‘It had a soul and you could feel it’ – why Liverpool owe their glory to Melwood

After his retirement in 2013, Jamie Carragher was on his way to the gym when he realised he had driven back to Melwood. He is not the only player to still feel the draw of Liverpool’s iconic and now former training ground.

The base was transformed from a “sorry wilderness” by Bill Shankly into the place where all-conquering teams were developed. It was home to his “Mini Wembley”, witnessed bemused visitors searching in vain for Liverpool’s magic formula, fostered a culture that endures in Jurgen Klopp’s side, played host to technical and tactical innovations, fearsome tackles, Graeme Souness’ flying elbows, the realisation of dreams and the breaking of hearts.

It was the place where boyhood Liverpool fan Jason McAteer sobbed his heart out on his final day, where Royal Mail delivered sacks of fan mail to Michael Owen and where Anne and Paula, and later Carol and Caroline, dispensed food, hugs and life advice from the canteen.

It was the place where the players sensed Fernando Torres’ sale before it happened and where Ronnie Moran would walk laps every day until he died.

Its location also created the spectacle of elite Liverpool players knocking on the doors of the houses that border the fields to ask: “Can we have our ball back?”

As revealed last month by The Athletic, Liverpool have chosen the international break as the moment to finally make their delayed move from Melwood to a new, state-of-the-art complex in Kirkby.

Former players and managers explain to The Athletic what made the old place so special to one of English football’s most successful clubs and why, once it takes hold of you, it never lets go.

Melwood was the birthplace of Shankly’s “pass and move” philosophy but when he turned up in north Liverpool in 1959 he was less than impressed by what he saw. 

“There was an old wooden pavilion and an air raid shelter and there were trees, hills and hollows, and grass long enough for Jimmy Melia to hide in standing up. It was a sorry wilderness,” Shankly wrote in his 1974 autobiography. “One pitch looked as if a couple of bombs had been dropped on it. ‘The Germans were over here, were they?’ I asked.

“The front pitch was bare except for the middle. I was told this was a cricket pitch. “I’ll cricket you!” I said and it was made into our five-a-side pitch.”

Ian Callaghan, holder of Liverpool’s all-time appearance record, was one of the players who experienced Melwood in those early days under Shankly, who quickly got to work innovating and improving, even if he had little time for those in the gym.

“Liverpool were a Second Division side going nowhere but after Bill Shankly was appointed in ‘59 he transformed the place,” he said. “What Liverpool Football Club is today, a fantastic worldwide club, he started it all off. Suddenly, everything we did was with a ball. Shanks brought in the shooting boards and the sweat box, which had walls about 30 yards apart.

“You had to play the ball off one wall, control it, turn and then play it off the other board. Your legs would be like jelly. It was great because you were working on your control and stamina at the same time.

“We only had a tiny gym with a few weights and a leg press. It only got used by players who were coming back from injury and looking to build their strength up. I remember having treatment one day and the door opened. Shanks popped his head in, looked around, shook his head and then the door closed. If you weren’t fit to play you weren’t of any use to him.”

Shankly (far right) puts his Liverpool players through their paces at Melwood in 1961 (Photo: Charlie Owens/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

If Shankly began the improvements, Klopp and FSG have taken them to another level with the £50 million facility at Kirkby designed with input from the manager and the players. It includes two gyms, a large indoor sports hall, swimming pool, an extensive hydrotherapy complex, specialist sports rehabilitation and medical suites as well as relaxation and dining areas. There are also dedicated TV studios, press conference facilities and an array of offices with balconies overlooking the pitches.

The site also brings back together the first team and the academy, which for Roy Evans, a Bootle-born defender in the 1960s and 70s and the club’s manager in the 90s, was always a vital part of Melwood’s culture.

“The 1964 boys were always great with the younger lads,” Evans tells The Athletic. “The nice thing was if you were a young lad of 15 like me at the time you got to mix with the first-team players like Ian Callaghan, Ian St John, Ron Yeats. We always used to play six-a-side competitions. You’d have two first-team players, two reserves and then two of the younger kids so it gave you the chance to play with your own team and those above you.”

Shankly, according to Evans was “a character” who “would pat you on the back but he would also kick you up the backside. He had good discipline. He loved football. For me it was Shankly who was the guy that started the whole Liverpool Way.”

Discipline can always fray on the training ground though and Melwood was no different.

“When you’ve got players like Tommy Smith there were always tackles flying in,” Evans says. “When you’ve got 30 or 40 people fighting for places there were always fallouts. To be fair to the staff you had Ronnie Moran, Joe Fagan, Bob Paisley and Shankly. They would let a little bit of it go and then step in and say, ‘Right, you’ve got to work together’. There was always the odd fallout but once you got off the pitch you would shake hands and get on with it.”

Evans first went to Melwood as a teenager. Back then the players used to meet at Anfield to get changed before getting the bus to West Derby. “Then they upgraded it so then we had a place to get changed down there so we used to drive to Melwood,” the 72-year-old recalls. “It made it a lot easier but we missed the laughs on the bus.”

Where does Melwood stand in Liverpool’s history? “It is not quite as big as Anfield in terms of the history of it. Not everyone will know it. But anyone who worked for Liverpool will know what a great training ground it was,” Evans says. “Of course I missed it when I left. I spent most of my life there. I was probably there more than I was at home.”

Evans, and plenty of Liverpool players before and after, also spent a bit of time knocking on the neighbouring doors to ask the question every back-garden footballer will be familiar with.

“It is surrounded by houses,” Evans explains, “and sometimes if you were playing five-a-side games and the ball would fly over into somebody’s garden and you would have to go around and knock on the door and say, ‘Can we have our ball back?’ Even if you were playing for a team like Liverpool you had to do that!”

Spectators were also common along the fences but Evans says Liverpool were always on the lookout for opposition spies.

“You didn’t have to tell anyone who the team was until the game but if they came over they could have guessed it so we always had to be a little bit careful,” he says. “If it was anybody who lived in the houses we couldn’t complain as for the amount of balls we kicked into their gardens!”

Another local lad who spent a large part of his life on the training ground was Phil Thompson, who visited Melwood as a fan, an apprentice, captain, reserve coach, assistant and a manager.

“Since 1969 to 2004 I’ve had a love affair with the place,” the three-time European Cup winner tells The Athletic. “I remember coming back in the week after Gerard Houllier had his illness (in 2001-02) and I remember standing against the wall where Shanks stood on ‘Mini Wembley’.

“I was standing there when the training was going on and thinking, ‘I am manager of Liverpool Football Club. I’m picking the team. I am doing what Bill Shankly did’. Now if that sounds weird to you, it was extremely weird for me who had been there and done it all. I had gone from being a Kopite to picking the team for Liverpool.

“I can still picture myself doing it because I had my right leg up back against the wall like the pictures you see of Shankly where the kids are all sitting on the wall. That was the wall I was standing alongside and it flashed through my mind that I was manager of Liverpool. Gerard was going to be out for months, we knew that. It was surreal. It still is.”

Mini Wembley?

“Mini Wembley was where the staff and their apprentices played their five-a-side but it was more like eight-a-sides,” says Thompson. “The person who was the last line of the defence could always handle the ball. Shankly was always that one directing things from the back pointing that right index finger as he would. It was amazing.

“You would have Shankly, Paisley, Fagan, Moran, Reuben Bennett, Tom Saunders and because of the amount of apprentices one of us would always go on the staff side and Moran used to always pick me. I thought they were only picking me because I could run as I was a cross-country champion. It was only as I got older and had a little sit down with Moran I asked him why he always picked me and he said, ‘We could see you could be a player so we were trying to give you our experience’.

“Now and again when I was on the apprentices, oh my god did they challenge your brain! They bent the rules. It was all done to test you. They would push the boundaries. The apprentices could be winning 12-11 and you should finish as we always finished at 12 o’clock but Shanks would be there to say, ‘Five minutes to go’. As apprentices we’d score another so it would be 13-11 and that five minutes would go on until it went to 14-13 to the staff and Shanks would whistle at the end of the game. You would be frustrated like mad. They really tested your character and how much you wanted to win. 

“If you ever got into an argument you’d think, ‘What have I done? I’ve just been arguing with Bill Shankly or Bob Paisley’. But they liked that if you had a voice and were able to compete. I remember one of the guys, Paul Johnson, got into a fight with Ray Clemence and I couldn’t believe it. Paul was a physical lad but you just didn’t get into fights with the more senior players.”

Thompson, who won seven league titles as a player, puts the success they had on the pitch down to the work done by the coaches at Melwood. “You ask any of my fellow pros,” the 66-year-old says. “The biggest thing you would hear is Ronnie Moran’s voice ringing in your ears. You could win four or five-nil on a Saturday.

“You come in on a Monday thinking we were Jack the lads. We’d be in a really great mood and we’d start off the eight-a-side and it would be all sloppy and Moran would go ‘Ahhhh! Who do you think you are? Do you know this team coming Saturday? They won here last year’. It was like that time after time and if you had a defeat nothing would change. They always believed in what they were doing and they never got carried away.

“Ronnie Moran wrote in his books every single day from the start of pre-season right the way through until the last game. He would write down what the weather was like, what time we were training, if anybody was late, which players were injured and what treatment they had. He would write it all down.

“So if we were having a little bit of a hard time he would go back to the same time the year before and see what we done, what was our training session, what did we do on this given day. If we had a couple of thigh strains he’d have a look if we had done something different he would always look back to the previous year.”

The atmosphere and magic of Melwood helped Liverpool to win 14 league titles and six European Cups in their time training there but it was not always obvious to outsiders.

“People would come to do their coaching badges and they’d come from abroad and they’d sit there on the veranda at Melwood. They would have notepads and a camera. They’d be there and we would come down to do our warm-up which was the same every day. Then we’d go out and put the sticks down across the pitch and play eight-a-side for like an hour and do a few sprints in between,” says Thompson. 

“When you would come back up and look, the fella would be sitting there with his notepad open and he’d be looking and say, ‘When do you start training?’ They were expecting it to be something ultra special because we were the best team in the world at the time. You must be doing something special but they would go home with their notepads empty.”

Liverpool have signed many players in the past 70 years who have either soared or flopped at Anfield but it was Melwood where they made those important first impressions on their new team-mates.

After a month-long trial at Melwood, Jim Beglin was signed from Shamrock Rovers in 1983. The Irishman was Bob Paisley’s final signing for Liverpool.

“I can remember the first day we were on the all-weather pitch and I remember only one first-team player was in that day and it was Graeme Souness,” Beglin tells The Athletic.

“Every other first-teamer had the day off but Souness was in. He was playing for the opposition and I didn’t do it deliberately but the first thing I remember was I had to make an impression. This was my big opportunity — Roy Evans said later that it stood out and made an impression on him — I took the ball off Souness. I went and did that and remember feeling really good about myself. 

“Then about five minutes later I saw another opportunity to take the ball off Souness. As I went into his territory he elbowed me so hard. I don’t know how he didn’t break my jaw. I thought, ‘Right, I can’t show any weakness now’, even though I wanted to go off the pitch and lie down because he hit me so hard. That’s how he used to play with his arms up and if anyone came anywhere near him he would fend them off. I didn’t know what I was doing for the next few minutes.”

Beglin still remembers the “magical” moment of seeing Bob Paisley walk over to watch him as he practised shooting, as well as the blunt warnings of Moran to any player who dared sit on the steps after training — “Get off the steps, they’re cold, you’ll get piles!” — but it was for a moment in November 1984, before Liverpool were to play Southampton, that he will always recall Melwood fondly.

“Kenny Dalglish liked to name his team at about 1:45pm on a Saturday for a 3pm kick-off. Fagan always named his team in the dressing room at Melwood on a Friday. I remember he told me I was playing. Once I found that out I was absolutely buzzing, I was on another planet. For me that was one of the great moments of my life and it happened at Melwood,” he says.

Like Evans he believes the culture at Melwood has been central to Liverpool’s success, including the recent glories of the Klopp era.

“Anfield was magical and that will never change but the humility side of it, the psychological stuff that was pumped into us was all done on a day to day basis at Melwood. How we trained, how we reacted, how they strived to get our feet back on the ground. You could come off the pitch walking on air if you had a great game but by time you got to Melwood on a Monday you were brought back down to earth.

“All of that is very important and I think Klopp even now stresses how you have to approach it in the right fashion. There is so much he delivers which was in place back then. You can never ever think that you have cracked it. I’ll always be grateful for Melwood and I consider myself to be very lucky to have been there. It will be missed.”

By the mid-1990s Melwood was in need of another revolution and it was brought about by Gerard Houllier.

“Being a massive fan I knew the history of Liverpool. Everything about the club is nostalgic,” says McAteer, who joined from Bolton in 1995. “The Boot Room, Anfield, the old dressing room and then Melwood was an iconic place where all the best players for Liverpool have played. It was very historical, nothing had really changed. Liverpool were quite stuck in their ways.

“(Houllier and his staff) were ahead of us in terms of the science of the game and the outlook of where it was going. They had different ideas. Melwood needed to accommodate what he wanted. He put the foundations in place for what you see today.”

McAteer, like many former Liverpool players, feels emotional at the thought of Melwood closing its gates — “I was gutted to be honest because it is part of the DNA, the fabric,” he says.

“You go to Melwood and you drive down you are in a built-up area of houses. It is where people live, it is a heartbeat. It is like you are part of the people,” he says. “When I was at Bolton they couldn’t afford a training ground and we used to train at a factory. Nobody came to watch us. Then all of a sudden you are at Melwood. You open the training ground doors and there are so many people there who want pictures and autographs. Sometimes it would take you 10 minutes just to drive out. “

The passion extended to the fan mail.

“When Michael Owen was at his peak with us Royal Mail used to come and deliver sacks of mail to him at Melwood,” he says. “We’d all get plastic bags of it and he would get sacks. It was ridiculous,” he says.

I turned up at this place 30 years ago. Little did I know that it would provide me with the memories of a lifetime. So many great people walked through those gates. And so many friendships formed. Thanks for the memories. pic.twitter.com/vmFPUdkq1n

— michael owen (@themichaelowen) November 10, 2020

“Do you know what else Melwood had? We used to have two girls called Anne and Paula who used to make all the food for us in the canteen. Anne and Paula were there every day and we’d train and they were basically our counsellors. The amount of times I’d cry to them and they’d give me a cuddle or they’d ask if you were alright and you would become attached to them. They become like your favourite aunties,” McAteer reflects.

“Training would finish and me and Jamie Redknapp would stay out and Ronnie Moran would come out and say, ‘Get in!’ Because we used to be on the training ground fizzing balls about. The girls would actually make us food to take home for our tea. That’s what it was like. Workplace is the wrong word. It was like a second home.

Steve McManaman, Rob Jones, Stan Collymore and McAteer launch a Liverpool away kit at Melwood (Photo: John Giles – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

“I cried my eyes out when I left Melwood and it wasn’t just because I was leaving Liverpool, the football club, it was because I left Melwood. I was absolutely broken. I was sobbing my heart out and Anne and Paula were giving me a cuddle and saying all the right things, ‘Come back anytime, come back and see us’. It’s not ‘Come back to Anfield’, it is ‘Come back to Melwood’.”

It is not only the players who revere Melwood. Gerard Houllier feels the same emotional bond to a place he describes to The Athletic as “legendary”.

“That’s what it is for me because even before I went to Liverpool I knew Melwood was the place where Shankly, Paisley, Fagan, Dalglish went to prepare the success of the team. I think it has a soul,” the Frenchman says. “It had a soul and you could feel it.”

Houllier was manager of Liverpool from 1998 until 2004 and in 2001 won a League Cup, FA Cup and UEFA Cup as well as the Community Shield and Super Cup. As McAteer explained, he also transformed the training ground with the opening of the Millennium Pavilion.

Houllier had visited Arsenal, Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers and France to help inform Melwood’s new designs.

“We transformed the place because we wanted to bring it up to the date with the 21st-century demands in terms of team preparation and work to be done on the field. But we kept the spirit. We kept the general feeling about the place I think,” Houllier says.

“I remember the wooden benches, even in the former premises it was very minimal. I think Sami Hyypia and Dietmar Hamann were signed in the old Melwood. They couldn’t believe it was so rudimentary and basic. But I think the new facilities — when you look at Melwood and you think of the trophies and silverware that have been won now. I don’t think we did too badly.”

About two years ago Houllier took his grandson to visit Melwood during a trip to Liverpool. “My grandson was surprised that my name was on the wall,” he laughs.

“They will reshape a new atmosphere there,” Houllier says of the move to Kirkby. “The good thing is they will have a unity of place, atmosphere and philosophy which is important. Part of your success comes from your home — I insist on the word home — on the home where you prepare your success. It creates an atmosphere, an ambience, you know?”

Can a training ground really have such an effect on a team’s performances?

“For me, training grounds are in some ways more important than the stadiums,” Carragher tells The Athletic. “You think of how long I was at Liverpool, I played over 700 games and you cut that in half, then I have played at Anfield say 350 times or something like that. But if you actually think of how many times you go to Melwood and it must be in the thousands.”

Carragher knows better than many how special Anfield and the world’s other great grounds can feel on those big nights and his book, The Greatest Games, out this week, is testament to that. But having started training at Melwood in 1987 as part of the school of excellence he is adamant of the power the place held. 

“There is a mystique about it because you can see what Shankly’s and Paisley’s teams did on the pitch you know about the finals, you know about the scores but the day-to-day stuff — that’s what people don’t see, what fans don’t see. That’s where the mystique is created,” he says.

“That feels like your home. You play at Anfield maybe 25 times a season, 30 if the cups have gone your way. You’ll do that in a month at Melwood by being there every day. It is that place that I think is the heartbeat of the club rather than the stadium in some ways. It does feel strange that Liverpool are finally moving on.

“I think we probably did get left behind in some ways when you look at other teams’ training grounds. Gerard Houllier came in and decided Melwood wasn’t big enough, wasn’t good enough and decided to build on the old all-weather pitch. That was a complete change.

“The old boot room way of doing things was (that) anyone passing could almost just come in. You would have all kinds of different characters at the gates. Legends were always knocking around the training ground. There would always be someone selling something. That’s just the way it was. I think when Houllier came in that stopped a little bit and it was more maybe if you were an ex-player you could come in.”

Liverpool fans try to get a glimpse of the squad training in 2005 (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

Carragher trained at Melwood with two of the finest strikers Liverpool have ever had in Torres and Luis Suarez, though you would have had to have seen one of them play at Anfield to know that was the case.

“If you are just looking at Melwood performances I don’t think Torres would get anywhere near the top 50 players to ever play for Liverpool,” he says. “Whereas Suarez was a beast in training. He trained the way he played. You could see he was a class act whereas Fernando was one of those players where… a training session is basically a game of football on a smaller scale whether you are working on a five-a-side or you are working on a back four. Everything is small. Whereas Torres exploded in big spaces and 11 v 11 that’s when he was at his best. So, it was probably quite clever not to really judge Fernando on training sessions when he came in or through the duration of his time because he normally did the business at the weekend.”

A change in the natural atmosphere at the training base will quickly tell the squad that something is up, as it did on Melwood in January 2011.

“I remember Torres leaving. I just remember it was one of those days where there were people just flying around the training ground,” Carragher says. “We talk about Melwood as being a private place and people can’t get in, well, there were agents everywhere. We were obviously trying to do deals and spend the Torres money. You just look at it and think, ‘I don’t like the look of this’. It wasn’t a good time that and probably one I don’t look back on too fondly.”

Carragher retired as a one-club man having played 737 times for Liverpool. “People always ask you, when you retire, ‘What do you miss?’ Of course you miss playing at the big games and at Anfield but I miss Melwood,” he says. “Just being there. It felt like your house, it felt like being at home. I’d be one of the first in. I’d drop the kids off at school and I’d be there.

“It’s a huge part of your life and a few months after I left I actually drove there without thinking. I was supposed to go to the gym in the morning and you know when you completely lose track of what you are doing. I was just going down Queens Drive and that journey I had made every day for almost 20 years. I just got there and was like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’”

Carragher is not the only player to have been drawn back and while the culture and the success that was created at Melwood resonates with many who worked there, so do the funny stories of what happened on and off the fields.

“I always remember — and this always makes me laugh this story — we’d sold David Thompson. He hadn’t even retired, he had just moved to Blackburn and one day he just drove to Melwood in his car,” says Carragher. “He was playing for Blackburn and he came to Melwood!

“Another one that comes to mind is when Pepe Reina hit the ball at Rafa’s head. Oh my god. It nearly killed him. I always remember a trick Robbie Fowler did as well. He did the Pele one where you flick it over your head. He did it to Xabi Alonso in a game. You should have seen Xabi Alonso’s face, honest to god!”

When Klopp was asked about Liverpool’s move to their state-of-the-art facility he admitted to “mixed emotions”. It is the emotion, the memories, the tradition of Liverpool football club that talk of Melwood evokes. It is a tradition Carragher would like to see upheld even now that Liverpool have departed.

“When I think of Melwood I think of one man and that’s Ronnie Moran,” says Carragher. “I think of him being there when I first started and then still coming in two or three times a week even when Gerard Houllier was manager until the day he passed, god rest his soul.

“He’d do his walks around Melwood and I remember one time going with him and just listening to him talking football and it was such an education. He was a man with that experience and expertise and who had seen it all before and didn’t kick up a fuss when the club moved him on. He was still very polite and respectful. A typical Liverpool man he didn’t think he owned Melwood when in some ways he possibly did. 

“He’d always ask Houllier, ‘Am I OK to come in and go for a walk?’ He was really respectful and he’d do his walks around the perimeter. Even when the game was moving on with foreign coaches you still had that link to the past. I think I’ve been going to Melwood a long time — it’s nothing compared to what he did. He was one of the first players there and then what he did coaching. He’s the one man I think of. Maybe we should call the new one the Ronnie Moran or call whatever they are putting at Melwood the Ronnie Moran estate.”

(Top photo: Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)