9/10/2023 0 Comments Adam and rhonni log cabin livingPut bluntly, Pepper did not seek to challenge any perceptions about him because “I didn’t want anyone to talk about me. Without that, “I wasn’t fit enough to sustain playing at any serious level over a long period of time.” The experiences between 20, when he was finally released, led to the desire that he thinks defined his rise completely disappearing. “People assume, but they don’t know, because I haven’t really told anyone about it - not even members of my family,” he says when we met at a restaurant as the sun sets on the cobblestones of Falkner Street near the centre of Liverpool earlier this week. He has not gone out of his way to contest any suggestions that he wasn’t good enough for Liverpool, or for any professional standard, because it has been easier for him to deal with by staying quiet. Pepper has never spoken to anyone before about what happened to him. Yet then, they were a club in a grave financial crisis and a civil war at ownership level impacted on relationships beneath, as the club lost institutional memory across every significant level. Some of those who were abruptly sacked in the summer of 2009 have since returned. Liverpool are a different club today different owners, a different manager and different staff. It felt like he was going to make it, especially when manager Rafa Benitez, who was notoriously difficult to impress and rarely forthcoming with compliments, asked him whether he’d been born in Spain due to his technical ability.Īcross the space of just a few months in 2009, however, Pepper’s world was turned upside down.Ī serious injury was followed by the culling of the academy coaches that knew him best, intercepting any clear path to recovery. At the end of a three-year youth contract, another three years as a professional were waiting for him.Īs expected, Pepper would captain every side he played for at the academy before training two days a week with the first team at Melwood. Though he was an Evertonian, he joined Liverpool at 14, and the club’s confidence in him was reflected by the length of the deal they were offering. Pepper, who was brought up on Scotland Road, a couple of miles closer to Liverpool’s city centre than Goodison Park, where he had a season ticket, took his time before deciding where to go. The next great hope of English football had become a national obsession due to the rise of Wayne Rooney, who was only five years older than Pepper when he scored the goal against Arsenal in 2002 that really launched his career. Nearly all of the major clubs in England were trying to sign him, along with Barcelona and Ajax, and agents were competing with one another in their attempts to impress and therefore represent him.Įric Hall, whose “monster, monster” catchphrase was born out of the amount of money he used to harvest for his clients, suggested Pepper should be insured up to the value of £5 million and with that, he became the most expensive 11-year-old in the world. Pepper turned 30 in December and today (Sunday), fitness-permitting, he might feature in midfield for Mayfair, a team from the Liverpool Business Houses League, when they face Highgate Albion in the semi-finals of that same competition, back in Birmingham at Solihull Moors’ ground.Ī few months after the victory over Little Paxton, Pepper’s photo was appearing in national newspapers for different reasons. When a photograph in the Liverpool Echo showed him at the front of the celebrations the following weekend, a teacher at school said, “Adam, that’s not you… you don’t do that!” The Brit won 2-0 that day and, in the aftermath, Pepper could not resist getting involved, presenting two fingers to the villagers from Little Paxton. His parents were hard on him when it came to manners. Pepper, who was always by his dad’s side, remembers the players warming up and there being a lot of, “‘Scouse this, Scouse that’ – it wasn’t nice.”Ī few of the Brit’s lads were, as Pepper puts it, “handy”.
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