No Nonsense Read online

  I leaned down, found my pads, but scraped my fingertips on cold concrete when I reached for my shirt. I began to panic. Where the fuck is it? How can it have disappeared? How can something like this be happening on my debut? I shot a glance at the crowd beside the dugout and felt bile rise to the back of my throat as intuition kicked in. One of those bastards had reached over and stolen it at half-time. He had done me in cold blood.

  I scanned blank faces, started to act my age, and begged: ‘Give us me shirt back. Please. I promise you can have it at the end of the game.’

  Keegan glanced sideways, a sixth sense stirred by the delay. ‘Someone’s robbed me shirt, gaffer,’ I eventually said, through a cotton-wool mouth.

  His face flushed from bewilderment to anger. ‘Get him another one, quick,’ he barked at Les Chapman, the kit man.

  ‘Sorry, boss, I only printed one for him because I didn’t know he was in the squad until late yesterday.’

  Keegan knew the rules. I had to wear my preassigned number. A blank shirt was no good. He did a cartoon double take between Chappy and me: ‘You fucking what? For fuck’s sake . . .’

  He seemed in imminent danger of a heart attack when his wild eyes alighted on Ali Benarbia. ‘I suppose you’ve got a shirt?’ he said, acidly. Ali nodded.

  ‘Right, you’re on. You, Barton, fucking sit down . . . ’

  The papers were full of it. Classic City, they crowed. The Comedy Club is open for business, yet again. Keegan couldn’t resist a variation on the theme of the Scouse hubcap story. ‘Unbelievable,’ he confirmed to Sky Sports. ‘His shirt disappeared. I was going to give him some experience. That’s life, though he should know better coming from Liverpool.’

  All I could hear, in my head, was Dad’s voice: ‘You’re going to get one chance, Joe. You’ve got to take it with both hands.’ I sat on the bus and wept. The hard man was being ridiculed as a punter’s fall guy. Keegan’s prejudices were justified. I was a parody pro, a wrong ’un who had it coming to him. My world was in bits.

  I didn’t make another squad for five months. Scunthorpe United were interested, but insisted on a trial, in advance of a proposed loan. True to form, I was knocked out contesting a header. When I came around in hospital they told me I had damaged the balance mechanism in my inner ear. I couldn’t sit up without projectile vomiting. It took six weeks for the room to stop spinning.

  I couldn’t drink, though I was beginning to get the taste. I retreated instead into the melancholy world of Morrissey, and Johnny Marr’s multi-layered, melodic riffs. I got into The Smiths quite late, because of my initial infatuation with Oasis, but they spoke to my soul. They challenged convention, addressing issues like depression, homophobia and child abuse in a literate, ironic fashion. Their music opened another window for me.

  Maybe, just maybe, there was another life out there, waiting to be experienced and articulated.

  Or maybe I was destined to throw it all away.

  My wild streak rapidly resurfaced on a lads’ night out with Frankie Lacken, which ended with a borrowed club car, a metallic blue Vectra, hurtling through a car showroom window in Chorley. For once, alcohol was not the cause. We swerved to miss an animal, hit a speed hump, and lost control because our attention had been distracted.

  Hearing the alarms wailing, and having been showered in glass, we panicked and legged it, intending to argue the car had been stolen. The police picked us up trying to make our way home, after being alerted by our taxi driver, and had to take Frankie to hospital for stitches in a chest wound. I had been lucky and escaped unhurt.

  The fact we had not been drinking worked in our favour with the magistrate, who dismissed a charge of leaving the scene of an accident. I decided abject apology was the only course of action when I was called in to see Keegan. I accepted the bollocking, and promised to pay off the repair bill at £150 a week.

  My football education involved an unlikely tutor, and one of the game’s typically unexpected friendships. My new mate was Robbie Fowler, who joined City in January 2003. My old mates regarded his arrival at Nan’s house, to pick me up on the way to training, as a religious experience. There seemed more chance of a unicorn being ridden through the public bar of the Huyton Park pub than a Scouse deity communing with snotty-nosed scallies, crowding around his BMW.

  I knew him as Bob, not God.

  He came to my rescue when I was banned from driving for accumulating too many points. My first car, a Fiesta I bought as a finance company bodge job, was destined for the scrapyard. Bob’s lifts saved me half an hour’s walk and a 60-minute journey on public transport to City’s new training ground at Carrington. He eventually offered to lend me 23 grand for my first proper ride, a Mercedes 230 CE Coupe, content I would pay him back monthly, without interest.

  To this day, I still do not know why he made such a deeply personal gesture. It makes me unashamedly emotional. Maybe he identified with me, because of the similarity of our backgrounds. Maybe it was an extension of the working-class solidarity that had led him to support the striking dockers. All I knew, without fear or favour, was that this wasn’t another Billy Big Bollocks footballer flashing the cash.

  Those lifts taught me the eternal truth that no one or nothing is forever. He acknowledged his star was dimming. He had gone from Liverpool to Leeds, who agreed to pay a percentage of his wages at City. As his passenger, I listened to him unburden himself about sudden insecurity and the quiet terror of remorseless decline. I thought, ‘This can’t be real. This is Robbie fucking Fowler,’ but I could sense him trying to channel my youthful positivity.

  His vulnerability scared me shitless. I asked myself, ‘Does this happen to all of us? Is this how you behave when you see your career slipping away?’ Bob was 29, and suddenly struggling in front of goal. I can only make sense of his predicament by viewing it from my current perspective, as a 34-year-old seeking to suck the marrow out of life as a professional footballer.

  His body was beginning to betray him. His mind was contaminated by self-doubt. He could no longer trust his instincts. His reactions were dulled fractionally, fatefully. I represented the coming generation, the tsunami on the horizon that was destined to sweep him away. I resolved, there and then, to lock those fears, those destructive emotions, deep within my subconsciousness. The survivor in me knew I needed to keep him close.

  He was sitting next to me when Keegan read out the team to play at Bolton on Grand National Day, Saturday, 5 April 2003. I knew I was close to a reprieve, because Coxy was rampaging around like Godzilla with toothache, and I’d been drafted into the squad as a precaution because Marc-Vivien Foe had picked up a bug. ‘Did I hear him right?’ I asked Bob. His grin was unusually eloquent.

  We lost to goals by Henrik Pedersen and Ivan Campo either side of half-time, but I played well. The frenzy of a Premier League fixture felt natural; I was able mentally to compress time, so I could think quickly and creatively. I hadn’t been infected by the fear spread by a run of only one win in seven games. I looked around the dressing room and knew I belonged. Drop me if you dare.

  I kept my place for a goalless home draw against Middlesbrough, when I was named man of the match for an effective man-marking job on Juninho. I picked up my first booking and my first goal at White Hart Lane on Good Friday. We took the lead after three minutes with a free header by David Sommeil, and I effectively sealed the win 18 minutes later. The video of my big moment is still there, for posterity, on the City website.

  I win a tackle in midfield, and the move flows down the right to Anelka. His weak shot is parried by Kasey Keller, Fowler makes himself busy, and the ball breaks to me on the edge of the area. I open my body instinctively and hit it sweetly, deliberately, with the inside of my right boot. Goran Bunjevcevic, the Spurs defender, reads the line of the shot but can only divert it past Keller.

  God, how young I look. The haircut is severe but my face is fresh and illuminated by excitement. I run towards the Shelf and do a full-length, face-down, legs-up Klinsmann d
ive before being swamped by my team-mates. Little did I know it, but at that precise moment, hidden in the away end at the far corner of the ground, Dad fainted. He was hauled to his feet by Dave Barton, who is not a relation but once saved me from a stampeding police horse at Goodison.

  I try to put myself in my old fella’s position. He’s surrounded by his mates, celebrating his son’s arrival as a Premier League player. He’s a football man down to his jockstrap, and appreciates how fragile life can be. I’m his first born. We fought against overwhelming odds, together. We plotted my route to the top, together. No wonder his stomach turned somersaults, and he hit the deck. I owed it to him to make sure no one would ever rob my shirt again, literally or metaphorically.

  I stayed in the team until the end of the season, and signed a new contract worth six grand a week. Not drug enforcement money, but close enough to tempt one local entrepreneur to ask for a 10-grand loan, to be paid back as 20 within a week. Suspecting, correctly, that it was required for a shipment from Amsterdam, I declined and put the money towards buying Nan’s council house.

  I was in her lounge on the afternoon of 26 June, watching Marc-Vivien Foe play for Cameroon against Colombia in the Confederations Cup semi-final at the Stade de Gerland in Lyon, when the unthinkable occurred. He collapsed, was tended on the pitch for 45 minutes, but died as a result of an undiscovered heart condition.

  I was numb. How could this be? Marco was supremely fit, a dynamic box-to-box midfield player who had appeared in 35 of our 38 Premier League games that season. He scored City’s final goal at Maine Road before the move to Eastlands. He had a laid-back personality, and seemed impervious to the game’s gnawing insecurities. I sat in his memorial service, at Manchester Cathedral, and made a silent pledge.

  Carpe diem, Joseph. Seize the day.

  Marco’s shirt number, 23, was retired and, despite the depth and authenticity of everyone’s grief, life went on. Keegan signed Paul Bosvelt and Claudio Reyna, serious midfield players, established internationals and natural leaders. I can see now that Kevin was buying himself insurance against his perception of my youthful inconsistency, but at the time it felt like a betrayal.

  He didn’t understand my psychology. I wanted to be trusted to play backs-to-the-wall football every week. I didn’t care if the new recruits showed me their medals. I was ready. I would be their worst nightmare. I would make myself undroppable. I played 39 games during the 2003/04 season, which proved more enlightening than my manager might have wished.

  The cracks in the facade of Keegan’s authority began to appear in our final training session before we flew to a second-round UEFA Cup tie in western Poland in November. He had waited 72 hours to announce to the group he was fining Robbie Fowler and me £500 for being 10 minutes late for the bus to Newcastle the previous Friday. We were bang to rights, since we hadn’t allowed enough time to negotiate the traffic from a shopping trip to the Trafford Centre, but Bob was indignant.

  ‘I’m not paying.’

  Instantly, about 25 pairs of eyes widened, and shifted to the manager.

  ‘You are.’

  It initially had the feel of one of those scenes from a spaghetti western, where bystanders weigh up the survival prospects of rival gunslingers while making a mental note of where to hide if bullets start to fly. Unforgivably, it quickly degenerated into a yah-boo, sucks-to-you spat that would have shamed Sesame Street.

  Everyone knew it was wrong to call out the gaffer so starkly and so publicly, but Keegan’s juvenile response invited disrespect. It got worse a day later, when Coxy advised me to pay up or I wouldn’t play in the tie, against rank outsiders Groclin Dyskobolia. I borrowed the readies from the boys in the card school, and dutifully trotted up to the manager’s room. He took the cash without a word.

  Steve McManaman advised Bob to do likewise, to keep the peace. He agreed to do so with spectacularly bad grace, but when he returned to Macca’s room his poker face dissolved quickly. He reached into his pocket and smugly handed me £500. Keegan had returned our fines, on the proviso we didn’t tell the lads.

  What was the point of the charade? It was an unnecessary drama, an unprofessional distraction. It gave us an undeserved excuse for playing poorly in the goalless draw which resulted in our elimination on the away goals rule. Most damagingly, the manager’s behaviour smacked of weakness. It was the St John’s equivalent of allowing your bike to be nicked.

  We didn’t win again for three months, and the dressing room became a place of petty intrigues, whispers and moans. I was in and out of the team during a toxic 10-match spell. It was only a matter of time before I mirrored the mood, and defied the boss. The flashpoint came in mid-April, when he left me out once too often, without explanation, for a home game against Southampton.

  I waited for the match to kick off before leaving the stadium to play a round of golf at Bowring Park, a municipal course just off the M62. I was on the fifth fairway when news came through that we had lost 3-1, and were only two points off the relegation zone. I was delighted. Fuck him. That’ll teach him to scapegoat me.

  Keegan’s heart wasn’t in the subsequent bollocking. He was hurt that I should be so adamant I had nothing to apologise for. He couldn’t comprehend what he regarded as my lack of loyalty. We were each, in our way, showing signs of a silent struggle. He was trying to maintain the illusion of his leadership qualities, while I was trying to subdue an insistent inner voice.

  My inner child was scared, vulnerable, fearful. He taunted me that I was about to be found out as a fraud. He misrepresented what could have been a rational managerial decision, to ease the burden on a young player in order to protect him from burnout, as a full-blown challenge to my masculinity. He distorted Keegan’s silence and lack of sensitivity into a career-threatening snub.

  The manager didn’t understand what that shirt meant to me, even though he put me back in the team immediately. It was a comfort blanket, which soothed the kid who was conditioned to mistrust and misadventure. I was on the edge. I had started drinking heavily, getting into the occasional scuffle on nights out. The more scrapes I encountered, the bigger target I became.

  It was a catch-22 situation. Keegan was right to worry, because I was struggling to cope with life in the spotlight. I was starting to lose control, to set a pattern of problems. Yet I felt I couldn’t share my insecurities with him, because he represented the type of authority figure I had been programmed to distrust.

  The manager struggled to differentiate between the player and the person. He sat with me in his office for hours, but couldn’t understand that the fiery nature which made me an effective footballer was also making me a nasty bastard. He simply didn’t understand the underlying issue: that I was fighting for my existence.

  We fell out again in July, during a tetchy pre-season friendly at Doncaster, the League Two champions. They were captained by John Doolan, an Evertonian who is now coaching at the Finch Farm academy, but he missed most of the mayhem because he was substituted in order to have stitches inserted in a head wound. Paul Green, his mate in central midfield, went in late on me three times in the opening 20 minutes. I wasn’t about to give him a fourth opportunity to make a name for himself.

  Estate rules applied. Green lingered in possession a fraction too long, which gave me the chance to scrape my studs down his shin. He shrieked and sat on the ball, so I kicked it out from underneath him without due care and attention. He deserved the kicking, and the referee did well to contain a 10-man brawl.

  It doesn’t take much for footballers to turn feral. Macca, Danny Mills and Richard Dunne all began to put it about a bit. Jermaine McSporran, a striker who belonged in a Spike Milligan poem rather than a team of scufflers, responded in kind. His partner Leo Fortune-West, a lower-league lump, then lunged at me. He would have broken my leg had it remained planted, but I was alert enough to leap in the air to minimise the damage. A badly cut leg was, in the circumstances, a relief.

  Keegan hooked me at half-time, which turned into
a screaming match. He made things worse by hanging me out to dry in the press conference: ‘Joey thinks he can look after himself, but when you start doing things like that, people sort you out. I have a problem with any player who just wants to go out and be physical all the time. There is no future in that.’

  Bastard. Kevin’s memory was as selective as the script for his moral lecture. We were closer in spirit than he dared acknowledge. Take a look at his head’s-gone brawl with Billy Bremner at the 1974 Charity Shield, where he was decked by a Johnny Giles right hook before being sent off with the Leeds captain. They tore off their shirts as TV commentator Barry Davies bemoaned the ‘unacceptable face of English football’, and both received an 11-match ban.

  Keegan, like me, was self-made. He was defined by his work ethic, his determination to make the most of himself. We got on infinitely better at Newcastle, where I was more mature, and the impetuosity of youth had eased. He was more aware of my demons, phenomenally receptive to the self-analysis I had undergone in prison.

  Maybe, at City, we were the right combination at the wrong club at the wrong time. I can honestly say he is the only person I have encountered in the game who loves football more than me. It took time for me to appreciate the magnitude of his achievement, as a scrawny kid from Scunthorpe who defied the doubters to win a European Cup with Liverpool and Hamburg.

  How sad, then, that he has been worn down by football’s sharp edges. When things were beginning to splinter at City, it was probably as well that he never heard the snide asides that he’d been broken by the impossibility of managing England. The feeling of rejection must have hurt him so badly. How has he been reduced to such a peripheral figure when the values he represents have never been more important?

  I realise this opens me up to a charge of hypocrisy, given what I was about to put him through as 2004 drew to a close, but he should still be centrally involved in the game.

  CHAPTER SEVEN