Eighteen years on Peter Crouch describes it as the darkest moment of his playing career but what stands out now from those brutal, barren opening weeks as the focal point of Liverpool attack is the love he felt on Merseyside when the rest of the world was laughing at him.
The striker became a source of ridicule when he failed to score in his first four months in the red shirt.
But while opposition fans and the media rounded on a £7m signing who arrived hot off the heels of their most dramatic of Champions League wins, when Crouch reflects now he fondly remembers how the club’s fans continued to back him during an 18-match run without a goal.
A new Amazon Prime documentary charting the ups and downs of Crouch’s career is released today. It opens with his missed penalty against Portsmouth, coming in a 15th appearance and still four short of his first goals, and Crouch saying that he wanted a hole to appear in the Anfield pitch and swallow him up.
But in an interview promoting the film, Crouch said he also felt special to have become part of the Liverpool siege mentality and considers it a period of time that shaped him as a person.
“It was the worst kind of professional experience of my life,” he says. “I signed for Liverpool after watching 2005 Istanbul, one of the greatest finals you’ll ever see, signing for a club and thinking I just need to get off to a good start. And then obviously not, not scoring for as long as I did. I felt like I was being totally ridiculed outside the city of Liverpool.
“No other club would be able to cope with having signed a player just after winning the Champions League who hasn’t scored in the manner that he did. It was like I was one of them and all the other influences, all the other people laughing and taking the piss … it was like a siege mentality that Liverpool have got and I felt special to be a part of that.
“Inside the city I felt the love. Outside I was ridiculed, my mum and dad stopped buying newspapers, I stopped watching TV. It was hard professionally but I got so much benefit and strength from coming through it.”
Crouch admits getting used to the higher profile that comes with signing for one of England’s biggest clubs took time and the fact team-mate Jamie Carragher wasted no time in telling him that they could have signed Andriy Shevchenko or Samuel Eto’o instead only served to ramp up the pressure to perform.
He would go on to score 42 goals in all competitions during three seasons at Anfield, which included a Champions League final defeat in 2007, and believes that the resilience shown laid the ground for him to become an England regular.
“All due respect to the clubs I was at before - QPR, Southampton, Portsmouth, even Aston Villa - when you go to Liverpool just after they’ve won the Champions League the focus is on them anyway,” he said.
“It just went from people at the local paper and local fans to being global. In the UK it was back page of your newspapers, not just the local ones. Every game was its own thing and I was the new star striker. Jamie Carragher said they could have gone Shevchenko, Eto’o, players like this.
“All of a sudden they end up with me and I can’t score. It was hard and I don’t think anywhere outside of Liverpool would have tolerated that. But they did and I’m thankful for that every day.”
