Robbie Fowler by Robbie Fowler

Author:Robbie Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2019-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

14

A NEW DAWN FADES

Major surgery to the squad was afoot ahead of the last season of the millennium. Gérard Houllier said farewell to Paul Ince, Jamo and Bjorn Kvarme. Somehow Liverpool’s Chief Executive Rick Parry managed to get £1.5m from Sochaux-Montbéliard for Jean-Michel Ferri, too – a player who managed a grand total of 37 minutes of football in the red shirt over the two seasons. I think Mr Parry deserves the football administrator’s equivalent of a gold medal for that one! And it was farewell to my old mate Macca, who left for Real Madrid on a free transfer. Fans will always have their own perspective on these things and it usually goes along the lines of players’ greed coming ahead of loyalty to the clubs who made their name for them and the fans who adore them. As with all things, there are usually at least two sides to any story and Macca would have felt aggrieved at the way he was made available to Barcelona the season before, only for him to be left sitting in a hotel room for 24 hours before being flown back home again without him ever speaking to anyone from Barca.

The point is not that any particular person is right and another party is wrong, but more than ever before, football is a business – and a huge, cynical, voracious business at that – and players are increasingly seen as commodities. Everything, including loyalty, has its price. If Macca came back from that Barcelona farce feeling as though he was last consideration in the trade, then you couldn’t blame him for looking out for himself when the next opportunity came along. He was off to lift domestic titles and Champions Leagues with Real Madrid, while Gérard Houllier set about rebuilding Liverpool from the ground up. Literally.

Gérard brought about some basic changes that had both immediate and longer-term impact. He oversaw the remodelling of the club’s Melwood training base, bringing in dieticians, fitness coaches, performance analysts and specialist scouts for different territories. He also brought in a new central spine – Sander Westerveld as goalkeeper, Sami Hyypia and Stéphane Henchoz in defence, Dietmar Hamann and Vladi Smicer in midfield and Titi Camara to provide a more physical foil to Michael Owen and myself up front. Later in the season, Houllier would also bring in Emile Heskey – a net spend, after sales, of around £25,000,000 and serious money in those days. Over the summer of 1999, Liverpool had sold 9.8 per cent of the club to Granada, which paid for the bigger part of this transfer splurge; suddenly, things were looking up. From my utter dejection at the end of the previous season, I felt as though this newly assembled squad was suddenly starting to look like a nicely balanced mix of experience, youth and local brio.

August 1999 felt like a real significant milestone for me, on and off the pitch. Kerrie gave birth to our first child, Madison. Talk about love at first sight! I was besotted and couldn’t wait to get back from training every day to see the baby.

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