God’s Honest Truth
By Kitchentable
Issue 71, Winter 2006
Footballers and their autobiographies usually make fairly uncomfortable bedfellows.
After spending a career in a team sport with little or no opportunity to present their own individual point of view - beyond clipped party line soundbites - the autobiography should by rights be something that a footballer relishes. Sadly, beyond the financial appeal, many players appear to see them only as a showcase for the anecdotes that you can expect them to be trotting out at a sportsman’s dinner near you in the coming years.
One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is that the quasi-Masonic nature of football’s job network dictates that any ‘warts and all’ disclosures can be ill advised if the warts in question belong to someone who might one day represent your best chance of future gainful employment. There are notable exceptions, of course, but it is often the case that the stature of the footballer does seem to be inversely proportional to how interesting their autobiographies will be. A player from the lower leagues would be less concerned about revelations of sleeping in his car and wearing the same underwear for a week, for instance, than a recent England international who is still clinging on to his Hugo Boss endorsement deal.
Despite all of this, I am an avid consumer of the genre and have never anticipated the release of one with quite the same zeal as I did with that of Robbie Fowler. Not simply because he was a Liverpool player but because he is a very rich young man. When you have ‘fuck you’ money, and Robbie certainly does, you don’t have to couch your words with one eye on future employment because, quite simply, you have no need of future employment. With no vested interest other than setting the record straight, this factor should ensure that there would be no need for coyness.
Of the subject himself, Fowler’s time at Anfield spanned a traumatic period of change for Liverpool FC and in his career we can often find a metaphor for the club itself. Innocence to disillusionment in 15 annual instalments is a statement that can be applied in equal measure to both the player and his employer.
Along the way, Fowler somehow went from prodigy to pariah. When your first manager drives you home from the club but your last manager simply drives you out of it, then there is certainly a story to tell.
Robbie Fowler’s story actually begins as Robert Ryder’s story and this provides both the first surprise and, perhaps, potential clue to the story. Despite his birth certificate recording his surname as that of his father Fowler was, until his teens, known by his mother’s surname of Ryder and, to this day, is still called Robert by his family.
Despite his parents occupying separate houses, though not separate lives, the childhood that the young Robert Ryder enjoyed is described fondly by Fowler and tells of a close-knit family living in an area that, whilst hardly Surbiton, was still well removed from the media perception that led him to be labelled as “The Toxteth Terror” later in his career. Football was, unsurprisingly, central to everything that happened during his formative years but the dedication and discipline he showed pursuing it might come as more of a surprise for a player so widely regarded as having such a natural talent.
The pursuit of the dream of playing football for a living was actually one of steady progression – ironic when taking into consideration his meteoric rise within the professional game when he finally broke into it. Along the way, some of the insecurities that, contrary to his laissez faire public persona, would hamper his career at Anfield were also evident when he went for trials at higher levels of the schoolboy game such as Regional and National.
Of course, knowing the difference between a player that you can see is good at 14 and one who you know will be great at 24 is the art of the professional club scout. The slight physique of the failed England trialist was of far less interest to professional clubs than his prodigious goal scoring ability and the process of trials and training with prospective clubs began. Although by then Robbie Fowler had a choice of suitors, including Manchester United and his ‘own’ club Everton, the continuous personal interest shown by our club’s first team manager convinced the family that Liverpool was the best place to make the step into the professional game. Almost 20 years after the event, the recollections of being so highly rated by Kenny Dalglish, not to mention the lift home in the Mercedes, is obviously still something that gives Fowler an immense feeling of pride. Far more pride than he gained from his ‘own’ club’s idea of showing their interest by presenting him with a pair of Stuart McCall’s shorts. Set against his eventual exit from the club, his introduction to Liverpool FC could not have been in more stark contrast.
And this is where it gets serious for the player and his autobiography. From the moment he achieved the dream and became part of a professional football club, the unchallenged warm reminiscences of a private childhood give way to engaging a very public set of stories. If a tabloid newspaper ran a contest to tell Fowler’s story in 75 words or less, the winning entry would probably read like this:
Robbie Fowler signs for Liverpool, gets in the first team, scores loads of goals, makes a load of money, becomes a Spice Boy, scores some more goals, gets injured a lot, takes recreational drugs, becomes undisciplined, falls out with the manager and skulks out of the door to seek a few paydays with clubs who don’t mind paying top dollar to watch players stagger through to the end of their underachieving careers. The End.
With the honesty afforded by his financial security, I was looking to Fowler taking the myths apart but, at the same time, I had a sense of trepidation about just what this honesty might reveal about the player and the club.
As the remaining chapters unfolded and Fowler detailed the rise and decline, if not absolute fall, of his career, the most predominant emotion I had was sadness. I was sad for the player, sad for the club and sad for the game as a whole. If I’m honest, I was sad for me too, as the bleakest thoughts I had about many of the aspects surrounding the club’s recent history were pretty much confirmed.
When Fowler took his first Number 27 bus to begin training at Melwood, the extent of his ambition was to be taken on as a YTS and gain a professional contract at the end of it. That he would eventually become team captain, after breaking numerous scoring records, was probably no more than a daydream to pass the time on the bus ride.
Although Fowler’s recording of his progression into the first team isn’t exactly matter of fact - the frustration of the near misses to making his debut are reasonably detailed for instance - it is clear that he found each step of the transition to be pretty unremarkable. When his opportunity came, the ultimate step up fazed Fowler as little as the ones that had gone before. This baptism was set against the closing chapter of Graeme Souness’ reign and Fowler acknowledges that the desperation of the time was probably to his advantage as the manager sought to reclaim some ground by blooding local players.
No sooner had Fowler emerged than the rumours of drug taking began to surface. In point of fact it would be more accurate to say that these rumours gained momentum, as Fowler admits that they had actually first begun when he was still a 17 year old YTS trainee. I was initially surprised to see that Fowler had dedicated an entire chapter to the subject because I felt he ran the risk of fuelling the allegations if he doth protest too much. I was anticipating him simply saying something along the lines of “as a player I have been randomly tested throughout my career so clearly this is all bollocks” but reading of the effect it had on him and his family, he’s justified in devoting more time to refute the allegations. Although Fowler makes the point that someone in his position is bound to attract these sort of stories, he leaves us in no doubt that their source, and the reason for their persistence, is to be found within the supporters of a certain other club in the city. Fowler goes as far as to say that his father, who followed the Blues home and away, is so convinced of this that he is now ashamed to have ever had any connection with the club. One thing is for sure, when the word ‘Smackhead’ is daubed in ten foot high letters on the back of your mother’s house, it might explain why you would want to have a go back at those you felt responsible when you put another goal in their net.
Whilst that particular goal celebration was still some way in the future, Fowler was certainly getting used to more orthodox celebrations as the goals continued to fly in, albeit under a different manager. The end of the Souness era was a disappointment for Fowler as he was the manager that had given him his chance but the promotion of Roy Evans marked what would arguably contain some of Fowler’s best performances in a red shirt.
This period coincided with the real explosion of money in football and Fowler found himself front and centre of the new wave of players as media icons. Whilst other clubs all had similarly qualified candidates, the spotlight fell on a collection of Liverpool players who would collectively become known as The Spice Boys. Whilst Fowler acknowledges that he was on nodding terms with Emma Bunton, he is at a loss to fully understand the justification for the tag that would define that group of players. One thing is for sure though, any similarity with the girl band could not have been based on measuring success - while The Spice Girls were racking up Number 1 hits, The Spice Boys would never reach higher than No. 3.
Fowler is at pains to point out that the notion of the club turning into a holiday camp under Evans is inaccurate - and offers a few supporting instances of the disciplining of players - but admits that there were incidents when the players let the manager down badly. Most notable of these was Evans being persuaded to allow Robbie Williams to travel on the team coach to a game at Aston Villa and then accompanying the players on to the pitch for their pre-game inspection.
Although Fowler expresses genuine regret about a lot of the peripheral issues of that time, it is difficult to argue with his assertion that he was at least delivering the goods on the pitch. Equally, though, it is difficult to argue that many of his teammates were not as two genuine opportunities to win the league title withered on the vine. Whilst Fowler’s recollections of his fellow players away from the pitch are many, few opinions are offered about the performances on it. This leads to some informative or amusing anecdotes, such as Kvarme’s introduction to life at Liverpool almost costing him his actual life as his sleep walking room mate David James began throttling him, but it does leave a few questions unanswered. In his book ‘Over The Top’, Tommy Smith spent 3 pages detailing the relative merits - or not - of journeyman striker Tony Hateley. By comparison, Fowler offers the sort of scant opinion that has World Cup and European Cup winning striker Karl Heinz Riedle put in the same bracket as Oyvind Leonhardsen as “not being able to hack it being at such a big club”.
The players that Fowler does mention in regard to this period, though, are the ones that got away. The list of players he indicates that Evans was in the running to sign includes Desailly, Thuram, Stam and Juninho. All of these deals, according to Fowler, went awry due to the lack of financial support from the board, as did moves for both Sheringham and Litmanen whilst both were entering their peak years. Understandably, Fowler cites these missed opportunities as pivotal moments when the club could have taken the final step under Evans. Of the missed opportunities to deliver the title, Fowler contends that the calamitous defeat at Coventry following the 4-3 win against Newcastle in 95/96 was borne of being physically “fucked” rather than complacency and is still racked with guilt over his suspension after being sent off in the derby in 96/97 that he feels cost the club qualification for the Champions League. The money from this, he believes, would have enabled Evans to buy some of the aforementioned players for the following season that he himself was eventually to miss large chunks of through injury. That it would have saved Evans’ job at the end of the 97/98 season was a point not lost on Fowler either, particularly in the light of who would soon be arriving at the club.
Most memorable films or books contain a single sequence or chapter that defines them, almost irrespective of the rest of the piece. In ‘Saving Private Ryan‘, it is the opening 20 minutes that transcends anything else about the rest of the film. Similarly, Fowler’s book has a chapter that achieves the same end - except in this case it is an all guns blazing assault on a French coach, rather than coast, which is responsible.
The chapter that Fowler dedicates to the detailing of his relationship with Gerard Houllier is the one from which the tabloids have found the richest pickings since the book’s publication. Whilst the individual incidents understandably make good copy it is the sum of these parts that paints a much more disturbing picture for supporters of Liverpool FC. Fowler determines that an already uneasy relationship with his new manager turned irrevocably towards a terminal breakdown after two incidents in matches in the early part of 1999. In the first, Fowler offered his arse to Graeme Le Saux at Stamford Bridge and the second when he offered his contempt to Everton supporters with the infamous line snorting goal celebration. For different, though connected, reasons, the incidents infuriated Houllier. At a time when the manager was courting the ’serious’ press, Fowler’s questioning of the sexuality of The Guardian’s most celebrated straight footballing reader was something that the man with the five year plan could well do without. In the case of the line-snorting episode, the guffawing pressroom response to Houllier’s ill-advised attempt at spinning the celebration as being a tribute to Rigobert Song sealed Fowler’s fate. Ultimately, Robbie Fowler’s Liverpool career was ended not by the shame he brought to the club through these actions but by affronting the manager’s vanity with regard to the press. Except, of course, the parting of the ways was anything but swift and it is the systematic wearing down of Fowler over the next two and a half years that makes uncomfortable reading.
Fowler accuses Houllier, amongst a host of other things, of mounting a concerted press campaign against him and in particular of cynically manipulating the Liverpool Echo’s Chris Bascombe by feeding the then fledgling reporter with negative stories about Fowler. This process also included berating journalists if Fowler was given too high a mark in match reports and even accusing other journalists who criticised other Liverpool strikers, such as Heskey, of doing so merely as part of a campaign to keep Fowler in the side. As Fowler says, some of Houllier’s behaviour wasn’t just strange; it was “fucking weird”. According to Fowler, Houllier used exactly the same tactics during Michael Owen’s final season with the club.
The accusations made by Fowler against Houllier, and a compliant Phil Thompson, are too numerous to analyse individually but if even only a quarter of them are accurate then it still points to a manager too vindictive to reconcile with the player but equally too scared to simply move him out. Although Fowler does not directly make the connection himself, it is not too difficult to assume that even the apparently conciliatory act of making him captain was not part of some longer-term ploy to give the player enough rope to hang himself with.
As captain of the club, Fowler played his part in a season that seemed at last to mark the return of the trophies, if not the football, of previous years. Fowler’s immense pride in leading the club to the treble in 2001, including memorable goals in two of the finals and the final day game that brought European Cup football back to the club, is still something that he feels to this day. Ironically, as he was presented with the UEFA cup by Cruyff, the Dutch legend whispered some advice in his ear about Houllier, saying “Don’t let him drag you down, you’re too good”. Of course, for Fowler, that ship had already sailed and, before the year was out, so had he.
Fowler’s move to Leeds was actually not the first bid that Liverpool had accepted, with that honour going to Chelsea’s £12 million offer the previous year. The response from Liverpool to what was a speculative Chelsea bid was not only to accept but also to forward Fowler’s current contract to
them to aid the negotiations - all without informing Fowler and whilst beginning to leak the usual “we don’t want to lose him but won’t stand in his way” stories to the press. Faced with a negative response from the fans, Liverpool’s approach to distancing themselves from the deal was simply to stop returning the Chelsea chief executive’s phone calls.
The Leeds bid, however, came at a time when the player no longer had the resolve to fight against the tide with a management team who so obviously wanted him out and
that was that. For one so shrewdly advised throughout his career though, the choice of club could not have been worse and Chelsea exacerbated this irony, their counter offer being dismissed by Fowler’s advisors due to the perilous financial state of the club. Fowler’s brief stay at Leeds offered one final twist in the Houllier saga when his eventual transfer to Manchester City was put on hold after the Liverpool manager made contact to say he wanted to bring him home.
In the end, the money wasted by Houllier on finding a viable replacement for Fowler meant that the board was unwilling to support the manager with the funds to conclude the deal, despite Leeds’ desperate state meaning that the club Fowler really wanted to go to could have bought him for as little as 20% of what they sold him for.
At whatever point Robbie Fowler decides to officially end his career, it is probably not too unfair to say that it actually ended the day he walked out of Anfield for the last time. After reading his autobiography, I am left with the feeling that there is a certain duality to him and it is one that might be explained by Robbie Fowler acting as the mask for the more introverted Robert Ryder. To me, it explains some of the contradictions - Robert Ryder feels that being nicknamed “The Toxteth Terror” is disrespectful to his family but Robbie Fowler is perfectly at ease being referred to as “God”. When Robert Ryder is disappointed at not playing a part in an England game, it is Robbie Fowler who, cigar and brandy in hand, berates Glenn Hoddle about it on the plane journey home. And when Liverpool sold the problematic Robbie Fowler in 2001, it left Robert Ryder shedding a quiet tear in Istanbul in 2005 knowing that he could have been playing instead of watching.
While the rest of us still bask in the glow of that match, it might be tempting to dismiss the book as no more than a former player’s account of an era that most of us would rather forget. To do this, in my opinion, would be to underestimate its relevance to the present as the people under whose ultimate watch all of these events happened are still running the club. Fowler, McManaman, Owen and Gerrard represent the four most talented players that the club possessed during that era, all of whom could, and should, have spent their entire careers at Anfield. During Houllier’s reign and in the immediate weeks following it, three of these players left and one came within a whisker of following them. In each case, there were instances where the board either tolerated or were complicit in events that ranged from irresponsible to downright distasteful in respect of these players. Their backing of managers financially over some players, and lack of support at crucial points over others, smacks of people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Can anyone honestly say that much beyond the manager has changed in the intervening period?
Robbie Fowler is probably not the most important player to ever play for Liverpool FC. His book, however, might well be the most important one written about it and we should ignore this lesson from history at our peril.
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