Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  “OK,” I said. “Last thing: did you get any applications for the job from the Championship manager brigade?’

  “We had a few and we always send a nice letter politely declining their services but pointing out that their achievements are not to be sniffed at.”

  So there you have it.

  COULD I BE A MANAGER?

  As I’ve said before, I’m really not sure that management is for me. I’m intrigued by it and I like to think that I know what I’m doing, but I don’t think I want to be the visible face of a football club any more. I can’t be doing with having to answer to people who know less than me, like the media or the idiots who shout things out. My tolerance for all that died many years ago. I’d love to be involved in a club – the bigger the better – but my preference is to help pull the strings far away from the public gaze.

  I remember parading a trophy around the pitch once when my manager walked up behind me and said, “Enjoy it – all these people will be calling for our heads next year.” He was laughing and so was I because I was too caught up in the moment to take anything that anybody said seriously, but I’ve never forgotten it and I now know exactly what he meant. Management isn’t about what you did for a club last season, or even last month – it’s about what you’re doing today. I’m not sure I have the stomach for that. I’ve been looking forward to enjoying my life for many years and even if I do end up having to hand it back for a while, I’m certainly not going to hand it over quite so easily this time.

  But it isn’t just that: as a player you can go home at a reasonable hour, while a manager should be first in and last out. He ought to set the example for how the players conduct themselves. The good ones do but some of them don’t, whether it’s the manager who doesn’t turn up until Friday or the manager who is simply out of his depth.

  I once played under a man who harboured so much jealousy about his players’ financial success that he used it as the basis for almost every argument or dressing-down that he had with them, or even as the start of a conversation. He had never earned big money like we had, and clearly it irritated him. When everything was going well, he’d try to be everyone’s best friend, to the point that he was cracking jokes in the tunnel with us before the game; but when we came back in at half time a goal down he’d bollock us, even though it was clear to any sane person that he’d played a part in taking our minds off the game. And he bollocked us in the worst way possible, by turning to his favourite subject. He’d claim that with the amount we earned in wages we ought to be winning every game. Football doesn’t work like that, as I’m sure you know, but it does offer conclusive proof that you too can be a manager, even if you know nothing. I can even remember one team talk that started with, “Look, we’ve all got a bit of money, haven’t we?” Nobody said a word. “Well, let’s not kid ourselves,” he laboured. “We have, haven’t we?” Trust me, people who are obsessed with talking about money often have far less than they’d have you believe.

  One season we went to Spain on an ill-thought-out trip that seemed to have no other justification than using up the budget. We didn’t train, we barely exercised – we had a jog one morning – and it was basically a stag party. Upon arriving at the hotel, the manager gave a speech in which he said, “It’s late, you’ve been on a plane, you need your rest and you’ll get a night out later in the week.” An hour later we were climbing over the spiked fence that surrounded the hotel. We hopped over one at a time until I realised that the key cards to our rooms also worked in the gate at the end of the path. As a side note, don’t slam the gate when your team-mate has his testicles two inches above a spike – it’s very painful.

  Anyway, we went out and I have to say it was a really funny night that did wonders for team morale. Unfortunately the next night when we all went out together, the manager included, we inexcusably wandered past the previous night’s bar. A rep came running out, shouting, “It’s the guys from last night!” We went into the bar but the manager sat at the back and didn’t say a word. He was absolutely gutted because he thought we were all his mates and wouldn’t do that to him. He sat there without saying a word and I actually thought he was going to cry.

  Eventually, our captain went to him and apologised, and later we all said sorry. I don’t condone going out and disobeying the manager’s orders. It isn’t the right thing to do. In fairness, the young lads who tried to tag along with us were sent back with their tails between their legs for their own good, and it is also worth pointing out that a manager who commands respect would never be on the receiving end of behaviour like that. Still, I have no defence really; it wasn’t professional, even if it was a great night.

  On a personal level, the two of us really had our battles. We locked horns on numerous occasions – before matches, at half time, post-match and on the training ground – mainly because I was too clever for my own good and he was so rubbish at his job. One incident, however, really stands out. My little boy had been unwell for a few weeks. Nobody really knew what was wrong with him, but he was off his food, had become very quiet and withdrawn and didn’t speak. He was constantly tired and lethargic. I took him to the doctor once and the hospital around the corner twice within a 10-day period and was told each time that nothing was wrong and that a scan or x-ray was a waste of time. We never made it past the on-duty doctor. Then one Friday evening while I was with the team for an away match, my wife rang from A&E and told me that a couple of hours earlier our son had collapsed at home and had been rushed into hospital, struggling to breathe.

  There was an agonising wait. We were playing at the other end of the country and it was late at night. I was stuck far away from home and my head was all over the place. The manager was great. He said I was free to do whatever I wanted – nobody would think any less of me if I wanted to give the game a miss and go home to be with my son. I waited for the next call from my wife, and later that night she told me that he had been diagnosed with pneumonia and was now on a drip and responding well. They were keeping him in for three days until he was strong enough to go home, and after that he’d have to come back every week for eight weeks.

  She sent me a picture of him laid out in a hospital bed on a drip, and I fell apart. He was so little and looked like he’d been knocked sideways. But he’s a real fighter. When he was born he wasn’t breathing and the medical staff had saved his life right in front of us, in the longest five minutes of my life. He’s our little miracle man. Still, he could do without getting poorly all the time, the bloody idiot.

  It seemed as if he was going to be OK, so I played the game and we actually won. I played pretty well considering everything that had happened, but by the end of the match I was starting to feel a bit emotional. After the game I checked my phone and my wife had sent me a few more pictures. I found a quiet corner of the changing room where the showers were, just out of sight of the manager giving his post-match speech, and that is where I bowed my head and discreetly shed a few tears.

  The trouble came a few weeks later. The manager had been first class when my son fell ill and had offered me all the help in the world – something that I am grateful for – but he threw it all in my face during a half-time team talk in a match where we were being completely outplayed. He went around each player and lambasted each of us for our lack of effort. It was totally deserved because we had been shocking in that first half. When he got to me he let me have it with both barrels. That was fine because I had no excuse but he finished by saying, “Are you gonna fucking fight? Your little boy fought harder than you in the hospital.”

  The emotions from that episode were still very raw and I completely lost the plot. The entire changing room became involved in a battle to break the two of us apart. In the second half we went out and played better but the game had already been lost. The manager gave a big speech about how we had “tossed the game off” just to spite him, which was bollocks, but his standing at the club had crashed the moment that the words about my son left his lips. Many of the play
ers with families, especially the foreign players for some reason, had found his words offensive and told me so on the journey home. The writing was on the wall for him.

  The next season the club took a turn for the worse. The word was that the manager was two games away from the sack. I don’t think the players had any intention of winning those two games on his behalf. But the footballing gods work in mysterious ways and before he could get the chop another club came in and not only poached him – something that ended badly – but paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation, although a quick call to any one of our players would have told them that everyone would be glad to see the back of him. Football is a crazy business. There are too many people in positions of power who don’t understand business. Some of them don’t even understand football.

  With the club in meltdown, our manager called a team meeting early one morning. The changing rooms at the training ground were in the usual horseshoe shape, facing some cupboards along the back wall where the kit man kept the towels. I was one of the last to file in that morning and I walked into a crowded changing room, staff included, with the manager sitting atop the towel cupboards swinging his feet with his head bowed. The last stragglers joined us, one of the coaches shut the door and the manager lifted his head. He was crying and looked as if he had been doing so all morning. He drew a couple of very deep breaths and rallied himself for his big moment. “Come on, ya cunt,” he said under his breath, before rambling on about what a loyal man he was and how he had never jumped ship before but on this occasion he “had to look after himself”.

  It was nauseating. I don’t have a lot of time for that sort of thing: if you’re going, just go. Don’t sit there with crocodile tears telling us how sorry you are when your players are facing a fucking shit storm. I hated the whole experience. Then he jumped down and walked around all the players, shook our hands and gave each of us an embarrassing little pep talk. I don’t even remember what he said to me but I do remember thinking it was pretty rich to hand out so much advice just before leaving the recipients in the shit.

  Later in the season that manager brought his new team back to play us in a league match and endured one of those days that everybody in football dreads. He was jeered and harassed all night and his team got “pumped”, as we say in the trade. I shook hands with the opposition players and went to walk down the tunnel but our kit man grabbed me. “He’s waiting for you in there,” he said. “Stay with me when we go in.” So I did, and sure enough there he was, waiting in the tunnel. He just stared at me and I at him, then he said, “Got your mates with you, have ya?” to which I replied, “No mates in football, gaffer. You should know that.” It was true, but it did nothing to ease the tension.

  After we’d got changed and left the stadium I took a call from our right-back.

  “Mate, did you speak to the old gaffer?” he said.

  “Only when I came off the pitch,” I replied. “Why?”

  “He’s after you, pal. I just thought you should know that as I was in the car park leaving the stadium, he came running up and shouted, ‘Where is that cunt?’ I told him that you’d gone home and he said, ‘Tell him from me that if I ever see him out I’ll fucking stab him.’”

  I immediately asked if my team-mate would be prepared to tell that tale to a journalist I knew. He wasn’t, and I couldn’t blame him, but it was worth a try.

  He was a very insecure man and an extreme example of a flawed manager, but the truth is he wasn’t helped by any of us. For example, I remember one occasion when the players had finished training and were having some banter on BB Messenger. The conversation became quite heated between a player who was on loan with us and another first-team player. It finally combusted when the loan player taunted the other man about his wife getting it “up the arse” from another player. That comment lead to an almighty change in the atmosphere around the club. The manager had to put the two on the same five-a-side team in training even though they wouldn’t pass to each other, because the alternative was that they went on opposite teams and tried to break each other’s legs.

  That’s the sort of rubbish that you have to deal with as a manager, and at the worst clubs there are five or six examples of disharmony at any one time, with the potential for more. I’m not sure that I’d have time for that sort of thing as a manager. If it were all about playing football, then I might be interested, but dealing with the media, the owners, the fans and, above all, the players is not something that I could tolerate for any great length of time. But, more than any of that, I would hate to have a player like me in my squad because the time and effort that managers have had to put into me is not something that I could supply.

  * * *

  There are managers who don’t help themselves, of course, and you never really know how you will turn out until you step into the big seat. That is another concern of mine, because I don’t want to end up hating myself. What if I ended up like the manager at another club, who never seems to get tired of trumping his last crazy moment? A friend has told me many, many stories about him over the years.

  One morning, apparently, as the squad was having breakfast in the canteen the manager called an impromptu set-piece session in front of the whiteboard along one side of the room.

  He draws a large goal and says, “Right, where’s my corner taker?” A lonely figure at the back eating toast puts his hand in the air. “Well, fuck off into the corner, then,” says his manager. The lad gets up and wanders over to the corner of the room. “Hold on,” says the manager. Take your ball with you – use the toast.” Everyone in the canteen looks puzzled but sure enough the lad picks up his toast and takes it to the corner of the room. “Right,” says the manager again. “Where’s my one, two and three?” These are the players who make their runs across the near post, the middle and the far post as the ball is delivered. Three more arms nervously stretch toward the ceiling. “Come on, then,” says the manager. “We haven’t got all day. Move the tables out of the way … Right, there’s the penalty spot where you start from. OK, take the corner, then,” he shouts to the lad holding the plate of toast. Nothing happens.

  “Take the fucking corner! What are you, a fucking spastic? Frisbee the fucking toast! You’re aiming for me.” And he sticks his arms up in the air. The lad half-heartedly throws a piece of toast underarm towards his manager.

  “Right, fuck off. Go and sit down. Give me the toast,” says the manager. “Here’s how to take a fucking corner. Ready … HEAD IT!” and he frisbees a piece of toast from the corner of the room towards the three lads running towards the whiteboard. Amazingly, one of them glances it.

  “TIMINGS!” shouts the manager. “Let’s get our timings right!” He frisbees another piece; this time his centre-half connects with it and it hits the whiteboard. “PERFECT!” he shouts. “OK, no more of those. Right, where’s my corner taker? You can watch from the stand this Saturday and you’ll be practising corners all week with me.”

  Yes, he actually dropped one of his players for not frisbeeing a slice of toast across a canteen so that three lads could head it against a whiteboard. If nothing else, it’s a first, and possibly a last. Scarily, that manager is still out there – and doing pretty well, as it happens.

  And he isn’t alone. There’s another manager that I know of who, while not typically eccentric, is nonetheless somebody I wouldn’t want to play for. I first heard of him a couple of years ago when somebody told me that his players were training from 9am to 5pm, which is unheard of. You may have a foreign manager who likes to do an afternoon session every now and again, and you can see how well that went down at Manchester City when Mancini tried to do it, but training typically starts at 10.30am and finishes around 12.30pm. Now, that may not sound like a long time, but working flat out for two hours takes it out of you and you need each afternoon to recover. And since the object of training is to win a football match at the end of the week, you need to leave enough in the tank to make sure the team performs at its highest
level.

  So starting at 9am and finishing at 5pm is rare for a reason – it’s bloody ridiculous. I was also told that he sends text messages to his players to tell them whether or not they’re playing; it’s just unbelievable. One of the worst stories I’ve heard about this man is that when my friend went to meet him to discuss the possibility of signing for the club, he was kept waiting for two hours. When the manager came upstairs, it turned out that he’d been in the building the whole time. “Good, you’re still here,” he said. “That shows me that you want to play for this football club.” What a cock – the fact that my friend had turned up to the meeting was a good indication too, I would have thought. When he phoned me later, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You’re not signing for him, are you?” I asked. “No chance,” said my friend. “He’s off his head. Nine to five – what the fuck is that about?”

  One of my old clubs experienced a meteoric rise from no-hopers to FA Cup winners, and there were still a few lads there who had been with them through thick and thin. It was always nice to listen to their stories because until you rock up at a club, much of what you know about it is only rumour and Chinese whispers. They told me that during one training session one of their ex-managers lost his rag with a centre-half because the striker on the other team kept winning headers in front of him from goal kicks. “Right,” said the manager. “Clearly, you can’t head the fucking ball, so head the back of his head.”