Graeme Le Saux: Left Field
Graeme Le Saux
A former Southampton, Blackburn, Chelsea and England full-back, the erudite and engaging Graeme Le Saux is far removed from the archetypal British footballer. His distinctive commentary on all the major issues in football, on the pitch and beyond, promises to challenge everyone's perception of the game in this country.Graeme Le Saux made an outstanding international debut for Terry Venables' new-look England side in a 1-0 win over Denmark at Wembley in March 1994, becoming the first Channel Islander ever to be capped for England.After joining Chelsea direct from Jersey, where he used to spend his Saturdays on his father’s fruit and vegetable stall, his career flourished under the guidance of Kenny Dalglish at Blackburn Rovers where they won the Premiership title in 1994-95. Graeme transferred back to Chelsea in 1997 for a record fee of £5.5 million before joining Southampton in 2003. He retired as a player in 2005.In his book, Le Saux addresses the gay slurs that dogged his career – including the infamous Robbie Fowler exposure – how he was vilified by a minority that labelled him a Guardian reader and too smart for football, and life at Stamford Bridge before Roman Abramovich millions changed the club and the game. His thoughtful manner and views on the modern game (he is now consulted for comment regularly by BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel Five) are expanded upon here, with particular focus on the huge amounts of money in top-flight football, players’ agents and the spiralling debts of countless football clubs.As a player, Le Saux was always seen as different – someone who broke the mold, an individual with his own agenda who sought more to life than playing 90 minutes of football. His insight into the game is informed by those experiences.
Graeme Le Saux
Left Field
HarperSport An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
For Mariana, Georgina and Lucas. I’m proud of my professional achievements, but nothing could make me more proud than our family
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud43079ac-70b9-5fea-a0a7-b85fca150645)
Title Page (#u46b96292-f0c7-516f-8136-55bb1e75727f)
Dedication (#u8d385a5b-b5ed-5036-92b0-23c8901455fb)
Introduction (#u0b6fe533-fa30-54de-9b6f-d2131557bd9c)
One Camping with Ken (#u28ebe3cd-80c1-5690-852a-0aa6781c1f47)
Two A Secret (#uab36ed82-fbe9-566d-a7ef-7053ee1dabc4)
Three First-time Blues (#u12ed5a64-bfcc-5024-a92f-00f112c35cac)
Four Glory in the North (#litres_trial_promo)
Five Going Batty and Turning Sour (#litres_trial_promo)
Six International (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven England under Hoddle (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight Ruud, Luca and Sexy Football (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine Chelsea and Ranieri (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten Farewell to England (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven Going South Again (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve Into the Mist (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_1ec30b7b-6adb-5297-956d-c4ee63f9b85c)
I am a lucky man. I’ve got a wife I adore and two children I dote on. I have a loving father and two sisters of whom I’m very proud. Once, I had a mother who doted on me. I’ve got a good life and a lovely house and I know I have an awful lot to be thankful for. I owe my material possessions to my career in football. The opportunities that are coming my way in the media and in business now also stem from the fact that I was a high-profile sportsman. And I’m proud of the links I still have with Chelsea and the ambassadorial role I have been asked to fulfil for them. I have every reason to be grateful to the game for the things it has brought me, but it hasn’t come easy. I was a man apart for much of my career. I came out of left field and, for a long time, I stayed there.
I was regarded as an irritating curiosity when I first signed as a professional footballer with Chelsea in late 1987. I was ridiculed for reading The Guardian rather than staring at the half-naked women on page 3 or raging at the stories on the back pages of the tabloids that the players reading them swore were lies. But they kept reading them. Partly because of me, partly because of them, I didn’t fit in. Partly because of an experience that had affected me in Jersey when I was thirteen, there was an urge to succeed inside me that made me more sensitive than I might otherwise have been. I was coming out of left field, a callow kid raised in the Channel Islands who knew nothing of the wider world, and most people didn’t know quite what to make of me.
Because I had different interests to the rest of my team-mates, because I didn’t feel comfortable in the pre-Loaded laddish drinking culture that was prevalent in English football in the late Eighties, it was generally assumed by my team-mates that there was something wrong with me. It followed from that, naturally, that I must be gay. For fourteen years, I had to listen to that suggestion repeated in vivid and forthright terms from thousands of voices in the stands. I seemed to be everybody’s favourite whipping boy.
My colleague at Stamford Bridge, Graham Stuart, who had a fine career with Chelsea, Everton and Charlton, says now that I was ahead of my time when we played for Bobby Campbell in the late Eighties. Off the pitch, he meant, obviously – a renaissance footballer in a dark age. Well, I was certainly in a minority. He was right about that. I just liked different things, ironically the kind of things footballers like now: a nice meal, an afternoon’s shopping, a trip to the cinema or a gig at The Fridge in Brixton, getting ready for the next game, feeling the intensity of a life in sport. Now, the traditional English approach I grew up with, where men were men and only women wore sarongs and used moisturizer, has been completely shattered. The pendulum has swung. It’s more acceptable for players to talk about the clothes they wear, the restaurants they frequent, the bars they go to. And, yes, the latest game for their PlayStation or the latest innovation on their iPod.
It would have been easier for me back in the early days if I could have found it inside me to subordinate my personality to the group and do what it took to blend in. But I was taking care of my diet when the team coach was still stopping at the fish and chip shop on the way back from away matches. I was hanging out at an Armenian café called Jakob’s in Gloucester Road in west London while ‘The Lads’ were organizing pub crawls. Again, it wasn’t that one was better than the other. Jakob’s wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of fun; I know that. But I liked it. It was just that I fell out of their ‘norm’. As far as the culture off the pitch was concerned, I pitched up ten years too early.
My Chelsea career spanned different worlds. I started it playing with Kerry Dixon, Steve Wicks and John McNaught. I ended it alongside Marcel Desailly, Gianfranco Zola and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. I gravitated towards the couple of foreign lads at the club in my first spell and people called me a homosexual. I gravitated towards the mass of foreign lads at the club in my second spell and people called me cosmopolitan.
That was the funny thing about my life in football, the theme that runs through it. Football began to move towards me; events conspired to help me. In 1995, when I was winning the Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers, the Bosman ruling came into force and changed the face of the game in this country. Bosman swept away the quota system that had limited the number of foreigners allowed to play in each team and, flooded by players from all over Europe, our game entered an age of enlightenment.
I wasn’t an outsider any more; I wasn’t perceived as being different. Football old-schoolers like former Chelsea captains Peter Nicholas and Graham Roberts, who had regarded me as a dork, a swot and a pretentious weirdo, didn’t hold sway any more. Traditional bastions of English football clubs – men who ruled by intimidation and bullying – began to be marginalized, and a culture that rewarded professionalism, instead of pouring scorn on it, took hold.
There were more changes in the three decades in which I played football in England than there have been in any other era of the game. The horrors of Heysel and Hillsborough were washed away by Gazza’s tears in the 1990 World Cup and the football boom that England’s run to the semi-finals in Italy engendered. The Fever Pitch generation rose up in the Nineties and suddenly it was trendy to be a football obsessive. There was the Britpop influence, too. A lot of the successful bands of the Nineties were made up of football fans who were always making reference to the sport they loved. I was friends with one of the lads in the Inspiral Carpets who was an Oldham fan, Noel and Liam Gallagher were Man City fans and Tim Booth from James was a Leeds fan. Together, they crossed the music–student–football divide and broadened the appeal of the game. The Lightning Seeds did the theme tune for Euro 96 and the separation between footballers and pop stars became more and more blurred. The Taylor Report forced football stadia into a brave new world, too, and when the Premier League was formed in 1992 and soon flooded with money from Sky TV, it made players into millionaires pretty much overnight.
I was part of that; I rode the wave. I went from an era when people like Ken Bates, David Moores and Doug Ellis owned football clubs to the age of Roman Abramovich and the invasion of the international oligarchs. I played for the only team apart from Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea who has ever won the Premiership. I played thirty-six times for England. I didn’t get carried away with it. I never lost my obsession with winning and my hunger to keep moving forward as a player. I was relentless about it. I never looked back. I didn’t like looking back – not after what had happened to my mum.
It wasn’t as if I had it easy, either. For a start, I had people chanting ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’ wherever I played. What an incentive that was never to make a mistake. Even in the winter of my career, playing for Southampton in a reserve game against West Ham at Upton Park, this young kid in the West Ham side started yelling abuse at me, spitting ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ at me. I told him that when he’d achieved what I’d achieved in the game, he could come back and talk to me. At half-time, I heard him getting a bollocking from West Ham’s reserve team boss.
I enjoyed highs and I saw lows. I heard the snap of Robbie di Matteo’s leg breaking in Chelsea’s UEFA Cup match against St Gallen. When Pierluigi Casiraghi’s career came to a terrible end at West Ham, I ran off the pitch and grabbed the stretcher from the St John’s Ambulance men who were standing in the tunnel while he was in agony on the floor with terrible injuries to his leg. I saw the grief and the pain that football can bring as well as the riches and the glamour. I saw the last snapshot of Chelsea before the revolution: its extravagance cheek by jowl with its miserliness, and the fantastic idiosyncrasies of the Ken Bates era. I was man of the match in the game that took Chelsea into the Champions League and made it viable for Abramovich to buy them.
I went to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. That was in the summer of 1998 after the World Cup in France when we had been knocked out in the second round. The squads from the Commonwealth countries involved in the tournament – England, Scotland and Jamaica – were invited to the palace and being driven into the courtyard behind the railings felt to me as if the gates of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory were swinging open and I was being ushered into a secret world that I had long imagined but never glimpsed.
Once we were inside, we were led up to one of the reception rooms and we all stood around in small groups, chattering away nervously until Her Majesty arrived. Soon enough, a door opened and the Queen walked in and made straight for the group that I was part of. She came up to me and asked the first of what I am sure are her standard questions. She asked me who I played for and when I said Chelsea, she seemed quite pleased. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘local.’
On the other side of the room, Sol Campbell was being introduced to Prince Phillip.
‘What part of Jamaica are you from?’ the Duke of Edinburgh enquired.
‘Walthamstow,’ Sol said.
At the other end of the scale, I remember the simple, visceral thrill of wrapping the white tape around my socks when I was preparing for games, just like one of my heroes, John Robertson, had once done. I loved Robertson as a player. He was left-footed like me and he was part of Brian Clough’s great Nottingham Forest side that carried all before it when I was growing up.
I chipped Peter Schmeichel once, too. I played my first stand-out game for Chelsea against Spurs in 1991 and rushed home to catch the highlights on the television but the Gulf War had broken out and the programme had been cancelled. I scored my only England goal against Brazil; it wasn’t a bad one, either. I played against some great opponents; if I had to pick my most difficult one, I’d say Brian Laudrup.
I did have my own share of injuries. I missed Euro 96 and Euro 2000 but at least I made it to the World Cup in France in 1998. Apart from the moment when I broke my ankle in 1995, that World Cup gave me my worst moment in football – when I was blamed for the late Dan Petrescu goal that gave Romania a 2–1 win over England in our second group game. Generally, though, I felt I over-achieved in football. I gave it everything and it gave back to me a lot more than I ever dared hope for.
In the end, I even learned the gift of being able to laugh at myself. I wish I’d been able to do that earlier. I wish I’d been able to ignore it back in 1991 when people started sniggering about how they thought I must be gay. In my second spell at Chelsea, I was at the core of the dressing room. I was secure in myself. People even laughed at my jokes and I laughed at theirs.
I used to take the mickey out of Gianfranco Zola, who was a particular friend of mine during my second spell at Chelsea. I used to tease him about his image of being the White Knight of Stamford Bridge, adored by all for his ready smile and his sublime skill. People had such a fantastic image of Franco, they could not imagine him being anything other than honest and truthful and the epitome of good sportsmanship, but I knew different.
One day in training, we were all square in a five-a-side game and Franco and I were running for a ball that was heading out of play. It went out so I turned around to shout something to one of my team-mates. When I looked back around, Franco had retrieved the ball and was in the act of curling a beautiful shot around our goalkeeper for the winner. He was adamant that the ball hadn’t gone out and when I disputed it, the other guys looked at me as if I was disputing the word of a saint.
‘Franco,’ I said, ‘you’re a cheating, low-down Sardinian git. When I write my book, I’m going to tell the truth about you and let everyone know what a sneaky, low-down, horrible little man you are.’
‘That’s fine,’ Franco said. ‘And when I write my book, I’m going to say that you look at me in the showers.’
ONE Camping with Ken (#ulink_ad5b883f-1a14-50bf-8899-63e4fb8e9973)
A sad and ugly irony lay at the heart of my career as a professional footballer. I represented my country thirty-six times, won a Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers and the Cup Winners’ Cup and Super Cup with Chelsea, played in an FA Cup Final and won the League Cup, and all of it was accompanied by the soundtrack of a lie. Even though I have never been gay, for a fourteen-year stretch of my eighteen seasons in the game, I became the leading victim of English football’s last taboo.
It started in the summer of 1991 soon after we reported back for pre-season training. I was in my first spell at Chelsea. We had what is known as ‘a strong dressing room’ – which is usually a euphemism for a group of players who were very good at dishing out a lot of stick. It was not a place for shrinking violets. The banter was flying around more than ever in those first few days back at our Harlington training ground. There was a lot of talk about where people had been for their holidays.
I’d had a good summer. I was twenty-two and had just broken into the first team. Over the previous eighteen months, I’d got matey with two of the forerunners of Chelsea’s foreign legion: Ken Monkou and Erland Johnsen. Ken, who was originally from Surinam, had signed from Feyenoord in the spring of 1989 and we made our first-team debuts within a fortnight of each other that May. Erland, who was Norwegian, arrived from Bayern Munich the following December. During that season and the next one, the three of us became good pals.
Erland invited Ken and me to go and visit him in Norway once the 1990/91 campaign was over. He wanted us to go and put on a few coaching sessions for some kids in a town on the border with Russia. So when the season finished, I took Ken down to Jersey, where I’d grown up. We spent a couple of days there and then we drove up through France, Belgium and Holland. Then we flew up to Norway. We had a good time. When the trip was over, Ken headed back to London, Erland went on his honeymoon around the Caribbean and I went off on holiday with my girlfriend.
When I got back to Chelsea and the boys asked me where I’d been, I told them. Somebody – I can’t remember who – said ‘Oh, so you went camping with Ken’. There was a bit of chortling and sniggering. It got to me straight away. I was sensitive about it immediately. I bit on it. I told them we hadn’t gone camping. I told them we’d been staying in hotels. But it stuck. It became a bit of a running gag. And soon, to my horror, it was out there on the grapevine that Ken and I were an item.
I was insecure enough as it was. I had come over from Jersey a couple of years earlier when I was eighteen and signed a professional contract. I felt isolated from the start. I didn’t belong to any of the groups or cliques I found at Chelsea. I didn’t do an apprenticeship so there was no group of lads that I’d come through the ranks with. And just because I had signed a professional contract didn’t really make me a professional footballer or part of the established group.
There were a lot of old-school footballers there when I arrived: men like Steve Wicks, Joe McLaughlin, Colin Pates and John Bumstead. They were soon joined by lads like Vinnie Jones, who arrived at the start of that 1991/92 season from Sheffield United, Andy Townsend, John Spencer and Dennis Wise. Some of them were good guys but I never got to know them during that time. They were footballers and I was this kid fresh out of Jersey. They would go back to their homes in Hemel Hempstead or wherever it was and I would get the tube back to my digs in Burnt Oak.
The club had stuck me in there. It was one stop away from the northern end of the Northern Line, about as far away from Harlington as you could get. It took me an hour and a half and two trains and two buses to get into training each day. It was ridiculous. It was one of these situations where the assistant manager, Gwyn Williams, knew a friend of a friend who had a spare room and was doing him a favour. But he wasn’t doing me any favours at all.
Everybody regarded me as an outsider. I was an easy target because I didn’t fit in. The only couple of people I knew in London were students so I turned up at training with my student look. I had my jeans rolled up and my Pringle socks on and my rucksack with The Guardian in it.
For much of my career, reading The Guardian was used as one of the most powerful symbols of how I was supposed to be weirdly different. It was pathetic really. It was used to give substance to the gossip that I was homosexual: Guardian reader equals gay boy. Some people really thought that added up. Most of the rest of them read The Sun and The Mirror and complained about how they were being stitched up all the time by those papers.
Andy Townsend got on the bus to an away game once and saw me reading The Guardian. He picked it up and said he wanted to look at the sport. He threw it back down a couple of seconds later. ‘There’s no fucking sport in here,’ he said. The rest of the lads laughed. I tried to laugh, too, but I felt a bit embarrassed – not embarrassed enough to stop reading it and conform to what they wanted but embarrassed nonetheless. I don’t know, maybe they were just trying to help me fit in.
By the time I broke into the first team at the end of that 1988/89 season, the other players had pigeonholed me as a bit of a loner. I wasn’t a loner. In fact, away from football I was pretty sociable. It was just that because of my background, I wasn’t what footballers regarded as typical. I got the impression they hadn’t really come across anyone like me before and that was the basis of a fair amount of stick I used to get.
Everything that led up to the spread of the rumours that I was gay stemmed from the fact that I didn’t fit in. Teammates looked at me and thought I was a bit different, a bit odd. So I became the target of day-to-day ribbing which just got worse and worse. I’d never had any problem with bullying at school. I never had any sort of problems of that type. I wasn’t the main kid but I wasn’t unpopular. Being a pariah was new to me.
I was sensitive and pretty naive and my greatest fault was that I stuck up for myself and took things a bit more seriously than I should have done. I reacted to jibes when I can see now that I should have just laughed them off or come back with a decent riposte. But I didn’t do that. And by the time I started to try and laugh them off, it was too late.
Going into training became an ordeal. I was trying to get used to London, trying to get used to living away from the tight-knit community in Jersey. And I was trying to persuade myself that I really could make it as a professional footballer. All the people I was competing against seemed so much older than me. So I lived in my own world with my Walkman and my newspaper and spent my spare time discovering London, like anyone new to a big city.
Ken and Erland used to get plenty of stick, too. This was partly because they were doing their own thing; they didn’t fit the stereotype. Foreign players had a better attitude to diet even back then. The British lads used to take the mickey out of Erland and pretend he was from a different planet just because he had a Scandinavian accent. But I had more in common with Erland and Ken, and so when the three of us went on this trip, it was manna from heaven for the piss-takers.
I think Ken probably got some ribbing about the gay stuff. He was a good-looking guy, single, did his own thing. In the programme that season, he listed his hobbies as ‘swimming, reading and meditation’. He probably ticked some of the boxes the bigots look at; but I don’t think it ever got to the same level that it reached with me. He was guilty by association with me but that was it. The more successful I got, the more it became an issue. The focus was more on me than Ken because I gradually became more newsworthy. I was also a lot easier to rile.
Once all the taunts about homosexuality started, Ken and I drifted apart. We stopped being friends, really. You succumb to the pressure, I think. When I left Chelsea, he went his way and I went mine. It’s not anything we ever spoke about which is quite strange in a way. None of the other players ever sympathized with me about it. I suppose they were just glad none of it was aimed at them; or perhaps the people who had initiated it felt embarrassed about it.
I took the homosexuality stuff very seriously very quickly. In those days, if anyone thought you had the slightest hint of the effeminate about you, you were in trouble. It was such a delicate stage of my life anyway. I already felt like the odds were stacked against me without being pitched into a world of double entendres and nudging and winking about being gay. I didn’t feel comfortable in my environment unless I was playing football. But the more my supposed homosexuality became a topic of humour, the more upset about it I became. I started confronting people about it all the time. It felt like everyone else in the dressing room was in on it. It even extended to people like Gwyn who would wander up to me before training and say ‘Come on poof, get your boots on’. It chipped away at me.
Bobby Campbell had succeeded John Hollins as manager by then but neither he nor anyone else in authority said ‘Lads, look, this is getting a bit silly’. By now the rumours were out of control. The piss-taking about camping with Ken started some time around the beginning of July and eight weeks later, my worst fears were realized.
On 7 September, we went to play a league game against West Ham at Upton Park. I got the ball on the left flank some time in the first half and played it upfield. Then the chant started. It came from the hard-core fans in the North Bank and was set to the tune of the Village People’s ‘Go West’: ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse, Le Saux takes it up the arse,’ they yelled – again and again and again. I stood there in shock. ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘It’s reached the terraces.’ I knew fans everywhere were going to try and make my life a misery.
Justin Fashanu had ‘come out’ in the News of the World a year earlier and even though his career was practically over, he was ridiculed and scorned for his admission. A few years later, he committed suicide. There also had been rumours about Trevor Morley and Ian Bishop, two West Ham players. They probably had about as much foundation as the rumours about me and Ken. I didn’t think I could afford for people to think there was the slightest hint of me being gay. Everything I was worried about, my preoccupation with being isolated and ostracized, was now turning into reality. Suddenly, I had something else to cope with as I tried to make it as a footballer, something else I had to fight against.
That afternoon at West Ham really scared me. I felt it had the potential to ruin everything. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It left me feeling isolated on the pitch. It left me feeling apart from the team, even on the pitch which had been my last refuge. I didn’t know who to be angry with, because it was my own team-mates who had started it.
It made me even more sensitive and my life at Chelsea even more complicated. It was the start of a series of problems for me at the club that ended with me hurling my shirt to the floor when Campbell’s successor, Ian Porterfield, substituted me and my departure from Stamford Bridge soon afterwards. I was very insecure, very nervous. I kept myself to myself because I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.
At Upton Park, no one mentioned the chanting when we got back to the dressing room at half-time, or at full-time. No one spoke about it at all. Maybe it didn’t register with some of them. It was never discussed and I didn’t make a point of saying to any of them ‘Thanks a lot for that boys’. But after that game, the chanting about me grew more and more regular. The pressure I was under when the taunts about being homosexual took hold was immense. I would go out onto the pitch knowing that I was going to get a torrent of abuse before I had even kicked a ball. Normally, as a player, you want to stand out but you want to stand out for the right reasons. If you get stick from the away supporters because you have done something well, you can live with that. It’s actually quite satisfying. But what started happening to me was that if there was some sort of lull in the game, I was the first fall-back option and the taunting would start. If the home fans got bored, they’d start singing about me.
I often wonder whether I could have prevented it. I tried damned hard to prevent it. I stood up for myself and got physically angry with people who pushed it too far, but I also withdrew more and more into my own little world to try and protect myself from the abuse so I wouldn’t have to confront it.
Once the thing about me and Ken spread beyond the dressing room, it went crazy. It became an urban myth. Wisey’s friends from Wimbledon would ask him about it; other players would talk to their mates at their former clubs. Soon, everyone was talking about it as if it was a fact. People said there was no smoke without fire. It was generally accepted – in football and in the media – that Ken and I were in some sort of closet relationship.
It never got to the point where I would go in the showers and someone would say ‘Watch out boys, Graeme’s around, backs to the wall’. But it was enough to give me a sense of isolation and paranoia. Once it really gained momentum, everything I did was used as evidence I was gay. The way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I went to art galleries and read The Guardian all turned into more clues about my sexuality.
The sheer number of people that would ask me about the situation between me and Ken was bewildering. I got bits and pieces of abuse in the street: the odd shout of ‘poof’ or ‘shirtlifter’ from the other side of the road, mainly from lads trying to get a laugh from their mates. No one said it directly to my face unless they were in a crowd at a game but the variety of insults aimed at gay people became my specialist subject. The worst thing was when you’d go to get the ball for a corner or a throw and there would be somebody a couple of feet away from you in the front row. Their faces would be contorted with aggression and they’d be screaming this homophobic abuse at me that was often really vicious stuff. When it was that close and one-on-one, it was shocking.
Pretty soon, opposition players were winding me up about it on the pitch. It didn’t happen that often but there were a couple of occasions when I responded or retaliated and all hell broke loose. When I made it an issue, the lack of action taken against the people responsible said a lot about the reluctance of the authorities to confront the problem, a reluctance that still exists today.
The media hounded me about it, too, particularly the tabloid newspapers. When I first started going out with Mariana while I was playing for Blackburn, she was a press officer for Camelot. The lottery was very high-profile back then and gradually people began to find out that we were seeing each other. A couple of papers started harassing her at work. They phoned up on the pretext of asking something about the lottery but pretty soon they dropped the pretence and started asking her about me.
The Daily Star was particularly persistent. Their reporter kept going on about how there were all these rumours about my sexuality and how the paper wasn’t convinced we were actually seeing each other. Mariana could have lost her job because she was spending so much time fielding these crackpot calls. She had to go and see her boss about it. In the end, this guy from the Star rang again and blurted out ‘Is he gay?’ She just said ‘Of course he isn’t’ and he said ‘Thanks’ and put the phone down. The following Friday, they ran a front page that said ‘Homo Le Saux? Not my Graeme’. On the inside page, it had the rest of the story and there was a picture of me. Underneath the picture, they ran the caption ‘Le Saux: all man’. It’s funny now but at the time I was fuming. It was the day before a game and we were travelling. All the playerswere getting on the Blackburn team bus and Tim Sherwood asked me if I had seen the paper. The guys were upset for me. It felt like I had some support from them. In contrast to the way it had been at Chelsea.
I think they were genuinely mortified that I was having to go through all that kind of stuff. I wondered whether it was defamatory: being called gay if you weren’t. In the context of football, I think it is, because, sadly, it could cost you your career. No manager would want to buy you, in those days, anyway. It’s a terrible indictment of the game but I’m afraid it’s true.
I was in my second spell at Chelsea when the real problems on the pitch began. Ironically, the atmosphere at the club had changed radically in the time I had been away. It was much less threatening, much less intimidating. Most of all, it was much more cosmopolitan. Ruud Gullit was the manager when they brought me back and they had recruited players like Gianluca Vialli, Roberto di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola and Frank Lebouef. It could hardly have been more different from the dressing room I had left behind. From feeling like an alien in my first spell at the club, I fitted in easily second time around. Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment hadn’t yet spread to some of my rivals at other clubs.
I had had four years at Blackburn Rovers by then, four years of an increasingly high profile and four years of taunts from opposition supporters. Everyone assumed that the fight between me and my Blackburn team-mate, David Batty, during an away game against Spartak Moscow in November 1995 had been over a gay insult he’d aimed at me but it wasn’t, not really.
From the time the rumours about me being gay first surfaced that afternoon at West Ham, I got plenty of comments from other players about me being ‘a faggot’ or ‘a queer’. It happened all the time. Robbie Savage was one of the players who seemed to get a particular thrill out of it. I guess that won’t really surprise anyone. I told him he should say it all again to me at the end of the game when I’d tackled him a few times. I told him we could sort it out in a football way and then see if he still wanted to call me a poof. It was irrational really, schoolboy behaviour.
There weren’t many players who went out of their way to keep going on about it. Most of the time, I let it go. But when Chelsea played Liverpool at Anfield in October 1997, Paul Ince started winding me up about it repeatedly and in the end, I gave him a taste of his own medicine.
Paul and I had always got on really, really well. We were England team-mates and I respected him a great deal. The game against Liverpool was a Sunday afternoon match and afterwards we were due to travel down to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of Glenn Hoddle’s England squad and start the preparations for the make-or-break World Cup qualifying game against Italy in Rome, which was the following Saturday.
Paul was really wound up during the game. He’d get so frantic in matches sometimes that his eyes would change – they’d kind of glaze over. There was a frenetic atmosphere at Anfield and it was an all-action game. They ended up winning it 4–2. I’d been clattered a few times already when Paul launched himself at me with a tackle, took my legs away and left me on the deck.
When I was on the ground, he started jabbering away at me. ‘Come on you fucking poof,’ he said, ‘get up, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ He said it a few times. I let it go. People get called ‘a poof’ all the time in football. It’s a generic term of abuse. But it was loaded when people aimed it at me. A few minutes later, he clattered me again and started yelling the same stuff. I snapped.
I said something that I knew would hurt him. I insulted his wife.
Paul went absolutely ballistic. He was livid. He spent the rest of the match desperately trying to kick lumps out of me. He was in a towering rage. When the final whistle went, I was going down the tunnel when I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye about to try and land a punch on me. I ducked out of the way and scarpered back out onto the pitch. The guy had lost it completely: he wanted to kill me.
Paul was a prime example of a guy who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. He had been calling me all the names under the sun, personal stuff that he must have known would hurt me, stuff that I found offensive. And yet as soon as I retaliated in kind, he couldn’t cope. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d said, and it was out of order. I knew his wife, Claire, and I liked her. It wasn’t about her, though; it was about letting him know what it was like to try to have put up with that kind of abuse.
Paul quickly turned it round in his own mind so that I was the villain. I knew it was going to be very awkward when we got to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of the England squad that night. I got there before him and there was plenty of banter among the lads sitting in the restaurant about what he was going to do to me when he arrived. I laughed nervously. I didn’t want a punch-up with him – he was a lot stronger than me.
I decided I needed to be the adult about it. When it was obvious he had arrived, I phoned him in his room and asked if I could go up and talk to him about it. He was reluctant but he agreed. I got up there and he got into me straight away. ‘You’re out of order talking about my wife like that,’ he said. ‘You know her, and anyway no one talks about my family like that.’
I told him that I hadn’t really known what I was saying but I asked him how he thought it made me feel when he was calling me ‘a fucking poof’. I explained to him that I hadn’t done it to insult his wife. Just to get back at him. But he wouldn’t accept it; it was an honour thing for him. It’s a shame, but ever since then my relationship with him has been very cold.
By then, the gay slurs had become a big part of my career. But the homophobia that surrounded me put me in a desperately difficult situation. It was difficult for me to keep denying I was gay and reacting angrily to any suggestion that I might be homosexual without being disrespectful to the homosexual community. Talking about something that isn’t actually true makes it impossibly difficult to confront. That’s why I didn’t brave the issue in the newspapers.
I have gay friends and I don’t judge them. I am not homophobic. If there was a gay player and he was part of a team I was playing for, that wouldn’t be an issue for me at all. Someone’s private life is entirely up to them. But when supporters and other players accused me of being gay, it got to me. It was complicated. I never believed there was anything wrong with being gay but I felt that if it came to be accepted that I was gay, I would be unable to continue as a professional footballer. That’s how deep-seated the prejudice in the game is. That’s why I fought back as strongly as I did.
Homosexuality really is football’s last taboo. We’ve got past pretty much everything else. The problems with racism that disfigured football for much of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are not over but they are on the wane. An awful lot of good work has been done and attitudes have changed. You don’t get people making monkey noises at English football grounds any more. You don’t get supporters throwing bananas on the pitch as they used to do when John Barnes and Ces Podd were playing.
But there is still terrible prejudice within football. That is part of the culture. People try and pick on other people’s weaknesses. You have to deal with constant mickey-taking and being derided for the most trivial matters: the trainers you have just bought, the haircut you have just had, the piece about you in the newspaper. It is endless and it can be draining. It is part of the competitive nature of the dressing room. Your team-mates are digging away all the time, trying to get one up on each other. If you can make someone else look stupid, that’s the ideal.
Given that kind of peer pressure, I don’t think a modern footballer could ever come out as a gay man. I don’t think anyone could think of any positive reason to do it. It would immediately isolate you from the rest of the team. The group would be too hostile for you to survive. The situation would be too daunting.
Football has not had to deal with a group of gay footballers standing there and saying ‘How are you going to deal with us?’ They haven’t had to confront homophobia yet because the gay footballers that are probably playing in our leagues are understandably too frightened to declare their homosexuality and cope with the backlash they would face. Until there is a powerful voice for a minority group, football will never make provision for it.
The abuse I had to suffer would be multiplied by 100 for a player who was openly gay. The burden would be too much. I think of the stick I had from the fans and it made me feel anxious and nervous even before I got out on the pitch. Sometimes, you go out there not feeling 100 per cent confident anyway and that apprehension is compounded by the fact that you are going to be targeted in the warm-up.
Every time you run to the side of the pitch, there is going to be a little group of people giving you abuse. Suddenly, all the anger and prejudice hidden away under the surface of someone’s everyday life starts spewing out. You start to get a sense of the mentality of the mob and to anticipate the way the collective mind of a hostile crowd works. You know that if the game starts badly for the team you are playing against, then within ten minutes they will turn their anger and their frustration on you. And then a whole stadium of 40,000 or 50,000 people will start singing about how you take it up the arse.
Most of the time, you try and blot that out but sometimes you can’t. On another occasion at Anfield, I went over to the touchline to get the ball when it had gone out for a throw. A kid in the crowd was holding it. He was nine or ten and his dad was next to him. ‘You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,’ he screamed at me. His dad was joining in as well. I got the ball and then I stopped and looked at him.
‘Who do you think you are talking to like that?’ I asked him. I pointed at him and then, of course, everyone else starting piling in. I was all for hauling that kid out of the crowd and putting him on the side of the pitch with me. Sometimes you have just got to draw the line and say ‘That is wrong, you don’t treat people like that’.
That has happened a few times: where I have confronted people and made eye contact with them. It never worked because there were always so many people around them. They are usually the kind of so-called fans that will scream personal abuse at a player for ninety minutes and then report them to the police if they look at them the wrong way.
There was another time when I stood up for myself, too, a time when I refused to look the other way. I had a family by then and my wife, Mariana, brought our new-born eldest child, Georgina, to her first game at the end of February 1999. It was Liverpool again but this time it wasn’t Paul Ince who was the problem. This time, it was Robbie Fowler.
I had admired Robbie when he was a young player. He was a magnificent finisher, one of the best natural strikers you would ever see. But as people, he and I are probably about as far apart as it’s possible to be. His trademark was his sarcastic, put-down humour. That’s fine, that’s great; if that’s how you play the game – fine. He had an irreverent, caustic attitude. I didn’t mind that but the thing with Robbie was that he didn’t know when to stop. When things became unacceptable, it felt as if he was ignorant of his social responsibilities and the consequences of his actions.
That Chelsea–Liverpool match at Stamford Bridge was a high-tempo game like all the clashes between the two teams seemed to be and there were a few incidents. Early in the second half, I moved to clear the ball from left-back and as I did so, Robbie tried to block it but ended up coming across me and fouling me. I went down and the referee, Paul Durkin, booked him.
Robbie looked down at me. ‘Get up, you poof,’ he said. I stayed on the turf while the physio was treating me and then got up. By then, Robbie was standing ten yards away. The ball was in front of me, ready for the free-kick. I looked at Robbie. He started bending over and pointing his backside in my direction. He looked over his shoulder and started yelling at me. He was smirking. ‘Come and give me one up the arse,’ he said, ‘come and give me one up the arse.’
He said it three or four times. The Chelsea fans, in the benches where the new West Stand is now, were going berserk. The linesman was standing right next to me. He could see what Robbie was doing but he didn’t take any action. He didn’t call Durkin over. Everyone knew exactly what Robbie’s gesture meant. There wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation. I asked the linesman what he was going to do about it. He just stood there with a look of suppressed panic on his face.
So I stood there with the ball, waiting. Robbie could see he was winding me up and I suppose that gave him a great sense of gratification. So he carried on doing it. I told the linesman I wasn’t going to take the free-kick until he stopped. It was a Mexican stand-off. I wish Paul Durkin had found it in him to decide what was going on and then send Robbie off for ungentlemanly conduct.
It was a big moment. What Robbie did provided a chance for people to confront a serious issue. Some people compared it to sledging in cricket but sledging is still essentially private – an exchange or series of exchanges that stay between the players on the pitch. Only the people on the pitch are aware of the insults that are being hurled. That’s where I believe Robbie crossed the line and betrayed the game. When a fellow professional does something like that to you, when he mocks you for public consumption, it adds credibility to unfounded rumours. That is why it upset me so much. I just cannot accept that that is just part of the game. In my football career, I never saw anyone do something like that to another player.
Whatever happens on the pitch should stay on the pitch. There is a huge amount of pressure not to break that omertà. I don’t know where it comes from but it surrounds you. It is self-protecting. If you’re a player and you talk about things that should be kept private because they happened on the field, you risk losing the trust of team-mates and opponents. As soon as you step out of the circle and expose what actually happens, it’s very difficult to get back in.
I felt that what Fowler did – because it was so blatant – allowed me to step out of the circle and hit back at him in whatever way I needed to. He had betrayed me on the pitch. He had broken the code first. I have felt that conflict of interest on a few occasions and until then I had always taken the stick that came my way and laid low until the fuss blew over.
Black players have had plenty of foul abuse aimed at them over the years but no fellow player has ever made a public gesture like that at any one of them. Robbie wouldn’t dream of making gestures to a black player so why did he feel it was acceptable to incite me by sticking out his backside?
I think football had a chance to make a stand there and then against this kind of thing. The game could have made a strong statement that such blatant homophobia would not be tolerated. Durkin would have been feted for that if he had taken a stand and I believe that maybe it would have taken some of the stigma away for gay footballers who are still petrified of being found out. It could have been a turning point.
But football didn’t make a stand. Durkin ran over and booked me for time-wasting. I was dumbfounded. I asked him if he was just going to let Robbie get away with it. He didn’t say anything. He said later that he hadn’t seen what Robbie was doing but I wonder if it was just that he didn’t want to deal with it. No one wanted to deal with it.
My head filled up with anger. I still didn’t want to take the free-kick. Perhaps I should have taken even more of a stand. Perhaps I should just have refused to take the kick and been sent off. That would at least have forced the issue but it would probably have made me a martyr for the cause and I didn’t want that. In that kind of situation, the pressure to play on is overwhelming. The crowd is screaming and baying, the rest of the players are looking at you expectantly, waiting for play to restart. I looked at Robbie again and he had stopped bending over. So I took the free-kick.
I was consumed with the idea of retribution. I wanted vengeance. I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It was like smacking a punchball. I tried to calm down but I couldn’t. There was no way I could get rid of my anger. I ran up to the halfway line and tried to confront Robbie. I told him my family was in the stand. ‘Bollocks to your family,’ he said.
Robbie revealed a slightly different version of the episode in his autobiography – and a different attitude to it. He wrote that after all his insinuations about me being gay, I had run up to him on the pitch and shouted ‘But I’m married’ and that he had replied ‘So was Elton John, mate’. It’s a nice line and it makes Robbie look funny, which is the most important thing to him. But I’m afraid it’s what’s called dramatic licence – he didn’t say it.
I waited for my opportunity. I should have come off really. My head was gone. I wasn’t even concentrating on the game. I felt humiliated. It was an age until the ball came near us again but I was possessed with the idea of getting my own back. In the cold light of day, it sounds inexcusable but I felt as if the anger of so many years of being taunted was welling up inside me.
Eventually, the ball was played down their left-hand side and Robbie made a run towards our box. I came across and ran straight into him with a swing of the elbow. I clattered him as hard as I could but thankfully I’m not very good at that kind of thing. In fact, it was pathetic. Durkin didn’t see it so I didn’t get punished. Thankfully, it didn’t do Robbie any lasting damage. We had a couple more kicking matches and in the end he caught me on the calf and I had to come off. About eight minutes from the end, Vialli brought Eddie Newton on to replace me and the most traumatic match of my career was over.
I was still incredibly angry after the game. I went to see Durkin. I had already heard that the Match of the Day cameras had captured my elbow on Robbie and I wanted to outline to him exactly why I had done it. Dermot Gallagher was the fourth official and he said he’d seen the whole thing with Robbie jutting out his backside. He started talking about the amount of stick he’d had over the years for being Irish.
I had ten minutes with them, talking about the whole thing. I asked Durkin about the booking. I asked him why I’d be time wasting when we were playing at home and the score was 1–1. He didn’t have an answer. I asked the linesman again why he hadn’t done anything and he didn’t want to engage. He didn’t know what his response should have been: a guy sticking out his backside to taunt another player – it’s not in the rule book is it?
The aftermath was awful. I got buried by television and the newspapers because I had tried to take him out off the ball. That was fair enough. But it seemed bizarre that they were focusing on that rather than the extreme provocation I had been subjected to. Because I had reacted, a lot of people seemed to want to excuse Robbie for what he had done. Three days after the game, the FA charged us both with misconduct.
I sent him a letter of apology for thwacking him over the head. I got a letter from him, too. It was a non-committal explanation of what he had done. It wasn’t an apology as such. It was an attempt to save face, couched in legal niceties, drafted by a lawyer or an agent, and designed to appease the FA tribunal before they sat in judgment on us. It was a sad excuse of a letter really. It was an insult to everyone’s intelligence:
Dear Graeme,
I am in receipt of your without prejudice letter about what occurred on Saturday, February 27 at Stamford Bridge.
I am sorry if you misinterpreted my actions during the game, which were not meant to cause any offence to yourself or anyone else. Hopefully this unhappy incident can now be brought to an end.
I am sure you share my hope that when we play together again either on opposite sides or on international duty, people have no reason to judge us other than on our footballing abilities.
Best wishes,
R. Fowler
It was supposed to be a private letter but Robbie released it to the press. He did make one serious point about the incident in his autobiography, though. ‘Football’s a tough sport,’ he wrote, ‘and to get to the top, you have to be incredibly thick-skinned. A bit of name-calling never hurt anyone and the truth is that I wasn’t being homophobic, I was merely trying to exploit a known weakness in an opponent who had done me a number of times.’
It’s an interesting line of defence. According to Robbie’s rationale, then, it’s okay to call a black man a ‘nigger’ on the pitch and pretend it’s all in the line of duty. I don’t think so. I don’t think even Robbie would try and argue that. Maybe he just didn’t think about his argument. It’s more likely he didn’t really have any defence and that that was the best he could come up with. It wasn’t a very good effort.
The television and radio presenter Nicky Campbell produced an article about what Fowler had written: ‘I bet what Fowler did that day at Chelsea made thousands of youngsters feel pretty crappy about themselves,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine if he had performed a craven Uncle Tom shuffle of subordination to a black player. A bit of name calling never hurt anyone?
‘But it is unfair to blame Fowler. The insular and impenetrable culture of football is the fundamental problem. There, difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned. This is the world of the institutionally incurious.’
A month after Robbie offered me his backside, we both found ourselves in another England squad. There was another awkward reunion at Burnham Beeches. By now, Kevin Keegan was the manager and we were preparing for his first match in charge, a home European Championship qualifying tie against Poland. Kevin summoned us both to his room. He wanted us to stage a public reconciliation for the press. Robbie didn’t have quite as much bravado in that situation. He looked like a naughty little boy. He seemed shy and tongue-tied. Kevin wanted us to do a photo-call for the media but I said immediately that unless Robbie apologized to me first, that wasn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there was no way I was going to go out there and pretend we had resolved the situation – no chance.
I made it clear that I didn’t want a public apology from Robbie; just a private word would do. But he refused. He said he had done nothing wrong, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Keegan started to back off at that point. He wasn’t qualified to deal with it but I felt more confident about it. By now, I felt bolstered by the debate the incident had caused, and in a strange kind of way I felt relieved that the issue was totally out in the open. Now, at least, everyone knew the kind of taunting I had to put up with from the fans every week. Now, they could guess at the routine abuse I had to deal with on the pitch. From that moment on, there seemed to be less animosity about the chants that were directed at me. The debate about the incident with Fowler took some of the mystery out of it all and exposed it for the puerile cruelty it was.
I don’t feel any animosity towards Robbie now but you cannot do that to people. Because of the kind of stuff that he sought to justify, sometimes during my career it felt as if the whole world was against me. It was hard to deal with. It’s starting to sound like a sob story now, I know, and that’s not my intention. But this was like bullying, out and out bullying.
I was determined to stand up for myself. I confronted Robbie about it while we were in Keegan’s room. I pointed out to him that if he’d taken the piss out of someone like that in the middle of Soho where all the gay clubs are, he would have got chased down the street and beaten up. Even then, Robbie couldn’t resist it. When I mentioned the gay clubs in Soho, he muttered: ‘You’d know where they are.’ I laughed, I admit it. He can be a funny guy. I told him I’d be professional with him on the training pitch but that there was no way I was going to shake his hand.
On 9 April, six weeks after the original incident and six days after Robbie had got himself in more trouble by pretending to snort the white lines on the pitch at Goodison Park during a goal celebration in a Merseyside derby, we were both told to attend our separate FA disciplinary hearings at Birmingham City’s St Andrews ground. I took a barrister called Jim Sturman with me to act in my defence and the Chelsea managing director, Colin Hutchinson, came along to support me. Jim had put a dossier together to show the disciplinary committee which detailed the homophobic abuse I had suffered from crowds over the years. We had video footage of some of the more extreme incidents and Jim also brought some of the hundreds of letters of support I received from members of the public.
Jim presented my case very eloquently and the panel seemed surprised by our approach. It wasn’t so much punishing Robbie that I was after. I didn’t want to get him into more trouble. He seemed to be doing pretty well by himself without any extra help from me. It was more about illustrating to them the problem with homosexual abuse that still existed in English football and the extent of what I had had to deal with.
If they had given me a punishment based on what I did, I would not have accepted it. I felt it was important to make a stand. I also saw it as an opportunity to get the whole thing off my chest. I had put up with it for so long and this was like a chance to exorcize a demon. In my mind, it wasn’t about Robbie Fowler. It was all about me. It didn’t matter who had done it to me. It wasn’t personal. It was about the victimisation and the lies.
I expected a token punishment for the fact that I had done something wrong on the pitch. If they had tried to make an example out of me, though, I would have taken it further. I would have made the FA accountable for what had happened. In the end, they banned me for a game and gave me a £5,000 fine.
They hammered Robbie. He was suddenly dealing with the fall-out from his mock-cocaine-snorting antics as well as what he did to me. In a way, it got the FA off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.
I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.
Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.
But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.
It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.
The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.
The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having to run up and down the touchline in front of the Main Stand. I was scared stiff. I thought the fans were going to kill me.
In the second half, Luca told me to go and warm up. Because the linesman was running the line in the half to our right, we had to warm up at the Kop end. So when I ran down the touchline towards the Kop, the entire Kop started singing ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’. I think it was the loudest I’d ever heard it. Then the wolf whistles started. But something really had changed. For the first time ever, it didn’t upset me. For the first time, I felt I had the confidence to see it as the wind-up it was and take the sting out of it without getting upset.
During my stretching, I was in the corner near the Kop and I turned my back to them. I did a hamstring stretch where you open both your legs out wide and you get really low and touch your elbows on the floor. As I did it, I looked between my legs at the supporters and winked and smiled. And they all started applauding me. There was nothing pre-meditated about it. It’s funny, but it made me feel as though the pressure was lifting a bit. It took the edge off everything. It was a catharsis.
In the end, I got there. But it didn’t wipe out what I’d been through. It didn’t wash it away. Let’s be blunt: it was awful; it nearly drove me out of the game. The homophobic taunting and the bullying made me feel left out and misunderstood. People have read me wrong because they thought I wasn’t a team player just because I was different, just because I didn’t conform to the stereotype of a laddish footballer.
In my first spell at Chelsea, I was so close to walking away from football. I went through times that were like depression. I would get up in the morning and I wouldn’t feel good and by the time I got into training I would be so nervous that I felt sick. I dreaded going in. I was like a bullied kid on his way into school to face his tormentors.
Sometimes, when I look back at what I went through, I don’t know why I carried on – other than this singlemindedness and some sort of belief that I had a destiny to make it as a professional footballer. I can’t work out why I didn’t pack it all in but it was like I was on a path and despite all the baggage I was carrying, I never let myself stray from that path.
It’s an indictment of our game and the prejudice it allows, but I felt a great surge of relief when I retired. Playing was such an emotional drain. I had to get myself up for the game and then I had to prepare myself for being singled out by opposition supporters. That’s another notch altogether.
Abuse is abuse, whatever it is. I never understood why, if you could be kicked out of a football ground and prosecuted for racism, why not for other forms of prejudice? Early in 2007, the FA finally said that homophobic abuse should be treated in the same way as racial abuse inside football grounds. Given the abuse that I, and others, suffered, it feels like it was about twenty years too late. Perhaps that’s their idea of a rapid response unit. Still, better late than never.
The result of football’s strange tolerance of the homophobic victimization is that for somebody in the game to admit they are gay just couldn’t happen. If somebody came to me and said they were a gay footballer and asked my advice about whether they should be open about it, I would find it difficult to give them an honest answer.
I would find it difficult to say to a gay man that he ought to be true to himself and to the community he is representing. That’s what I’d want to tell him but the reality is that if you are a footballer and you want to do well, keep your mouth shut about being gay. That’s a terrible indictment of the English game but football is a society within a society. It’s another country.
TWO A Secret (#ulink_7119b612-a9a8-5616-ab9e-90aeac120905)
The thing is, I did have a secret; a secret I kept all through my playing career. I thought of it as a guilty secret. I was ashamed of my part in it and sometimes the guilt ate me up. Sometimes, it still does. Maybe that’s why I haven’t spoken publicly about it until now. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really even spoken to my dad, Pierre, about it, why I’ve tried to blank it out for so long. It had a big effect on me as a man and as a player. I was always concerned that it might be used as a reason for why I was so sensitive and quick to anger when I was on the pitch. For a long time, my secret went to the very heart of me.
My secret is this: when I was thirteen, my mother, Daphne, died. I know now that she had developed breast cancer a couple of years earlier and had a mastectomy. I know now that she thought she had beaten it but that it came back more deadly than ever. I know now that when I went away on a school football trip to northern France, my dad knew that my mum might have died by the time I got back to our home in Jersey. I know now that he had agreed with the doctors that it would be better for my mum if it was kept a secret from her. He was told that it might benefit her if she didn’t know how seriously ill she was. And obviously, if he wasn’t allowed to tell her, he couldn’t tell me or my two sisters.
So I didn’t even really realize my mum was ill. I was full of life and energy and busy chasing all my football dreams, haring to matches and training sessions all over the island. As a youngster, you don’t think about life or death. Anyway, mums and dads are always there. The thought of mum being ill never really crossed my mind. Perhaps I blinded myself to how poorly she was. Perhaps I shrugged off the signs I saw and I suppose everyone else helped me with my denial. It was only twenty-five years ago but people weren’t as open about cancer back then as they are now. It was still talked about in hushed tones.
My mum didn’t have chemotherapy so she didn’t lose her hair. She didn’t show too many outward signs of being ill. There were a couple of occasions when I walked into the room and found her crying but I just put it down to Mum being emotional. Even when an ambulance came to pick her up from our house in St Ouen, I failed to appreciate the seriousness of what was happening. I thought it was a bit of an adventure and my best mate, Jason, and I cycled furiously down to the parish hall and waited on the steps so we could see the ambulance driving past on its way to the hospital in St Helier. That was the last time I saw her. She was forty-one.
My poor dad: what a burden it must have been for him to carry. On the day he was in the hospital being told that my mum’s cancer had come back and that she had approximately nine months to live, I climbed onto the flat roof of the garage next to our house to retrieve a football. When I was getting down, I slipped and fell and gashed my shin so badly on a breeze block that it needed fifty stitches. It was a pretty dramatic injury and I was taken to hospital, too, without knowing of the terrible events that were unfolding there. Jason’s mum took me and bumped into my dad on the hospital steps. He thought she had come to inquire after my mum. When she told him what had happened and that the doctors were saying it might impede the use of my leg, the combination of it all was almost too much for him to bear. He says now it was the worst day of his life.
My mum was in and out of hospital in the weeks before her death. Then, that ambulance took her away and I went off on a football exchange trip to Caen for a long weekend. It was Easter and I was incredibly excited about it. I had an amazing time in France. We won the tournament we were playing in and some scouts from Caen, who were then in the French first division, were talking about me going over there for trials for their youth team.
When I got back to Jersey, I was euphoric. I’d bought some Easter chocolates for everyone and I couldn’t wait to give them to Mum and tell her all about my trip. We got the boat back to Jersey and I ran off it with my friend James Robinson, who was one of my close mates from school, when it docked. I spent a lot of time round at his house so I thought it was a bit weird when his dad looked straight through me on the quayside.
Soon, I caught sight of my dad. I was full of myself. I showed him the trophy I’d won and I gabbled out all the stuff about the trip. I was yakking away and we got in the car. We got about five minutes down the coast road from St Helier heading towards St Aubin. Out there in the bay was Elizabeth Castle on its rock. I suddenly thought ‘Oh Mum, how’s Mum?’ I asked Dad and he drew the car slowly into one of the lay-bys overlooking the beach.
He muttered something like ‘Just a second’ while he was stopping the car.
So I said ‘How’s Mum’ again.
‘Mum died whilst you were away,’ he said.
I couldn’t comprehend it. I said: ‘What?’
‘Mum’s died,’ Dad said. ‘She’s not with us any more.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It all seemed horribly unreal. As much as I tried to comprehend it, I just couldn’t accept it. I burst into tears while Dad tried to comfort me. As we drove home, fear gripped me. What was I going to say to my sisters? Who would I turn to now that Mum wasn’t ever going to be home again? Arriving at the house we walked into the lounge and there were all these cards of condolence – bizarrely it reminded me of Christmas. Mum was a very popular lady. She was a great netball player. She had loads of friends. And I just felt so lost. I looked around and I thought: ‘Everyone knows and I don’t. I’m their son and I’m the last one to know.’ Both my sisters were there – Jeanette is two years older than me and Alison is six years younger – and I felt that I hadn’t even been there for them. I can’t really express how difficult it was or how desperate I felt. I suppose you just spend time trying to come to terms with it.
I couldn’t even go to my own mother’s funeral – I was too embarrassed. I felt guilty because I suddenly saw it with such clarity after the event. It was like when someone throws a surprise party for you and you genuinely don’t know about it until you walk in. It’s that instant when you realize what has happened and suddenly all these pieces fit together.
Suddenly I knew why James Robinson’s dad couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew why we had been asked to go to church in France on the school trip the previous Sunday when we weren’t even a religious school. The teacher knew mum was seriously ill so he was desperate for us all to go to church and say a prayer for our loved ones. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I was distracted because I had a game of tennis organized for that Sunday morning and I didn’t want to go to the church. So the teacher let me off church and allowed me to play tennis. I thought that was unusually generous. I thought I’d got the best of the deal because everyone else was going to church while I was hurtling round a tennis court.
On reflection, all these pieces came together and I just couldn’t deal with it. I regret not going to the funeral more than anything now because it stopped me coming to terms with my mum’s death. On the day of the funeral, I went down to a hotel in St Brelade’s Bay with Jason, where his father worked, and just sat by the side of the swimming pool, staring into the water. I grieved and I went through a lot of emotions but I never had any support in those early years. I’m not blaming anyone – it wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just didn’t speak about it and it wasn’t until later in my life, when I met Mariana, that I felt I could open up about it. I did grieve at the time. I cried – a lot. It was more shock than anything. I found it really difficult to let go of her. I tried to remember her and relive things that happened before she died as part of trying to preserve her memory. But that made me even more upset. I’d transport myself back to a time when she was there and then, when I was forced to come out of it, it just accentuated the loss. I was a thirteen-year-old kid having to deal with that kind of emotional baggage. It added a complicated layer to my psychology.
It certainly wasn’t my dad’s fault. He didn’t have anyone to tell him the best way of dealing with the situation. It all happened a generation ago and cancer was still a bit of a taboo subject back then. You were supposed to deal with tragedies like that with a stiff upper lip and just get on with it.
I went back to school after the Easter holidays. I can still see the look in people’s faces now: their sympathy. When people said how sorry they were it used to annoy me. I wanted to say to them ‘Why are you sorry; it wasn’t anything to do with you; you’re not to blame’. Emotionally, I became a lot more sensitive. Add the sensitivity from my mum’s death to the alienation I felt at Chelsea when I first arrived there in my late teens and it made me particularly vulnerable.
My mum had been so supportive of me as a child. One of the things that upset me most about not having her around was that I could no longer share my experiences and achievements with her. She was the one who picked us up from school. She took so much interest in us. Some of the things I did, I felt I was doing for her. We couldn’t wait to tell her what we’d done at school when she was there waiting for us at the school gates. She was so interested in our lives. After she died, I felt this huge hole because she was no longer there. From the age of seven upwards, I always played football on the school pitches during lunch hour. Because I was left-footed, every day I used to come home with eight inches of mud down my right trouser leg, a crusty, muddy mark that mapped out the trajectory of a slide tackle and invariably ended with a hole in the trouser knee. Mum used to wash them and mend them patiently. She had a rota with my school trousers because I got them muddy every day. I often think now ‘Thank God she let me carry on ruining my trousers’. I wish I could communicate that to her but I can’t.
That was one of the saddest aspects of it. Through all the various milestones of my life and my career, I always had a moment when I wished she could see it. It would have made all the sacrifices and the hardships that she had endured for me worthwhile. And I know, just like any mother, she would be proud of me and my sisters.
My mum’s death changed me. It strengthened my drive and my outlook. I was always single minded anyway. I was always feisty and ambitious but when she died it made me want to leave Jersey. It is such a small island and it was such a traumatic experience that it turned parts of Jersey into unhappy places for me for a few years. Whenever I went down certain roads or visited certain beauty spots or beaches or shops, it brought back memories of my mum. It just used to upset me. Now, I can look back on them as happy memories and happy associations but for a long time those memories just upset me deeply.
I love my island. It’s only nine miles wide and five miles north to south but I loved growing up there. My identity is Jersey. Even though my dad wanted to call me Jean-Pierre (he was overruled by my mum), I feel more English than French – but more Jersey than English. Life seemed uncomplicated and happy there in the years before Mum died. I would cycle down the hill from my house to St Ouen’s Bay, with its dramatic dunes and its miles of beach and the warren of underground tunnels the Germans built after they invaded Jersey at the start of the Second World War. I’d play football for hours on the firm sand. Then, for a real challenge, I’d cycle back up the steep hill past Stinky Bay, where the smell of seaweed wafted up from the rocks below, and past the trees bent over by the sea breeze and the signs advertising Jersey Royal Potatoes back to my house on the hill.
It’s such a beautiful place, such a stark contrast to what I had to confront in London. No wonder I felt the culture shock so badly when I swapped Jersey for Burnt Oak. Often, in the evening, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I would drive my car to the headland at Grosnez, the most northwesterly point of the island, and park it by the ruins of the fourteenth-century arch there. I’d get out, stare over the water to Sark and then lie on the bonnet, listening to the waves and staring up at the stars. Sometimes, going to those places still makes me melancholy but back then it would bring tears to my eyes. I suppose it was part of coming to terms with letting go of my mum. I never said goodbye to her. I never had that raw sort of emotion. I kept it all within me.
People can psychoanalyse me as much as they want and it would be very easy to pin all my emotional baggage onto this one massive event. It would be easy to say I reacted to Robbie Fowler because my mum died or I hit David Batty because my mum died. But I might have been like that anyway. I don’t know. One of the reasons I believe I kept it from everyone at Chelsea and was glad that no one knew about it was because I had this fear that if people knew about my mum, then at some point someone would have made reference to it to try to use it against me. And I knew that that would have made me uncontrollably furious.
That would have been worse than anything I experienced, worse than any of the homophobic taunts. That’s one of the reasons I have never spoken about it. I never told anyone at Chelsea about it. In that way, I used football as a valid reason not to talk about her death. It was part of my process of denial. I told myself I couldn’t talk about it because people would use it against me and that meant I didn’t have to talk about it.
At various points during my playing career, I might get a casual question about what my parents did. I’d say my dad was a chartered quantity surveyor and my mum was a housewife. I just never talked about it publicly because I wanted to protect what I had. Some people would probably say it was a classic case of denial but it wasn’t that. I shared my thoughts with my friends in Jersey, friends like Jason and Susie, and now that I have moved away from football, I don’t feel as uncomfortable talking about it with people outside the game.
It’s strange. I have a close relationship with my dad and my sisters. We’re a loving family but we don’t talk about that time much. There are times when I think we ought to talk about it. My younger sister was only seven, just a bit younger than my own daughter is now, when Mum died. She never knew her mum. She deserves to know more.
When I became a footballer, it was my decision not to say anything about my mum so it’s always been my responsibility to deal with people that don’t know about her death and therefore say something inappropriate. But with any problem I’ve ever had, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to blame it on the fact that my mum died when I was a kid. I have never used her death as an excuse. That’s one thing I find hard to accept about some people: there is a type of person that uses things that have happened to them as an excuse to fail. Some circumstances cause people to implode. Equally, you can try and be determined to cope with adversity and get over it. I went through a stage of just feeling utterly lost. I questioned everything. I questioned the fundamentals of my life and there probably was a time when I could have made some bad decisions that derailed me.
However, I avoided that. It is a huge credit to my dad and my two sisters, and to my school and friends, that things happened that way. Football was always a huge release for me, too. It was just there. That was my time – I was never distracted. It allowed me to block out all the stuff about my mum. It helped me focus. I was desperate to win anyway but this made me even more absorbed in my football. And my mum’s death had another effect: I’ve been through bad times in my career and I’ve been able to cope because none of it was as traumatic as my mum dying.
I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the woman who became my dad’s partner in the years after Mum died. Her name was Alice and she became a mother figure to me and my sisters. There was no sense of resentment towards her because she had taken our mum’s place or anything like that. I only feel a deep and lasting appreciation towards her. In many ways, she kept our family together. She and my dad never lived together but we always went round to her house for Sunday lunch and she became a steadying, stabilising influence in all our lives. She was a lovely, loving, caring, gentle and kind lady.
Alice knew my mum and dad when they were younger but after Mum died, Dad was working on a building contract at Jersey Potteries and he bumped into Alice again while she was working in the gift shop there. She was like a saint to us. She had a massive role in a lot of people’s lives: she gave her life to other people. Her sister and her own mother completely and utterly relied on her. She had met my dad again when he was a widower with three children. Why on earth did she take us on when she already had so many responsibilities?
Sadly, Alice has now gone as well. One Tuesday in August 2002, I was in London having lunch with Gianfranco Zola when Mariana rang me and told me I had to come straight home. I asked her what the matter was. Had something happened to the kids? Was she alright? She kept telling me to come home and that there was something she had to tell me. When I got back, she told me Dad had called and that Alice had died. She had gone to bed the night before and she hadn’t woken up. It seems her heart had just given out and they never discovered what caused it. A partnership of twenty years with my dad came to an end with shuddering suddenness.
I spoke at her funeral which was at St Martin’s Methodist Church. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But I had to do it: I had to do it for her; I had to do it for me; and I had to do it for my mum. After what I had been through with my mum, I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t done that last thing for Alice. All the emotion that I went through on that day counted for double and in a way, it gave me some closure about my failure to attend my mum’s own funeral. I told myself that day that I had to stop taking small things so seriously. I told myself I had to remember what was important in life. I told myself I had to enjoy every moment because life can be so fleeting and brutal. We have all these constant reminders of our mortality and yet we still get so upset and stressed about the most ridiculous things. All great thoughts and then the next day you have a row about whose fault it is you’ve run out of milk.
I don’t know what my dad must have gone through. After Alice died, he said he felt lucky to have known both her and my mum but he must sometimes think ‘What did I do to deserve this’. But he never let his commitment to me and my sisters drop. He and my mum used to spend a lot of what is known now as ‘quality time’ with the three of us. After she died, Dad worked hard but he was always there for us. My mum was a good netball player and Dad had played football to a decent amateur standard so we were all encouraged to be sporty.
Dad was ambitious for me when I was a child. He would drive me here and there. He was a taxi service. But his way of connecting with me was through football. He would get a football out when I was two or three and he felt pretty quickly that I had an eye for it. As I got older, he became much more serious about my football. It helped that I was an outdoor kid. I wouldn’t think twice about going on a two-hour bike ride and I took cross country very seriously. Football, however, soon became all-consuming. I played for my school, St Saviour’s, and for the Island Primary Schools and the Island Cubs. That was the first time I ever came up against Matt Le Tissier, who was from Guernsey. He was right-sided, I was left-sided, so we were always rivals.
I came up against him time and again and it often seemed our careers shadowed each other’s. We were the first players from the Channel Islands to represent England. He made his debut sixty-six minutes after I made mine. There seemed to be something linking us. He was born on 14 October 1968. I was born on 17 October 1968 – weird. Every time I played against him when we were kids, I used to get that nervous feeling you have when you’re up against someone who you think is better than you. I can’t remember him showing me up too badly but that may just be because I have erased it from my memory. I do remember, though, that when he signed professional forms for Southampton when he was sixteen, it felt like someone had finally burst the dam as far as Channel Islands football was concerned. He was the first from the islands of my generation to get a professional contract. He showed it could be done.
There was some good schools football in Jersey. At a younger age, there was an Easter primary schools tournament which is still an annual event now and has become very prestigious. Deeside Schools always came down and they were one of the best sides in the country: Ian Rush, Gary Speed and Michael Owen all played for them at different times. So I was exposed to a good standard of football. Later, I went to a secondary school called Hautlieu and continued to play football while I studied. What went against me in terms of the bigger picture and getting a shot at a trial with a professional club was the fact that I lived on the island. For a club to invite me for a trial was a big commitment because they would have to pay for the cost of the flight and put me up in digs. The expense was prohibitive.
When I was thirteen, my dad paid for me to go to a soccer camp put on by Southampton. I had the accident when I fell off the garage roof a few weeks before the camp was due to start but even though I had all those stitches in my shin, there was no way I was going to miss it. I loved it. I spent a week there. They asked me to stay for a second week and said they would keep an eye on me. My dad had high hopes for what that camp might achieve for me but when I went back the next year, they said I had not developed as much as they had hoped.
I endured some of the rites of passage many aspiring footballers go through – such as the careers meeting with the sceptical teacher. She had a computer with a fairly basic careers programme. She asked what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to be a footballer. She keyed it in and it was reminiscent of Little Britain – the computer said no. ‘Nothing’s come up,’ she said. So she put ‘sportsman’ in and again nothing came up. In the end, she said ‘What else would you like to do?’ I shrugged. She gave me a printout of how to become a bank manager, just so she could tick her box. When I signed for Chelsea a couple of years later, they took me down to the Lloyd’s Bank at Fulham Broadway. I looked up at the bank manager as I was writing ‘professional footballer’ on the form. I thought of my careers meeting. ‘I could have been you,’ I said.
Anyway, I kept plugging away. I had had a trial at Notts County when I was thirteen or fourteen and got my picture taken with Howard Wilkinson and Jimmy Sirrell. I played for Southampton in a testimonial with people like Kevin Bond when Chris Nicholl was the manager. But nothing materialized and I began to think nothing ever would. However, when I got to seventeen, I won a soccer scholarship to the Florida Institute of Technology, which is on the Atlantic coast, well north of Miami and not far from Orlando. I still had this determination to put some distance between me and Jersey and all the melancholic memories of the loss of my mum that used to flood over me now and again. Moving to the States for a couple of years, studying marine biology and playing football, seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that. Everything was ready to go. I had a big farewell party and then I went up to London to stay with my aunt the night before I was due to catch the plane to Miami. That night, my dad phoned. There was a last-minute hitch. Florida Tech had been on. There was a problem with my visa at their end – it was something to do with them having miscalculated their numbers of foreign students. Anyway, it was all off. I felt devastated.
I dealt with it like I’d dealt with a lot of other setbacks: I threw myself into football. I played morning, noon and night, training and playing, training and playing, squeezing in a Saturday morning job on a fruit and veg stall and my A-level homework when I could. And I had a stellar season that year. By then, I was playing for a team called St Paul’s who I thought were the best team in Jersey. I played for their juniors and their seniors and that year both sides won the Jersey league and qualified to play for a Cup called the Upton against the winners of the junior and senior leagues in Guernsey. I won the junior and the senior Upton that year and I also represented the island at junior and senior level against Guernsey in a competition called the Muratti. We won both of those, too. So I won six major trophies. From the outside, it might sound a bit like Channel Islands small fry but for us it was a big deal and it formed an important part of the Channel Islands sporting calendar. It made me a bit of a schoolboy phenomenon in Jersey because nobody before had ever accomplished what I had that season.
Some time that summer, the Chelsea manager, John Hollins, came down to Jersey to present the end of season prizes for the island’s football clubs. I wasn’t eligible for the Player of the Year award for the senior team because I was under age so I wasn’t even at the ceremony. However, people kept going up to John and telling him about me and all these records I’d set in Jersey football. ‘If he’s as good as you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘I better get him over and have a look at him.’ He wrote my name down on the back of a match box next to the phone number of an official of St Paul’s. When he got back to Chelsea, he made the call and in July 1987, they contacted my dad.
I went over for a week’s trial and at the end of it, they offered me a professional contract. There was still one more hurdle to overcome, though. I’d failed my biology A-level and my dad asked John Hollins if he would mind if I re-sat it that November and postponed joining Chelsea until December. That was pretty ballsy of my dad and my heart was in my mouth because I thought Chelsea might be offended. But John Hollins didn’t seem to mind and it was all agreed.
So, eventually, I left Jersey. I didn’t feel I had to be on the island any more. I still loved it but my mum’s death gave me a real determination to get away and fulfil my ambitions. A lot of people who grow up in Jersey feel they would miss the island if they moved to the mainland but emotionally, I was out of there. I couldn’t change what had happened. If only I had known then what I know now. But then we can all look back and regret things. It’s how we deal with them that is important. Perhaps it will help me be an ear for someone who has been through a similar thing. Perhaps it’s already making me value my children with an extra keenness. My mum’s death changed many things in my life but back then, it made me feel as though I had to carve out a life for myself away from Jersey. I felt like I was on a mission.
THREE First-time Blues (#ulink_0cbb3ffb-9f4b-598b-b38e-5f77cca71c73)
In theory Chelsea’s training ground at Harlington should have felt as though it was at the centre of the modern world. It was a few hundred yards south of the M4. You could hear the hum of the traffic streaming in and out of the capital when you walked from your car to the changing rooms. On the other side, it was bounded by the runways at Heathrow. You could see the planes queuing up to land as they glided in over the west London suburbs, and the roar from Concorde as it took off sometimes stopped training in its tracks. Harlington and being part of Chelsea Football Club should have felt like a launch pad. It should have felt like a hub. But to me, it was a desolate place. It was no man’s land.
I saw it first in the summer of 1987 when John Hollins, who was a manager heading into a storm, invited me over for a week’s trial. I arrived so full of energy and enthusiasm and determination. It makes me smile now to think of how naive and raw I was. I ran myself into the ground that week. I was determined to seize my opportunity – I thought I might never get another. So I hurtled around like a madman in training and the first teamers loved it. They probably recognized that wide-eyed enthusiasm from the time they had it, the time before the routine of being a professional footballer gripped them.
One of the most popular training drills was for the first team to form a big circle and stick one of the trialists in the middle of it. We had to try and get the ball off them and they had immense amounts of fun with that. They were like matadors with a young bull. I charged around and flew at them. They knew they had a live one. They were doing olés every time they touched it and kept the ball away from me. There were cheers and whoops. Roy Wegerle, who also played for Blackburn, QPR, Luton and the USA and was one of the most skilful players I’ve ever seen, did this trick where he received the ball on his right foot, dragged it behind his left foot and then flicked it out the other side all in one movement. I couldn’t get anywhere near the ball. Every day that week, I was utterly exhausted at the end of training. I gave it absolutely everything.
After seven days, I went back to Jersey. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me saying that I had failed one of my A-levels. The amount of football I had been playing that year, it was a miracle I could even read. A few days later, John Hollins phoned my dad and said they wanted to offer me a contract. I couldn’t believe it. But my priorities were slightly different to a lot of footballers even then: my dad told John that I wanted to resit my biology A-level that November and that I’d like to postpone joining the club until then. John was relaxed about it. It wasn’t as if he was planning to rush me into the first team. So he said that was fine. I re-took biology and passed it and at the beginning of December I became a Chelsea player. I had just turned nineteen.
The club was going through a difficult period and its future was uncertain. Ken Bates, the chairman, was fighting to buy Stamford Bridge and save it from the developers. John Hollins was a good manager but I soon realized that he was a gentle man in charge of a very strong dressing room and that that was not a good combination. There was nothing sophisticated about Chelsea in those days, certainly not among the players. It was staffed by tough, unyielding men some of whom played hard and drank hard and then came to training. These men did not eat pasta salads and florets of broccoli.
These men were not King’s Road dandies like Alan Hudson and Peter Osgood and the playboys of a previous Chelsea generation. I was scared witless of some of them. There was a bloke called John McNaught, a really rough, tough, Scottish central defender who was literally hardnosed. He was terrifying. He only played thirteen times for the first team but I played plenty of reserve football with him. Pat Nevin, who I respected, liked McNaught for his honesty but he just scared me rigid.
Some of my team-mates in club football in Jersey had played their football in Scotland and Wales and Ireland so it wasn’t as if people like McNaught and Peter Nicholas, when he arrived later, were aliens to me. Nonetheless it amazed me that people like them were professional players. I was expecting professional footballers to be professional in every sense of the word but there were players there for whom football was all about the lifestyle off the pitch. Their work had to fit into their lifestyle rather than the other way around. McNaught would arrive in the morning a bit hungover and ragged. You could tell he had been out. He would turn up late for reserve games. He was a good centre-half, tough as old boots, but I was taken aback by his approach. I thought that if you were professional, you needed to be in top condition. Back then, before the influx of foreign players made English football much more driven and professional, you could just about disguise the fact that you lived your social life to the full. Some of these guys could get away with it.
The minute I signed my contract, I really appreciated what I was doing; I felt so fortunate. But with some of these players it was a way of life. They had grown up with it. They had always gone out and they had still made it. I didn’t feel the two were compatible for me. I knew that if I did that, I’d be shot to pieces; I knew I couldn’t afford to do it. To be honest, I didn’t want to do it, anyway: it wasn’t me.
I found it hard to make good friends at Chelsea. I was caught between the apprentices and the battle-hardened professionals. That’s what I mean about the no man’s land. I hadn’t come up through the ranks at the club with good apprentices like Jason Cundy, David Lee, Damian Matthew and Graham Stuart; and I was regarded as an over-earnest young swot by blokes like Nicholas, Steve Wicks, Kerry Dixon, David Speedie and Andy Townsend, the men who called the shots at the club and ran the dressing room.
I don’t know how much of my alienation at the club was about class. I have always shied away from class issues and I have never judged anyone on class. But I think I was judged. Some of the lads told me I was a bit posh. In England, unlike in Europe, I’ve always noticed that there seems to be an issue with young players who have been educated academically, purely because they are so much in the minority. Those players find it hardest to fit in, particularly when they are trying to fit in with a group of young lads. It has changed a lot now and improved but some footballers still have a very insular mentality.
Class wasn’t obvious in Jersey. I didn’t consider my family privileged in any particular way. I didn’t consider myself middle class. I wasn’t privately educated, for instance, but apart from the fact that my parents couldn’t have afforded it, there wasn’t really any need for private education in Jersey: there were no problems with lack of books or facilities. The class boundaries weren’t defined there. We all played rugby and football. I played football with some really street-wise guys in Jersey: builders, plumbers, electricians and other labourers. I grew up in a team that had quite a solid base of Scottish and northern English players and rather than scorning me, they took me under their wing.
But when I arrived at Chelsea, everything felt very closed off. There was a lot of intimidation. Suddenly I was involved constantly with people who were alien to me. In Jersey, most of my routine was about school and I only saw the lads now and again. Now, the main part of my life was about mixing with players at Chelsea with whom I had nothing in common. I wasn’t a poor little rich boy but I think some of them regarded me like that. Also, there was no respite from it: the micky-taking seemed absolutely relentless and it gets hard when you’re always the target.
It was a tough environment. By the time I got back there in December, the club was sliding towards relegation and John Hollins was in trouble. People look after themselves, particularly when a club is in trouble, and the lads ran the show. Anything went. The management did not solve the problems I had, they didn’t tackle my isolation – in fact, they helped to perpetuate it. Once, in training, we were sitting round in a big circle talking something through as a team and I said something that Bobby Campbell, who succeeded Hollins, took exception, too. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he joked. ‘You’re just the product of a German rape.’
He didn’t know that my mother had died, of course, so he couldn’t know quite how deeply that comment hurt me, but I was still astonished he could say something like that. He was clearly aware that the Channel Islands had been invaded by the Germans during the Second World War and I suppose that was his idea of humour. Comedy was different then: he was mates with Jimmy Tarbuck, and people like Freddie Starr were considered funny at the time. But Campbell didn’t make anyone laugh. Even the other lads looked surprised by what he said; most of them just looked at the floor. I raged inside. I didn’t say anything but I never forgot what he had said. It was part of the wider problem I felt I had at the club: no one ever stood up for me. You expect to feel nurtured when you go to a club like that but I wasn’t. I felt alone most of the time.
If you have not come through the ranks from fourteen or fifteen, it becomes more and more difficult to integrate. You’re an outsider to the players who have been there together for a few years. You’re a threat to them and you’re a threat to their mates. No one could put me into a definite category which also made them suspicious of me. That created mistrust. I didn’t relate or conform to fit into a group. I didn’t compromise enough. I challenged a lot of stereotypes and I didn’t have any allies. I couldn’t compete in a talk-off with the smarter guys because I wasn’t quick enough or confident enough to take them on verbally. I certainly couldn’t challenge them physically. If you have got a little group of players you are friendly with, you are safe within that group. I never had that. I had been at school with my friends and protected within that environment. There were confrontations as at any other school but I was popular and confident when I was in Jersey. However, as soon as I came into football, I was getting stick from all angles. Over a period of time, it wore me down.
Of course, there were happy moments within it all. I was there for more than five years in my first spell. I couldn’t have survived if there was no respite at all. There is always laughter at football clubs. There are incidents every day. Once, at the end of a five-a-side game on one of Harlington’s muddy pitches, David Lee slid in to prod home a goal. He opened his mouth to shout ‘Yeah’ as his momentum carried him into the goal and then suddenly he started clutching his face. One of his teeth had got hooked by the net as he shouted; it had twisted the tooth and flicked it clean out. I was doubled up with laughter like the rest of the lads. For some reason, we spent several minutes scrambling around in the mud trying to find it. What were we going to do with it? Give it to the tooth fairy? I don’t know if we thought they could screw it back in if we got it. But we never did.
The same thing happened to Craig Burley when he was an apprentice. He had two front teeth missing most of his career. Know how he did it? A ball came to him chest high and he got caught in two minds about whether to stoop to head it or do a falling volley. In the end, he did neither. In the end, he tried to knee it and he just kneed himself in the face and knocked out his two front teeth. Cue more scrabbling around in the mud. It was funny at the time.
I’m not saying I felt I had a lot of enemies at Chelsea, either. I liked lads like Graham Stuart and Damian Matthew and Jason Cundy. Graham and Jason used to pick me up from the bus stop at Hampton Court, near the digs in Kingston I’d moved into after I left Burnt Oak, and drive me into training. We got on fine and they used to laugh about what Indie band I’d been to see the night before. Some of the lads gave me a nickname, Berge, after the television detective Bergerac, who gave the impression that my beautiful island was riddled with violent crime.
Mostly, however, I struggled. Perhaps I was a bit homesick as well but I found many of the aspects of my new life intimidating and hostile. At Harlington there were separate dressing rooms and groups of players were separated off into their own little space. That made integration even harder. It was like a little passport control system. If you did well, you moved into the next dressing room and up the food chain as it were. The young lads were down at the far end, furthest away from the entrance. The first teamers were just inside the door. There was another one for the also-rans.
There was scope for moving onwards and upwards within that strange little hierarchy but places in the coveted dressing rooms didn’t come up until a player left. So if you wanted to be in a dressing room with The Lads, you needed to wait for someone else to be sold and then jump in before the replacement came. If you knew someone when you signed for Chelsea, you might get fast-tracked. That kind of separation meant I never really got to know a lot of my team-mates in the first team. I might train with them occasionally but when you are training you are focusing on that. It was really disruptive.
In the early years, I never really thought I was going to be good enough to make it at Chelsea and if I analyse it, a lot of my success was based on insecurity. A lot of ambition is based on fear of failure. I have seen so many players get dispirited, walk away and give up before they should have done. I’ve wanted to say to some of them: ‘You are too good to give up.’ But the one thing you can’t do is change that desire in someone. You have either got the will to succeed or you haven’t. It’s not going to happen unless you make it happen
For a long time at Chelsea, I felt I was way behind people like Graham and Damian because, when I first arrived, they had been playing football at that level for two or three years as apprentices. I felt like an outsider looking in. There were plenty of moments when it would have been easier for me to jack it in. That’s why I never signed a long-term contract at Chelsea. I always gave myself targets. I signed for two years and got through that. Then I signed for three years and got through that. I had a little bit of security but not too much. I’m such a safety first guy normally but I took a risk by signing short-term contracts because I wanted to play football on my terms. I didn’t want to be tied into something that I couldn’t get out of if it wasn’t working.
I played the first six months in the reserves under Gwyn Williams, one of Chelsea’s great survivors, a Bates man who only bit the dust when Roman Abramovich took over. Gwyn held plenty of positions at Chelsea down the years – mainly because he was a good coach and because he was always upbeat and lively. At different times, he ran the academy, the reserves, he was assistant manager, he did the travel, and he was chief scout. When I was there, he was really hard on the players – he used to hammer us. His idea was to try and prepare everyone for the profession. In some ways, I liked him but he destroyed a few people.
He was always very hard on the black lads but I know he didn’t see it as racist – he was hard on everyone and didn’t single them out in particular. It was very much a product of its time. It seems harsh and brutal now but even then, less than 20 years ago, it was seen as acceptable. Racism in the game was more of a problem then and I suppose Gwyn could argue that he was just trying to steel the Afro-Caribbean guys for the stick they would receive from their fellow professionals and from sections of the crowd at away games. Thankfully, racial abuse has dwindled in English football now to the point where Gwyn’s kind of education isn’t acceptable any more.
Frank Sinclair and Eddie Newton still liked Gwyn despite all the insults he levelled at them but there were others like Nathan Blake who found it more difficult. That brings us back to the Robbie Fowler dictum: football is a tough business and if anyone has a weakness, it gets picked on.
Some players can handle it and others can’t. I could take it – at least most of the time. But it changed me. I found it very hard when I was younger. The atmosphere was so intimidating. People would play on your weaknesses and really get stuck into you – more psychologically, but also as a player. At Chelsea in the late Eighties, there was a tradition that if you were judged to have been the worst player at a training session, you were awarded a yellow bib at the end and you would have to wear it at the start of the next one. Once I had the bib, even if I had a brilliant training session the next time, I tended to get it again – because that amused The Lads. That got demoralising and it was quite isolating – it made you feel like an outcast. I noticed that Dennis Wise introduced that ritual at Swindon when he was manager there. I saw a newspaper article about how Paul Ince had had to wear the yellow bib once or twice when he played there for a spell. I bet he took that well.
When the accusations about my sexuality started and I took it seriously, that snowballed. But even apart from that, the taunting and the mickey-taking and the picking on people was relentless. Some of the lads had this routine they thought was hilarious. We’d be on the mini bus to a reserve game and we’d be driving through Parliament Square, say, and past Big Ben. Nobody would mention Big Ben but then one of the boys would say to me, ‘What’s the time, Graeme?’ I’d say, ‘Quarter to seven,’ and they’d fall about laughing and go on about Big Ben being right there. Or we’d get onto the forecourt at Old Trafford and one of the lads would say innocently ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I’d say ‘Of course we bloody are, look there’s the ground’ and the laughing would start again. I suppose I was pretty gullible. If somebody wanted to know what the time was, I’d tell them the time. I never recognized it as a prank.
There were cheap shots like that constantly. I felt I came in for quite a bit of stick. I must have seemed very different and so I was an easy target. I had my rucksack and my Walkman; I had jeans with a hole in the knee. I used to get hammered. Now that I’ve stopped playing, I look at the younger players and the ones that stood out were the ones who got the grief. It wasn’t the kind of life I had imagined it would be. There were times when I was very unhappy. It had almost got to the point where I had separated my football life from my life away from the game in order to stay sane.
I had a few run-ins with people. I had a go at Kerry Dixon about being lazy in training and we both threw punches. I had a ding-dong with Peter Nicholas, too. But those things happened every week. John McNaught and a striker called Billy Dodds were having a massive argument about something and John called him a ‘thick Scottish prick’. When Billy pointed out John was Scottish, too, that kind of shortcircuited John’s brain and they had a punch-up. Fights in training still occasionally happen now but it was a much tougher environment back then.
Maybe it was partly because Chelsea were going through a tough spell fighting relegation but sometimes training just felt like anarchy. Some of the guys just didn’t care. In the reserves, we used to do shooting practice and the lads would boot the ball over the bar on purpose so that it flew into the field behind the goal. They’d climb over the gate into the field and have a kick-about over there while the coach was trying to put on a shooting session on the pitch. The reserves was a sub-culture. There were players in the reserves who only ever seemed to play for the reserves. For some of them, the idea that it was supposed to be a stepping stone into the first team had ceased to exist – they had gone missing in action. Quite a lot of them had dodgy attitudes. They didn’t want to be at the club. It’s very easy for a young player to get influenced by that and think that’s the way to behave. You’ve got to be single-minded to avoid that trap.
I earned £120 a week when I first signed. The first thing I bought was a Sony Walkman for £100. It had wind-in head-phones and it was my pride and joy. It got me through the journey to and from my digs in Burnt Oak every day. It was nearly a week’s wages for me so it was like Michael Ballack spending £100,000 on something. My second contract, which I signed in 1990, took me up to £400 a week. That allowed me to have a mortgage of £75,000 at a time when the interest rate was 15 per cent. I wanted to get a fancy car and live the life a bit but prudence got the better of me and I decided to invest everything in a flat.
My thinking was that whatever happened in my football career, if I could come out of it with a property and no mortgage then that was a worthwhile ambition. So I climbed onto the property ladder and bought a flat and then, later, a fourbedroomed Victorian house in Thames Ditton, Surrey. We were in a recession at the time. When I sold the flat eighteen months later, I only got what I paid for it. I was only twenty-three and I suppose I bought it for the family that I didn’t have. I thought that if I bought this house I could live there if I had a wife and family, too. I wasn’t planning to get married imminently but I was always thinking ahead and planning stuff. I thought I could live there okay if I did find someone.
So I paid £225,000 for it and I never got my flash car. I imported a Suzuki jeep from Jersey instead. The rest of the lads were driving XR3is and Renault 5 turbos and I had a Suzuki jeep. It had a maximum speed of about 50mph. I drove it to Wales once on the motorway and I had to take a run up of about two miles if I wanted to overtake anything.
At least the football side of things went okay. I made my debut for the reserves against Portsmouth at a half-frozen Fratton Park and I was awestruck because the former England forward Paul Mariner was in the Portsmouth team. I played left-back that day but on other occasions Gwyn had me playing all over the place. I played at centre-back for three or four months and at one point, I said to Gwyn that I couldn’t play centre-back any more. He said that in that case, he wouldn’t bother picking me – so I played at centre-back. I think that was part of my problem in my first spell at Chelsea: they felt I was so versatile that I never got settled in one position. When the players who played in a set position regularly were fit, I’d find myself out of the team. You become easy to drop: I hadn’t cost them anything and I was part of the furniture so it was easier to drop someone like me than someone they had paid a lot of money for.
But they were a good group of young players in that Chelsea reserve side. Jason Cundy was sold to Spurs for £800,000 in 1992 and his career was marred first by back problems and then by a struggle with cancer. Dave Lee was a really good player but he broke his leg badly and never really recovered from it. And Graham Stuart, who was a clever, creative player, had a good career at Everton, where he won an FA Cup Winners’ medal, and at Charlton Athletic where he was part of the Alan Curbishley success story. It was a good bunch but sadly most of us had to leave in order to realize our potential.
The reserve team did okay but the first team was struggling. A couple of months after I arrived, John Hollins began to come under serious pressure. He had fallen out with players like Speedie and Nigel Spackman and team spirit had disintegrated. One day in February 1988, Bobby Campbell suddenly turned up at training. I hadn’t been aware of speculation linking him with the job and he hadn’t been officially given it: he just loitered around a bit at Harlington, watching from the sidelines, that sort of thing. It was very odd. He was supposed to be John’s new assistant but it was obvious he was the manager-in-waiting. After a few days of that, John told him to get lost and that while he was still manager, Campbell wasn’t welcome. In March, John got the sack and Campbell took over.
Campbell was a Scouser. He was flash, flash a bit like Ron-Manager. He wore a lot of gold. He had a Rolex that didn’t lock properly, which was something that he seemed to like. He used it as a kind of gimmick. Every time he clapped his hands, the strap would come undone and the watch would rattle and it would all draw attention to the fact that he was wearing a Rolex. He was a bit tougher than John and he brought in players like Graham Roberts, Peter Nicholas, Dennis Wise and Dave Beasant and they became powerful people within the club. The club was going through a stage where things were going to have to get worse before they got better and, at the end of the season, we were relegated from the top flight after losing a two-leg relegation play-off against Middlesbrough. To make things worse, there was crowd trouble after the game and an attempted pitch invasion. Chelsea were forced to close the terraces for six matches the following season as a punishment.
It wasn’t a happy time to be involved at Stamford Bridge but the next season, Campbell did a great job. We were promoted at a canter with ninety-nine points, seventeen clear of our nearest rivals Manchester City, and when the Second Division championship was already won, I finally got my chance in the first team. I’d travelled with the first team a couple of times before that but I hadn’t made it to the bench. On the last day of the 1988/89 season, we were away to Portsmouth at Fratton Park, just like we had been for my reserve debut.
When Campbell told me to warm up, I did about twenty sprints up and down the touchline. I was hyperactive; I was petrified; I was desperate to get on – all at the same time. I was so nervous, I kept checking to make sure I had my shirt on. Campbell beckoned me over with about fifteen minutes to go and sent me on for Steve Clarke. Tony Dorigo was in the team at left-back and Clive Wilson was playing leftmidfield. Dorigo was an England left-back and Wilson should have been – not much competition there then.
The line-up that day, just to give an idea of the time warp between then and when I played my last game for Chelsea alongside men like Marcel Desailly and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, went like this: Dave Beasant; Steve Clarke, Joe McLaughlin, Graham Roberts (capt.), Tony Dorigo; Gareth Hall, Peter Nicholas, Kevin McAllister, Clive Wilson; Kevin Wilson, Kerry Dixon (Monkou).
When I ran onto the pitch, I felt like I was starring in a movie about me. Everything had been building up to this point and now that I was living it, part of me wondered whether it was real. But I felt so alert, hypersensitive. It was as if everything around me had a different perspective. I was so wired that I was absorbing everything around me. I felt quicker than I had ever felt – I had so much energy I felt I could run past anybody. On an entirely different level, I also knew that if we beat Portsmouth, I’d get a win bonus that would pretty much double my salary for the month. It seemed like a vast amount of money to me at the time. We won 3–2 and I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. It was the only league game I ever played outside the top flight.
I had moved from Burnt Oak by then. I was renting a room from a friend’s parents in Kingston-upon-Thames. John and Carole Denvir were antique clock dealers and they were wonderful people to stay with. Being with them gave me back my perspective when I got home from training and I felt they were a very positive part of my life, so when I had some spare time, I used to go up to Portobello Road and go to antiques fairs. I loved hearing about the history of something – where it had been made and who had owned it and the character of the carver or the manufacturer. I collected antique tins and old football boots. For a while, funded by the Professional Footballers Association, I even took an evening class in antiques in Oxford Street. Most of the people there had double-barrelled surnames and wanted to open their own antiques shop. I was the footballer at the back of the room. I’d also started a part-time degree in sociology and environmental studies at Kingston Poly, which took up another two nights a week, but I didn’t finish it. When I broke into the first team, I didn’t have the time any more.
In 1989/90, I trained with the first team before the season began and then played in the reserves until Christmas. I got back into the first team for a game against Crystal Palace. Andy Gray, Palace’s midfielder, spat at me – which was nice. I shoved him and regretted it immediately. He was a scary guy. I spent the rest of the game thinking my life was probably in danger. We both got booked. Then, in the last minute, when we were 1–0 down, I scored an equalizer. For the first time, I felt like I really belonged with The Lads. They were so pleased in the dressing room afterwards and I had never seen that before. I suddenly felt…not popular, but part of it, and accepted more, because I had done something that had had an effect on them.
It didn’t really last. There were still plenty of times when I felt like jacking it in. I felt intimidated by my own peers. Peter Nicholas was one. He was the club captain and he could be really sarcastic. Then there was Graham Roberts, the former Tottenham player, who would throw his weight around.
I remember my full first-team debut in a Full Members Cup third-round tie against West Ham three days before Christmas 1989. There were 8,418 hardy souls there to see it. It was auspicious for me, but probably not for them, although we did win 4–3. But it was overshadowed by the behaviour of Roberts, who was captain at the time. As captain, it was his job to hand out the players’ complimentary tickets before each match. The rule was that each player got five tickets for a game he was playing in to hand out to friends and relatives. He only gave me two so I asked him where the rest were and he said he was taking those. I told him I had people coming to watch because it was my debut so I needed all of them. He kept saying he needed a couple of extras for himself and I kept telling him I needed my full allocation.
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