#2Sides: My Autobiography

by Rio Ferdinand

  He was only just getting started, and I’m sure if he’d stayed he would have had England playing his way. It would have been good, progressive football but with a real winning mentality. Sometimes we’d play with three at the back, other times we’d have four. Sometimes we’d go with four midfielders, sometimes five. All the players enjoyed it because it wasn’t just about passing and attacking more; it was about playing with purpose, with a real focus on being flexible and tactically creative.

  Glenn Hoddle contributed a great deal to my football education. He painted mental pictures so we could visualise the game in front of us. He also had a knack of simplifying things and breaking things down. The manager would say: ‘If you come out of defence and take one of their midfielders with you it creates problems for them here, and here, and here … and when you move forward someone else in the team will drop in to your position, so don’t worry about that.’

  Hoddle would spot a weakness in our next opponent and gear training towards that. If their fullbacks were weak, we’d work for two or three days on how to attack them. He might box that part of the pitch in training and make us route all our attacks through that area. He was one of our greatest-ever technical players and his training mirrored the way he played: loads of fun skill stuff, and lots of keep ball and one-touch. One part of the warm-up was going through cones with the ball and having to chip it back, or keeping the ball up and volleying it back without letting the ball touch the floor. It annoyed some players who weren’t great with their touch. Michael Owen used to moan his head off: ‘Fucking hell, not this skill shit again.’ His game was about scoring goals. He was brilliant at it, and that’s all he wanted to work on. But I loved it – I’d happily do skills all day long.

  Hoddle took me to the 1998 World Cup in France and even though I didn’t play, he’d started to trust me and said he wanted me to build the defence around me. It’s the only time I’ve thought to myself, yeah, I can see a future for England, I can see what he wants to do. He had a clear vision of what he wanted and you saw the beginnings of it at the Tournoi de France in 1997. By 1998 the team was starting to take shape: young players were coming through and we were on the cusp of getting really good. Then he got sacked. It killed us and I don’t think we’ve ever recovered. Ever since, I’ve been hoping someone would come in and continue what he started but it has never happened.

  Kevin Keegan took over in 1999 and I knew straight away he didn’t fancy me as a player. Coming up to the European Championships in 2000, he came to my room and said: ‘Listen, Rio, I’m not going to take you. You’re a great player, and you’ve got a big future, but I don’t think you’ve got the experience and I need to take experience.’ Then he took Gareth Barry who was younger than me! Even more ridiculous was that he said ‘if you were Italian, or Brazilian, or French you’d have 30 caps by now, the way you play.’ I thought: ‘Well you just spoke about the World Champions, the European Champions, and one of the best teams in the world … But I can’t get in the England squad!’ Suffice to say I didn’t get on too well with Kevin Keegan as a coach.

  Before and after Keegan, Howard Wilkinson took charge for a couple of games and that was just bizarre. He was like a school teacher or an army sergeant. He had us out doing set pieces the morning of the game in a field next to the hotel and all he wanted to talk about was set pieces. ‘Set pieces win games,’ he’d announce, and then he’d tell us the percentages of games won by set pieces and… well, I’m afraid he lost me completely.

  Compared to those two, Sven-Göran Eriksson seemed a huge step up. When he was appointed in 2001 I thought, ‘Wow, he’s been a great manager in Italy, he must be cultured and sophisticated and we’ll be back to the days of Glenn Hoddle again!’

  I remember going to our first meeting with him. I was so eager and excited. I thought: what magic has he got to sprinkle on us? I came out and remember saying to Frank Lampard: ‘That guy just made football sound more basic than any manager I’ve ever played for!’

  The first conversation I had with Sven he said to me: ‘I don’t want my centre-backs running with the ball.’ I couldn’t believe it. But he was the England manager and I wanted play for England, so if he told me to lick his boots ten times in order to play for my country I’d have done it. Tactically he was very unimaginative: ‘I want you to go here; I want you to go there. I don’t want my centre-backs running with the ball. I want you to get the ball, pass it here.’ But he was also charming and had a good, human side which created a nice atmosphere in the squad and meant we always wanted to play for him.

  I think Sven was a bit over-awed by David Beckham. If truth be known, he was a bit too much of a Beckham fan. But, still, Sven was a genuinely nice fellow. I remember one time Wayne Rooney and I were on the massage table just after the story came out about Sven’s affair with Faria Alam. The TV was on and, as we’re lying there, Faria Alam appears on the screen. There were quite few people milling about and people coming in and out of the room. I was going, ‘Look at her! I bet Sven … I mean, can you imagine? I bet he was throwing her all over the gaff!’ All of a sudden I notice it’s very quiet and Sven, standing behind me, goes, ‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that’; he then starts to laugh, says ‘Good night’ and walks out. I’m lying there thinking: ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ while all the lads are cracking up. But that’s what Sven was like: he made everyone feel comfortable. I liked him a lot and got on really well with him. Tactically, he wasn’t sophisticated like I expected and he didn’t bring us on; but maybe I was expecting too much.

  Steve McLaren, who followed Sven, was a much better coach than people give him credit for. It’s actually quite hard to say why things went wrong with him and we failed to qualify for Euro 2008. Again, when he first came in I was excited. I’d heard great things about him when he’d been at Manchester United and he’d been our trainer under Sven. One problem, I think, was he was just too pally with the players. There wasn’t that distance you normally get between manager and players, like we had with Ferguson. Yes, sometimes we can be joking around, but at a certain point it’s clear: ‘I’m the manager, and this is how it goes.’

  McLaren didn’t have that. He’d call John Terry ‘JT’ and Frank Lampard ‘Lamps’, and play two touch with us during training. A lot of the squad saw that not as weakness, exactly, but as something strange: that’s the kind of thing you do that as a coach, not as a manager. With the best managers, I find, there’s always a distance from the players.

  But, again, Steve McLaren was a decent, good guy. He got hammered later for that interview he did in Holland where he spoke with a Dutch accent. But I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I thought it was very human. I used to do something similar in training with foreign lads at United. It’s a way of trying to help people understand me. If it can help them understand a bit better, I’ll speak slowly and try to use their accent. My Dad used to work with a lot of Turkish people in the rag trade and he’d do that. He’d be like ‘Sevela, come on, come on. Why you talking? Come on, please …’ so they would understand him a little bit better. I respected that; it’s a nice trait to have. But at the same time, managers seem to have to be a bit more resolute to succeed. I’m not a manager yet, so I don’t know.

  People criticised McLaren for his tactics but I’m not sure I’d go along with that. It’s very hard to put my finger on why things didn’t work. Stuff just seemed to go wrong, like in Croatia when the ball bobbled and went under Paul Robinson’s foot. That was hardly the manager’s fault! The truth is that we just didn’t play particularly well throughout that qualifying tournament and I think the players have to take a lot of the blame for that. We didn’t perform. It’s as simple as that.

  Then it was time for Don Fabio, who was appointed in 2007. I think Capello was the manager who disappointed me the most. He came to us with a sky-high reputation and I couldn’t wait. He’d coached the AC Milan team I loved as a kid, with Marco van Basten and Gullit and Rijkaard and people like that. I knew he was going t
o be progressive – I mean, he’d been at Real Madrid. And Roma. He’d been everywhere, done everything, won everything. When he first arrived I asked him about the great players he worked with and he’d start talking about the Baresis and Maldinis. I thought: ‘This is going to be so great! I’m going to learn so much! He’s got all this fantastic knowledge and experience, he’s going to bring great stuff to this team. Now we’re definitely going to improve.’

  And … what a let-down! He had us playing the most rigid, basic 4–4–2, with no deviating allowed under any circumstances. One game against Spain he had us playing with two central midfielders against the three best midfielders in the world. I thought: ‘The game has evolved, man! This is not possible! Please get some bodies in here to stop us getting overrun!’ It wasn’t rocket science.

  But what could we do? With Capello you have to just do what you’re told or you’re out. I should also stress that it wasn’t my best period because I was struggling with my back problem and was injured a lot. You want everyone to see you in your best light, especially someone you’ve respected for years. Then again, I think most of the players felt let down. I remember Jamie Carragher being disappointed as well. He’d just come out of retirement from England, to work with this man. We expected ideas and creativity, but what we got was a stifling prison camp mentality.

  Capello’s attitude was ‘I’m the boss and you’ll do what I say all day, every day.’ There was never much warmth. He seemed to need to show us how strong and disciplinarian he could be and was so aggressive sometimes it was just ridiculous. There was a definite divide between him and his coaching staff and us, which we respected. But some of it wasn’t very clever – like the way he chose the captaincy, giving John Terry and Steven Gerrard and me a game each. He made an absolute circus of the situation.

  Part of it could have been a cultural problem; mostly, though, I just think he hadn’t moved with the times. Playing 4–4–2 was getting us outnumbered in midfield all the time. Rubbish teams were passing the ball around us, like Algeria at the World Cup. They kept the ball better than us and played better than us.

  I know people back home were expecting us to win the World Cup in 2010 but that was ridiculous. There was no chance of doing anything. Tactically, we were all over the place, and even if we’d got past Germany in the second round, our midfielders would have been exhausted by the quarter finals because of the amount of ground they had to cover. We never had any respite in any of the games because Capello would always be shouting: ‘Press! Press! Press!’ even when it was hot. I’ve got nothing against pressing; it’s an essential part of the modern game. But you’ve got to be intelligent about it.

  Remember, this is a team of players who’ve played a brutally hard season in the Premier League. Our league is so exhausting it leaves everybody knackered for the big tournaments. Look at the statistics for the distances our players run; the intensity and sheer number of games we play really works against us. By the time we get to the quarter-finals of a tournament, we’re on our last legs.

  Added to that, most of us are carrying injuries. That was certainly the case with every tournament I went to. In Japan and South Korea in 2002, I had a groin injury and I don’t even know how I played a couple of the games. My main memory of that tournament is treatment. Treatment, treatment, treatment … you needed vigorous treatment sessions just to get fit for a game. I do think a Premier League season is harder than a season in any of the other big leagues – and we don’t have a winter break like they do in Germany. It’s just another thing that works against us.

  We still could have done better under Capello. People talked all the time about how Gerrard and Lampard in the same team never really worked. I thought the solution was to drop one of them, or give them very strict instructions: ‘This is your role; that’s yours.’ But no one ever felt strong enough to do that because they were such good players for their clubs and were among the best in Europe.

  One thing Capello did get right, though, was when he talked about the England shirt ‘weighing heavy’ on some players. The media talked us up as ‘the golden generation’ but we certainly never gave ourselves that tag and it became a millstone. We’d have one good game in the run-up to a tournament and suddenly be favourites to win it. We’d go into a tournament thinking if we don’t get to the final it’s a failure. It magnified and built up the pressure to a ridiculous degree.

  I’ve been on the bus after a game and heard senior players worrying: ‘Oh no that’s going to be four for me in the paper tomorrow.’ You laugh, but when you get to your room you think that’s an England player saying that! How are we going to have a chance of winning if he’s thinking like that? If a player’s obsessed with what the papers will say about him, how is he ever going to go out and express himself? The answer is: he can’t. He’ll do the exact opposite and decide to take no risks at all. He’ll think: ‘If I misplace a pass … that’s a five.’ So he just plays safe. The pressure is unique. Expectations are high when you play for Manchester United. But with England it’s intense for small periods of time: heavier and much more concentrated. It’s just too intense. The players wake up, read the paper every day, see that people back home are doubting them – but the same time demanding the world. Then you’ve got people saying: ‘He should play … he shouldn’t play… he should be doing this or that if he’s in an England shirt …’ It comes with the job. And I’m sure they get worse than that in Brazil or Argentina. You’ve got to be able to take that burden on your shoulders. Some players can, and some players can’t.

  History may judge that Roy Hodgson’s most lasting achievement was to lower expectations of the national team to a more modest and manageable level. Then again, modesty isn’t really the point of international football.

  My relationship with him never really recovered from the incident in October 2012 when he got chatting to passengers on a tube train in London and casually mentioned that my England career had reached ‘the end of the road.’ He apologized after the story appeared in the papers but it was so disrespectful. The England manager simply cannot speak to the general public about stuff like that. Later, as I explain elsewhere in this book, I felt he mishandled the issue of my possible return after injury and the relationship with John Terry after the racial abuse case. In relation to the England team, none of that would have mattered if Hodgson had managed to get us playing well. But he didn’t. At Euro 2012, I felt he under-used exciting younger players and was too defensive in his tactics. Watching Italy’s Andrea Pirlo take us apart with a passing masterclass in the quarter final, the thought occurred to me that if he’d been English Hodgson and other England bosses might never even have picked him.

  At the World Cup in Brazil, I felt Hodgson got it wrong again in his approach to mixing youth and experience, falling between two stools. The defence wasn’t good enough, partly because he left out Michael Carrick and Ashley Cole, two players with loads of tournament experience. And he put too much responsibility on captain Steven Gerrard. I’d rather the manager had put all his faith in youngsters and given them valuable experience.

  The bottom line is that instead of developing our own English style of progressive, clever football as we could have done, we’ve wasted a generation or two. We’ve had eight managers since Glenn Hoddle and there’s still an air of being unfulfilled. We never seem to be quite good enough as a team and as individual players, we never produce enough moments of brilliance and we never found the right formula for the players we’ve had. The sad fact is that we’re even further away now from achieving anything than when I first went to a World Cup 16 years ago.

  Moscow, 21st May 2008

  Go left

  Go left

  Go left!

  In the video of the penalty shootout you can see all the Manchester United players standing together on the halfway line with our arms round each other’s shoulders. I’ve got my arm round Michael Carrick. What you can’t see is that I’m holding onto him just to stay on my feet. By t
he time Ryan Giggs walks up to take penalty number seven, my legs have gone to jelly and I think I’m going to be sick. It’s my job to take penalty number eight and all I can think is: ‘Please don’t let it get to me. Please. Please.’

  The penalties are as close as the match. Cristiano Ronaldo, our best player all tournament, stutters his run-up and misses. A few kicks later, John Terry has the chance to win it for Chelsea, but slips, hits the post, and doubles over on the wet grass. He looks like he’s been folded in half. Everyone else scores: Owen Hargreaves puts his in the top corner; it’s beautiful. Tevez scores too, and Nani and Anderson. It takes a lot of bottle for those two young players to go up there and take Champions League Final penalties. Now Giggsy is doing his little run and … he buries it! Beautiful. Only now I’m next. I’m not sure my legs will even work. Before my turn, Anelka steps up to take Chelsea’s seventh. He has to score to keep them alive. On the video you can see me telling our goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar to dive to his left. I’m actually pointing and screaming: ‘Go left! Go left! Go LEFT!’

  So Anelka runs up.

  And Edwin goes right.

  Not only is it raining heavily, we’re also drenched in history. It’s been nine years since United won this cup, 40 years since the only other time we won it, and 50 years since Munich, when the Busby Babes died trying to win it. The thought of losing now is unbearable.

  It’s an all-English affair in Russia but it makes perfect sense for us to meet in the final because we’re the two best teams in Europe. Neither side came into the game as favourites, but Chelsea had slightly had the better of things against us over the last couple of years. Every time I watch Didier Drogba he looks unplayable, but he doesn’t generally do much against us. Tonight, however, he slapped Vida and got himself sent off.