Liverpool Football Club is in my blood.
My grandad, Bill Jones, played 277 games for the club and won the league title in 1947. He’s the reason I’ve always been a Liverpool fan and from the age of six or seven he would take me to games.
From there, you just get the bug, don’t you? By the time I was 14 or 15 I was going to the games on my own and would stand on the Kop. My dad was a Liverpool fan too and I think that’s the way it works in families. My kids are the same: my son goes to the game now and he loves it, and it’s not a bad club to support as a kid, is it? I definitely picked the right one.
It was always my absolute dream to play for Liverpool. I would kick a ball around in the garden with my grandad and he always supported me when I was playing Sunday league football – I remember that he’d come to watch me play.
Playing professionally, and for Liverpool, was always the dream, but it’s the dream for a lot of kids and it doesn’t always happen. I had an ability there and you get a bit of luck along the way as well, and I suppose it was strange that I ended up playing for Liverpool like him. We are actually the only grandfather and grandson combination to ever play for the club, so our family has its own unique little bit of LFC history.
My first experience of playing at Anfield was actually against Liverpool, though.
I was 18 and playing for Crewe Alexandra, where I’d come up through the youth system, in a League Cup game. We were in Division Four [now League Two] at the time. That’s like the start of the dream coming true – to get to play at Anfield. I just never thought that a year later I would be there playing for Liverpool!
All my family were there and I can remember the game clearly. I think for the first 20 minutes or so we actually played really well, but in the end they had far too much for us and we lost 5-1. I actually played quite well and it got reported for a few weeks after that Kenny Dalglish was thinking then of possibly buying me.
If remember rightly, I think Liverpool did contact Dario [Gradi, Crewe manager] at that time but he put them off. He said I was too young and not ready yet, so that fizzled out.
But a year later, in early October 1991, the time was right. It all happened so quickly.
I played for Crewe on the Wednesday, then on the Thursday I got a phone call from Dario saying that Graeme Souness had been in touch. Liverpool wanted to buy me and they wanted to meet me on the Friday.
You didn’t really have agents in those days so Dario sent Kenny Swain to drive me to meet Graeme and all the staff. I remember Dario saying, ‘Go there but if it’s not right and you don’t want to sign, you don’t have to,’ and I was thinking, ‘Mate, there is not a hope in hell that I am going there and not signing for Liverpool!’ The money just didn’t matter at all; this was my chance to play for Liverpool.
