No Nonsense Read online

  I’d gone by the time Sven-Goran Eriksson arrived, but by all accounts he was so enraptured by Chappy that he had him take Friday team meetings in character. Football clubs can be dismal places, especially when results are poor, and he had a unique ability to make people feel better about themselves.

  Managers, though, are judged infinitely more subjectively by players. We obsess over them, share their faults and foibles on the network. There are very few secrets. One manager became infamous within the game for what can best be described as his creative accounting. Since I have given too much of my money to the legal profession down the years, I had better say, for the record, I have never played for him.

  His speciality was making late substitutions, on the understanding his assistant would later collect a percentage of the player’s match fee. This was extended to include a cut of the bonus accrued by his academy director, payable when a homegrown product made his first-team debut, however short his time on the pitch.

  This manager’s biggest earner, though, involved the recycling of former players. The scam was pretty simple. He would recruit trusted retainers from former clubs, since he had a shrewd idea of what they would be earning. They would invariably be seen as logical signings, given that all managers have go-to guys. The tariff for the transfer was precisely half the wage rise the player received as a result of the move. It would be paid monthly, invariably in cash.

  Of course, it was in the manager’s interests to look after his boys as generously as possible. He consciously operated to the detriment of his employers due to a deeply ingrained sense of greed and a cynicism bred by his expendability. Insecurity militates against loyalty and, some would argue, basic decency.

  Again, I had better make it crystal clear I found Stuart Pearce to be a man of the highest integrity. But the tide went out pretty quickly on him, once the prevailing respect for his achievements as a player ebbed away. He was initially very popular with the fans, but tried a little too hard to play to the gallery to be entirely convincing to the senior pros.

  He had typically English traits, haring along the touchline to retrieve errant footballs, celebrating passionately and winning every header while being yards from the action. I was accustomed to such animation and quite comfortable with it until he made a point of placing his good luck charm, a Beanie Baby horse borrowed from his daughter Chelsea, beside the water bottles at the edge of his technical area. That left me susceptible to the logic of Claudio Reyna.

  ‘Do you like that sort of stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, it shows he cares.’

  ‘Nah, that’s bullshit. Do you ever see Wenger chasing around like that? People who know what they’re doing, people who are absolutely in control, don’t run up and down, throwing balls back in.’

  I had never thought about it in those terms before. Why would I? I was brought up to duck teacups and take one for the team. Claudio came at it from another angle, as a hugely experienced player who had captained his country and would go on to play a key role in establishing City’s New York franchise.

  He was spot-on, because who really benefits from the posturing and chest-thumping associated with the English Way? It might make the individual feel good, and provide a suitably theatrical cutaway for that night’s TV highlights package, but it is an indulgence.

  Claudio believed in the limits of managerial influence. His theory was that, assuming training is well structured, tactics are sound and preparations are precise, the manager’s job is peripheral once the match kicks off. Living the game, following each cough and kick, might make the gaffer appear admirably engaged, but his gestures are of minimal importance.

  I understand the concept of taking the temperature of the game from the technical area, but as a player you don’t need someone screaming at you to press, or screen, or track back, or pick up at set pieces, provided you have got your head where it needs to be. If your mind is so unfocused that you are failing to do the basics, you are simply not up to your job.

  Football managers get too emotionally connected to what is going on around them. They have a highly developed sense of their authority, so it is easy for them to be drawn into the sort of incident which ended with Alan Pardew head-butting Hull City’s David Meyler when he was at Newcastle. Screaming at referees and treble-teaming the fourth official in a juvenile attempt at intimidation rarely works.

  I can appreciate someone like Jurgen Klopp, arriving at a new club, in a new culture, seeking to generate solidarity through theatrical commitment, but too many managers, like his predecessor Brendan Rodgers and Roberto Martinez, his erstwhile counterpart across Stanley Park, are sophists. They’re clever in framing their arguments and presenting their philosophies, but are deceptively insubstantial.

  On balance, I prefer the clinical approach of coaches in both rugby codes. They look for the opportunity to make subtle adjustments by sitting in the stands with their analysts. Rationally, I understand such pragmatism, but try that in football and the fans’ first instinct is to ask, ‘What the fuck’s he doing up there?’

  A manager should keep his distance. He has a bigger picture to observe, and technology can connect him to a trusted lieutenant on the touchline. To extend that military analogy, a general does not go into battle alongside his troops. He secures the high ground, takes an overview, and makes cold, minutely calculated life-and-death decisions.

  I believe in planning for chaos, preparing for the most daunting eventuality. The range of human weakness spans the managerial meltdown, the inexplicable error, and the rush of blood which results in a red card. Don’t stop with plan B. Use up the entire alphabet, if that means covering all the bases. Substitutions should be structured, but not preordained.

  I make notes the night before the game, when thoughts are logical and uncontaminated by emotion. They’re a reference point. I’ll remind myself, if X happens I’m going to think about Y. If Y happens I’m going to think about Z. I’m not arguing that I am going to make the perfect decision every time, but the process gives me a better chance of doing the correct thing, more often than not.

  Conversely, some would say perversely, I feel strangely compromised when I see my manager scribbling on scraps of paper during the game. He doesn’t need a photographic memory, but if he can’t remember three key points – the limit of relevant, easily digestible information – at half-time, he is in the wrong business.

  Baseball folk talk about the Major Leagues as ‘The Show’. Football has taken on that theatrical dimension, even though we all hide behind what I like to call the wizard’s curtain. Players and managers are masters of distraction; when people come too close to the truth of who we are and what we do, we create a diversion.

  A protection mechanism ensures players don’t share deep conversations. When a coach does great things it is generally because he has an ability to bond his athletes at a level beyond the superficial in an industry that operates at a dismally shallow level for at least 90 per cent of the time. The real gains, that final 1 per cent, come from the magnitude of a common cause.

  As a player, I’m inspired by those moments of authenticity, when someone decides to cut through the bullshit smeared across most things to do with the game. Those moments may come in a match, or in a training-ground situation, but when they arrive I consciously think, ‘That’s real, that’s right, that’s different.’

  Generally, the only time you are given true insight is when things go wrong, really wrong. That strips away trivialities, and you see a perfectly defined snapshot of what people are about, in terms of their character and where they are in their lives. It might be the smallest thing, an angry word or an unguarded response when we are under the cosh, but it reveals so much.

  As for the pantomime stuff, players banging their chest and kissing the badge, guilty as charged. The ties are stronger when I’m in more fervent environments, like Marseille and Newcastle, but I invest emotionally in the clubs I play for. I don’t just turn up. I can’t. I need to feed off the ener
gy of a place, feel at one with the people I play for. I am an all-or-nothing kind of person, and I struggled at QPR because those feelings were not reciprocated.

  It is important to differentiate between that visceral, highly charged approach and the detached, deeply selfish behaviour that shapes so many careers. In retrospect, I’m not proud of having handed in a transfer request at City in January 2006, so soon after the club had supported me in the aftermath of Michael’s trial, but it had the desired result.

  These things tend to have well-rehearsed choreography. City rejected my request, and turned down a verbal £4.5m offer from Middlesbrough, whose manager Steve McClaren had identified me as a potentially dynamic influence in his midfield. Word magically filtered out that a fee of £6m would concentrate certain minds, but negotiations continued simultaneously with my agent. I signed an improved four-year deal in the summer.

  I was established as a name, a face, and didn’t sense the dangers. I slipped back into having the occasional bender, in which drink conspired in the illusion I was invisible and invincible. I wasn’t about to back down in a confrontation. One of my late-night adversaries surprised me by calling me the following morning, to apologise. I learned later he had been advised to do so for the state of his health by a well-connected individual who had form for stuffing victims into the boot of untraceable cars.

  Liverpool is a village, so it was probably predictable that my next problem, at the end of September, should be caused by a return to my boyhood club. Everton fans had no compunction in regaling me with the details of Michael’s murder case. The abuse was constant, uniquely vicious. The home players did their best by acting in concert, to try to wind me up.

  It was especially sweet, then, that Micah Richards stole a point by securing a 1-1 draw with virtually the last kick of the match, in the 94th minute. I gave my shirt to a City fan in a wheelchair, and was goaded into baring my backside at the remaining Everton supporters. I was smiling as I walked for four paces with my shorts at half-mast, before our goalkeeper Nicky Weaver ushered me back to the dressing room like a disapproving dad.

  It was daft, impulsive and light-hearted, but that didn’t stop the outrage machine creaking into action. The home fans who prompted a futile investigation into the incident by Merseyside’s finest should have been done for wasting police time, and the jobsworths at the Football Association inevitably decided to throw their weight around, as guardians of public decency.

  I was charged with improper conduct, and with bringing the game into disrepute. Ten days later I entered the parallel universe of the FA’s old headquarters at Soho Square where, after a functionary took fully 10 minutes to work out how to use a DVD player, the three-man disciplinary panel gravely examined the evidence of my own arse.

  They were the usual combination of timeservers, who couldn’t follow the logic of a kid’s comic but conducted themselves as if they were law lords. They imposed a £2,000 fine and invited my observations. I could have gone to town on them, given it was a colossal waste of time, money and professional expertise, but I restricted myself to a couple of acidic asides about their pomposity. I had a career to develop.

  Steve McClaren had become England manager in August, following the WAG-fest at the 2006 World Cup. It is difficult to explain how you learn such things, since it involves a form of osmosis in which media whispers become conventional wisdom, but I became aware in the autumn that I was on his radar. I had to keep my nose clean.

  My first Premier League dismissal had come two years previously, when the unassuming Rob Styles issued me with a second yellow card following an argument in the tunnel at half-time at Tottenham. We were trailing 3-0, but somehow came back to win 4-3. My second red card, just before Christmas 2006, was fair enough. I launched myself late, and two-footed, at Bolton’s Abdoulaye Faye, and hoped it would be seen as a forgivable flash of excessive zeal.

  I was playing well, and a month later David Moyes was ready to meet the £5.5m buyout clause in my contract. The attractions of Everton were obvious, despite my burlesque show at Goodison Park earlier in the season, but I decided against pursuing the opportunity because I reckoned the uncertainty of attempting to bed in at a new club could threaten my England chances.

  I am goal-oriented, to a fault. I stayed with City because I calculated the team could have been designed for me to show what I could do and impress. Claudio Reyna and, initially, Paul Bosvelt were effective holding midfield players, which gave me licence to get forward into the box. I also had an ulterior motive: I reasoned that if I excelled internationally it would bring me to the attention of Champions League clubs.

  The other variable was the haphazard nature of the England system which, at all levels, is harder to get into than get out of. Just as I feel I deserved many more full caps, on the basis of consistency of performance, I should have had a much more fulfilling career at age-group level. The reason it took so long for me to break into the Under-21 squad beggars belief.

  I was the classic late developer, overlooked by FA coaches who had a vested interest in promoting their protégés from within. I was a Premier League starter, excluded because they preferred to pick lads who were benchwarmers in the Championship. It took Trevor Sinclair, during a trip with the senior squad in 2003, to shift opinion by asking David Platt and Steve Wigley, who oversaw the Under-21s, why I hadn’t been picked.

  Their intelligence didn’t even extend to my date of birth. They said I was too young since I was ‘17 or 18’. Trevor informed them I was ‘20, and playing fucking brilliantly’. When Steven Gerrard weighed in with an endorsement, they decided they’d better check me out. I made my debut, against Macedonia in Skopje, the day after my 21st birthday.

  My internal monologue, before my first training session, may not surprise you: ‘I’m going to show these cunts what’s going on here. I’m going to take control, show them I’m the best young player in the country. I’ve been waiting four or five years for this, and they’re going to realise they’ve made a right rick.’

  Fair play to Platt. He announced my selection and admitted: ‘I don’t know him well enough. I walked off the training pitch thinking, “Bloody hell.” It’s hard to step into international football. You need character and personality. What he has is great energy, more awareness on a football pitch than I gave him credit for. He has also shown me he has great personality. He surprised me.’

  I was booked on my debut in a 1-1 draw, but did well enough for Platt to ask me to play out of position, in right midfield, in order to do a marking job on Cristiano Ronaldo in the pivotal qualification game for the European Championships, against Portugal at Goodison Park, four days later.

  We started poorly, conceding a soft goal from a free kick by Ricardo Quaresma, who had just signed for Barcelona and was reckoned to have greater potential than the teenager who had cost Manchester United £12m. I first became aware of Ronaldo at Sporting Lisbon, so I knew how good he was, especially in a 3-4-3 rotational system which demanded complete concentration. I grafted on him, smashed him, subdued him so effectively that he switched wings for the second half.

  We needed to win to make the finals. I equalised with a low, close-range shot just before half-time, after Franny Jeffers scuffled for a Shola Ameobi header from Paul Konchesky’s free kick. That was as far as the fairy tale extended; Tottenham’s Helder Postiga punched in a late free kick and we were out. I picked up another caution, and was suspended for the meaningless final group match in Turkey.

  I was too old to be retained, seething because systemic laziness had denied me my due. I was convinced I belonged at international level, and had plenty of time to think through the permutations of selection, until McClaren’s promotion altered the dynamics of the situation. Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard were first choice in midfield, but I felt I had more about me than the supporting cast, which included Scott Parker, Owen Hargreaves, Gareth Barry, Jermaine Jenas and Michael Carrick.

  Had things panned out differently, I could have made the ob
sessive debate about the mutual suitability of the Gerrard–Lampard axis redundant. From what I gathered, Steven agitated to get Liverpool to sign me in 2004, because he felt we had the potential to forge a partnership. I met with Gerard Houllier at Melwood, and agreed everything verbally. A deal was close to being concluded when he was sacked that summer. It was never revived.

  There is no point in dwelling on lost possibility, but had that move gone through the temptation to recreate the chemistry of my proposed pairing with Steven at international level would have been overwhelming. As it was, I had to wait until February 2007 for news to break of my selection for the senior squad’s friendly against Spain at Old Trafford.

  I take people as I find them, and have never forgotten John Terry’s immediate gesture, in calling to congratulate me. He took his responsibilities as captain seriously, told me I deserved the recognition, and promised to do all he could to facilitate my transition. He has had serious issues to address in his life and career, but I have always admired him as a player and a leader of men.

  There was, though, an elephant parading around the team room when I checked into the England hotel. It was carrying a banner that read: ‘We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like shit. Here’s my book.’

  My observation on the literary efforts of my new teammates, following the 2006 World Cup, was manna from heaven for the media, who, if they’re honest, find covering England a bit of a chore. They leaped to the convenient conclusion that I was disrespecting Gerrard and Lampard, when my criticism had been obliquely directed at Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney, who apparently published his first autobiography at junior school.

  Wayne took offence when I suggested, in a radio interview with Sir Clive Woodward, that England lacked world-class players. We spoke for an hour, working through our issues. I admire him as a warrior, respect his willingness to sacrifice himself for the group, and can only dream of being as naturally talented as him, but wasn’t about to change an honestly held opinion.