by Gary Neville
‘I should let them in here, the lot of them,’ the manager went on. ‘They can tell you what they think of that performance. Absolute shambles.’
I didn’t need telling. I drove home for one of the loneliest nights of my life. I opened the front door, walked straight to the fridge and just sat there with two bottles of beer on the go. I needed to drink to forget.
Part of your brain is trying to remind you that there will be another game in a few days’ time. You tell yourself that in the crazy rollercoaster of professional sport you’re going to have massive highs and lows and it’ll all look better in the morning. But this was one of those nights when I couldn’t find any comfort wherever I looked.
I kept going over the game in my head, and the manager wasn’t in the mood to let me forget it quickly. A few days later we were up against Bayer Leverkusen, but I was dropped to the bench. Very harsh, I thought. I’d made a mistake, a bad one, but I’d been playing well. Steeling myself, I decided to go and see the boss and make that very point. I should have known better. He told me he couldn’t accept that performance without making changes. And it would be another three games before I was back in the team.
I returned for our trip to Anfield – the game when Diego Forlán, despite his struggles at United, would guarantee himself lasting affection from our fans. He scored twice in a vital win. Then, a week after beating Liverpool, we faced the champions, Arsenal, at Old Trafford. We were without half a team so Phil was drafted into central midfield, alongside Scholesy. He faced a massive job against Patrick Vieira, but it was our best display of the season so far. We hustled them out of the game, and Phil was superb. Scholesy and Seba scored, and we finished the afternoon knowing we were back in the business of winning championships.
Ruud was brilliant that season. He scored twenty-five goals in the league, none better than his second in a hat-trick against Fulham in March. He beat about five players in a run from the centre circle. That win took us top of the league, and, with our experience, we could smell the title. ‘Something’s happening,’ Becks said to me as we walked off the pitch. He meant the championship, but it was also clear that his time at the club could be coming to an end.
In February we’d been knocked out of the FA Cup by Arsenal, but it wasn’t the result which caused a massive stir. In the dressing room, the manager blamed Becks for one of the goals – and Becks disagreed. He answered back, which was always liable to escalate things. And the manager erupted, spectacularly.
He wheeled round, saw a boot lying on the floor, and in his fury kicked it like he was blasting for goal. He was facing Becks but there is no way he meant to kick the boot into his face. I’ve seen the boss in training; if he tried it a thousand times, he couldn’t do it again. But the boot flew up and hit Becks just above the eye, cutting him. He put his hand up to his forehead and felt blood. So suddenly he was standing up too, shouting and raging.
For a second the gaffer was dumbstruck, which isn’t like him. I think he knew that hitting a player with a boot, even by accident, was a bit extreme. He apologised straight away: ‘David, I didn’t mean to kick the boot in your face.’
Becks wasn’t having any of it. A few of us had to stand up to keep them apart.
We left the ground and went out that evening. Becks was clearly wondering if that was the end for him at United.
With another player, the story might not have leaked out. But, of course, it was Becks, and the incident was quickly all over the front pages. On and on it went. The press followed him everywhere.
Becks carried on training and being professional. But as the matches got bigger and bigger towards the end of the season he was left out of key games. The papers started to speculate about his future. He was being linked with Europe’s biggest clubs, from Barcelona to Milan to Madrid.
Change seemed inevitable. The boss and Becks were at odds, and Carlos seemed to think we’d run our course after eight years together. He felt that neither of us was quick enough, even if Becks had bundles of stamina. Perhaps we’d become too predictable. Perhaps it didn’t suit how he wanted to play if we were going to use Ruud as a lone striker. Whatever the reason, it was obvious that Carlos had his doubts, and he was the manager’s closest adviser.
I think all the players saw strengths and weaknesses in Carlos. There’s no doubt he was instrumental in helping us evolve as a team, becoming more sophisticated and patient in Europe. He had us playing different formations, weaning us off our traditional 4–4–2. Tactically he was excellent, but his day-to-day training could be very dry. Some days things would feel very bogged down in specifics, stopping the play to rerun one pass. Rene Meulensteen, the first-team coach in recent years, was much more into flowing training sessions, Steve McClaren too. Carlos was different from any coach I had at United and he’d be quite open that he didn’t want us playing small-sided games all the time. It was as if he didn’t want us having too much fun in the week so we’d be hungrier on Saturday.
The transfer rumours around Becks gathered more momentum in April when he was on the bench as we thrashed Liverpool, and then again when we travelled to Arsenal. He was also a substitute when Real’s ‘Galácticos’ came to Old Trafford, defending a 3–1 lead from the quarter-final first leg. Roberto Carlos, Luís Figo, Zinedine Zidane and particularly Raúl had done for us in the Bernabéu. It was Ronaldo’s turn in the second leg.
I was suspended but, sat in the stands, I couldn’t fail to join the standing ovation as the great Brazilian came off after his hat-trick. It was a unique moment as we realised we were in the presence of one of the great players of the last twenty years. What was it, sixty-two goals in ninety-seven games for Brazil? What a talent, even with all his injuries, and what a character. I remember a game against Brazil with England in 1997 when Ronaldo and Romario were standing on the halfway line having a joke, cracking up, while the game was going on. I don’t know if they were taking the piss, but I guess I’d have been that confident if I was as gifted as them.
Ronaldo was the star of the night, but, typically, Becks wouldn’t be kept out of the headlines by anyone. He came on and scored twice, and he would help us secure the two more victories we needed to clinch the championship. I was chuffed for him that he finished on a high. That 2002/03 title was one of the sweetest because we reclaimed it against some people’s expectations. It’s always a great feeling winning it back because all year you’ll have felt like you had something extra to prove. That’s a great motivation.
We’d got our trophy back, but it was the end for Becks. As we walked around the pitch after beating Charlton in the last home game of the season, waving to the fans, Becks told me that a move was in the offing. ‘They’ve had talks,’ he said. Our little chat would get picked up by lip readers on Match of the Day.
It was the first time he’d actually confirmed to me that he was probably off. All the talk about his future had alerted Real Madrid and Barcelona. The latter wanted him in the Nou Camp, but his heart was set on the Bernabéu.
It wasn’t the way he wanted to leave but Becks had always had this urge to go and play abroad. He hadn’t chosen its timing, but the move could be sold as something good for him as well as for the club. United would get £25 million for a player who’d served them brilliantly and cost them nothing, and Becks would get to play for arguably the only club in the world as big as United, where he would be a huge star alongside some of the greats like Zidane, Figo and Roberto Carlos.
It went down as an acrimonious split but I know Becks has huge respect for the manager, and vice versa – something confirmed in the many warm words they’ve said about each other since. It was a wrench for Becks to leave United, but he’s not exactly done badly since, playing for both Real Madrid and AC Milan.
I knew I’d miss my mate. We’d roomed together, sat next to each other on the team bus for the best part of a decade. To the rest of the world he might be David Beckham, superstar, but to me he was still the best mate I’d known since the age of fourteen. We’d
been through so much together. We’d played together every week on that right side for club and country to the point where we became almost telepathic. We’d learnt to play with each other since we were kids and could react instinctively. I’d see a pass played into Scholesy in midfield and before the ball had even left his boot I’d be setting off on the overlap, knowing for certain that it would soon be arriving at Becks’ feet. The opposing winger would already have been left behind, caught unawares, and now the full-back wouldn’t know whether to come with me or close down Becks. It sounds so simple, yet it caught out opponents game after game, for years and years.
We knew each other’s games, and we learnt how to handle each other’s temperaments. I can barely remember a cross word. We didn’t need to get on each other’s case because we trusted each other to be giving everything. Becks had a phenomenal work rate during his time at United; he had a capacity to run and run. In the physical tests there were few players who could match his stamina. There’s the infamous bleep test in training, a running exercise designed to make you sprint until you drop. Becks and Yorkie were the only two players in my time who managed to run it all the way through, to beat the machine. The rest of us would be on the floor.
His technical excellence hardly needs restating. Name anyone from the two decades the Premier League has been in existence more likely to land a cross on someone’s head. And he had what I call great ‘game intelligence’. To be honest, I think all of us – me, Becks, Butty, Scholesy, Phil – had that. There’s not enough intelligent English footballers who understand the game, who don’t need to be told where to move or what pass to make. Becks was one of the very best for decision-making. Neither I nor he was blessed with the greatest pace so we worked out a way around it.
On top of all that, he had a fantastic big-match temperament. He wanted the ball all the time. That’s the courage the best players have – to take possession, to take the heat off a teammate however tightly marked. It wasn’t just those celebrated passes and set-pieces but his ability to hold the ball that marks him out as having a very special technique.
Becks had ambitions from a young age, and when he left United he was well on his way to achieving them. He was more than just a footballer, and he had become a globally recognised figure. That’s opened a whole lot of fantastic opportunities for him, from his academies to helping London win the 2012 Olympics.
His career has gone the way he wanted it to go, and looking back on a glittering twenty years you have to say that he hasn’t let it affect his football. Just consider what he’s achieved, with all his trophies and his 115 caps for England. Unlike a lot of players who get wrapped up in a showbiz lifestyle, there was real substance to David. He is a model for any aspiring footballer – driven to succeed with a beautiful talent.
Becks is one of the United greats, but I could understand why the manager – particularly our manager, who was so used to controlling his players – was put out by the attention from the press on one player. It was time to say farewell to my best mate.
Strike!
IT WAS THE affair that earned me the nickname Red Nev, the episode which seems to get brought up as often as any of my on-field achievements. I’ll always be the one who takes the blame over the Rio strike. I’m forever to be seen as the leader of the rebellion.
‘The most hated footballer in the country’ was how the Sun branded me, and the strike made the front pages of every paper. It even led the Ten o’Clock News, so God knows what recriminations there would have been if we’d actually followed through and refused to play for England.
Would I have walked out? Would I really have refused to represent my country over someone else’s missed drugs test? I can say now that I came closer than anyone imagines.
At the height of the talks, I swear I was ready to grab my bags and leave the England hotel. I knew the consequences would be drastic. At twenty-eight, I would never play for England again. I’d be slaughtered by the media and fans up and down the country. I’d definitely become England’s most hated footballer – if I wasn’t already. But that’s how strongly I felt about it. And only one telephone call stopped me.
From the start I was convinced right was on my side – I still am. We can argue all day about the threat to go on strike, and whether that was the best way to make our point. But I still believe, passionately, that the FA badly mishandled Rio’s case and someone had to stick up for a point of principle.
At United, it was no great secret that Rio had missed a drugs test. We knew he’d screwed up and that he was due to have an FA hearing. I assumed Rio would continue playing and be given a fine and some kind of warning or suspended sentence. I assumed justice would take its natural course. How wrong I was.
It was the week of England’s final group qualifier for Euro 2004 and my dad had just picked up me and my brother to take us to Manchester airport to fly down to London to meet up with the squad when I took a call: Rio had been dropped over the drugs test. My initial reaction was that it was a joke. ‘How can they drop him? He’s not even had his hearing.’ I have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong, and from the start I thought this stank.
Before we reached the airport I rang the boss. ‘We’ve got to do something about this. Rio’s been left out and he hasn’t even been charged with anything.’
The boss said the matter had been discussed the previous night when the club had been urging the FA to pick Rio, but they’d got nowhere.
I rang Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the players’ union, and made exactly the same point to him. I wasn’t just going to stand aside and let the FA hang Rio out to dry.
This was never a case of trying to get Rio off the hook. He was wrong to miss the drugs test. At the very least he was daft and forgetful. He was going to get punished for it. My point – and this was what I kept hammering home – was that the FA must wait until the hearing to punish him. For me, it was a clear case of judging before the evidence had been heard. He deserved the chance to explain himself.
I don’t think Mark Palios, the chief executive of the FA, had much interest in listening to those arguments. He hadn’t been long in the job and he’d already set this agenda of cleaning up the game. I saw this as being his chance to prove that he was a strong man. He wasn’t going to back down.
At Manchester airport, Scholesy and Butty felt the same way about Rio’s position. They thought that it was a disgrace. As United players, we had been raised to stick up for each other, so that’s what we decided to do.
But this was not a case of just looking after our own. At the time, Rio was not a particularly good mate of mine. There were plenty of players in the England squad – David James, Kieron Dyer, Frank Lampard – who knew him better. I like to think I would have acted the same way whoever was in trouble, whether they played for Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea.
We arrived at Sopwell House and insisted that the four of us, the United lads, had a meeting with Palios. It was the first time I’d really spoken to him.
‘You’ve been a footballer,’ I told him. ‘You’ve actually been in a dressing room, you know what it’s like. You know that some lads sometimes do something silly, step a little bit out of line. What do you do, hang, draw and quarter them? Or do you think, “No, they’re entitled to a disciplinary process”?’
‘I have to do what’s right and proper,’ he kept saying, but this wasn’t law, it was just his opinion. No one except the FA seemed to think it necessary to ban Rio. Not Sven, not Uefa, nor our opponents the Turks. They all came out and said they had no objections to him playing. It was a policy decision by the FA. As far as I could see, it was about one man’s image. Having made a decision, it seemed as if Palios needed to look tough.
‘You’re being judge and fucking jury,’ I told Palios. ‘You’ve just come in here and you’ve wanted to make a point for yourself, the new sheriff in town.’
That hit a nerve and he snapped back. I reckoned there and then that he didn’t have the temperame
nt for a big job like running the FA.
There had been a feeling that under Adam Crozier, his predecessor, it had all been a bit too carefree, particularly when it came to money. Palios was brought in to tighten the belt. He might have been a top finance man but that’s what he should have stuck to – punching numbers into a calculator. Being chief executive of the FA is about being able to manage people, to deal with a crisis – about being the front man for the biggest organisation in British sport. To me, he seemed out of his depth.
‘We’re going to go and talk to the rest of the players, but we want Rio reinstated,’ I said. ‘This is fucking out of order.’ And off I went to see Becks, the captain.
Becks called a team meeting in the hotel. Sven was there for that first one. He was supportive and said he backed what we were doing, but he didn’t want to set himself against the FA publicly, which was a disappointment. I can understand why he felt in an awkward position, but if we’d had Alex Ferguson in charge, I think Rio would have played. Sven was always a diplomat. He avoided confrontation.
So it came down to the players. I spoke for most of the meeting. ‘Look, this could be you next week,’ I said, ‘and this doesn’t just relate to missing a drugs test. This could relate to anything. If we think Rio is getting a raw deal, and I do, we’ve got to defend him.’
We were on a roll now and another meeting was demanded with Palios involving the players’ committee – Jamo, Michael Owen, Sol Campbell and Becks – as well as the lads from United.
Palios kept banging on about how ‘we never leaked this out’ and ‘we never breached Rio’s confidentiality’. And I kept replying, ‘You’re not picking this up. What part of you thinks that you wouldn’t breach his confidentiality when you left him out of the squad? You might as well have announced it on the News at Ten.’
Palios made it plain we weren’t going to get anywhere with negotiation, which is when we decided to go for the secret ballot on the Tuesday evening about whether to strike. Was that the clever thing to do? I don’t think anyone would ever say, ‘Yeah, that went brilliantly.’ But would I do the same thing again? I think so, and at the time I certainly couldn’t see any other way. We had to show the FA that we were serious. And we had to find out if everyone else in the squad felt as strongly as the lads from United.