The Times Interview: Jamie Carragher

Carragher’s Guide To Liverpool, Part 2: Never Forget Where You’re From

“It was great growing up there. It was football non-stop. On one side of Marsh Lane there was the Brunswick Boys’ Club. That’s where I learnt football. The school was on the other side of the road. You’d play football at school, and when it was finished, cross the street to the Brunny and play again. That was your life.”

LIKE sinew through a limb, Marsh Lane winds through Bootle, running from Aintree Road down to the docks. It is big and wide and offers a collage of the whole area, from the fat steel drums of the gasworks at the top to the red-brick warehouses at the bottom. A railway and canal criss- cross it. Along the way are schools, terraced houses and shops. There’s the Solly, the pub that Carragher’s dad, Philly, used to run. Here’s his primary school, St James RC, and the Brunny across the road.

Carragher had been in the Liverpool first team for four years before he finally moved out of “Carra’s Lodge”, the house he’d lived in with Paula, his mother, and Paul, his brother. He grew up on Knowsley Road, another main thoroughfare running parallel to Marsh Lane, but with more shops and less industry. “A little bit posher,” he smiles. He lives in Blundellsands now, where the streets are quiet and tree-lined, with views across to north Wales. It is only five minutes from Bootle, however.

“I go home all the time,” he says. “I was there the other day seeing my mum and a few of the lads. No pubs, though. Professional athlete and all that. Bootle’s where my memories are. It was one of the most deprived areas of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. The kids never had much, though you could always scrape a few quid together to get a ball. I think people learnt to get on with things and do it with a sense of humour. There’s a sense of humour, a little bit of character about people from Liverpool. Places like Glasgow are similar — working-class areas where people make the best of what they’ve got and do so smiling.”

Carragher can certainly be comedic. He is getting married on July 1 to his partner, Nicola, at a country house in Shropshire. His Liverpool colleagues will be invited, including Benitez, not least because it’s the first week of pre-season training “and it means he’ll have to give me the day off”. Otherwise, it will be a non-celebrity event, not like David Beckham’s nuptials. “Nah. I’ve sold my wedding pictures to The Kop magazine for a pound.”

Here’s a serious point, though. “People think every footballer’s like Beckham, going to big parties and that, but we (Carragher and Nicola) lead a normal life. I’m not having a go at Beckham, but that lifestyle gets you in the press a lot, and something similar is happening to Wayne Rooney. People look at the money certain players spend on cars and jewellery and think everyone’s the same, but there’s only a handful like that.”

Carragher is genuinely down-to-earth. James, his two-year-old son, has already been told that when he’s old enough, he’ll be playing for Merton Villa, Carragher’s old boys’ side on Marsh Lane. Bootle schools and football teams are forever benefiting from Carragher’s visits and donated signed shirts. “I haven’t forgotten my roots or whatever. I see myself and the fans on the same level. I don’t see myself on a pedestal,” he says.

“People call me a ‘classic scally’, and I take that as a compliment. I mean, that’s what I am. I’m an ordinary lad who’s been fortunate and done well at football. I am a bit of a scally, like. A bit of a laugh. A bit rough around the edges.

“I went to Lilleshall (the former FA school of excellence) and there were 32 of us together, living in dorms. You can imagine what we got up to; it was brilliant. There was another lad from Liverpool, Jamie Cassidy, and we used to wind up the other lads. The sharp Scouse tongue and all that . . .

“I still see Jamie. We were in the same FA Youth Cup-winning team (with Liverpool in 1996) and he played for England Under-18s. He never made it because he broke his leg and then got a really bad cruciate ligament injury. What happened to him just shows how lucky I’ve been.”