I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  You’re stuck in that situation. What are you going to do, barge your way into the cabin and fly back to Manchester, or pull a parachute out of the overhead bin and launch yourself out of the fire exit? And so you sit there, eyes clenched shut, thinking, why are we talking about making attempts? Can’t we just land successfully or go somewhere else?

  I saw Gatwick from all angles that day. Sideways, nose down, sliding past the end of the wing. At one point the runway appeared to be at forty-five degrees to the wheels. The relief on landing was almost indescribable – and then, being footballers, we immediately forgot all the trauma and started trying to flick each other’s ears instead. Only when the assistant manager mentioned the next away game did it all come rushing back to us. We’re at Newcastle on a Wednesday night? Oh God …

  At least the Nice Coach is waiting for you on the tarmac. You are taken straight to the hotel, where all the keys are laid out on the counter next to your name. No checking-in required, no swipe of a credit card for any extras. The shout will go out – ‘Dinner at seven o’clock!’ – and the next three hours open up for you to spend as you choose … as long as you don’t wish to leave the hotel, do any exercise or make a beeline for the bar.

  At Stoke it was almost our favourite time of the week. Every time it was the same: break out the Trivial Pursuit board, split into teams, roll the dice. At the risk of sounding boastful, Joe Allen and I ran the show. What that man doesn’t know about animals simply isn’t worth storing. I’m a pure sport and geography man, an orange and blue slice-of-pie specialist. Joe’s interests ranged far wider. You could throw him a literature question – the death-knell for most players – and he would have a decent stab at nailing it, particularly if it was related to science-fiction.

  The teams tended to be the same. The Kids: Jack Butland and Tom Ince. The Scots: Darren Fletcher and Charlie Adam. The Bournemouth Connection: Benik Afobe and Adam Federici. I have been around football for a long time, but few things have astonished me like hearing the words, ‘It’s either Pope John Paul I or II,’ coming out of Darren Fletcher’s mouth. Yet all of us would surprise ourselves. Jack Butland would pull some absolute blinders out of the bag. I would get things I didn’t even realise I knew, at least until someone picked up the Masters edition and the standard suddenly went through the roof. There were times then when I couldn’t understand the question, let alone fathom the answer. I’d be sat there with Benik and Charlie staring at me, thinking, do I answer with a colour or a city?

  Trivial Pursuit could last all day for us. If we had wrapped it up by dinner, it would be a football quiz in the evening – a proper multi-faceted one, conducted in the sanctuary of the massage room. Name the only player to have scored in the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, FA Cup, League Cup, Football League Trophy, FA Trophy, Champions League, Europa League, Scottish Cup, Scottish League Cup and the Scottish Premier League, Conference National and the Conference South. (It’s Gary Hooper, by the way.) Name the twenty French players to have made more than 100 appearances in the Premier League. I’m a tough quiz-master. I don’t allow any clues until you’re maybe one player short and have admitted defeat.

  At some stage the physios will go for a beer, or to bed. The massage room then becomes our playroom. You might start a game of two-touch – all of you in a circle, firing the ball at each other, first mistake bringing a collective punishment. This is where the ear-flicking of earlier becomes critical, because an ear-flick – aggressive, vindictive – is the usual penalty of choice. I’ve seen blood drawn, I’ve seen men on the ground. Phil Bardsley had a particularly effective strike, his forefinger winding back and smashing down like the sting on a scorpion. The really nasty players strike with power, dig in with the nail and then follow through to leave their finger in there, like a destructive midfielder leaving their studs up in the challenge. The dream is what you might call the Canal Shot: flicking across the lobe, finishing deep in the hole beyond.

  The Queensberry Rules of two-touch are one flick for one mistake, flicked by everyone in a row for two. It was quite acceptable to try to stitch up your fellow players by giving them a horror-pass, particularly if they were Marko Arnautović, but his touch was so good he would usually rescue it, and then seek cruel revenge. You would rather hit the floor and curl into a ball than take the full aural assault from a group of angry players. At least that way you could protect yourself from the rogue Bugle Shot, where some sniper would take you out on the nose instead. One good Bugle Shot is worth three Canals. It can be hours until your eyes stop watering.

  If the following day’s game is a night one, you will be up early, assuming the adrenaline from the ear-flicking has worn off and you actually slept. There will be breakfast, a team meeting to discuss formation and tactics, a light lunch at twelve. You will then, like a crotchety toddler, be sent back to bed for four hours.

  Not everyone can drop off. Some will watch box sets, play Fifa, or text the kitman to ask him to charge their smartphone. No one interacts in the corridors, for you are now a prisoner of your own room. I always enjoyed a sleep, the longer the better. Two hours was ideal, possibly brought to a conclusion by a gentle knock on the door and a parental murmur through the crack: ‘Peter … Peter … It’s time to get up for West Ham United …’

  The pre-match meal is always at four. I would shower before, waking myself up from the long snooze. Others will gamble on having time to shower post-food. Then it’s onto the nice coach to arrive at the stadium an hour and a half before kick-off.

  It’s rare that we go our separate ways afterwards. The club like to supervise your post-match recovery, make sure you’re eating the right foods and getting your protein-shake down you at the right time. The coach takes you back to the private terminal. The propeller plane awaits for your next rollercoaster ride through the bumpy skies.

  When you travel by train, as you often will into London, it blows people’s minds. Hang on, there’s the Manchester City squad at Euston station! Look, it’s Harry Kane walking past the West Cornwall Pasty Co. outlet by platform five! But train travel makes sense. Most footballers in north-west England live close to Macclesfield and Wilmslow stations. That’s about an hour forty to the middle of London, whereas a coach can take four or five; with a plane, even a private one, you’re still looking at three hours once you’ve got from terminal to ground. Clubs will book out two first-class carriages right at the front of the train, which can really annoy passengers who would ordinarily sit there. Even if we don’t need all the seats, no punters are allowed in our carriages, the vestibule guarded politely but also with great firmness by the woman who looks after all the travel arrangements. She will witness some remarkable sights in those carriages, but never do they leak, for which all clubs are forever grateful.

  You can’t take advantage of the usual first-class buffet options. That menu does not apply on the football special, where the best you can hope for is a tea, water or occasional juice. No small can of Coke, no complimentary pretzels. The best bit is when you pull into Euston, normally close to platform one if you’ve come from Manchester Piccadilly, and the posh coach is already waiting for you by the buffers. Harry Potter has Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross. The Premier League has a secret gate on the east side of Euston that opens only to let posh coaches in. You bowl off the front two carriages and walk straight up the stairs to your next seat. It drives the already angry usual first-class passengers into a frenzy, although not as furious a frenzy as when you ship a bad defeat in London, and then get off the train in the north at the same time as 500 fans who have made the same trip and had to pay for the pleasure. In the year that Stoke were relegated it could get quite nasty at Stoke station at ten on a Saturday night, and rightly so. We were letting the fans down. We were first class in ticket only.

  You end the day on a high. The rubbish bus is there in the station car-park to take you back to the training ground, but you suck it up because the journey is only ten minutes, and your own vehicle await
s. When you do disembark, it’s like a Premier League version of Wacky Races: twenty sports cars being started simultaneously, the quiet night air suddenly split with VRRROOOM and NIIAAOOOW, everyone thrashing it along the access road and then piling out onto the A-roads and motorways. Most of the local area is now wide awake, thinking that somehow they’ve moved to Silverstone overnight. Classic footballers: all of us doing exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time.

  THE END

  You make very few key decisions as a footballer. Most of the big thinking is done for you. If you’re lucky, someone decides to offer you a pro contract. If that goes well, you might get lucky again and have two or three clubs try to sign you. They’ll decide when you’re picked and where you’ll play if you are. You never get the chance to choose to play for your country. If one man likes you, he’ll select you. If the next man doesn’t, he won’t. It’s all out of your hands. You just play football as well as you can.

  Until you can’t.

  Most players I know didn’t want to retire. It was forced on them, like so much else. Jermaine Jenas couldn’t get up in the morning without pain. Ledley King’s knees meant he could barely walk. Bobby Zamora was gone in the back and the hip. These were young men, but they were living on anti-inflammatories just to get round the house. They couldn’t put themselves through the pain any more.

  I was the lucky one. My body still works. I thought I could have got through another season in the Premier League, and I reckoned I could have done okay. I could have scored goals. I understood that if I chose to step away then it would haunt me, and every Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, on midweek evenings in the depth of winter, I would think, why am I here rather than out there?

  I retired because I just knew. I knew that there was a natural end in sight, that there were new adventures opening up in front of me. You can love where you are and still know that it’s time to leave.

  I realised I would miss the big games, but I was missing those anyway. I love watching the top Premier League matches, the special nights of Champions League action. I know how good those evenings are. But I was still playing and I was already feeling jealous, because I was no longer at that level. I didn’t want to go down any further.

  There were moments in my final season at Stoke – a club I loved playing for, a place that I felt so at home for so long – when we were struggling to snatch draws from Championship teams we should have been comfortably putting away. I would look at players I didn’t think were better who were getting selected ahead of me, and I couldn’t really argue. I feared I had lost a yard – not of pace, because that was never there, but of timing. That critical slight reaction was no longer there. I became an angrier player, and I was never an angry player. I was flying into tackles in a way I would never have done at my peak, and I couldn’t work out why. Maybe it was the frustration of realising I was no longer the main man. Of knowing it was coming to an end.

  Football was all I had ever done from the age of sixteen. It was all I ever wanted to do. When I was twenty-four I assumed I would be retired at thirty-two, because everyone was in those days. I came up with Ledley and he retired seven years before me. Instead I made it into my thirty-ninth year, just like Jermain Defoe, as Teddy Sheringham and Mark Hughes had in generations gone before. We were all the type of players who could make an impact with our attributes at any age: Defoe would always bag you a goal, Teddy was all first touches and vision. In your later thirties it’s about football intelligence rather than speed of foot.

  I knew that some managers would still consider me as an asset coming off the bench, someone who could shake things up. That in itself was a reason for me to stop. I didn’t want to be the fifteen-minute man. I didn’t want to be a head on a stick. If you come on that late you’re usually chasing a game, so the ball gets lumped up to you, and you flick them on or knock them down. You can earn a good living doing that in the Premier League. But I felt I was better than that version, that I’d forgotten that I always wanted to be Gazza or Luca Vialli, not Ian Ormondroyd or Kevin Francis. I’d forgotten how to play, and so had those who wanted to use me. It was as if we had gone full circle, back to the clichés and misconceptions that dogged me at the beginning of my career: bang it long to the big man, don’t bother playing it to his feet. I didn’t want to be remembered like that.

  Twenty-three years as a professional footballer. That felt like a remarkably good innings. There are times as a footballer when you wish no one knew you, so you could walk down the street and go out messing around without being filmed on a phone or stopped in every aisle of the supermarket. They were rare regrets for me. I understood every single day how good football had made my life: playing for some of the great teams of the world, winning the FA Cup, perhaps the most famous trophy of all, playing at World Cups. Going to places I would never have seen, meeting people who would otherwise never have looked at me. Experiencing highs and setting off celebrations that make my heart fizz just thinking about them again.

  I had done my coaching badges while I was at Stoke, aware that a sudden end to it all would be much harder to cope with than a gradual transition. And then my book happened, and the BBC podcast with Tom and Chris kicked off and kicked on, and I enjoyed it all so much. I stood on a stage at the O2 in London at a festival named after me and had Liam Gallagher and Katherine Jenkins stroll on as guests. All for a skinny kid from Ealing who used to cry himself to sleep because he was teased so much about the shape of his body, who used to lie in bed wishing he could be a normal height like everyone else.

  On the opening day of my first season outside football, I felt the sadness heavy on me. I was fine not going through pre-season. I went on holiday in July for the first time. I was looking forward to having a proper Christmas for the first time in my adult life, no longer training on Christmas Day, playing Boxing Day, training the day after, spending New Year’s Eve in a distant hotel, far from family and boozy celebrations. Saturday mornings were now with my two daughters and two young sons, Bank Holidays going away with them rather than without.

  I still went to a game, because I sensed I had to. If I had stayed at home I knew my thoughts would have run away with me. Someone compared it to attending the wedding of a girl you had once been in love with, but I saw it more as a little personal wake. No one wants to go to a funeral, but you have to, and when you do, and sob your eyes out, you feel better afterwards. You’ve got through it. You have closed that chapter.

  Abbey expected more emotion from me in the summer, when I made the announcement. More tears on the day it became official. I thought about seeing a counsellor, because I’ve witnessed what happens to some players when they step away. They are rudderless ships, no idea where to go now the greatest adventure of their lives has come to an end. I knew that, much as Saturday mornings with the kids all climbing into our bed would be wonderful, I would be twitchy come the afternoon, waiting for an adrenaline kick that was gone for good. Every day in football I had laughed, usually proper belly-laughs, crying with the joy of it all. What else can replace that?

  You begin to adjust when you come to peace with the fact that nothing will. Retirement is not better or worse than playing. It is just different. You can’t compare your new life to your old because it serves no purpose. I love to look back but you need to look forward too.

  Little things catch you by surprise. You’ve never had to think about staying fit. It’s just happened as part of your day-job. Each morning you run hard, stretch, eat the most nutritious food without having to give a moment to its preparation or sourcing. Hang on, I thought. I’m going to have to get myself a Gold’s Gym pass. I’m going to be down the local Bannatyne’s, picking up my free towel in reception and asking if the Zumba class is already full. Member of the month, P. Crouch. Comes every day, crying.

  You can leave the game with good intentions, forget that you can no longer eat what you like because you’re no longer burning it off and end up doing what we might call the Full Ruddock: re-e
merging into the public sphere a few years later, looking like someone’s inflated you with a pressure hose. You start off thinking you’ll just pop the TV on in the morning, and before you know it you’ve smashed through the whole of Lorraine and are gutted that it’s over so soon. A couple of times I found myself so engrossed that I was calling Abbey through to discuss items I’d seen. ‘Abs! ABS! Check out the makeover they’ve given this woman. She looks a-mazing!’

  I began playing tennis again, a sport I played so much as a kid. I embraced the big cliché of all retiring players and started trying to get my golf handicap down. But I’ve kept the football skills ticking over as well. I lined up a few legends matches. I looked at the front lawn of my house and thought, we could squeeze a little five-a-side pitch in there – it’ll obviously be for the kids, but I may as well make it man-sized, so I can invite a few of the lads over, and it’s probably going to be quite intense, so should we look at the planning regulations for the installation of floodlights? I still let the rhythm of the football season dictate to me: summer off, getting stuck into work in August, working hard through autumn. I’m just more like the Bundesliga: mid-winter break to go somewhere warmer and eat ice-cream, mini pre-season on return and then piling back into business.

  There aren’t many careers that define you as totally as professional sport and then have to come to a complete halt. Musicians can keep going until their fingers or vocal cords finally fail. Even if their initial fame is a fleeting one they can come back for reunion tours when the nostalgia kicks in. You can’t do that with football. You can’t get the Liverpool Champions League final team of 2007 back together and take the match on tour. I’m not sure Harry Kewell would be fit for it anyway.