A few months later, the Reds were champions of Europe again. I watched the final with my family. Even being six years old, I knew what that night in Istanbul meant. Just walking around the city a few days later, you could look at people’s faces and see how a run like that lifted up the community. We knew the parade was coming up, and of course my brothers and I wanted to be a part of it. The funny thing was that we didn’t even have to break our mum’s rule to see it. The Liverpool bus came right down our street.
We stood on the front porch with our Liverpool kits on, watching our heroes ride by with the European Cup dangling off the side of the bus. I nearly could have touched it.
You couldn’t experience a day like that and not want to be a footballer. It’s the same for my brothers. And that’s something that is really important to my story that people don’t always talk about. We all had the same dream. At the time, I was already a part of the Liverpool youth setup. For every six- or seven-year-old out on the pitch, trying to chase a dream they don’t even know a whole lot about—there’s a big support group behind them. It was no different for me.
It’s funny, my brothers and I were so competitive that whenever it would rain—which was all the time—we would be stuck inside doing nonsense, trying to play games. So one day my mum had probably had enough of it, and she had my dad teach us how to play chess. And it was brilliant, actually, because chess requires the same competitiveness and strategy as football. But the feeling you get when you know you’re about to finish off your brother, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do to get out of it? Ahhh, it’s incredible. The look on his face.
The most important thing, though, was that it was another thing we could do together. My brothers weren’t just my brothers, they were my best friends.
As I got a bit older, and I moved up through the Liverpool academy, Tyler and Marcel willingly sacrificed their own dreams for mine. I think maybe we all realized at a young age that being a professional footballer was more realistic for me. And my parents did, too. That’s a hard thing for a young lad to understand. There were weekends when Mum couldn’t take my brothers to their matches because I had to be at the academy at a certain time—and it was always them who made the sacrifice. To this day I’m so incredibly grateful to both of them.
Every step I took, we took.
Every cap I got, we got.
Every experience I had, we had.
That’s how it works where I come from.
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