I, Robot Page 2

  Social media changed all this. You barely get anything through the post these days but you will get an instant deluge on Twitter. I see it mainly as a good thing: it brings fans closer to players, as if they have a direct hotline, and if some of those use the opportunity to make predictable jokes about the relative attractiveness of my wife and me, then so be it. The rise of the smartphone can also sometimes break down too many barriers. People are so used to intimate contact that they try to shake your hand when they spot you in a pub toilet. You’ve just been touching your old chap, you think, as they mangle your palm. It’s either that or the surreptitious photo, taken as if staring intently at a message, given away by the audible shutter sound and a blinding burst of flash.

  You never complain because you never forget what football can do. When I first signed for Villa, the East European bloke who was doing some decorating for my mum asked if I could get a pair of tickets for him and his autistic son. I’d got them a couple at Portsmouth and apparently the lad had loved it. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to sort, so when reports came back that the trip to Birmingham had also been a success, the request kept coming and the tickets followed. Milan and his boy ended up coming to every home match, and his son started to change. He had been struggling at school, not talking to anyone, unable to cope with much in his day-to-day world. As he came to more and more games, he began to come out of himself – talking to other kids in his class about football, showing them his programmes, actually having mates go over to his house for tea for the first time. I was so chuffed. It wasn’t even a big deal for me. You always get four tickets for every home match as player. My dad wanted one. Milan and his son could have two others. If more of my family wanted to come I could easily borrow a couple of spares from team-mates. To hear that football had helped bring about such a transformation was wonderful. It was exactly what I thought football should do.

  During that time I moved into a new flat in the little Warwickshire village of Knowle. It needed painting, and not knowing anyone else I asked Milan. He came up with his mates on the weekend of our next away match, stayed over and decorated the whole thing. He then refused any payment. I tried to reason with him – you’ve worked flat out here, at least let me pay your lads. Not a chance. And so I remember, every time a kid stops me, or when we do a trip to the children’s ward of the local hospital: it’s not a big thing to you to have a chat for a few seconds, but it can be powerful for them. Justin Channing and a Polish painter. Not a bad pair of nudges.

  What comes back to you can be just as wonderful. You score a goal in a big game and you see thousands of people leaping around and screaming and looking like the best possible thing in the world has just happened. You run to them with your expression mirroring theirs, all of it feeds back in a glorious happy loop, and you think: I did that!

  When I scored England’s opener against Trinidad at the 2006 World Cup, twelve million people were watching in Britain. Even taking into account the proportion of those in the Celtic nations hoping we got turned over, that’s an awfully large number of people to make happy at the same time. A musician might have the same size audience cumulatively over a period of time, but only a footballer is privileged enough to have it as the accidental instantaneous reaction to his day job. It’s a good feeling to go back to as you reach the end of your career. After you’ve been beaten at home by Shrewsbury you do let the mind drift back a little. You hold those memories close, feel the warmth, go to your happy place.

  The strangest fans I ever came across were those awaiting us in Japan when Liverpool played in the World Club Championship in 2005. The whole trip had a weird haze about it: we had one day to adjust to the eight hours of jet lag before our first match, so we didn’t adjust. I remember playing Mario Kart with Steve Finnan at 3am, wide awake, with a game against the Puerto Rican champions a few hours later. I scored twice. Who knows how many I might have banged in had both my eyes been open.

  We knew something was up when we came through the arrivals lounge in Tokyo and there were banners for individual players with big hearts drawn around them. Hundreds were waiting outside our hotel. We tried to sneak out of a side-door to go for a stroll, but word got out that we’d escaped. First there was one person following us, then two, then fifteen. By the time we got to the nearest mall we had three hundred fans in a tightly-packed group, ten yards behind us, saying absolutely nothing and never attempting to get any closer. We would walk into a shop and they would all stop outside. We’d walk out and they would wait until we were ten yards on and then resume the world’s politest stalk. We made it all the way back to the hotel before, freaked out by it all, I turned around and waved. ‘You alright?’

  Suddenly it was all photographs and autographs, girls screaming and other girls crying. They loved Steven Gerrard. They were in love with everyone. ‘Where is Bišćan?’

  I cannot speak Japanese. I probably pronounce Hidetoshi Nakata in a way that no Japanese person would recognise. So I had sympathy with the difficulty the locals had with my name, even as it gave some of the team-mates a new nickname for me. Months later, training on an autumn day at Melwood, I would hear reminders of that trip floating through the Liverpool air. ‘Feeter!’ would come a plaintive shout. ‘Feeter …’

  The politeness was remarkable. When they took a selfie they announced it by shouting, ‘Selfie!’ Before the shutter was pressed they would count you in: ‘One. Two. Three!’ You were constantly being given presents – little trinkets, or chocolates, or beautiful bits of nothing that they’d made themselves. In Burnley I had a spicy sausage named after me. Different vibes.

  For pure noise, it’s hard to beat the experience of playing in Istanbul. When Liverpool played Beşiktaş, the İnönü Stadium – the old one, with the open ends and the Kapali stand at the north side where all the beautiful lunatics went – was like nothing I had witnessed before. Everyone in that stand appeared to be male, exclusively between the ages of twenty and fifty. There were no women, no kids, no older men. It was pure aggression, all of them bouncing in unison for hours, flares going off, fireworks, wild banners. I had absolutely no idea what any of the big signs read but it made you shiver with excitement. ‘Robot Boy! Mickey says hello!’

  You couldn’t not be up for a game in an atmosphere like that. Fans waiting at the airport to give you grief rather than chocolates, shower you with ear-splitting whistles as you came out onto the pitch. We don’t whistle like that in Britain. We can’t do it loud enough. We’d try it like that and end up sounding like a load of postmen. It would actually be quite relaxing. In Istanbul it’s like a different technique entirely. It sounds like the buzzing of thousands of angry crickets. Perhaps the Turkish method also involves rubbing arms and legs together.

  We talk about the architecture of great stadiums but it’s the supporters who fill them that make or break them. I loved the look of the San Siro as a kid, the way its towers made it look like a football castle. I loved watching Football Italia and Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan team of Van Basten, Rijkaard and Gullit. But it was the noise when I played there in the Champions League that made it my favourite away ground of all time, just as it is the noise that Manchester United’s away fans make that underlines what sort of club they are. I played for Liverpool. My mum’s family are all Manchester City fans. Old Trafford can be ghostly quiet sometimes. But I’d rate United’s away fans as the noisiest there are. They don’t shut up. It’s the same with Newcastle. They travel well. There’s been little fun to be had as a Newcastle fan in recent years; everything except Rafa Benítez has been rather depressing. Yet they still go every week.

  As a kid growing up in west London I used to go to Wembley for England games whenever I could. It was an awful stadium by that point. You couldn’t see very well and people would be pissing up every available wall because the toilets were so poor. The new stadium is a million times better. But the atmosphere has not survived. I spent a decent amount of time sitting on the bench during Fabio Capello’s regime
, and the posh Club Wembley seats around us would either be empty for long stretches after kick-off and around half-time or be full of punters who had bought debentures as much for the concerts they’d hope to see as England World Cup qualifiers. I can understand the corporate vibe. I’ve done it at the Emirates to watch Spurs in the Carabao Cup and I’ve done it at Wembley itself when Spurs were rebuilding White Hart Lane. The food was amazing and the seats deep and comfy. You were closer to a relaxing snooze than a jump up and down while singing. But you lose so much when the balance goes too far that way. Football is not snooker. It’s not Test match cricket. It feeds off the noise and it has to get you to your feet.

  You get the same types of fans at all grounds. The joker, always trying to get a laugh at one of the subs when it’s quiet. It’s seldom funny and it’s never original. ‘Give us the Robot, Crouch!’ You grit your teeth and try to duck out of sight by pretending to tie your bootlaces. The lonely one, who tries to start the wrong chant at the wrong point and ends up doing a self-conscious solo that soon tails off. The angry man, the one who apparently supports the home team but spends two hours abusing it at the top of his voice: a life of frustration, and suddenly he’s in a space where it’s both legal and acceptable to call a complete stranger a fucking useless bastard while he’s trying to do his job.

  Crowds turn more quickly now. You look at the abuse heaped on Manuel Pellegrini and Unai Emery after the first two games of the Premier League season in 2018–19. They had barely begun at West Ham and Arsenal and some fans were trying to get rid of them. You can’t always be leading. You can’t always win. It never helps a player and it seldom helps the club. I remember defender Jean-Alain Boumsong being singled out at Newcastle in a team that also included the not universally appreciated Titus Bramble. When I played there for Liverpool in March 2006 he had a stinker – losing me for our first goal, then early in the second half completely miskicking the ball before rugby-tackling me as I galloped into the box. Penalty, red card, game gone. He stood there for ages afterwards, boos ringing out, staring at the sky, and then trudged round three sides of the pitch to the tunnel, rather than the quick and easy route, getting absolute pelters from the crowd as he did so. I mean, he was bad. He did have a nightmare. They had paid £8 million for him, and he looked like a man playing centre-half for the first time. While he did move on to Juventus, it was only after they’d been relegated to Serie B. But I did feel sympathy for him.

  You see things like that happening to fundamentally nice people and you always appreciate a good reception when one comes your way. In the middle of your career it’s easy to think that adoration is normal, but it’s gone fast, and nothing else you ever do in life will ever see you treated the same way. There was a time at England when I seemed to score every game. Even on the bench I’d come on and score. I thought nothing of it. I associated England with goals. Before a match the same thing would always happen: a player flicking through the programme would come over looking surprised and say, seen your goal-record? Yeah. Why are you on the bench, then? I’m not sure. But you’ve scored in every game! Yeah. I thought it was normal. I thought it was great, but I couldn’t imagine it ending. Then it gets a bit harder, then you start being left out of squads, and then you look back and think, oh, that was fun …

  Your idea of what is normal changes when you get that sort of attention and love. You pie off Rourke. You chat to Daniel Craig and Jude Law in a bar at the Sir Thomas Hotel, there to meet the Liverpool team. Prince Harry comes over during a tour of the England dressing-room, looks at you and says, ‘How did you bag Abbey?’

  Now no one wants to talk to me about my goals. They want to talk to me about my podcast. I was in a central London hotel recently and the actor James McAvoy waved at me. He was with Samuel L. Jackson. ‘Just want to say that I love the podcast!’ he told me, although Samuel couldn’t have looked less bothered. Perhaps Mickey had had a word.

  I missed it when it was all gone. The bedsheet banner, the giant flag. I always wanted to be under one of those. The songs! When you hear thousands of people singing something just for you, it’s hard not to feel a bit special. I remember my first one, at QPR, inspired by the fact they thought I looked like Rodney from Only Fools and Horses: ‘No income tax, no VAT, a sixty grand transfer fee/ Black or white, rich or poor/ Peter Crouch is gonna score … / God bless, Peter Crouch! Long live, Peter Crouch! C’est magnifique, Peter Crouch …’

  I was nineteen years old when I first heard that. Amazing – and so much better to be the subject of a unique one, rather than a generic one that every club has. I was lucky again at Liverpool: ‘He’s big, he’s red, his feet stick out the bed, Peter Crouch, Peter Crouch …’ At Stoke too: ‘Everywhere we go, everywhere we go. Six foot seven tall he’s bound to score, everywhere we go …’

  If you do get a good one, you can feel like you’re the fans’ favourite. I think of one of the first I heard at Anfield was to the tune of ‘You Are My Sunshine’: ‘Luis García/ He drinks sangria/He came from Barça to Liverpool/He’s five foot seven, he’s football heaven/ So please don’t take our Luis away.’ Sometimes you get a good song, but find you’ve been lumped in with others. Liverpool’s Spanish stars had one to the tune of ‘La Bamba’. ‘Ra Ra Rafa Benítez/ Ra Ra Rafa Benítez, Xabi Alonso, García and Núñez …’ Alonso won the World Cup and two European Championships with Spain and the Champions League with two different clubs. García won the Champions League and played for Barcelona and Spain. Antonio Núñez … Antonio Núñez spent the majority of his career in the Spanish second division.

  Football can give you so much. It can open doors and it can put you in the same chant as a player three times your equal. But sometimes even football is not enough. On the same trip to Miami that saw the Mickeyfest, me and the lads were in a restaurant when one of them recognised the tiny woman in dark glasses and baseball cap sitting behind us. ‘Hang on, isn’t that Madonna?’

  It looked like she was having a conversation with one other person. Only when you’d been staring for a while did you realise there were four massive security guards parked at a nearby table, keeping a careful eye on anyone that went near. At one stage I got up to use the toilet. One of the big men followed me out.

  ‘Crouchie?’

  Turned out all four of them were English. All Southampton fans. I chatted to them for ages. They asked for signatures. I obliged. They asked for videos for their kids. Go on then.

  After about half an hour, keen to be reunited with my mates, I asked them a question. ‘Alright if I get a picture with Madonna?’

  Suddenly it was all serious. ‘No.’ ‘What?’ ‘She doesn’t like to be disturbed. Please sit down.’

  What? I thought. Neither do I, and I’ve just sorted you boys out …

  I’d been outranked. The Robot gets you Mickey, but it doesn’t get you close to the Material Girl.

  MANAGERS

  You never forget your first manager. I was eleven years old when I met mine. It was a time of youthful fun and innocence, a time of pure excitement at playing in an actual team for the first time, a time of your dad being absolutely furious that you were being subbed off so that the kid with glasses who hadn’t got on could have a crack playing the dashing goal-scorer role up front instead of you.

  The manager was Mr Waring, one of the school teachers. He was a Derby fan, a football purist, a man who understood that his role was to instil a love of football into us and give everyone in the year a chance to shine. That contrasted with my dad, a Chelsea fan, who believes football is purely about winning. If I’d scored three goals and be looking to press on for a double hat-trick, Mr Waring would reason – quite fairly – that perhaps someone else should have a go. My dad would start raging on the touchline. ‘You what? He’s on fire! They can’t handle him!’ The other side would stage a rousing fight-back. The kid with glasses would do his best. We would lose. My dad would annihilate Mr Waring on the walk back home as if we had just witnessed England being humiliated by Iceland
at Euro 2016.

  As you rose through the football pyramid you began to understand that Mr Waring’s philosophy was not the dominant one. When I was still at school, the coaches at Spurs would get me in to train with the youth team, who were often two or three years older. I was always rather nervous. The lads were confident, full of chat and the expanding vistas of young men who were playing football for a living. They had an easy camaraderie. I had a constant sense of intimidation.

  Des Bulpin was a Glaswegian-born coach who defined the old-school approach. He loved me as a player. The other lads would get on a bus to an away game and he would tell me to jump in the car with him, so I could arrive more rested. The others used to terrorise me for that. Being the golden boy when all around you are becoming men is not as much fun as you might think.

  There were other downsides. Because Des rated me he would be harder on me than the others. There was the sense that I might be going places, and that to do so I would have to toughen up. One afternoon during the holidays he took me aside.

  ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You can have a day off tomorrow like usual, or if you like you can come in and train with the lads again. What do you reckon?’

  I wasn’t quite sure whether it was an honour or a curse or a test or nothing at all. So I was honest. ‘Er, I might play football with my mates in the park, cheers.’

  When I came back in for the next scheduled session a few days later he was straight into me. ‘Here he is, the part-time man!’

  All the other lads were watching, all of them creased up.

  ‘Had a good time at home, did you?’ Des continued. ‘Watching Back to the Future with a Big Mac in one hand and something else in your other hand, playing with yourself?’