I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  And then there is the fourth official, the one who gets none of the upsides and all of the downs. The referee is running around on the pitch, immersed in the game. The assistants get to run along the touchline, albeit in a slightly cumbersome fashion. The fourth official gets to stand right next to both benches and be abused throughout the game by both. Any mistake the referee makes is blamed upon them. They are his envoy to the two sets of coaches and substitutes, and so one assistant from each bench will be assigned the job of trying to influence the game through him. I’ve spent a lot of time on the bench in recent years, and I can tell you that it’s relentless. They know the fourth official can speak to the ref via radio mic, so they’ll be at him from the start. ‘You’ve had a nightmare!’ ‘That’s never a foul!’ ‘Hey! Hey! That’s the second time he’s done that!’

  How can they hit back? By telling a manager to stay in his technical area. That’s pretty much their only riposte. They are the traffic wardens of football. They are the community officer to the referee’s constable. They don’t have handcuffs. They don’t even have a truncheon. They have to tell a proper policeman if they want to make an arrest. The best case scenario is that they can impose a small on-the-spot fine for littering. ‘I warn you, I’ve got a notepad. If you carry on with this behaviour, I’m going to note it down.’

  I say all of that, but football is nothing without its officials. We literally couldn’t have a game without them. I couldn’t score goals and bask in the adoration of thousands of strangers. We couldn’t earn eye-watering amounts of money. Referees are the protectors, the enablers, the hidden hand. And it is such a difficult job. You only have to see what happens at club training grounds when you have a practice match and one of the coaches – highly experienced, quite possibly a former elite player – has to officiate. They’re rubbish. They’re constantly in the wrong place. They make mistakes. They hate giving decisions. The contest degenerates into a load of hacking and complaints. Full-on square-ups, balls booted away, basic rules no longer adhered to. It’s horrible.

  So referees deserve our respect. Where do you end up otherwise? And if the Premier League refs should be praised, think too of the teenagers doing it in cold, muddy parks every Sunday morning. No annual retainer, no free trips to games in Europe. Just a lonely few hours being whinged at by hungover cloggers.

  Thank you, referees. Thank you.

  SET PIECES

  There is a view among some in football – the purists, the creatives, a section of those who consider themselves artists – that scoring from a set piece is somehow unfair. It’s taking a sledgehammer to a door rather than picking the lock. It’s turning the free-flowing choreography of football into the formal line dance of the NFL. It’s what you are forced to rely upon when you’re not good enough to score any other way.

  In February 2005 I scored the equaliser for Southampton against Arsenal from a Jamie Redknapp corner. To Arsène Wenger, fuming that his side’s title defence had been undone in such a straightforward manner, it was the final straw. Already upset by Rory Delap’s long throw-ins and the somewhat physical approach of David Prutton in our midfield, he referred to me after wards as a ‘basketball player’, as if I had dunked the ball into Jens Lehmann’s net rather than outjumped the defenders he had scouted, signed and coached to head it past a goalkeeper he had selected. The inference was clear: they’re not as good as us, they’ve exploited some inexplicable loophole in the laws of the sport, they have played the game in an underhand manner.

  Wenger never really got over it. When he used to bring his Arsenal team to Stoke when I moved north, and his title ambitions were repeatedly Pulised, he would treat our tactics – out-working and out-muscling the opposition, piling big men into the box off every free-kick, corner and throw-in – like the anti-football. It wasn’t anti-football; it was anti-Wenger’s football, which is why we did it, and why we would have been mad not to. They were miles technically better than us, man for man. Had we tried playing pretty triangles they would have filleted us. So we gave them a problem they couldn’t handle, based on set pieces. It worked. I’ve scored more league goals against Arsenal than any other team. Not bad for someone who plays a different sport.

  There’s a delicious irony in the set piece being decried at a club where Steve Bould’s near-post flick-ons were once a defining and silverware-winning feature. So fearful did some teams become of Stoke’s set-piece prowess that panic fed into the initial weakness to create a mad vortex that used to suck goals in. Rattled defenders would be so worried that they would give away penalties. Teams terrified of Delap would concede corners rather than face another of his throw-ins.

  We made everything take so long. On every free-kick, even from ones within our own half, we would rumble Shawcross and Robert Huth forward into the opposition penalty box like wrecking-balls. The body language of the opposing defenders would collapse as they trundled up. I remember Reading’s Jobi McAnuff sighing as he tried to mark me up on our eleventh corner. ‘I’ve spent twelve seasons trying to get into the Premier League, and now we have, I find out it’s like being back in League One …’

  You can work on your formation and your team selection all you like. You can play the most beautiful passing football. If you can’t cope with set pieces you will still get beaten. When I was in the under-16s team at Spurs we played our equivalents at Barcelona. They were amazing. I’d never seen a performance like it. Every single one of them, from the striker to the left-back to the goalkeeper, could play. We were Spurs; we were decent. Against them we looked ordinary. They must have had 90 per cent of the possession and at least five golden chances in each half.

  Yet we beat them. We had one set piece, a beautifully weighted free-kick, and I got to it before their keeper: 1–0. They couldn’t believe it. They considered it sacrilege, an insult, an outrage. We laughed all the way back to north London. Sometimes at Stoke we used to come off the pitch at the final whistle and say, how the hell have we won that? We had defended for eighty-nine minutes, worked one brilliant free-kick and a cunning corner routine and walked off 2–0 winners. Daylight robbery in stylistic terms, entirely right under the rules of football.

  Much like the 50–50 tackle, we love the formal set piece in Britain for exactly this reason. It’s a chance for the committed to outwit the gifted. It’s something to look forward to. You don’t want to rush it, which is why the quick free-kick is greeted with such dismay. In Spain they just want to restart the game as quickly as possible. A five-yard pass sideways, let’s crack on. Instead we say, everyone hold on a minute. Let’s get the big dogs up. Let’s do it all as slowly as possible to ramp up the tension. Few other nations go as berserk for a simple corner as we do. If a cross ricochets off the full-back’s leg from a cross and the linesman points to the corner flag we react like it’s worth half a goal. ‘YES! FUCKING CORNER!’ If a pass is played into the winger in exactly the same position that he’d take a corner from, there is barely a murmur. We need the official awarding of the set piece to get us going.

  I understand this. When a quick free-kick goes wrong it feels like such a criminal waste that the perpetrators should receive automatic yellow cards. If I were Aymeric Laporte or John Stones, watching David Silva or Kevin De Bruyne taking short corners, it would drive me mad. I’d want it played onto my head as quickly as possible. But I couldn’t really complain, because it works. They’re winning everything.

  Because here’s the thing: the quick free-kick is usually a lot better, because no one is marking up and no defensive line has had time to take shape, and short corners can feel the same. Wait for your big men to come up and all the opposition players who were out of position have now taken the chance to get back into position. It’s literally the worst time of all to attempt to score.

  I set up a goal for Michael Owen on my England debut by taking a quck free-kick. Looked up, saw a gap, sent him through, international career up and running. The only issue I have with the quick one is when you’re still on the gro
und having been fouled, and in your keenness to take it you end up trying to kick the ball while you have one hand on it to stop it rolling and one knee still on the ground. For a man of six foot seven it’s not very becoming.

  Even a kick-off is a set piece, and it used to be one of my favourites. When you had a strike partner it was an opportunity to be bullish at the start of a match – I’m feeling good today mate, make sure you play me in, yeah? – and to cane your defence when they had just conceded. As you waited for the goalkeeper to pick the ball out of his net and hoof it back to you, opposition players all smiles as they jogged back past still celebrating, the two of you used to whinge like a pair of cantankerous old pensioners.

  ‘What the hell are we playing with here?’

  ‘We’re running around like idiots, and these fucking clowns keep conceding.’

  ‘We carry this team.’

  ‘Without our goals they’d be out of a job.’

  Now that only one man is required for a restart, it’s all changed. You no longer have a fellow striker but two attacking wide men. It’s lonely. Those wide men aren’t really your mates, not in the same way. Is anyone your mate? God, now the paranoia kicks in. You stand there thinking, I hope they’re not talking about me back there …

  Still we persist, at the very start of the game, with the pointless clip forward. If, at any other moment in the game, you had the ball at your feet in the centre circle, you would lay it off, always to feet. When the game starts, you instead have licence to punt it out of play. No one complains. It’s not like it’s about spot-betting any more; no one’s interested in jeopardising their career and reputation for a £500 punt on the time of the first throw-in. You clip it forward because there is a natural caution in the first minute. Play the ball back and the next clearance might get charged down, as Shane Long did when scoring the fastest goal in Premier League history. Go long and you might win the header. If you don’t, at least the ball is in their half. It’s safety disguised as aggression. It’s like a fast bowler sending down a bouncer way over the opening batsman’s head. He’s not taking a wicket, but the batsman’s not scoring any runs off it either.

  When Sir Clive Woodward had his brief spell somewhere in the back rooms of Southampton, he came out with the arresting claim that we should be scoring from nine out of ten set pieces. If that was ambitious, there is still a great premium placed on coming up with something new and different. Because the manager has to go big picture, he typically hands this responsibility for fine detail to his assistant, who will seize his rare chance in the spotlight by getting very stressed about it. The only time you’ll see ever an assistant manager out of his seat during matches is when you’re either defending a set piece or about to take them.

  So nervous are they that their work or lack of it could undo all the team’s hard yards, they become frantic in word and action. Arms wave. Eyeballs pop. Phrases fly out heavy in profanities. ‘MARK YOUR FUCKING MAN! NO! NO! YOU’RE DOING IT ALL WRONG!’ There will be a certain amount of arse-covering, so the manager understands it’s not his fault that the opposition striker has just had a free header on the six-yard line. ‘I TOLD HIM! I FUCKING TOLD HIM ABOUT THAT RUN!’

  After 150 years of association football there is little room left for the truly groundbreaking, so when you do see something new, it blows your mind. I loved the penalty that Robert Pirès tried to pass sideways to Thierry Henry against Manchester City in 2005, even if it had been borrowed from Johan Cruyff, and even if they did stuff it up. I used to love the little near-post corner routine that Teddy Sheringham would work, which we pulled off once with Stoke at West Ham with Jon Walters in the Shez role. Harry Kane does something on wide free-kicks where he has two players over the ball, one right-footed and the other left-footed, already monkeying with the central defenders’ minds, and then he deliberately goes offside as the first man fakes to take it. The defenders then drop in when the second man steps up, so Kane is now onside, and yet the defenders are chasing him, on the wrong side and out of position. I love the free-kick that is deliberately sent under a jumping wall, all disguise and sleight of foot, and I still swoon at the memory of Matt Le Tissier getting the ball played back short to him, rolling it up his foot and then dipping the sweetest of volleys home.

  When you do hatch a plan, hammer it in training and see it come off in a match, it’s an amazing feeling. You celebrate the goal but you celebrate the subterfuge too. With it often comes a sense of relief, because as a striker there will be a split-second when you know you have lost your man and that the exact right ball is coming in, and you are so excited about the free header that you have to keep it all together and actually make proper contact rather than taking your eye off it because you are already imagining the giddy aftermath.

  You can overthink them. Rafa Benítez loved an elaborate routine. There were times where I would be doing some bizarre dummy-run beyond the near post with team-mates splitting behind me in all directions like the Red Arrows at Farnborough Air Show. I’d be thinking, Rafa, I’m six foot seven, Sami Hyypiä is six foot four. Stevie Gerrard can put a dead ball on a six-pence: let’s just cross it and I’ll head it in.

  You can certainly over-train them. If you haven’t been picked to play on the weekend, you begin to loathe set pieces, because on Friday your job will be to don a bib and act as the opposition while the first team practise and practise. You become a mannequin, a guinea pig, a stooge in someone else’s fun, and you feel insulted. It’ll probably be raining. You’re having to walk, because the big boys are still learning the moves in slow motion, so you’re cold, and you understand there’s no real point in trying that hard either, because the sooner they get the routine right and score, the quicker you can all go in.

  The accepted etiquette in that situation is that you shouldn’t be too busy. Don’t bust too big a gut as it looks bad on the first-choice team. But occasionally something is lost in translation, and all hell breaks loose. We had a German defender at Stoke called Philipp Wollscheid, and he refused to do anything but his absolute best, almost as if he were a professional being paid to do it. Our assistant coach Mark Bowen set up a drill where Wollscheid and his fellow stooges had to break a defensive line that the rest of us were holding. That was fine, except that he was taking it far too seriously, barging into me, and then I’m losing my head and giving him a little dig with my elbow. Before I know it, he’s kicking out at me and cutting my leg, and I’m grabbing hold of his nose. He was very camp German about it. ‘Oh my God! You haff all seen this! Captain!’ (This to Ryan Shawcross.) ‘Captain! I haff been punched! I cannot believe this – because he is English you let him get away with this!’

  All because he was being too busy. All because he was doing the job he had been asked to do as he had been asked to do, rather than as the unspoken rule that he had never heard suggested he should. But Phil was always different. On a team trip to Dubai we went out for a few beers, and ended up in one of the lads’ rooms for a few more. Suddenly he’s grabbing the phone on the bedside table, looking distressed, shouting at us all.

  ‘Argh! I’m so angry!’

  ‘Phil mate, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I am so very angry!’

  ‘You’re angry? But why?’

  ‘No, not an-gry. Un-gry! I’m so, so ungry!’

  Turned out all he wanted was a cheese and ham toastie.

  On our pre-season training camp in Austria we were given a rare afternoon off. A few of us decided to play golf, a few stroll into town for a coffee. Phil decided to go off on his own. When I saw him later, he again looked distressed.

  ‘I had absolute nightmare! I was stuck in the fun Ekulah!’

  I had no idea what he was on about. What was an Ekulah – a local Austrian bar, some sort of rural jail? How could it have been so bad when he himself had described it as fun?

  It took several minutes to work out he’d been on the funicular railway. Being a footballer I neither knew there was a railway in the area nor that the
word funicular existed. English was Phil’s second language yet he was schooling me in an obtuse technical backwater of mine.

  We thought he was weird. But he thought we were weirder. Phil used to wear tracksuits so baggy it was as if they belonged to a man twice his weight, yet he wasn’t bothered. He would bring the ball out of defence with the gait of a fashionista carrying a handbag in the crook of her arm. He would run in such a strange fashion that mates of mine coming along to watch us would say to me afterwards, what the hell is wrong with your centre-half? Maybe in Wadern, the little town he came from in south-west Germany, they all ran like that. And he was a really good player. Just different, like Rob Green was different. Different in a way that football dressing-rooms, cruel as they are, struggle to handle.

  Set pieces. Attacking ones are always more fun for a striker. I have nothing to lose and a possible goal to gain, unless the manager has instructed me to do a near-post Bould-style flick-on, in which case I can’t score and will thus be quite grumpy. Defending an opposition set piece as a striker is miserable, not least because you’ve usually got to run all the way back from at least the halfway line to your own box. The whistle goes, the crowd cheers. You sigh heavily. ‘Fuck’s sake …’

  As one of the taller gentlemen in that team – okay, that county – my job is usually the same: either picking up their tallest player, or as a free man, attacking the ball to get it away. There will be four men marking, one on the near post for anything short, and me in the middle. I’d much rather be free than marking. If you lose your man and he scores – easily done, whether blocked off by another player if you’re man-marking, or given the dummy and slip if it’s zonal – there’s no escaping the shame. You go into the dressing-room at half-time and it’s there in black marker-pen on the whiteboard: VIDIĆ = CROUCH. Angry faces staring at you every way you look. Some just looking disappointed in you, which is of course far worse. You sitting there with a sports drink in your hand and your nose on your chest. ‘But I’m a striker …’