by Peter Crouch
I was devastated. I was humiliated. All the way round the pitches on the warm-up the lads were ridiculing me. But I can understand why he did it. He was testing me. Did I really want to be a professional footballer? Was I just a nice kid from a nice part of Ealing, or could I handle a little of what I would get much more of if I ever made it into the professional ranks? I never turned him down for training ever again, and he never stopped rating me and telling others that I was good enough – even when I didn’t look like a footballer to some eyes, more of a lumbering siege engine rather than someone who could actually control a ball.
Sometimes you need that tough love from your manager. With the Spurs youth team we would train on the pitches at Chigwell in the morning and then go down to White Hart Lane in the afternoons to work in the old ball-court there. Occasionally, there would be a little time to kill. One time, we decided to detour via a snooker hall on Edmonton High Street. The fruit machines were fun. The lure of the giant rectangle of green baize was intense. The six of us were soon deep in an endless game: Ledley King and I were the tallest and thus the best equipped to actually cue somewhere near the white ball.
Then someone noticed that training had already started. Snooker can do that to you. It’s why they stick it on telly in the afternoon. One minute you’re having your lunch and you’re bored, the next you’re five frames in and it’s gone dark outside and the back of your legs have stuck to the sofa. Our manager Bob Arber did not see it that way. We ran all the way there, but he was waiting for us as we sprinted in, look of incredulous fury on his face.
‘Snooker? Flipping snooker? Gonna be professional flipping snooker players, are you? Using the spider as your flipping cue, were you? Standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the blue?’
It was exactly what we needed. It kept us young dreamers grounded and switched us on to the standards required. Making a joke to a teenager about Big Macs and small personal assets these days would get you sacked, but in the same way that PE teachers at school are often the strictest, so these early managers knew that we needed boundaries. One of my jobs was to clean David Ginola’s boots. If I didn’t do it properly I would have to stay late to do them again. By the end I was polishing them so intensely that I actually got told off for obscuring the large white Nike swoosh with black polish. In my keenness to impress I was jeopardising David’s lucrative sportswear contract.
Without discipline we were awful. To make up for our otherwise lack of interest in a more formal type of education, Spurs brought in a teacher to get us through an NVQ in Leisure and Tourism. We may have experienced the lure of a snooker hall in north-east London but we had absolutely no interest in how they were run. Because the teacher wasn’t used to footballers and the fact they needed constant corralling, he gave us an inch and we took the whole of the classroom. It was horrendous. You had kids who were naturally the loudest and most disruptive in a normal class, and then combined into one uber-rabble. A recipe for disaster, and one that left a grown man in tears. I still feel bad about it to this day. Although I did get my NVQ, so at least one of us was paying attention.
For all that has changed in football, you still tend to address your manager as you did all those years ago: Gaffer. It used to be a fifty-fifty between ‘Gaffer’ and ‘Boss’, but sadly Boss is dying out. The last true Boss was probably Fabio Capello, who was so strict that Gaffer felt too familiar, as if you were asking him out for after-work drinks. The foreign lads tend to prefer ‘Mister’, which dates back to when Britain exported association football to the world through ex-pat coaches in the early part of the twentieth century, and the formal was all-important. They’ll have a pop at pronouncing Gaffer like a local yet lose track of the correct intonation and make it sound instead like a walled city on the Mediterranean.
All managers have nicknames with their players. None of them can be used in front of them. There was no player in England brave enough to address Capello by his, let alone Harry Redknapp by the one Jonathan Woodgate came up with. The best ones are always the convoluted ones: the manager who was known as The Judge because his hair resembled the white, curly wig of a legal man; the kit-man further down his chain of command who had a similar style and was thus The Magistrate.
Capello had other issues. At his first press conference he promised to learn English. He made this promise through an interpreter and obviously enjoyed the experience because he continued to use an interpreter for the rest of his time in charge. He didn’t even learn an English swear-word, like a student on a school exchange programme. When he was angry it thus felt as if he was furious with the man on his right with multiple degrees in major European languages rather than the ones with NVQs in Leisure and Tourism sitting slumped in front of him.
He would stare at the poor bloke, spraying rage and disbelief, waving his arms about, red with anger and indignation. The interpreter would then have to try to be furious with us, even though he was a very pleasant, calm individual, and have to get the essential message across in more palatable fashion: ‘The boss says you are a something of a disappointment and that he is banning mobile phones from the dinner table. Also the next person he catches wearing flip-flops to breakfast can, ah, go quickly back to where he first came from and procreate at their leisure.’
I had loved Capello at Milan. I was so looking forward to working with him, but his lack of effort in learning even the most basic phrases – easy ball, man on, Grey Goose Wanker – came across as a lack of real interest in doing the job properly. He and most of his staff still lived in Rome, and usually only came over for training camps. He had a seventy-something assistant called Italo Galbiati who had worked with him everywhere from Milan and Roma to Juventus and Real Madrid, but no one was really sure what that job was. He mainly used to run around the training pitches with a ball under each arm, screaming in Italian about topics we could only guess at. His enthusiasm was magnificent, like an Italian Sammy Lee, and he was clearly a pure football man. But none of us ever exchanged a cogent word with him.
Galbiati used to take over the communal areas of the hotel, the ones where we had enjoyed relaxing, and kick back with his fellow Capello underlings: Franco Baldini, who coached vigorously in Italian; Massimo Neri, who did fitness work vigorously in Italian; and Franco Tancredi, who worked with the goalkeepers on things that they did not understand. They would sit there drinking espressos, talking with great intensity and passion, and we would wave at them half-heartedly and trudge back to our rooms. You felt like you’d walked into the wrong hotel. You felt like you’d walked into the wrong country.
The permanent interpreter is never a good look. Eventually it will start to fail. The manager will talk at pace for five minutes, waving his hands around to signify complex tactical moves, varying his tone and emphasis, thumping his fist on his heart. He will then nod at the interpreter. The interpreter will nod back. ‘He says knock it long.’ Those overseas managers who make the effort to learn English – maybe before their arrival, as Pep Guardiola did, or quickly in their first year, like Mauricio Pochettino – always give themselves a better chance. If you struggle to communicate in post-match interviews, how have you managed to get complicated tactical plans across to your players? How can you persuade a potential new signing to commit to your club for three years when you’re acting like someone on a week’s holiday?
All managers have their biases. When you’re stressed, you fall back on old certainties, and you see that with how overseas managers tend to recruit from their domestic leagues. A Portuguese manager brings players he knows from his homeland rather than taking a punt on a young British kid from the Championship. A German brings in Germans. It used to be the smaller clubs in the Premier League who would take a chance on young British talent. That’s now changed: Fulham and Huddersfield, during their brief time in the Premier League, looked to various overseas leagues. Watford are all about foreign signings. Harry Redknapp is meant to take me, Jermain Defoe and Niko Kranjčar wherever he goes, although Harry actually
sold me more times than he bought me.
The manager makes a real difference when you’re thinking about signing for a club. Word gets around with players. This guy’s good, he’ll push you but he’s fair. This one’s a nightmare, he’ll take the praise when the team does well and throw you under the bus when you lose. You hear about their tactics and you hear about whether training is fun or a classroom on grass.
I loved Rafa Benítez as a manager. He signed me for Liverpool at a point when many doubted, and he was obsessive about football and the myriad ways it can be played. But I never felt I got to know him as a person. He was emotionally closed to you as a player unless you wanted to discuss last night’s game in the last sixteen of the Europa League between a team from Slovenia and the Maltese runners-up, in which case he would light up and hold court for hours.
Rafa’s entire life is football. He has a wife and children but I still find it impossible to picture him taking his kids to school. He has two Alsatians which he has drilled like he drills his defences. I can’t imagine him in the supermarket, or if I can it’s wandering around with a confused look on his face, trying to work out why the oranges are arranged in that pyramid formation in the fruit and veg aisle, making a mess of the self-service check-out because he wants detailed video analysis of how it coped with the last customer. ‘UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.’
You take what you can from all of them. Gerry Francis at QPR was old-school in some ways but secretly quite forward-thinking for the time. He had good attacking formations, some of the flair still there from the days when he played alongside Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh. He gave me my league debut when I was nineteen and returned to my life fifteen years later when he went upstairs at Stoke under Tony Pulis. He still had exactly the same haircut.
Sven-Göran Eriksson was in some ways the antithesis of both Rafa and Gerry. His mullet days were long gone and he could talk about anything but football: Japanese poetry, the architecture of John Nash, the music of Grieg (Edvard not Tony). I absolutely loved him. He was the calmest man I have ever met, in or out of football. His record with England was very good: qualifying for every tournament, reaching the quarter-finals in each one, which was how good we were. We shouldn’t have beaten Brazil at the World Cup in 2002, yet it took a lucky goal to defeat us. Portugal were better than us in 2004 and 2006. Sven also exuded power and charisma. That may be at odds with your mental image of him, and indeed the geeky nickname us players had given him. But he had it. You could see where his successes away from the pitch came from. I’ll say it: Sven was sexy.
Tony Pulis is not sexy. But Tony Pulis knows he isn’t sexy, and that the clubs he’s at aren’t sexy, and that the combination of him and the club and the players he has at his disposal means he can’t pretend to be either. Instead he works on all the other attributes, and it works for him. He would have loved Stoke to have passed teams off the pitch. We couldn’t so we had to do other things: unsettle the opposition, get the tackles in, develop our long throws, work on our set pieces and hold off on them until the big lads had come up from the back … to join the big lads from midfield and the big lads up front who were already there. We had to keep the ball alive in the opposition box and make their defenders head it and head it and head it, until they were so sick of it they were almost begging for the chance to play a nice sexy pass out from the back instead. Teams used to give away corners to us rather than face another long throw. I once saw Spurs’ goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes have to take a knee like a boxer who had just been floored, so tenderised was he by Rory Delap’s relentless aerial bombardment.
Pulis understood that you could try to play beautiful football and be relegated, or be horrible to play against and stay up. Stoke stayed up for ten years. It’s like if I played basketball against LeBron James. I’d have to be up in his face, stand on his toes, use the sharp bit of my elbows in the soft part of his back. It’s why the Premier League is so different to La Liga; their smaller teams try to play the same style as Barcelona and Read Madrid without the players to do so, and they get taken apart. Use what you have rather than what you wished you had.
Even fine managers can struggle to adapt as the football around them changes. Most have a period of success with their methodology and tactics and then find themselves superseded by the younger and funkier. George Graham had it cracked from 1988 to 1994 and then became gradually outmoded. Arséne Wenger was the king of all that was new and glamorous but by the end was too close to a cliché for a man of his abilities and achievements.
It happens because you get stuck in one philosophy. The best have the ability to adapt to the players and budgets they’re stuck with. I’ve always felt that Harry Redknapp could have had success at the top of the Premier League and the bottom of League Two just the same. His teams could play different styles; he could find players if given £50 million or £500,000. Harry had a big enough character not to be intimidated at a top-four club but also the man-management to motivate Dagenham & Redbridge. Rafa got Newcastle back out of the Championship but, partly as a result of his obsession with tactics, could sometimes overcomplicate things. At Liverpool we played a poor Wolves at home and Rafa went for two holding midfielders. Keeping it simple can he harder than you think. Harry was fantastic at the obvious. Put players on the right side for their dominant foot. Keep a good defensive shape. Give each man no more than two straightforward instructions.
The greatest British manager of all time could do all that. Sir Alex Ferguson might look like a man who never changed, but he did, as football transformed across his twenty-seven years at Old Trafford. The way you could treat players changed completely but his values were solid even as his tactics adapted. He went from Bryan Robson to Cristiano Ronaldo, a revolution in players’ characters, nationalities, lifestyles and needs, and he won all the same. A first league title in 1993, his last twenty years on, but done totally differently: from two rapid wingers and two old-fashioned English centre-backs to an attacking trio of Ronaldo, Rooney and Tevez, and then on to pulling a golden season from Robin van Persie. From a striker’s point of view he always let his centre-backs follow you deep into midfield, never dropping off, always up your arse – a nightmare for a forward, but brave from a manager since it can leave holes. Adapt? He won his first Champions League final without Roy Keane and Paul Scholes, arguably his two best players, who were both suspended. He won it by bringing on the right two substitutes at the right time and watching them both score.
Pep Guardiola is a fabulous manager. I love the sort of football he plays. To play for him or for Jürgen Klopp would be both a privilege and enormous fun. I’d also love to set up an experiment where Pep took over at Macclesfield Town for a season, dealing with players who can’t pass it, defenders who give goals away and no money to buy replacements. At Manchester City he has full-backs who can play as wingers or midfielders, centre-backs who can bring the ball out and knock it, a goalkeeper who has a touch with his feet like a Premier League outfield player. He’s rarely made a duff buy. He plucked Aymeric Laporte from Bilbao, a man yet to play senior international football, and suddenly he’s one of the most accomplished defenders in Europe. He improved Raheem Sterling dramatically and made Kyle Walker seem a bargain at £50 million. He found Fernandinho at Shakhtar Donetsk. If he’s at Macc and he has to look only at free transfers, if his players can’t play like City’s can, does he keep the same philosophy or does he go long ball?
In the first part of my career I was selfish, only concerned with what I was doing. I thought of many coaches simply as lackeys. Now I’ve done my coaching badges, now I’ve had two decades analysing what the best can do, I’m only about respect.
Managing ages you. Look at the difference in José Mourinho’s hair and face in ten years. Watch the close-ups of Graham Taylor during An Impossible Job. My mum has always asked me never to try it as she understands what the stress does to you. It’s brutal. You get almost no time to turn a club round. Half your players might be sit
ting around on five-year-contracts, the other half want to be elsewhere. You have a director of football buying players you don’t want, you have a chairman who thinks he’s a genius yet doesn’t know his Arsenal from his Eibar and you have fans who think their club deserves to be in the next division up because they were once there fifteen years before.
It’s brutal, yes, but it’s also totally engrossing. Could you pull off the miracle that others could not? Could you handle the long hours? As a player, you have a degree of influence on a team. As a manager you have a vision. It’s your set-up. Imagine that feeling if you got that team promoted – getting the group together, choosing the formation, dictating the style. Players win matches, but managers win titles. There are so many decisions that have to be made correctly or you will fall short. It’s Championship Manager, except not on your rubbish computer and without the ability to speed boring matches up by smashing the spacebar.
If I did it, I would take the best of all I have been exposed to. The obsession and organisation of Rafa. The unflappability of Sven. Harry’s personality. Pulis’s defensive shape and set pieces. Paul Lambert’s enthusiasm. Steve McClaren’s training sessions. Capello’s discipline and art collection. I could do the hard stuff – pulling players off, dropping the wasters. It’s the soft stuff I’d struggle with: celebrating on my own rather than with the team, having no one to wind up, no longer being part of a WhatsApp group called No Bells Allowed. If I found out everyone else was going on a night out and I wasn’t invited, I might have a little cry.
There are managerial rules. Don’t drive the sort of car a player drives. Don’t wear trainers with diamond studs on them. Don’t work out in the players’ gym wearing a sleeveless vest and getting two of the younger lads to spot for you when you’re bench-pressing. Become a master at PowerPoint: you’ll only use it once at each club, when you have your interview, but it can blow the mind of an impressionable chief executive.
