I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  Misses stay with you. If you’re an Arsenal fan, you will adore Thierry Henry but be haunted by the straightforward chances he failed to bury in the Champions League final of 2006 that they went on to lose. Manchester United supporters have every reason to appreciate Andy Cole but will also never forget the chance against West Ham on the final day of the 1994–5 season that, had he taken rather than seen well saved by Luděk Mikloško, would have won United the Premier League title at the expense of Blackburn. I still think about Chris Waddle hitting the inside of the post against West Germany in the semis of Italia 90 and Gazza stretching and not quite reaching that cross from Alan Shearer against Germany at Euro 96. Each time I see the Gazza golden goal chance I subconsciously stretch out my own right leg as if I can rewind history and poke it in, which ironically had I been playing aged sixteen I could easily have done, as my legs were already twice as long as Gazza’s.

  How many punters who aren’t Wolves, Charlton or Burnley fans could describe a Chris Iwelumo goal? But everyone can picture his miss from two yards out for Scotland against Norway, when the keeper was out on his feet and the goal was wide open. Had Chris banged in the winner minutes later, or Scotland won that game some other way rather than drawing 0–0, and with it ruining their chances of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, then it would never had maintained its grisly allure. I missed a bad one against Trinidad in the 2006 World Cup but it was erased by my headed goal shortly afterwards. You can’t find it clipped up on its own on YouTube, whereas simply starting to type ‘Iwelumo’ auto-completes to produce his lowest ebb. In the warm-up game against Jamaica no one remembers my rubbish dinked penalty miss because I completed my hat-trick a couple of minutes later.

  But if nothing follows the miss except disappointment and defeat, you’re done for. The worst feeling a striker can have is to miss a sitter and then watch the opposition breaking away down the other end at pace. If you were in defence you’d suddenly become the best centre-back in the world, but you aren’t, so you’re instead powerless and scared, watching the three sides of the ground jumping to their feet and thinking, ‘Please don’t score, please don’t score …’

  Miss and win and the miss never gets shown on Match of the Day. Miss and lose and everything bad stems from you. The pundit will talk over your aberration from multiple angles, grimace and say, ‘If only they’d taken their chances …’, and you’re slumped on your sofa, weeping into the throw-cushions. ‘Yeah, that was me …’

  It takes a striker to appreciate all the tiny nuances that make up a striker’s game. I know if I’m going to have a good game from my very first touch of the match. If you receive the ball with your back to goal and you kill it and hold the defender off, you feel like you will bury any chance that comes your way. You lay it off and the thought sneaks into your head: I’m on it here, it’s happening today. You’re also thinking, I don’t really want to be on this part of the pitch, far from goal, with a defender’s knee going into the back of my thigh, but I’m doing it to be ready for the penalty-box good stuff that will follow. If the defender is a meat-head and he comes through the back of you, the doubts kick up instead. If he takes the ball and strolls off, he’s owned you. You’ve been dominated. This could be a long, bad day.

  You have your own mental map of the penalty area. You take the smallest of subconscious clues – the angle of a whitewashed line glimpsed in the corner of an eye, whether it’s the right-sided centre-back or the left-sided one who is clambering all over you – and you know exactly where the goalposts are and what shot you need to get away to have the highest percentage chance of scoring. Most of the time you don’t look up to see where the goal or the goalkeeper is. You just know. I’m beyond the right edge of the ‘D’ – okay, the near-post shot probably isn’t on. I can see the penalty spot in my peripheral vision – good, I could go either way here.

  You practise it so much as a kid and then a fully formed adult that you barely consider what you’re doing. You always start at the back post if a cross is coming in, because if you start front you can’t get back if the cross is hit long. If the winger is struggling to get the ball in, you dart across to the front post because it’s not reaching you at the back. When you do your work outside the box, you work out which of the centre-halves is the weak link, and pull onto them when you are in the box.

  Be patient. When you see the winger breaking free down the flank or your full-back overlapping him, it’s too easy to let the excitement rush over you – we’re in! we’re in! – and to make your run too early. Instead you have to wait – we’re in … pause … pause … go! – so that you don’t overrun the pull-back that’s coming.

  If you go past the near post, it might be the best run to get away from your marker, but nine times out of ten you won’t be able to get the right touch to score. The only option to you there is the glancing header or flick, which is not only one of the hardest skills to pull off but can leave you looking like an idiot if it fails to come off. ‘Ah, if only they’d taken their chances …’ If you wait, you have less chance of receiving the ball but a much greater chance of scoring. Wait, and you have the whole goal to aim at. Drive the ball, clip it, curl it. All options are now open to you.

  The margins are so fine. Start your run a second too early and you’ll overrun the cross by two or three metres. Get the angle of your dart even a few degrees off and you’ll be in the wrong place again. It’s why it’s such a great feeling when it comes off. So much goes into it. They say footballers are stupid, but if you set up a university course based around the art of striking, you would have otherwise brilliant mathematicians totally baffled by the complexity and speed of the calculations required.

  Imagine the equation required for even a straightforward volley off a cross. ‘Take a spherical object travelling at 72 miles an hour, on a trajectory of 18.6 degrees, with a cross-wind of 12 miles an hour that will drop to 2 miles an hour where the main stand blocks it off. At what exact point must the outside of your foot make contact with a small area of this spherical object to send it on a controlled curve into an area 14 feet away that is less than a square foot in size? You will also have someone else pushing you as you attempt to make this contact, while your stabilising leg will be in uneven turf made slippery by rain and watering.’

  That’s looking merely at the cross and shot, as if they operate in isolation to the other twenty players. For that ball to get to the winger it’s been slotted at the perfect pace and direction to the feet of multiple other players, all of different height and pace, travelling at varying speeds on a surface that is anything but uniform. And every single action will have an opposing figure attempting to make that action as difficult as possible.

  Chess grandmasters are referred to as geniuses. Chess pieces can only move in set directions. No winger is limited to the diagonal runs of a bishop and no full-back the straight bursts of the rook, even if Tony Pulis sometimes tried to make it that way. One chess player controls all sixteen pieces. He is up against one other chess player. A football team is eleven brains controlling eleven independent players, battling eleven other brains and bodies, sometimes with Tony Pulis screaming at them from the touchline too.

  David Silva sees passes and movement and angles that ordinary people don’t see. That is a rare and special form of intelligence. He is constantly plotting graphs and speed and trajectories and doing it while running around with his heart racing in front of 40,000 screaming people. Wayne Rooney knew how to find almost invisible pockets of space, when to turn, how much weight to put on a pass, where to run, how to launch himself into the air to make perfect contact with a ball travelling across him too fast for most people to even lay a finger on.

  These are all constant mathematical equations. If black cab drivers in London are virtuoso braniacs for being able to pilot you anywhere in town without recourse to a map or satnav, footballers are masterminds of their own surroundings too. That’s why we fancy ourselves. That’s why we’re show-ponies and divas. We know what
we do. There is such a thing as the strikers’ striker, in the same way there is a guitarists’ guitarist. We don’t really include Ronaldo and Messi as nines; they don’t hold the ball up, move it wide and then get in the box, mainly because they’re too busy doing loads of other mind-blowing revolutionary things, but still. The strikers’ strikers are Shearer, Ferdinand, Jürgen Klinsmann. My all-time favourite number nine is early Ronaldo, the Brazilian one. What he did at PSV, at Barcelona … I used to tape his Inter Milan games when they were on Channel 4’s Football Italia just to watch his runs and finishing. I don’t care how fat he is now. He can get as fat as he wants. He’s earned it.

  I also loved early Robbie Fowler – the relish he took in scoring goals, the happy celebrations that followed. What Harry Kane is doing at the moment is frightening. He’s not like thin-era Ronaldo, slicing teams open with his pace, and he doesn’t have one other attribute that is better than anyone else in the world, but he’s nine out of ten at everything. Luis Suárez blows my mind: I remember Rio Ferdinand telling me that he had this trick where he dribbled the ball at your legs, just to pick up the rebound and be away. You’d feel the ball against your foot, stop because you had it, and then look up to see him away and gone. Suárez looks lucky. He scores a lot of goals after appearing to bumble his way through, or off what appear to be ricochets. They’re not ricochets. He’s played for them. He’s turned you into an inadvertent team-mate. You’ve given him an assist.

  The definition of a good goal changes with the passing years. You watch back online compilations of the old masters and it can all seem unfairly easy. The old goal of the season clips can be slightly underwhelming. ‘What. A. Goal!’ screams the commentator. ‘See. That. Every week!’ you think.

  My most pleasing goals from a technical perspective are the flick-up-and-volley for Stoke against Manchester City and the overhead kick for Liverpool against Galatasaray in the Champions League. The greatest buzz came from the one I scored for Spurs away at City. I was five yards out and the net was gaping but it got us into Europe ahead of them and the Spurs fans were going ripe bananas.

  But I’ve loved every one. There are no unwanted goals as a striker. They’re all your babies, and they are all beautiful.

  HOLIDAYS

  There is a place up in the north of Sardinia near Porto Cervo that is close to holiday heaven. Deep blue sea, little pale-sand beach, headlands and coves. David Platt was the first British explorer to make land there; he had a place in the area during his long spell in Serie A, and he took us lads in the England under-21 squad along one lucky summer. There are football pitches, a golf course, multiple swimming pools, villas. I went back there as a fully grown footballer with Abbey. As we walked in we saw Gianluca Vialli by the pool, looking stylish in the heat in a way that no British man can manage: blue cotton shirt unbuttoned extravagantly low, arse-hugging tailored chino shorts, muscular tanned legs. There was nothing about the look that I could replicate, and I hurried Abbey along with a firm hand in the small of her back.

  Still, I thought. I’ve arrived. I’m a Premier League footballer and I’m going to act with class. Down at the quayside were small motor boats that you could take out for the day. No need for a licence, but the romantic man could easily order a luncheon hamper and a bottle of champagne on ice to take his gorgeous wife for a spin along the coast, stopping in a secluded bay to drop anchor, eat a little seafood, catch a few Mediterranean rays. Get a load of that, Gianluca.

  The boat trip all began so well: chugging gently away from the jetty; me at the wheel feeling like the captain and king of all I could survey; dropping anchor in a beautiful spot. Cracking open the hamper and the champers, Abbey gave me you’re-my-hero vibes. I am on absolute fire here, I thought, as we lay back on the cushions and had a little woozy doze as the boat bobbed about.

  Suddenly I felt colder. A great shadow had come over us. Had the sun gone behind a rogue cloud? I opened my eyes to see an enormous yacht gliding to a stop directly next to us. It was gigantic – sixty-odd metres long, three levels of decking, enough cabins to house a football team. Which made sense, because I then spotted Flavio Briatore strolling along the deck. At the time Flavio was spending some of his many millions as joint owner of QPR, although he didn’t seem to have brought Peter Ramage or Ákos Buzsáky along with him for the ride.

  Our motor launch suddenly looked like a child’s inflatable dinghy in comparison. It looked like something Flavio might store on the poop-deck to send ashore for supplies. Abbey looked up at this floating palace and put her hands on her hips. ‘Why are we on this boat? I want to be up there!’ Flavio had not only taken away the sun, he had stolen my thunder as well. I have never felt more comprehensively gazumped.

  Flavio and his supermodel wife eventually got off, intimidated I like to think by the presence of QPR’s player of the season 2000–2001. ‘I signed for your club for a mere £60,000 and was sold less than 12 months later for £1.5 million, making a tidy profit of almost a million and a half quid!’ I wanted to shout after him. ‘That represents an excellent return on an investment that you, as a successful multi-millionaire entrepreneur, may well appreciate! Flavio? FLAVIO!’

  Alas, my pithy words would have been lost in the vast swell left by his departure. It was then that I realised the wind had picked up while he had been moored next to us. Flavio had actually been inadvertently protecting us from some serious weather that was blowing in from the ocean. Time to be off too, I thought, and grabbed hold of the rope to haul in the anchor.

  It didn’t budge. The anchor was snagged on something. No problem, I thought. I’ll just pull harder.

  Nothing.

  Okay. Let’s stick her in reverse, free the anchor from whatever it’s trapped under and heave it up.

  Nothing again.

  It was now that we started to panic. The wind was sending waves thumping against the hull, spinning us round on our accidental mooring, sending us swinging towards a shoreline that on closer inspection seemed to be made entirely of large jagged rocks.

  A yacht came zipping past us, the crew shouting at us in Italian, gesticulating at us to get out of the way. I don’t speak nautical Italian but it was quite clear that one of them had questioned my seafaring abilities and additionally called me a fucking idiot. It gave me fresh impetus, and together Abbey and I gave the rope everything we had.

  We may as well have been trying to tow Flavio’s palace. I looked around, spotted the corkscrew in the hamper and started sawing manically at the rope. There is a reason why no saw is corkscrew-shaped. Soon there were more holes in my fingers than the ropes. Blood on the deck, panic in our throats. What had begun as a romantic gesture was running into a horror movie. The rocks were getting closer. Abbey was readying the life-ring. With one more desperate stab with the point of the corkscrew the rope suddenly snapped. I whacked the throttle forward and we roared away, freezing, exhausted, covered in salt and dried blood like sailors cut adrift for days.

  Back at the jetty, overjoyed to be back, I realised that we had no anchor and thus might be in serious trouble. The sensible thing to do, I knew – the adult thing, the responsible thing – would be to inform the staff immediately, and give them my credit card details so I could pay for the damage inflicted. Characteristically, I pied off that approach in favour of hiding the severed rope in a box, tying the boat up quickly and striding off with only a cursory word for the chap in charge. ‘Everything alright sir?’ ‘Spot on mate, loved it.’

  By dinner time, our panic had subsided and the whole episode had taken on a comical knockabout air. Abbey and I were laughing about it, waving the corkscrew on our table about. We saw Jermaine Jenas down by the pool and gave him a wave.

  The next evening we bumped into Jermaine again.

  ‘Good day, mate?’

  ‘It was for a bit. You know those motor launches? We took one of them out for a spin. We were in the middle of nowhere and went to park up, but there was no bloody anchor!’

  Me and Abbey looked
at each other.

  ‘That’s a disgrace,’ muttered Abbey.

  ‘I’m absolutely fuming,’ I agreed. ‘I would give the fella down by the jetty dog’s abuse. You can’t be sending boats out without an anchor. What sort of place is this?’

  To think my holidays as a footballer began in such contrasting style. As a young player you just go where the footballers two years older than you are going, which in my case was Tenerife and Ayia Napa. I wanted to go to neither, which mattered less than the fact that everyone else was going and that it was three hundred quid all in for return flights and a week’s accommodation.

  Every youth team in the Premier League seemed to be there. The big hitters of the scene were the brash young talents who had already broken into the first teams: Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Jason Euell; Frank Sinclair, Andy Myers, Michael Duberry. The look was sleeveless tops and Maharishi trousers, the sounds UK garage, the transport of choice a rented moped. Maharishi trousers worked for me – they were long and baggy, and hinted at a girth of thigh that I did not possess. I tried my best with garage, and actually enjoyed it for a time, but my arms were poorly showcased in a sleeveless top. I used to look at the chiselled biceps of Rio and of Frank Sinclair and think, bloody hell. I’d then look at my own thin, pale arms and see only linguine. Possibly as a result I had no luck with the girls whatsoever. I can’t wait until I get in the first team, I thought. I’m going to come back here and clean up. Then I got in the first team and was desperate not to go back.

  I was still finding myself, let alone a more fitting holiday destination. A few years later, playing well at Portsmouth, I was given a week off training by the manager Graham Rix. I went to Gran Canaria with my mum. A few years on I tried Cancún, which in spring may be amazing but in June is just hot. I then fell back into the rhythm established by those two years older than me: Portugal first, and then a few years later, Florida.