Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  It’s been like that at every club I’ve played for. I remember a ball getting stuck in a tree at one club and a black French player saying to an African player, “You climb this tree – you’re a bigger monkey than me,” before the pair of them fell about laughing.

  Tackling racism should never be considered the job of one person or organisation. The task is too great and, if I may say, too diverse. Nobody seems to know what the right thing to say is any more; this prevents people from stepping forward to speak out.

  Maybe quantum mechanics is easier, after all. In Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? he talks about each individual’s consciousness as being only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness that pervades the universe. His best-known work on wave mechanics, known as Schrödinger’s Equation, goes some way to explaining the interconnectivity of the universe at a quantum level.

  Think of Suárez and Evra as ocean waves, or tornadoes. At first glance, they appear to be two separate bodies, but they’re not. That is simply the way we choose to perceive them. Waves and tornadoes are simply water and wind stirred up in different directions. The truth is that nothing is separate and everything is related. The colours that we see exist only in our own consciousness.

  With thanks to Mr T, working at Cern.

  * * *

  “Philosophy and science are two different things and never the two should meet,” said Mr T, when he eventually saw the finished article. I had been pretty pleased with the final column up until that point, but this latest review was tough to take, given that it came from the man who had inspired the article in the first place. At the very least he owed me an explanation.

  “OK,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “That bit at the end,” said Mr T. “You’re into the realm of philosophy. None of what you end that article with can be tested in a controlled way – it’s all theory and speculation. You begin with a sound version of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is fine – nobody disputes that the wave function collapses when we observe it because that is something that can be shown to be the case with the right experiments – but how are you going to prove that absolutely everything in the universe is connected?

  “Well, I was going down the route of entangled particles, really, and scaling it up a bit,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” said Mr T. “You should have written about entangled particles, then.”

  “Hmmm … Why don’t you fuck off?” I ventured.

  Mr T laughed. “Because according to that article, there’s another one of you out there somewhere begging me to stay; so just this once I’m going to assume you’re half right and listen to that other you.”

  * * *

  Quantum mechanics is the only thing that has enabled me to put the phone down on people chasing me for money, or to turn a blind eye to the bottles that were thrown at me last season by the “fans” of my old club after a match at their ground. It enables to me to treat everything with less importance than I would otherwise.

  I can remember vividly the first game after I really got into it: I was playing against West Ham United at Upton Park and the ball had gone out for a throw-in to my team. I ran off the pitch to retrieve it, to the usual hail of abuse. I looked up and saw these big, bald, middle-aged men looking down on me from little plastic chairs for which they’d probably overpaid. They seemed to vent in unison with a sort of slow and rhythmic, yet forceful, tirade of abuse. And I was picking up a football. I felt so sorry for them. I felt as if I knew something that they didn’t and it made me pity them immediately.

  Since that moment, none of the peripheral shit that goes on around me every day has bothered me. I remember when HMRC came to see me at my house; halfway through our meeting the man who revels in delivering bad news on behalf of Her Majesty leaned forward and said, “You don’t seem to be taking this as seriously as perhaps you ought to. You owe us more than a million pounds.”

  If there are no definitive explanations and answers to the fundamental questions of life, then anything is still possible. And that is an incredibly exciting place to be – it is literally what has kept me alive. The fact that there are no answers is, in fact, the answer.

  THE AWFUL ROWING TOWARD HAPPINESS

  Last season, not for the first time since I became The Secret Footballer, I found myself writing about depression. It drove me crazy – I just couldn’t get into the right frame of mind to describe it. I played all the songs that I used to have on a loop when the depression was at its worst, to try to stir the right – or wrong – emotions. The main one was Peter Gabriel’s Mercy Street. It was based on the poem 45 Mercy Street, which started life as a play and ended up as the title of a book by Anne Sexton, a renowned poet who suffered from manic depression – or, as we would now call it, bipolar disorder.

  Sexton’s writing has been a huge influence in my life, and her 1975 work The Awful Rowing Toward God has been a perpetual source of inspiration. I never met her – she died before I was born – but I feel incredibly close to her. I can’t explain that feeling, except to say that each time I read any part of that book it feels as though she is talking directly to me and about my life.

  Anne Sexton was still alive when her publishers set a release date of March 1975 for her book, even though she had told them that she would not allow it to see the light of day until after her death. On 4 October 1974, she met her good friend Maxine Kumin, a fellow writer with whom she would share early versions of her work. During that lunch the two discussed the first drafts of The Awful Rowing. On returning home, Sexton put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings and poured herself a glass of vodka before locking herself in her garage. She started the engine of her car and killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

  At one point I very nearly followed Anne Sexton down the rabbit hole and I still can’t shake the morbid curiosity that lies deep within me, despite all the medication.

  The column wasn’t going well. I don’t know whether it was because my medication had some kind of memory-erasing property that I wasn’t told about, or I was simply in a state of permanent happiness. And that was always my reluctance in turning to drugs. It’s difficult to tell who the real me is any more. In my attempt to find out and to write a column that I’d be happy to put my pseudonym to, I wandered down a familiar and dangerous path: I made the decision to stop taking my medication.

  The problem was, I didn’t know how long it would take for my artificially inflated serotonin levels to revert to their natural position – given how I felt before I went on the medication – somewhere south of bugger-all. And I couldn’t ask the doctor who prescribed the drugs because I knew he’d talk me out of this risky decision. I didn’t want that. I needed to find that dark place where the simple things of everyday life are as painful to contemplate as they are impossible to act on.

  With my limited medical knowledge and an absurd amount of faith in Google, I came to the misinformed conclusion that if it takes the body several weeks to build up effective serotonin levels on a particular medication, it must take the same amount of time for them to reduce. As one of my old physios used to say after another unsuccessful self-diagnosis, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

  But I’d concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the only way to write the column was as a person who hadn’t only been there but still was there, just like Anne Sexton when she wrote those agonising poems. I don’t feel competitive with The Awful Rowing Toward God, but I do feel that I have something to live up to – if that’s the right choice of words for this situation. Only somebody trapped at the bottom of the rabbit hole can offer a true account of depression, provided they can find it within themselves to put that account into words.

  So I got a month’s extension to my deadline and flushed the medication.

  In the event, the changes were fairly swift. I began to experience signs that something wasn’t quite right within 48 hours. I have missed taking medication before; I once left my washbag on the coach on th
e way back from an away game and it took the coach operator three days to get it back to me, by which time it had been on an outing to Blackpool.

  The effects of being clean and not altogether that sober are strange, to say the least. I find that my vision is affected in a most peculiar way, as a tingling feeling shoots through my eyes at random moments in the day. And it is most inconvenient. I have had to “style it out” in a lot of difficult situations, the worst of which came when I had to suddenly grab the arm of an elderly man as I was crossing the road. It was ridiculous: here was this young(ish) man, an athlete no less, being escorted across the road by a pensioner. The worst part of the whole sorry episode came as I lunged to grab his arm: he looked up at me and said, “Thank you.” Piss-taker.

  When this happens, playing football is difficult. I have actually been on the ball when it has happened and I wasn’t able to cover it up. I remember putting my foot on the ball when it was obvious to everybody watching that I should pass. I just couldn’t co-ordinate myself. But at that point in my career, and with that particular club, I was receiving so much abuse that I could have walked off. Weeks later, I told my manager to take me off while the game was going on but he just looked at me and asked, “Are you injured?” I didn’t know what to say; technically, I suppose I was.

  Mirtazapine, the part of my medication that allows me to sleep at night, is so effective that it knocks me out within 20 minutes of my consuming it. The dose that I take is very strong and works by relaxing the muscles that have been on edge all day. Not too long ago, I took a double dose because my roommate and I had been out for dinner and I’d had Coke by the bucketload – the drink, that is. I’d followed that with a coffee, the upshot of which was that I was wide awake gone midnight. But at that hour my body tends to fail me: instead of the double dose making me drowsy, it just relaxed my muscles to the point that I couldn’t speak properly because my tongue was hanging out of my mouth and my face wouldn’t move. My roommate was crying with laughter and accused me of feigning a stroke for attention. But I digress.

  Two weeks into my “clean and not so sober” project, I crashed spectacularly. I don’t know why it came to me but I couldn’t get Jefferson Airplane out of my head: when the shakes came, I remember hearing the opening bars of White Rabbit. Then the flashbacks began. I saw my father as he would have looked 25 years earlier. But the image I had of him was not one that I remembered ever seeing before. As the withdrawal went on, so the song became more persistent, but I wasn’t capable of working out why I was even thinking about it. I just saw my father standing in our old house looking out of a window that took in a view that didn’t belong there. But he was facing away from me and if I walked toward him the distance between us grew. I knew he had a message for me, but at that moment he wasn’t ready to give it to me for some reason.

  In his prime, my father was a handsome man, with jet-black hair and a natural golden tan. He was strong, too: he had the arms of a boxer and could be imposing when I ignored my mother’s calls to come in for dinner or when I should have been concentrating on homework instead of playing football. And he had an eccentric streak, brought about by a desire to learn. He could berate his football team on the television while reciting a Shakespeare play for a course that he’d enrolled in at the local college; he had the brawn and skill to build many of the houses that surrounded our street, while retaining an interest in the stained glass that would eventually end up inside their sitting rooms. He was inspirational.

  And as I watched him for the best part of 20 years, I came to believe that I could do anything with my life, whenever I wanted to do it. That belief often manifested itself in selfish and destructive behavior, but on the whole it resulted in bursts of creative energy.

  I remember so much of my childhood. Although I gave my parents plenty of cause for concern, those were fantastic years, full of love and every advantage that my parents could afford. Above all, they passed on a level of wisdom that I’m now beginning to take advantage of. Because of all that, it didn’t seem right that I couldn’t place this image of my father looking out the window.

  So here is the column. It took a ridiculous amount of sacrifice and stupidity to write it. Was it worth it? Probably not. It’s just a column, after all.

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  First published 20 September 2012

  “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” According to Larkin they do, anyway. The quote sticks in my head not least because, strangely, it was something that my dad used to say to me when I was about 13 years old before slapping a copy of the poet’s 1974 book High Windows into my hand.

  At the time, it was difficult to know what to think. On the one hand, it was an extremely steep learning curve, way beyond anything that I was capable of digesting; but on the other, it sowed a seed in my mind that has only just begun to germinate – that with the right influences and the right teachers, a person has the ability to do and say what they please.

  If you’re lucky (or not), you may even find an audience, if what you seek is fame and attention. I never wanted to be famous.

  But things in our house were never quite how they first appeared. When I was still of Disney age, I remember being sat down to watch Alice in Wonderland. It was a surreal experience – of course it was. The story makes no sense and features a succession of nightmarish characters that could quite easily pass for somebody’s version of hell. Then, one day, my father told me to watch it again: “Right, now listen to this song and tell me what you think Alice in Wonderland means.”

  The song was White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane, and I happen to be listening to it as I type this. The song seemed to finish with a thousand doors all swinging open in unison as the band’s female singer, Grace Slick, belted out the line, “Feed your head, feed your head.” And that’s when I understood.

  “Feed your head, feed your head” – it was an acid trip. Everybody works that out eventually, of course, but when you work it out at the age of 12, things are never quite the same again.

  When it is obvious that all you want to do as a kid is play football, these interruptions are as curious as they are eccentric, but my outlook on life really began to change out of all recognition when I became a footballer. Until that point, I had been in search of some perspective to life – a meaning, if you like – and I felt that it wasn’t far away.

  I still continued to look for these little insights into life while having to live a very sterile existence as a sportsman. You can be the most successful footballer who ever graced the pitch, but you’re never any closer to finding a meaning than somebody who has only played a handful of pub games. It doesn’t matter how many medals you win.

  The level of attention that a top-flight footballer pays to mundane things such as practice, hydration, rest and nutrition is extremely important if you are to maintain any success in the game. But it is also incredibly frustrating because it accounts for a lot of time that could be spent stimulating the mind.

  After a while, the things that made me a great footballer hampered my life progress and I came to resent every one of them. This, in turn, led me down a very dark path.

  It is a feeling that I still have to this day, although the edge has been taken off by the medication I now take. Football has only ever provided me with any great joy in the immediate aftermath of winning a game. When you win a game of football, it is a unique feeling. Winning says, “I’m better than you, and the lads that I play with are also better than you.” It’s a playground mentality, deep rooted in us all, that comes racing to the surface in the wake of a success.

  But losing a football match is a terrible feeling. Worse, being responsible for that loss with a mistake feels as if the whole world is pointing at you and laughing while taking pot shots at your stomach.

  Afterwards, you arrive home alone, with just your thoughts for company. That’s when a player suffering from depression is extremely vulnerable. I know, because I went through it for nine tenths of my career. Everything
about football, other than winning, feels like a grind. To me, at least.

  I can recall being comprehensively beaten by Arsenal. That was when a little piece of my life fell apart. Until that moment, I had felt quite comfortable as a footballer in the Premier League; I never looked out of my depth and, if anything, I performed very well.

  I watched the DVD of that match over and over again, trying to work out how the Arsenal players were doing what they did. It was like Brian Wilson listening to Sgt. Pepper on a loop. “How do they do this?” I asked myself. “How can I do it?” Once the game becomes complicated in your head, there is no way back.

  I became even more withdrawn, to the point where I’d come in from training and sit on my own, staring at the wall. The TV wasn’t on and the curtains were usually drawn.

  I can’t even remember if I had any thoughts about life. It was just an emptiness – a hopeless void that was only punctuated at certain points of the day by playing a game that I had come to hate. For me, that is the “spiral” effect that you sometimes hear sufferers of depression talk about.

  Around the training ground, I became extremely volatile and would find myself in conflict with a different person nearly every day. It was all I could do to get through it. I just wanted to go home and stare at the wall again. The wall never answered back, you see.

  At its worst, I drove to the training ground, took one look around at the familiarity and turned around. My brain had started to associate everything with unhappiness.

  The silver BMW belonging to our striker, which was the first car I saw in the morning, now filled me with dread; the groundsman who used to grunt “Good morning” to me while having his morning fag became a figure of repetitive torture.

  And then I’d walk through the changing room doors, only to be confronted by the usual banter regarding my shoes, my jeans or the fact that I was late.