I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  I got down in my blocks, heart bashing against my ribcage. The gun went. I got up again, just, like a section of pipe being winched into place by a crane. I started trying to run, and it was as if my limbs were all working independently of each other – right leg and right arm going forward at the same time, left arm going across my body, feet as heavy as blocks of stone. I cramped in my left calf at twenty metres. I cramped in my right calf at thirty. By forty metres I was last and feeling as if I were breaking up in flight, bits of me separating off and spinning away in all directions. At fifty metres I lost all control. One moment I was upright, albeit at a weird angle. The next I was face down on the dark red track.

  There was silence from the hundreds of kids watching. Then laughter, spreading from one little group to the next, and then the next, until all of them – the coolest kids in town, the ones from my school, my own mates – were all roaring and screaming and rolling about in the stands. I got up. My life could get no worse. And then I looked down the track and realised that I still had forty-nine metres still to run, and that rock bottom was still quite a long way further on. I started a humiliated jog down the remainder of what was now an empty track, dead last by ten seconds in a race won in twelve, trudging back round from the finish line to our school’s place on the grass, every kid looking at me, every kid pointing, every kid laughing.

  More than two decades on my mates still wind me up about it. That fall was because of nerves, and I vowed that day that they would never stop me doing what I wanted. At least with football I know what I’m doing. I know the nerves will side-swipe me but I understand that once I get going I will be in my safe place and at my comfort level. With golf I’m lost and alone. I love the sport: I took it up much later than most footballers, and I enjoy every second I play, even if I’m still not ready to play a round with Jamie Redknapp.

  Yet the prospect of playing in front of any sort of gallery brings me to my knees. I’m often asked to play in pro-ams, very much as an underwhelming am to be paired with a disappointed pro, but I can’t do it. The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St Andrews, Pep Guardiola’s one in Catalunya. I could be playing spectacular courses with spectacular partners: Hristo Stoichkov and Ronald de Boer at one, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Douglas at the other. I can’t because of what might happen. I can’t because there is nothing to get me past the nerves. A crossbar challenge in front of 80,000 people is intimidating but achievable. An eight-foot downhill putt in front of Bill Murray is not.

  A little while ago my dad persuaded me that I was ready to play the East Course at Wentworth. I wasn’t, but even in your late thirties, you defer to your old man. Even as we walked to the first tee I was awash with doubt and remorse. Dad, I’m not good enough. Son, neither am I, keep your voice down. I loosened my shoulders and took out my driver. I saw my dad turn round and look a little startled. Behind us was standing Bernard Gallacher, eight times a player in the Ryder Cup, three times the European captain.

  I was ready to stick the driver back in my bag and clear off. I’ve got a swing like a man trying to wriggle out of handcuffs. Even at seventy, Bernard hits the ball like a man breaking rocks. My dad, like all dads, sensed my distress and tried to do something about it.

  ‘Mr Gallacher!’ he shouted (my dad had never met him before). ‘Why not the West Course this morning? Isn’t the East a little dull for a player like you?’

  Bernard shrugged. ‘Ach, I just fancied a little tickle. You lads crack on.’

  My dad saw the look on my face and strode over. ‘Listen,’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Who cares where your tee-shot goes? Forget about Gallacher. We’ll never see him again.’

  It worked. I stepped up to the ball, took a breath and clattered an absolute beauty down the middle of the fairway. I glanced back at our celebrated gallery in time to see a little nod of approval. Yes, Bernard. It’s what I do.

  My dad glared at me. ‘See?’ he whispered, sticking his ball down and waggling his driver. ‘I told you. Nothing to worry about.’

  He pulled back his club and let rip. The ball shot sideways at incredible pace, just past my ankles, directly at a large detached house off to the side of the tee. The last we saw of it was as it burrowed under a white picket fence and disappeared deep into a millionaire’s garden.

  Neither of us looked back. Straight to the buggy, slamming it into gear, off down the cart path without so much as a wave at Bernard. There was no question of looking for the ball. It would have taken a team of archaeologists to unearth it. Dad just dropped a new one by mine and took the penalty. It was almost dignified.

  When I see the effect of nerves on others now, I try to help them as best I can. Sometimes that means giving them space to roll out the weird superstitions that make them feel slightly better. At Burnley you learned that whatever worked for Tom Heaton worked for the team. Sometimes that means giving them space so they could vomit in the toilet rather than on your shoes. The memory of Shaun Derry throwing his guts up is like a time machine taking me back to Fratton Park in 2001.

  You see it worst in the young kids who have just come into the team. On the outside you put on an understanding smile and attempt to talk them through it. On the inside you’re thinking, thank God I’m not you. The message you give is the same one that I used to get as a lad at Spurs, and then QPR: ‘You’re in this dressing-room for a reason – because you’re good enough. The manager has seen what you can do and he trusts you. Whatever you’ve done to get here, just do that. Don’t change it just because you’re in a superior team. What you do is enough.’

  I’ve been lucky in so many ways. I’m naturally upbeat. I try to find enjoyment in everything I do. It’s the introverted ones who struggle, who over-think it, who lose themselves in what ifs and oh no’s. I know great players who were brought low by thinking too much. I had mates from home who had the ability to make a career of football but who had the mentality of a troubled singer-songwriter and lost themselves in self-analysis.

  The majority of footballers aren’t great thinkers. We take the mickey about the rare ones of our breed who dare to read books or attempt to learn another language. But thinking rarely helps. Thinking gets in the way of instinct. Choosing to be judged by millions of strangers each week makes no sense as a wellbeing choice. It’s madness. If you thought about it too much you’d end up at the obvious answer: don’t do it. So instead we behave as if we’re the title characters in a sad children’s cartoon. The Boy Who Thought Too Little.

  It’s not even about negative thoughts. Just thoughts are bad enough sometimes. To take a penalty in a World Cup finals you need to clear your mind of all but the simple mechanics of striking a ball. There is no room for consequence and there is no room for imagination.

  It’s a skill as much as being able to strike the ball itself. Some players learn it; most come ready-made. Here I’m lucky again; I can only ever concentrate on one thing at one time, even if as a father of four I would like to be capable of coping with more. As soon as I started getting ready for a match, anything else that may have been going on in my life or the wider world was elbowed out of the way. There was never a point in twenty years of professional football where I was playing and thought about anything else but professional football, and in some ways that is the most beautiful thing. When I faced huge problems off the pitch I began training or playing, and all those worries just disappeared. Those times on the pitch were completely free.

  It’s why I’ve never understood when a player’s dip in form is blamed on ‘off-field issues’. You play to escape. It’s why taking a break from football to solve those issues makes even less sense to me. I can’t think of anything worse than sitting at home obsessing about it all. Even if the things that are bothering you are all over the newspapers, football provides its own special refuge. You go into training and the other lads will make a big joke about it, and suddenly you think, actually, this is all a joke. It’s not life or death. You arrive at the club feeling like your whole world is falling in.
You kick a football and, like a happy young puppy, you just want to chase after it. It’s insulting and beautiful at the same time.

  I remember one period in 2006 when it felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. And yet training with Liverpool that week was the most enormous fun. We played Birmingham away at the weekend and I scored twice before the first half was even up. To look at me jumping about with Steven Gerrard and Luis García you wouldn’t think I had a care in the world – celebrating in front of the fans, grinning as I walked back to the halfway line, beaming even as I was subbed off on fifty-six minutes with a hat-trick up for grabs.

  Playing at Anfield could be hard on the nerves. I was so anxious before my debut, in the Champions League against FBK Kaunas, that I tensed up Perivale-style and pulled my hamstring the first time I tried to put on the after-burners. But there were so many times when Anfield lifted me close to joy – ninety minutes of running, jumping and avoiding tackles, all of it in a cauldron of noise, staggering into the showers afterwards physically spent and soaked in sweat but feeling so alive. My head was so clear, my body tingling, buzzing so much that it would be several hours and many beers until I could even think about going to bed.

  There are psychologists now at every club to help you through. Sadly not many players want to use them, because of the unspoken fear of somehow appearing weak to others. It doesn’t matter that in cycling much of the success of the Great Britain track team at the Beijing and London Olympics could be put down to the work that former clinical psychiatrist Steve Peters did with Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and others. A football club is still a tribal environment. It can be unforgiving and it can be ruthless. I could never ask a psychologist for help in coping. You fear that if you show weakness then someone else will take advantage. That needs to change, but it will take time.

  In place of dialogue, there are slogans. Everywhere. In the dressing-rooms, in the gym, in the canteen. All of them are cheesy. Most are meaningless. Here are some classic examples.

  INDIVIDUALLY WE ARE NOTHING. TOGETHER WE ARE EVERYTHING. That’s going to boost your confidence, being told that you are worthless without the presence of Bruno Martins Indi. Together we are everything? What, a crack team of decorators? A boy band? The cosmos? We’re just footballers. We’re probably mid-table. We’re trying our hardest. That may have to be enough.

  TRAINING IS EVERYTHING. Hang on, I thought we were everything? Also, matches are everything, not the drills we do while wearing gloves and luminous bibs on a Tuesday morning. There are no fans’ songs about dominating the five-a-sides. No one bangs on about how good Oasis were in rehearsals.

  CULTURE COMES FIRST. Only in a yoghurt factory. People will tell you that New Zealand’s success in rugby is because they have star players humble enough to clean the dressing-rooms after matches. Yes, because the fact they are all big, fast and have unbelievable handling skills from having played the game since the age of three pales into insignificance with the ability to pick up their dirty pants and lob them in a laundry skip.

  THE SCORE TAKES CARE OF ITSELF. Take it from a striker: it doesn’t. Don’t insult me and my goals. I worked my arse off to get in position for that three-yard tap-in. You should have seen what the centre-half was trying to do to my Achilles on the edge of the box. Show some respect.

  Sometimes there are big photos of you too, by your spot in the dressing-room, of you scoring goals if you’re a striker, or you standing on a striker’s toes if you’re a defender. They are always specific to you and designed to highlight your contribution to the team. In the fag-end days of my time at Burnley I will always be grateful that no one stuck up a picture of me sitting on a bench for eighty-three minutes, wearing a thick warm-up coat. I’ve always preferred science-fiction to gritty realism.

  Sport often bleeds into business. All those slogans have been borrowed or repurposed by seminars or in offices across the country. You take your inspiration where you can, although I’ve never been entirely convinced that there is too much similarity between running a large HR department and spending your mornings trying to hit a team-mate on the arse with a spare ball. But I do like the image of Nigel in accounts returning to his desk one day to find a giant photo on the cubicle wall of him at his finest: polishing off the final column of a complicated Excel spreadsheet, index finger poised over the return key. This is the best you, Nigel. Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.

  TROPHIES

  In an upstairs cupboard in my house is a large plastic box. In that box is my lifetime in football: almost every trophy I ever won, from five-a-side tournaments as an eight-year-old to an FA Cup winners’ medal, from little wooden shields to empty bottles of champagne. There are deflated footballs with the faded signatures of old team-mates, silver salvers with neat inscriptions. There’s also strange-shaped pieces of carved glass, cups with big handles, bits of cheap black plastic with team names from my past and wins that almost no one else can now remember.

  Each of them takes me back. I’ve played in Champions League finals and at World Cups but I used to love the summer five-a-sides as a kid as much as any of them. The weather was always baking, the grass usually brown and parched. You would have to wait an age for your next game, and when it did come round it would be over in blur of shouts and blocked shots and trying not to fall into the ‘D’ and give away a penalty. In between matches you would shovel down a burger and an ice-cream and then stand around in the small tent where the organisers were sat, trying to work out what that result might mean for who you would face in the next round. All the time there’d be sweat dribbling down your back, your face red, knees and elbows grazed from landing on the hard bare earth.

  You can say that none of it mattered, but it did to me. I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach as we parked up outside Craven Cottage for the Middlesex County Cup final, my West Middlesex Colts team up against Enfield Rangers. I was ten years old and allowed to use the actual dressing-rooms. I walked out of the tunnel looking for my dad and his mates in the main stand. I even banged in one of the goals as we won 3–2.

  The little individual trophies you got at the end-of-season awards would usually all appear to be from the same trophy factory somewhere in the Far East. They’d consist of a square black plastic base, a gold-leafed player caught in the act of striking a ball with the top of his foot, leaning back slightly, head down, other arm perfectly balanced with outstretched foot. No matter that the only man to ever kick a football like that was Bobby Charlton during the 1966 World Cup: it was the totem for all us, whether striker or midfielder, Player of the Season or Top Goal-Scorer; maybe even the trophy that was a prize and an insult all rolled into one, Most Improved Player.

  Sometimes the gold figure might be involved in a frozen tussle with an opposition player. Sometimes it might be a creative central midfielder with his foot nonchalantly on the ball, another man sliding in for an old-school challenge that was almost definitely going to take man as well as ball and should really end in a yellow card. Never did there seem to be a trophy showcasing purely the defender’s arts – a towering header, a casual interception and classy piece of distribution. It almost made me feel sorry for defenders good enough to win Player of the Season. But then again I was a striker, and defenders were my enemy, so they could suck it up.

  When I signed my first professional contract I thought: wow, I wonder what the real trophies look like in this proper adult world. And then I saw a few, and they were a bit rubbish. The medals might come in a felt-lined box but some of them look like chocolate coins. The designs were either underwhelming or, in the case of newer competitions, unpleasantly gaudy. The five-a-side ones might only have been won by teams from suburban west London, but they were often more creative.

  As a kid the trophies came most seasons. West Middlesex Colts were feared throughout west Middlesex. As a professional I won almost nothing for years. Nothing at QPR. Nothing at Portsmouth. Not really a success at Aston Villa, the first actual bit of silverware coming on loan a
t Norwich when they won the Championship title to get promoted to the Premier League. Even then I didn’t really feel part of it. I had only been there for the last three months of the season: part of the temporary cavalry with Darren Huckerby and Kevin Harper. I was still given a medal but I wasn’t certain I’d earned it. There was still a week of the Premier League season to go when Norwich were confirmed as champions, so I was back at Villa even before the open-top bus parade. Great to see you again, Mr O’Leary.

  But here’s the strange thing I began to understand about trophies as a professional sportsman. They don’t matter. Not the physical things, anyway. What you care about is the achievement itself, the memory of that special day. The lump of metal, the little square box? Far less frequently in your thoughts. There is a reason why they are all in that box in the cupboard rather than up on the walls or in a cabinet.

  Take the runners-up medal I got from the Champions League final of 2007. I saw it on the night in Athens, and I haven’t looked at it since. You should be proud of something like that. You’ve got through the qualifying round, the group stage, the two-legged nightmares of the knock-out rounds. You’ve beaten some of the finest sides in Europe, and ended up with a silver medal, which in the Olympics is considered a pretty special thing. But in football it is something far, far worse, a reminder less of how far you have come than the fact that you failed to go all the way. It’s why the expression on the faces of the runners-up as they collect their medals are akin to men having a fresh turd placed on their palm. The medal itself is the same size as the winners’ one. It’s not unattractive in itself. It has some heft when you pick it up. But you still don’t want it, which is why quite a few players leave it at the ground or lob it into the crowd. Who wants a permanent reminder of the time they messed up on the biggest day of their footballing careers?