Robbie Fowler and the neverending search for legends

By Emerald Gao
Written on July 3, 2007

From Tony Barratt's piece for Robbie Fowler Week:

It was his performance in the second-leg which made the rest of the country sit up and take notice though. Fowler struck five times to leave the Fulham defence looking like a kids' team's back four on Botanic Park.

After that he was asked if he'd ever scored more than five and he said: "Yeah, I scored 16 once."

The newspapers set out to find the team he'd scored 16 goals against and one of the Sundays ended up tracking down the lad who'd been in goal that fateful day. They got hold of him and took him down to Melwood to be reunited with Robbie. True to form, Fowler gave him a bit of stick when he got there, but he also gave him a load of training gear and made sure the newspaper looked after his 'victim' with a few bob for his troubles.

It's impossible to overstate just how popular Fowler was with the Liverpool fans at this time. His love affair with the Kop was so intense that only the one with Kenny Dalglish stands comparison in the modern era.

And it wasn't just down to his goals. There was a cheekiness about Fowler that most local fans could identify with and that endeared him to us even more. Even when he messed up, he did so for the right reasons. His infamous goal celebration against Everton may have been ill-advised but most Liverpool fans would love to do something similar given the opportunity. And his abuse of Graeme Le Saux may have been immature and out of order but at least he'd picked the right target to wind up.

Then there was the time he scored against Brann Bergen in a Cup Winners Cup tie at Anfield and lifted his Liverpool shirt to show off a t-shirt displaying his solidarity with the sacked Liverpool dockworkers.

True to form, he was fined by UEFA for his actions but it was a price well worth paying for Fowler as not only had he raised awareness of the disgraceful way 500 workers had been treated by their employers, it also inadvertently led to his status as a local folk hero being set in stone.

It wasn't just about public displays either. Speak to dockers who manned the picket lines during their lengthy dispute and they will readily tell you about Fowler and his great mate Steve McManaman regularly helping them out with donations.

Both Fowler and McManaman kept it quiet. They weren't doing it for publicity but Liverpool being the village that it is, word soon got out and they got the respect they so richly deserved for doing the right thing by their working class comrades and for not forgetting their roots.

It must truly be a blessing to have been a fan of the club when Robbie Fowler was in his prime, the same way it was with King Kenny or Jocky or Ian Rush, or even the indomitable Emlyn Hughes. The role of club legend is something so hard to attain, even more so now in the modern era, when players are shopped around by their agents for higher payrolls but maybe less devotion. It takes a lot of love between a player and a club for them to devote a handful of years to a single place, let alone a decade or a dozen years, and while this is a point I've made before, there must be something about the way these players were both superstars and servants to the club that is so attractive to me.

The more I think about it, the more I think that's how I was absorbed into the clubs I support: Liverpool because of that thick Scouse tradition, even Valencia's stubborn (and often strange) regionalism, although it was certainly Owen and Aimar who first drew me in. To my mind, club loyalty is a coin, with flipsides of fan and player devotion; they are meant to mirror each other, one providing the means, the product, and the football, while the other provides motivation and support. They have to be equal. I'm not belittling other clubs for having a high turnover rate or an inadequate fanbase, because the system is hardly pure enough to allow for that kind of simplicity. I do think, however, that an idealized notion of football is important in order for the sport to remain meaningful for fans, clubs, and players alike.

The Steven Gerrard saga was terrible for a lot of reasons, but what I found most disturbing was that it happened twice. Gerrard has always come off as a bit dim, but as a Scouser born and bred, it seems inconceivable that he would make the same mistake of alienating his fanbase only a year after the first fiasco. We fans might have breathed a sigh (or several ... thousand) of relief after the matter reached some sort of finality in 2006, but the doubts never really go away, no matter how good a captain or a footballer he is. In that sense, maybe he was the lucky one, to be in possession of such rare talent that it remained wiser to pay him while asking for weekly displays of penance than to consider him an expendable burden. Others more steadfast in their dedication but less skilled on the pitch would not have received the same treatment.

There are a lot of players who have come and gone through the years, and their names remain a part of Liverpool history, no matter how small. But when you look at the big picture, only a few names stand out. Liddell. Hughes. Dalglish. Rush. Hansen. Fowler. There will be more in the future -- maybe Gerrard, even, or someone else yet undiscovered. But the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there is no such thing as an instant legend. Rafa has a powerful hold over us, because he has laid the grounds for a new generation at Liverpool, one that embraces the grand Scouse culture that forged the club without forgetting that success often arrives from elsewhere. His system also makes players work, not only for the victory every weekend but also for their very place on the team, and thus their chances of becoming someone the fans can put faith in.

After the Champions League final, I was struggling for awhile to find some kind of closure to the season, but it took a hefty reminder from Barratt's article to discover where it lay. It's fitting that Fowler would end his Liverpool career under Rafa, then, as a changing of the guards, a call to arms for the legends of the near future.

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