Regardless of my involvement, David took the club by the scruff of the neck and, with very little money but lots of grit and determination, dragged them back up to the top end of the table, finishing in the top six most years. Unless you were there during that period, you could never truly appreciate what that man has done for the club – to the point that, by the time I left, he had built a squad of young, very talented, super-fit, highly motivated players who were ready to push on to the next level and knock on the door of another top-four finish and the Holy Grail of the Champions League.
Everton are now based at one of the finest training grounds in Europe (the club moved to Finch Farm in 2007), and all the structures in the other vital areas, such as youth development and scouting, are in place to ensure the steady progress under David can be maintained.
It is also right to mention the contribution made to the club by the chairman, Bill Kenwright. The chairman of any football club is an easy target for criticism and I know Mr Kenwright has had more than his fair share. I also know from my dealings with him, and the way the boss spoke about him, just how committed he is to the club and its wellbeing. I am sure, in the whole of the Football League, you would not find any chairman who loves his club as much as this man (although Derek Shaw at Preston would run him close).
I will give you an example of how passionate he is. A few years ago, we were going through a bad patch and results were poor. We were at the wrong end of the table and our next away game was against one of the London clubs (a lot of ex-footballers will testify it gets harder and harder to remember exact results and the opposition as the years go by). We were at our hotel in London the night before the game when the boss informed us that the chairman wanted to speak to everybody. That put the shits up a few people and we all thought it was going to be a bollocking of some sort. He dined with us in the private dining room set aside for us.
It was tense, to say the least. Then he got up and addressed us. We were waiting for the flak to fly. We could not have been more wrong. Mr Kenwright spoke of his affection for the club, how he had first started following Everton as a young boy and how it had shaped and enriched his life. He spoke of his admiration for the current set of players, how he wouldn’t swap any of them and if we all stuck together, everything would be OK.
It was an amazing and moving speech, and it meant a great deal to everybody involved to be reassured they had such a supportive chairman. In terms of oratory skills, the speech reminded me a little of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address but, as we’d just eaten our pasta, I preferred to call it the Spaghettisburg Address. The next day we drew and then went on a good run to move up the table.
When you are responsible for the rehabilitation of players with serious long-term injuries, it is very difficult not to get emotionally involved – well, it was difficult for me anyway.
After all, it was me who carted them off the pitch, diagnosed the injury in the dressing room, broke the bad news, comforted and consoled them. It was me who arranged and watched the subsequent surgery, who was at their bedside in those nervous moments before the anaesthetic took effect. It was my face they saw first when they opened their eyes post-operatively (poor bastards), me who spent every day with them, side by side, through the long recovery period.
Mostly, with all the advances in surgery, we got good results and the player returned to action as good as new. Sometimes, however, things didn’t work out too well and it caused great personal heartache.
Unfortunately, in my last year at Everton, we had too many serious injuries which caused a huge emotional drain on the medical staff. It really was the perfect storm of injuries. One after another. It was unbelievable, but not unbearable (I can bear anything now, can’t I?). I felt personally responsible for not being able to give David a strong team every week, which I had always previously managed to do. David didn’t blame me, but those walks up the stairs and the subsequent breaking of more bad news started to make my 51-year-old legs feel their age.
During the prolonged rehabilitation periods, you do get very close to the player and their pain becomes your pain (as if I hadn’t already had enough pain in football). One of the guys I got closest to at Everton was Yakubu, as a result of the Achilles tendon he ruptured at White Hart Lane at the end of November 2008. It was a horrific injury and, when I watched the brilliant surgeon, James Calder, repair it, I feared the worst for ‘The Yak’, especially given the power and size of the man. He was facing nine months out with no guarantees he would recover. He had to spend the first three months wearing a special boot and could not do any training at all. The bookmakers had stopped taking bets on The Yak becoming the first 100kg footballer.
The rehabilitation process was painful and painstaking, and we became good mates. He was the perfect professional and actually lost weight. We had a great bond and a great working relationship – even though I nearly drowned him one day. We were about to start the swimming pool phase of The Yak’s rehabilitation and, despite his protestations that “black men can’t swim”, I coaxed him into the pool. He was wearing a lifejacket, a special buoyancy suit and some ankle floats. Just like the Titanic, I thought this man was unsinkable. Nevertheless, once he was in the water he was clutching the side and hanging on for dear life. I explained he could not possibly sink, so he should let go and start paddling his arms and feet.
Eventually, after I had prised his fingers off the safety bar, he reluctantly let go and, fuck me, sank straight to the bottom of the pool. He couldn’t have sunk any quicker if he had been wearing a suit of armour. All I could see, way down at the bottom of the pool, was the top of his head and a stream of bubbles was exiting his lungs at an alarming rate.
Luckily, all the other players were around the edge of the pool doing a cooldown, and the ones who weren’t helpless with laughter gave me a hand to fish The Yak out. I am sorry, Yak, but that is right up there with the funniest things I have ever seen in football.
All the hard work and dedication, on both our parts, paid off and The Yak returned to the first team at Hull in September 2009. He scored a goal after just 11 minutes and ran 50 yards to embrace and thank me. It was a fantastic moment for me and I have a picture of it on my wall at home. You may not think it means much, but anybody who knows The Yak will testify he doesn’t like to waste energy running needlessly. Thanks Yak.
I really enjoyed the challenge of working with the so-called ‘injuryprone’ players. I had great success with Big Dunc and enjoyed similar results in the two years in which I had the pleasure of working with the charming, highly intelligent and brilliant Louis Saha.
We were excited to work with Louis despite his injury-prone reputation. In his first season at the club, we were extremely careful with him, in terms of not pushing him too hard, and quickly gained his trust because he had intimated that at all his previous clubs he felt this had not necessarily been the case.
By his second season we had developed a relationship that allowed us to push him harder. In those two seasons, Louis played nearly 70 games and scored more than 20 goals for Everton, despite being injured and out for six weeks when he first came to us from Manchester United.
When Louis signed his new contract in February 2010, Bill Ellaby, the player liaison officer, handed me an envelope. He explained it was a thank you from Louis. I was touched he had taken the trouble to thank me in writing. I opened the envelope thinking, “Fuck me, this is a thick letter.” But it wasn’t a letter; it was an envelope stuffed with £50 notes.
That is the type of gratitude I prefer. After all, let’s face it, talk is cheap. Apparently, he rewarded every member of the medical staff in the same way. I think he respected us for the care and time we gave him. It was a magnificent gesture from a great guy. Sometimes, though, things don’t work out quite as well, and occasionally a player never fully recovers from an injury. That happened to Li Tie, and it caused me great personal sadness.
Li Tie – the ‘Chinese David Beckham’ – was the nicest, humblest guy
I ever met. He had a great first season at Everton in 2002/03 and the fans loved him. They used to sing, “One Li Tie, there’s only one Li Tie.” I used to sit in the dugout and think there must be fucking millions of Li Ties back in China!
Sadly, he broke his leg in early 2004 while playing for China and, even though it was a simple fracture, it just refused to mend. We tried everything to make it heal, every type of bone stimulator, but it was a torturously slow process. Eventually, and understandably, I started to get pressure from the boss. Basically, he wanted to know when Li Tie was going to be fit. I told him he would be fit for the start of the New Year.
In the first week of January, I was called to David’s office, where the coaching staff were assembled, and again asked the question: “When is Li Tie going to be fit?”
“As I said before, the start of the New Year.”
“Baz, it’s January now.”
“Yes, I know, but don’t forget he’s Chinese; his New Year is in February.”
I consider that to have been one of my finest-ever jokes but, do you know what? Not one person in the room even smiled.
Of course, it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all. Li Tie never fully recovered from that injury and left Everton in May 2006, and I felt great sadness and personal responsibility.
While experiences such as those with Li Tie inevitably put a strain on me professionally, the good memories certainly outweighed the bad in my time at Everton.
I have so many fantastic memories from my time at Everton – from running up Bondi Beach with Tim Cahill, to crossing balls for Tim Howard in Soldier Field in Chicago when I went to watch him play for the USA.
I have been to the USA eight times, the Far East twice, Australia twice and virtually every country in Europe. Thanks to Everton, I have been to the top of the Empire State Building, walked over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, visited space control in Houston, drunk a Singapore Sling in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, seen IndyCar racing in Canada, had a coffee in the first ever Starbucks in Seattle, climbed to the top of the Willis Tower, the highest building in America, taken a trip to an old gold mining place in the Rocky Mountains, watched Shaquille O’Neal play basketball for Miami Heat in Florida and Roger Clemens play baseball for the Houston Astros in Texas, swung myself around on the gym equipment on Venice Beach in Los Angeles, gone to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, swum in Lake Michigan, stood in the middle of the largest public square in Europe in Ukraine, ridden an elephant in Thailand and witnessed a very unusual game of ping-pong in Bangkok.
A conversation I had with my son a couple of years ago provides an interesting example of just how many places I visited. Ollie came home from school and asked me to help him with his homework about assassinations. There were three he had to learn about.
“Dad, who was the American President who got shot last century?”
“Well, son, that was John F. Kennedy, and he was assassinated in Dallas in the early ’60s. In fact, I have stood on the very spot where he was killed.”
“OK, and what about that English pop star?”
“Well, son, that was John Lennon. He was murdered outside The Dakota building on the corner of Central Park in New York. In fact, I have stood on the very spot where he was shot.”
“And the fashion designer?”
“Well, son, that was Gianni Versace and he was killed outside his mansion on Ocean Drive in Miami. In fact, I have stood on the very spot where it happened.”
So many great times, so many wonderful memories, so many famous players I had the honour of working with. And the best one? The best memory?
It has to be going to the FA Cup final in May 2009. Why that one? Possibly because it was the most recent highlight but primarily because, as a child and footballer of a different era, the FA Cup still held an almost mythical, magical place in my heart.
The week before the final, as well as the build-up to it, was a condensation and microcosm of all the hype, all the media interest and all the preparation that surround modern-day football – shoe-horned into that magical but intense period prior to the game.
The regular season had finished on a high with a 2-0 win at Fulham – arguably our best performance of the whole campaign – and a well-deserved fifth-place finish. All the teams breathed a collective sigh of relief that the season was over and went on their holidays – except for the cup finalists, Everton and Chelsea, and Manchester United who were taking on Barcelona in the Champions League final.
The drug testers visited our training ground early in the week. That was the safest bet of the year. I assume they visited Chelsea’s too – with only a few teams left in full training, it was predictable. It was always a slight worry when you thought a visit from the drug testers was imminent. Not because you ever suspected any of the players would be guilty of an offence, but because there were lots of thorough and painstaking procedures to be negotiated, just to complete the test within the legal parameters.
All went well, though, so I could relax and start to enjoy the build-up to the FA Cup final. In a funny kind of way, those few days of training prior to the match, with the media attention and heightened importance, were similar to those final few sessions at Halifax before the crucial last game of the season against Hereford United in 1993. A case of just watching the clock and counting down to the kick-off.
It was, of course, the complete polar opposite in the mindset of the personnel involved in either of those situations – Everton’s players excited and looking forward to the occasion, Halifax Town’s players (and manager) crapping themselves and dreading the game. Maybe the difference in terms of expectations of the outcome was the clearest quantifiable measurement of just how far I had come since then.
We flew down to London on the Thursday by private jet (of course) and stayed in the Grove Hotel near Watford, which is arguably the finest hotel in England. An added bonus of this magnificent place is the fact it has a really good football pitch, so we could train that afternoon and again on Friday morning. Training was fantastic on both occasions and the players were prepared to perfection by the boss.
The weather was gorgeous and, in the afternoon, the staff all sat around the outdoor pool with its lovely little man-made beach and enjoyed each other’s company, secure in the knowledge that, whatever the result, Saturday was going to be a day we would all remember for the rest of our lives.
On Friday evening, the boss met the staff in the bar, bought us a couple of beers and thanked us for our work that season. We toasted Everton and retired to our rooms to try our FA Cup final suits on. The outfits were amazing – suits, shirts, ties, shoes, all from one of the finest tailors in London. Rumour had it the whole ensemble cost more than £1,000 per person, with the handmade shoes alone supposedly worth more than £300. A far cry from sharing the beans on toast at the motorway service station.
There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky on Saturday morning, literally or metaphorically speaking. I put my suit on and looked at myself in the mirror. I felt intensely proud of what I had achieved, where I had come from. All the hard work had paid off. Ironically, at that moment, it didn’t seem like it had been hard work at all – more a question of following the path fate had sent me down.
We got on the coach and left for Wembley. There were TV crews and well-wishers everywhere. All the hotel staff had come out to see us off. We had a police escort for the short journey and the noise of a helicopter buzzing over the top of the coach relayed back those classic cup final pictures that had so excited me as a child – a child who could only ever have dreamed of a moment like this.
And then, just when you thought your senses couldn’t absorb any more emotion from the occasion, we turned into Wembley Way and saw – and heard – the Scouse Army. Where were the Chelsea fans? The Toffees had done the impossible and turned the FA Cup final into a home game. Every hair on my body – even the ones that had dropped out long ago – stood up.
I caught the eye of my great friend, Dr Ian Irving, a man who had been
with the club for more than 30 years, and I knew in that moment, in that brief eye contact, we were both swallowing hard to stop the tears forming.
I walked into the dressing room – huge, palatial, wood-panelled with a separate medical room complete with ice-making machine and a massive fridge full of drinks. Fortunately, Jimmy Comer – probably the only masseur in the Premier League with the club badge tattooed on his calf – had already put all the gear out so the smell of the wood panelling and 30 pairs of hand-made leather shoes was intermingled with those smells – the smells of football – the Vicks, leather of the boots, Deep Heat, shampoo and massage oil.
Close your eyes and inhale the smells, inhale the memories.
Psychologically I felt my journey of discovery was complete; it had gone full circle. I had started at the very top all those years ago at Birmingham and endured one of football’s greatest rollercoaster rides. It had been bumpy and there had been highs and lows but I had stayed on it and ridden it from the top division to the bottom division, and all the way back to its final destination – Wembley and the FA Cup final.
EPILOGUE
It would be nice to say we went on to lift the trophy, paraded it around Wembley, returned in glory via an open-top bus to a civic reception on the Liverpool Town Hall steps in front of tens of thousands of delirious Everton fans and all lived happily ever after – The End.
Life’s not like that, though (unless you are in an Enid Blyton book), and we lost the FA Cup final 2-1, despite being a goal up after the first minute.
The evening reception at the Grovesnor Hotel in central London was, in spite of everybody’s best efforts, a real anti-climax, and the open-top parade remained a pipedream.
I didn’t live happily ever after either. Over the next few months, leading into the start of the 2009/2010 season, I began to fall out of love with the whole thing. Even the parts of the job I had always loved started to become less enjoyable.
The Smell of Football Page 24