MAN WHO LAID PATH OF GOLD
Houllier’s tireless work set up glory for others
AS we sat sipping coffee in the quintessentially Parisienne cafe down the road from his flat, Gerard Houllier was recounting how Istanbul 2005 was one of the happiest days of his life.
Or the saddest.
Just 12 months on from his sacking, Houllier was in the dressing room after Liverpool’s incredible Champions League final win over AC Milan.
“It was very emotional for me,” he recalled. “I was reluctant to get involved in the celebrations, but virtually every player came up to me, gave me a hug and said, ‘ This is your team. Our team’.
“It was funny because it was the first time I noticed that I had signed and worked with every player in that team apart from two.”
Houllier, though, was never a bitter man. Those emotions were joyful ones, even if Rafa Benitez, above, will always be credited with the glory.
Yesterday, it was announced that Houllier had died at the age of 73. As a frontline manager he famously won five trophies in a year with Liverpool – 2001 – and league titles with Paris Saint- Germain and Lyon, twice.
Things would have been different if his second- place finish i in 2002 had been that elusive title win on M Merseyside. As it is, his re real legacy for f football is the in incredible work he did to lay the foundations whi which enabled others to claim the more obvio obvious glory. Houllier resigned as France team manager a little over four years before they lifted the 1998 World Cup. However, his brainchild at Clairefontaine, the French precursor to St George’s Park, produced the players that conquered the planet. A decade after that success, with their country’s football again in the doldrums, the French Football Federation brought Houllier back on board to repurpose their approach to the game.
He had worked out that defensive coaching was now so good that the focus had to be on attacking coaching to score the goals that were needed.
Houllier, whose apartment overlooked Roland Garros Stadium, explained all this to me as I took a break from covering the 2017 French Open tennis.
A year after our meeting, an exuberant, irrepressible, forward- thinking young France team beat Croatia 4- 2 in the World Cup final.
Always in the background, by then he had moved on again to become a football ambassador for Red Bull.
He was vague when I tried to pin down exactly what that meant. Whatever it was, the rise of Salzburg and Leipzig as growing entities in European football has shown it worked.
Save for the occasional passing nod of greeting at Champions League matches, though, it turns out that was to be our last meeting. It would have been hard to guess.
Even then, on the cusp of entering his 70s, Houllier was still networking hard, a major figure behind the scenes of top- level football nearly a decade after heart problems ended his managerial career.
Our conversation was regularly interrupted by people coming up to shake his hand. It seemed he knew them all.
“One last thing,” Houllier said after insisting on paying for the coffees. Did he want a personal favour?
“You writers need to go easy on Arsene Wenger at Arsenal... he’s a good man,” he said as he patted me on the back and ushered me out of the door.
Perhaps it takes one to know one.
Virtually every player came up to me, gave me a hug and said, ‘ This is your team. Our team’