Phillips seizes his chance in Liverpool’s defensive troubles
The 23-year-old centre-half has stepped up to help Klopp’s injury-hit side reach the last eight in the Champions League
Nat Phillips was driving around Germany, the window was down and the voice of Gerry Marsden was at full pelt. Liverpool had just won the title and, despite being 800 miles from his parent club, Stuttgart’s on-loan defender was savouring the moment.
“I drove into the training ground blasting You’ll Never Walk Alone from the car,” Phillips recalls. “One of the lads who sat next to me in the dressing room, Philipp Klement, was a City fan so I wanted to make sure he knew what had happened.”
By the time Liverpool received the trophy, Phillips was home but still on the outside looking in, a television viewer rather than on the podium. “Inspirational and motivational,” the centre-back says. “Seeing what it meant to them and what a huge achievement it was. It was the same when I saw them win the Champions League. I was in and around training then without playing a part. I was jealous they got to experience that moment. It made me think I want to feel something like that one day, and achieve something like that myself.”
Fast forward two months and Phillips was thrust into the sharkinfested waters of trying to replace the irreplaceable Virgil van Dijk.
Last Wednesday, the 23-year-old granted himself a brief moment of personal satisfaction in that thankless task, making his weary way from doping control to Liverpool’s dressing room in the Ferenc Puskas Arena, where he absorbed the significance of helping his team to the Champions League quarter-finals.
“There was a big exhale,” says Phillips of the victory over RB Leipzig. “I just sat there and took it all in for the first five or 10 minutes. When I turned my phone on, it was red hot. There were messages coming from everybody. Every time I replied to one message, I had five new ones from friends and family, old coaches, people just saying how proud they were.
“It was a massive night for me and my family. I never thought at the end of last year and the start of this year I would be playing Champions League football. Obviously spectacular circumstances have dictated that with the injury crisis, but nevertheless it was a special night for me. I have kept the shirts I wore. When we are allowed to go out and about again I will be getting them framed.”
Amid the thrill of contributing to Liverpool’s return to the quarterfinals, Phillips craves more.
“It would be sad if I go on with the rest of my career and it is already peaked,” he says. “It is important to me that it [Wednesday’s win] does not become the biggest occasion or best game I have ever played in. I try not to think about it too much because you can tie yourself in knots. My thought process is to take things day by day. I want to continue to keep having those moments. To be able to do that I have to be competing at a very high level in my career.”
Despite Liverpool’s defensive troubles, on a personal level Phillips has exceeded expectations, including his own. A year ago he returned from a season’s loan in the Bundesliga under no illusions about his Anfield status.
The former Bolton trainee, the son of Wanderers legend Jimmy, was looking to advance his career elsewhere, omitted from Liverpool’s Champions League squad for the group stage. Then the injury tsunami consumed Anfield.
Phillips will evolve the latest centre-back partnership with Ozan Kabak at Wolves tonight. Knowing Van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip will return in pre-season, he is savouring every chance.
“If you had asked me at the start of this year if I am capable of playing in the Premier League I would have said yes,” Phillips says. “Whether it would have been with Liverpool I’m not sure, because the demands are so much higher on a Liverpool player. But certainly I would have been able to play in a Premier League game and do a job. “Over the last year, Premier League football was something I saw as an ambition. With any player, the more games you play in a team, the more you do feel like you belong. But I won’t get carried away with it. I don’t want to catch myself becoming complacent and not putting in the amount of work I need to stay at this level.
“At a club like Liverpool you can never rest on your laurels and think, ‘I am safe now’. You have to earn your right to play every week with training and performances. If you buy into the idea I am there, I can relax a bit, you could end up paying.” Manager Jurgen Klopp has been especially attentive, appreciating Phillips’s maturity and intelligence. His courage has endeared him to the coaching staff, too. The defender split his head open against Fulham last weekend and reopened the wound training at Budapest’s Hidegkuti Nandor Stadium on the morning of Wednesday’s tie. “It wasn’t something to rule me out,” he says. Naturally, father Jimmy is the perfect mentor. “We talk about the games in the same way we did when I was 17 or 18,” he says. “If he thinks I have had a bad game he will tell me. If he thinks I have had a great game he will tell me.” Whatever the future holds, Phillips appears to have a knack of choosing the right path at every crossroad. After his release by Bolton, he was a day from enrolling in college in the United States before joining Liverpool. In a traumatic season, there has been room for one romantic story. “Sometimes you have to roll your sleeves up and crack on and bring whatever value you can to the team,” he says.