No Nonsense Page 7

  ‘It was me, Jock.’

  ‘Right, come with me.’

  He ordered me to lie face down, and pushed my head into the floor with the palm of his hand. I was determined not to whimper and show him he was hurting me, but he just kept pushing and pushing. The pain was indescribable. I didn’t cry, honestly. But my eyes watered with the pain. When he let me up he simply said, ‘Never fucking do that again.’

  He had made his point, that I had to know my place, and never mentioned it again. I never held it against him, and kinda saw where he was coming from. I’d been caught being a cheeky bastard. Now I’m a senior pro I don’t mind a lad with a bit of edge. I’d much prefer that to the kids who play nice and polite. You need people pushing boundaries.

  When I was 17, I was running around like a lunatic, getting sent off in training, because I had such an overpowering hunger to play professional football. There was only one place at the dinner table, and I was determined to be the one who was going to eat. I went after the alpha males, and I could see some of them thinking, ‘Fucking hell. That’s the way you get my shirt.’

  Never forget, I’m seeking weakness. I’m scheming, building a dossier on everyone, because every friend is a potential enemy. I literally do have a little black book. I might put the hammer on someone in training, get a little physical, and he might give up at that point. Noted. Next time there is scope for confrontation, bang, I have already worked out what is going to hurt him.

  People are doing the same to me, but I am better at the black ops stuff than them. I’ve never physically punched someone during a training session, but my language can be threatening. I am frighteningly articulate and terribly cruel when I am angry, or angling for an advantage. I find a way to cut straight through your heart. I’m hardened to violence of the tongue, because of the life experiences I’ve had.

  I’ve always been prepared to sacrifice more than anyone else. I used to hear the lads in my youth team talking about going out on Saturday night, or on a Tuesday after a ressie game. I’d have a quiet chuckle. I’m thinking, ‘I’m getting closer to you. You might be ahead of me, but I’ll be really ready for training tomorrow. You won’t. That’s me closing the gap on you.’

  I had fallen into the lifetime habit of being out for at least two and a half hours every day, working on my basics, having balls fed to me for heading or shooting practice. I wanted to be Joe Calzaghe, the boxer who never dropped his intensity. Watch some of his great fights. He may lack the ring smarts of some of his best opponents, but he wore them down with his relentlessness and then imposed his will.

  Be honest. Will you be the one who never quits, who tracks back to make a tackle in the 94th minute when the game is long since won? Will you go again when your throat is burning and your stomach seems saturated by molten lead? Will you train on your own and force yourself to do one final shuttle run, knowing it will end in a shower of sick? If you can say yes, you could be a man, my son.

  Forget the money. I hear of a lad on 36 grand a week at 17. He’s probably never going to kick a ball for the first team. That is going to fry his brain, and that’s not his fault. The majority of young players don’t come from the best social or economic background. You can’t blame him for taking the money, because no one is going to turn their nose up at a fortune.

  The ignorance out there is frightening. I once spoke to a good young player about the importance of looking after himself, financially. He didn’t have a clue what a mortgage was. He kept his money under the bed. He reasoned that if he wanted a house he would take it out and buy one, like he would a piece of fruit.

  There’s a moral responsibility to educate these kids, to give them a pathway, and it’s been negated. There should be a salary cap for young players. Give them a maximum of £250 a week at 18, rising to £5,000 at 19, and keep the rest in trust funds which can only be accessed when they are 35, or retired. That still gives the market economy plenty of time and freedom to move.

  If you have an agent at 17, and he is telling the club they can’t do this or that because he has to protect your brand or your image, have a word. Don’t put the gold-encrusted cart before the horse. Get out there and learn your trade, play real football. Feel what it is like to be elbowed in the face by a lower-league defender who needs the £150 win bonus to pay his mortgage.

  Forget the fripperies. I was listening to some young lads recently, wondering whether they should rub ice on their faces before they go out for a game. Cristiano Ronaldo does so, because he wants his face to glow for the TV cameras. The difference is, he is one of the best two players in the world, whose life is minutely dedicated to his career. He has always put in the hours to ensure he operates optimally, whatever the showbiz bollocks. He is not preparing to run out before two men and a dog in a development fixture.

  The game will change massively in your lifetime. Football is still miles off the pace, compared to the NFL and NBA. Look at the time, effort and intelligence involved in those two sports. A top-level player is a product of a 10-year sequence of single-minded application of the highest possible quality of advice and information.

  Where is football going? It is a given that you can only train people physiologically for a certain amount of time each day, let’s say two hours. You can’t ask someone to perform on a Saturday and then blast them all week. Our science is generally good, and improving in its practicality, but the real step change is going to come in mindsets and mentality.

  We’ve already seen Dr Steve Peters come over, to work with Liverpool and England, but he can’t have the requisite impact because he is trying to do the wrong thing. The principle is right but the message is wrong. I think he is brilliant, but he is a clinical psychiatrist, whose professional instinct is to control fires, dampen them down. As a footballer your flames have to be fanned. Your blood needs to be up.

  We still think of football as an endurance sport, but it is now a high-intensity interval sport. It involves lots of small, high-speed interactions. Demands on the body come in short, sharp blasts. To be honest, I don’t think many clubs or coaches have got their heads around that evolution of the game. There are still far too many stupid soft tissue injuries.

  We can improve physically, but the great leap forward will be in the mind. The Belgians are particularly advanced in the area of brain training, a discipline designed to improve the number and clarity of pictures in a young player’s brain when he receives the ball. Their experts reckon that Lionel Messi’s brain processes around 120 images of his immediate options, and their outcomes, in that split second.

  As an interval sport, football is an emotional game. The collective emotion of 11 individuals can overcome those with greater talent, if they want it more and put something extra into their work. External support is vital. I know this will sound cheesy, but when you know your fans are rooting for you, when you hear the low rumble of a supportive chant at a key moment, it does lift you.

  Materially, the game is in a fantastic position. But it won’t always be so. Sport, like life, is cyclical. Empires rise and fall. Kings live and die. By rationalising what we are doing now, in a position of financial strength, I am also trying to prepare your generation for a new survival strategy, based on heart and hunger.

  Look at the financial markets. Generally, when things are going well, people say, ‘Happy days. Let’s buy, let’s borrow, let’s lend.’ Then, suddenly, Armageddon strikes. Everyone goes, ‘Oh shit.’ That’s when the clever people emerge. You only realise who hasn’t got trunks on when the tide goes out. Who in football hasn’t invested in a pair of trunks? We’ll find out soon enough.

  Speaking of trunks, we need to address the popular misconception that it is best to avoid meeting your heroes, because most of them aren’t what you’ve built them up to be. That misses the point. By discovering just how human they actually are, you appreciate that anything is attainable in life. They are ordinary people – not normal, ordinary – who have achieved extraordinary things.

  Stuar
t Pearce was an icon of mine. You know, Euro 96, his mad penalty and all that. All of a sudden I am at City as a kid, and he is joining in my session, absolutely lamping balls at people. He’d smash it at you from a range of about two yards, and bollock you if you couldn’t get hold of it. I didn’t understand at the time, but he was obviously testing us. Some would respond; others would shrink a bit. He had his information, his insight.

  He trained as he played, all out. He was an interesting mixture, being an introverted character with extrovert tendencies. He fascinated me during match days, when two youth-team players would be assigned to do the chores in the first-team dressing room, to give us a feel for things.

  Most of the youth-team lads would linger in the tunnel and watch the pre-match warm-up, but Pearcey was never there. He was allowed to prepare in his own way, and I would sit in the corner of the dressing room, slyly hoping he wouldn’t notice me while he did his warm-up. It was some show.

  He wore nothing but his socks, shinpads and a pair of white pants. He would work himself into a frenzy, stretching, striding, jumping, grunting. He’d be sweating, staring, scary. I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck is this? He’s a lunatic.’ Now I am older, I can understand why, psychologically, it worked for him. He was in the zone, his way.

  But back then, I just thought, ‘Wow. Whatever it takes. I am seeing behind the curtain here. This is not what they let you watch on TV.’ Little did I know there would be plenty of time to ponder Pearcey’s weaknesses. Our time together at City would prove to be eventful . . .

  CHAPTER SIX

  CARPE DIEM

  Arthur Cox was on me before I could react. A solid, bull-necked man, powerful despite being in his early sixties, he had his hands around my throat and had pinned me against a wall in the canteen at Manchester City’s training ground. His eyes were ablaze, and his weathered face was taut with contempt. His words were a murderous hail of machine-gun bullets.

  ‘How can you not get in the first team? What the fuck are you doing? There’s something wrong. You’re not working hard enough. You’re not dedicating your life to this. Is that it? Listen, there’s nothing stopping you here. You should be playing. If you don’t knuckle down, I will fucking have you. I’m going to box your ears. You’re a disgrace. You’ve got to go harder. Go. Fucking. Harder.’

  He let me loose and, for once, I knew better than to protest. This was what tough love felt like. Puzzling, pulverising, intimidating, energising. I was 19 and perversely thrilled he was on my case. Promoted from chief scout to be Kevin Keegan’s assistant, Coxy was cunning, watchful and deadly. Sixteen years managing Chesterfield, Newcastle United and Derby County had turned him into a cross between Yoda and Luca Brasi, Don Corleone’s personal enforcer.

  He was Keegan’s sounding board, the Yin to his Yang. Kevin had the influence of office, but diluted it, within reason, because he loved football, and footballers. He was bubbly, infectious, innocent in his determination to involve himself in training. He would instigate frantic sessions of head tennis, and hang around to serve up headers and volleys for anyone willing to share his endless childhood.

  Arthur’s interactions with players were darker, more profound. He lurked in the background, sensing weakness, stalking the feckless and the careless. His aggression was tinged by a revealing envy, since his dreams of being a professional footballer had been shattered long before, by injury sustained in a reserve match for Coventry City.

  I loved him. I was a kid, struggling with life, hustling to make my way in the game. He burrowed inside my brain. I was immediately unbalanced whenever he walked past me, shaking his head slowly and silently. What have I done? What does he know? What is he thinking? What has he heard? Why does he care? Why does he bother with me?

  When he sat me down and asked, ‘Where do you think you’re at?’, the world condensed until it felt as claustrophobic as a confessional. He had a piercing stare, designed to unnerve, but somehow, deep down, I knew he cared. He’d obviously done his homework on me, with Jim Cassell and Alex Gibson. He appreciated how close I’d come to being kicked out.

  He sought out Asa Hartford, my reserve-team manager, and attended most of our home games at Hyde United’s ground. He was hard on me, very hard, but occasionally I would catch a glimpse of an animated gesture when I put a reducer on a senior pro who felt the stiffs were beneath him. My restlessness and juvenile ruthlessness fitted snugly into his value system.

  As someone who had a fantastic career despite being better suited, physically, to working life as one of Santa’s elves, Keegan obviously identified with my determination to compensate for my lack of stature. In hindsight, he was trying to teach me to better myself, without explaining fully what he wanted, or why he wanted it. He had too much trust in my ability to pick things up; I needed clearer guidance, greater detail, rather than management by assumption.

  I was too immature to grasp why he hated the hassle of a kid treating a Tuesday training exercise as a cup final, when he was trying to get his head around his team for Saturday and his most valuable players fancied a gentle workout. His old-school belief in the hierarchy of the dressing room meant he loathed my lack of respect for my peers. He demanded unity, incompatible in my eyes with personal ambition.

  The four lads ahead of me in my preferred position might as well have had targets imprinted on their foreheads.

  Terry Dunfield had an easier passage through the academy. He was a better technical footballer, two-footed and composed. But, like me, he was a prisoner of his upbringing. He was a nice middle-class kid from Canada, whose deference was instinctive and ruinous, since it signalled softness. I quickly realised he could not cope with my physicality, so I smashed him at every opportunity.

  He made nine first-team appearances before he asked Keegan to release him, to take up a three-year contract at Bury. He had the strength of character to overcome a career-threatening injury, a broken kneecap, and he captained his country. He played effectively in the lower leagues and North America until 2015, but with me, he stood no chance.

  One down, three to go . . .

  Ali Benarbia was a super bloke, engaging and encouraging, up to a point. A French-Algerian whose skill on the ball made him a fan favourite, he had survived hard schools at Monaco, Bordeaux and PSG. He saw me coming. He was too quick for me, too streetwise. Yet he struggled with the pace of the Premier League. He left within three months of my first-team debut, to take up semi-retirement in Qatar.

  Nice knowing you, pal . . .

  Kevin Horlock, a holding midfield player capable of great delivery from set pieces, was a Northern Ireland international, lively, funny and popular. He had already entered City legend by being sent off for ‘aggressive walking’ towards the referee in a goalless draw at Bournemouth. He made 232 appearances over seven years, across three divisions, but was sold to West Ham a week after Ali left.

  See ya, mate . . .

  That left Eyal Berkovic, an Israeli international who thought his pedigree deserved special privileges. The notoriety of being kicked in the face by John Hartson, in retaliation for a petulant slap following a training-ground tackle at West Ham, merely marked him as a victim, awaiting his fate. Don’t waste your compassion on him.

  He was on 30 grand a week, compared to my £300, but this was about bottle rather than bank balance. He was just another body, a diva who dared to dwell on the ball. The inevitable occurred in a practice match. I went in hard and low, won possession and left a little on him. I was up, looking to release a forward pass, while he was rolling around, clutching his leg and squealing like a stuck pig.

  ‘Sort him out,’ he wailed. Keegan complied. ‘Joey, get inside,’ he yelled. I’d been dismissed for doing my job. I had no intention of breaking Berkovic’s leg, or doing lasting damage. I wanted to look good by making him look bad. I wanted to earn respect and opportunity. It was my way of proving that someone of his temperament could not be trusted. I was right. Keegan tired of his tantrums and sold him within nine months.
r />   Good riddance . . .

  I had a love-hate relationship with Derek Fazackerley, Kevin’s senior coach. He liked my spikiness, but bristled when I refused to let him bully me. I didn’t mind him riding me hard, but stood my ground when he crossed the line. I’d challenge him for taking the easy option of having a pop at me, instead of dealing with more established players who tossed it off when the mood took them.

  Coxy knew which buttons to press. ‘No ifs. No buts. No bollocks,’ he would say, whenever I felt aggrieved. ‘Work harder.’ He quietly worked on Keegan, and used a lifetime’s political nous to get what he wanted. ‘Put the kid on the bench,’ he advised him. ‘That’ll be our way of telling the board we need money for new players.’

  That’s why I walked into the away dressing room at the Riverside Stadium, at 1.30pm on Saturday, 23 November 2002, to find my first-team shirt, number 41, folded neatly on the bench. I should have taken more care of it, but I lost myself in the moment. This was my destiny. I might only have been one of the substitutes, but I considered myself a man among men.

  Monkey see, monkey do. I mimicked the other subs, seasoned pros who carried their shirts and shinpads to the bench before placing them under their seat. What I failed to notice, since I was concentrating so hard on the match and the manager’s body language it narrowed my field of vision, was that they took them back to the dressing room at half-time.

  Middlesbrough established a two-goal lead early in the second half, Ugo Ehiogu and Alen Boksic converting crosses from Geremi, who scored a third after Nico Anelka had pulled one back. That was Keegan’s trigger to turn towards me, and utter the words I had longed to hear: ‘Warm up, Joe – you’re going on.’ I was about to discover this feel-good film was a disaster movie.