I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  There are critics who believe the best place to put a pen is down the middle. The rationale: goalkeepers never stand still. Trouble is, when they do dive they will leave a trailing foot or leg, which means that you have to lift the ball. And if you lift the ball it brings into play the horror of popping it over the bar. You can’t blast it. The ball will arrive on the goal line too quickly, before the keeper has committed one way or the other. Your best bet is to clip it with the instep, aiming for head height. There’s a 1 per cent chance he doesn’t move, that he stands there and catches it. You think about Andriy Shevchenko nudging it down the middle in the Champions League final shoot-out against Liverpool in Istanbul and Jerzy Dudek putting his left hand up as he falls right to bat it away. But it’s the best way of scoring if you have the guts for it. The goalkeeper is vacating that area. It is yours to claim.

  The worst penalty is what we might call the Mannequin Save, where it’s not in the corner and it’s not down the middle, and it’s about a foot off the ground, so a moulded plastic shop-dummy pushed to the side could stop it. Yet the mad thing about penalties is that it can be the best penalty in the world if the goalie goes the other way. The only good penalty is the penalty that goes in. Eric Dier’s one for England against Colombia in the 2018 World Cup was nowhere near as technically correct as the earlier ones from Kane and Trippier. It didn’t matter. It went in. It won England the match. It sent the nation ripe bananas. It was beautiful.

  And so back to my original question. I know I should choose Messi or Ronaldo. They are geniuses. I wish I could strike a ball as they do. But I can’t. I can’t risk a stutter in the run-up, not when my life depends on it. I don’t want to go of a heart attack. I want a blaster.

  I want Harry Kane. Of course I do. He’s missed a couple, but the many he scores are a thing of rock-solid wonder. Against Colombia the defenders scuffed up the penalty spot, which is truly disgusting behaviour, yet you still knew – knew, not hoped – that he would bang it in. Harry would save me. Not least because, when he was a kid in the academy at Spurs, I taught him everything he knows. Some of what he knows. A little of what he’d already worked out.

  Harry, my life is in your hands.

  INJURIES

  You get towards the end of your career in football and you notice yourself becoming grouchier with each passing season. Everything is worse despite the fact that everything is clearly better. Yet you feel as though the old days were better, despite the fact that you got paid less, played on muddier pitches, trained at worse places, had ill-advised hair and played a less attractive style of football.

  I’m a little hesitant to say that more players seem to get injured from tackles these days. I don’t really want to claim that some players go down too easily, or take too long to recover, or occasionally milk it. I don’t want to say that, but I have to, because to be honest I believe it.

  At the time I started out as a kid at Spurs, it was considered a bad thing to be out injured. When George Graham was manager, he brought with him the attitude of a former Arsenal manager: this is a flaky club, these players are soft, they need to be toughened up. He brought in a rule that all injured players had to do three sessions of rehab a day. You arrived straight after breakfast and you left when it was dark. All to make being out seem as unattractive as possible, to turn a fun career into a dreary nine to five. If you were fit you trained in the morning, had lunch and went home to play golf or watch MTV Cribs. If you were injured you stood there at the window of the training-ground gym, like Annie at the Hudson Street Home for Girls, staring out all tearful at your friends going off to play.

  At the time, Graham’s tactics worked. Footballers are simple creatures with simple motivations. Let us have fun. Let us enjoy ridiculously short hours. Don’t make me do what feels like a proper job, please. But the power of the modern manager has waned. No longer can you say to a player on the deck, get up, get out there. Those decisions now lie with the medical team. They are the ones who decree whether a player should come off injured and when they are ready to come back, even when the player themselves may disagree. I’ve seen Robert Huth wandering around with a great flap of skin sliced open on his forehead, blood pouring down his nose, asking the physio to bandage it up, looking positively pleased with the scenario despite appearing to have been attacked by a shark. Tony Pulis was bang up for it: ‘That’s my boy. That’s the attitude.’ And the physio taking one look, shaking his head and still having the last word on whether he should play. Have-a-go heroes are not appreciated as they used to be.

  There are players who are bizarrely competitive about their injuries. ‘Oh yeah, I had that one, but far worse.’ ‘Oh, is it only a grade two? Mine was a seven. Yeah. First time they’d ever seen anything beyond a three.’ There are players who sense an injury before they are actually injured. ‘I’ve got a feeling that something might go. Better take me off.’ I can’t get my head around that. It might go, so you won’t play? It might not. You could still play. It might do, in which you can’t play, but you’re not playing now anyway, so what’s the difference?

  There is one at every club. Their names and reputations are known at all the other clubs. There is one player in the Premier League who is notorious for both being brilliant when he is fit and also never being fit. He is rumoured to pick and choose his games based on the standard of the opposition. When it looks like a run of easy matches, games where he can make a flashy impact, his injury concerns clear up. When the opposition are bigger, nastier and far superior, he’s back on the physio’s table.

  Football is not a game for dabblers. From the age of twenty onwards, you will almost never go into a match feeling 100 per cent fit. Most of us spend ten years playing at around 70 per cent. There will always be a niggle, always be soreness. You keep going because you can. You don’t stop because as soon as you do someone will take your place, and they might not give it back. It’s not something we like to advertise or that is probably good for our long-term health, but anti-inflammatory pills are passed out like sweets. The physio will ask on a Friday who wants an Ibuprofen, and on a Saturday before a game, who wants a Voltarol or two. I don’t like them. I never have; they make me feel awful. But I’m in a small minority. Most players will knock one down. I know many who have been on them for years.

  No one talks about the silent pill-swallowing heroes, because it’s seen as standard behaviour. But everyone talks about the malingerers. We had one at Stoke, in the season when we were relegated, who was stretchered off the pitch in apparent agony. We assumed he had a career-threatening compound fracture. It turned out he had a groin strain. I got into the dressing-room at the end of the game to see him having his shorts sliced off, as if he was being cut out of a car wreck or being readied for amputation. He could have stood up, taken his shorts off, jogged on the spot and put them back on again. Instead he lay there with an arm thrown over his face like a man about to be humanely put down.

  A few weeks later the same player sustained a small nick on his thigh – the sort of thing that a five-year-old might look at with interest, wash off under the tap and subsequently pick the scab off. Each morning there is always at least one player in the physio’s room being treated, some for serious long-term injuries, others being strapped up for training or pounded by the masseurs and chiropractors so they can stumble out for one more session. This player would go in each morning and ask for a sticking plaster. He would then ask the physio to apply it. This went on for a week, the player totally unapologetic, the rest of us somewhere between astonishment and disgust.

  I played in the League Cup match between Liverpool and Arsenal where Luis García tore his cruciate. In the same game our Chilean winger Mark González was stretchered off, his leg in a brace, medics giving him gas and air. We lost the match 6–3 and the atmosphere in the dressing-room afterwards was sombre. We’d lost two players to long-term injuries. Poor sods. Hope they can somehow come back to play for us again.

  I came in to training on Monday. The firs
t thing I heard was that García was going to be out for a year. The next thing I saw was González doing squats. In the gym. With 100kg on the bar. I thought I’d witnessed a miracle. I walked out and walked back in again. He was still doing squats, if anything at greater pace.

  ‘Mark. What happened?’

  ‘Yeah, I get bang on leg.’

  ‘But I saw you stretchered off. On gas and air.’

  ‘Is good now. I no need treatment Sunday either. How your weekend?’

  A decade later, I was still being asked by players at other clubs if that story was true. It had spread throughout the Premier League at such a rate that most assumed some form of exaggeration or Chinese whispers. I was there. I witnessed it with my own eyes. It happened. A stretcher, gas and air, ten minutes added time – and squats on Monday.

  Easy though it is to see such scenarios as serious moral failings – and quite often that is the case – sometimes it is about fear as well. We had a player at Portsmouth who had spent the majority of his career in the Championship. He was comfortable at that level. As we moved through the Premier League, deeper into competitions like the FA Cup and UEFA Cup, he began to look scared. The bigger the game, the more intimidated he appeared to be. Often the team for Saturday’s game would be announced on the Thursday. If he was in, the charades began as soon as we went out to train. He would sprint over to take a corner and then pull up, clutching his hamstring. He would shake his head, swear about his bad luck. ‘Yeah, I think I’ve pulled something. Better go in, hadn’t I?’ And then he would overdo it, going round to each player later as we got changed, looking for support. ‘I’m feeling it bad, what do you reckon? I don’t want to let you boys down. I should probably pull out, shouldn’t I? Don’t you reckon …?’

  I couldn’t behave like that. I would be lying to myself. I was devastated enough when I was actually injured, the only fear being that someone somewhere might think I’m one of the skivers. Once I was injured over Christmas. That’s an old favourite of the slack – pull something minor before that frantic run of games so you can have the festive period at home with your family. The thought that anyone might have believed I was faking it made me die inside. I wanted to bring the MRI scan in to training to prove it to everyone. Look! There it is! That indistinct white blurry bit on the other white bit by the grey and black areas!

  I couldn’t make it up because I’ve seen bad injuries close up and I’ve seen what they do to players. I was there when Stephen Ireland shattered his left fibula and tibula in training, and it was almost as horrific as the infamous David Busst moment. Phil Bardsley was the closest player to Stevie, and as soon as it happened he grabbed his head and started yelling in horror. None of us could look. Everyone felt sick. We all knew that it could have been any of us. It just happened to be him.

  You always analyse such moments in the aftermath, when the whole training-ground complex seems to have fallen silent. Stephen had been injured before. He was coming back and going in for bad tackles, trying to prove himself. The one that did for him was a 60–40 against, stretching out against a team-mate we called Johnny Brazil – Dionatan Teixeira, a South American-born Slovakian who was a terrible player but a lovely lad. There was nothing either could do, but it changed both their careers.

  Stephen eventually came back. Not all players do. There was a burgeoning talent I played with who was just breaking into international football when he got injured in what looked like an innocent tackle in training. It was nothing more than the smallest player on the pitch standing on his ankle, but it damaged his ligaments and led, eventually, to the end of his career. When the medical advice came that he should retire, we all felt sympathetic – until he started phoning all the players who had been there that day, trying to get us to go on the record and say it had been an appalling, premeditated challenge.

  It was clear that he wanted to sue the person who had injured him. He was lining up witnesses. ‘Come on, Crouchie, it was a shocker, wasn’t it? You’ll say that for me, won’t you mate?’ But I couldn’t say that, because it hadn’t been. It wasn’t Kevin Muscat on Matty Holmes in 1998, where Matty was lucky not to have had his leg amputated. ‘Don’t worry, Crouchie, he won’t be liable, the club would cough up for it on insurance.’ But I wasn’t having it, and I couldn’t look at the player in question in the same way ever again. He had always been very confident in his abilities, made it quite clear that he didn’t need the other players as mates. He certainly didn’t have any mates about that campaign.

  There are the unlucky ones. Harry Kewell played in every major final Liverpool got to in his time there, but only a partial role in each: coming off in the Champions League final of 2005 with an abductor muscle problem; doing his groin in the FA Cup final of 2006; only a sub in the Champions League final of 2007. He was never the player he had been at Leeds and it could never come back. Then there is Michael Owen, such an extraordinary talent in his early days and almost unplayable at his peak in 2001, when he snatched the FA Cup from Arsenal almost on his own. He was just a small kid from Chester but quicker than any player I’d seen first-hand at that point. But as the injuries kicked in he had to hold something back when running rather than opening up fully, because he knew that if he were to go full gas then something would tear. I had enormous sympathy even if the concepts – explosive pace, delicate hamstrings – were alien to me. My hamstrings were as powerful as Cheestrings. It’s hard to pull a muscle that isn’t really there.

  Word gets around when a player is faking, but word gets around too when injury has taken a player’s edge. It might not always be visible to the public but other players can see the signs. You can train on your reputation but you cannot dominate in matches on the same. Not that it always matters. A player at 80 per cent of what he used to be might still be superior to everything else you have in the squad. It’s why degenerating talents can keep moving around and keep getting deals. There is always someone hoping that the shadow of the old you is still better than no shade at all.

  You find yourself wondering sometimes how good a player might have been. I played with Ledley King in the Spurs youth team so I understand how superior the original model was even to the Rolls-Royce of a defender who played in the Premier League for a decade and went to two World Cups with his country. The two of us were caught messing around in one session as under-18s and got called in to see the coach for a ticking-off. It was quite clear from the coach’s lecture what he thought of us both.

  ‘You, Ledley, you need to behave. Stop messing around and you WILL play for England. You, Crouchie … you might. Yeah. But you, Ledley …’

  I was the spare part, the mate who was allowed to tag along to keep the star happy, the Jonathan Wilkes to his Robbie Williams. I was fine with that. I could see the same things they could. That I ended up with twice as many England caps as Ledley was a source of sadness to me. Watching Ledley at Spurs, sitting in the gym trying to use the arm-bike to keep fit while the rest of us legged it off for training, used to break a little piece of my heart every time.

  Footballers are lucky boys now. Clubs are like the most amazing private hospitals. Everything gets taken care of. You have a toothache, they will bring in a top dentist. You have a callous on your little toe, there will be a chiropodist to gently file it away. If you need a scan, you can get one that afternoon, rather than waiting for a fortnight as most have to. It used to be that each club had one physiotherapist. At a Premier League club there will now be three or four, as well as three masseurs, a club doctor, an osteopath and a chiropractor.

  The chiropodist I have found very useful. When I run, my toes curl over for some unknown reason, and I end up putting most of my weight on my nails. It creates a build-up of hard yellow dead skin, which may sound like nothing but – if you are still with me, rather than being sick in a bucket – can become so painful that I can only walk with a limp. A career on the line, all because of one toe. Don’t tell me modern footballers don’t see the darker side of life. Your feet are your to
ols. And your head in my case, but still. Let me protect them.

  The scans I appreciated but found more difficult. I had a CT scan once that involved almost total immersion in the white plastic tunnel of doom. They gave me headphones to take my mind off the incessant beeping and a mirror so I could partially see out, but the claustrophobia was still too intense. I’m alright if it’s just the ankle in the tunnel. You can enjoy quite a pleasant little snooze in that scenario. But anything else and I’d rather run it off.

  Only once have I truly let myself down. It came towards the end of my career, when I was given a rare start in the first team, only to find ourselves 2–0 down early on. I gave the ball away, chased after it and – furious with my own performance, angry about the team’s – launched into an absolute horror of a tackle. I got a yellow. It should have been a sending-off. But it might as well have been; my hamstring, already sore, suddenly became an excuse. I just wanted to get off the pitch. I went into the dressing-room at half-time and thought: I’m done. I’m no longer the footballer I thought I was.

  I texted Abbey at full-time. She told me to sleep on it. She was right; by the morning I felt better about my future, even as a sense of shame lingered. The team had come back from 2–0 down to snatch a point, and all the talk afterwards had been of how much character we had shown. Not me, I thought. I nearly became the player I never wanted to be.

  There are players who appear to feel no pain. John Terry played as if his skin were some strange artificial sheath over a metal skeleton. He would wear short sleeves in training even on the most brutally cold day, like a Geordie teenager going out in the Bigg Market. Huth looked genuinely chuffed to have half his forehead missing.

  And then there are the players who seem to feel too much. Their bodies are either more sensitive or their minds are somehow a funnel for all the pain at the club, and all the dark agonies of the world. Harry Redknapp used to grow so weary of Gareth Bale going down in training at Spurs that he instructed the physios to leave him there. We played around him as he lay on the pitch. Eventually he would get up, too. With England it was Emile Heskey who was more sensitive to contact than anyone around him. At the time he was starting ahead of me and I was on the bench, which became doubly galling. Not only was he getting picked, but when he played, he turned me into a yo-yo. He would go down. Fabio Capello would signal for me to warm up. I’d do twenty seconds and Emile would climb to his feet. Five minutes later he’d be down again, and I would be off for another twenty seconds. By the end even the physios would be getting arsey with him, sighing as they stood up, grumbling as they picked up their medical bags. I just wanted to shout at the pitch, shout at Capello. ‘HE’S FINE! HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?’