Gerrard: My Autobiography (2 page)

The families are very good at supporting each other. At Liverpool, You’ll Never Walk Alone. Our famous club song is more than a string of words and a great tune; it is a pact between people. We stand together in good times and bad. The people who run the Hillsborough Families’ Group deserve so much praise. They want justice and they
just won’t give up, which is completely right. There are families across Liverpool with an empty seat at their table, an untouched bedroom upstairs. These families deserve justice. I fully support the campaign because I want it myself. We should know exactly what happened at Hillsborough, and who was to blame. Action should be taken against those in authority who let ninety-six innocent people die. My cousin died at Hillsborough, and he has not had justice. When I warm up at Anfield, I see the ‘Justice for the 96’ banner and I nod passionately in agreement. The government should hold a proper inquiry. Only then can the families of the ninety-six sit at home and mourn, knowing justice has been done. Only then can they tend their loved ones’ graves knowing someone has been brought to account for this terrible tragedy. A tragedy that could have been avoided.

Hillsborough must never be allowed to happen again. No-one should lose a life or a relative at a football match. Every time I see Jon-Paul’s name cut into the cold marble outside the Shankly Gates, I fill with sadness and anger. I have never let anyone know this before, but it’s true: I play for Jon-Paul.

CUT MY VEINS
open and I bleed Liverpool red. I love Liverpool with a burning passion. My determination to reach the heights at Anfield intensified when poor Jon-Paul passed away. Also fuelling my drive to succeed was an accident I suffered during my school days. My career was nearly destroyed before it started. All my dreams of starring for Liverpool and England, of lifting European Cups and shining in World Cups, rested on the skill of a surgeon when I was only nine.

Anfield was already my first love and my second home. I’d been there a year, training with Michael Owen at the Vernon Sangster Sports Centre, learning my trade, when a calamity hit me that left me in hospital fearing for my future. Even now, I shudder at the memory of what took place on a patch of grass near my house on the Bluebell Estate of Huyton, Merseyside.

It was just a field, surrounded by bushes, a mess really. The type of place where people threw their rubbish without a second thought. Me and my mates didn’t care. All
that mattered to us was the grass was half-decent for a game of shootie. We were on it night and day, summer and winter. To us kids, that scrap of wasteground was Anfield, Goodison and Wembley rolled into one – a heaven on earth. One Saturday morning, early doors, I was kicking about on the strip with a kid from our street, a boy called Mark Hannan. We’d sorted out the pitch. It wasn’t exactly the Bernabeu, but it was home. A mate nicked some nets from his Sunday League team, cut them in half, and rigged up two seven-a-side goals. Perfect.

So there was me and Mark, having a dead good kick-about, when the ball flew into some nettles. No problem. I ran across to fetch it. ‘I’m not putting my hands in there,’ I shouted to Mark. ‘I’ll get stung.’ I couldn’t see the ball. The nettles were too thick. ‘I’m going to have to kick it out.’ So I pulled my footy socks up and put my leg into the nettles to kick the ball out. It wasn’t coming. I gave it a really good welly with my right foot, my tin-opener, the one I shoot and pass with. I kicked fast and deep into the nettles.

Agony. Total agony. My foot hit something. Jesus, the pain was merciless. I nearly had a heart attack. I fell down, screaming for help. In my career I’ve had smashed metatarsals and torn groins, but honest to God, I have never felt pain like this. Like poison from a needle, it shot up my shins. Mark sprinted over. ‘I don’t know what it is, Mark,’ I yelled. ‘I can’t see it. My leg won’t come out of the nettles.’ Mark looked. Christ. All the blood drained from his face. He’s going to throw up, I thought. How bad is it? I looked down and couldn’t believe my eyes. A garden fork was embedded in my big toe. Straight through
my trainer and into my foot, no stopping. Some nugget tossed this rusty fork away, and it got lodged in the nettles. The handle wasn’t there, just the metal prongs, and I had kicked right into them. I felt the prong go in, burrowing into the bone.

‘Go and tell someone!’ I shouted, and Mark ran off to get my mum and dad.

A neighbour, Neil Weston, heard me screaming, and came running up. He dragged me out of the nettles, the fork following like an extra limb.

‘Shall I pull it out?’ asked the neighbour.

‘You can’t, you can’t!’ I shouted.

‘I’ve got to try,’ he said. The fork wouldn’t shift. ‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ he said, and disappeared.

I just lay there on the grass, tears spilling down my face and fears spinning through my head. Would I ever kick a ball again? Shit.

Mum and Dad arrived sharpish. Immediately, Dad realized how serious this was. ‘He’s going to lose his foot,’ I heard him tell Mum. Amputation? Jesus Christ, no. My Liverpool career was being buried in a bed of nettles.

Finally, the ambulance from Alder Hey nosed its way into the field. It had taken only ten minutes but it felt like ten hours. The medics took one look at the foot and even they understood they couldn’t yank the fork clear. ‘We’ll have to sort this out back at the hospital,’ one of them said. Four people lifted me into the ambulance and off we went, bells and lights going crazy, racing to Alder Hey.

The journey was torture. I never realized how many bumps there were on the roads of Liverpool. Every time we drove over a bump, I screamed at the ambulance
driver. Whenever I moved, I took the load of the fork in my bone, a stone in weight bending my toe. Tears followed every movement. I was shaking. One of the medics tried to hold the fork to stop it digging further in. The pain was horrific. I kept shouting at the driver. ‘It’s not his fault,’ Mum and Dad told me. I just wanted the pain to stop. Stop. Please stop. As we sped through the streets, they pumped me with gas and air.

At Alder Hey, I was rushed straight into Accident and Emergency on the trolley – straight through, no waiting. Everyone could see how bad it was. And hear. Mum was hysterical, and I screamed the hospital down.

Only when a painkilling injection took hold did my howling stop. I was all dazed and weak but not quite unconscious. Through the clouds, I heard the doctor say, ‘The fork is rusty, there’s a chance of gangrene. We might have to take the toe off to stop any gangrene spreading.’

‘Wait,’ Dad intervened. ‘Steven plays football, you must speak to Liverpool before you do any operation. They must know what is going on.’

My dad quickly called Steve Heighway, Liverpool’s Academy director, who drove over sharpish. Steve’s the strong type, and he immediately took control. ‘No, you are not bloody well taking his toe off,’ Steve told them.

The doctor replied, ‘We have to operate. The decision will be made by the surgeon.’

Steve was adamant. ‘No. Don’t take his toe off.’

Steve won the argument. Thank God. The surgeon numbed the whole foot and tugged the fork out. The hole was huge, as big as a 20p coin and an inch and a half deep. It was a mess, but at least the surgeon saved my toe
and my career. ‘You are a very, very lucky young man,’ Steve said. The doctors all agreed. ‘We have never seen anything like this before,’ they said. Even my brother, Paul, looked worried when he came to see me, and Paul usually winds me up over anything.

The one half-decent thing about the accident was that I missed three weeks of school. The doctors insisted, so who was I to argue! School sent homework round but it never got done. No chance. I was too busy milking my injury. My family spoiled me rotten. I lay there on the couch, being waited on hand and bandaged foot, and watching Liverpool videos. Fantastic. All my heroes parading their skills on the screen: John Barnes, Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush. This was my sort of medicine, guaranteed to quicken recovery. Every day, a nurse came round to clean the hole with antiseptic, pack it with cotton wool balls, put a mesh around it. She then bandaged the foot up to the ankle. As the wound healed, the nurse put less and less cotton-wool in. Soon I could go to school on crutches. But I was not able to play in the yard. Nor could I go to the Vernon Sangster to train with Liverpool. For the first time in my life, I was prevented from doing what I love most.

That accident, and the weeks of recuperation, reminded me how important football was in my life. I started watching football seriously on the telly. I sat on the couch juggling the ball on my head, or with my left foot. I held the ball tight, almost for reassurance. I never wanted to be apart from a ball again. I was still getting twinges of pain, but after five weeks I was able to kick the ball cleanly. Thank God. Without football, my life would have been
empty. I never forget that utter desolation of being separated from a ball.

As well as Alder Hey’s permission to bunk off school, the doctors sorted out another bonus. The surgeon took one look at the rusty garden fork and said, ‘That shouldn’t have been there on the back-field.’ So Mum and Dad showed the trainer and the fork to a solicitor and he knew we had a case. We claimed off the council because it was their wasteland. You’re going to, aren’t you? I’ve only made two claims in my life: one was a crash in a taxi which got us £800, and then the fork in the foot. We got £1,200 for that. That wasn’t bad! Mum took me to town, got me new kit, two trackies, loads of stuff. ‘All that pain was well worth it!’ I kept laughing with Mum.

When I think back to the accident, the pain still goes right through me again, like an electric shock. I still see the fork sticking out of my trainer, still sense it grating against the bone. Once or twice, I spoke about the incident with my dad. Like Steve Heighway, he wasn’t the type to take credit. Dad would never boast ‘I made sure they didn’t take your toe off’; he just says, ‘You were fortunate, Steven.’ We all knew if I had lost the big toe of my right foot, any chance of Liverpool and England would have ended right there, impaled on a rusty garden fork on a council wasteland in Huyton.

Bungalows cover that patch of land now. No nettle-beds will ambush any innocent schoolkids now. My earliest pitches disappeared under concrete or cars. They park all over the cul de sac where I grew up, Ironside Road on the Bluebell Estate. Back then, that tarmac area in front of my house, No. 10 Ironside, was My Pitch. No
cars allowed. Unless the weather was good, when we’d dash round to the grass back-field, we’d be on Ironside. Straight out the front door, into a game, full throttle. Brilliant. Someone put that concrete area there for a reason, I’m convinced of it. Someone was telling me to make football my life, showing me the way ahead. It was so strange. That was My Pitch. If anyone was there when I came out of my house, they had to go. We used it for five-a-side, ten-a-side, twenty-a-side, rounders, shootie, catch, and a great game called Bare Arse. That was hilarious! If you got a certain amount of goals scored past you, you had to get your arse out. Everyone then got a free shot at your bare arse. Bare Arse is a Scouse tradition that produces brilliant goalkeepers and really accurate shooters. Fifteen years on, when Peter Crouch struggled to get off the mark at Liverpool, Bare Arse came in handy. We played it in training to help me and Crouchy with our shooting. I dropped my shorts and got Crouch to aim at my Bare Arse. Someone looked over the wall, sneaked a picture, and me and Crouchy both got our arses in the papers! The papers never said we were just playing Bare Arse! Games picked up on Ironside have stayed with me for life.

Ironside was known as the Happy Street. I arrived there on 30 May 1980, straight out of Whiston Hospital and into a football-mad house on the Happy Street. Bluebell’s quite a big estate, a warren of roads with four pubs, one on each side: the Swan, Bluebell, Rose, and Oak Tree. Quite a few famous people come from around here, comedians like Freddie Starr and Stan Boardman, and the old actor Rex Harrison. The actress out of
Sex and the
City
, Kim Cattrall – the lively one – lived on Whiston Lane for a while. Bands like The La’s, Space and Cast grew up in Huyton. Characters were on every corner.

I loved life on the Bluebell – my kingdom, my playground. Two youth clubs offered the usual attractions, but mostly we were outside, playing two-man chase on the River Alt, hide and seek, and you’d better be quick. Me and my brother Paul would come home filthy with mud. Mum went crazy, Dad just smiled. Ironside was always alive with activity. In the summer, families sat out, chatting away, sharing a drink while the kids played. Ironside had many distractions. Two girls my age, Lisa and Caroline, lived either side of No. 10 and I knocked about with them, crawling around the square, playing in the mud. Girls fascinated me. I had no sisters myself. I thought Lisa and Caroline were well fit. I flirted with them. Lisa and Caroline had one fault, though: they couldn’t play football.

Didn’t matter really. I never had far to look for a game. Bluebell was full of lads up for some footy action, always has been. Huyton is famous for producing decent pros, like Steve McMahon, Joey Barton, Lee Trundle, Peter Reid, Tony Hibbert, Craig Hignett and David Nugent. The town is crammed with Sunday League sides. Football is the local religion. On the Bluebell, I joined forces with seven or eight lads my age and we all became good mates, playing football every hour until our mums shouted us in. One problem bugged me: I never got a really decent game out of them. I was better than them, simple as that. I preferred games with Paul, three years my senior. Paul had around fifteen mates and their matches were full-on
brilliant. At six, I could hold my own with Paul and the other nine-year-olds. Most of Paul’s mates wanted me on their side. I loved competing against them. They accepted me because I didn’t look out of place. Paul’s mates were good players as well. Paul himself had trials at Bolton Wanderers. A kid called Danny Walker turned down a YTS at Tranmere Rovers. Paul’s gang played in a local league for an U-10 team called Tolgate, run by two fellas from the Huyton area. One day, I followed Paul down to a Tolgate match and asked the organizers if I could join in.