I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  Treatments have moved on from the magic sponge. There is what I refer to as the Horseshoe, a piece of metal that is held like a knuckle-duster and scraped down your calves and thighs to release tight fascial tissue. There is the Game Ready, a red rectangular box filled with ice that attaches to a black compression sleeve that you fasten around your injured limb. They’re so popular now that players will buy their own if the club refuse to supply one. You see lads with one Game Ready on one leg and one of the other, looking like they’re off to the moon.

  You see other players sitting on tennis balls or going up and down on foam rollers. Pretty much everyone wears compression tights after a game. It doesn’t matter how shaky some of the scientific evidence behind some of these gadgets might be. If it might work, if you know others who swear it does, you will give it a go. I still remember seeing Robbie Fowler in those thin brown nose-strips and pestering my mum until she bought me some. I wore them down the park and ran about with a look of amazement on my face, which may have been as much to do with how tight I’d stuck it on as anything else. ‘Boys! Look how fast I am! I’m faster with this on, aren’t I?’

  My personal favourite now is something called the Hypervolt, a sort of massage gun that I apply to my back and glutes to loosen everything up before a game. My team-mates will always take the mickey when they see me using it, and quite rightly so: it looks like I’m pummelling myself with an instrument purchased in a Soho back-street. But it was all I needed to get me ready for a game, whereas others had the most elaborate regimes. Huth would do what looked like a full gym work-out – grunting press-ups, swinging kettle-bells, sweating heavily, balancing on things that made it difficult to balance. Meanwhile I would be chatting to a few mates while dildoing myself.

  Different strokes. I’ve also developed asthma in the last few years, something the club doctor told me could come on at any time. The dildo does nothing for that, although maybe I’m using it at the wrong end. I have to use a brown inhaler like everyone else. At least I’m not Mario Balotelli, who claimed he was allergic to grass. And training. And early nights.

  Our paranoias about injury, our desire to stay a step ahead of everyone else, means that players become attached to particular physios and their idiosyncratic treatments. Jonathan Woodgate brought his old Leeds man into the England set-up, and the physio subsequently got a big-money move to the New York Knicks NBA team. Ledley brought Nathan, his rehab man at Spurs, into Capello’s England camp, which went down badly with Fabio.

  Capello had his own men and his own strange ways. One of his masseurs used to follow every treatment by blasting you across the back of the legs with a hairdryer. We were never told what it was supposed to do, which made for some uncomfortable moments as you lay there naked on the massage table, your arse-hair parting beneath the blasts of hot air like a wheat field in a storm. I was also instructed to practise a breathing technique which involved standing in my room with one arm out to my side and the other holding on to the wall, which was something I only usually did after coming in from a big night on the sauce. I tried it, it did nothing. Still, my arse-hair had never looked better.

  You’ll be familiar with some of the embarrassing ways footballers have got themselves injured. Dave Beasant, the former Wimbledon, Newcastle and Chelsea goalkeeper, dropping a bottle of salad cream on his foot. Kevin Kyle, one-time Sunderland and Scotland striker, holding his eight-month-old son on his lap while trying to heat up a bottle of milk, spilling boiling water all over his family jewels and having to phone in sick with burned testicles. Sam Henderson, a goalkeeper with Queen of the South, damaging his shoulder after being hit by a runaway cow on his dad’s farm.

  I have my own to add to the list. While a young man at QPR I used a spare weekend to visit some mates over at Bath University. On the way home from school a few years earlier we had developed a game that involved diving into bushes. You could go front-side or back first, the technique a matter of personal preference. The best hedges were dense enough to hold your weight and offer sufficient spring to launch you at least partially back out. There were some absolute crackers along Ealing Common. With the right speed and angle of approach you could pull a full somersault off the best.

  In Bath, bellies full of cheap student drinks, heads full of schooldays nostalgia, we went for it again. I will say this about the West Country: it has some absolutely first-class hedges. Ealing was good, but Bath was a whole new level, a real Mecca for the bush-jumping enthusiast. Bang back into form, at the absolute peak of my game confidence-wise, I spotted a beauty coming up, accelerated away and launched myself into a trademark parabola – only to spot, at the very last moment, a large metal spike sticking up through the middle.

  Thank God my reactions were still sharp. Twisting in the air, I somehow managed to brush it with my leg rather than catching it amidships, where it surely would have killed me. As it was, I still sustained a brutal gash up my thigh. As I lay there on the pavement in agony, blood coming through my jeans, I thought: is this how it all ends? Is this how I go out of professional football, when I’ve barely even begun?

  When I got back to London I had to lie to everyone. I told manager Gerry Francis I had tripped and fallen on a coffee table. I was certain he didn’t believe me, and I was so relieved by my relatively swift recovery that I vowed to change. In an emotional phone conversation with my mate in Bath, I formally announced my bush-jumping retirement. Of course I missed it: you don’t commit to a new sport like bush-jumping, take it to fresh heights of daring and skill, and not have your regrets.

  Mine was that we had just opened a fresh front in the sport, based more around the gritty urban scene than leafy provincial towns. We would jump on the train from Ealing up to Soho, wait until kicking-out time when all the bars and restaurants were lobbing out their rubbish, and then focus on the biggest pile of grey bin-bags we could find. It was a halcyon period. Find the right back alley and you could get stacks of rubbish bags sixteen or eighteen deep. One night all of us were on fire – speed, aggression, the most innovative of angles. We thought the night could get no better – and then one of my mates let out a yell, and started waving something in the air. ‘TWENTY QUID! I’VE FOUND TWENTY QUID!’

  He was still shouting that when a taxi came round the corner, failed to spot him and drove right into him. As in slow motion he flipped up in the air, rotating over the bonnet and crashing down on his back in the road. We stood frozen, aghast. The driver stepped out, hands on his head: ‘Son, are you okay? Son?’ Nothing for what seemed like an age. And then our mate raised first his head and then one extended arm, a huge grin spreading across his dazed face.

  ‘I got twenty quid. I’m brilliant!’

  NERVES

  You hate nerves as a footballer and you love them too. You grow accustomed to them and you never really learn how to lose them. They come in the big games and the small games. When they go, you know deep inside that maybe your time with football is coming to an end.

  When I played for England we were often told to have a little sleep in the empty hours before games, particularly when it was an evening kick-off. The hotel would be quiet, the bed large and comfy. You’d lie there after your doze, all warm and cosy under the thick duvet, no one to bother you, understanding that in three hours’ time you would be running out into a cauldron of 80,000 screaming fans, half of the country watching on television. And then the thought popped up in your head: I could just stay in this bed. I could just stay here and not have to face those nerves, not have those knots in my stomach, not have the sick feeling fizzing round my guts. What if I don’t answer my phone, or the knock on my door? What if I just don’t go out? Later, having played the game, you ride a wave of adrenaline so strong you can’t sleep again until close to dawn. You forget all about the nerves, until the next match comes around, and they begin again, and you remember once more that they never end.

  There was a night, up in Manchester, with England playing at Old Trafford while Wembley was being redev
eloped, when I almost gave in to them. We were on the team coach from the Lowry hotel, driving slowly through the traffic around Salford Quays, when I glanced out of the window at a pub by the side of the road. At a table by the door was a bloke about my age, sipping a pint, messing about on his phone. In that precise moment, I would have done anything to swap places with him – to be sitting there with a beer, not a care in the world, ready to enjoy watching England on the telly and then go home without millions of people discussing every aspect of what you’d done. I’m pretty certain everyone in the pub would have given anything to have taken my place, on the England coach on the way to play for their country, getting very generously rewarded for it too. It was a ridiculous, stupid thing. But for about thirty seconds, it seemed like the most attractive idea in the world.

  I got it again during the World Cup finals in Germany in the summer of 2006. Playing in the World Cup is the pinnacle of any Englishman’s career, something I’d dreamed about as a kid and had hoped for desperately for the previous few years as I’d tried to establish myself in the Premier League. In the dressing-room before our opening group game, I looked at the players getting changed around me – David Beckham, Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, John Terry. The enormity of it all hitting me all of a sudden: oh my God, Peter, you’re at a World Cup! You’re actually about to play!

  It was as if I were watching the whole scene on TV, as if I were back home seeing it all relayed to my front room. And with that came the butterflies. There is a whole country watching this, I thought. There will be everyone I know and care about watching me, and millions and millions more I have never met who will be passing judgement on everything I do. I sat there, swallowed and thought, why didn’t I just become a bin-man? And yet the moment I walked out of the tunnel it all turned to excitement.

  If it was bad for me, it was worse for my family. They were powerless to do anything about it; at least I could lose myself in the game. My mum and dad felt more uncomfortable the longer the game went on. They cared so much, and they just wanted to protect me from the worst consequences. My dad would find himself going to specific cafés for his pre-match lunch in the hope that it would somehow bring the luck of the week before, walking the dog at certain auspicious times, pulling on the same lucky pants.

  Before that World Cup my mum sat me down and made me promise that, should we find ourselves in a penalty shoot-out, I would not take one. It was a tricky situation for me. I could see where she was coming from, but I could also picture the look on Sven’s face in the team huddle out on the pitch as I told him his striker couldn’t step up because his mum hadn’t given permission. As it turned out I got lucky, although it was also as unfortunate as it could be. Because Jamie Carragher had been banging in penalties every time we practised them in training, he was given the fifth one when we played Portugal in the quarter-finals. I had come on as a sub after Wayne Rooney was sent off, and was lined up for number six. Carra cracked. Ricardo went the right way and palmed it onto the bar. I had kept my promise to my mum but at the expense of England going out of the World Cup. In that scenario the only real winners were Portugal.

  You can feel it on the pitch when the nervousness has spread to the fans. The atmosphere sours. You don’t hear individual shouts but you can sense the vibes. There is a different sound for ‘we-need-a-goal’ nerves, a distinct one for ‘this 0–0 is killing me’, another for ‘we’re 1–0 up and hanging on’. You can also see it in the eyes and the actions of a manager. When he changes his mind on something, you know he’s struggling. A manager has to be decisive, even if that decision is wrong. It’s like being an army officer leading mutinying troops. You might be wrong, but you have to convince all the wannabe rebels that you’re right. Even if you don’t know the answer, pretend you do, or else the players will be all over you.

  At Southampton Paul Sturrock used to say something, listen to an assistant and then change his mind. It might have made sense but it also weakened him in our eyes. We didn’t want weakness. We wanted a leader. It’s like Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can, attempting to perform an surgical operation with no previous experience. ‘Do you concur?’

  Nerves should be crippling and for some players they are. You survive because you know that if you can get through them, if you can overcome the abject terror and fear of failure, then the release that follows will be the best feeling you ever have. There will be a blast of endorphin that you could never replicate any other way, a buzz so intense that you almost feel sorry for someone who never gets to experience it.

  I played professional football for a long time. Even at thirty-eight, sitting on the bench, I would feel the full force of the old panic and pleasure when the manager signalled at me to get ready. I’d be thinking, ‘Do I actually want to go on?’ at exactly the same time as thinking, ‘For God’s sake, man, get me on, yeah?’ I’d be standing on the touchline, stripped down to my kit, see my squad number come up on the electronic board held aloft by the assistant referee and go almost weak at the knee with nerves. It happened in league matches with Burnley when we were safe. It happened with Stoke when we were down in the Championship. All of it worse as a substitute, with more time to think about everything, with more noise from the fans seeping into your brain, with no physical release to distract you from the sick feeling building and building in your stomach like a toxic soup.

  And the weirdest thing of all? Every single footballer knows exactly what I’m talking about, and yet none of us really discuss it. It’s the elephant being sick in the corner of the room. It’s the one taboo subject in an environment where you will happily chew over the freakiest and darkest things known to mankind.

  Maybe it’s a strange kind of machismo. Maybe it’s because everyone has to find a way to cope and so just gets on with it. But you can see it all around you, in the way that normally chatty team-mates fall silent, or the funny ones go serious, or the cocky ones start going pale and dropping things. In 2019, I took part in a BBC documentary about mental health with the Duke of Cambridge. Gareth Southgate told a story about one of his early games with England, when David Seaman sat down next to him afterwards and said, ‘Oh, I was so nervous before the game.’ Gareth had been shocked. ‘I was thinking, Dave Seaman gets nervous? Now that can’t be. And suddenly the whole dressing-room changed for me, because I suddenly started to look at how everyone was carrying on before the game, getting their own mind right …’

  Gareth can talk about these things. Most players go the other way. The worse they feel, the less likely they are to share it with anybody. I attempted to cope with humour and messing about, trying to make it clear that I wasn’t really bothered at all by trying to look like a man bothered by nothing. Others stick on their headphones and don’t talk to anyone. Some – those who would usually rather eat a book rather than read one – suddenly immerse themselves in the duller parts of the match-day programme. ‘Give me a moment lads, I’m catching up with what the groundsman’s been up to in his latest column.’

  Even though I believe it’s good to talk, I also believe it would make me more nervous if I did so. By talking about my nerves I would be focusing on them more. By listening to other people’s worries, I know I would be helping them but I’d also be introducing fresh fears into my own head. ‘Are you worried about the physical power of the right-sided centre-half, Crouchie?’ Not until you flagged it up I wasn’t. ‘Yeah, there’s a record-breaking television audience expected for this one, mate.’ Brilliant. Cheers. That’s really helped.

  It’s not like my system is flawless. Pretending not to be nervous only works if your pretending is convincing. I got quite good at reading out choice selections from the programme, an act most team-mates seemed to swallow. It genuinely looked from the outside like I was taking it all lightly, when actually the reason that it looked like I was taking it lightly was because I was taking it very seriously indeed. Everyone has a coping mechanism. This was mine. On my face, a big grin. On my lips, a quirky stat from an opposition pen-pi
c. Inside, a voice dying to cry out: ‘I’ve been this way all my life! School games! District trials! On loan at Dulwich Hamlet! The Championship, the Champions League, the World Cup!’

  The Middlesex schools athletics finals, Perivale track, west London. I’m fifteen years old, down to run the heats of the hundred metres. We are being called to our blocks in rows of eight, and I am still three lines back when the nerves take over. I can’t do this, I think. I don’t want to be here. I do, but I don’t. I wanted to be picked. I now want to be anywhere else than a part of suburban London that even most people in suburban London have never heard of. I want to run so I can win. I don’t want to run because I can’t win, because I can’t run. I can’t run because I am so nervous my legs won’t move. Woah.

  Suddenly my heat was being called. My line had reached the start. All the cool kids from my school were on the grass around the track, watching on. Every cool kid from west London was there. All the nice girls. All my mates. Everyone.