by Peter Crouch
When the final whistle goes you return to the pitch, ostensibly to congratulate your team-mates, in reality to milk it a bit more. Big coat on but unzipped, so they can see the sweat on your shirt, no tracksuit bottoms to they can see the mud and toil on your legs, socks rolled down to emphasise how relentlessly you worked. A grand show, a masterful humblebrag, all disguised as a simple desire to shake Pascal Chimbonda’s hand.
That’s if you’ve done well. If you’ve had a shocker you’re off that pitch like a rabbit chased by a dog. No one there to meet you on the touchline, the manager pointedly looking elsewhere. Fellow players on the bench are only giving you a high-five out of sympathy, and everyone knows it. It’s patronising but no one else has even acknowledged you, so you take it gratefully and pull the hood up on your big coat and try to take solace in the protein shake the fitness coach has handed you – even if you know that one of the reasons he’s given it to you is that the club gets £1,000 from the drink manufacturer every time it gets shown on television, and the fitness man is probably on his own commission too.
Substitutions are tough for us, but they can also be brutal on the manager. Coaches can live and die by their decisions. Get it right and you change a game and a career. Look at Sir Alex Ferguson bringing on Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Teddy Sheringham for Andy Cole and Jesper Blomqvist in the 1999 Champions League final. United were 1–0 down to Bayern Munich and lucky it wasn’t more: then a stolen goal from each and United have made history. Graham Taylor, by contrast, took off Gary Lineker in his last game for England, brought on Alan Smith rather than Alan Shearer and the team crashed out of the 1992 European Championship.
Too often the timing appears to be based on habit rather than logic. Managers make a change at seventy minutes but rarely at fifty-five. If it’s not working, why not crack on? At least Mourinho was ballsy, subbing off his subs. It’s an admission that you got it wrong, but it’s better to accept that rather than let it cause more damage.
Don’t make pointless substitutions. What is the use in bringing someone on at eighty-nine minutes when you’re 2–0 up? What was the point of those international friendly matches when each side would make eight changes, and the bench would be littered with one-cap wonders? Jon Flanagan. Michael Ricketts. Francis Jeffers. These were games ruined by substitutions, careers mockingly defined by what should have been crowning glories.
Look, it’s not easy. You get your sub ready, give him his tactics, and then the other team make a change that renders yours outmoded. You’re winning, so you take off a striker and stick on a defensive midfielder, and they equalise. Now you need to score a goal with insufficient strikers and too many crabs going sideways in midfield. Do you put your striker back on?
It’s 0–0 so you lob on a third striker. He scores. Now you want to defend that lead, except you’re all forwards. You’re wide open through the middle. You’ve done exactly what you wanted to do and it’s only made it worse. Sometimes you throw on an extra man up front and it perversely makes it harder to score, since the opposition will now drop deeper or the new striker will make the same runs as you and mess yours up. Often the best form of attack is to keep the same shape and balance but to move the ball more quickly.
I seemed to be about panic. When I came off the bench the other team would often make a reactive change too – stick a big defender on, go to three at the back, send their tall striker back at set pieces to mark up. Panic and confusion are good things to see in your opponents’ eyes. I was an agent of destruction bringing terror and fear in his wake, even when in my head I was a dashing combination of Paul Gascoigne and Gianluca Vialli.
The greatest subs make you proud to be one of them. Solskjær: seventeen Premier League goals off the bench, including four in one insane sub appearance against Nottingham Forest in February 1999, as well as the Champions League final one a few months later and another famous peach against Liverpool in the FA Cup. Defoe: twenty-four Premier League goals as a sub; Olivier Giroud twenty goals by summer 2019.
These men understood the tiny nuances, the little gaps left open to you. They know that even when you have so little time you can’t go too hard too early. There are times when you’re so keen to make an impact that you make five flat-out sprints in the first six minutes and spend the next ten breathing out of your arse. The half-chance comes and you’re not there to pop it home because you’re in the centre-circle feeling sick.
Not for the super-subs. Geoff Hurst, England’s great hero at the 1966 World Cup, was only in the side as a replacement late in that tournament because first-choice Jimmy Greaves cut open his leg. Mario Götze played seven minutes of Germany’s World Cup quarter-final in 2014 and then didn’t feature at all as they walloped Brazil 7–1 in the semis. For eighty-eight minutes of the final against Argentina he sat on the bench. Then Joachim Löw pulled off Miroslav Klose, record goal-scorer at World Cups, and gave Götze his chance. ‘Show the world you are better than Messi and can decide the World Cup,’ he’s supposed to have told him. Seven minutes from the end of extra time, Götze volleyed André Schürrle’s cross home to steal away the biggest prize in football. All of it as a substitute. Beautiful. If perhaps still not quite as good as Messi.
CHAIRMEN
There may well be football club chairmen in this world who are quiet men or women with very little backstory of note. Characters with no obvious eccentricities, shy individuals as happy pottering around in their garden or curled up on the sofa with a good book as sitting in the single best seat in a football ground. They could conceivably exist. It’s just that in twenty-five years in football I’ve never met one. Every single chairman of every single club has been different to the average human being in some way. There is always an edge, always an angle. There is always a story.
And there is always an ego. I was a youngster at Spurs when the memo came round to everyone at the club: if you see Alan Sugar and his wife at any point in any part of the stadium or training ground, you are to address them as Sir Alan and Lady Sugar. It conjured up in my mind the image of the combative star of The Apprentice cantering around the White Hart Lane pitch on a grey charger, armour gleaming in the sun, helmet visor pushed up, jabbing a lance at groundsmen and ball-boys and shouting, ‘You’re fired!’ while Lady Sugar trotted after him on a palomino mare. No matter that he had received his knighthood for services to the home computer and electronics industry. Like Ben Kingsley and Nick Faldo he took his honour both with great pride and as a permanent prefix.
Other people might think of chairmen and picture would-be Manchester United owner Michael Knighton juggling the ball in front of the Stretford End, or Ken Bates buying Chelsea for £1 and selling his shareholding to Roman Abramovich for £17 million, or Peter Ridsdale leaving Leeds United £103 million in debt, Cardiff £66 million in debt and being acting chairman when Plymouth fell into administration.
I also think of Simon Jordan, Crystal Palace chairman during the 2000s. Simon always had a lot to say. I was still a young player at Portsmouth when he was in his pomp, a time too where there was a decent rivalry between his club and mine. I had never met him personally before a curious incident took place while I was on holiday in Marbella. I was with two friends, strolling down a hill towards the beach. A Mercedes convertible roared past us with the roof down and slammed on the brakes. Then it reversed at pace, to reveal an even more tanned than usual Jordan behind the wheel, sunglasses up on his head.
‘CROUCHIE!’
Straight in, no hellos, no introduction.
‘Crouchie! Who’s your agent?’
I told him. He nodded.
‘Tell him I’ll be in touch, yeah?’
No goodbye, sunglasses down, accelerating off down the road.
My agent never did hear from him. I’m not sure Simon left the game really liking footballers. As someone who had made his money with the Pocket Phone Shop, he may have resented the amount they expected to be paid. As things spiralled out of control at Selhurst Park his players got the blame. Perha
ps he was not particularly fond of managers either: he got through five in his first three years at the club. When you call your autobiography Be Careful What You Wish For, you perhaps move on with a few regrets.
I moved from Sir Alan at Spurs to Mr Wright at QPR. Circumstances weren’t great. Chris Wright had been successful in the music industry, signing Blondie, Spandau Ballet and the Specials’ 2 Tone label. At QPR he had been less successful, signing Paul Furlong and Steve Morrow. The only special thing was the debt: £570,000 being lost a month.
Administration was the inevitable result. There were supporter demonstrations and attempts to claw back some of those enormous losses in hopelessly petty ways like making everyone at the club pay for their food at the staff canteen. It wasn’t too bad for the players, but for the staff, a proportion of whom wanted to bring sandwiches from home, it was too much. With the club sinking towards the third tier, new chairman Nick Blackburn came to see me. ‘You’ve done well,’ he told me. ‘We’ve got to sell you to keep the club from going under.’ And so a skinny kid from Ealing who had arrived at the start of the season for £60,000 was offered at the end of it to Preston, Burnley and Portsmouth for £1.2 million. Portsmouth won the auction; Nick got my affection for telling me I was welcome back any time for inadvertently helping a club we both loved.
What QPR didn’t realise was that, with the subsequent arrivals of Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore and Tony Fernandes, life was only going to get messier. What I was about to discover was that the chairmen in my life were about to get louder.
Milan Mandarić knew a little about misbehaving footballers. While in charge of the San Jose Earthquakes in the late 1970s he had become good friends with George Best, which made the carpeting I received from him just after I had signed all the more galling. Due to an unfortunate angle on the security camera in a marina bar and a beer-based prank from Shaun Derry, it appeared that I was hammered midway through an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon. I wasn’t, but I was able to take a little revenge over the next few months as I sat on the balcony of my flat.
I had bought a place down on the marina. I was on the third floor. Milan had the penthouse on the top floor of the development across the way. I had a pair of binoculars out on the balcony, ostensibly to look at the yachts coming and going, but in reality to watch their owners messing about. Occasionally I’d lift the bins a few degrees and check out what our chairman was up to. I could see right into his flat and precisely what was going on. It was probably for the best that he never worked this out.
Mandarić was the sort of chairman who desperately wants to be involved with every aspect of the club. He had massive plans for Portsmouth, and he would eventually see many of them come to fruition under Harry Redknapp, but in these early days all of us were struggling. We were training at HMS Collingwood, a windswept naval base where the sailors clearly despised us. We had to wash our own training kit. When we failed to win a single match in a month, Mandarić came down to the dressing-room and told us he was therefore not going to pay us. Except because he was a naturalised American who had lived in the States for thirty years, he didn’t quite put it that way. ‘I hate coming down to the locker-room, but you guys aren’t performing, and I’m not happy,’ he said. ‘You’ve not done your job, so I’m not paying you for it.’
I was twenty-one and juvenile. After the locker-room reference I was in my own world of childish mirth. The older players, though, were incandescent. We had contracts. They had families to support. When I left QPR I had been on £800 a week. My new flat had cost me £217,000 and I thought I had made it. While everyone else was shouting about what a disgrace Mandarić was, I was thinking, I’ve still got loads left from last month. And also thought he had a valid point.
Milan was aiming higher. Despite the fact that Portsmouth were on a run of thirteen consecutive seasons in the second tier, that they had only been higher for a solitary season in the previous forty years, that the average attendance at Fratton Park was around 11,000, Milan managed to sign Robert Prosinečki, recently of Real Madrid and Barcelona, a man who at the previous World Cup had scored the goal that won Croatia the third-place play-off. Prosinečki had genius in his boots and a red Marlboro hanging off his lip as soon as those boots were unlaced. He had no interest in running but wasn’t asked to. He had no interest in speaking English so Mandarić signed a nice lad from Slovenia called Mladen Rudonja (nickname: Turbo Rudi) to act as his unofficial interpreter.
Prosinečki probably shouldn’t have played at times. Marlboro Reds are not famed for their cardiovascular benefits. But manager Graham Rix had clearly been told by the chairman, and had to swallow that one, just as he had had to swallow the locker-room invasion that undermined him even more. And so the fading maverick was allowed to both cut teams apart and do nothing defensively for his own. In a game against Barnsley he scored a hat-trick of sublime quality to put us 4–2 ahead with time running out. We drew 4–4. Mandarić watched on from the stands and began to plot Rix’s demise.
When I returned to Portsmouth six years later, by then an established England international, the club had changed just as much. Mandarić had sold up to Sacha Gaydamak, a man who appeared star-struck by big-name players, whose father Arcadi had at the time been convicted by a French court of illegal arms trading to Angola, and who was later charged with money laundering.
As a player you assume an owner will not spend money he does not have. And so you looked at the crowds of 15,000 and a team that included Lassana Diarra, Sulley Muntari, Nico Kranjčar, Jermain Defoe, Sylvain Distin and Sol Campbell and thought, you really are very successful at quite a young age, aren’t you?
You never got to meet him. Gaydamak was quite distant, unintentionally aloof, much like a budget Abramovich. You’d glimpse him occasionally through the open dressing-room door, gliding past with two huge bodyguards, never looking in, never speaking to any of his expensively assembled team.
We genuinely thought he was building something special. The club finished eighth in the Premier League. We got into Europe and were beating Milan at Fratton Park until a Ronaldinho free-kick and Pippo Inzaghi goal in the ninety-third minute nicked them a draw. We were walking over teams. Talking among ourselves, we reckoned we were a couple of signings away from getting into the Champions League.
Harry spotted the cracks first. When he departed I was initially puzzled. ‘Why is he leaving? We’re flying!’ He’d worked out what others would soon realise: Gaydamak’s funds had dried up, been frozen or just disappeared.
It got no better for Portsmouth. A Dubai-based businessman named Sulaiman Al Fahim bought the club off Gaydamak for a quid, and things were so grim no one even thought this cheap. It wasn’t even the low point for Fahim, who nine years on would be sentenced to five years in a United Arab Emirates jail for stealing £5 million from his wife. Forty-three days into his regime, and with none of the players paid, the club was sold again, this time to a Saudi Arabian called Ali al-Faraj, who had never been to Fratton Park. The unconventional chairmen kept coming – Balram Chainrai; a Russian named Vladimir Antonov who was then arrested for asset-stripping. Only when the supporters bought the club, with relegation from the entire football league a real possibility, did the recovery finally begin. Maybe Mandarić had been a delight after all. A great institution in turmoil. It shouldn’t have happened to a club like that.
No matter where they come from, no matter how long they last, there is a universal look for chairmen. A wool overcoat in the English winter, in dark grey or black, never a puffa jacket or anything from the club shop. A sober scarf, a self-conscious and badly muted celebration when their team score, like someone who has never truly celebrated a goal as a child; someone next to them who looks massively bored, who when the camera cuts to them mid-match is messing about on their smartphone.
The seat they sit on will literally be the most comfortable one in the entire ground. That’s the sort of privilege your investment secures you. The area around Abramovich’s box at Stamford
Bridge has overhead heaters, because south-west London is obviously parky when you’ve spent much of your childhood in the far north of Russia. Having seen his yacht docking when I was on holiday in Sardinia, such designs almost seem spartan: the boat had two swimming pools, two helicopter pads and a submarine on the back. I assumed it was reversing into port because the front of it was sticking out so much in front of the super-yachts either side. It wasn’t. It had been moored for hours. It was just three times longer than all the others. It was almost twice as long at the Stamford Bridge pitch. Maybe the submarine was to get from the stern to the bow without tiring your legs out from the walk.
It was the frogmen swimming around the hull, keeping it safe from nosey Sardinian fish, that made me realise that Roman must have viewed the purchase of Oliver Giroud like I would a pint of lager – a momentary decision with minimal financial impact to bring a couple of minutes of brief pleasure. When John Terry and Frank Lampard were at Chelsea he let them use one of his other five yachts for a free holiday. The staffing was apparently nuts – forty of them looking after four guests. If you dropped a drink on the floor a crack team of cleaners swept in like pinafored SAS and instantly made the incident invisible for you.
A chairman will generally have a personal suite at the ground. They will usually have a boardroom, and they will always have their own reserved parking space. It was when Erik Pieters stuck his car in Peter Coates’s designated spot at the bet365 Stadium that I realised a certain malaise had set in at Stoke. Had it happened at Spurs, Sir Alan Sugar would have ripped the players head off. Coates is a very nice man, and instead sent the security guard up to ask Erik to move it. But you could tell he wasn’t happy, and you could sense that the attitude which said it was better to sling your car in the owner’s space rather than in the players’ area thirty metres away was not going to translate well on the pitch. It wasn’t the only reason we got relegated from the Premier League in 2018 but it told its own small tale.