Liverpool ready to discover it's a Kewell world after all

AS the sun started to set on a family holiday on the Algarve yesterday, Harry Kewell prepared to draw a line in the sand.

With his libel case against Gary Lineker, with his fitness, which is improving by the day, and with news that Liverpool would start its defence of the European Cup against a little-known team from Wales, it seemed that he could finally look forward to the new season and put 18 months of misery behind him.

Total misery? Not quite. Not when he was part of a European Cup-winning team with Liverpool, the club he supported as a boy growing up in Sydney. But his memories of that spectacular fightback against AC Milan, he admits, are very mixed.

A surprise choice in place of Dietmar Hamann, after five months of almost constant injury problems, he tore a groin muscle in the opening 20 minutes of the game and was forced to watch from the fringes as the miracle of Istanbul unfolded.

As the team headed home the next morning, the players immersed themselves in the newspapers, devouring every word, but Kewell cut a forlorn figure. He did not want to read those papers for he knew what they would say about his role in the drama. In the team ratings, where Jerzy Dudek, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard enjoyed top billing, the Australia forward stuck out like a sore thumb. Three out of 10, it seemed, was the best his efforts deserved.

Kewell had a winner's medal, he had kissed the trophy and he had danced around on the podium with his team-mates, but, from a purely personal point of view, his triumph was hollow.

"I know exactly how Roy Keane felt (about his European Cup medal from 1999, when he was suspended for the final against Bayern Munich)," Kewell said.

"People told me I was still a part of it, but you want to be out there for the whole game and feel that you have made a difference. For the team and the supporters, I was incredibly proud, but, for me as an individual, it was strange."

It is a confession that makes the criticism of Kewell, for limping out of the game, all the more absurd. Put simply, he was not fit to play in that match. He has hardly been fit to play since the opening months of his Liverpool career at the start of the 2003-04 season.

In an ideal world, had manager Rafael Benitez not been confronted with such a chronic injury crisis last season, Kewell would have spent the past six months doing the best thing for his career, which would have been recuperating, rather than jeopardising his future by playing when weighed down by ankle, groin, achilles tendon and back injuries.

"It hasn't been a nice time in football for me," Kewell said. "I've been criticised, but I know the truth and people within the game know the truth. The boss knew right from the start of the season that I had an injury and that every time I played, he was taking a chance with me and that I was putting my body on the line because, at any given time, it could snap. That's what happened in the final.

"It was the biggest game of my life and the injury wasn't on my mind, but when I stretched and felt it snap, I knew right away that I couldn't go on."

Copyright - The Australian