I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  As ever, the overseas stars are ahead of the game. When my old friend Andrés Iniesta signed for Vissel Kobe in Japan, a clause in his deal guaranteed the purchase by the club of a certain number of bottles of Iniesta’s own wine label, Bodega Iniesta. His fellow silky passer Andrea Pirlo also has his own vineyard, while the former Manchester United midfielder Anderson has gone one step further into the world of agribusiness and now owns 800 cows. Apparently he used to tell his United team-mates that when he got up to 500 he would retire; it’s to the credit of a player sometimes criticised for his work-rate and desire that he pushed on to 800 before sacking the football off. All he ever wanted to do was farm, the Alex James of the Premier League scene.

  I’ve always eaten my evening meal at 6pm, usually with my children. When I mentioned this to Fernando Torres, he told me that he used to go out for dinner at 10pm. Wasn’t he starving? The trick was his afternoon kip. He wasn’t hungry at 6pm because he’d only just woken up. I liked his thinking, and I liked the scenes when I went to Madrid with Spurs and saw all the kids out with their parents at Torres o’clock. I tried to convert to those sophisticated ways but watching my kids eating tea at 6pm just made me so hungry. By 10pm on a night out I was either knackered or smashed. I once managed to go mental and delay tea until 8pm but it backfired as I’d drunk more on an empty stomach and ended up going home at 9pm.

  When an English player transfers to Spain, France or Italy, they must adapt or starve. Go out for dinner at 6pm and nothing in Madrid or Barcelona is open. Wait until 7pm and you’re dining by yourself. You start at 10pm and finish at midnight. No wonder continental breakfasts are so small: you’ve only just eaten. In the UK nothing is ever civilised after 11pm. The only way of having a sit-down meal after midnight is at a bus-stop with chips and pitta.

  Abbey and I went away to Paris and neglected to recalibrate our stomachs to French time. We went out for an evening meal at 7pm and ate in silence. We went to a bar and stayed there for two hours, but no one came. We left at 10pm as people started flooding in. We moved on to a club. It was deserted. We sat around for a while, drank on our own until I threw a few shapes on the empty dancefloor and then fell up the stairs at 2am to get a taxi home. Outside was a massive queue of locals waiting to get in. Securing a taxi was the easiest thing in the world because they kept pulling up to drop eager clubbers off. It had been like a sad old wedding: drinking morosely on our own, eating too fast, wanting it all to end so we could go to bed. They say you should dance like there’s no one watching. We had no choice. We were two hours off all night.

  Parenting changes how you eat as a footballer. The pleasure goes out of a nice restaurant meal. Instead it becomes a race: can you get through your main course before any of your kids has a meltdown? Forget starters or a dessert. You cut your losses where you can and sprint like hell for the bill. If the kids start walking around you’re close to the end. You pray it’s the sort of place where the menu doubles as a colouring-in sheet, which would also work for some of the football teams I’ve played for.

  The best meal of the year? The Christmas one with all the staff in the canteen. Everyone together, all those you never ordinarily see – the secretaries, the security men, the assistant groundsman. The worst? Anything post-match. You’ve had caffeine drinks before the game, caffeinated chewing-gum, jelly babies, Gareth Bale’s baked beans. Afterwards you smash down a sponsored protein shake, two pizzas and some chicken wings. Your guts are in turmoil. They don’t know if it’s three at the back or a sweeper.

  I think of those canteens and I think of pranks. The easy king of them all being to pass the salt shaker with the top unscrewed. It’s so simple but so devastating to the victim’s dish. It pains me immensely that Stoke now have non-screwable tops to the salt and pepper pots. I think of canteens and I think of nerves, too: how I used to go to the old Spurs training pitches at Mill Hill as a schoolboy and be so anxious in front of the older youth players that I would sit frozen to my seat. I have an abiding memory of Gary Barlow singing on the radio about lipstick marks on his coffee cup, and me being so nervous I couldn’t even pick my own coffee cup up. I would sit there waiting to be told what to do, unable to eat, unable to stand in line to get food to eat.

  I think too about Bruno Martins Indi at Stoke, bringing in his own tub of coffee and hiding it behind the coffee machine in the players’ lounge. He put his name on it with a Post-it note, like a money-conscious student. It wasn’t even posh coffee, nothing ground or even partial-bean, just an absolute standard Douwe Egberts. Obviously we demolished it. I stuck it on the table and we piled in. Even the lads who don’t like coffee were throwing it back. All the time the little yellow note lying balefully on the floor, its solitary word both a cry of dismay and a warning that carried no threat whatsoever: ‘Bruno’s.’

  RED MISTS

  I’m not by nature an angry man. I don’t swear at the television. I don’t rant on social media. I almost always wake up in a good mood. I got to play football every day, except on the days I got to rest because I’d been playing too much football. Much in my life still makes me very happy indeed.

  And yet on the pitch I got angrier. Far from mellowing with age, I Meldrewed with age. I was grumpier than ever before. There were times when I disgraced myself with tackles so bad they required public apologies, when I’ve behaved as if I have no control over my actions. I’m not alone in that. In every team there is at least one player with a hair trigger. Inside most professionals is a beast ready to roar. All that’s needed is the right provocation to set them loose.

  Mill Hill, north London. I’m training with the Spurs youth team. We have a kid playing up front who can do it all. He has already played for England at his age level and most wise observers are expecting him to one day make the senior side too. He’s strong in the air, good off either foot and he’s fast. But he’s also a lunatic. He loses his temper as often as he loses his marker. He kicks people. He is to referees what meerkats are to snakes: up in their faces, insolent, always on the attack.

  The coaches know this. They know too that it’s holding him back. It limits what you can do on the pitch when you’re sent from it so frequently. So the hard man of a manager decides to school him in training by playing sneaky centre-half to his centre-forward, getting right up his backside, standing on his heels, pushing him. Son, this is what defenders will do to you. Let’s practise not reacting. Let’s be calm. Let’s stay on the pitch.

  It was a noble plan but a flawed one. The first time the lad was kicked you could see him twitch. The second time his eyes went. The third time all of him went. A characteristically quicksilver turn, one punch. Smack. The coach went down like George Groves to Carl Froch. Out like a light. The lad just walked off. Straight to the changing-room. That’s the last we’ll ever see of him, we all thought. Remarkably, he was back in the very next morning, although it didn’t last long. Beating up the youth team manager is never going to advance your career. It’s not quite what potential suitors are looking for in a young player.

  When the red mist descends, logic and sense go out of the window. You think of Joey Barton elbowing Carlos Tevez, kicking Sergio Agüero and then trying to headbutt Vincent Kompany in the space of about three minutes in May 2012. Paulo Di Canio, shoving referee Paul Alcock and then, as a manager a decade later, fighting one of his own players. Gennaro Gattuso, as an unhinged Italian midfielder an unholy combination of those previous two, deciding in 2011 that nutting then Tottenham coach Joe Jordan might somehow be sensible. Joe Jordan was one of the most frightening footballers of the twentieth century. He was nicknamed Jaws in Britain and Lo Squalo (‘The Shark’) in Italy. Gattuso may as well have tried to French-kiss a crocodile. He still did it, because his mind had gone. You can see the horror on the faces of his Milan team-mates as they try to pull him away. ‘Mate! You’ve got an ageing Harry Redknapp there, Kevin Bond if it has to be an assistant coach. Oh no, Joe’s taken his glasses off. Run!’

  I’ve never known an angrier play
er on the pitch than the young Wayne Rooney. He was the same in training as he was in those early big games for Everton and England: a crew-cut bull of a boy, smashing opponents and then getting up to smash in shots with equal ferocity. It was essential to the threat that he was, and his team-mates and teams’ supporters loved him for it. My dad loved it; he had idolised the Chelsea of Ron Harris and Micky Droy, and used to repeatedly make me watch his video of the 1970 FA Cup final replay, an absolute bloodbath of a game where they spent more time kicking chunks out of each than kicking the ball. Twenty-five years on, referee David Elleray watched it again and claimed that by the standards of the 1990s, it merited six red cards and twenty yellow. By the standards of 2019 it would have been a three-a-side. That all twenty-two players who began the game lived to see the trophy raised by Harris was one of the great medical miracles of its time.

  I think Dad wanted to toughen me up. A lot of the lads I was coming up against were from rough old backgrounds, and they could handle themselves. Perhaps it’s a good thing he hadn’t seen me in the school playground, where I was a terrible wind-up merchant, very much the Craig Bellamy of the west London under-11s’ scene.

  Badminton is by no means the sport of the streets, but if you refuse to let anyone else play then you pay the price. It was my mate Rob who snapped, snatching away the racquet and smacking me across the back with it. I went down like Willem Defoe in Platoon – onto my knees, arms outstretched, head thrown back, face twisted in agony. A few weeks later, playing for North Ealing Primary in the big clash away at Northolt, Rob’s brother Ed was having a nightmare, and I kept telling him so. Just like his twin, Ed snapped. He ran over, kicked me, and was instantly sent off. As he left the pitch I carried on. ‘Not only are you rubbish, but you’ve got yourself sent off too. Useless!’

  Those demons have stayed with me. In my debut season at QPR I was sent off at Crewe for two pointless yellow cards – one for a stroppy tackle, the other for a stroppier refusal to retreat ten yards from the subsequent free-kick. Against Chelsea for Liverpool a few years later, I behaved even worse. John Obi Mikel was playing the role of that Spurs youth team coach, standing on my toes every time Pepe Reina hit a long goal-kick towards me. Every time I tried to control the ball I’d find my foot nailed to the floor by his studs, yet the referee was giving me nothing. I tried to chest one down. Mikel stood on me again. The ball rolled away towards the touchline, him trying to shield it from me, and I lost the plot. I don’t even properly remember, but it was horrific, a two-footed scissored lunge. It didn’t look like I was trying to break Mikel’s leg. It looked like I was trying to break both his legs.

  Thankfully I partly missed him. He was sensible and nimble enough to jump out of the way. I was still so angry that I accused him of diving, which was laughable when the only one doing any diving was me. I told another Chelsea player to fuck off. I then delivered a lecture to the media afterwards along the lines of foreign players bringing so many good things to the English game but diving not being one of them.

  Only when I watched it back did I realise quite what I’d done. Was that me? It was like my body was no longer my own. I spoke to Ben Thatcher once about his infamous elbow to the face of Pedro Mendes. He couldn’t explain it. He thought Mendes was a really nice bloke, and yet he knocked him unconscious into the advertising hoardings. He described it as almost an out-of-body experience. He genuinely didn’t think it was that bad until he watched it back, which was around the same time he was banned by Manchester City for six matches and the FA for eight more.

  Sometimes it’s purely your own fault. When you miscontrol a pass and the ball bounces away from you, you’re both angry at your own mistake and convinced you must now win the ball back, a combination that leads to all manner of brutal lunges and studs-up leaps. Some of my very worst tackles have come like that. You think of Gazza in the World Cup semi-final of 1990, diving in on Thomas Berthold, lunging again at Gary Charles in the 1991 FA Cup final, chasing a ball that was never really his, going in at waist height. Classic red mist.

  Sometimes it’s because of what is happening elsewhere in your life, but not the way you might think. If you’re having a difficult time at home it can produce your most focused football. The game is your release, your escape from it all, and so your concentration is total. You relish the physical challenge but you’re getting it all out of your system. It’s when everything else is too easy that you’re likely to snap. If your days have been spent playing Ludo with your daughters then you’ve forgotten what it’s like to take an elbow in the chops and roll with it, depending on how competitive your daughters might be. It’s why retired footballers often throw themselves into something equally as physical when their first careers come to an end. Jamie Carragher drops his kids off at school each day and then drives straight to a boxing gym in Liverpool for a two-hour training session. He’s replicating exactly what he had for the previous twenty years: knockabout banter in the changing-rooms with some proper characters, some shouting and barging, running around in a restricted area waving his arms about and then a quick shower followed by some lunch. He’s not so much retired as done a job swap.

  Red mists descend where you see them and where you don’t. To be in a dressing-room at half-time in a big match is to watch eleven pans of steaming water all ready to boil over. Someone hasn’t tracked a runner. Another has had a shot when there was an easy pass on for an unmarked team-mate. Now it all comes out – fingers jabbed in chests, shoving and shouting, punches swung. I’ve seen proper fist-fights, and it’s actually a good thing. It shows you care. It shows that you have standards. The dressing-rooms to worry about are the ones free of red mists. How can you be calm if you’re 2–0 down and sinking like stones?

  Nothing makes players angrier than a spit. It’s considered the lowest of the low, far worse than a simple brutal tackle, partly because it’s sly and sneaky, partly because it’s bodily fluid. Some fine players have been caught out – Francesco Totti gobbing all over Christian Poulsen at Euro 2004, Patrick Vieira landing one on the torso of Neil Ruddock for Arsenal against West Ham (a decent-sized target, to be fair), Cristiano Ronaldo getting chopped by Robbie Savage and, from his knees, spitting at Savage’s unmentionables. It always causes a mass pile-in, and usually at least one red card.

  There is no more memorable example than Frank Rijkaard’s mouthful into the back of Rudi Völler’s hair at the 1990 World Cup. It’s a miracle of technique – Rijkaard absolutely pinged it – and accuracy, nestling deep in the springy curls of the German striker’s mullet. I always thought the perm should have cushioned the impact, absorbing all the kinetic energy, but Völler knew exactly what had happened, as if his hair was alive, like that of Medusa. The intricate structure held the string of saliva there for all to see, one of the defining images of that marvellous tournament.

  For defenders it’s the relentless pacy forward who will most wind them up – accelerating past them as if they’re an overweight spectator rather than a professional athlete, ghosting round their outside as if they’re a cone on the training pitch. They take their revenge with what we might call a delay tackle, when they size up what should be a 70–30 challenge in their favour, hold off for a fraction of a second until it’s a 50–50, hold off a fraction more until it’s a 30–70 and then absolutely launch into it. The referee sees a man in control winning the ball. The defender sees sweet revenge. The striker sees sky and then an extreme close-up of grass.

  Revenge comes soon. The defender has the ball deep in his half, about to clear it down the line. The striker comes sliding in, ostensibly to block it, more accurately to let the ball fly past him and then keep sliding into the defender’s standing leg. It looks like you’re simply trying to close him down, beavering away diligently for your team, but the ball was never in your thoughts.

  And so it rolls on. The centre-half is shepherding the ball out for a goal-kick. You’re chasing him down. He’s holding you off, making you look silly. You’ve got two options: continuing
to be mugged off, waving your outstretched leg at the ball while he sticks his backside into you and keeps you at bay with all the ease of a man against a child, or launching into him, chopping him down and taking the inevitable card. Being so publically belittled is humiliating and makes you lose your rag. You dive in. You bounce off his massive thighs. You lie there in the mud, the crowd laughing, and as the ref shows you a yellow card the defender picks the ball up, pops it down casually for the free-kick and trots past you, trying not to laugh too obviously.

  The best players do play on the edge. They need that fire, that overwhelming desire, to seize control of the big games. Steven Gerrard had it: sent off in the Merseyside derby as a nineteen-year-old and then again after only 18 minutes in March 2006; a red card against Manchester United in the FA Cup in 2011, another after only thirty-eight seconds in his last match against them in 2015. Rooney had it. Gazza had it. Dele Alli has it now. There is such a fine line between having the best game anyone has ever seen, and momentarily going too far and ruining it for the entire team.

  There are also the plain dirty, the ones for whom it is less mist and more lifestyle choice. Sergio Ramos has won the World Cup, the European Championship and multiple European Cups. He’s also the most carded player in the history of La Liga, the Champions League, and the Spanish national team. He’s the most booked player in the history of any of the major European leagues. Despite that he always looks surprised to be sent off, astonishment on his face, his eyes innocent and his arms out in supplication. It’s why Eric Dier’s tackle on him for England against Spain in October 2018 brought such a smile to so many faces. Ball won. Man taken. Is there a problem, Sergio?