Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  “Another day he walked into training with all his fishing gear on. He loved fishing. He had everything: the stupid hat with all the flies attached, the waders, the jacket with pockets all over it, even a smoking pipe hanging out of his mouth. Under one arm he had his rod and under the other he had the most enormous fish I’ve ever seen. It looked like a fat eel; its head and tail were both touching the floor as it looped under his arm. He hadn’t been fishing, he wasn’t going fishing, he was just coming in for a normal day’s training and he’d decided to get dressed up in his fishing gear first and go to the market early to buy a fish. It was just for banter. What a bloke he was – absolute legend.

  “But I want people to know what he was like as a player, I want people to understand how good he was. People think they know Gazza and they think they know his game, but I’m telling you nobody has ever scratched the surface. If I was a coach with the FA, I’d be showing my midfielders videos of Gazza’s best games all day long. He was just unplayable. In training he was so strong, when he had the ball you couldn’t get it off him. And he was aggressive with it, too – not in a dirty way, but if you came up alongside him you’d get an arm across your chest and a shove to go with it, and this is all at top speed. Not many players can do that. And he’d still have the end product: a pass, a shot or a cross. I’d go in to nick the ball off him and it was like hitting a brick wall – you couldn’t move him when he had the ball. He was just phenomenal.

  “And he was fit, too. This is what people never gave him credit for. He was probably the fittest guy I ever played with. I don’t think anybody knows this but he gave himself two hernias from overtraining in the gym. He had that little double chin and everyone assumed he was fat, but he was seriously ripped, with a ridiculous six-pack. He was in the gym almost every day, first person in and last person out. He was obsessed with being as fit as he possibly could be because his talent demanded it. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as Gazza did to be a footballer.

  “He was loved, too. The players loved him, the owners loved him, the fans loved him, he was adored everywhere he went, and I know that was also true at Ibrox. We had a seriously talented team and he strolled in and took over the place. Not many people do that without sowing the seeds for a little bit of jealousy, but he did, and he didn’t do it by kissing people’s arses. He did it by being himself. When Adidas would send him 10 huge boxes of their latest crap he’d walk it all down to the youth team changing rooms and say, ‘There you go, lads, help yourselves.’ He’d stay for hours after training to talk to the two old women who washed the kit at the training ground. What would he be talking to two old women about for hours on end? I have no idea, but they loved him.

  “He had loads of time for everybody, even the paparazzi, who treated him like shit. When I got to Ibrox we never had paparazzi, but when Paul Gascoigne arrived we had 10 full-time photographers outside the training ground right up until the day he left. That was hard for him and I swear he was on the front and back pages of the Sun for about two years, but he was always himself and he still made time for them. And they loved him for it, on a human level, and not just because he was great fodder for them.”

  Now imagine how it must feel when one morning you wake up and all of that has suddenly stopped. I am not and never was the player that Paul Gascoigne was, but because of that I know I will never end up like him either.

  MY DRUGS HELL

  People sometimes ask me if there’s a lot of drug-taking in football. Perhaps they can see traces of my misspent youth.

  It is fair to say that in my late teens I could have gone either way. In my search for some kind of meaning to life, I wrote songs and shared joints with what I liked to refer to as “like-minded people”. The truth of the matter was, most of them were deadbeats. It was a morale-crusher when my father pointed that out, but he was right nonetheless.

  All the kids in our street played football from the moment we came home from school to when our parents came looking for us because it was time for bed. But as we got older our priorities changed: at 16, 17 and 18 we discovered other things, like women, music, alcohol and, in some cases, drugs.

  I was good friends with one lad in particular in our street, despite the fact that he was a year younger and went to a different school. One of our favourite pastimes was playing Championship Manager while on massive booze marathons that lasted for two or three days during the summer months when our parents were away. That game always had the effect of making us want to play football for real, so when we could stare at the screen no longer we’d go outside and kick a ball back and forth.

  Over time we got to marking each other’s control and technique out of 10. Under the dim glow of a single orange street lamp in a lay-by in one corner of our street, the only thing that could be heard was the monotonous echo of a ball being kicked, followed by a number being called. Hours we were out there, and inevitably my control improved until eventually it became flawless.

  When we’d had enough we’d lie down in the middle of the road – it was a quiet street – and look up at the stars before pondering the fundamental questions of humanity: where do we come from, where are we going, what are we going to do with our lives and how much bigger could our neighbour’s tits get?

  My schoolfriends didn’t mix with his, which isn’t to say that my school was superior. I had just been lucky when our classmates were drawn out of the hat – for some reason I had been lumped in with the intelligent kids, while he … well, he hadn’t. Because of that he was able to lay his hands on some very good Jamaican woodbine. The search for answers seems important when you’re that age, even though you don’t have the knowledge to talk about such things with any great authority. The marijuana was an eye-opener, for sure. Like a lot of people who smoke it, I felt as if I was on to something but I was also very aware that the downside of the drug meant that I really couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it, on the rare occasions when either of us said something worth further thought in the cold light of day.

  Like all relationships, however, ours had its peaks and troughs. We had both taken part-time jobs on the same industrial estate, but as each of us made new friends at work we didn’t really bump into one another too often, until gradually we simply moved on. There were lots of people around my age at the firm I worked for, and many of them are still friends of mine to this day.

  A couple of them told me that they went clubbing every weekend and asked me if I wanted to go with them. I’d never been before; in fact, I had barely been out of my own town. But I couldn’t wait to go. Over the next couple of years I got into clubbing in a big way and became part of a hardcore group who would follow DJs all over the country.

  We went everywhere: London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool … Everybody in our town who was seriously into house music and clubbing would travel the length and breadth of the country to watch the biggest names in clubland perform. And while where I lived every night out ended with a fight unless you had a doctor’s note, I can honestly say that in the clubs that I went to I never once witnessed any trouble. Well, almost never. I do remember being at the Don Valley Stadium for Gatecrasher’s Millennium Eve event when somebody climbed the rigging and stopped the show. When he eventually clambered down, somebody smacked him. I’ve phoned one of the lads I was with that night and he tells me that the incident happened while Judge Jules was playing, and although we were a long way from the stage and we couldn’t be absolutely sure, we still told everybody that it was Judge Jules who hit him.

  The reason there was no trouble is largely that alcohol played second fiddle to ecstasy. Ecstasy convinces you that everybody is your friend. If you’re walking along and you accidentally bump into a stranger who also happens to be on the drug, the apology tends to take on a life of its own, to the point where you end up hugging and offering to meet up later.

  That isn’t to say that there wasn’t the occasional unsavoury incident. On one outing to Gatecrasher in Sheffield, we made
such good time that we decided to visit a pub not too far from the club. About 30 of us descended on a nice-enough looking establishment but it became clear almost immediately that we’d made a terrible misjudgment. It was crazy – 15 to 20 local heavies mixed in with 30 of the most brightly dressed teenagers you’ve ever seen. The whole place was a seething mass of Day-Glo. It was difficult to tell who’d won by the end, but I remember there being a sudden realisation in both camps that we were all in this pub together and no one had had a beer in the last 10 minutes. It was surreal – the fight just seemed to fizzle out and people began queueing at the bar to order drinks. And as the barmaid tried to serve one person, he’d say to her, “Oh, actually I think that bloke is before me, love,” before pointing to somebody from the other group. It was ridiculous: by the time it ended a bloke that I’d bought a pint of Foster’s for was so grateful that he offered to “sort anybody out” who gave us grief while we were in Sheffield.

  Since then, studies have linked ecstasy to depression when taken on a regular basis. I don’t remember experiencing any of the other side-effects, such as overheating, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat and renal failure, but I do remember suffering from terrible jaw-clenching. By the end of the night I’d have the mother of all headaches and I would not be able to prise my jaw open. It got to the point where I was beginning to wear my teeth down through constant grinding. I am ashamed to say that my solution was to wrap a £1 coin in a £20 note before placing the package toward the back of my mouth on one side between the top and bottom molars. When the pill took effect, I’d involuntarily clamp down and that would prevent the grinding. This wasn’t a piece of drug-takers’ knowledge passed between revellers; I had in fact stumbled on this solution myself after spending about £20 on packets of Chewits at the Ministry of Sound in London. I thought I’d put one of the sweets into my mouth but it turned out to be a coin wrapped in a note, as I realised an hour later when it was still intact. There’s nothing glamorous about drugs, but on the other hand it did keep my cab fare safe.

  Ecstasy, in part, is dangerous because the pills are produced illegally – which means there is no way of knowing how strong they are, or what other substances they contain. One night at the Ministry of Sound, they took me to a void in which time had no meaning.

  Armand Van Helden was playing. We’d gone to see him because he’d been a rising star in our world for some time but now he’d made it big thanks to a monster hit entitled U Don’t Know Me. This was his big night. I remember him coming on – but nothing else. Afterwards I was told that I’d been holding on to an exposed RSJ for around nine hours. Not moving, certainly not dancing, just holding on. I thought I was having a great time.

  The fun really began when I got home. I climbed into bed and shut my eyes, my ears ringing. I was freezing cold, though I put that down to spending hours travelling home in nothing more than a short-sleeved T-shirt. I pulled the sheets up to my nose but the shivering got worse. I grabbed another blanket out of the airing cupboard and doubled it over before laying it on the bed, but it had no effect.

  At some point I became aware of something going on around the edges of the bed, even though I knew that I was the only person in the house. My eyes were closed but I had the feeling that they were open, like the feeling you have when you know you’re dreaming, only in reverse.

  The shivers subsided long enough for me to reach for the glass of water on the bedside cabinet. I rolled over and opened my eyes and there they were: a dozen or so hooded figures with what appeared to be tridents in their hands walking very slowly, heads bowed, around the bed. They were emerging out of the wall to my right and walking around the foot of the bed and up the other side before disappearing into the wall on the left. Ecstasy isn’t known primarily as a hallucinogen and most people don’t take it for that, but it has been known. Whatever strain of MDMA this new pill belonged to, it was clear that the “comedown” was horrific. I lay in that bed for four fucking hours watching those figures. I have a fairly high threshold where being scared out of my wits is concerned, but that was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

  It went on so long that I began to have serious thoughts about why they were there and where they’d come from. Maybe they had been sent? Who by? Shouldn’t they be chanting something? I couldn’t see their faces but nevertheless their appearance gave the impression that they should be chanting. In my brain something clicked into place: they must have a message for me. Almost as soon as that thought came into my head they began a slow, rhythmic chanting. I couldn’t make it out at first, but as soon as I shut my eyes the words became clearer. The first two were drawn out, in keeping with the slow pace of the figures making their way in step around the bed. But the last word was more definite. Although I still didn’t know who had sent them, it was now clear what they were saying: “FEEEED YOOOOUR HEAD, FEEEED YOOOOUR HEAD, FEEEED YOOOOUR HEAD, FEEEED YOOOOUR HEAD, FEEEED YOOOOUR HEAD.”

  And it is this remnant of ecstasy that has haunted me ever since. I have recurring nightmares of different people who always bring me the same message: “Feed your head.” I have them to this day and they can be very scary because in every one of them I am about to die before I shake myself awake. My anti-depressants were supposed to stop them, and for a while they did, but as soon as my body became used to the dose the dreams came back with a vengeance. I think I got off lightly: many of my fellow clubbers have been left very distant by their own experiences and one who completely overdid it had to go through electroconvulsive therapy.

  That was the last time I ever took drugs without a doctor’s prescription. But that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all interest in ecstasy. A steady trickle of research seems to indicate that some strains of MDMA – far removed from anything you’d ever buy on the street – can benefit sufferers of depression. I’d like to see greater research into this and other banned substances in the hope that it might extend the treatments available to people like me. For decades the blanket prohibition on possession and distribution has held back research. I’m not talking about legalisation – that’s ridiculous. What I am saying is that these substances should be fully researched in controlled environments.

  Anyway, my drug-taking started with marijuana and ended with ecstasy, with nothing in between. After I became a footballer it was impossible to go clubbing, much as I enjoyed it. And besides, the scene was changing: the music had enjoyed its golden period and clubbers weren’t just indulging in different strengths of ecstasy any more. There was a new drug, ketamine. It came with the worrying warning that vets used a form of it as a horse tranquiliser. And as if that wasn’t disturbing enough, “Special K” had the ability to temporarily paralyse people who took it as a pill. It didn’t seem suited to the club scene at all.

  That scared the hell out of me and I was glad to have moved on in my life. But I think that on some level it is part of the human condition – the need to explore and experiment, the quest to discover and learn.

  * * *

  I had long finished with ecstasy by the time I became a footballer, although that didn’t stop me from dealing drugs in my first year as a professional. A friend had given me eight Viagra tablets for my personal use – I had no idea where they came from or why he thought I needed them, and I had no intention of taking them – and I mentioned my haul in the changing rooms. That led to a severe bout of peer pressure that only ended when I sold all eight tablets to two older pros for £25 a pop, which was good money for me back then. Apparently they were very effective, although to this day I’ve never tried them myself.

  I have, however, been prescribed a whole pharmacy’s worth of other drugs.

  In my first book I told how a newspaper reported that I had become addicted to methadone after taking some heavy-duty prescription medication to numb the pain of a bad injury. I do not know where that story originated but it was completely fabricated. However, a couple of years after that incident I injured the same ligaments again and had to go back to the same doctor in the Midl
ands. For the second time I would have a needle pushed the length of my ligaments so they could be flooded with sugar solution. And again I might end up in agony.

  As I made my way to see the doc on the Monday I couldn’t help thinking about the excruciating pain I’d endured during the first course of injections. Typically, an injury such as the one I had requires a minimum of three or four courses of injections before the ligament is strong enough to cope with a stringent rehab programme. The solution works by encouraging the ligament to stiffen almost immediately, to the point that new cells grow within a matter of days. There are many people, mainly surgeons, who dismiss this treatment, but trust me, it works. Many physios in the Premier League and beyond today routinely send their players for a course of these jabs for all manner of ligament injuries, especially rolled ankles.

  The first time round, I made the rookie error of trying to speed up the process by forgoing the local anaesthetic that was supposed to numb the area around the ligament. I never made that mistake again. The needle that delivers the sugar solution is about six inches long and as thick as a kebab skewer. It is inserted and manoeuvred with so much force that it very often ends up bent at the base.

  Even with the local anaesthetic, the process wasn’t pain-free. Because the sugar solution injections are so intrusive, the injections that deliver the anaesthetic need to be incredibly effective, and that means that before treatment on the ligament has even begun, a patient has to endure a dozen extremely painful jabs around the area to make sure it is well and truly numbed.

  I told the doc that I couldn’t face going through all that again. But apparently the medical world had advanced since I’d last visited, and the procedure could now be done under semi-conscious sedation. Rohypnol was on the scene.