I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  As a result, we reserve a special kind of disgust for the player who shies away. We interpret it as a character failing, a public demonstration that the individual believes they are more important than the team, that they are not prepared to hurt a little for the long-term collective good. I’ve seen it even at the highest level. I’ve played with a defender – a man whose primary task is to tackle – who was jumping out of tackles that cost us goals, jumping out of tackles in a season we were relegated. I had a fellow forward who, when I flicked the ball on from a pre-planned move off a throw-in, was still standing in the empty part of the pitch rather than where he was meant to be. Next throw, same issue. I asked him what the hell he was doing: he pointed at the opposition centre-half and said, I can’t go near him, he’s crazy. I told him this was an irrelevance, although not quite as politely. He shrugged. I don’t want to get hurt. I couldn’t think of him the same way after that.

  On a pre-season tour with the same team a different tackle-jumper would consistently refuse to eat dinner with the team. He would take only a light soup and then immediately retire to his room. I was billeted in the next-door room and, intrigued, crept out onto the balcony one night to see if I could look through the sliding doors and find out what he was up to. Remarkably, having ordered room service, he was sitting at a table set for two, wearing the complimentary towelling robe, talking at his phone, which he had placed upright across the table. The phone was showing his wife on FaceTime, sitting at her own table at home, eating exactly the same food at exactly the same time. It was a FaceTime dinner date, and it had been happening every single night. In all my years of football, I’d never seen anything like it.

  Does that admittedly unusual marital focus at the expense of a communal team dinner really create an attitude that leads to bottling tackles? There is clearly nothing wrong with demonstrating your love for your family. Many people will consider his actions charming. Am I less of a person for not following his example? Possibly. But I couldn’t help but think that the man who chooses to dine with a pixelated image of his distant wife rather than his defensive partner was lacking a small but critical amount of commitment. You are a professional footballer. You are paid to tackle. You are paid to be dedicated.

  I’m a considerate team-mate. I returned quietly to my own balcony, careful not to disturb him. But only after first taking a photo that I immediately posted on the squad’s WhatsApp group. There is a price to pay at every level.

  While it doesn’t legitimise his approach, this tackle-jumper is not alone. There is a tackle-shy wrong ’un in every team, from kids’ football to Sunday League and through the age-groups, and you can be sure that every one of their team-mates knows it. There will be chuntering. There will be shakes of the head and slaggings off behind their back. The only possible way these tackle-avoiders can be granted any dispensation is if they are so extraordinary going forward that their total lack of defensive responsibility no longer matters. We can call this the Prosinečki Protocol, in honour of the great lazy Croatian who decorated the Portsmouth team I played in almost two decades ago. Robert P was one of the most naturally gifted footballers I’ve ever seen, as well as being one of the game’s most consistent smokers. He didn’t have enough English to understand the phrase ‘Track back, they’re all over us’ but was fluent when it came to ‘Back off lads, this is my free-kick’. We let it go because in the time it took to complain he would have beaten three men, one of them four times, and smashed home a top-corner piledriver from the edge of the box. It’s the same if Leo Messi ever jumped out of a tackle. Because he’d probably scored four in the game already, you’d let him off.

  The issues come with the bang-average but occasionally mercurial number ten who gets you half a dozen goals a season, a couple of them in the Carabao Cup. The rest of you are on a constant fume. We’re all doing shifts for you, what are you doing for us? Sure, you’ve thrown in a pretty turn and a nice switch of play, but what else are you bringing? You’re not chasing back and you’re not tackling. Where are the goals, the assists, the headaches for the opposition rather than for us?

  In my time at Stoke I remember earwigging as our manager Mark Hughes buttonholed Pep Guardiola after Manchester City had given us a walloping. How do you keep everyone working so hard when they’re all superstars? Pep replied that it was easy. When the two players who run the most are David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne, the best two players you have, what excuse do the others have? There are no luxury players at City. All of them run and score and set up chances and tackle and press and never ever stop. It’s the same with the front three at Liverpool and the forward players at Spurs. Twenty years ago strikers could just strike. Now Sadio Mané, Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino never stop. Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen and Son Heung-min are relentless.

  You cannot be a man down these days, not in the Premier League. Elsewhere in Europe there are still playmakers who play and water-carriers who do their legwork. You can be a Giuseppe Giannini or a Nicola Berti, a Pirlo or a Gattuso, Zidane or Deschamps. The coaches and supporters are fine with that. No one can remember a single Pirlo tackle, and they don’t have to. Rio Ferdinand told me that when he came up against the maestro in the Champions League, Pirlo played as if he were wearing glass slippers. He was never anywhere near anything so base as a challenge. Not that it was a problem for the Italian; he dictated the game from a position on the pitch where you couldn’t get near him.

  The better the opposition, the more tackling back you’re expected to do as a striker. If they’re not so good you can play further up the pitch, otherwise you’re expected to be behind the ball, closing players down and putting in challenges. The problem is that your skill set is elsewhere. Try all you like and you still look like an occasional bowler lobbing down an over of gentle experimental off-breaks to a batsman on 150 not out. I was once deputed to track back at Old Trafford and put Paul Scholes under pressure. It was humiliating. I tried to get tight to him and he turned me as easily as a man leaning on a lamppost. When I stood off him a touch he started spraying perfect sixty-yard passes to all corners.

  People used to say that Scholes himself couldn’t tackle. It was the excuse given for him totting up ninety-seven yellow cards and four red in the Premier League. The only player to have been booked more times than Scholes in the Champions League is Sergio Ramos, and we know all about him. Not Scholes’s fault, you would hear. He just finds it hard to time his challenges. Strange, then, that he was able to strike a moving ball so well that Guardiola described him as the best midfielder of his generation, that Xavi claimed he was the greatest in his position for twenty years. Weird that he could hit the sweetest of volleys direct from an outswinging corner into exactly the small square of the goal he wanted, yet couldn’t stop the same wand of a foot treading on an opposition player’s Achilles. Strange until you played against him, when you realised he meant every single challenge. Scholes was indeed a genius player. Some might say he also had a dark side.

  There is a horrible fascination when you are a footballer about the assassins of the tackle who lurk in the shallows of the game. Kevin Muscat was genuinely unhinged. Vinnie Jones’s infamous Soccer’s Hard Men video might have been the subject of a ban at his own club Wimbledon and landed him with a record fine, but no one could say he wasn’t an expert in his chosen field. We all remember the photo of him grabbing Paul Gascoigne’s crowning glories but a more typical example can be found in the opening minutes of the 1988 FA Cup final, when he went through Liverpool’s Steve McMahon like a threshing-machine. Because Steve McMahon is Steve McMahon, he gets up as if he’s just been tickled rather than filleted. I wouldn’t have moved for days, if nothing else to make sure Vinny didn’t come back for dessert.

  It was the way it used to be. Your first dirty tackle was a free one. It was as if the laws governing bookings and red cards were suspended for the first five minutes of a game. Stick in a reducer early on now and you’ll be booked immediately, and then have to spend eighty-nine minutes tr
ying not to get another yellow card when the opposition are doing their best to get you one. The worst tackles these days are seen at training grounds, where you’re aware that you should be playing with a match intensity to prepare you for what is to come at the weekend, but you’re also conscious that these are your team-mates, and so you forget how to tackle and get half-injured as a result, and then start swinging punches at each other because you’re now angry and upset. John Hartson and Eyal Berkovic got on very well before one clattered the other at West Ham training. Berkovic’s assists were responsible for the majority of Hartson’s chances. One mistimed challenge later and the midfielder is punching his striker in the leg and the striker is booting the midfielder’s head like it’s one of his crosses.

  To my shame, my tackling became worse as my career went on. It might have been the frustration of being stuck on the bench, of me wondering if I was as good as I had been, or because of the fear that I was maybe losing the pace I did have and was now arriving too late to everything. There were ones I wasn’t proud of. The most disappointing always come from your own errors, when you chest the ball down and lose control, or overrun it, and a desire to make amends combines with an anger at your own ineptitude to create a horror-show of a lunge. I just hope it balances up the karma of having been kicked all over the place myself as a youngster. As a kid you were always booted if you were the best player. If you tried something cheeky with an older player – nutmeg him, put him on his backside – he would dish out an immediate lesson with his studs. Glen Johnson told me that the young lads at West Ham still talked about how Stuart Pearce had routinely smashed them all in his time there, just to let them know the pecking order. In my early days at QPR, Leon Knight arrived on loan from Chelsea, made the mistake of looking down his nose at the Championship and got booted halfway back across west London by the grizzled old pros Karl Ready and Steve Morrow.

  There are players who can make tackling look graceful. N’Golo Kanté takes the ball off you almost apologetically, and is then twenty feet away moving at pace in the opposite direction before you’ve had a chance to curse him. After four years in the Premier League he was still only picking up a booking once every eight games or so. He’s never been sent off in England. He averages considerably less than two fouls per match. That would be decent for a lightweight striker, let alone the pre-eminent defensive midfielder of his era.

  Then there are the true defensive heroes, who are so good that they make tackling redundant. Emperor of the Non-Tackle was Ledley King, who I grew up with at Spurs and watched develop into the most under-appreciated centre-half in Britain. He was so elegant at such a young age. He honed his skills in the football cage in the middle of the estates in Bow, east London, where he grew up. It was an unforgiving place to play football – there were kids of all sizes swarming all over you, barely any respite given, and no adults around to call the fouls. I tried it a few times when I stayed over at his. It was terrifying and brilliant at the same time, and it made him so comfortable on the ball. As an adult playing for Spurs he would bring out his speciality three or four times a game: ushering an opposition striker down the wing, easing him out and then turning back with the ball like a magician pulling a playing card out of a stooge’s ear, bringing the ball back up the pitch and then spraying his pass to a moving team-mate’s feet. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Even at the end of his career I wasn’t entirely sure whether he was right or left-footed. He would pass mainly off his right but do all his skills and tricks with his left. He was a Rolls-Royce among stock cars.

  Then there is Alex Wordsworth, possibly the worst footballer I’ve ever seen – if you could describe him as a footballer, which you couldn’t. When I was growing up, he would come down to the park in Ealing, the rest of us in full replica kits, him in jeans and a jumper, and be incapable of trapping a ball or more than two keepy-ups in a row. He was useless – until it came to jockeying. He had the ability to stay in front of you whatever you did. Should you manage to get past him, he then had a hook tackle so deadly that it should have been made illegal: one moment you were bringing your foot back to shoot, the next you were face down on the ground, looking at the trouser-legs of his stonewashed denim.

  I’d have to describe him as the most naturally gifted defender I ever played against. Sorry, Ledley.

  AWAY DAYS

  We’re not complicated individuals, footballers. We wear the same brands of overpriced clothing, drive the same unnecessarily fast cars, live in the same leafy enclaves. We like things done for us and we like the big decisions taken care of by someone else.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than trips to away matches. Not for us the careful use of Google Maps and live traffic updates, of finding charming local lodgings via Airbnb, of planning ahead to secure the best fares and quirky restaurants. You leave for an away match not only sometimes unable to point out your destination on a map but with less on you than most people have for a trip to the shops.

  It astonishes non-footballers how little actual footballers carry with them. When playing away in Europe in my days at Liverpool and Spurs, I would leave the house in my club-issue tracksuit. In my hand would be a washbag or small man-bag, containing toothbrush, phone and possibly iPad. There’d be no plug adaptor, because you can’t expect a footballer to know the standard socket arrangement for a place as exotic as Paris or Milan: in the kitman’s bag would be one packed for each of us. There was no passport, because you’ve already had to hand that in to a lady at the club earlier in the week, on the basis that waiting until the actual day to find your passport would be to leave at least three players in the departure lounge. Maybe one man out of twenty might be carrying a book, which will mark him out as a dangerous maverick who should sit with the staff rather than his fellow players.

  No one has any luggage. And by luggage I mean any of the normal items you might take with you for three days away: socks, shirts, trousers, shoes, sun cream, travel guide. You don’t even have a spare pair of pants, because all your pants will be provided for you: the ones you wear in training, the ones you wear round the hotel, the ones you wear in matches. We literally cannot be arsed with the things that cover our arses. All of us will be given the same brand and colour, usually a slimline black Y-front, which means that when you see a team run out for a Champions League match, every one of them will be wearing identical underwear. If you were to both read books and wear your own pants you should expect to be treated like the lunatic you clearly are and be asked to make your own travel arrangements in future.

  There is a routine to away days that all footballers find comforting. You train at the normal time on Friday, polishing off by midday. You shower and put on the club-issue tracksuit. If the game is a decent distance away, requiring a train trip or flight, you will then be taken to the station or airport in the worst bus you will ever board.

  The usual team coach is a beauty: sleek, black, tinted windows. Leather seats inside, arranged in groups of four around wide tables, a coffee station halfway down and a kitchen with chef at the back. That won’t be with us, because it’s been sent on ahead to meet us at the other end, with kit stashed underneath, regular driver at the wheel. That’s the coach you arrive at the ground in. The one that picks us up from the training ground is the sort you took on school trips – seats in pairs, all facing forward, no leg room, seat covering a strange pattern of orange and brown triangles, a slight aroma of long-forgotten sweaty passengers in the air. It goes down with footballers as well as walking there with backpacks.

  You don’t use the same airport terminal as everyone else, of course. If your club is in the north-west, you fly in and out of the private terminal at Manchester. Not for us the signs to T1 or T3, the dual carriageway off the M56, the epic distance from park-and-ride to checkin desk. We wriggle past the Marriott in Hale, under a bridge, past the Holiday Inn and into a secret world of ease and luxury. You’re straight into a hangar by the plane, possibly seeing someone like Sir Alan Sugar stepping out of his priv
ate jet, and keeping your head down in case he remembers that he only got sixty grand when he sold you from Spurs to QPR. You sit down with a cup of tea and give your washbag to a girl who puts it in a bigger bag with everyone else’s washbags, which causes panic because everyone has the same brand of washbag. In an hour’s time you will witness the unsavoury sight of ten grown men fighting over identical Louis Vuitton washbags and the rest scrapping over Gucci ones. ‘That’s mine!’ ‘Nope, definitely mine.’ ‘What colour’s your toothbrush?’ ‘Erm, no idea …’

  The planes for domestic flights are small. Too small. When you fly to Europe it’s a decent-sized thing with proper jet engines, and you relax as a result. When you’re popping up to Newcastle it’s so cramped I enter the cabin at a crouch and progress down the aisle like a soldier under fire. You squeeze into your seat, glance out of the window, see a propeller and make a small cry of distress.

  It’s only Newcastle. It’s only England, even if it is November, but there’s something about those flights – how easily the plane gets knocked about by even the lightest of winds, the coming back in darkness, the fog, the wailing of the engines as they fight to get us airborne – that brings big strong footballers to their knees. You will see fearsome central defenders with sweat pouring down their faces. You will see strikers holding hands with wingers. The plane yawing from side to side, prayers being shouted, the desperate clutching of armrests even from those who have stayed solid through everything else.

  There have been times when I’ve thought it was all over. Flying with Burnley from Manchester down to Gatwick en route to Brighton, I remember vast black clouds all around us. Realising we were circling at the same height with too many other planes, the captain came over the intercom to tell us that we were going to try to land, but to expect a sudden roar of engine and steep climb if it wasn’t looking too pretty.