‘I’m an ex-Liverpool star – pre-season booze-up ended with the squad in jail’

Ex-Liverpool star Stephen Warnock revealed how a boozy pre-season night out landed him and his team-mates in a German prison cell.

The 42-year-old, who also played for Blackburn, Aston Villa and Leeds, was on loan at Coventry City during the 2003/04 season. At the end of a brutal summer training camp, manager Gary McAllister let the players blow off steam with an end-of-tour squad p***-up.

Speaking on the Undr The Cosh podcast, Warnock says the night out got out of hand when the players were stopped at the door of a nightclub. “We were on tour and we’d had a tough pre-season so [McAllister] said we needed to have a bit of team bonding,” the former full back explained.

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“We had almost like a raft with a bar on it going down a canal, and we were just going to go out and have a day on the booze and get to know each other. Anyway, we’ve gone out on the p*** and later on we were like, ‘Can we go out tonight? ‘, and [McAllister] said, ‘Absolutely, make sure everyone’s there’.”

“So a few of us wandered down to the local nightclub, it was like a five minute walk, and we get chatting to the doorman or the owner or whoever it was and we were like, ‘We’re a football team from England, we’ve got about 30 lads, are we alright to come in tonight with shorts on and stuff?’

“And he was like, ‘Yeah yeah no problem’. So we go back to our hotel and we’re drinking for few more hours, and when we get back to the club he said, ‘You’re not coming in’, and we were like, ‘Why not? We spoke to you face to face’, and he was like, ‘Nah nah’.”

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Tensions quickly rose, reports the Mirror, and reached boiling point when Warnock’s team-mate, David Pipe, squared up to the doorman, who responded by striking him in the face with his nightstick.

“The fella’s just whipped a cosh out and smacked him [Pipe],” Warnock remembered, “and it’d have knocked anyone else out, killed them, but he just stood there, took a blow to his face and then he’s just knocked [the doorman] out, Pipey just floored the fella.”

The players decided to leg it after angry staff members started barrelling out of the venue to take them on, but the police were quickly on their tail. After injuring himself while drunkenly jumping over a 10ft wall, Warnock re-grouped with some of his team-mates at a petrol station.

“I found like five of the lads and we were all buzzing thinking we’d got away with it. But then a riot van comes round the corner and lashes us in the back and all the lads are in there, they’ve all been caught.”

The players ended up spending the night in adjacent prison cells, but were let out the following morning after paying a €700 fine, with the press, thankfully, none the wiser.