others. Out went Milan Baros, Antonio Nunez and Mauricio Pellegrino. It didn’t matter that Jerzy Dudek had been one of the heroes of Istanbul. Rafa felt the goalkeeping position needed strengthening and even before the Champions League Final he had lined up a deal for Reina. You have to say that was one of his best transfers. Baros, too, had played his part in one of the greatest nights in Liverpool’s history. But there is no sentiment in football. He left to make room for Crouch.

The pressure to perform at Liverpool is always intense. We drew four of our first five Premier League games, and then lost 4–1 at home to Chelsea, and you could sense people were sharpening their knives to plunge into Rafa. The criticism lingered on the assumption that he couldn’t get to grips with the unique features of English football, the pace, intensity and physical nature of the game here.

Rubbish. And we soon exposed that myth. When we beat West Ham at home on 29 October, the win didn’t feel out of the ordinary. It was routine. Yet it acted as a springboard for us to go on an exceptional run of form. We won 10 straight games in the league and when James Beattie scored a consolation for Everton in a 3–1 win at Goodison Park in December, it was the first time Pepe had conceded a goal in the league for almost two months.

There are times when, as a team, you play almost on auto-pilot. That stems from the trust you have in your team-mates. We had the best goalkeeper in the world in Pepe and two of the best defenders in the world in Carra and Sami. I was being given licence to roam from the right of midfield and we had Xabi and Momo who were ruthlessly efficient. Plus, we had lots of players who could chip in with goals: Riise, Fernando Morientes, Crouchy, Luis Garcia, Zenden and Harry Kewell.

We weren’t the finished article by any stretch of the imagination, but we weren’t the pushovers we had been on too many occasions the previous season, that was for sure. Football is all about making progress.

There was a disappointment during that purple patch, but it came on foreign soil. We had travelled to Japan just before Christmas for the World Club Championship by virtue of our Champions League success.

To be crowned the best team on the planet was a huge incentive for us, more so because the great Liverpool teams of the past had always failed to get their hands on the trophy. How we came up short I don’t know. We battered Brazilian side Sao Paulo in the final, seeing goals dubiously disallowed, but still lost 1–0. Rafa was fuming afterwards, but the season would contain a silver lining.

We had gone out of the Carling Cup in a shock defeat to Crystal Palace and been dumped out of the Champions League by Benfica, losing both legs, but the FA Cup provided us with a great source of satisfaction. En route to the final we beat Manchester United in the fifth round and Chelsea in the semi-finals, so no one could accuse us of having an easy draw. Of course, the final itself turned into a drama with the penalty shoot-out win over West Ham, but there was a sense of accomplishment at the end of that season.

We were never going to leap from fifth to first in the table, but finishing third with 82 points, one point behind Manchester United and nine points adrift of champions Chelsea showed we were making strides. Making that final step is the most difficult, but there were clues as to how we should go about trying to get there. Of the six games we lost in the league that season, two were against Chelsea and one was against Manchester United.

If we could correct that imbalance, Liverpool would become genuine contenders. I finished the season positive about the future. I believed that under Rafa, Liverpool were becoming a force again.

“The pressure to perform at Liverpool is always intense.”

An Unsung Hero

Pako Ayesteran’s role in the success Liverpool enjoyed under Rafa Benitez often gets overlooked. He was Rafa’s assistant, the link between the players and the manager, as well as being an innovative coach.

All the trophies we won in that period came while Pako was alongside Rafa in the dug-out and I often wonder what he could have achieved had he stayed, instead of leaving at the start of the 2007–08 season.