Hi Cyn, It's two articles.
Here we go.
No regrets for Fowler on the leaving of Liverpool
BY OLIVER HOLT, CHIEF SPORTS CORRESPONDENT
ROBBIE FOWLER, the icon whose leaving of Liverpool plunged half of Merseyside into mourning and sent shock waves through English football, spoke openly for the first time last night about the arguments with Gérard Houllier and Phil Thompson that forced him out of Anfield and into the arms of Leeds United, a transfer that may yet prove the decisive factor in the race for the FA Barclaycard Premiership title.
Fowler, 26, who has scored six goals in eight league games since David O’Leary paid a fee estimated at £10 million for him at the end of November, revealed to The Times that he had several disagreements with Houllier over his regular omission from the Liverpool side last season and said that he had felt victimised and upset when a row with Thompson cost him a place in the line-up for the Charity Shield in August.
Fowler, whose hat-trick against Bolton Wanderers and sublime chipped goal against West Ham United have seemed already to confirm that he represents O’Leary’s shrewdest signing so far, insisted that he felt no bitterness towards Houllier, but said he came to realise that he risked missing out on the World Cup for the second time in succession if he did not escape the shadow of Michael Owen and Emile Heskey. Both were regularly preferred in the Liverpool attack and there were even signs that Jari Litmanen was edging ahead of him in the pecking order.
To the delight of their critics and the dismay of their supporters, Liverpool’s title challenge has faltered since they sold their No 9 and they now appear to be alarmingly dependent on the fitness and goalscoring prowess of Owen.
“It did surprise me that Liverpool sold me to a championship rival,” Fowler said. “If I was a chairman, manager or whatever, I would not sell one of my better players to a team that is likely to be challenging them for the title. It might backfire or it might not. I think Liverpool were scared by the fact that I had 18 months left on my contract and they were wondering whether I was going to sign a new one. I never asked for a new contract because I was waiting for them to offer me one. They spoke about offering me one in the summer, but that was as far as it went. Nothing materialised.
“Did Gérard ever really have faith in me? That’s a very hard question to answer. There were times when I was in his office and he was telling me I was this and that and the big star, and I could be the best or I could be whatever I wanted to be. I still get on very well with Gérard and I don’t want to say he forced me out, but I think people can read between the lines.
“He made me captain, which was a great honour, but I used to go in and see him and ask him, ‘how many captains at other Premier League clubs do you see sitting on the bench?’ There’s not an answer to that, to be honest. When you are sitting on a bench, you’re not a captain, are you? “When I was playing and there were occasions when we’d be down to ten men because of a red card, I was always the one getting brought off if they needed to make a tactical switch. Well, I was always led to believe your captain should be on the pitch to gee everyone up. I think I was made captain because I had been at the club a long time. That was it.
“The fact is that I was third choice. It was obvious that I wasn’t in the first-choice team Gérard wanted to play. This is a very big season because there is a big incentive at the end of it. I missed the last World Cup in 1998 and I don’t want to miss this one.
“It’s up to me now. If you are third choice at a club behind two England internationals, it is going to be very difficult to get ahead of them in international terms. It was a brave choice that I made and at the moment it seems to have been the right one.”
Number 2 goes like this-:
SATURDAY JANUARY 12 2002
Exclusive: The Robbie Fowler interview
BY OLIVER HOLT, CHIEF SPORTS CORRESPONDENT
ROBBIE FOWLER sat in an office at the Leeds United training complex near Wetherby. Now and again someone appeared at the window and every time Fowler stared out he saw a new friend trying to make him laugh. Alan Smith, the club’s enfant terrible, pressed his nose up against the glass and made grotesque faces; Michael Duberry pretended to drop his shorts; Michael Bridges gave him a V-sign and smiled broadly. Everyone, it seems, has taken to their new goal machine in an instant.
Fowler is easy to like. Not just because he can play like an angel and score goals that even hardened ex-professionals describe on television as “things of beauty”, but also because he is quiet and reflective and funny. To call him misunderstood would be to invite the hounds of hell, who have excoriated anyone who has ever kicked a football these past few weeks, to howl their indignation. Perhaps this much will have to suffice: he is more sinned against than sinner.
There is something self-deprecatingly melancholic about Fowler that those who have categorised him as a class A rabble-rousing Scouse miscreant never see. He has a family now, wife Kerrie and young daughters Madison, 2, and Jaya, 1. They are still in Liverpool while Fowler searches for a house for them all in Yorkshire. Kids, it was agreed, represented a whole new world of worry. Fowler thought about that for a minute and then smiled. “It’s a brilliant worry, though, isn’t it,” he said.
Trouble does seem to seek him out, but he does not run around with it arm in arm. It caught up with him again a few weeks ago, when his friend damaged a camera after a photographer had taken a picture of Fowler asleep in a taxi, dressed in army fatigues, on the way home from the club’s Christmas party. It was before midnight and Fowler was on the way back to his hotel, but he was arrested all the same and soon released without charge.
“I was angry about all that,” he said. “I had come to a new club and, regardless of what has gone on in the past, I am not as bad as people seem to think I am. People’s first impression of me is that I am a bad boy, but people who know me know that I am not a bad lad. I was at a new club and I wanted to settle down quietly and do my job.
“I think the thing that upset me most was that one paper thought it was front-page news. The day before, a man had been convicted of murdering Sarah Payne, and that wasn’t on their front page. Something is wrong if people would rather read about a footballer who was asleep and who was arrested for something he had not done.
“Look, I’d be lying if I said I stayed in every night. I do go out, but I know there is a time and a place for everything. If you are going for a quiet drink, you are not affecting anyone. If you are doing it 48 hours before a game, then people will make a big deal of it.
“This time last year, my wife and I went to the first new place we had tried for two or three years. Someone started taking pictures, there was an argument with some of my friends, a camera got broken, the bouncers thought it was me and they started laying into me. I got another smack for nothing.”
David O’Leary, the Leeds manager, and Peter Ridsdale, the chairman, were staunch in their support when Fowler was arrested after the party and they have already been repaid. Fowler did not score in his first three games, but then the goals came in a flood. Two against Everton, three against Bolton Wanderers and a sublime half-volleyed chip over David James against West Ham United. A dummy that he sold a defender at the Reebok Stadium was the most beautiful thing of all. Everyone began to realise that Liverpool, who were top of the table when they sold him, might have made a big mistake.
Fowler had played out his last couple of seasons at Anfield in an atmosphere that only ever resembled, at best, an uneasy truce. Gérard Houllier, the Liverpool manager, made it increasingly plain that his preferred choice in attack was to pair Michael Owen and Emile Heskey.
He tried to paper over the cracks by making Fowler captain in the absence of the injured Jamie Redknapp, but the uncertainties lingered. Eventually, just before the start of this season, the tensions exploded when Fowler had a training-ground shouting match with Phil Thompson, Houllier’s assistant.
“What actually happened,” Fowler said, “was that Phil Thompson was standing behind the goal and I was taking penalties. I’d hit a few into the corner and this particular one, I sort of whacked it and it hit the net and bounced down. But as it hit the back of the net, it kind of carried on a bit before dropping. It never hit him but it nearly hit him and he came running over and got right in my face and a few things were said. I said a few things to him and he said a few things to me. Things like that happen on training grounds every day, arguments between players and coaches, but the amount of publicity it got was frightening.
“I missed out on another medal because of that and that is what hurt me more than anything.
“I was down to play in the Charity Shield. Gérard had told me I was going to play. A player against a manager, you are never, ever going to win. Me and Phil apologised to each other because things were said in the heat of the moment. It was something so trivial, so stupid, and in a way I did feel bullied. I wanted to play, so that’s why in the end I had to say sorry. At the start, I felt, out of principle, I didn’t need to do it.” That was the beginning of the end, the final catalyst in the cutting of the umbilical cord that has linked Fowler to Liverpool, the club and the city, all his life.
As he sat in that room at the Leeds training ground, thinking ahead to his new life, he thought back to his old one, too, from the days when he attended St Patrick’s School in Toxteth and lived for break times, when he and his mates would burst into the playground and kick a ball about.
“All I can remember about being a kid is having a ball at my feet, really,” Fowler said. “That’s what my Mum would tell you: ‘He always had a ball’. I remember one Christmas I got a bike. That was what our childhood was all about: football and mucking about on bikes.
“I’ll never say a bad word about Liverpool. A lot of other people seem to, but I think that’s why Scousers stick together. We all know it’s a lot better than people make out.”
Fowler admits that butterflies were fluttering around his stomach when a friend drove him down the M62, the motorway that links Liverpool with Leeds, to finalise his transfer. “It wasn’t a case of being scared to join Leeds or scared to leave Liverpool,” he said. “It was just that I had not been in that position before. It was new and strange. It was difficult. I didn’t know how to feel.
“I had been at the club for a long, long time and you do think you are going to be a one-club man. But football’s changed a lot now.
“People were saying, ‘he’s OK because he’s sitting on the bench’, but I’m not like that. I want to play football. I am there to play football and score goals. People were saying that my record wasn’t the best, but you can’t do anything about your record when you are sitting on benches and you are coming on or you are playing and then coming off. For the last few months, if not years, that was what was happening to me.”
He said he felt comfortable at Leeds “from day one”. The sight of him in a white shirt did not bother Fowler half as much as it seemed to affect most Liverpool supporters. “I have actually played for England in a white shirt,” Fowler said, “so it wasn’t that strange at all.
“There are lads here that I have met and played with in England squads, so that helped a lot, too. It’s been easy to settle in. It’ll be a bit of a shock when we all move across here, I suppose. My Mum won’t be there to look after the kids any more.”
The strangest thing is watching Liverpool play and groping with new feelings. Fowler sat on his sofa in his Leeds city centre flat on Wednesday night and watched his old team stumble and fall against Southampton. “From a Leeds point of view,” he said, “that was a great result. I don’t want to sound obnoxious to Liverpool fans, but there will be games where I don’t want Liverpool to win now. I want them to do well. It’s just that I want Leeds to do better.”
Still make me wanna weep
