I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  It’s now all about Dubai. When I started out at QPR no one in the UK had heard of the place, unless they sailed a dhow and dealt in spices. Twenty years of frantic building-boom later, it’s the go-to destination. I’m not actually a huge fan but I’m trapped by the practicality of it all: guaranteed weather during the league’s international midweek break, a flight of just five hours, good hotels and rather nice restaurants.

  Managers go to different places. Managers go to Barbados and an all-inclusive resort. You do not want to bump into your manager on your holidays any more than you want to stay in the same hotel as your teacher when you’re at school. But you will always bump into another footballer. It can be awkward when you first spot them in the hotel; you’ve never been formally introduced before, but you once spent ninety minutes trying to elbow each other, and now you’re self-consciously standing next to each other in the queue for the egg station. I cannot be arsed with this, you think, smiling and nodding, asking how his new manager is, trying to read his eyes to see if he’s going to give you one more sly dig in the ribs as you lean forward to request a cheese and tomato omelette. Two days later you’re playing golf with him, absolute best mates, because you’ve realised you have so much in common. It’s like a footballer holiday romance. ‘Tell me more about the 3G surface at the training ground.’ ‘I will if you explain the story behind that charming new tattoo you’ve got down your shin.’ ‘You first.’ ‘No you …’

  I’ve seen players go on holiday with a team-mate. It always looks a bit weird, as if they have no other friends. I saw it once at a family resort. The two of them had clearly followed the wrong bit of advice. They wanted buckets of cocktails and a wet T-shirt competition and instead had a pirate-themed play-club and actors bowling about dressed as the cast of Frozen.

  I took Abbey to Crete a few years ago. En route to our villa we passed through Malia, site of regrettable holidays of the past. I felt the bad memories come back to haunt me as I watched the streets and bars go by. Then, suddenly – ‘Hang on Abs, is that David Bentley?’ We ended up having a night out with him of spectacular size. At one point all three of us were dancing on a table, at least until Abbey busted a move bigger than the surface area beneath us, disappeared backwards and crash-landed on the tiled floor. We took her back to the villa, called a doctor and were told that she had broken her coccyx. I’ll never forget the image on her lying face down on the bed, the female doctor massaging cream into Abbey’s naked arse as she repeatedly threw up into a bucket. None of that would have happened without David Bentley. Don’t tell me he didn’t fulfil his potential.

  There’s a new one that’s cropped up on the scene in the last few years, as showcased by Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku: the rented house in the Los Angeles hills, private party in permanent swing. With it comes a new standard Instagram shot: player on the steps on a private jet, or kicking back inside with a champagne flute, accompanied by a cheeky hashtag. #nitetimeflitetime #cristalairbaby.

  I don’t know much it costs to fly to LA on a private jet. I know London to Mallorca is about £10,000, so you can probably work it out. Is it worth it? A commercial flight is the trickiest part of a footballer’s holiday. You’re there to be abused by anyone who spots you, and the clever disguise I use on other forms of mass transit – a device I call my Train Hat, which is a hat I wear when on the train – does not have the same power when you’re a sitting duck in the departure lounge for two hours beforehand. Catch the wrong flight and 30 lads on a stag-do from Manchester will spend all three hours of an EasyJet flight singing abusive songs at you and your partner. Sometimes the only option is to commit to it. On a flight from Paris to Nice during the 2016 European Championship I had my Train Hat removed early by the sixty Northern Ireland fans on board and realised I had no choice but to join them in 900 kilometres of the song about Will Grigg being on fire.

  On a private jet there’s no security queues, no checking in, no baggage limit. You don’t bother with the usual rammed airports. Instead you take off from the old World War II RAF ones – Biggin Hill, Northolt, Farnborough – like Bling Command, as though you’re on a critical mission to Dresden rather than a knees-up at an exclusive Portuguese golf resort. There’s seldom even a scheduled departure time. You’re on board with a cold beer, and someone will look around, shrug, and say, ‘Shall we go now?’

  I’ve been lucky sometimes. Abbey was on the Strictly Come Dancing show in Blackpool one Saturday and I was on a solemn pledge to come and watch. Which was fine until I overplayed my hand in the pub the night before and woke up at one in the afternoon. I was supposed to be there at five. I had no car, even if it had been advisable to drive the 250 miles north.

  Sophie Ellis-Bextor was also on the show. About twenty minutes after I woke up, I got a call from her husband Richard, the bass player in The Feeling. Crouchie old boy, I’m flying up to Blackpool in a couple of hours, can I offer you a lift? Turns out he was a pilot. Turns out his mate had lent him his plane. He was leaving at 3pm I went back to bed for an hour, got a cab to the private airfield, chilled in the back of the plane while he drove it – I mean flew it – and arrived in Blackpool slightly ahead of schedule.

  Abbey was beside herself. ‘Oh Pete, I knew you’d make it.’ ‘Wouldn’t have missed this for the world, babe …’

  You have your mavericks. If you’ve read my first book you’ll be familiar with the unusual behaviour of Rob Green, a man so incomprehensible he would read books on the team bus or go to his local pub and have a cup of tea by the fire. He’s the same with his holidays. The rest of the lads will be comparing Dubai tans when Rob bowls in and announces he’s been to the Great Wall of China. Another goalkeeper, Loris Karius, posed for pictures by his poolside rented villa in Beverly Hills. Rob had a snap at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro having trekked it with an old school chum.

  I was always slightly envious when he told me about his expeditions. Had I missed out? Had I not been brave enough? In my England days your summer was eaten into by international tournaments, except when you got beaten at home by Croatia and don’t qualify. It made you risk-averse. You just wanted to go somewhere that did a job. Playing away from home you get to travel to some amazing places, and you see absolutely nothing of them. The stamps in my passport are extraordinary yet the memories are all of bland hotels and Theo Walcott in official Football Association lounge-wear.

  Word of mouth has been a help. I never fancied Ibiza – too much banging house music for me, too many memories of smashed-up Brits abroad from my trips at a younger age as a smashed-up Brit abroad. Then I spoke to Fernando Torres, and Luis García, and Pepe Reina. All of them spent their summers in Ibiza. ‘Is it not all English lunatics?’ ‘No, just don’t go to San Antonio.’ I tried it one summer, a villa in the sticks, and loved it. Being a footballer, I then went back to the same place five years on the spin.

  Xabi Alonso was great for tips of where to go in Madrid. At Stoke, Bojan Krkić gave me the inside line on Barcelona. In return, I told them all about the Samrat Indian restaurant in Ealing. Former Middlesbrough striker Mido kept the farm he bought in Yarm long after his time at the Riverside was up. It’s his kids’ favourite holiday destination. They would much rather be on a rope-swing or wading through a tributary of the Tees than snorkelling off Sharm El Sheikh. ‘Daddy, please can we go to Middlesbrough? Please?’

  Most of us use the same travel agents, in the same way that no footballer can have their house done up without using the same interior decorator as four of their team-mates. The travel agent is usually the same one that the club employ to organise the pre-season training trip, because if you can sort out flights, accommodation, training kit and very specific dietary requirements for twenty-eight players and fifteen staff, you can probably handle a family weekend in Dubai. You always wonder what the mark-up might be, but you’re prepared to pay it because the idea of having to read TripAdvisor reviews and make a quick, safe online reservation intimidates the hell out of you.

  No one ever
learns the local language. Only on the rarest of occasions will you even try a por favor or obrigado. No one ever comes back with a charming local recipe or a clay pot for making tagine. So frequently do players forget their passports for overseas games that most clubs ask you to hand them in at the club the day before departure, where they can be looked after by a responsible adult and only handed out briefly when required. We can’t do things for ourselves. Many will have literally no idea what country they’re in. You could show them a map of Europe and they would struggle to get within three national borders of their current location.

  Everywhere are Louis Vuitton cases with accessorised man-bags, except for one player I know who insisted on a transparent suitcase. You could see his underwear, his crumpled shirts, his washbag. The inside of my suitcase is one of the things I’d least like strangers to see. It’s like wearing transparent trousers.

  You are expected to keep fit on your holidays. In summer the club will fat-test us before we leave and fat-test us when we return. You’re then fined for every percentage point that you might gain. I tend to tick over with some light swimming and tennis, although one year Abbey persuaded me to try a yoga class that the resort was offering. I was stretched out in Downward Dog, surrounded only by women, acutely conscious of not letting my long limbs interfere with anyone else’s personal space, when I glanced up to see Graeme Souness at the studio door, just back from a punishing heavy metal workout in the gym. He was staring at me in disgust. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  And still we have never cracked what we might call the Vialli Code, the correct way to dress when away. Phil Jones represented all that goes wrong when he was pictured the other year in a tight-fitting vest, shorts that were too short and a generic baseball cap. We spent years persisting with budgie-smuggler trunks when the rest of the world was in bermudas, and then hammered board shorts even when the wheel had turned full circle and Cristiano Ronaldo was wearing a thong so brief you could see his breakfast. Through all this my dad Bruce has resolutely stuck with the Speedo. He’s in his late fifties but still feels happiest on holiday in something last seen on Mark Spitz at the 1976 Olympics. My sister would refuse to go the beach with him.

  His excuse? I’m a serious swimmer. These things make a difference. I used to enjoy asking how many milliseconds he was looking to shave off his time from the sun-lounger to the buoy and back, and then ask him if he was that bothered why he wasn’t shaving other areas too. Dad, Michael Phelps is the most decorated swimmer of all time. He has won more Olympic medals than 161 individual countries. And yet even he prefers a knee-length costume. Might he just be on to something?

  SHIRTS

  For some people, hearing a particular song will instantly transport them back to a different time. The melody and beat kick in and you’re at the school disco or in your mate’s bedroom or on holiday with the boys. For others it’s the merest whiff of a certain smell. Suddenly the memories come flooding back – of an old flame, a trip away, a more innocent time.

  For me it’s football shirts. I see the blue Chelsea one with red trim and Amiga across the chest and suddenly my head is full of Gareth Hall and Erland Johnsen. You show me a QPR home kit with Compaq picked out in large white letters over one of the blue hoops and once again I’m happily skipping along in the company of Andy Impey and Clive Wilson.

  I love football shirts. I always have. I always will. I don’t mind an album cover, and band posters are fine, but there’s nothing like a shiny bit of ill-fitting polyester mass-produced in China with a label inside that says KEEP AWAY FROM NAKED FLAMES to truly get the heart racing.

  I was lucky. I have always had football shirts in my life. The first time I was ever really conscious of owning something special was when I was given the Chelsea drill-top from about 1988 which had a diagonal stripe across the chest. This was the same era that Chelsea’s away shirt was a delightful shade of jade, not dissimilar to the Barcelona change kit of a few years back. In my mind’s eye I can see the original Hazard of Stamford Bridge, Micky, strolling about in midfield like a prototype Andrés Iniesta, although the similarities between the clubs at that point probably ended there; Chelsea’s big trophy win of that period was the Full Members’ Cup, and they would shortly be relegated to the Second Division. And if you think there is something funny about John Bumstead’s name, you need to show some respect.

  Kits in 1980s were so shiny and smooth. It felt like a giant leap forward from the scratchy weave that had dominated the late 1970s, and the designs marched forward hand in hand with the technology. There’s an argument that shirts peaked at the end of that decade, the season that ended with Italia 90. The England shirt that will forever be associated with Gazza mopping his eyes with its front and Keith Allen wandering around in the background on the video for ‘World in Motion’ is maybe my favourite one of all time, including all the versions I got to wear many years later.

  I was nine years old during that World Cup. The tea-time kick-offs were the only thing that got me inside. As soon as they finished I’d be back in the garden or down the road to Pitshanger Park for more games in my replica kits. The Italian one is always a beauty. They never get it wrong. But that edition, the shirt worn so beautifully by Totò Schillaci, by Roberto Baggio, by Guiseppe ‘The Prince’ Giannini pinging passes around with nonchalant ease … The blue of the blue! The contrasting white of the shorts! Watching Baggio’s ponytail swishing, Franco Baresi strolling about and Giannini’s dark locks bobbing as he ran – that was as good as the opening credits of Baywatch for me. Even the goalie shirt was a thing of beauty: a fantastic silver, strangely almost bat-wing under the armpits, modelled with typical Italian style by Walter Zenga or Gianluca Pagliuca.

  I was a full-kit wanker in the Brazil shirt from that same World Cup. I wore it to training with Northolt Hotspurs. In my head I thought I was Careca; on the field I was an obvious target for anyone who’d had a bad day at school. It was a golden shirt, and the start of a golden period for me and shirts. The best shop in the world as far as I was concerned was Soccer Scene on Carnaby Street. It wasn’t big but it had shirts that you could only dream of. It was football porn. Dad would take me up there on the Central Line from Hanger Lane to Oxford Circus for a birthday treat or if I’d been playing really well. I’d stand and stare and desperately hope they had my unusual size.

  My Italian obsession continued after the World Cup in the shape of James Richardson and Channel 4’s Football Italia. I’d watch the Saturday magazine show, when he’d be sitting on a sunny café terrace with an espresso and the Corriere dello Sport and the pink of La Gazzetta, and then I’d follow it with the live match on the Sunday afternoon. I loved that Sampdoria team of Vialli, Mancini and Lombardo and I loved both the iconic blue home shirt with the white, red and black band around the chest and the white away kit. The sponsors were ERG. I’ve got no idea what they did. Perhaps they were Erg. But I’ve remembered them, so their endorsement clearly paid off.

  I had the Chris Waddle Marseille kit, the white with pale blue stripes across the shoulders. If that didn’t make me privileged enough, I had it in long sleeves. It was so rare that it used to stop rival kids dead in Pitshanger Park. ‘Wow! You’ve got a long-sleeved foreign shirt!’ While wearing it I’d try to run in languid fashion like Waddle himself, just as when I wore my Italia 90 England one I’d bustle like Gazza, or attempt to bob and weave like Roy Wegerle in my QPR top.

  If I sound spoiled I did try to share the love. I’d lend them out to mates so we could have All-Star five-a-sides. One mate would be in the long-sleeved Marseille shirt, another in the Sampdoria away one and I’d be in the QPR Classic FM number pretending to be Les Ferdinand. When I later got to play with Sir Les in my earliest days at Spurs it almost blew my mind, although whereas I loved the long sleeve he would never be seen in anything but a short sleeve. He was too hard to have his wrists covered, although he was also an absolute gentleman.

  Sometimes you ended up in kits that had no relatio
n to your leanings. I was at a five-a-side tournament one summer, possibly in 1993, when the kit stall was doing a special offer on Liverpool’s Adidas green away kit – the one with the three stripes in white over the right shoulder that you might associate with Mike Marsh and Torben Piechnik. The shorts were the reverse – the three stripes coming up over the left thigh – and it was these that the stall was knocking out, for a remarkable £2 a pair. All the lads were piling in. At that point I had no affiliation with Liverpool, but an official pair of shorts was an official pair of shorts. I used to wear them as pyjama bottoms. I had them for years, certainly longer than Mike Marsh or Torben Piechnik.

  As I got older and started training with QPR, my Chelsea allegiances weakened and my interest in other British kits grew. I loved the Rangers one of Brian Laudrup’s era, particularly the one with white and red hoops around the shoulders which had something of France about it, had it not been for McEwan’s Lager being the sponsors. Aston Villa’s retro-inspired lace-up neck of 1993 rocked my world, worn so well by Dalian Atkinson when he scored that worldie against Wimbledon at Plough Lane, and actually laced up properly by his strike partner Dean Saunders. I liked Newcastle’s claret and blue hooped away shirt of 1996, showcased so stylishly by David Ginola, and the tight-fitting one that Kappa made for Wales, even if it made John Hartson look like a portly flanker.

  There are so many reasons why I would have loved to have played in Italy – the food, the culture, the weather, even the football – but they could have sold me any move based on the shirts. There’s barely a bad one in there. Juve’s stripes. Udinese’s homage. The simplicity and distinctiveness of both Milan and Inter; the unique colour of Roma; the dreaminess of the Napoli blue. In the same way, any player who makes the France national side knows that they are blessed. They get it bang on every single time: the 1984 European Championship-winning shirt of Platini, Giresse and Tigana; the three-stripes sleeves of the World Cup 1998; the paler blue body and darker blue sleeves of Russia 2018.