Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  In fact there is a strikingly similar passage in Carra, when Rafa Benitez tells the millionaire Carragher in 2005 that he won’t be getting a pay rise: “I was speechless. Rarely, if ever, have I been left feeling in such a state of numb shock.” Yet in Carragher’s book this is a passing incident, whereas in Cole’s the insulting offer is the centerpiece of the book. Indeed, it’s the main reason why Cole wrote the book: “I just hope the fans understand where I’ve come from, the reasons for leaving and the reasons for doing this book. I’m not asking for sympathy—just an awareness of what’s gone on, how I didn’t want to leave, and how I feel the board messed things up. Not me.”

  “I’m not the deepest of thinkers,” Cole admits at one point, and he genuinely seems to believe that once readers know the full facts of the case, they will see that he has no interest at all in money and was in the right on every point in the saga. The book is too easy to parody, largely because Cole has no ability to observe himself from the outside. At one point, he and Arsenal’s David Dein have yet another discussion about a new contract. At the end they shake hands, and Dein asks him to keep the conversation under his hat. Cole writes, “The most effective contract I can ever enter into is the unwritten one where I look someone in the eye and give my word.” He pledges: “Mr Dein, I won’t be telling anyone.” But later the negotiations take a bad turn, and so Cole recounts the conversation (including his monastic vow) in the book.

  No criticism of Cole is ever justified. Though he writes the book after leaving Arsenal, anyone who ever doubted his loyalty to Arsenal takes a lashing. When former player Peter Beagrie has the temerity to criticize him on television for not stopping a Swedish header at the World Cup, Cole notes Beagrie’s former clubs (“Manchester City, Bradford City and Scunthorpe United”) and the size of his head. Score settling takes up much of My Defence. People who do not either cross Cole or praise him barely figure in the book.

  He also spends many pages explaining (in bizarrely overwrought language) that Chelsea didn’t illegally “tap him up.” However, my conclusion on reading Cole’s own account is that they did. That in fact is exactly what the FA Premier League’s tribunal found. In any case, who cares? If you want to write a courtroom thriller, there needs to be something at stake. Here the issue was a player trying to move from a big club to an even bigger one. Cole ended up with a fine of $135,000. I wept bitter tears. It isn’t true that all soccer players have IQs of 63. However, jointly with Bat Ye’or’s mad Eurabia, Ashley Cole: My Defence is the worst book I have ever read.

  STAGE 4: STARDOM

  What’s it really like to be a famous player? As usual, it’s Carragher who captures it best. In May 2001 Liverpool completes their “Treble” of cups by beating Alaves 5–4 in overtime in the UEFA Cup final. Carragher describes the scene in the locker room afterward: “Mentally, physically and emotionally we were too drained to celebrate. I threw off my kit, kicked off my boots, dipped myself into a bath that was bigger than a swimming pool and stared blankly at my teammates. . . . The pace with which each triumph had overlapped the next meant none of us had had a chance to pause to absorb the scale of our accomplishment.... We were too exhausted and bewildered to appreciate the view.”

  The serial reader of these autobiographies soon grasps that being a multimillionaire professional player is often not much fun. The players can’t get up to much because of hassle from fans, tabloids, and their clubs’ dietitians. The nation follows their every move: Even Carragher receives an offer to sell his wedding pictures to Hello! magazine.

  All this encourages isolation. In any case, players are discouraged from developing interests outside soccer. It just drains energy. And so they end up spending a lot of time sitting around. Rooney, whose only hobby is sleeping, takes up betting on sports out of sheer boredom. A typical player’s summer vacation is Dubai in midsummer, but as Rooney says, all hotel rooms eventually come to seem the same. He doesn’t seem very interested in anything beyond soccer: “I suppose I’m laid back. I don’t get bothered, either way, by what people do or say. All I care about in life is being out there, playing soccer—and of course Coleen. That’s about it really.”

  The players are encouraged to marry young, in the hope that this will keep them at home, but it doesn’t always work out. All five players issue paeans to their wives or girlfriends that echo the ones they gave their parents, but at least two of said wives or girlfriends are now ex-wives or ex-girlfriends. Thankfully, Gerrard and Carragher largely spare us the details of their private lives. They only want to talk about soccer. Their books are the truer for it.

  Not everyone is so circumspect. The reader’s heart sinks when Cole reveals that he is about to propose marriage to Cheryl. Their chosen venue is Highclere Castle, and we feel their pain when Jordan and Peter Andre stage their own celebs’ wedding there shortly before the Coles’ big day. Cole still recalls Cheryl’s reaction verbatim: “no way! Right Ashley, we’re changing venues!” Astonishingly, Cole also reprints his wedding speech in full.

  Much of the fun the players have is on the team bus (Rooney and his United teammates play Shit Head, a simplified version of poker) or at the training ground (Gerrard and Peter Crouch at Liverpool play a game called Bare Arse, in which one player shoots at another player’s bare arse). Every player believes that his own club has a unique team spirit.

  There is the odd interesting personal revelation: It turns out that Rooney likes to sleep with a television set, a light, and a vacuum cleaner or hair dryer all switched on.

  But what you really want from these books is insights into life on the field. Of course, Rooney and Cole are unable to deliver any. Here is Cole’s analysis of “that skilled live-wire Cristiano Ronaldo”: “His skills are slicker than his hair, and any defender has to be on top of his game to stand a chance of keeping tabs on him.” And here is Rooney’s: “Ronaldo is a great lad and loves to have a laugh.”

  Luckily, Gerrard does provide the odd glimpse of soccer and players. He gives a wonderful account of the years spent unlearning his English love of the tackle. “For most professionals,” he explains, “tackling is a technique. For me it’s an adrenalin rush.... [T]he sight of the other team with the ball makes me sick.” When he tackles, he doesn’t hold back: “I can’t.” And so, in his early years as a pro, he keeps hurting people in training and getting sent off in matches. Gerrard recounts his catalog of victims with some pride. Eventually, he learns to take it easy and to tackle with one foot instead of two. This is a rare detailed account of the mechanics of soccer.

  Occasionally, too, Gerrard captures another player in a vignette. Here is Gerrard, in the penalty area and poised to fire in a loose ball against Arsenal in the FA Cup final of 2001: “I swung my foot back and then brought it in and down. No contact. The ball had gone. Michael [Owen] had pounced in front of me. Half-volley, full impact, past David Seaman, 1–1. I was still going through with my redundant shot when Michael sprinted away, making for Liverpool’s fans.”

  The scene nails what made the young Owen special. Gerrard manages the same for the referee Pierluigi Collina: “Jesus, he scared me. ‘Gerrard!’ he’d shout if I crossed the line into what he considered unacceptable, and he’d wave that long, bony finger at me in admonishment. Shit, I’ll be good. Collina’s bulging eyes were terrifying.”

  Carragher, who watches soccer obsessively on television, comes up with a surprising admission: Even he would have picked Ferdinand and Terry for England ahead of himself. “I was too similar to Terry. He’s a better version of me.”

  If there had been more expert analyses of their craft, getting through the books would have been less of a slog.

  STAGE 5: ELIMINATION WITH ENGLAND

  In the spring of 2000, Gerrard gets his first experience of England’s locker room. The occasion is only a friendly against Ukraine, but you wouldn’t know it: “As kick-off approached, the players talked louder and louder.... Battle-cries began. Each player was made to feel that nothing else in his life would ev
er matter as much as this. Club affiliations and expectations were irrelevant.”

  Shouts come from all corners of the locker room. “This is England!” “Our country!” “Don’t miss a tackle!” Fucking deliver!” Alan Shearer and Tony Adams stand in the middle of the room, Shearer screaming and Adams walking up to each teammate in turn to ask, “Are you fucking ready for this?” Gerrard looks Adams straight back in the eye and says, “You bet I’m fucking well ready.” In fact, he is “so hyped up I almost couldn’t tie my laces. Fucking let me at Ukraine. Where are they?” He has never experienced anything like this at Anfield.

  The golden generation will forever be associated with failure amid hysteria. Yet reading these five players’ accounts of international soccer, you see that they also have an artisan’s interest in their time with England. To them, playing for their country means close encounters with the best practitioners of their particular craft.

  For most of the five, the international debut is a source of anxiety. Lampard is lucky. Not many of us get to make our England debuts playing in midfield besides our beloved elder cousin, who guides us “through every step and pass.” During the game, Lampard even briefly thinks back to the old days in Jamie Redknapp’s garden, when the two of them would kick balls at Grandpa’s birdcage.

  Gerrard is so nervous before his first meal with England’s squad that he doesn’t dare go into the dining room. Happily, Jamie Redknapp (who emerges from these books as a thoroughly good egg) rounds up the other Liverpool players, and they all walk in together. Then they introduce Gerrard to his new teammates. Shaking hands with the United players, he discovers that they don’t have horns.

  The quality of training startles Gerrard. The other players pass the ball around much too fast for him. Shearer hits every ball into the top corner. And when Gerrard first runs into a Beckham cross in training, “It was a goal before I touched it. Honestly. Beckham puts his crosses in just the right place; it is in fact harder to miss.” Whenever England get knocked out of yet another tournament, the players get depicted as buffoons, but if you have actually played with them, you probably can’t see it like that.

  Internationals know that a newcomer in their world needs help, and so almost everyone rallies round—sometimes even the opposition. When Gerrard comes on as a sub against Germany at Euro 2000, and hits a few passes, Germany’s Didi Hamann, his teammate at Liverpool, runs past and says, “Keep doing what you are doing.” When the ball goes out of play, Gerrard turns to his opponent and confides, “I am shitting myself here, mate.” Hamann replies, “Relax Stevie. Just do what you do normally.” Of course, that doesn’t stop Gerrard taking him down shortly afterward with “a fullwhack tackle,” then shouting, “Fucking get up, Didi!” and later complaining to journalists that Hamann had “squealed like a girl.”

  Only one of the five authors is unfazed by his international debut. Admittedly, Rooney is surprised to be called up at seventeen years and three months: When Moyes first tells him, he assumes it’s for England undertwenty-ones. Yet once the misunderstanding is cleared up, Rooney goes out for a kickabout on the street with his friends. When he finally arrives at England’s hotel in St. Albans, he is so tired from the long drive that he sleeps for hours and has to be shaken awake for the team meeting.

  Gerrard’s overcharged emotional tone contrasts with Rooney’s blithe emptiness throughout their two books, but nowhere more so than on the topic of England. Before Rooney’s first game in a big tournament, England-France at Euro 2004, he politely waits for Sven-Göran Eriksson to deliver his team talk and then tells the other players, “Just give me the ball. I will do it.”

  Rooney’s self-belief is all his own. Yet most of our five players seem to share the national view that England is destined to win a tournament. After qualifying for the World Cup of 2002, Gerrard immediately thinks “of England in 1966, and how special it would be to bring the trophy home.”

  Self-belief peaks in 2006. Most of these books first appeared that spring, in a bid to benefit from the national hype, while Rooney got his $9 million from HarperCollins partly with an eye to his writing a Churchillian account of winning the pot. After the World Cup some of the books were reissued, with updates that try to explain the unexpected failure in Germany.

  On the way to glory, the players endure long days in their hotel in Baden-Baden. At least the games room is brilliant and equipped with its own comment book. Cole recalls, “Stevie Gerrard cracked us all up when he scribbled ‘What a pile of shite.’” Oh, happy days.

  Then they meet Portugal. “We were better than them. Miles better,” Cole reflects before the game. As the players wait to go out onto the pitch, Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo chat in the tunnel. The subject: Quinton Fortune. Manchester United’s South African reserve is supposedly leaving Old Trafford. Ronaldo asks Rooney whether he knows where Fortune is off to. Rooney doesn’t. Nor does Ronaldo. Then they wish each other good luck.

  All five memoirs agree on one point: Rooney did not stomp on Ricardo Carvalho’s genitals. Well, certainly not intentionally. The sending off was all Ronaldo’s fault. And so the game comes down to a penalty shoot-out—a climactic scene in all these books, like the shoot-out at the end of a western. All our heroes bar Rooney are there, as if Eriksson had deliberately selected his writers to take the penalties.

  “Of course you can’t help but think about Southgate, Batty, Pearce, Beckham and Waddle and all those penalty nightmare misses of old,” admits Cole, who is due to take England’s fifth kick. “It lurks in your mind somewhere, adding more pressure and a little bit of fear.”

  First, Lampard’s shot is saved. Owen Hargreaves scores, and then it’s Gerrard’s turn. “I broke away from the safety of my friends in the centrecircle. Suddenly I was alone.... The journey was only forty yards, but it felt like forty miles.” Following Eriksson’s advice, he counts the steps on his walk so as not to think about the pressure. Nonetheless, his shot is saved too. “For months, now, it had played on my mind that I would have to take a penalty in the world cup,” he explains. “I knew we would come up against a shootout in Germany. My nerve, and my accuracy, just went. Shit.”

  Next comes Carragher. As he later discovers, he has been chosen to take for the wrong reason. Eriksson’s assistant Tord Grip will explain afterward: “He took one really well for Liverpool in the Champions League final.” But Carragher notes that although he has watched the DVD of the Istanbul match “a thousand times,” he has never yet spotted himself taking a penalty. “It’s frightening to think England’s assistant manager could be so ill-informed,” he comments. It’s hardly as if a penalty shoot-out in the World Cup were an unforeseen event that nobody could have planned for. How did the Swedes keep themselves busy in the six months before the tournament?

  Nonetheless, Carragher places the ball on the spot—and scores! Unfortunately, the referee hasn’t blown his whistle yet. Carragher has to retake, and this time the keeper saves. Inevitably, Ronaldo scores, and England is eliminated again, before Cole gets his turn.

  A nation mourns, but not Carragher. Sitting on the team bus waiting to leave the stadium, he receives a text message that says, “Fuck it. It’s only England.” Those are Carragher’s thoughts exactly. Of course he is upset, but: “Whenever I returned home from disappointing England experiences one unshakeable overriding thought pushed itself to the forefront of my mind, no matter how much the rest of the nation mourned: ‘At least it wasn’t Liverpool,’ I’d repeat to myself, over and over. I confess. Defeats while wearing an England shirt never hurt me in the same way as losing with my club.”

  He thinks this is a typically Liverpudlian point of view. He recalls the fans on Liverpool’s Kop stand singing, “We’re not English, we’re Scouse.” As he says, “I’m sure there are a whole range of social reasons for this. During the 1970s and 1980s, Merseysiders became increasingly alienated from the rest of the country. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome developed, and it’s still going strong.... There’s no affinity with the nat
ional team.” To Carragher, Wembley 1966 doesn’t mean England winning the World Cup. It means Everton winning the FA Cup. In 1986, ten minutes after Maradona’s Argentina had beaten England, “I was outside playing with my mates copying the handball goal.” As a boy he traveled around Europe following Everton, yet it would never have occurred to him to go to Wembley to watch England. It must be different for Londoners, he says. These are honest thoughts, the sort you don’t tend to read in the tabloids in the months before a World Cup.

  Rooney gets over the disappointment fast too. In the locker room after the game, Eriksson tells him not to worry about his red card. “But I hadn’t,” Rooney tells us. “It was already history.” On the team bus to the airport, he sits next to Cole, tells him he is sorry, and says (according to Cole, anyway) that he will knock out Ronaldo the next time he sees him unless the Portuguese says he’s sorry. Yet Rooney doesn’t seem angry, more “let down” by Ronaldo. Then, according to Cole, “Wazza got out his mobile and tapped out a text to his Man United team-mate. By the look on his face, he was doing it through gritted teeth but he sent it. He texted something like: ‘Well done Ron!’ like he was being sarcastic or something, ‘All the best in the next round.’” Some English fans might have spent the next few years blaming Ronaldo, but Rooney gets on with his career.

  Even after getting knocked out, Cole still believes the pretournament hype: “On our day, without doubt, we’re better than them, France, Germany and Italy. The world cup had our name written all over it, and it should have been our time. We should have won it. But we didn’t play well enough.”