by Simon Hughes
Another player of the year award in the Championship resulted in a move to Blackburn Rovers, where his manager was Graeme Souness.
‘Souey was someone I had a lot of respect for. He’d won three European Cups as a player when I was growing up as an Everton supporter, so the image of him holding that big trophy aloft was something imprinted on my mind. I resented him but admired him too. He was a man’s man. He appreciated me for who I was. He didn’t try to mould me into something I wasn’t. He encouraged me to be me. So I thrived under him. For twelve months, I was on fire and ended up in the England squad.’
Thompson says Souness’s best trait was allowing players to be individuals within the framework of a team structure.
‘He trusted you. He commanded a certain level of performance and if you didn’t achieve it, he’d go mad. He lost it a few times. The formation was there. But he’d never complicate it, allowing you to play to your own strengths and express yourself. If you made a mistake, he’d trust you to learn from it and develop. When we lost the ball, he’d want us to regain our shape quickly and go again. With the ball, there was a lot of freedom. We repeated that day after day in training. The younger boys really flourished under him, lads like Damien Duff.’
Having already led the club to promotion back into the Premier League before securing the League Cup with a surprise 2–1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur, Souness guided Blackburn to a top-six finish during Thompson’s first season at Ewood Park, one he believes was his career best.
‘We were playing Fulham on one of those winter days where the weather was cold and the stadium was flat. Craig Short tried to control the ball on the halfway line and pass it with his instep when he should have just headed it away. So from one side of the pitch, I screamed, “Just fucking get rid!” As I shouted it, the whole ground fell silent. Everyone heard it.
‘I thought nothing of the moment. I’ve gone in at half-time and I’m undoing my boots. Suddenly I felt this crack on my head. It was a big water bottle and it was Shorty. “Don’t you ever fucking talk to me like that again,” he said. He threw the water in my face. So I’ve jumped up and we’ve started smacking each other. We were rolling round for fifteen minutes. It was murder. The whole of the half-time was lost.
‘We were 2–1 down and went back out and caught fire, managing to get a draw. The following Monday it was 1 April and me and Shorty were in the gym, having made up. The canteen was in the next room, so I went and picked up a load of ketchup sachets. I squirted them all over my mouth and told Shorty to get one of the lads to run in and tell the physio he’d just knocked me out. So I sat there with my tongue hanging out and ketchup pouring from my mouth, nose and ears. Shorty’s standing there shouting, “You deserved that, you little cunt”, and the physio comes running in and puts me in the recovery position. He’s shouting, “Get the defibrillator! Get the doc!” Then I jumped up. “April Fools!”’
Thompson believes what happened next illustrated the difference between Houllier and Souness.
‘Souey’s called me into the office and I’m thinking, “I’m on for a fine here”, particularly for the Fulham incident – definitely on for two weeks’ wages. Souey goes, “See what happened on Saturday, at half-time …” I’ve gone, “Yeah, about that, gaffer, I’m really sorry …” But he stops me. “No, Tommo. I love all that. I want that in my dressing room. It got the team going, didn’t it? We were brilliant in the second half. Well done.” Then he’s given me a bottle of red wine that cost about £400. I’m used to drinking Jacob’s Creek. “It’s a nice one, that,” he told me.
‘I knew when I did well after that for Souey because he’d call me in on the Monday and go, “Hey, here’s one I rooted out of the cellar.” He was brilliant.’
Thompson’s form earned international recognition and he was soon called up to represent England in games against Slovakia and Macedonia by Sven-Göran Eriksson. In his first training session, he fell, holding his knee. It was the start of a run of injuries connected to the same part of the body. He could play. Then he’d be struck down again. Operations followed, two of which were conducted by the renowned Bayern Munich doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt and Richard Steadman, the specialist knee surgeon from Colorado. Aged twenty-six, Thompson knew his best days were behind him.
‘Louis Saha was in the next bed and Dr Steadman told both of us that we had to think about the quality of our lives when we were old. I retired. Louis did not. He played for another six years, including one great season at Everton. He carved out a great living for himself. It’s probably something I could have done too. But I just felt I was being a bit of a fraud. I wasn’t myself as a footballer. The play was going through me but I wasn’t dynamic. I was getting picked for Premier League teams like Wigan, Portsmouth and Bolton. I wasn’t letting anyone down. I was still nicking a few assists and a few goals. But in my mind I knew I could be better and my body wasn’t allowing it, and it frustrated me. Before games, I was having fluid taken out of me with a syringe. It felt like I had a serious disability. My performance levels dropped to a five or six out of ten. That devastated me.
‘I’ve got friends like Jamie Cassidy who got struck down at the start of their career. Then I’ve got friends who got struck down at the end of their career, so they’re thankful for the time they had. So I shouldn’t really moan about it. But it leaves a really bitter taste in my mouth because I’ll never know how far I could have taken it. It happened to me just as I was beginning to find myself.
‘I know, of course, inwardly how far I think I could have gone but I can’t prove it. The way I viewed myself is that I didn’t see Frank Lampard as being better than me. At the time I was called up for England, he had no more than ten international caps. I’d grown up playing against him and I never had any problems. I felt I was better than him. So, although I don’t feel jealous, it’s hard to see someone like Frank go on to have a great, great career when I think to myself that it could have been me. In those months before being called up for England, I was confident of being the best player on the pitch every week, regardless of who we were playing. I knew I was going to get an assist, a goal or a killer pass. I was having an impact in games whether they were against big opponents or teams we were expecting to beat. Everything was coming together and I felt another season playing at that level would earn me the recognition I really wanted. Suddenly, the chances of that happening were swept away.’
Thompson believes he’d have played professionally at a high level until he was thirty-six had his body allowed him.
‘I loved everything about football: being paid to kick a ball for a living; getting out of bed every day knowing I was going to be out on that field. Psychologically, it still distresses me because I wanted to prove that I was a top player.’
Since retiring in 2007, dealing with the time and space has not been easy.
‘I think I’ve had some sort of crisis or breakdown. It changes you as a person. Me in the football world and me in the real world are two different animals. It’s strange. It’s weird. I don’t mean that I’ve only just discovered how to wipe my arse. It’s in terms of having confidence and decisiveness. You lose what you had before. When you play football, it masks a multitude of problems in life. You get up every day, you’ve got that drive and happiness, a routine. It’s fulfilling and it can be very settling. You swipe that away and you’re left with frustration. You’re left with a lot of unused energy because your body is used to blood running through it. It can be very destructive. It feels like you’re floating or drifting along with no purpose.
‘I can’t understand these players that say they don’t miss it. I want to bang their heads on the floor. How can you not miss it – running around, getting a sweat on, filling your lungs with air, kicking a ball on grass into nets with all your mates behind you, ready for the battle? If you don’t miss it, there’s something wrong with you.
‘I’m still trying to channel it. I’ve realized that I’m a very dynamic person. I like to ha
ve a lot of things going on at any one time. I’ve got four businesses. I couldn’t just have one, because that’s not dynamic enough. I’m better when I’m on the edge, when there’s competition and adrenalin.
‘My body still knows when it’s Saturday. It’s pre-programmed. Although it’s fading, it’s still there. In the first few years after I retired, I’d wake up every Saturday and my heart would be beating against my chest. I’d have that butterfly feeling in my stomach. There was a breathlessness. It took me a while to figure out that my body was preparing itself as it always had.
‘Then your missus tells you you’re going to Sainsbury’s. It was Saturday. It was meant to be the best fucking day of the week.’
CHAPTER NINE
MAD ERIK,
Erik Meijer, 1999–2000
‘I AM NOT two-footed. I am not small and quick. I am the opposite. I am the big guy in front who lets the ball drop in the space so someone else scores a goal. I am the one who made others play better. I helped offensively and defensively. Tactically, when the manager told me to do something, I fulfilled his instructions. I was somebody who liked to involve the audience, the referee, the opponent and my own teammates. I played with rage.’
Erik Meijer tells me this without blinking once. It is his response to the opening question of an interview where a guided walking tour of his hometown of Maastricht is incorporated into four entertaining hours. Pauses are brief and his sentences are well structured, delivered with the sort of bewildering intensity with which he once played football. He has a beautifully Dutch way of explaining feelings, using idioms I have never heard before. He has piercing pale-blue eyes and his focus is consistent. I instantly believe him to be scrupulously honest.
During eighteen months at Liverpool, Meijer played twentyseven games, scoring just twice. Both goals came during a 5–1 win at Hull City’s old Boothferry Park ground in the Worthington Cup. He was not so successful in the league, though it was a competition where Liverpool never lost on the seven occasions he was selected by Gérard Houllier in the starting eleven.
His doggedness, however, was embraced. Liverpudlians appreciate a trier. In a survey that took place six years after his departure, Meijer was voted ninety-ninth in a list of one hundred players that shook the Kop. Amongst other members of the squad, he was well liked. When Meijer was on the receiving end of a rough tackle in training, he responded not by lashing out at the teenage perpetrator but by kicking a dressing-room door instead in frustration.
Few Liverpool strikers in the club’s history could match Meijer for passion – a commodity that can lift a footballer to improbable heights or bury him in reckless pursuit of the impossible. At Anfield, Meijer was christened ‘Mad Erik’. Many of his appearances came from the substitutes’ bench, his physical presence and heading ability proving useful when Liverpool were chasing a result or protecting a lead. It soon became a familiar sight: the game halted for a throw-in or a corner kick and Meijer entering the pitch, sprinting to the near post and demanding the ball. He’d gesticulate wildly and bellow instructions to random teammates before hunting opponents like an irate father in pursuit of a hoodlum, crashing into a tackle as a king-size mattress does into a skip.
As Meijer says, he ‘involved’ the crowd. Every match was treated the same: as if it were a European Cup final. He would lead the attack in reserve games at Knowsley Road in St Helens, with Danny Murphy often playing behind him. When Derby County were the visitors and there were no more than fifty spectators in attendance, Meijer hunted a right-back who played the ball to his teenage goalkeeper. Meijer continued on his quest only for possession to be switched to the left-back on the other side of the pitch. Undeterred, Meijer eventually managed to block an attempted clearance, conceding a throw. He responded to that by immediately leaping to his feet, pumping his fists in the air, yelling, ‘Come on!!! Come on!!!’ to the handful of diehards freezing on the touchline.
Meijer remembers the moment clearly. ‘This is me, extreme,’ he grins. ‘It is in my genes. I cannot help it. My reaction to a challenge is to put all of my weight behind the response. Even if I might not be successful, I go all-out.’
He emphasizes that he is not merely a one-man war, though away from the game his outlook is just as enthusiastic.
‘I work hard, I party hard,’ he continues. ‘I like to live. I like good food. I like a good glass of wine. When I go out with the boys, I like more than one beer. I like to have people around me, enjoying life. But I am concentrated and focused when I play football. I never used to drink during the week. As soon as the game was finished, the first thing I took was an ice-cold beer. If the physio told me it was not good, fuck it. Football was like a balloon. You could not always have it under pressure. Sometimes you have to let a bit of air out.’
Meeting Meijer felt secretive. I had arrived in Maastricht in the early hours of a Wednesday morning. Landing in Charleroi near Belgium’s French border, I crossed country by hire car before entering the southernmost part of Holland, an area that hangs down from the rest of the country like an appendix, hemmed in by Belgium and Germany. It was this precarious position that saved the town from war damage in 1939. The Dutch government didn’t bother mounting a defence. Yet German forces still chose to blow up the bridges that stood over the curving Meuse river.
Today in late autumn, there is a feeling that something is about to happen, although in reality it probably never will. I awake to a concerto of police sirens. There are the bells of a Catholic church and every hour the town-hall clock sounds a chime. It seems that every road has a cycle path and most people in Maastricht are slim. Winter is coming and those milling about in Vrijthof, a huge cobblestoned square, wear heavy coats, scarves and mittens, protecting themselves from blustery winds. There are elegantly dressed men and women taking breakfast in cafes, and plenty of students, the majority of them in jeans. More than a fifth of Maastricht’s one hundred and twenty thousand population attend its university, which specializes in international business, meaning English is the dominant language spoken on the streets.
Meijer suggested we convene at Maastricht’s oldest pub, In Den Ouden Vogelstruys. I am told by the waiter in a bow tie that the building has been here since 1730 and was originally a staging post for traders. Inside, the room is dark, with dimmed lighting. There are candles, mahogany panels, muskets on the ceiling, drawings of the inn’s regular customers and photographs of bygone days. Frothy cherry-coloured Trappist seasonal beer is served.
As the clock strikes twelve, Meijer, chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the chill outside, slips through the wooden doors, bringing with him the scent of sweet and savoury breads being baked in a nearby French patisserie.
Meijer is a strong, lean, tough-looking man. His walk is upright and confident. His lips are fleshy. His nose has surely suffered many knocks. His hands are thickset and seem as though they could crush another human being. ‘You being English, I am surprised you are not already drunk,’ he announces, laughing loudly before engaging the other customers, who had previously been enjoying a quiet one. To the untrained eye, it would appear as if Meijer is the licensee of this establishment, greeting his public with robust handshakes and slaps on the back. He is charismatic. ‘You have come all this way. I am very surprised and very pleased someone from Liverpool still wants to speak to me,’ he adds modestly.
Meijer removes his purple quilted jacket and rolls up the sleeves of his light–blue-coloured Ralph Lauren shirt as if he means business. He begins by telling me why he thinks he will always live in Maastricht, a place he insists is ‘the centre of the continent’. In 1992, a treaty signed here led to the formation of the European Union.
‘In fifteen minutes, you can be somewhere different, where everybody speaks Flemish, where everybody speaks French or where everybody speaks German,’ he says. ‘Within one hour, you can be in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Brussels or Eindhoven. On a fast train in two hours, you are in Paris. Maastricht is a beautiful place: family, friend
s, Michelin restaurants. There are more hills in Limburg than anywhere else in the Netherlands. They say we live like people in Burgundy in France. You can walk and escape. Why should I be anywhere else?’
The night before, Meijer had travelled an hour and a half from Amsterdam, where he works as a pundit for Fox Sport, covering football. In two days’ time, he will fly to Munich to appear on German Sky Television. Meijer is forthright and typically Dutch in his appraisal of the nationalities he is surrounded by and encounters on a weekly basis.
‘I think the word “arrogant” is a French word. That says something about the French. They do things their own way. They don’t want to change. Belgians are a little bit relaxed during discussions. They don’t like to get involved if there are problems. They stay out of it. Then you have the Germans: focused, hardworking, always on time. The Germans have strict rules. It is also why Germany is economically the most successful. And the Dutch? Big mouths. Always have an opinion and they say it. If the trainer says we go to the right and the Dutchman sees space on the left, that’s the way he will go.’
Meijer was the Premier League striker who had it not been for the ‘intervention’ of football would have been a butcher like the rest of his family. His father never allowed him to kill livestock, although he can remember the sound of squelching blood in his shoes during his trips to the abattoir as a child. You could imagine Meijer running a slaughterhouse.
