Legends of club football – Sami Hyypia

He made his international debut at the age of 19 against Tunisia on November 7, 1992.

Liverpool weren’t his first exposure to English football. He underwent a two-week trial at Newcastle in 1995. Failing to get a contract from the Magpies, he joined Dutch side Willem II, where he was soon appointed as captain. Before heading to Liverpool, he helped Willem II qualify for the Champions League.

At Liverpool, he was initially regarded as a relative unknown who might struggle to impress. He made his debut for the Reds against Sheffield Wednesday on August 7, 1999 in a game which Liverpool won 2-1, and quickly formed an extremely reliable central defensive partnership with Stephane Henchoz, which provided the foundation for Liverpool’s historic treble in 2000-01, when they won the UEFA Cup, the FA Cup and the Worthington Cup.

In 2000-01, Liverpool’s full-time captain Jamie Redknapp suffered from a long-term injury, and Hyypia shared the captaincy with Robbie Fowler. In 2002, after both Redknapp and Fowler left the club, Hyypia was appointed as Liverpool’s first-choice captain.

After a bright start to his Liverpool career, there was a brief dip in his form and he was replaced by the emerging Steven Gerrard as Liverpool’s captain. Gerrard still remembers nervously approaching Hyypia to discuss the issue, only to be disarmed as Hyypia shook his hand and wished him good luck. It was not only on the field that Hyypia made a positive impression. Also, with the pressure of captaincy now relieved, his performances went on to improve.

Hyypia was renowned for his disciplined play and he didn’t receive a booking for 87 consecutive matches from January 2000 to October 2001. He received the only red card in his career in a game against Manchester United in 2003. He later described that incident saying “Van Nistelrooy was going through and maybe I took his shirt a little bit. The referee thought so. I got a straight red card. They got a penalty. It was an agony to watch the game in the dressing room. The only red card of my career. You remember that sort of thing.”

With the arrival of new Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez, Hyypia found a new central defensive partner in Jamie Carragher, and the partnership blossomed, even bettering the Hyypia-Henchoz combination. The duo’s performance was crucial in Liverpool winning the Champions League in 2005. That campaign included a sweet left-footed strike by Hyypia to score a crucial goal against Juventus. Hyypia rates that goal to be the best one in his career.

Hyypia was relegated to third-choice captain with the appointment of Carragher as Gerrard’s deputy in the 2005-06 season. He played in the FA Cup final against West Ham that season, which Liverpool won. (Though Hyypia missed his spot kick in the penalty shoot-out.)

With Daniel Agger joining Liverpool in 2006, Hyypia was no longer a certainty in the first-team, but he continued to play his part well whenever called upon to do so.

In the summer of 2007, Hyypia was linked with a move away from Liverpool, but he decided to stay on at the club. On August 25, 2007, he broke his nose in an away match at Sunderland. But he quickly returned on the pitch three days later to captain the team against Toulouse in the Champions League qualifying match in the absence of Gerrard and Carragher, and he scored Liverpool’s second goal in the game. On March 2, 2008, when he played against Bolton Wanderers, Hyypia made it into the top 20 Liverpool player appearances of all time.