by Anon, Anon
The safety mechanism that prevented me from engaging in any violence in the split second after I arrived was to go straight through to the boot room and stay there for a couple of seconds before walking back in with my boots. Those few seconds were very important. They saved a lot of people from a lot of punches, me included.
In any football club, there are one or two players who live and breathe football. They have to be first even in the warm-up and, for me, they became my barometer whenever I came into training. The more these two pissed me off for no reason, the more susceptible I felt I was to blowing up. I hate warming up: it is without doubt one of the most tedious things in a footballer’s career, particularly when you do the same warm-up day in and day out.
One day, I think I must have cracked – either that or I had a moment of clarity without realising it. “I don’t want to do this any more,” I thought to myself. “This must be one of the most pointless things that any person can do with their life.” And with that, I walked out of the training ground and went home. I surfaced from my bedroom three days later. The crazy thing is that, when I went back to training, nobody said a word. Not the players, not the coaches and not the manager.
Years later, after I had become all but a recluse, my club doctor invited me into his office to talk about my moods. He took one look at me and asked: “How is your mental health?” That’s when I knew that he’d busted me.
I told him everything that had happened to me in the last however many years, which didn’t take as long as I’d thought because I hadn’t done anything worth doing. I didn’t go out and I didn’t talk to anyone.
The levels that I’d sunk to are all too obvious if I look back at the first few months of my treatment. Below is an extract of a conversation that my club doctor was kind enough to pass on to me for this article. We think that this is probably about three months into my treatment.
Doctor: “Don’t worry: you’re not different to anyone else.”
Me: “No, doc, you’re wrong. I am different. I used to ‘get’ it but now I’ve lost it.”
Doctor: “What did you ‘get’?”
Me: “Everything, doc. I was close to understanding everything and now it’s gone.”
Doctor: “Do you mean football or something else?”
Me: “Something else.”
Doctor: “Do you know what that is?”
Me: “Not any more.”
Doctor: “OK, I think we should take your citalopram dosage up from 20mg to 40mg, just for a few weeks to see how we get on. I’d also like you to see a cognitive behavioural therapist as quickly as we can. Do you have anyone local who can escort you home today?”
Doctors only ever ask that when they are worried that you will throw yourself under a train.
For what felt like a split second after I upped my medication, I thought I was home. I immediately felt that I might be able to get back to what I was doing before football.
Alas, this turned out to be nothing more than a Proustian brush with a remembrance of things past. I remain convinced that there is something more to life but, although I got the treatment that I clearly needed, the answer has never felt so far away. Whatever that was, I am certain that I was on to it before this game got in the way. Football has seriously fucked me up.
* * *
So that’s the column taken care of. But here I am, thanks to my Method approach to writing, deep in the rabbit hole once more.
When the depression hits this time, after another disastrous match, I’m so tired that I skip the meal my wife has left out for me. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be feeling this bad. I can’t even be bothered to get my toothbrush out of my washbag or pour myself a glass of water to take up. I never drink it, anyway: an entire reservoir must have given its life in pints of water that I take to bed and never drink. I turn the lights off in the kitchen and head up the stairs. They creak as I ascend and I become aware of the noise reverberating around the landing.
The child gate at the top of the stairs seems like a deliberately placed torture device and I fumble for the mechanism that unlocks it. It swings open, but closing it behind me is out of the question. I tell myself that my wife will notice it in the morning before she takes the little one out of bed and puts him down to run around.
My body is crying out to turn right towards our bedroom but something stronger pulls me to the left, where two doors are pulled to. I walk to the first one and nudge it open; the bottom of the door brushes the carpet and stops abruptly as the energy I have put into the gesture runs out. In the middle of the room is a bed whose Toy Story sheets cover a little boy with his knees pulled up to his chest. I can’t bend down – my knees and back won’t allow me to – and I stare at him for a minute before kissing my hand and tapping the top of his head with it. He immediately turns over to face the other side of the room and I decide to let him be. I close the door behind me and walk towards the second door, but as I put my hand out to open it I can hear what sounds like whispering.
It’s pitch black and my brain is so tired that it can’t work out which of my senses it should heighten. I stand at the door and pull myself together. One half of me is very aware that there is no blunt instrument to hand if whoever is on the other side of the door poses some sort of threat; the other half is thinking that I should have brought up that glass of water, as I’m suddenly very thirsty. I strain my ears and just make out a woman’s voice.
It is my wife, singing White Rabbit quietly to the younger of our two sons.
The next morning I wake and slip downstairs. I walk into the kitchen and two little boys run up to me: “Daddy!” I kneel down and hug them; I smother them. “Lift us!” The older one always says that; I’m not quite sure what it is about being a few extra feet off the floor that is so exciting for little kids, but I don’t argue. As I try to lift them, however, my body screams. It’s as if one of my enemies – and there are many – is driving a chisel between my vertebrae.
“Come on, Daddy! Lift us!” I try again and somehow hoist them into the air. Their smiles widen, but now they’re up they have no idea what to do. So we stand there for a moment and hug each other while the younger one sticks his finger up my nose, something he finds hilarious and revolting at the same time. He couples his laughter with a shudder that makes the rest of us of us crack up.
“I heard you singing to this one last night,” I say to my wife, who is making me a coffee.
“When?”
“Last night,” I repeat. “When I came up to bed I could hear you in his room singing to him. I didn’t want to go in as it sounded as if you were trying to get him off to sleep.”
“I stopped going into his room when he was about a year old. I didn’t get up last night at all.” She gives me a look somewhere between pity and anger. It’s gone too far now – I’ve been losing it for the last few months and she’s had enough.
I put the boys down and go back upstairs to where my phone is charging. Ignoring the text messages, emails and breaking news notifications, I open my contacts and tap in the name of the one man who can help me. But he isn’t there. I delete the name and instead search for “Doc” but I already know what is about to happen. About 20 contacts flash up; it turns out that I have a doctor for every ailment. “Doc (knee specialist)”, “Doc (groin specialist)”, “Doc (back specialist)” … it seems they are all specialists in one thing or another. When you meet them they tend to appear before you in full Savile Row regalia, with some sort of grandfather clock time-piece hanging off their wrist. Fortunes, they charge. One of my heroes, Kenneth Williams, summed up the situation: “I should think in the old days you were better off because nowadays they’re all specialists. Everyone’s becoming better and better at less and less, and eventually someone’s going to become superb … at nothing.”
Eventually I narrow it down to three contacts, all down as “club doctor”. I call the first of them: “The mobile you have called was last used seven years ago by somebody claiming to be a knee spec
ialist, who now lives very nicely in that tax haven of the Turks and Caicos Islands.” I try the next one: “This is the Vodafone voicemail service for 0789 … The person you are trying to reach did even better than the last specialist you rang, bought a very nice loft in New York and now spends his days becoming increasingly eccentric around Greenwich Village.”
The last doc answers straight away. “Hello, my friend. How are you?” he says.
“Not good, doc,” I say. “Not good at all. I’ve lost it.”
“Where are you now?”
“At home.”
“Stay there – I’ll be there in an hour. Are you on your own?”
“No, the wife and kids are here,” I say.
“Don’t let them leave the house before I get there.” And he rings off.
Fortunately, the doc was able to put right what I had fucked up, but it took many months. And once I got back to a point where I could function again, I had a very clear feeling that what I had been searching for didn’t exist. The best that I can hope for is to find a way to survive the regularness of life.
Oh well.
I guess that not every story ends with the hero landing on his feet.
EPILOGUE
THE REAL MEANING OF FOOTBALL
I always told myself that I wouldn’t push my kids into sport. When playing football was making me feel like topping myself, I vowed that I’d keep them away from it altogether. But my older son is now at the point where he wants to try the things that he does in the back garden, like football, mini-golf and swingball tennis, with other kids. Near our house there is a flashy country club that caters for children whose parents drag them there kicking and screaming and dressed in all the gear, with every possible accessory. It is an extremely competitive environment and I get off on the fact that while we don’t fit in because we don’t come from money, most of the other members would love their children to be professional sportspeople, like me.
I sneer at these people – or at least I did – because the kids aren’t playing for the enjoyment of it. They’re playing for their parents, and all the flash kit in the world can’t conceal the fact that they aren’t about to pick up a tennis racket or a golf club and perform like Roger Federer or Tiger Woods, no matter how far their parents stick their tongues up the teacher’s arse. They’ll probably all grow into very successful adults – and maybe the competitive spirit that they pick up now will play a part in that – but it rather flies in the face of my fairly liberal approach to parenting. I’d like my own kids to be successful but I’d much rather they were happy.
However, it seems I have passed my own hunger to win down to my children. My older boy is still in the phase of smashing things if he loses at Connect Four, but if we can turn that frustration into a positive we might have something we can work with.
I tried him at golf, but that didn’t go well. There was an unfortunate incident with a duck that wondered out of his flash lake and across the flash driving range, to catch a flash of my son’s iron across his head on a follow-through swing. It was a distressing moment for all the kids who witnessed it, and we’ve since been branded “the duck killers”.
Next I took him to the squash courts, because what kid doesn’t like hitting a little ball as hard as he can wherever he likes? The problem is that a squash court is a sterile environment, and as soon as you introduce rules the fun goes out of the window and the boredom flies in. It was the same with tennis, where the ball rarely made two consecutive visits over the net. Don’t even get me started on cricket. There was only one thing left to try, and I faced the uncomfortable truth that my son was going to have to have a go at football.
We took a trip to one of the big sports stores and he chose his first pair of boots. “I want the same as Daddy,” he said, and that was the first time that my heart swelled with pride. The next was when he asked for the same shirt, with his name across the back, and some shin pads. I was falling into the trap of buying all the equipment possible, just like the pushy parents. We came out with cones, a mini-goal and even some Under Armour kit because he’d once seen me wearing it on a visit to the training ground.
Where we live, football is not a sport that one encourages one’s offspring to participate in. Because of that there are no local teams, so we had to venture to the nearest big town, where the kids are very streetwise and wary of anybody different coming into their midst. If I’m honest, I’ve tried to shield my kids from this to a certain extent, because I didn’t want them mixing with the kind of crowd that I used to mix with. All I’ve succeeded in doing, however, is alienating us from where we came from as well as from where we are now. We get the cold shoulder at my son’s private school and at the flashy club round the corner, but just when I think that we should return to our roots, a mate will call to tell me that there was a spate of burglaries and a stabbing back home over the weekend.
I tracked down a local club that had decent facilities and was run by an ex-player; he explained that the boys were competitive but mostly just loved playing football. That was good enough for us and my son seemed to join in with the training sessions pretty well. The other kids bonded with him because they weren’t born with silver spoons in their mouths and were very genuine, and my son loved the fact that these kids were actually talking to him. It was humbling to watch and made me feel like a piece of shit for what I’d asked him to become when we moved to our present home.
After a couple of weeks the coach said that he felt my son had enough about him to play in a match, and asked him to come along on Saturday. My son’s first-ever football match! Suddenly I felt incredibly competitive. What if he was no good? What if he embarrassed himself? The other parents on the touchline would be looking at me wondering why my son, of all the kids there, couldn’t play football.
We worked all week in the back garden and I tried not to come across as busy as Lewis Hamilton’s dad, who uses the royal “we” when talking about his son’s Formula One career. We practised passing, running with the ball, control – all the basic things – until his big day arrived. I was a bag of nerves but my son was very calm. As we drove down to the recreation pitches, past the burnt-out cars and the police chalk outlines on the ground, I pulled out a bottle of Lucozade and handed it to him.
“Quick, drink this,” I said.
“I don’t like Lucozade,” he pointed out.
“Daddy drinks it,” I said.
“OK, Daddy. Maybe just a bit, then.”
We pulled into the car park and he jumped out and ran into the changing rooms. A few minutes later he emerged in his own little kit, the sleeves dangling over his hands. The coach spotted me and strolled over to tell me that my son was starting the game. I broke out in a sweat and my heart began to race. There was a good crowd, maybe 100 people, and the referee and linesman actually had the proper kit on, rather than the dodgy tracksuits that a couple of volunteers might have worn. Suddenly this all looked very official and it occurred to me that I hadn’t given my son any advice whatsoever. How could I have let him go out there without warning him what to look out for? I’d short-changed my own flesh and blood.
The teams were lining up and the referee was checking with his linesman that they were ready to start. Then he set the timer on his watch. This is what we do at professional level. Did they realise the age of these kids? Jesus, was that a scout on the far side? I began to scrutinise the touchline for a man with a worn-out coat and a notepad, who would talk briefly to the coaches before getting into a crappy old car and driving off.
This was unbearable. He was going to be eaten alive out there. I had to get a message to him; I had to say something that would inspire him and encourage him to really get stuck in and cover up all the flaws in his game. He’d only been practising for two weeks! Surely people would take that into consideration, wouldn’t they? I’d have to tell everyone, I decided. I’d have to go down the line and tell people once the game kicked off – the parents, the coaches. I’d have my son’s back.
> As the teams got ready and the referee put his arm in the air and the whistle to his lips, my mind was racing. I couldn’t think of anything to say! I was panicking: some inspirational words were needed, something that my son would remember as a point of reference in his interviews after he lifted the FA Cup at Wembley in 20 years’ time. Then it came to me.
He was on the far side of the pitch, so I cupped my hands around my mouth and called over to him.
“HEY!” I shouted.
He looked over. “Yes, Dad?” he yelled back.
“JUST DON’T BE SHIT, OK?”
“OK, Daddy,” he said.
Perfect. Just in the nick of time, too.
INDEX
(the initials TSF refer to The Secret Footballer)
A
Abate, Ignazio 1
Abbiati, Christian 1
Abu Dhabi 1
Abu Dhabi Media 1
Adidas 1, 2, 3
agents 1
Alice in Wonderland 1
Anelka, Nicolas 1
anti-gravity treadmill 1
app, directional 1
see also technological aids
Armstrong, Lance 1, 2
Arsenal FC 1, 2, 3
atheism 1
Awful Rowing Toward God, The (Sexton) 1, 2
B
Bale, Gareth 1, 2
Barcelona, FIFA Club World Cup won by 1
Beckham, David 1
Bellamy, Craig 1
Blatter, Sepp 1
“Boat Story” 1
bone testing 1
see also technological aids
brain, understanding 1
see also technological aids
C
Capello, Fabio 1
Carlos, Roberto 1
CBT 1
charities 1
