Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  “I don’t remember too much of what happened over the next couple of hours, but I do know that at some point I fell asleep, because I vividly recalled being startled awake by the sound of sirens coming from above deck. My first reaction was to panic because I had woken up disorientated, but then I realised it was the coastguard. The music was still going strong but there was no sign of the others.

  “In the past I’d always been the one to deal with the coastguard because I was fairly comfortable apologising on behalf of everyone. There are three things to remember where the coastguard are concerned: firstly, always acknowledge that you have done wrong with a grovelling apology – never make excuses. Secondly, always make sure the safety equipment on the boat is present and correct; otherwise, you simply give them a reason to hammer you. And lastly, never try to scramble around for that equipment while attempting to make your apology when drunk at sea with four near-naked women and two other footballers.

  “As the coastguard stopped their engine and pulled alongside us, I could see that their faces did not have the usual ‘We get this all the time’ expressions. Instead, they looked pretty serious.

  “‘What are you doing out here?’ shouted one of the officers.

  “‘Uh, nothing really,’ I stammered. ‘Just messing around.’

  “That was a mistake: never say ‘messing around’ when you’re at sea.

  “‘Follow us in to the mainland for a chat, please sir,’ said the officer.

  “This was worrying: we’d never had to go back for a chat before. Strange as it sounds, the first thing that came into my head was the paparazzi: they often snapped footballers down on the shore in the summer and they’d certainly love to get a shot of three players and four unknown women following the coastguard back for a ‘chat’.

  “In a panic I looked around for help. I needed something – anything – to avoid following the coastguard back in. And then I saw the shore. Immediately I relaxed: at worst, this was going to be a yellow card for persistent fouling. The coastguard had had enough of us and our loud music, I told myself, and was going to impose a fine. It was unfortunate but not the end of the world.

  “I told the officer that I’d round up the people who were still below deck and that he could go on without us, as we weren’t far from the shore. He’d be able to see me coming into the marina in a few minutes anyway. It wasn’t as if I could speed away. ‘Let me make sure that everyone knows we’re about to leave first,’ I said. ‘I don’t want them falling into things as I get up to speed. You go on and I’ll follow.’

  “‘That’s France, sir,’ came the reply. ‘Unless you want to drift back through the busiest shipping lanes in the world again, you should follow us.’

  “‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We probably will, if that’s all right.’

  “On the way back we followed the coastguard closely but, as usually happens in these situations, it wasn’t long before Jonesy became bored. As we were negotiating the shipping lanes, he decided that it might be more fun to follow a container ship that was passing ahead of us. He pulled the wheel hard to the left and in doing do scattered everybody on board to different parts of the boat. I was in the middle at the time and ended up shooting down the steps below deck.

  “The pain was excruciating and I struggled for breath. It felt as if somebody was sticking a knife into me. I could hear the laughter from above but nobody came to check on me. I grabbed hold of a seat and managed to lever myself up before staggering back above deck. As soon as I reached the top step I saw Jonesy, who had been waiting for me. He was still at the wheel; before I could protest he shot it in the other direction and sent me careering toward the starboard side. I couldn’t put my arms out in time and there was nothing to grab – I was heading over the side.

  “Just as I took my last step and braced myself for a wet landing, an arm came out of nowhere and grabbed my hand. It was Tel. If he hadn’t managed to stop me, I’d have gone over the edge and drowned for sure. I’m a decent swimmer but I could never have stayed afloat even for a second due to the injuries that I’d sustained moments before. I was still struggling to breathe and I couldn’t move my arms from my sides.

  “Thankfully the shore was coming into sight. The coastguard prevented any more boats from leaving the marina as we approached, and as we came in to moor I felt a huge sigh of relief wash over me.

  “One of the officers came walking along the wooden walkway until he reached our boat as we were getting off. ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’ he said, looking at me. ‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘Just an old injury playing up, I think.’ He didn’t believe me but that wasn’t why he was there and so he didn’t press me on it. ‘Listen lads,’ he began, ‘would you mind signing this for my boy?’ And he produced a programme from the previous season.

  “We looked at one another before fighting for the pen he was holding and signing as quickly as possible. Tel even gave the guy his phone number so he could bring his son down to a game when the new season started. We handed the programme back to him and as he turned to walk away he said, ‘Just be careful on the boat, lads, OK? If you do go further out it might be an idea to drop anchor next time.’

  “We stood by the boat before Tel said, ‘Does that mean we can take the boat back out?’

  “‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘but do me a favour and don’t go near the shipping lanes. Luckily one of the container ships called us, otherwise who knows what could have happened?’

  “‘Come on, then,’ said Tel. ‘What time is that restaurant booked for?’

  “‘Seven,’ I said, slinking back on to the boat.

  “We made the short trip around the coast to a little private mooring that the restaurants and some of the homeowners occasionally used. There were no other boats as we tied up the Sunseeker and went inside to eat.

  “The restaurant was packed and the wine was soon flowing. Some people came over to have their pictures taken with us; the mood in the place was laid back and happy. It’s amazing what the sun can do for people. Everybody was having a great time; I’d even managed to forget that I still couldn’t take a deep breath without wincing. The Sauvignon Blanc helped. After a couple of hours I forgot that I’d nearly been killed at sea that afternoon.

  “Suddenly a huge crack reverberated around the restaurant, followed by a low groan. The noise had come from outside; two waiters were immediately dispatched to investigate. Thirty seconds later one of them came tearing back through the doors, shouting to the sommelier, who in turn briskly walked to the middle of the dining room and said, ‘Ladies and gentleman, sorry for disturbing you, but may I ask which of you has tied a boat to the quay outside?’

  “The whole restaurant turned to look in our direction and the sommelier walked toward us. ‘Would you mind following me outside, sir?’ he asked. ‘There is a slight problem with the boat.’

  “I followed him to the exit. The boat was a little way from the restaurant and couldn’t be seen by the diners, but that didn’t stop most of them from leaving their tables in our wake. I remember thinking that somebody had tried to steal it or, failing that, had vandalised it, but I couldn’t think what they could have done that would have caused the noises that we had heard moments before.

  “As we got nearer to where we had left the boat, I decided that it couldn’t have been vandalised. It wasn’t there any more – it must have been stolen. So why were we still walking towards the quay? Was the sommelier just trying to rub salt into the wound?

  “‘Sir,’ he said, ‘is this your boat?’

  “I looked down. ‘Er … yes.’

  “The boat hadn’t been stolen after all. Instead it was hanging vertically from the quay by its stern, like a giant £1m plug hanging from a bath tap.

  “All of us, diners included, stared at the yacht as it creaked from side to side.

  “‘What’s happened?’ said Tel.

  “‘What’s happened?’ I said, looking at him as if he were speaking a different language. ‘What do you thin
k’s happened, Tel? The fucking tide’s gone out, you dick.’ I couldn’t help remembering that he was the one who’d been so keen on sailing to the restaurant.

  “The thing was, there wasn’t anything that we could do. The boat would either fall, possibly to its death, in the next few minutes, or the tide would come back in and rescue it.

  “‘This is why nobody ever comes by boat,’ said the sommelier.

  “After what felt like the entire village had had their photographs taken with the boat, we returned to our table for dessert and waited for the tide to do its thing, which, eventually it did.

  “‘I could call the coastguard,’ said the sommelier in the meantime.

  “‘No, don’t do that! I mean, they’re probably busy at sea.’

  “When I finally managed to get to hospital I had two broken ribs and a collapsed lung. I missed the start of the next season. But at least I hadn’t lost any teeth, unlike Tel.”

  THE PERKS OF THE TRADE

  I’ve never had much interest in the perks that come with football. My golden years came about in part because I forfeited all the bullshit that came from success. I wanted to succeed in this game more than I wanted to revel in any of the spoils; believe me, there are plenty of players who choose to go about that in reverse. But I was also very lucky that I found a club that was a “project” or a “fixer-upper” in much the same way that, say, Leeds United or Sheffield Wednesday are – a big club that just needed a change in fortune. I decided that, on the pitch at least, I was going to be that change of fortune. I gave my body and my life for that football club: I helped them achieve things that they’d never achieved in their entire history. That club went on to enjoy their most successful period ever, sell out every week and, for a while at least, take on and beat almost everything that this country could offer. I made the owners hundreds of millions of pounds.

  Now that I look back, I realise that I forfeited some amazing freebies – not that I could care less. In fact, in a weird way I feel pretty proud of myself for refusing to sell out. You should have seen the look on the faces of boot suppliers when they’d turn up to the training ground to hand out vast amounts of crap, only for me to tell them I didn’t want it. I think I get some kind of perverse pleasure out of it; it’s the same pleasure I get from totally ignoring women who walk up next to me in a bar and start flinging their hair about. It isn’t rudeness, although it probably comes across like that. I think it’s more that I enjoy being in control of the situation.

  But these opportunities never really go away, and depending on what it is a player is after, he can have pretty much anything he wants so long as he knows which number to call. I’ve turned down watches, sponsorship deals, golf club memberships, holidays, clothes, apartments (yes, really), phones … the list goes on. One thing I did accept was a sponsored car because I refuse to buy cars. I cannot justify spending that amount of money on something that I know I won’t get a return on. I also took tickets to see Kasabian at Earl’s Court, though that almost ended badly after I got too close to Danny Dyer and had to dodge a hail of drinking vessels filled with piss.

  Some perks simply have to be taken up for the greater good, however. I owe everything to my parents and I’ve tried to repay them as best I can over the years. I’ve taken them around the world, sent them to watch their heroes in concert and bought their house from them so they had no mortgage to pay (strictly speaking, that was to release equity to pay for my own ivory tower, but still …). So when my father’s team – and by extension my team – Tottenham drew AC Milan in the last 16 of the Champions League, I thought that this would be the perfect way to repay him. The problem was that the tickets were like the proverbial rocking horse shit. Worse, two of my friends – diehard Spurs fans – had decided to tag along, partly for the game but mainly because they smelled a good time brewing.

  I tried everyone. I spoke to a couple of lads at Spurs but they had already given away their complimentary tickets, and I spoke to my own club, too – usually a last resort. Not many people know this, but every club gets a couple of tickets for any event held at Wembley on behalf of the FA; every year I put my name down for those tickets and at the end of every year I get offered silly money for them as somebody’s team reaches an unexpected final. Liverpool have done very well for me over the years, in particular. Now, that has nothing to do with anything really, except that I had given tickets to the club secretary after her husband’s team had got through to a final and I felt she owed me.

  A very good trick for getting tickets is to go through your club secretary, who requests two tickets for “scouting purposes” for the club she represents. I have had great success with that in the past. Lo and behold, she contacted Milan and, as if by magic, they told her to piss off. They must know that one.

  Just when all hope seemed lost, I was invited to lunch by one of my best mates and he asked me where I was watching the Tottenham game. There was only a week to go and so I told him that although I’d harboured ambitions of going to the San Siro, I’d probably left it too late now and so I’d end up watching it on the TV at home. I threw plenty of crocodile tears in because he tended to hang out with some pretty big-hitters. And it paid off. “Hold on a second, mate,” he said. “Let me make a quick call.” When he came back to the table, he was wearing one of those grins that said, “I can see how much it means to you, mate, and I’m glad to have been the friend who has sorted it for you. You’ll owe me forever and that makes me happy.” It was an amazing moment. “You need to call Paolo when you get there,” he said. “He has the tickets and he’ll take you in.”

  It transpired, rather bizarrely, that he’d rung Liam Gallagher, who at some point had been associated with Adidas, who sponsored AC Milan. It was a safe assumption that Adidas had a box at the San Siro as part of the deal, and that depending on who was asking there might be a couple of tickets kept aside for distant acquaintances of Adidas’s “friends and family”. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the corporate equivalent of the six degrees of separation.

  I rang my father: “You fancy going to the San Siro to watch the Tottenham match?” I rang my friends and told them the good news, and that I would get the flights for everyone just as soon as I was back home. True to form, by the time I arrived home they’d already booked the flights and, in an unexpected twist, had even booked one for me. It’s amazing how happy football can make some people.

  And so it was that, thanks to Liam Gallagher, my father and I and two friends met Paolo at the VIP entrance of the San Siro in the middle of a monsoon and ascended those famous circular stairs until we reached the executive boxes. You get an impression of things from limited exposure, don’t you – usually from TV, where it is easy to show something in a false glory. When I was a kid watching the Italia 90 World Cup, that stadium mesmerised me. It still does, but the reality is that when you walk up those stairs it’s like wading up a waterfall of piss. My advice is to take the lift. Paolo led us to a door and said he’d leave us to it; we thanked him profusely and for once the kisses on both cheeks didn’t feel awkward, even for my two friends, who simply don’t kiss other men no matter what the circumstances. We had enjoyed an extended lunch and were still basking in the warm glow of a few bottles of a fantastic red wine, so we were happy to go along with anyone’s traditions.

  As I put my arm out to turn the handle, the door opened to reveal a stunning and very smiley Italian woman whose name I’ve forgotten but whose phone number I still have, saved under “Stunning Italian woman”. Let’s call her Isabelle, if only because I like that name. She welcomed us in and showed us around what was without doubt the finest executive box I have ever seen. On the right-hand side, down the entire length of the wall, was a shrine to Adidas that encompassed pictures of, among others, David Beckham, wearing the red-and-black stripes of Milan, with a pair of his white Predator boots – signed, of course – in a glass case. There were memorabilia from a host of legendary players – shirts, boots, trophies and so on, all signe
d and proudly displayed. I’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing and it usually comes across as garish, but now I couldn’t help but be impressed. Perhaps it was because of the quality of the players.

  Underneath were fridges of beers and Cokes, and there was a huge plasma screen where you could watch replays of the game if you missed something live. Along the back wall was a bar with an impressive array of drinks and a young man eager to pour them, and in the middle of the room was an enormous table groaning under the weight of incredible-looking food including hand-carved hams, olives the size of plums and pasta dish upon pasta dish, each more inviting than the last. At one end of the table a waiter stood ready to dispense plates, glasses and cutlery. I’ve been in executive boxes all over the world and for the most part they are like hotel rooms – if you’ve seen one, then you’ve definitely seen them all. But this was the real deal. I remember thinking that if I ever had anything to do with a football club’s corporate entertainment, then this would be the level to aspire to – the basic things such as food, comfort, a bit of memorabilia and service but done really, really well.

  “And out of these doors you can see the pitch and your seats, please gentlemen,” said Isabelle. “Please, you only let me know what you want and I will make it happen for you.” I bit my tongue, mainly because double entendres remind me of shit Carry On films, but also because the view left you speechless. The box was smack bang on the halfway line, just below the level of the camera angle that you see on the TV. You have to hand it to the Italians: they know how to do things with style, and out of the 80,000 people who would be packed in to the San Siro that night there was no doubt who had the best seats. As I wandered outside, the full scale of the San Siro hit me and I silently repeated what a friend once said to me when I took him on a tour of the stadium at my first big club: “Ahhh, proper football.”