I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  And yet, for those who do not make it a lifestyle choice, the red mist can part as quickly as it descends. When you see the referee reaching for his back pocket, you know. You see the red card and your heart sinks. Look at Rooney against Portugal in the 2006 World Cup, head going back, then hands on knees. Or David Beckham after his kick at Argentina’s Diego Simeone eight years earlier, face as white as his shirt, trudging off without daring to look at his team-mates. Even those who keep the rant going as they are ushered off – the Bartons and Di Canios of this world – are doing it because they know what they’ve done. Angry at themselves, angrier at the world.

  STRIKERS

  There are some things you can be certain of, on the basis of first-hand experience, and this is one: strikers are most selfish human beings of all time.

  We are. Any striker who pretends otherwise is not really a striker. They’re an attacking midfielder, or a winger who’s cutting in too much. A striker is selfish because it’s wired into us from an early age. As a kid I used to hog the ball. Other kids often weren’t that keen on being in my team because they knew I wouldn’t pass. I wouldn’t pass because I wanted the glory. I wanted the adoration that comes with scoring goals. Off the pitch I’ve always been relaxed, generous, chatty. On the pitch I’m a shit. I’m a striker.

  Scoring goals is the best feeling in the world. You realise that when you’re playing five-a-sides aged nine and you’re banging them in for fun, and all the parents on the touchline are cheering you and all your team-mates want to hug you. You knew you were good and so, it seemed, did everyone else. I loved it. I would stand there being mobbed and think: ‘I am absolutely all over this. It’s all I ever want to do.’

  Thirty years on I was still chasing that feeling. It doesn’t actually matter whether you’re scoring for England at Wembley or in your local park. The joy is the same, it’s just the noise levels that change. When I was about twelve I used to join in park kickabouts with the kebab-shop men from down the road. These were real intense games played by real intense Turks. I’d bang in a goal and they would be lobbing me up in the air, piling on, me sticking an arm out of the melee and giving it loads with them. ‘Yes, fucking right!’

  The striker is the lead singer in the band. You have to enjoy the attention and you have to be able to handle it. It’s why strikers usually have the most extravagant haircuts and the most colourful boots. We’re prima donnas. We’re frequently petulant. The posters in Match and Shoot! when we were kids were all strikers, and we still think of ourselves as the pin-up boys.

  Strikers are selfish in ways you can see and in ways you might not. Jermain Defoe and I had a good record playing together, but there would genuinely be times when he had the chance to play me in but would instead push the pass a little wide, so I’d have to cross it back to him instead. The first time it would happen in a match you’d give him a mouthful afterwards – ‘J! For fuck’s sake!’ – and you’d get an apologetic raised hand and a shout back – ‘Sorry mate, next time yeah?’ Then it would happen again. And then again. In the end I realised I couldn’t say any more. He was always going to do it, and he scored enough himself to justify it. We were mates. We were partners. But we were also in competition.

  Someone told me as a kid that I’d end up at centre-back. You’re big, they said. You’re not about pace, you could pass it out from the back. Quite a few expected it as my career went long. You end up moving backwards the older you get: my mate Dion Dublin went to Manchester United as a striker and finished at Norwich at centre-half. But I never wanted to move, and so I worked on my technique and my heading and I made the case, every single week, that I should remain the glory-boy. Had I become a defender, there’s no way I would still have been playing aged thirty-eight. I love the game, but where would the adrenaline come from? Being a striker, you are chasing a fix. The more goals you score, the more goals you want. Look at Mo Salah in his second season at Liverpool. You get big numbers one year, you get golden boots and glittering accolades, and you want them all the next. Give me the penalties. Get me chances because I need to keep up with Harry Kane.

  Leo Messi is the exception because he scores so many and yet lays on goals for team-mates too, but pure strikers don’t have that generosity in them. Strikers are about themselves. Defenders want the team to do well, but strikers are happy if the team loses yet they’ve scored. It sounds ruthless, but your job is to score goals. Nothing else. Without that greedy streak you’ll never make it, and without that self-obsession you won’t be able to give to the team either. My first thought when I was relegated with Stoke was that I could be the one who scored the goal in the play-off final that got us back up. A selfish thought with a benevolent effect.

  The hit a goal gives you never dies off. You can see it in the face of a striker who hasn’t scored for ten games, or who has been out with injury for months. The emotional release when they finally score almost breaks them apart. All the doubts and pain and worry explode out of you in one moment. It’s the most intense explosion of passion you’ll ever see from many British men. Forget the Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo numbers; they’re chasing hat-tricks, not individual goals, and a solitary strike in every game would feel like a disappointment to them. For the rest of us, the kick goes on. I scored just over 200 goals in my professional career, and every single one made me feel amazing.

  Ronaldo and Messi are so good in so many areas that they’ve almost driven to extinction one of the great beasts of the old football world: the goal-hanger. The goal-hanger, who will more often self-identify as a poacher, was defined by his gloriously one-dimensional nature. Always in the six-yard box, at least half his goals per season scored from less than five yards out. Messy goals, shinny goals, tap-ins and steals off others. They would still be the most important player in the team and the one with all the awards come the end. The great poachers were all artists in their own right. Gerd Müller. Gary Lineker. Filippo Inzaghi. Emilio Butragueño. All that feeding off scraps made them kings at the top table: a World Cup winner, a World Cup golden boot, six La Liga titles, three Champions League trophies. You could sum them all up with Johan Cruyff’s magnificently snooty comment about Inzaghi: ‘Look, the thing about Inzahgi is he can’t actually play football at all. He’s just always in the right position.’

  Striking started to change in the early 2000s. In many ways Ruud van Nistelrooy was born to be a poacher; he scored 150 goals for Manchester United, and only one of them came from outside the box. He was certainly selfish. A goal in a defeat was a win for him. But he could do too much else to be a true goal-hanger. His link-up play was excellent, and he scored one goal, against Fulham in 2003, that would have delighted Ryan Giggs: a solo spin, turn and dribble from the halfway line with a cheeky early finish to boot.

  These days, being a poacher just isn’t enough. You need to drive the pheasants onto your friends’ guns as well as stealing them yourself. A couple of seasons ago Pep Guardiola was definitely looking to phase Sergio Agüero out of his first XI. Gabriel Jesus was the coming man. Pep knew Agüero was a magnificent finisher, but he wanted more, and his one-dimensional beauty had to do more as a result – drop deeper, press defenders, play others in. To consider dropping your club’s all-time record goal-scorer appeared to be madness, but Agüero responded magnificently. The fact that Pep even thought about dropping him shows how managers now demand more.

  Even so, there is something about the poacher’s art that should endure. There is nothing wrong with a goal off your knee from two yards out. You don’t get double points for one smashed in on the volley from the ‘D’. I played with one troubled young striker who spent too much time trying to score the perfect goal. He would hang around on the edge of the box waiting for a cut-back so he could curl one in, rather than getting between the two posts where a loose ball might hand him a goal on a silver salver.

  Timing is critical to a striker. So too is movement – judging where the pass or cross is going to come and being there first. You can get five
or six Premier League goals a season just from hanging around between the penalty spot and the goal line, looking for ricochets to slam in. I would pride myself on being in the penalty box 100 per cent of the time the ball was coming in, even if I had just been linking up play deep in our own half. The moment the ball goes wide is the moment I hit top speed, which may be popping-to-the-shops speed for most players and reversing-off-the-drive speed for Gareth Bale but reflects too my entire strategy. And I would constantly be moving to get a chance. The stats we get from the GPS units in our shirts would indicate, season after season, that I was in the top three for distance run in almost every game. No wonder I’ve struggled to put on weight. I’d cover around twelve kilometres a match, which for a striker is a notable amount, and I did it all in pursuit of goals.

  I was still learning aged thirty-eight. At matches, sitting on the bench, I’d watch the forwards and log their movement – going in behind, down the sides, the things I could never do because I didn’t have the raw pace. I’d have given almost anything to be flat-out fast and be able to latch onto a ball over the top, but the fact I couldn’t meant I had to rely on developing other attributes, and unlike pace, those don’t fade in your late thirties. I’d watch the forwards because I used to do it when I went to games as a teenager with my dad, sitting in the Matthew Harding Upper at Stamford Bridge. Andy Cole, always on the shoulder of the last defender, never back in his own half at any point in the game, all little darts into space. Gianfranco Zola, a very different player, a man with so much vision it was like he had watched an advance screening of the game the week before. Les Ferdinand, the tallest five foot eleven man of all time, owning the penalty area and the zone in front of it, out-jumping defenders six inches bigger than him. For a kid who wants to be striker you cannot beat watching the game in the flesh, the complete picture widescreen in front you, your attention zooming in like a camera never could. I used to watch the strikers so intently I’d sometimes leave not knowing the score.

  Then I began to do it for a living, and I discovered that it was less a union of brothers than a constant battle for supremacy. Roman Pavlyuchenko was always outwardly civil to me when were together at Spurs, but I got the genuine impression he didn’t like me, purely because I played the same position as him. A lot of strikers feel that way about other strikers, but they usually manage to disguise it a little better. Pav was not a man given to great personal warmth, but even bearing in mind his natural temperament there was a constant vibe whenever he looked at me. Being a striker, I tried to use it to my own advantage, and when he was on the bench and I was starting I would run about the pitch thinking, I really hope I play well today so I can stick it to that misery guts.

  It must have worked, because I’d always seem to get picked for the big Champions League games ahead of him, even when we were playing one up front with Rafael van der Vaart in behind. And it made me feel rather good about myself, just as it had been testing being in the England set-up and getting the distinct impression that Dean Ashton had me in his sights. Dean was good – strong in the air, capable of striking with either foot, very good at rolling defenders. Had he not been so unlucky with injury he may have played instead of me a lot more.

  You win some of these battles but those other strikers are always at your heels. You may think yourself a footballing pin-up but there is always someone younger and prettier waiting to replace you. When you get past thirty your manager starts looking at you like you’re ready for a retirement bungalow in Bognor, and the pretenders queue up. At Stoke it kept happening and I had to keep trying to fight them off. Wilfried Bony. Peter Odemwingie. John Guidetti. Mame Biram Diouf. Saido Berahino. Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Sweden, Senegal, Burundi: it was difficult not to be paranoid and think the world was out to get me. It was cut-throat and it was cruel but I saw them all off, at least until Stoke decided Sam Vokes was the answer and sent me to Burnley with minimal warning. All those distant rivals and it was a Welshman from the New Forest who saw me off. I couldn’t complain. I knew how the game worked.

  There is also that strangest of creature: the unselfish striker. You know they’re an unselfish striker because they never score any goals. No, I’m being unfair. You know they’re an unselfish striker because everyone refers to them as an unselfish striker. It becomes their identity, and it’s a compliment and an insult rolled into one. Unselfishness is an attribute most parents would love their children to show. But their children are not Premier League strikers.

  Shane Long. Emile Heskey. Paul Dickov. Peter Beardsley. All of them scored goals, but they set up heaps for others too. There’s a reason why Michael Owen rated Heskey as his favourite strike partner. One of them kicked the door down before subduing the guards and the other strolled in for the crown jewels. Heskey had four seasons at Liverpool. During that time Owen scored more goals – 99 in 181 appearances – than he managed before or after. He helped Liverpool win a famous treble in 2001, won European Player of the Year and got a move to Real Madrid. Emile went to Birmingham, and then Wigan. And they say karma pays you back.

  Shane Long went twenty-three games without a goal up to December 2016. The following year he had a fresh drought that lasted 325 days. Four months after that he went another 279 days scoreless. Even typing those words makes me feel slightly sick. The non-footballer might ask why he’s had such a decent Premier League career. I can tell you: he runs his arse off. He runs short. He runs decoys. He runs into the corners, and no striker naturally wants to go anywhere near the corners. I admire him all the more for the fact I know I could never follow suit. You’re a striker, not a charity worker. Benítez was delighted with my work when I went eighteen games without a goal for Liverpool, and made a point of telling me. It made no difference. There was still a part of me that was dying inside. There is a pleasure that comes in laying on a goal for someone else but compared to scoring one yourself it doesn’t touch the sides. It’s like meeting the most funny, beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and you reacting to her leaning in for a kiss by offering up your mate’s mobile number.

  The true striker will ignore old friends to celebrate a goal. I scored for Stoke away at West Ham towards the end of the 2017–18 season. It was a tap-in from four yards. Because I thought it was the goal that would keep us in the Premier League, I went bananas and made for the Stoke fans. Joe Allen tried to congratulate me. I elbowed him in the face. I had no recollection of it whatsoever. It was only when Joe came up to me afterwards and complained that his jaw was in bits that I realised what I had done. Having scored a goal notable only for its simplicity I had clattered an old mate to celebrate with a load of people I had never met before. To put it another way, I had seriously injured a great pal just so that I could be adored. Classic striker. I watched it on Match of the Day on catch-up later that night. My behaviour was so reprehensible that I had to keep rewinding it to convince myself I could truly have done such a thing. I then sent him a 3am text full of remorse and shame. ‘Sorry mate hahaha smiley-face emoji.’

  Your manners as a striker are seldom acceptable. You can do nothing for a goal and yet celebrate it like you have dribbled it past five. You can watch someone else dribble it past five, nudge their pass in from a yard out and then wheel away to take all the credit.

  Playing away in Milan for Spurs in the Champions League, Aaron Lennon broke from inside our own half, burned two defenders on the outside and then cut it back with the goalkeeper stranded. I brushed it in and then ran off in the opposite direction. I blew kisses to the crowd. I raised my arms like a boxer who has just won a split-decision after twelve brutal rounds.

  Looking back at it now I’m embarrassed. You can see the moment it’s clicked and I’ve thought, I’ve done nothing to warrant this goal, but that moment comes after I’ve celebrated with several players who hadn’t touched the ball at all. It’s shameful how long it takes me to remember Aaron is out there somewhere, and disgusting how I then give him an exaggerated point as if to say, you cheeky little scamp … Thankfully he
jumped up and embraced me, and I was able to whisper a half-arsed apology in his ear. ‘You did that. Oh – you know.’

  You can try to pretend that pointing at the goal’s creator makes it all better, but it’s always too late. One of my first Robots came when David Beckham and Jamie Carragher did all the donkey-work down the right and I tapped it in with my nose under the crossbar. I then made Joe Cole wait with his congratulatory hand out so I could milk it. It’s like a wicketkeeper in a Test match taking a simple catch and running away waving the ball in the air while the bowler whose skill induced the outside edge stands there on his own. Everyone else in the team mobbing the keeper, and eventually he climbs out of the embrace of strangers in the crowd and jogs over to pat the bowler on the arse.

  I’ve said I’m not a selfish person, but these are the acts of a selfish man. It feels like I’m a different person. I bin off my mates to celebrate. Sometimes I want to hurt someone. I don’t think I’m that man, but it appears I am. I’m a striker. I’m a shit.

  There is a price we pay for these shameful actions, though, and it is called the miss. If you miss a simple chance it’s always your fault. If you miss a chance you conversely make everyone in the crowd a natural-born assassin. Nothing makes the spectator inflate their own footballing abilities like seeing a professional mess up. When Harry Redknapp famously remarked that his wife Sandra could have converted a chance that had been spurned by Darren Bent, you knew that Darren was done for at Spurs.