Jan Kromkamp’s Liverpool career lasted less than eight months, and the FA Cup framed it from start to finish. He made his debut in the chaos of a 5-3 win at Luton in January 2006, and in May he came off the bench in Cardiff in one of the great finals.
He never managed to make the right-back spot his own, and he was soon on his way home to the Netherlands. But he left Anfield with a winner’s medal, which is more than plenty of better-remembered players can say.
From Friesland to Alkmaar
Kromkamp was born in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Friesland, on 17 August 1980, and started out at Go Ahead Eagles in Deventer.
In 2000 he stepped up to the Eredivisie with AZ, where he spent five seasons and became a regular at right-back. Marco van Basten noticed, and in August 2004 Kromkamp won his first Netherlands cap, against Sweden.
A cross that beat Reina
The 2004-05 season was a big one for AZ. They went all the way to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup, knocking out Villarreal in the quarter-finals.
In the first leg in Spain, with 16 minutes left, Robin Nelisse needed two attempts to turn in Kromkamp’s cross for a 2-1 win. The goalkeeper he beat was José Manuel Reina, a few months before he became Liverpool’s Pepe Reina.
Villarreal had clearly seen enough. That summer they signed the man who had helped knock them out.
Swapped for Josemi
Spain did not work out. Kromkamp made just six league appearances for Villarreal, and by the turn of the year the Spanish club had agreed a straight swap with Liverpool.
Josemi, Rafa Benítez’s first signing at Anfield, went back to Spain. Kromkamp came the other way, and the deal was completed on 4 January 2006.
Straight into the Luton thriller
Three days later he was on the bench at Kenilworth Road for the FA Cup third round. Liverpool were 3-1 down at one stage, but they came back to win 5-3, and Kromkamp replaced Peter Crouch in the closing stages.
Nobody knew it then, but it was the first step on the road to Cardiff.
Behind Steve Finnan
The problem was Steve Finnan. The Irishman was Benítez’s first-choice right-back, and Kromkamp could not shift him.
He made 18 appearances for Liverpool without scoring, 14 in the Premier League and four in the FA Cup, with more than half coming from the bench.
Sixty-seven minutes gone in Cardiff
On 13 May 2006 Liverpool met West Ham in the FA Cup final at the Millennium Stadium. It was chaos from the start. West Ham went 2-0 up, Djibril Cissé pulled one back and Steven Gerrard equalised, and then Paul Konchesky’s looping cross drifted over Reina to make it 3-2 to West Ham.
Three minutes later Benítez sent Kromkamp on for Xabi Alonso, and he played on the right side of midfield as Liverpool chased the game.
You know the rest. In stoppage time, Gerrard hit a spectacular long-range drive to force extra time. Reina then saved three West Ham penalties, Dietmar Hamann, Gerrard and John Arne Riise scored theirs, and Liverpool won the shoot-out 3-1.
Jan Kromkamp, just over four months after arriving, was an FA Cup winner.
Back to the Netherlands
That summer he went to the World Cup in Germany as part of Van Basten’s Netherlands squad, although he did not make an appearance at the tournament.
His final Liverpool appearance came in a 1-1 draw at Sheffield United on 19 August 2006, and on 31 August 2006 he returned home to join PSV Eindhoven.
Champion with PSV
The move worked. Kromkamp won back-to-back Eredivisie titles with PSV in 2007 and 2008. Just 12 days after leaving Anfield, he was already facing Liverpool in the Champions League, helping PSV to a 0-0 draw in Eindhoven. The clubs would meet again, but PSV never managed to beat his former side during his time there.
Injuries then took over, and he hardly played for a couple of years. In 2011 he went back to where it all began, Go Ahead Eagles, and in June 2013, worn down by knee problems, he retired.
On the touchline
Kromkamp stayed in the game as a coach, working his way up through the youth teams at Go Ahead Eagles to the under-19s, and in 2020 he took his first senior job as head coach of CSV Apeldoorn in the Dutch amateur game.
Once a Red
Jan Kromkamp is not a name that comes up often when Liverpool fans talk about 2006. He was never more than Finnan’s understudy, and his stay was over almost before it began.
But he was there in Cardiff, on the pitch when Gerrard scored that equaliser, and he has the medal to prove it. Not many players can say their Liverpool story began at Kenilworth Road and ended up with an FA Cup winner’s medal.
