I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  The assistant manager is almost a manager. Harry had Jim Smith; we used to call them the Flat Cap Combo. Jim’s exact responsibilities were never that clear to us players. He used to organise chip-the-crossbar contests for a tenner a pop and then go inside when the actual training started. Still wearing his cap.

  It’s a position one arse-width from power. The assistant gets much of the good stuff without the bad: he can still share a joke with the players, has a tracksuit with his initials on the chest, but he doesn’t have to front up to the media. No fan has ever pointed at an assistant manager and started singing, ‘You’re getting sacked in the morning …’

  And yet some never escape it. Some people are born sidekicks. Phil Neal. Tord Grip. Terry McDermott. John Gorman. Brian Kidd. Most of them get a go as manager somewhere at some stage, but it never ends happily. Bruce Rioch had Stewart Houston as his assistant at Arsenal, then switched and became Houston’s assistant when he took over at QPR. It would never have worked. A fundamental law of physics had been broken, and only disaster could follow.

  It’s the same with coaching staff: fitness coach, goalkeeping coach, analysts. A manager has his loyal lieutenants and they follow him everywhere he goes. He gets a new job and gets the band back together; he gets sacked and they follow him out the door. They have to. They’re the mole. They become the final paragraph in the story breaking the news. ‘Assistant manager Steve Sidekick has also left club with immediate effect.’

  Occasionally, one will be left standing. When the only other option is the chairman’s teenage son, this man will become the caretaker manager. And because of another one of football’s laws of physics, he will have immediate success, Champions League level success – at least until the moment he is appointed full-time, at which point all form will fall away, and everyone will come to their senses and say, what were we thinking, he was making teas until last month.

  We had it at Southampton when Steve Wigley took over from the sacked Paul Sturrock. He got the caretaker role: ‘Good old Steve, let’s pull together for Steve.’ He got the full-time job: ‘Hang on, Wigs is our manager?’

  A caretaker can find himself typecast. David Pleat did it three times at Spurs. Neil Redfearn has done it four times: Leeds, York and twice at Halifax. Tony Parkes did it six times in eighteen years at Blackburn, and then again at Blackpool. He was caretaker so frequently that no one could remember what his actual job was supposed to be. And yet a player will always fear a manager, temporary or long-term. A manager can make you or break you. When rumours sweep the dressing-room of who might be taking over, footballers think about it in purely selfish terms. Does this bloke rate me? Will I be playing more? Will I be training with the kids?

  I was at Southampton and rotting in the reserves when Wigley got sacked. Someone whispered that Harry might be on his way up the road from Portsmouth. I celebrated as if I was already scoring. ‘Flipping quality, I’m back in the game …’ Stephen Ireland was pied off at Aston Villa by Paul Lambert, so left for Stoke. Shortly afterwards Lambert followed him to Stoke and pied him off there too.

  Then there was the case of Dwight Yorke at Manchester United, when Ferguson changed his mind about leaving in 2002 and instead signed a new three-year deal. The players in the dressing-room all looked at Dwight, whose good-times lifestyle was increasingly at odds with the Ferguson way, as the news filtered through. Then one spoke for all. ‘Yep, that’s you screwed, Yorkie …’

  FOOD

  Footballers are creatures of habit. Before every game for Spurs, Gareth Bale would always have exactly the same meal: beans on toast. I used to watch him, large plate of plain pasta and chicken in front of me, just like everyone else in the squad, and say to myself: that’s not going to give you the energy you need for a game at this level. Two hours later he’d be steaming all over the pitch, running from first minute to last, so much dynamism and strength and speed. The fortieth time he accelerated past me, I’d think, what the hell is in those beans?

  It seemed like the sort of meal a seven-year-old might have for tea on a Sunday, when they were still quite full from lunch. Gareth may as well have been eating Numberelli Apaghetti or Alphabites. Yet he was so good, so consistently the outstanding player on the pitch, that I got it in my head it was all down to the beans. They must be magic. If you planted them they’d probably produce a great beanstalk that would take you to a strange land in the sky, inhabited by a giant who wears an Alice band in his hair.

  I was jealous. Gareth always wolfed down his beans with obvious enjoyment. Meanwhile, I was forcing my pasta and chicken down, partly because we were allowed no sauce and partly because I’d eaten that dish before every one of my professional matches to that point. There were times, when you had the early Saturday kick-off at 12.30pm, that you’d be attempting to eat it for breakfast. Sitting there in your tracksuit, not really hungry anyway, cup of tea to one side, giant plate of bland nutrition staring at you. On a few rare occasions the team would take pity on you and let you have spag bol instead. Have you ever eaten spag bol before 9am on a Saturday? The best day of the week, and you’re starting it in the most spirit-crushingly lacklustre way.

  It was Gareth who blew my mind and changed my game. My usual breakfast before a 3pm kick-off was the sort of thing a hungover student might have in their dressing-gown watching Football Focus: cereal, toast with Marmite, a pot of tea. Post-Bale I began going bigger early doors – perhaps some eggs, even some fruit – and then a Bale-esque luncheon of magic beans plus yoghurt and banana. He’s had seven years at Real Madrid and has won the Champions League four times; the eighth of my many years at Stoke was spent mid-table in the Championship. Some beans are clearly more magic than others.

  In my later days I breakfasted on match days with the older gentlemen in the team. Those who are dads are always in the restaurant when it’s still dark, your natural alarm clock having been forever rewired. The ones without kids come down for food at 11am and still manage to look more tired. Together we would then tick off one of the most pointless of all footballing traditions, a pre-lunch walk around the hotel car-park, where some dogged autograph hunters tracked us round the coach bays while we tried to avoid eye-contact. It was like a slow-motion game of cat and mouse. Followed by baked beans.

  The game moves on in other ways. An increasing number of players are vegan: Jermain Defoe, Chris Smalling, Héctor Bellerín, Jack Wilshere. I’ve got a feeling Jermain may be vegan like Pam from Gavin and Stacey was vegetarian, with a significant level of non-plant based treats, but he was always about the little advantages and trends – the first player to be constantly in compression tights, a cryotherapy suite installed in his own house, one of the first to have a chef at home.

  The chef angle would have been unthinkable a few years ago. There were several in the same building as me in my early days at Aston Villa, but only because I was living in a hotel. Lost for ideas, unable to cook for myself, I’d have a full Belfry carvery most nights. For the single man these days hotel living makes a lot of sense. It’s cheaper than eating out, the quality of the food will be excellent and you have someone to talk to you between sessions on the Xbox.

  I’m lucky to have Abbey for many reasons, but not least because I can hang on to her healthy coat-tails. She’ll do a full green juice in the blender each morning – cucumber, spinach, kale, all things never found at a Belfry carvery – and I’ll polish off her remains. The most sophisticated plan I came up with as a single man was bulk-buying from the frozen meals emporium Cook, although at the very start of my first spell at Portsmouth I’d take it in turns making dinner with Shaun Derry and Courtney Pitt, an early prototype of Come Dine with Me which, unlike the final television version, usually finished with a penalty shoot-out competition into the inflatable goal which dominated my lounge.

  Word gets around about the good chefs. Footballers aren’t great at discovering things by themselves. They prefer to be handed things on a plate, not least the identity of people who are going to hand them thi
ngs on a plate. A few of the canteen staff at training grounds have subsequently developed a lucrative sideline in at-home evening dining. Ask them with sufficient warning, out-bid any team-mate also in the market and they’ll be round as required. If you don’t mind having the same meal twice in one day and you’re capable of putting something in the microwave for three minutes – not a given – you can head home from the training ground after lunch with a plate wrapped in tinfoil. It’s the classic signal that someone’s partner is away. I’ve done it many a time. It’s like saying goodbye to your mum after Christmas: a kindly woman in her fifties concerned that a well-paid man in his twenties living in a major European city will be unable to find anything edible to keep him alive.

  My lunch game changed with Bale and my dinner game was recalibrated by England. It was one of Sven’s greatest innovations, along with the post-match jam sessions featuring his assistant Tord Grip on the accordion: a chef travelling with the team at all times, taking over each hotel’s kitchens, producing unheard-of culinary wonders like sushi, fresh pasta and a salad bar. It made going away with England feel like a pleasant continental weekend break with a little exercise in the middle.

  Sven had his critics but he understood what mattered to players. We are boy-men but we like the illusion of being treated like adults. Juande Ramos at Spurs, by contrast, went the other way and banned tomato ketchup from the players’ canteen. If you were seen spreading butter on your toast you were treated as if you’d just sparked up a Benson & Hedges. I could understand if I had moved to an entirely spread-based diet, slamming great golden bricks of it into my mouth. One light smear upon a solitary piece of wholemeal toast, however, did not feel as if it would hinder my performance. Banning ketchup and butter simply antagonised men whose days were spent running around burning excessive amounts of calories; my bodyweight at thirty-seven was within half a kilogram of my bodyweight at QPR aged nineteen, although I’m pleased to say the proportion of muscle had apparently increased. You probably noticed.

  What Juande hadn’t figured out – and the same goes for Fabio Capello, who briefly tried the same with England – was that the players were having butter on their toast for breakfast at home and ketchup with their evening meals. For all the resentment created, he had managed only to marginally decrease the intake of something his players were eating anyway. I say all this without even being a huge ketchup fan. I have some sympathy with Gianfranco Zola and Thierry Henry when they arrived in England from Serie A and could not work out what this strange red stuff was that people lashed on top of every single meal. In France the flavour comes from the food. You don’t need to put a mix of liquidised tomato, spirit vinegar and sugar on it. I would sit next to James McClean at the Stoke training-ground canteen and look on open-mouthed as he poured HP Sauce onto everything he ate – pasta, vegetables, all meats. I’ve seen him put a blob of it onto his rice pudding. Yet he was one of the fittest players at the club. It worked for him, so why harsh his saucy vibe?

  Trends travel with players. In the same way that Sir Walter Raleigh brought potatoes back from the New World, so I like to think David Platt, Paul Gascoigne and Paul Ince introduced fresh pasta and pesto to the Premier League on their return from playing in Italy. It didn’t seem to work the other way – I couldn’t see Zola or Henry going home with recipes for pie and chips – but for a while it blew the British footballer’s mind. Pesto confused me. When I was told it was made with crushed pine nuts my mind was filled instead with images of pine cones. The first time I saw one of the foreign lads at Portsmouth using olive oil I may genuinely have used the word ‘wow’. Our canteen had been on the naval base at HMS Collingwood. You were served food with ladles onto a metal tray. Among career sailors the phrase ‘extra virgin’ had very different connotations.

  Football canteens now are unrecognisable from those rough old days. The best are like real restaurants. You would happily book ahead and pay to eat there. The Spurs set-up on Hotspur Way in Enfield is a marvel. You go back for seconds whenever you can, although you should always expect stick from your fellow players when you do so, more so if you’re one of the coaching staff. Yet still the majority of the overseas players will spurn the best of what Britain has to offer in favour of something their partners have knocked up for them at home. They will be flouncing out with a dismissive, ‘I can’t eat this!’ around the same point as I’m tucking into my second helping. ‘Carol, I absolutely adore what you’ve done with this dry chicken …’

  Creatures of habit, there are certain restaurants in each major British city that all footballers will frequent. There is San Carlo on King Street in Manchester and another branch on Temple Street in Birmingham; there is a Chinese called Wings on Lincoln Square in Manchester where they must have an unspoken rule that at least one Premier League footballer is always dining. It’s run by Mr Wing, a lovely fella who will always look after you. Wayne Rooney hired the whole thing out for his birthday one year. At some stage in proceedings he and I did a karaoke turn bolstered by Gareth Barry and Joe Hart. We did Westlife’s ‘Flying Without Wings’, despite being literally within Wings, which tells you something else about the mentality of footballers.

  Where once a footballer’s favourite meal out was steak and chips (protein plus carbohydrate, perhaps a token pea garnish for appearances) we are now truly global in our culinary tastes. Rio Ferdinand has an Italian restaurant called Rosso. Clarence Seedorf has Fingers, less an anatomical statement than a chain of Japanese eateries. Pep Guardiola has invested in Tast, a high-end tapas bar in Manchester. The size of the small plates is in proportional contrast to the price – an issue for most civilians but not for footballers trying to catch the eye of the most charismatic manager in the modern game.

  There are almost 40,000 places to buy some sort of meal in London. Footballers prefer to eat in one of three: Novikov in Mayfair (Japanese upstairs, Italian downstairs), Sexy Fish on Berkeley Square and Nobu on Berkeley Street. Together with the May Fair Bar they form the Golden Rhombus of Saturday night entertainment for Premier League stars, whether they live in the capital or not. You’ll bump into a few of the Liverpool lads. ‘I was down in London last week.’ ‘Oh yeah? Where did you go?’ ‘Novikov. Top.’

  A man can get caught up in the Golden Rhombus and he can forget that anything exists outside it. Through habit, fear, a lack of adventure, it always ends up with the same dish: black cod. I’m not sure who first ordered it, but now everyone has to. It’s as if there is nothing else on the menu. Abbey and I can no longer order the dish, despite how delicious it is, because it’s become a totem of footballers’ herd mentality. I can’t even say the words without cringing.

  Japanese replaced Italian which replaced the steakhouse. It makes sense. It’s healthy, and you can eat a load it while still being capable of movement the next day. The standard of chopstick use is also improving all the time. Where once there was consternation is now a basic level of competency. I’ll use chopsticks throughout the starters, albeit with a slight reliance on the lean-low-and-shovel technique, and only abandon them for a fork when the main comes and I realise that I’m eating at such a slow rate that I’m burning more calories in attempting to eat than I’m managing to consume.

  A staple of the old haunts was the signed photo of the footballer on the wall, proprietor’s arm around his shoulder, empty plate of spaghetti in front of him. Go to Giovanni’s in Cardiff and you can still find the faded images of a sated-looking Ian Rush, a light frosting of carbonara sauce on his jet-black moustache. The deal was understood by both parties: you do me a photo, thus attracting easily impressed customers, and your meal is on the house. Thirty years on and the bill is more frequently settled by a game of Credit Card Roulette, where the card of each player present will be placed in a champagne bucket and the waitress asked to pull one out at random. The tension in the room at that moment is on par with a penalty shoot-out in a major cup competition. Will I be eating for free, or will I be walking away with a receipt for eleven black cod
s?

  Our table manners are better than you might think. Much like the cantankerous Fabio Capello (‘We have one hour to sit together!’) I would often encourage my fellow dining players to place their mobile phones in the middle of the table, with the stipulation that the first one to touch theirs paid for the entire meal. It actively encouraged conversation while at the same time bringing a glorious element of tension to proceedings. You hear your phone ring and see your agent’s name flash up. It could be an amazing new deal that he needs to confirm with you right then. Do you risk answering it only to find out he’s done a pocket call by accident? Another ringtone. It’s your partner. A furious, wounded voicemail versus an £800 bill. And they say there is no atmosphere in football any more.

  Goalkeepers tend to be the least messy eaters. They’re good with their hands. There will always be one player, often a central defender, who eats instead like a man in a food fight and ends up with diced vegetables in his eyebrows. As a soup connoisseur, I will always eat with a proper soup spoon, tilting the bowl away from me when the level falls sufficiently. It is in such small details that a man defines himself, but I cannot maintain the decorum in other areas. Offered a splash of wine to taste, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for – some sign that it’s gone off, or simply that it tastes nice. Just as on a trip to the barber’s you are shown the back of your head in the mirror at the end and will say ‘Yeah, that’s smashing, mate’, even if they’ve shaved in the outline of a cock and balls, so the routine when I’m offered wine is always the same. Nose into glass, frown, double sniff, little pause, nod. ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’

  Before a recent operation I suffered from polyps in my nasal passages, which for a time completely killed my sense of smell and taste. Abbey and I would go out for dinner, the waiter would come over with the wine and I would think back to a Michael McIntyre quote about being selected for the main role in the Bullshit Production. The glass may have had a stinkbomb in it, but unless it was visible to the naked eye I wouldn’t have known. And yet I had to go through the whole charade, Abbey trying to keep a straight face. ‘What do you think, Pete? Is it corked?’ Me going through the whole Production rigmarole when I just wanted to shrug Partridge-style, ‘Just flipping pour it, mate …’