Robbie Fowler and the problem of honesty

Robbie Fowler has an honesty problem.

After crawling through the morass of banal cliches of James Milner's book, I didn't think honesty could be a problem where autobiographies were concerned, but Fowler's My Autobiography has set me right on that score.

The most significant element of this book, I think, was its timing. Fowler wrote the book in 2005, while he was enduring a torrid time at Manchester City. It is only in the book's epilogue that we learn that he is returning to Liverpool, his hometown team, the one he joined as a teenager.

Writing the book, Fowler set out to settle a few scores; one in particular. Of all the books we have reviewed so far on the Ademola Bookmen podcast, none come close to Fowler's in the sheer loathing the author has for a particular individual. In Fowler's case, it is Gerard Houllier.

Large parts of the book's 480 pages are tied up with attacking Houllier. This is the very kind of thing that I go in for in these books. Beefs between players, coaches, and so on, make for great reading, viewing, etc. The fact that they are in pre-production of a dramatized film of the events of Saipan 2002 are a clear testament to that fact.

But whereas the national emergency of the Keane-McCarthy brouhaha began with a shouting match between the two men, Houllier's modus operandi was much more underhanded. According to Fowler, Houllier was less likely to confront a problem head- on, than he was to quietly pour hemlock into its ears while it was sleeping.

So sly and underhanded was Houllier that he hid behind his number 2, Phil Thompson. In the Shakespearian telling of this particular story, if Houllier is Claudius to Fowler's Hamlet, that would make Thompson Polonious. But rather than being cleaved by a sword, in Thompson's case, Fowler almost hit him with a football. But the real tragedy here was that it wasn't Thompson who was smithed by the errant ball, it was Fowler himself. Outrageous fortune, indeed.

In Fowler's telling, it was a petty, training ground incident that ended one of the great Liverpool careers. A career that saw Fowler score 183 goals for his local team, earning him the nickname the Toxteth Terror initially and then the much simpler and more impressive one of God.

According to God, one day as he was peppering shots at goal, the nearby Thompson went apoplectic as one of the shots nearly hit him, even though he was standing on the far side of the goal net.

Fowler says that Houllier was insisting to him that he was central to his plans while at the same time trying to quietly offload him to other clubs. If Houllier was on the lookout for a pretext to finish the job of getting rid of God, he had found it in this childish spat.

When Houllier joined Liverpool in the ludicrous position of co-manager in 1998, he did so without the knowledge of his fellow co-manager, Roy Evans. Much like everyone else at the club, Evans believed that Houllier was being brought in as an assistant rather than a usurper. After spending the first few months of the season countermanding Evans' decisions, Houllier took sole charge of the team when a frustrated Evans resigned.

Sadly, for Fowler, it was around this time too, that his career started to wane.

Having exploded out of the blocks as a 17-year-old, scoring more than 30 goals in his first three seasons, Fowler had the right to believe that he would go on scoring forever and always. The goals didn't dry up exactly, as Fowler always scored, but never again at the same rate.

Two things may be to blame for this. Certainly injuries, which hampered Fowler for most of his career, but professionalism was also a possible problem for Fowler.

His career spanned the period in English football when beer was replaced by broccoli. The industry that he started out in, where team building was done in the pub, is not the one he finished in. His book is perhaps the only one we've read from the last 20 years that didn't devote a chapter to nutrition. And while that is very welcome for the reader, it does leave you wondering whether the change in English football is partly what left Robbie behind.

Fowler has every right to dedicate large parts of his book to attacking Houllier – and his proxy, Thompson. They did drive him out of a club that was his, after all. And while he did re-sign for Liverpool in 2006, it wasn't before he had to watch them lift the European Cup as a spectator in 2005. For a player who didn't win much, that must have been a bitter pill.

In Houllier, Fowler has an individual to blame for the fizzling out of a career that promised more than it delivered. Houllier probably was sly and underhanded. The manner in which he got rid of Fowler may have been both of those things, but it doesn't mean that he wasn't right in doing it. Breaking up is hard to do. It was tough for Fowler, and it seems that Houllier did fudge his lines when he did it.

I remember Fowler for his astonishing ability to sniff out goals in the most unlikely of places. But I also remember him as a cheeky and roguish individual. This is an image that Fowler failed to remember while writing this book.

Honesty in an autobiography is usually a virtue. In the case of Fowler's, I can't help but think that had he written it at any other time in his life, the book would have been much less petty. And for him, if not necessarily for the reader, that would have been much better.

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