EXCLUSIVE: 'I had tears in my eyes' - Coaches reveal how Steven Gerrard became a Kop hero
STEVEN GERRARD is set to play in his last league Merseyside derby on Saturday, three days after his 700th appearance for Liverpool.
Published: 00:10, Fri, February 6, 2015
By PAUL JOYCE
Express Sport catches up with his first coaches at the club, Hughie McAuley, Dave Shannon and Steve Heighway, on the nurturing of a star, how battles with Everton have always been integral in his journey to the top and a future at LA Galaxy.
HOW DID YOU FIRST COME ACROSS STEVIE?
Dave Shannon: We used to do the scouting as well with maybe three or four other scouts. So on a Sunday morning, for instance, I would go to one park where there were a load of kids playing. Steve would go to another one and Hughie somewhere else. You just used to walk round and have a look and see if anything really hit you. But you cannot be everywhere and there are so many pitches in these places that you used to get talking to people. I said I was working at Liverpool, here’s my number and if you see anyone decent give me a ring. I was literally sitting at home one night and I got a call from Ben McIntyre who was with Whiston Juniors, saying there was this kid called Steven Gerrard. ‘You’ve got to see him. He’s outstanding. There’s a game on Sunday.’ I said: ‘If he is that good we are at Vernon Sangster at 5pm on Wednesday send him in.’ He was eight. We used to work on the U9-10s from 5pm to 6pm and the others would be on the balcony waiting to come down. At 6pm the U10-11s would come in. Then at 7 pm, the next lot would come in. It was like a conveyor belt.
Hughie McAuley: You get to know your scouts. There will be some scouts who always say, ‘you’ve got to see this player’ and then there are ones who you have a really good relationship with. Dave had the tie-in with Whiston Juniors and you could sense that they were really excited about Steven as a young lad.
Steven Gerrard's first coaches Hughie McAuley, Dave Shannon and Steve Heighway
DS: The best thing the scouts can do is keep the average ones away from you. Sometimes they’d feel that if they didn’t send someone in for three months that we thought they weren’t doing their job. The problem comes when you get a kid in and we could work with him for 25 minutes and realise that he is not going to be good enough. But he’s got a six week trial.
HM: Steven came in that night and it was funny because, as coaches, when you see something a bit special you don’t even need to speak. You just sort of look and make eye contact with each other. Sometimes he would do things as a young kid and as coaches you would just look at each other and nod. Straight away you knew he had natural ability and the talent to be in the right positions, to get on the ball, to more often than not make the right pass. It was very natural. He wanted to boss everyone around him really. Like he was saying, ‘By the way I’m in charge here, I’ll get on the ball, go up and down, go forward, defend, side-stepping, getting shots at goal.’
DS: He was just different. I remember Jamie Carragher coming in and he was telling everyone what to do from the moment he arrived. He’d say: ‘Get in lad, you won’t get hurt.’ These kids have just walked in and straight away they have this impact which opens your eyes a little bit. They want to show you how good they can be.
Steve Heighway: And Steven wanted to tackle (punches hand with fist)
WASN’T THE FEROCITY OF HIS TACKLING A PROBLEM AT ONE STAGE?
SH: He went through a spate of playing every practice match like it was a first team game. He was getting himself hurt and playing out of control a little bit.
HM: He would be like that in games. I remember one incident at Everton with Franny Jeffers. We had actually battered Everton but we lost 1-0. Franny scored. Steven being Steven, he wanted to make his mark and there was a 50-50 ball right on the half way line. He almost launched Jeffers into the wall. That was his competitive streak which he had too much of at one point. We just had to curb that a little bit. We didn’t want it to get to the stage where he was injured.
SH: We only had a limited time with them. The FA allowed us two nights a week, an hour at a time. It isn’t like it is now. At 16, when they left school they suddenly came to you full time. I can remember Ronnie Moran saying to Jamie: ‘You don’t have to put a whole career into a week, son.’ Steven was the same. He just had to tone it down a little bit because it wasn’t doing him any favours at 16. I remember one ridiculous challenge he went into on a pig-sty of a pitch in the bottom corner of Melwood. He went up for a ball in the air, twisted awkwardly, and was out for about a month. It was in that context that we were telling him to slow down. You’d tell him off one minute but then, in private, turn to each other and say, ‘Wow. Fantastic.’ You were just trying to protect him a little bit from himself. But that was typical of all those best ones. They wanted to impress every single minute. They had a chance to go Melwood full-time and they wanted to catch Dave’s eye, Hughie’s eye. They wanted Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans to see them.
HOW DO YOU NURTURE A TALENT LIKE THAT?
HM: The ones we thought we could take with us, we would give them a bit more. We went on tour to San Sebastian in Spain and we would take the likes of Steven and Michael Owen. It was an U18 trip and they were U14, but we wanted them to have the experience of travelling: representing the club, going through airports, being at games in these high-profile youth tournaments against the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid. We took him to the FA Cup Final in 1996 versus Manchester United. I can still see the picture of my wife, Maria, walking down Wembley Way with Steven holding her hand. He was small at 14 and she was holding his hand, terrified of the crowds there and of losing him.
DS: We wanted them to listen to the messages which were a bit more intense, a little bit stronger because you were dealing with the U18s.
SH: He was lucky in that he came in at a time when everything was changing. Kids in professional football had only ever been trained before. They were coming in, warming up and just playing games on the all-weather pitch. Now we were demanding they were coached. The centres of excellence the FA introduced, which is how Hughie and Dave became involved, were the first time the kids were coached. A lot of the hard-nosed professionals in the game didn’t know what we were doing. ‘Coaching’ was a dirty word in the early 90s.
But there was terrific consistency in staff when he came in. He was getting a message from Hughie and Dave at 10. Then Hughie, Dave and me at 11, 12 and 13 right up to the day he made his first team debut at 18. I bet, in his sleep, he can hear the words Dave or Hughie would say and that is fantastic. It was always us three. It must have driven him nuts.
DS: Wherever he turned one of us was there: ‘Don’t do that,’ ‘Hey what are you doing?’ He could never say; ‘Steve says this or Hughie said that’ because we knew.
WOULD IT BE LIKE THAT TODAY?
SH: It was a unique opportunity for us to spend nine years nurturing a boy. We never made Steven Gerrard and we have never said that. We were very lucky to have him in. I like to think Stevie found his early years at Liverpool ‘cosy’. People use the phrase ‘family club,’ but I don’t like that because clubs have got so big. It was a small group of staff working with small groups of players. Now with physios, sports scientists, coaches, assistant coaches, there are 50-60 people. There is a danger of losing that closeness.
I have to say, the people who worked with him in his early days were top class people who later on in life weren’t always treated well by Liverpool Football Club. He worked in an age where there is a lot more loyalty between club and staff. In those early days, right up until seven or eight years ago, there were some top quality specialists working with kids. Any club that gets rid of specialists is foolish. There will always be new people coming in, but you also need continuity and consistency of message. Sometimes change for change’s sake is not the right decision.
DS: We were demanding as well. We would say, ‘Play the ball 35 yards over there onto the player’s chest.’ As coaches, we would go first. Some of the lads wanted us to miss and for the balls to go everywhere. But because we could do it, Steven responded to that. We’d work on getting everything right: where the standing foot is, we would spend ages doing body shape. Look at him now, he can anything with the ball. We would stand 20-yards away and drill a ball to them. When Steven drilled it back, you were the one under pressure. But that is the environment we were building.
SH: Pass it like a Liverpool player we used to say.
HM: I can remember Stevie and Jamie even at the end of their time there, being 10-15 yards apart, just passing the ball to each other and those were the values that they had grown up with from youngsters. It was the simple things all the time. They had more in their game than that: natural ability and game understanding. But it all developed from those values.
WHEN YOU RECOGNISE YOU HAVE A POTENTIAL STAR IS IT JUST FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL? HOW IMPORTANT WAS SCHOOL FOR EXAMPLE?
SH: The idea that you can be rubbish at school and expect to be a good person and a good player is inconsistent. The things go hand in hand. That was always the message. We weren’t singling Stevie out and saying you need to do well at school. That is the message every kid got because that is what I believed in and always have. We wouldn’t have been happy if we’d had calls from school saying this kid is messing about. We would have taken that really seriously because we believed that wasn’t right. Steven didn’t get any special treatment in that sense. He did in other areas because we identified him. He got more of our attention.
This was our job, so he was always in our mind 24/7. I don’t mean you gave him anything. Steven and his parents never asked for anything. We had one of the world’s best young players and he never asked for a thing. We will all have dropped himself off at his house in Ironside Road, occasionally. You’d pop into the house and his parents never asked for me for anything at any time ever. Compare that with today and the horror stories I hear.
HM: The key word is trust. He believed what we said to him on and off the field.
STEVEN MADE HIS 700TH APPEARANCE FOR LIVERPOOL AGAINST BOLTON ON WEDNESDAY. ALL THE LANDMARKS HE HAS ACHIEVED MUST MAKE YOU PROUD?
DS: We all knew he had a great chance if he stayed healthy and didn’t get injured because of his cavalier attitude. We knew he was an exceptional talent. His team-mates knew because they always used to say to us ‘What about Stevie...’ Players always know who the best players are. To do what he has done and be so humble... well, he has shown that we not only wanted them to become great players, we wanted them to become a great person as well. We wanted them to have humility, like all the legends of the past at Liverpool.
HM: There are not places at Liverpool for everyone. The overall standard was very, very good and I remember at times finding it hard to prune the group and leave anyone out. There were players who went on to have good careers, but maybe they didn’t just have that X-Factor.
HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN HE ANNOUNCED HE WOULD BE LEAVING LIVERPOOL IN THE SUMMER?
SH: There is no debt to be paid on either side here. Steven Gerrard has had an incredible life. He has met some great people, played with great players, enjoyed some fantastic occasions and been well paid so Liverpool don’t owe him anything. And he doesn’t owe Liverpool anything. They have had 27 years of a boy in an age when nobody stays that long, when everyone is off in search of the extra million, the extra opportunity. It is a total balance what he has had out of Liverpool and what Liverpool have had out of him. He should walk away without a single voice saying there is anything wrong with that. He walks away clean. It has been a wonderful partnership.
HM: I still go and watch Liverpool and when you find out he is on the bench for a game, it is not quite the same. He obviously feels he still has a lot to offer and that he wants to play for as long as we possibly can. That is uppermost in his mind.
DS: I was very emotional. I texted him and said I’m sure you have made right decision and I’m not afraid to admit I’ve got tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because it was the end of an era, but I had tears in my eyes. I wouldn’t have wanted to see him playing for another team at Anfield.
STEVE, YOU PLAYED IN THE STATES. HOW WILL HE FIND IT AT LA GALAXY?
SH: It is going to be wonderful for him. The chance to take your family to America? Very few ever come back. It is just going to be such a wonderful experience - the climate, the lifestyle. I did it myself at 34 and went to Minnesota and Florida. The game is really buzzing over there. Every Premier League game is shown live. You can see the lot. He is going to be an absolute God. He will love it. He will be idolised over there.
WHERE IS THE NEXT STEVEN GERRARD FOR LIVERPOOL? CAN THERE BE ANOTHER STEVEN GERRARD?
SH: The question is huge and you could do a fantastic, two hour TV debate on kids aged 12-13 and likelihood of them making it in the game. What I do know is that it will be down to the potential of the kids who are being taken on, the quality of the adults you put with them and the environment you put them in. Then the final ingredient would be the opportunity you give them when they are 17-18. There will be no magic other than those four things.
DS: The problem now is that because the tenure of managers is so short, that unless there is an absolute gem coming through the academy system they are not going to give these kids a chance to get a game in the first team.
SH: I have been down coaching the U12s at Liverpool for the last few months and it was fantastic. Alex Inglethorpe (Liverpool’s Academy Director) has been absolutely great and we have spent hours talking to each other. I am not directly involved, I’m not paid, and so I’m thinking what would we have done? There is a little caucus in there, because it is a huge group, who are really talented and am I thinking how would we have identified them? What demands would we have made on those kids? The criticism of the academies is that you do so much for them now and that life has become easy. That can never be right with a young footballer. I don’t mean being nasty, but you have to be tough, honest and disciplined and make demands of them. That is what we did. No kid would ever have got away with anything because of our values. You could never satisfy us and I am sure they would say that.
HM: I would reiterate the point that it is about hunger. The kids have to be hungry. ‘Hunger’ and ‘passion’ seem to be old fashioned words now, but one of Steven’s favourite words is passion. You can see that in what he does. He knows what it means to wear that red shirt and he always has done. You see the passion and feeling in the way he plays. Steven is Steven. They don’t come along that often. He is unique. But the challenge for the coaches at the academy is to produce players who, one day, will be good enough to play in Liverpool’s first team. It is not easy.
SH: How can the players not be out there? Liverpool is a unique area. Great players play the game of football today and where have they come from? You cannot just take a haphazard view to it that they will either emerge or they won’t. Speaking to Alex at the academy, he is desperate to get things right. It’s very refreshing. He wants to know what was happening 20 years ago when all those players like Steven, Jamie, Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and so on came through.
STEVEN GERRARD is set to play in his last league Merseyside derby on Saturday, three days after his 700th appearance for Liverpool.
Published: 00:10, Fri, February 6, 2015
By PAUL JOYCE
Express Sport catches up with his first coaches at the club, Hughie McAuley, Dave Shannon and Steve Heighway, on the nurturing of a star, how battles with Everton have always been integral in his journey to the top and a future at LA Galaxy.
HOW DID YOU FIRST COME ACROSS STEVIE?
Dave Shannon: We used to do the scouting as well with maybe three or four other scouts. So on a Sunday morning, for instance, I would go to one park where there were a load of kids playing. Steve would go to another one and Hughie somewhere else. You just used to walk round and have a look and see if anything really hit you. But you cannot be everywhere and there are so many pitches in these places that you used to get talking to people. I said I was working at Liverpool, here’s my number and if you see anyone decent give me a ring. I was literally sitting at home one night and I got a call from Ben McIntyre who was with Whiston Juniors, saying there was this kid called Steven Gerrard. ‘You’ve got to see him. He’s outstanding. There’s a game on Sunday.’ I said: ‘If he is that good we are at Vernon Sangster at 5pm on Wednesday send him in.’ He was eight. We used to work on the U9-10s from 5pm to 6pm and the others would be on the balcony waiting to come down. At 6pm the U10-11s would come in. Then at 7 pm, the next lot would come in. It was like a conveyor belt.
Hughie McAuley: You get to know your scouts. There will be some scouts who always say, ‘you’ve got to see this player’ and then there are ones who you have a really good relationship with. Dave had the tie-in with Whiston Juniors and you could sense that they were really excited about Steven as a young lad.
Steven Gerrard's first coaches Hughie McAuley, Dave Shannon and Steve Heighway
DS: The best thing the scouts can do is keep the average ones away from you. Sometimes they’d feel that if they didn’t send someone in for three months that we thought they weren’t doing their job. The problem comes when you get a kid in and we could work with him for 25 minutes and realise that he is not going to be good enough. But he’s got a six week trial.
HM: Steven came in that night and it was funny because, as coaches, when you see something a bit special you don’t even need to speak. You just sort of look and make eye contact with each other. Sometimes he would do things as a young kid and as coaches you would just look at each other and nod. Straight away you knew he had natural ability and the talent to be in the right positions, to get on the ball, to more often than not make the right pass. It was very natural. He wanted to boss everyone around him really. Like he was saying, ‘By the way I’m in charge here, I’ll get on the ball, go up and down, go forward, defend, side-stepping, getting shots at goal.’
DS: He was just different. I remember Jamie Carragher coming in and he was telling everyone what to do from the moment he arrived. He’d say: ‘Get in lad, you won’t get hurt.’ These kids have just walked in and straight away they have this impact which opens your eyes a little bit. They want to show you how good they can be.
Steve Heighway: And Steven wanted to tackle (punches hand with fist)
WASN’T THE FEROCITY OF HIS TACKLING A PROBLEM AT ONE STAGE?
SH: He went through a spate of playing every practice match like it was a first team game. He was getting himself hurt and playing out of control a little bit.
HM: He would be like that in games. I remember one incident at Everton with Franny Jeffers. We had actually battered Everton but we lost 1-0. Franny scored. Steven being Steven, he wanted to make his mark and there was a 50-50 ball right on the half way line. He almost launched Jeffers into the wall. That was his competitive streak which he had too much of at one point. We just had to curb that a little bit. We didn’t want it to get to the stage where he was injured.
SH: We only had a limited time with them. The FA allowed us two nights a week, an hour at a time. It isn’t like it is now. At 16, when they left school they suddenly came to you full time. I can remember Ronnie Moran saying to Jamie: ‘You don’t have to put a whole career into a week, son.’ Steven was the same. He just had to tone it down a little bit because it wasn’t doing him any favours at 16. I remember one ridiculous challenge he went into on a pig-sty of a pitch in the bottom corner of Melwood. He went up for a ball in the air, twisted awkwardly, and was out for about a month. It was in that context that we were telling him to slow down. You’d tell him off one minute but then, in private, turn to each other and say, ‘Wow. Fantastic.’ You were just trying to protect him a little bit from himself. But that was typical of all those best ones. They wanted to impress every single minute. They had a chance to go Melwood full-time and they wanted to catch Dave’s eye, Hughie’s eye. They wanted Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans to see them.
HOW DO YOU NURTURE A TALENT LIKE THAT?
HM: The ones we thought we could take with us, we would give them a bit more. We went on tour to San Sebastian in Spain and we would take the likes of Steven and Michael Owen. It was an U18 trip and they were U14, but we wanted them to have the experience of travelling: representing the club, going through airports, being at games in these high-profile youth tournaments against the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid. We took him to the FA Cup Final in 1996 versus Manchester United. I can still see the picture of my wife, Maria, walking down Wembley Way with Steven holding her hand. He was small at 14 and she was holding his hand, terrified of the crowds there and of losing him.
DS: We wanted them to listen to the messages which were a bit more intense, a little bit stronger because you were dealing with the U18s.
SH: He was lucky in that he came in at a time when everything was changing. Kids in professional football had only ever been trained before. They were coming in, warming up and just playing games on the all-weather pitch. Now we were demanding they were coached. The centres of excellence the FA introduced, which is how Hughie and Dave became involved, were the first time the kids were coached. A lot of the hard-nosed professionals in the game didn’t know what we were doing. ‘Coaching’ was a dirty word in the early 90s.
But there was terrific consistency in staff when he came in. He was getting a message from Hughie and Dave at 10. Then Hughie, Dave and me at 11, 12 and 13 right up to the day he made his first team debut at 18. I bet, in his sleep, he can hear the words Dave or Hughie would say and that is fantastic. It was always us three. It must have driven him nuts.
DS: Wherever he turned one of us was there: ‘Don’t do that,’ ‘Hey what are you doing?’ He could never say; ‘Steve says this or Hughie said that’ because we knew.
WOULD IT BE LIKE THAT TODAY?
SH: It was a unique opportunity for us to spend nine years nurturing a boy. We never made Steven Gerrard and we have never said that. We were very lucky to have him in. I like to think Stevie found his early years at Liverpool ‘cosy’. People use the phrase ‘family club,’ but I don’t like that because clubs have got so big. It was a small group of staff working with small groups of players. Now with physios, sports scientists, coaches, assistant coaches, there are 50-60 people. There is a danger of losing that closeness.
I have to say, the people who worked with him in his early days were top class people who later on in life weren’t always treated well by Liverpool Football Club. He worked in an age where there is a lot more loyalty between club and staff. In those early days, right up until seven or eight years ago, there were some top quality specialists working with kids. Any club that gets rid of specialists is foolish. There will always be new people coming in, but you also need continuity and consistency of message. Sometimes change for change’s sake is not the right decision.
DS: We were demanding as well. We would say, ‘Play the ball 35 yards over there onto the player’s chest.’ As coaches, we would go first. Some of the lads wanted us to miss and for the balls to go everywhere. But because we could do it, Steven responded to that. We’d work on getting everything right: where the standing foot is, we would spend ages doing body shape. Look at him now, he can anything with the ball. We would stand 20-yards away and drill a ball to them. When Steven drilled it back, you were the one under pressure. But that is the environment we were building.
SH: Pass it like a Liverpool player we used to say.
HM: I can remember Stevie and Jamie even at the end of their time there, being 10-15 yards apart, just passing the ball to each other and those were the values that they had grown up with from youngsters. It was the simple things all the time. They had more in their game than that: natural ability and game understanding. But it all developed from those values.
WHEN YOU RECOGNISE YOU HAVE A POTENTIAL STAR IS IT JUST FOOTBALL, FOOTBALL? HOW IMPORTANT WAS SCHOOL FOR EXAMPLE?
SH: The idea that you can be rubbish at school and expect to be a good person and a good player is inconsistent. The things go hand in hand. That was always the message. We weren’t singling Stevie out and saying you need to do well at school. That is the message every kid got because that is what I believed in and always have. We wouldn’t have been happy if we’d had calls from school saying this kid is messing about. We would have taken that really seriously because we believed that wasn’t right. Steven didn’t get any special treatment in that sense. He did in other areas because we identified him. He got more of our attention.
This was our job, so he was always in our mind 24/7. I don’t mean you gave him anything. Steven and his parents never asked for anything. We had one of the world’s best young players and he never asked for a thing. We will all have dropped himself off at his house in Ironside Road, occasionally. You’d pop into the house and his parents never asked for me for anything at any time ever. Compare that with today and the horror stories I hear.
HM: The key word is trust. He believed what we said to him on and off the field.
STEVEN MADE HIS 700TH APPEARANCE FOR LIVERPOOL AGAINST BOLTON ON WEDNESDAY. ALL THE LANDMARKS HE HAS ACHIEVED MUST MAKE YOU PROUD?
DS: We all knew he had a great chance if he stayed healthy and didn’t get injured because of his cavalier attitude. We knew he was an exceptional talent. His team-mates knew because they always used to say to us ‘What about Stevie...’ Players always know who the best players are. To do what he has done and be so humble... well, he has shown that we not only wanted them to become great players, we wanted them to become a great person as well. We wanted them to have humility, like all the legends of the past at Liverpool.
HM: There are not places at Liverpool for everyone. The overall standard was very, very good and I remember at times finding it hard to prune the group and leave anyone out. There were players who went on to have good careers, but maybe they didn’t just have that X-Factor.
HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN HE ANNOUNCED HE WOULD BE LEAVING LIVERPOOL IN THE SUMMER?
SH: There is no debt to be paid on either side here. Steven Gerrard has had an incredible life. He has met some great people, played with great players, enjoyed some fantastic occasions and been well paid so Liverpool don’t owe him anything. And he doesn’t owe Liverpool anything. They have had 27 years of a boy in an age when nobody stays that long, when everyone is off in search of the extra million, the extra opportunity. It is a total balance what he has had out of Liverpool and what Liverpool have had out of him. He should walk away without a single voice saying there is anything wrong with that. He walks away clean. It has been a wonderful partnership.
HM: I still go and watch Liverpool and when you find out he is on the bench for a game, it is not quite the same. He obviously feels he still has a lot to offer and that he wants to play for as long as we possibly can. That is uppermost in his mind.
DS: I was very emotional. I texted him and said I’m sure you have made right decision and I’m not afraid to admit I’ve got tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because it was the end of an era, but I had tears in my eyes. I wouldn’t have wanted to see him playing for another team at Anfield.
STEVE, YOU PLAYED IN THE STATES. HOW WILL HE FIND IT AT LA GALAXY?
SH: It is going to be wonderful for him. The chance to take your family to America? Very few ever come back. It is just going to be such a wonderful experience - the climate, the lifestyle. I did it myself at 34 and went to Minnesota and Florida. The game is really buzzing over there. Every Premier League game is shown live. You can see the lot. He is going to be an absolute God. He will love it. He will be idolised over there.
WHERE IS THE NEXT STEVEN GERRARD FOR LIVERPOOL? CAN THERE BE ANOTHER STEVEN GERRARD?
SH: The question is huge and you could do a fantastic, two hour TV debate on kids aged 12-13 and likelihood of them making it in the game. What I do know is that it will be down to the potential of the kids who are being taken on, the quality of the adults you put with them and the environment you put them in. Then the final ingredient would be the opportunity you give them when they are 17-18. There will be no magic other than those four things.
DS: The problem now is that because the tenure of managers is so short, that unless there is an absolute gem coming through the academy system they are not going to give these kids a chance to get a game in the first team.
SH: I have been down coaching the U12s at Liverpool for the last few months and it was fantastic. Alex Inglethorpe (Liverpool’s Academy Director) has been absolutely great and we have spent hours talking to each other. I am not directly involved, I’m not paid, and so I’m thinking what would we have done? There is a little caucus in there, because it is a huge group, who are really talented and am I thinking how would we have identified them? What demands would we have made on those kids? The criticism of the academies is that you do so much for them now and that life has become easy. That can never be right with a young footballer. I don’t mean being nasty, but you have to be tough, honest and disciplined and make demands of them. That is what we did. No kid would ever have got away with anything because of our values. You could never satisfy us and I am sure they would say that.
HM: I would reiterate the point that it is about hunger. The kids have to be hungry. ‘Hunger’ and ‘passion’ seem to be old fashioned words now, but one of Steven’s favourite words is passion. You can see that in what he does. He knows what it means to wear that red shirt and he always has done. You see the passion and feeling in the way he plays. Steven is Steven. They don’t come along that often. He is unique. But the challenge for the coaches at the academy is to produce players who, one day, will be good enough to play in Liverpool’s first team. It is not easy.
SH: How can the players not be out there? Liverpool is a unique area. Great players play the game of football today and where have they come from? You cannot just take a haphazard view to it that they will either emerge or they won’t. Speaking to Alex at the academy, he is desperate to get things right. It’s very refreshing. He wants to know what was happening 20 years ago when all those players like Steven, Jamie, Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and so on came through.
