LITMIR.BIZ

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he was 15 and 16 and I was only 10 or 11. He was such a good player that he became the one whose standards I wanted to match. It wasn’t a question of trying to take his place, more ‘Robbie Fowler’s the best, try to get alongside him’. Sadly his career has been blighted by injuries, but in his prime he was a wonderful finisher – really sharp. He was never one to take players on and beat them for pace, but then he didn’t need to. He could finish with both feet from any range. Whether it was placement or power or chipping the keeper, he was awesome to watch.

      Robbie and Steve McManaman were joined at the hip – off the pitch and often on it too. I didn’t point it out to them at the time, but if Macca had the ball and Robbie and me were both making runs with a fifty-fifty chance of receiving the pass, it would rarely come to me. You could tell they were best mates because Macca was always looking to feed Robbie. It got a bit frustrating at the end. But Robbie was a great lad, and one of the chief jokers in the team.

      His most infamous scrape was pretending to snort a line of cocaine off the pitch during a Merseyside derby. When he made the odd mistake, it was always through naivety. People forget that footballers are normal lads, and Robbie was from Toxteth, a particularly tough district of Liverpool. We forget how much stick he took from opposition supporters. Take it from me – and I don’t even live there – Liverpool is rumour city. Everything is recorded, distorted and passed on. If you’re seen going into a toilet, it must have been to take drugs; if you’re seen outside a casino, you must have just lost two million quid. Bearing in mind that half the city is red, and half blue, it’s an easy line of attack to spread some gossip about one of the enemy’s players. Robbie took the full brunt. Every time we played Everton their fans sang songs about him being a ‘smackhead’. You can see how frustrated someone would get if they hadn’t been doing that kind of thing. The upside, I suppose, is that because Robbie grew up in the heart of Liverpool – unlike me – he became very streetwise. I think that helped make him such a success.

      When Liverpool fans see one of their own performing well in the team, that player develops a special status. The supporters can relate to him as a man as well as a footballer. Maybe they saw themselves in Robbie – a working-class lad, raised in Liverpool, who had come up through the ranks in the traditional way. Coming from Chester, I was a comparative outsider, so there was never much chance that I would be given a nickname to compare with that of Robbie, who was known to the fans simply as ‘God’. When I was growing up, I thought he was God too. I was never jealous of him, but I did take note of the fact that the fans were less inclined to sing songs about me than him, even when I was making a big impact in the team. At times I did wonder why I wasn’t regarded as another of the club’s ‘local heroes’.

      Now, I have a different perspective. Towards the end of his Liverpool career, when he was slipping, Robbie fell behind some of the club’s other strikers on the supporters’ song list. They would chant about Titi Camara, or one of the other forwards the club had bought from overseas. Some of them hadn’t scored a hundredth of the goals Robbie registered for Liverpool, and these days I ask myself, ‘Was Robbie enough of a god to Liverpool fans?’ He returned from Manchester City a hero, of course, in the winter transfer window of 2006.

      But it happens in football. When you hear Ryan Giggs being booed by United fans, as he was one season, you know for sure that nobody is immune. I don’t understand how people can ignore a player’s achievements just because he’s going through a sticky patch. When Giggs was being jeered, he had won seven championship medals and a European Cup. How can that be forgotten? People will say, ‘He earns £50,000 a week and he’s a millionaire now,’ but it doesn’t half hurt to be booed by your own people – the fans who grew up in the same communities as you.

      On the cast list of big Liverpool characters, Robbie’s mate Steve McManaman was also near the top. Contrary to popular opinion, he was a quiet and sensible lad. If someone was getting out of hand, he would be the one to have a word and tell him to calm down, or apologize to the people the player had just upset. You never saw Macca drunk. On the pitch, when he was in his prime I’ve never seen anyone like him. When I was 15 or 16 years old, watching from the stands, he controlled games. We used to play 3–5–2 just so he could have the run of the pitch. He used to win matches on his own. He was the best player I’ve seen live.

      Paul Ince joined us a little while later. That was a fantastic signing. The basis of it was that we had tremendous flair going forward but could be a bit open at the back when all the midfielders were on the attack. It’s true that we did need a bit of steel to break up opposition moves, and even in his mid-thirties, in a one-off game Incey could mix it with the very best. He was definitely one of the jokers, with a huge lust for life. If he had you under his wing you’d certainly find him putting a glass of champagne in your hand and offering you a cigarette (not that I smoked). I say this affectionately, because it was always light-hearted with Incey. He had a sense of fun. He was made captain almost straight away. The peak of his career was spent with Manchester United and Inter Milan, but he still did an important job for us.

      In August 1997, during the summer before my first full season, John Barnes moved on to Newcastle, which left a big hole on the training ground. In games, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he gave the ball away. In training, he was just majestic, a joy to watch. You ask anyone who’s played alongside him, ‘Who’s the most gifted player you’ve ever seen in training?’ I’ll bet they say John Barnes. His passing, his touch, his finishing – everything was beautiful to observe. I didn’t play with him in his heyday, but I’ve watched videos of him and he was awesome. He has to be among the top three players Liverpool have ever had. He does get recognition for his enormous natural talent, but not quite on the level he deserves. It might be because he didn’t perform as well for England as he did for Liverpool. But, boy, could he play.

      That same summer, I went to Malaysia with England for the World Youth Under-20 Championship, which was of some concern to Liverpool, who knew I was going to be playing a prominent part in the following League season and were worried about me not having a break. It was obvious that I would be playing every game for England in Malaysia. Amazingly, when I got to the Far East it felt as if everyone knew me. Not many of the Under-20s had played for their club side, but I’d played twice, which seemed to be enough to earn me all this recognition. We sailed through the group stage, winning all our games. I scored in a 2–1 win over Ivory Coast and a 5–0 thrashing of the UAE, and then got the only goal against Mexico – which meant that the first of my great confrontations with Argentina came before the 1998 World Cup, because it was them we had to face in the second round. We were 2–0 down by half-time. Though Jamie Carragher reduced that deficit just after the interval, we lost 2–1. I had to wait another 12 months for my first goal against one of England’s biggest rivals.

      Really, after that defeat, from the end of June onwards, my mind was focused on the coming season with Liverpool. I couldn’t wait to get back on to the training ground. Up front for the 1997/98 campaign it was going to be me, Robbie and Karlheinz Riedle, who had signed that summer from Borussia Dortmund. Stan had moved on to Aston Villa, and it was reasonable to assume that Karlheinz wouldn’t be playing every game on account of his age. My expectation was that he and Robbie would be the starting strikers, but that August Robbie was struggling with an ankle problem so I ended up starting in the first eight games. In that particular pre-season I had been flying, scoring plenty of goals and playing really well. My confidence was up and I probably got ideas above my station, thinking, ‘I could be in from the start this year.’ But it was Robbie’s injury more than my own good form that opened the door. So there I was on 9 August, lining up for the first game of the new season – against Wimbledon again.

      It was Incey’s debut in a Liverpool shirt, and he was soon being brought down by Vinnie Jones in the penalty area. The manager had already told me I’d be taking the penalties – which was an incredible honour, given my age. So, again, there I was, in the midst of all these Liverpool legends, being asked by Roy Evans whether I would accept one of the biggest responsibilities a manager can hand to a player. In baking conditions, my penalty went in OK, but over the next 10 or so games I was about to learn the difference between reserve- and youth-team football and the first eleven.

      Below the senior team, I had been accustomed to scoring every week –

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