No Nonsense Page 17
Experts seemed unable to help until I met James Calder, a London-based specialist. He recognised the bone in my foot had been under such stress that it had stopped regenerating. I required a new form of operation, in which he would drill holes in the bone to stimulate the healing process. He would be learning on the job, along with surgeons from Australia and the United States, who monitored the procedure on a video link.
I was wheeled into theatre on the promise I would be back playing in two months. That estimate doubled by the time the anaesthetic had worn off. I ended up being out for six months. I became deeply depressed, seized by a dread my career was over. Peter Kay was there for me, as ever. Jamie Murphy, the physio who shepherded me through the darkest valleys, was my confessor, tutor and, above all, my friend.
There were too many days when the curtains remained drawn, and I endured a form of mourning, but all things must pass, as George Harrison sang. I played in the final nine games of the season, including the 2-1 home win over Sheffield United on Easter Monday, 5 April, when promotion was confirmed with five matches to spare.
The highlight of the run-in was the 2-0 win at Plymouth Argyle that clinched the title. The Toon Army stormed the pitch at the final whistle, and lifted us all shoulder high; it was a surreal out-of-body experience, like drifting along on an inflatable lilo. The eight-hour coach journey home the following morning, necessary because flights had been grounded due to the Icelandic ash cloud, was equally bizarre. Most of us were drunk; the lightweights lay down in the aisle and tried to sleep.
I was delighted for Chris, who had been promoted from interim manager the previous October. His man management was occasionally questionable, but he gradually came to terms with the dynamics of a combative, committed group, tight-knit and raucous. A phenomenal rapport had been established between some combustible characters.
Malingerers and those with ulterior motives had been forced out. Senior players had been as good as their word. Nobby led by a captain’s example. Even Andy Carroll, one of the worst trainers I had ever seen, was a force of nature when it mattered. We believed. There was an affinity with the aims of Chris, Colin Calderwood and Paul Barron, our goalkeeping coach. The madness had subsided.
Or so we all thought.
On the eve of the new season we were consumed by a dispute which set off a train of events that ultimately cost Chris his job. The argument soured, expanded and eventually brought several more of us down. It was triggered by the structure of a bonus-payment scheme, but boiled down to points of principle and Ashley’s perception of power.
Negotiations dragged on for a month between the players’ representatives, Nobby and our vice-captain Steve Harper, and the club. No Premier League squad had ever gone into a season without agreeing a performance-related deal, yet the night before our opening game at Old Trafford the situation was deadlocked, and inflamed.
Let’s shelve, for the moment, the question of whether such an arrangement was strictly necessary, when basic wages were so high. I have some sympathy for that view, to be honest, but this involved custom and practice in modern football. Harps had called around the league, to check that our demands were at an acceptable level.
I consulted with the PFA, who confirmed that every member of the first-team squad had to sign the agreement for it to be valid. This was a problem, since I was in a militant mood. I didn’t want to get dragged into the politics, but when the owner insisted we had to agree to his terms before a ball was kicked, I had little choice.
Chris retained our respect, but he was frantic, adamant we had to sort things out that night. I was incredulous, increasingly irate. I told him: ‘We’re playing Manchester United tomorrow. We don’t need this shit. I don’t need this shit. It is interfering with our preparations. Is this what we’ve come to?’
In hindsight, his alarm was understandable. Ashley regarded the episode as a critical test of his manager’s credibility. If Chris could not enforce the owner’s will, his power over his players was, to all intents and purposes, negligible. The strain was etched on his face the following morning, when he called a squad meeting and reiterated that bonuses had to be agreed before we made our bow on Monday Night Football.
I made a decision there and then. Fuck Ashley. I wasn’t going to sign, regardless of the consequences. We were dealing with a tyrant who was trying to impose his will on us, an individual who uses financial pressure to force people to do as he wishes. Someone had to stand up to the bully. It might as well be me.
I’ve got enough money. He’s a very rich man, but only a man. I’ve met him one on one and he is not as horrible as he appears when he goes through intermediaries. I had a vision of thrashing it out with him mano a mano, but the reality of the situation was that we were locked in yet another meeting at 4pm, four hours before kick-off.
I took the floor: ‘Do you know what, lads? This will be worth about 85 grand a man, if we stay up. I’m not going to sell my soul to him for that. I want to stay in this league for what it means to me as a player, for the justification he can never understand or put a price on. This is about how we value ourselves as a group. It’s not about money. I’m not signing.’
The debate swirled, from the potential impact on younger, lower-paid players, to the lunacy of the timing of such a manufactured crisis. Eight to 10 of the lads supported me. I tried to explain to Chris that our decision wasn’t a personal snub, but the logic of the argument didn’t register. He understood the decision’s gravity when it was communicated to Llambias.
To no one’s great surprise, we lost 3-0 to United. The agreement remained unsigned, and relationships festered. Speaking later, to those with better access to the corridors of power, Ashley had his Margaret Thatcher moment that night. Instead of vowing to smash the unions, he resolved to break up the players’ leadership group.
We found our defiance liberating. Team spirit soared. We knew we were not going to get a bonus, but that was the point. We wouldn’t let him undermine us. We were going to do well in spite of him. In fact, we were going to do well to spite him. Ashley might have owned the football club, but he didn’t own us. It was a while before the guilt kicked in.
Chris bore the hangdog look of a man on borrowed time. He told me subsequently he made a point of wearing his best suit to West Ham on 23 October, because he was convinced he was about to be sacked and wanted to look presentable. A 2-1 win ensured his survival. To use his words, ‘I took my coffin’ to the Emirates a fortnight later, in expectation of summary execution.
We won again, beating Arsenal by an Andy Carroll goal. According to that day’s papers, he and Nobby had marked the previous weekend’s 5-1 win in the Tyne–Wear derby by embarking on a 14-hour drinking binge. I hardly helped by losing control in the following match, a 2-1 home defeat by Blackburn, which led to a three-game ban for punching Morten Gamst Pedersen in an off-the-ball incident.
I was still my own worst enemy. When Chris was finally sacked on 6 December 2010, the day after a dispiriting 3-1 defeat at the Hawthorns, I had every reason to examine my conscience. The club statement pointedly spoke about appointing a successor ‘with more managerial experience’. It praised his ‘exceptional character and commitment’ without removing the implication he had not been strong enough to control his players.
Had I done the right thing, in the wrong way, by so blatantly confronting Ashley? Had I been seduced by my supposed influence? Had Newcastle somehow become a personalised vanity project? Had I overestimated what a football club means? Such challenging questions can only be answered through quiet contemplation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE PEOPLE’S GAME
On the advice of Steve Black, my friend and spiritual ally, I seek serenity in Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. My favourite place to sit and think is an alcove, close to the tomb of Frederick Arthur Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby. Legend has it that anyone who finds the minuscule bronze mouse hidden on this monument to a Victorian man of means must rub its nose and make a wish.
His legacy, as a former Governor-General of Canada, includes the Stanley Cup, ice hockey’s greatest prize. Stanley Park, the green lung between Everton and Liverpool football clubs, is named after him. He belonged to an age of poverty and paternalism, which coexisted in a city developed by the despair of the slave trade and the desperate ambition of Irish and Italian immigrants.
Pay £5.50 to reach the top of the cathedral’s sandstone tower, and the panoramic landscape spread 154 metres below you takes in the Irish Sea and River Mersey, industry and distant hills. Gentrified streets, elegant rows of smart three-storey houses, were once slums which spread from the dockside before they were cleared into the hinterland.
Liverpool is a place of impulse and contradiction, emotion and discord. It is no wonder I feel so at home there. It is a political city, an opinionated city. People will happily engage you in conversation about football, or the issues of the day. I was weaned on stories of the Toxteth riots, and opposition to the poll tax.
I am resolutely agnostic, and find it difficult to reconcile the purity of unquestioning faith with the commercialism that means this building, the world’s largest completed Anglican cathedral, lacks only a rollercoaster ride to relieve visitors of their loose change. Yet its scale is so imposing I can understand how supplicants are drawn in by a belief in a higher power.
It has become a cliché to speak of football grounds as modern cathedrals, but, like most clichés, the observation contains a grain of truth. There is a similar sense of worship, of population by ghosts. They are places where men and women congregate, to share and celebrate their dreams. They leave behind something of themselves, an intangible residue of raw emotion.
St James’ Park is the classic cathedral on the hill. It dominates the Newcastle skyline. Sam Allardyce sold me its sanctity. He promised passion, a life lesson. I was touched immediately by the yearning of the fans, the longing for their loyalty to be at least appreciated, if not reciprocated. It sounds crazy to say this, but I have always seen myself as an extension of the people I play for.
I’ve fallen out with fans on more occasions than I care to remember. I’ve spoken my mind and delivered uncomfortable truths. I told QPR supporters I joined their club solely for financial reasons. It didn’t make me try any less on the pitch, but I will never repeat the mistake of allowing money to be the single factor dictating an important decision.
It was strange. I was uneasy at QPR, because I suspected the fans would see through me. It made me realise what my underlying motive was, at that time, to be in the game. I needed to refresh myself. It was almost as if I had to fall out of love with football to fall madly in love with it again. I needed to sweep away all the crap that had accumulated around me.
People might struggle to understand this, because of the constant controversy and initial underachievement through injury, but even failure at Newcastle had its compensations. I have not forgotten the telling mixture of anger and hope prompted by our relegation. The sense of solidarity was special and somehow sacred.
Liverpool, my birthplace, is defined by football. Manchester, the city in which I grew up as a footballer, has two great clubs, surrounded by many others in Greater Manchester. In Newcastle there is only Newcastle. The Toon is the Toon. Even now, when I return, I am struck by the generosity of memory, the warmth of the welcome.
Football is still the people’s game.
It is not the property of capitalist monsters who treat it as a plaything or a profit centre. I have the privilege of playing the game, for silly sums, but when I can no longer cut it I will revert to being a fan. I’m already discovering the joy of taking Cassius to matches. It is my game, his game, your game, our game. It represents our communities. We are the people who will prop it up long after the TV money has gone.
Players deserve to share the rewards of prosperity. I’m not justifying some of the scary numbers out there, but people aren’t taking out TV subscriptions because they are fascinated by owners and their boardroom bullshit. They enjoy what we do, even if danger signs of disillusion are easily detectable. A balance needs to be struck before a wedge is driven between those who play and those who pay for the emotional release football can still provide.
A tipping point will come, when the finances of the game become unsustainable. I’m not Nostradamus, so I can’t identify precise timings, but it is the nature of markets. They expand, explode and expire. There are already indications of an impending crash. More and more genuine football lovers are alienated by the elitism and arrogance of Premier League clubs who are quite happy to be marketed as tourist attractions.
Fans can make their presence felt. They are a positive force for the common good. Think of the impact of the boycott organised by Liverpool supporters in protest at ticket prices, the movement towards fan-owned clubs. Look across the Football League, and applaud well-organised campaigns against awful foreign owners at clubs like Leeds United and Charlton Athletic. Revolution is in the air.
Eventually, the corporate pigs who have grown fat at the trough will impose one price rise too many. People will say enough is enough. They will take up arms against the notion that it is necessary to push the game out of reach of those who sustained it when it was not so fashionable or profitable. They will reclaim their birthright.
What is football? As far as I’m concerned, it is players playing, and people watching. No one cares about the corporate conceit, the garbage that swirls around the hospitality industry. That is business, while football is art and science, poetry and theory.
Football is nothing without the fans. An empty stadium is as cold as Lord Derby’s tomb. Empty seats are gravestones. Football is nothing without footballers who reflect the passion they generate. Empty-hearted mercenaries, who apply the kiss of death to the badge of whatever club they happen to be earning from, inspire only anger and frustration.
The FA have lost sight of their responsibilities as guardians of the game. They have allowed themselves to become a pale imitation of the monster they spawned. The Premier League is cleverly presented and commercially astute, but tear off the mask of modernity and it is a vampire, which will suck the lifeblood out of the English game unless a stake is driven through its heart.
Economies have been ruined across European football by greed and larceny. Serie A bears the scars of neglect and nefarious activity. Ligue 1 in France has been enslaved by PSG, and their Qatari owners. Portugal’s Primeira Liga is little more than a factory farm. Despite the defiance of Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid team, La Liga is warped by the commercial, cultural and political influence of Barcelona and Real Madrid.
The bleakness of Blackburn, Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United buying the Premier League was at least neutralised last season by Leicester City. But the majority of our biggest clubs are global corporations, distanced from their communities. Foreign owners are going to ruin football as we once cherished it. Without wishing to belabour the point, as someone who has earned well from the game I understand people concluding that I am part of the problem.
I could quite easily keep my nut down, say nothing, and pick up a few quid. That isn’t me. I’ve seen, on the streets where I grew up, what happens when it is every man for himself. You have to leave something for others. You can’t just take, take, take, because bad things, or bad people, fill the resulting vacuum.
Why should my kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids be denied the opportunity that we were given to fall in love with the game? If we keep going as we are they will be priced into indifference. Football has become a vehicle for the egos of owners who don’t recognise their real role, as custodians of the game. Heritage must be cherished and protected with equal ferocity.
Sport often holds up a mirror to society. I learned about Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics as a child, without fully understanding the context of the story. It took time to appreciate the principled defiance of Muhammad Ali, and to grasp the significance of the silent, bla
ck-gloved protest of John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the Mexico Games in 1968.
The lack of jobs in Liverpool was a preoccupation in my formative years, the early nineties. War in Yugoslavia was a grainy, distant experience. It came to life much later, through the personal experiences of Serbian and Croatian team-mates. Football was the platform for ethnic and political tension which was to cost so many their lives.
Politically, I buck the trend, because as I have got older I have become more left wing. I grew up in a Labour heartland, where it was accepted that prominent sportsmen, like Robbie Fowler and the Wigan rugby league players, had the right to champion causes and provide social commentary. Margaret Thatcher was the devil, Neil Kinnock well-meaning in a bumbling sort of way. Tony Blair caught my attention when Noel Gallagher turned up at Number 10.
As you will have guessed, I wasn’t exactly a responsible adult when I started to earn decent money. I didn’t have the deepest understanding of economic issues beyond a vague belief that I had the right to spend what I earned on whatever I wanted. Some of the things I bought still make me shudder. As I have accumulated wealth I have moved left of centre, because I still identify with anyone under pressure to survive. That’s not a party political stance, but a human point of view.
With Labour the dominant force and Grandad loving a political debate, it is likely I subliminally absorbed their principles from a young age. I haven’t always voted for them, and won’t do so simply because that is expected of someone with my heritage, but the selfishness and superficiality of their opponents is striking.
Footballers, as a breed, are pretty uniformly right wing, so that makes for some interesting conversations in the dressing room. Try explaining to a bunch of Premier League players that money gives you a certain status, but it doesn’t make you happy. That’s a tough gig, since they either look blankly at you or enquire what planet you beamed down from.