I, Robot
Peter Crouch
* * *
I, Robot
How to be a Footballer 2
Contents
Picture credits
Prologue
Fans
Managers
Food
Red Mists
Strikers
Holidays
Shirts
Referees
Set Pieces
Penalties
Injuries
Nerves
Trophies
Agents
The Bench
Chairmen
Formations
Own Goals
Tackling
Away Days
The End
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
First things first: yes I am very tall, no the weather isn’t different up here, and no I don’t play basketball. Glad that’s out the way.
I’ve been a professional footballer for 20 years, have 42 England caps, have scored over 100 Premier League goals and hold the record for the most headed goals in Premier League history.
In my time I’ve been promoted, relegated, won trophies, gone months without scoring, been bought, sold, loaned and abused – and I’ve loved almost every moment of it.
Also by Peter Crouch with Tom Fordyce
How to be a Footballer
To my beautiful wife Abbey, who will only read this page of the book. I love you and laugh with you every day, (even when you’re pregnant). This one is for you. Love you always. x
PICTURE CREDITS
1 Football is a serious business. (Photo by Harriet Lander/Copa/Getty Images) 2 I once had a night out in Brighton dressed as a chicken. (© Peter Crouch) 3 A magnificent welcome in Burnley. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images) 4 A fan in Speedos and a snorkel (Photo by Warren Little/Getty Images)
5 Former QPR defender Justin Channing. (© Peter Crouch)
6 Showing Fabio Capello my right-arm off-spin. (Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images) 7 You didn’t argue with Fabio. (Photos by Michael Regan/Getty Images and ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images) 8 Rudi Voller reaches into his magnificent perm. (Photo by Bob Thomas Sports Photography via Getty Images) 9 ‘I’m not sure why I’m on this pitch.’ (Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images) 10 When I found out about Gareth Bale’s magic beans, it blew my mind and changed my world. (GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images) 11 I could out-jump him even if I couldn’t quite out-pace him. (Photo by Jamie McDonald/Getty Images) 12 Jermain Defoe and I had a prolific record playing together. (GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images) 13 He could have passed a few more times. (KIRK/AFP/Getty Images)
14 Courtney Pitt and I were very much style icons. (© Peter Crouch)
15 I originally asked for the England shellsuit top at Christmas 1990. (© Peter Crouch) 16 Mike Dean. (Photo by James Williamson – AMA/Getty Images)
17 Jeff Winter. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)
18 Play to the whistle, they always say. (Photo by Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images) 19 After I scored against Arsenal from a corner, Arsene Wenger described me as a ‘basketball player’. (Photo by Ben Radford/Getty Images) 20 Harry Kane. (Photo by Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images)
21 Steven Gerrard. (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
22 Legendary Coventry goalkeeper Steve Ogrizovic. (© Getty)
23 Here I am sporting the latest designer luggage from the Parisian fashion house G’Arbage. (ANDREW YATES/AFP/Getty Images) 24 Tackling is part of the game (Photos by Athena Pictures/Getty Images and IAN KINGTON/AFP/Getty Images) 25 You put the luminous subs’ bib over your choice of wet-top or big coat. (PAUL ELLIS/AFP/Getty Images) 26 You look like you can’t even dress yourself. (Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images) 27 Loved this day. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)
28 Another trophy. (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
29 The fab four, or at least the quite good quartet: me, Steve Sidwell, Glenn Johnson and Sean Davis. (© Peter Crouch) 30 I interviewed Andy Cole and Les Ferdinand for my new Amazon show. (© Peter Crouch) 31 My last game in football! (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
32 Possibly my favourite non-footballing moment. (© Peter Crouch)
33 Iniesta and me … twice (© Peter Crouch)
34 I arrived at Crouchfest fearing no one was going to turn up. (© Peter Crouch)
PROLOGUE
A footballer’s book is supposed to be a simple affair. ‘I was born here. My mum and dad look like this. I was good at football and I got better at football. Here are some matches you already know about and some you forgot. This guy was nicknamed Trigger and that guy we called Smudge.’
But I never was your typical footballer and so see no reason why my book should follow conventional suit. Rather than the same old same old, a tour through the familiar and the banal, I’d rather show you how it really is: the secret tricks and the inside stories, the madness and the mistakes, the truth behind the puff and the magic behind the curtain. When you’ve played at the top for two decades, you see things that you can’t forget: the players who are so scared by the idea of cooking for themselves that they get the canteen staff to clingfilm up the same lunch they have just eaten so they can have it again for tea; the one who sustained a tiny cut on his leg yet went to the club doctor every day to ask to him apply a Band-Aid on his behalf; the player who shut himself away in his hotel room every night to have his dinner opposite his smartphone, a smartphone showing his wife on FaceTime eating exactly the same dinner at exactly the same time.
You might think you know what football chairmen are like. You don’t. Not until you’ve heard about the one who propositioned me from an open-topped sports car, or the one who spent so much on their house that they could have bought the entire local town. You don’t really understand what agents are until you’ve heard about the one who rides a motorised trike lit by UV lights around Marble Arch, wearing a fur coat and smoking a cigar. Over the following pages, you’ll also discover which position on the pitch produces the most selfish human beings in existence, what the stretches substitutes do on the touchline really mean and why grown men who play football are unable to choose their own pants.
I’ve done a few things myself as well. It’s time I got the story about the worst 100-metre race of all time off my chest, and explain why my early career was nearly derailed by me and my friends inventing the thrilling new sport of bush-jumping. I also did something on holiday once involving a pleasure craft, a sudden nautical storm and a bottle-opener that I cannot carry with me any longer.
Not for us the straightforward analysis you’ve become accustomed to on television. Instead, I’m going to reveal why the outswinging corner is always better than the inswinger, what really happens when you pull out of a tackle and why Rafa Benítez’s pet Alsatians are the best-behaved dogs in Europe. Find out what secret gift the Real Madrid president gives out when he makes a big signing. Come with me onto Roman Abramovich’s yacht and discover what happens when you spill a drink on his deep-pile carpet. Step inside the Golden Rhombus of Football and understand how a man can lose himself within it.
You may be familiar with Mickey Rourke. You won’t be familiar with what happened with Mickey and me in Miami one summer: I’ve had to corroborate several subplots with friends to remind myself that all of it actually took place. It will shock you when you find out which board game obsesses Premier League dressing-rooms and which international player intimidates all the others with his dominance of it.
We will talk about the silly little games we play. There is one so childish yet so addictive that the truth about it has never leaked out before. Until now. We will dig into the curious and often disturbing world of referees: the strange clothes they wear; the myste
rious so-called training they undertake; and why they are reminiscent of the worst defensive midfielders of all time. We will discover the identity of the greatest tackler I have ever faced and try to fathom his obsession with stonewashed jeans.
I’ve been lucky in football. I have gone to places and experienced things that I could never have dreamed of. I know the best trophies to drink champagne from and why the bubbly you get for man-of-the-match performances cannot always be trusted. I’ve seen a lumpy clogger of a player transformed into an inadvertent elegant genius, simply by being in the wrong place at a very bad time. I have witnessed one of Fabio Capello’s assistants parting the arse hair of England legends with a highly unusual hairdryer technique.
It hasn’t all worked out. There was the time with Madonna when the Robot only got me so far. There was the incident when a member of the British royal family made a disparaging remark about my ability to attract women. And don’t get me started on what happened the time my dad and I found ourselves teeing off in front of one of the legends of modern golf.
Still. There are secret rules that need to be brought out into the open. Why managers can never drive players’ cars. The secret platform at the London train station that is football’s equivalent of Harry Potter’s Platform 9¾. The cut that an agent can expect to make off your big transfer move. There is strangeness everywhere you look: midnight curries with Tony Pulis and Cameron Jerome, eaten in an empty stadium; the fitness gadget that works wonders for your hamstrings but looks like a sex toy; the kickabouts with kebab-shop owners that were as intense as a Champions League showdown.
It’s been the most enormous fun to be part of. Of course it has. I am Peter Crouch. This is I, Robot: How to be a Footballer 2 – The Big Stuff. Shall we?
FANS
You’re lucky, as a Premier League footballer. Lucky for what you do, for what you earn, for how much fun you can have. And lucky, too, for the adoration you can get for just doing what you always wanted to do.
You can find football fans in the least expected places. After the World Cup in 2006 I went on holiday to Miami with my mates from home. The plan was for some nights out, some sunshine, some time away from all that pressure and madness we had with England in Germany. On our third or fourth evening on the town we walked into a bar and past a bloke who looked exactly like an older, more rubbery version of Mickey Rourke.
‘That bloke looks exactly like Mickey Rourke,’ said one of the lads. The bloke who looked like Mickey Rourke looked at me and did a double-take.
‘Hey, it’s Robot Boy!’ shouted the bloke who looked like Mickey Rourke, who we could all see now actually was Mickey Rourke, and started doing a bad version of what was now clearly my trademark.
You can’t fight these things. ‘Yeah, I’m Robot Boy,’ I told him. And so began the sort of surreal forty-eight hours that you don’t see coming when you’re a kid in the Spurs youth team.
First, we had our photo taken together, both of us Roboting, me considerably better than Mickey. Then Mickey took us into the VIP section and began to back up his reputation as something of a hell-raising maverick. Drinks kept coming over. Girls kept coming over, more for Mickey and the drinks rather than any wider appreciation of his new friends. The night became purely about one long adventure with Mickey Rourke, at least until it became the next day and then pretty close to sunrise.
Mickey didn’t appear to own a phone. As we left he was insistent that we meet again the following evening, and wrote down the name of a bar on a piece of paper. We went to bed, woke up marvelling at what had just gone up and agreed that we might as well go to the bar he had mentioned, not because he would be there – Mickey was just being polite, going through the motions – but because if Mickey had recommended it, it would probably be quite a spicy venue.
But he was waiting for us when we walked in. ‘Robot Boy! Robot Boy’s boys!’
If anything this was a bigger night. There was no awkward first hour this time. We were straight back into it. Mickey, drink after drink, all manner of dancing and new friends.
We got in at four in the morning. One of the last things I remembered doing before going to sleep was to hang the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door, which made the constant banging that woke up me and my mates at 11am intensely irritating.
‘Fuck off!’ we all shouted from under our duvets. ‘Fuck off, we’re asleep!’
The banging increased in volume. ‘What is wrong with these people?’ I muttered as I stumbled to the door. ‘Can’t they read?’
I stuck a bleary eye to the peephole in the door.
Mickey.
I turned back. ‘Lads, it’s fucking Mickey Rourke.’
The chorus was instant. ‘Ah, pie him off.’ ‘He can do one!’ ‘Give it a rest, Mickey, won’t you?’
There was no thought about his film-star status, the kudos of his company, or the good times that we had shared. We just wanted to be asleep. I got back into bed and we ignored one of the great Hollywood character actors of the past forty years until he went away.
When we awoke a couple of hours later, we noticed that a letter had been shoved under the door. It was written in the most insane script, as if it was the first time the author had ever held a pen, or if he was experimenting with the Daniel Day-Lewis method. It took a while to decipher the words.
‘Hey you guys! Such a fantastic couple of nights. Let’s do dinner right? Meet you 8pm at this place. Mickey.’
We were in a heavy state. A two-day bender and hangovers to match. The last we wanted was another huge one. I was ready for room service, a film in bed and lights out about ten. The conversation was a simple one. ‘Shall we swerve it?’ ‘Yeah, let’s pie him off.’ ‘Agreed?’ ‘God, yeah.’
We never saw Mickey again. I didn’t even think about keeping his letter. These sorts of things just happened at that point, when you played for England at World Cups. It wasn’t that you took them for granted. You simply had no time to reflect on them before the next random encounter took place.
I don’t want to give the impression that it was all glamour. I enjoyed my three-month loan spell at Norwich in 2003; lovely club, great supporters, huge fun helping out with a successful promotion push. But it did get shitty at times. When you park in the players’ car-park at Carrow Road you have a short walk through the crowds to get to the home dressing-room. That’s fine. It gives you the chance to have a chat with a few of the fans. I was on my way in when I spotted a teenage girl running towards me. Autograph, I thought. I have been playing well. Not a problem.
My dad, who had got there slightly earlier, was just behind her. He was waving and looking panicked. What was he trying to tell me? It looked like he was shouting, ‘No!’ but what could be the problem? She just wanted a photo. Why was he staring at me like I was bobbing about in the ocean with a shark’s fin approaching at pace?
I was concentrating so much on my dad that I wasn’t really looking at the girl. She was clearly excited, but I was the big-name striker powering her club into the Premier League. Could you blame her, I thought, signing her shirt, squeezing up close to her for the photo. Dad had stopped going bananas and was now hunched over with his head in his hands, a figure of dismay. I gave the girl a smile and turned back to my dad.
‘What is wrong with you?’
He shook his head. ‘I tried to tell you. I tried …’
He pointed at the girl as she walked away. Poo, all down her leg, smeared all over her back. There were bits dropping onto the ground as she went. I’m not saying it happened because she saw me. Maybe she was oblivious to it all. We’ve all been caught out at times. I’ve never had a laxative effect on any other autograph-hunters, at least not that I’m aware of. But I tell the story only to underline that not all interactions with admirers end up with free drinks with superstars in the best clubs of one of North America’s great cities.
You can never let it go to your head because the memories of when you were on the other side are too strong. At the age of ten I
spotted QPR defender Justin Channing bowling about in Ealing. I couldn’t believe he was actually human. I couldn’t believe he was wearing jeans. I had assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that footballers spent all their time wearing team kit, possibly with a warm-up tracksuit over the top. A full kit, walking to the shops. I shouted at my mum in disbelief. ‘Mum! Justin Channing’s got jeans on!’
My aim was always to get in The Shed at Chelsea when I went with my dad. I wanted to be in with the proper fans, with the singing and the shouting, right in the guts of it all. Dad kept refusing and taking me to the seats in the big East Stand. When he finally relented and we made it in I couldn’t see a thing, but I didn’t care. I finally felt like a real supporter.
I used to buy Match and Shoot! magazines every week. A regular feature that had a deep effect on me was when a player was pictured sitting surrounded by the most enormous pile of readers’ letters, tipped out of several brown mail-sacks. One day, I thought, I’ll have bags of fan-mail like that and will be sitting on the floor in a heavily branded Reebok tracksuit.
Eventually, after a long crossover period when I went from being occasionally shouted at in west London (QPR) to moving to Aston Villa and suddenly being recognised on Alcatraz (day visitor rather than incarcerated; even David O’Leary wasn’t that bad), it came to pass. At Southampton the letters started coming, and I would try to reply to every one. The dream scenario was a request for a signed photo (big stack, pre-prepared) with a stamped addressed envelope included. It saddens me that there is a whole generation of fans growing up who will never know the acronym SAE.
Come the move to Liverpool and a regular place in the England squad and it all went ballistic. I didn’t want to let anyone down but there were too many for the old system to cope with, so I took the stack of pre-signed photos to my mum and let her at it. As at many other times in my life she came to the rescue magnificently.