by Peter Crouch
On the upside it helped prolong my career. I was a decent Plan B. My appearances as a substitute in the Premier League constituted about 9 per cent of my total playing time but almost 15 per cent of my goals. Defoe has scored more Premier League goals as a sub than anyone else, and he was still playing into his late thirties too. But there is a stigma that comes with it. Apart from Jermain and me, two other players high on the list of most sub appearances are Shola Ameobi and Carlton Cole. Both big lads, both target men. Because when you do get sent on as a striker, you’re usually losing. You’re chasing the game. You’re there to make things happen, and so the team panics and resorts to lumping it long.
Maybe I shouldn’t complain. No one throws on a centre-back when they’re losing. You’re the cavalry. You’re a superhero. It would just be nice if they could keep the panic in check. Keep playing good football. Get the ball forward in wide areas and fling some decent crosses in. Play it in to feet. I’m a substitute, not an incompetent.
It’s the first training session on a Monday when a lot of that anger can come out. The players who actually contributed on the Saturday will do a light session to ease out their legs. Everyone else has to do a proper full run-out, a run-out dominated by furious rebuffed man-boys. The slightest thing can set it off: a late tackle, a poor pass. Suddenly you have men slapping each other when they really want to be slapping the manager. The manager understands this and often chooses to stay in his office, pretending to work on his post-game analysis. Everyone knows the real reason: he wants no part of the fall out from ten angry men, and everyone takes it out on the unfortunate coaches instead. Football being football, it’s all out of everyone’s system by Tuesday, and by Wednesday all the players are best mates again and looking forward to the weekend.
Competition not to be on the bench, competition when you’re on it. Only three of the seven substitutes can come on. There are often two strikers. So you’re warming up in the corner, next to the other sub forward, and the assistant manager points in your direction. Suddenly you’re panicking: does he mean me, or him?
The charades begin. Thirty thousand people in the stands all around you are singing and shouting. No one is able to hear a thing, so you start mouthing silently from corner flag to bench.
‘Do you mean me?’
‘Yeah you.’ (Points again.)
‘Sorry gaffer, you’re pointing at both of us.’
Coach going red in face: ‘No! You!’
Still mouthing silently. ‘Dave, your pointing over distance is impossibly imprecise. Could you clarify?’
The coach kicks a water bottle in frustration, then points to the sky. Right, that’s me. He points to my waist level. Right. That’ll be the other one.
If it’s you – great, but not that great, because you’re still only a sub. If it’s not you, the anger explodes again. ‘What? Why the hell not me?’ It’s like the girl you thought you were dating but who had blanked you comes over with a smile on her face and a pint and then gives the pint plus a peck on the cheek to the bloke standing next to you. It’s double humiliation. You’re not just Plan B. You’re the Plan B to the Plan B.
Your rival knows. The crowd knows. You have to make the sort of face seen at awards ceremonies when the cameras are on you and your rival gets the big gong instead – a fixed smile that says I’m so happy for them even when inside you’re somewhere between punching them and crying. And so begins football’s own Walk of Shame: back to the dug-out, keeping your big coat on, the man next to you unzipping his for action. Your head down, everyone laughing at you, and even you don’t know what you are, because you’re not the forward on the pitch, and you’re not the one coming off the bench, so really what is the point to you at all?
There are times when you hope it isn’t you. Finding your team 4–0 down against Manchester City with half an hour left and them playing keep-ball, or Liverpool cutting loose. A thankless task, knowing there is no chance at all of you scoring four goals to bring it back, their centre-backs showboating, even their goalkeeper’s flicking it over your head and making you look a fool. Worse still is when you get two minutes at the very end, with the team already nailed on for defeat. You find yourself muttering under your breath as you pull off your tracksuit bottoms. ‘Don’t even flipping bother. This is degrading …’
Referees are supposed to add thirty seconds to the match for every substitution, as well as the same for every goal and each card handed out. As a player coming off or coming on for a team that’s in front, you drag the whole thing out for slightly longer and you feel like you’ve won a small victory. If you’re still on the pitch you completely fail to take any of the above in when complaining to the referee about the amount of added time at the end of the ninety minutes. You just tell him it’s too much if you’re winning and too little if you’re behind. Most of the time it just appears to be random. It may well be an in-joke among the officials, something to give them a little tickle in a job that sees you relentlessly slagged off by everyone else in the stadium.
The fourth official prepare to holds up the board. It’s 0–0 and there have been two subs. Six minutes flashes up. The referee tries not to laugh too openly. The linesman is having to pinch his own thigh to stop himself cracking up. A word into his mic. ‘Kevin, you wind-up merchant. Classic …’
Not all benches are equal. What used to literally be a bench is now like the sort of set-up you get in executive cars: heated seats, deep padding, a recliner, adjustable headrest. The old White Hart Lane had everything but a massage function. At Stoke it’s possibly the best furniture in the city. If you’ve been to the bet365 Stadium for a winter midweek game you’ll understand that the heated elements are also close to a medical necessity. At Elland Road the bench is really low: you can barely see across the pitch. At Old Trafford you’re so far back you’re in with the fans. The poshest now are at the Emirates or the Etihad. The worst I’ve experienced recently were at Ashton Gate. It lashed it down with rain all afternoon, and the bench was directly in the deluge. It brought on a personal crisis. I’m approaching forty years old and I’m sitting on the bench against Bristol City in the pouring rain. What am I doing with my life?
For all the money in football, no one has yet developed clothing for substitutes that is appropriate to all the conditions one experiences. You have a choice between a wet top – what in civilian life is known as an anorak – and a big padded jacket. One keeps you dry but makes you cold. The other keeps you warm but gets you wet. Why not provide a jacket that does the best of both? The club-issue wet top is rarely efficient even at its basic task. The Galvin Green stuff I wear on the golf course is far superior. So much money being spent in football but none of it on beading fabrics. The shame of it. ‘FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL NO ONE BRING ME GORE-TEX?’
You get cold on the bench, so you stick on bobble hat and gloves. You do your warm up and you’re baking hot, so you take them off as you sit down and instantly get cold again. You put the luminous subs’ bib over your choice of wet-top or big coat. It gets stuck on the hood or caught up at the back, and you look like a hunchback or a tortoise, and now the fans are not only thinking you’re past it because you’re on the bench but that you can no longer dress yourself.
You don’t expect to come on in the first half so you don’t bother putting your shinpads in. Then a player on the pitch gets injured after half an hour and suddenly you can’t find your shinpads. You don’t want to be warming up in your shirt so initially you don’t put it on, and then the call comes and you realise with a lurch that you’ve left it in the dressing-room, and you have to send the kit-man running in to get it.
When the panic sets in and the manager is raging, you will see substitutes lose the ability to perform basic motor skills like taking off a coat or tying a lace. At Portsmouth the signal would come back from Harry Redknapp to some of our overseas players, and they would quite casually stand up, stretch, sit down again and start pulling their tracksuit bottoms off. Pads in, taping ankles, tie-u
ps for socks. Harry would be turning round again, going purple with rage – ‘FUCKING GET READY!’ – and the subs would be unzipping their two layers of big coats to find they’ve forgotten their shirts. The kitman would be shrugging his shoulders, and now they’re on their hands and knees looking under the seats. The referee sees the signal from the touchline that a sub is coming on for an injured player and blows his whistle, except the sub has now disappeared from view, so the game goes on with you down to ten, and Harry is now ready to explode. You’re watching through your fingers thinking, he might actually kill someone here. There was always a meeting called by the assistant coach the following Monday: ‘Lads, if you’re a sub, you have to be ready to come on at ALL times …’
You hydrate as a sub as if you’re playing, because you might be. But because you’re not, you don’t sweat any of it out, which means that as soon as the half-time whistle goes, you’ll see all the subs go sprinting down the tunnel for the changing-room toilets. You’ll have another pee before the end of half-time and then be desperate again around the eighty-minute mark, which is exactly when you’re meant to be coming on.
So many negatives, and yet coming off the bench can be the most wonderful feeling. Some of my best times in football have come when I’ve begun a day devastated not to be picked and ended it as the man who’s scored the dramatic late winner. That ten-minute cameo when you arrive in a flurry of limbs and change a game that was going the other way. You’re the one everyone is talking about, you’re the one in all the headlines. It lets you point out to all your team-mates that they were a heinous collective failure until you arrived to save their backsides.
There was a period under Mark Hughes at Stoke when I kept doing it, and the amount of love I got in the dressing-room afterwards was an absolute delight. I felt like Superman. At the very start of my career, as a stringy nineteen-year-old at QPR, I came on with us 2–0 down at Gillingham, smacked in a volley for 2–1 and then set up the equaliser for Chris Kiwomya. My first Robot for England was as a sub against Hungary. Even at Aston Villa, where I didn’t really do myself justice, I came on late to score the winner against Middlesbrough that got us into the UEFA Cup.
There is an accepted protocol to being a substitute. You can’t sit there slagging off the player in your position, no matter how much you might like to. You can’t pretend to have all the answers and you can’t forget that you’re not a supporter in the stands. It’s not acceptable to shout, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ or ‘Easy ball, you idiot!’
You can choose who you sit next to, which is nice. No need to sit in formation or ascending squad number. If a player alongside you says something funny, remember that someone somewhere will be filming you, and soiling yourself with laughter when your side is getting thumped is not a good look.
Do not look too desperate in front of the manager. I’ve seen players deliberately do their warm up in his direct eye-line – sprinting flat out, stopping in front of the bench, sticking in ostentatious tuck-jumps. Have some self-respect. You’re still a sub. When you do warm up, do so towards the corner flag at the end where your supporters are. The middle of the pitch is the posh seats. The ends behind the goals are the noisy sweary ones. Go too far and you’ll be abused. Don’t go far enough and you’ll annoy the chairman.
You’ll have seen subs loosen up thousands of times. What you might not realise is quite what each stretch means.
One knee on turf, other knee up. Usually seen early on in a game. An entirely token effort. You’re only out there because the coach has told you. Purpose: to look like you’re warming up when you’re actually watching the game. Pro tip: every now and then throw an arm in the air so it looks like you’re doing something.
Standing with legs wide apart, looking forward. You’re looking forward because you want to watch the match. You’re not running because you know there’s no chance of you coming on for ages.
Standing with feet shoulder-width apart, rotating torso round to either side. You’re bored of the match and want to see what’s happening in the crowd.
We’re footballers, yet we will not touch a ball with our feet as we prepare to come on. No professional golfer would ever walk to the first tee without having hit a bucket of balls on the range first, but subs don’t have the space or opportunity. Multiple stray balls would end up on the pitch, and suddenly you’d be trying to sneak on in your big coat and subs’ bib hunchback like an overgrown kid climbing over the neighbours’ fence. Excuse me, could I have my ball back?
We now see some clubs wheeling out exercise bikes onto the touchline for players to warm up on. It makes no sense to me, unless they want me to do a bike race first. You use your body in a totally different way on a bike, or in my case, not at all. I’ve done pre-season training with Tony Pulis when he made us ride up near-vertical mountains. I would have been quicker putting the bike on my back and running as fast as I could. I climb off a bike like a man getting out of a car after a four-hour journey. My backside hurts, my hamstrings are tight and my quads are on fire. If you want to bring out random pieces of gym equipment, an elliptical trainer would be an improvement. A treadmill would be better. At least then you’re running. Does Geraint Thomas prepare for a mountain stage of the Tour de France by kicking a football around? Quite.
It is an art, watching a game as a substitute. You have to analyse what is going on, but specifically to your position. I might have had no idea at all whether we were playing three in defence or a back four, but I’d have worked out which of the opposition centre-backs I was going to pull on to, who was crossing it where, what corners we were using, where the little pockets of space in the box might be. When the time comes to go on, you hope your manager understands that your brain is fried with adrenaline and keeps his instructions simple. But he’s also caught up in the game, and he can’t both watch it and talk to you. You try to get little dregs of information out of him, but then something dramatic happens on the pitch and he’s on his feet – ‘FUCKING HELL SMUDGE!’ – and you have to apologetically ask him to repeat the critical tactical re-jig bit he’s now forgotten.
Only when the whistle goes for the change do you actually have his full attention. Then his arm is around you and you’re all his. ‘Right son, what I want from you is …’ You hope it’s one thought, maybe two max, rather than the approach taken by the lovely Graham Taylor with Nigel Clough in the aforementioned England documentary An Impossible Job: a complicated, contradictory briefing which leaves you pretending to know your role when in actual fact you are utterly clueless. Personally I’m always fine with my own bit but I’m so wrapped up in the excitement of it all that I forget what I’m meant to be telling the rest of the team. I’ll run on thinking, oh God, what was it, and then the winger will look at me and the sight of his face will trigger it – oh yeah, it was you! You’re going wide!
Over twenty years as a professional player, I’ve experienced both sides of what we might call The Hook. There is the coming on, and then there is the coming off. For every man that leaves the bench, one must take his place, and you can almost always feel it coming.
Seventy-ish minutes have gone. You give the ball away. The crowd groans. You glance over at the touchline and see the manager sending his two sub strikers out to loosen up. You’re pretty much done for at this point. It’s just a matter of when. You run around frantically, trying to make something happen, but your desperation only makes it worse. You see one of the subs taking his tracksuit top off. Right. You’ve got a minute absolute max to do something amazing. You start shooting from everywhere, praying for a juicy back-post cross to come in, all the time thinking, I just want to sit that sub back down on the bench. Stick your jacket back on, son, I’m not done yet.
Occasionally, very occasionally, it will happen. You smash one in. The cross you’ve been waiting for all game finally arrives all perfect and wrapped in a bow. Now you’ve ripped up all those plans. You’re not coming off now. You’ve stuck two fingers up at the manager and his flawed i
deas. What, you were going to take this bloke off, the one who’s just won us the game? More often you’re trudging off, trying to remember to high-five the man replacing you rather than dig him in the ribs. Strikers might be the most likely to come on but we’re also the ones most often taken off. Goalkeepers: never. If a centre-back is subbed off when he’s not injured, it’s a story.
Taking any player off in the first half is both ruthless of the manager and a bit of a show. If you’re subbing a player at forty minutes, why not wait until half-time and spare him the humiliation? You pray that you’ll never suffer the ultimate ignominy: being subbed on and then performing so abjectly that you get subbed off again. José Mourinho did it to Nemanja Matić at Chelsea and then again to Juan Mata at Manchester United. Pure degradation.
If your goalkeeper has been sent off, an outfield player has to make way for the reserve keeper. The fall guy is usually a striker or winger. The indignation is intense. Hang on, why me? I’m not the one who messed up! Through his decision the manager is basically spelling out that you are a luxury player, the most dispensable he has, the one man he’s not going to miss. In your head you tell yourself instead that it’s because you’re the most creative. You’re actually too good for the slog to come. ‘This is backs to the wall now, they only need cannon-fodder.’
Being taken off can be a great reward. If you’ve played well, the manager will be standing on the touchline to greet you with an affectionate cuff round the back of the head and a light slap on the arse. ‘Well done, son, you have a rest, we need you for next week.’ You can milk it from the crowd as you leave the pitch – a slow walk, an obvious reluctance to leave the arena that you had graced so beautifully. Raising your hands above your head to clap the fans who are singing your name. A rueful smile. ‘Ah, I was only getting started …’
