LITMIR.BIZ

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me up, and that night I slept in digs before playing against Sheffield United in a match we won 3–2. I scored two goals. Then it was back to Lilleshall and full-time training.

      The fifth round came, and the phone rang again. This time we played Manchester United at Anfield and I scored a hat-trick in a 3–2 win. That is one of my special memories. Then we beat Crystal Palace in the semis, with me scoring three goals over the two legs. For the first leg of the final against West Ham I was away with England U-16s, but in my absence Liverpool won 2–0 in front of more than 15,000 spectators. I was back for the second leg of the final at Anfield to face Rio Ferdinand and co. in the West Ham defence. Now there were 20,600 in the stands. Within two minutes of the whistle going, Frank Lampard scored and narrowed our lead to 2–1 on aggregate. Then I managed to force in a header, and we scored again through Stuart Quinn. So we were crowned 1996 FA Youth Cup champions in front of a huge Anfield crowd.

      If anyone asks me, I still regard that trophy as one of my major honours, up there with the FA Cup. The Youth Cup is the whole focus of junior and academy football, and to be exposed to that experience so young left a considerable mark on my development. Jamie Carragher and I still talk about it to this day.

      My main friends from my Liverpool days are Carra, Danny Murphy, Didi Hamann and Steven Gerrard. I think of the other players as mates, but the four I’ve just named are my closest friends. But when I first joined the club everyone seemed to be everyone else’s close pal. In those days I would have struggled to pick out four names for fear of offending the rest. There were fewer foreign players back then, and the squad changed less frequently. Carra, as we all call him, has been my mate all the way through. We started to become close when I was at Lilleshall and coming back to Liverpool for those FA Youth Cup games. He made his debut in the first team a while before me, but then dropped away a bit before returning permanently around the time I joined the first eleven. We’ve been room-mates ever since, and have become closer and closer. I regard him as my best mate at Liverpool.

      He’s an amazing character. He’s the resident joker and the social secretary, and makes the club tick behind the scenes. If we have a night out, Carra’s the one to organize it. He’s invaluable for team spirit. He’s very knowledgeable about football, and quite opinionated, too. He eats, sleeps and drinks the game. My relief, when I go in to training, is talking to Didi about horse racing, but if you talk about anything other than football to Carra he’s not interested. He won’t even pretend to be interested. He’ll tell you to shut up. But if you ask him to tell you the starting line-ups for the 1965 FA Cup final he would reel them off. He gets every football magazine and every book. If Sky showed a documentary about, say, the FA Cup glory years, Carra would be glued to it.

      I could never be like that. I would burst. When Carra’s injured or suspended, he nearly explodes. Without his football he’s like a time-bomb waiting to go off. When we talk about what he’s going to do when he finishes playing, he’s deadly serious about being one of the supporters, travelling to every away game. He’s a fan through and through who is just living the dream. On a couple of occasions my parents have spotted him in the crowd, at Middlesbrough and Chelsea. If he’s suspended, he’ll go to the game with his friends and sit among the supporters. He keeps it quiet because the manager worries he might have a drink on the way to the match. Carra’s just a diamond like that. Deep down, he might still have a feeling for Everton, who he supported as a boy, but he loves Liverpool Football Club. Above all, he’s a fan of football. He loves the lads and he loves the craic of getting on the team bus to head off for a game.

      He works incredibly hard, too. He’s a solid, reliable full-back. We all take the mickey out of him, calling him the stereotypical club pro, Mr Dependable. He believes he’s got more in his locker than that. He gets irate if someone who isn’t playing as well as him gets heaps of praise. Carra’s an unsung hero, there’s no question about that. He’s always the last Liverpool player to be sung to by the crowd, yet he has given as much to the team and the club as anyone currently at Anfield. It gets him down, because he feels like one of them. He sees himself as one of the supporters and asks himself why they don’t love him as much as they should.

      But all this, of course, was still to come back in the mid-1990s. When Carra and I met I was still a young dreamer working my way towards a career in the Premiership.

      I honestly think I did as much as I possibly could as a schoolboy and youth footballer. I don’t see how I could have added much more to my CV. I think I’m right in saying that only Terry Venables and I have represented England at every age level. I played only one Under-21 game for England, and then went straight into the senior squad. Similarly, I played only 10 reserve games at Liverpool before being promoted to the first eleven. As soon as I left Lilleshall it was bang-bang-bang: A-team, reserves and first team within minutes of one another, or so it seemed.

      The issue of my nationality was a theme of my early days in the game. Given my goalscoring record for Deeside Schools – an average of three per game – it was inevitable that the Welsh schoolboy selectors would take an interest and try to persuade me to pledge my allegiance to them. I always knew when a scout was present: I had only to look over to Dad’s usual vantage point to see whether he had company. Nobody would talk to my father during a game because he would make it clear that he wanted to concentrate on the match and on how I was doing. Mum would make all the conversation with the other parents, who wouldn’t intrude on Dad’s privacy in his spot behind the goal. So I had an early warning system: if anyone stood next to my dad, it had to be a scout. To anyone else he would have said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, I’d just like to watch the game.’ I glanced up often, for reassurance, so no scout could have slid up to my dad without me knowing.

      When I was first approached by Wales I was playing for Flintshire schoolboys. I ended up at the national trials, two years younger than I should have been. I didn’t enjoy trials; I never have. You would end up staying in a college for two days, not knowing anyone, very much on your own. But you have to put yourself about if you’re going to get anywhere in football. So I went to a training session, then the first trial, then the final one, not thinking much of it. For the equivalent trial with England a couple of years later it felt like life or death, but with Wales, at the age of 13, I think I regarded it as an elaborate football course rather than as an audition for international representation. I didn’t feel a weight of expectation, which probably helped.

      During the final session my dad approached the organizer and said, ‘If you’re thinking of picking him, you should know that Michael’s not going to be available to play for Wales.’ Dad had spoken to Steve Heighway at the Centre of Excellence, as well as to a representative from Lilleshall. The advice was that if I got tied into the Welsh schoolboy system it would prevent me from playing for England at the same junior levels.

      In that final trial, I knew it wasn’t going to lead to a place in the Wales team. And the following year, of course, I was selected for Lilleshall after a windswept trial at Chester’s Deva Stadium, which meant that I was away for two years and studying at an English school. Besides, the only option I ever had was to play for Wales schoolboys; it was never going to be possible for me to go on and represent Wales at senior level because there’s no trace of Welsh blood in me, though my surname has Welsh overtones. I’m English, with Scottish ancestry on my dad’s side. I always try to make that clear to people who may wonder whether I turned my back on Wales.

      So, in international terms it was England or no one, and I had a really successful youth career. I broke the Under-15 scoring record that had been shared by Nick Barmby and Kevin Gallen, and at Under-16 and Under-17 I also scored plenty of goals. You hear so many rave reviews about young players who are going to make it, but experience teaches us that a lot of them disappear. I’m so pleased that I managed to escape that fate, not to mention proud that I lived up to the promise I showed as a kid.

      That aspect of football has changed dramatically even from when I was a teenager. Then, if you got offered a two-year deal and £500 a week you were ecstatic. And you had to be some player to be offered a formal deal at 15 years old. Nowadays, it’s so important not to let a Michael Owen or Steven Gerrard slip through the net that clubs employ a scattergun approach, offering lucrative contracts to just about anyone. In one sense it devalues what it meant when I was a teenager. The grapevine is

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