by Gary Neville
Steve is undoubtedly a world-class player and I wish he’d played for United. In fact I went on a personal tapping-up mission at Euro 2004 when I knew Chelsea were trying to take advantage of Liverpool being in turmoil.
‘Come play for United,’ I said one day when we were in the hotel. ‘The fans will take to you in no time.’
He just laughed. ‘I’ll do it if you go to Anfield.’
He’s a top, top player, Steve, but he has never quite shown how good when playing for England. Is that down to him, to the managers, to the expectations, or to the fact that we never had a great team around him?
You could write a whole book just trying to answer that question, but I think it involves several factors, on and off the pitch. For example, there’s no doubt that the FA mishandled managerial appointments, letting Terry go way too easily and appointing Glenn Hoddle and Steve McClaren before they were ready. But would any manager in the world have turned us into England’s first trophy-winners since 1966?
We had good players, a few great ones, but I’m not sure we ever had the depth of talent, or the right sort of players, to be consistently strong at international level. Because we win trophies galore for our clubs, people seem convinced that we should be winning with England. But they overlook how much our clubs have benefited from the foreign stars sprinkled through the Premier League.
I think the situation is changing and improving but we just haven’t produced enough players of the right technical and tactical quality. That’s easily proved by the very few times we have held our own against top-quality opponents. Holland in 1996 is pretty much the stand-out match, which tells its own story. We stood toe to toe against Argentina in 1998. We beat a couple of poor German teams, at Euro 2000 and in Munich in 2001. At Euro 2004 we didn’t play badly against France and Portugal but we didn’t exactly put them to the sword either. There were so many games when we were chasing shadows, incapable of controlling possession or tempo. There were so many times when I was playing for England and thought, ‘This is what it must be like coming up against United.’
The FA can help far more than they do. I don’t want to damn an entire organisation, but take Geoff Thompson, the chairman during most of my England years. He only ever sought out one conversation with me. Did he want to pick my brains on World Cup preparation? Or ask how the FA could help behind the scenes? No, Mr Thompson wanted to know why I didn’t sing the national anthem. ‘Gary, we’d rather appreciate it if you joined in,’ he said. I had to politely explain that no disrespect was intended, I simply preferred to spend those few minutes, as I’d done all my career, focusing on the match. And that was the extent of my dealings with the chairman of the FA.
The FA has a lot of great staff behind the scenes doing their best to make sure the squad gets the best possible preparation. We never had any complaints about facilities. We had top hotels, our own chef. We never wanted for anything.
But when it comes to grand strategy, the FA has not been blessed with dynamic leadership. There’s been a lack of real substance at the top addressing the bigger issues of player and coach production.
We’ve not had a coaching philosophy, and we’ve needed one to eradicate all the damage done through the eighties by the Charles Hughes approach to football. With the European ban after Heysel, we lost our way altogether. We became obsessed with power and direct football.
Howard Wilkinson is a decent man who had some success as a club manager, but he ended up dictating coaching policy and the youth set-up without any real experience of European methods or philosophy. His way was very much the old English style.
We’ve got Trevor Brooking, but he’s banging his head against a brick wall and has struggled to drag the game forward. It’s good to have a true football man involved at the FA but you have to give him more clout. Everything at the FA seems to take a lifetime. They’ve finally started working on a National Football Centre, but it has taken years.
The FA needs dragging into the twenty-first century. It’s been like the House of Lords for too long. When you think of the FA, who do you hear speaking out for the good of the national team? Who do you trust to be making sure we are doing everything we can to win a World Cup?
I scored my only goal in an England shirt in my very last competitive game. Shame it was in the wrong net. It was that crap night in Croatia in October 2006 when the wheels came off the Euro 2008 qualifying wagon. I rolled a backpass to Paul Robinson and then turned to move upfield. The first I knew about the bobble was when the crowd roared. I turned round to see the ball trickling into the net.
It was a bad trip from start to finish. The coaches sprang 3–5–2 on us a couple of days before what was a massive fixture. I know Terry Venables, Steve’s right-hand man, had always wanted to be tactically flexible, but I wasn’t comfortable. We’d just come off a bad 0–0 draw with Macedonia and we hadn’t had enough time to prepare.
As a player, you like to be able to visualise a game, to have an understanding of how you are going to play and what you need to do to counter an opponent. But I just couldn’t get a handle on what was expected from me at right wing-back. I hadn’t played there for ten years. I told Phil before the game that I was worried about it. And that was no frame of mind for such a crucial game.
I didn’t know if I was capable of delivering what the team needed on the night. And it was clear a few of the other players were just as unsure as me. Jamie Carragher had come in as left centre-back, but he never looked comfortable either.
The biggest problem was that we lacked pace and penetration. With me and Ashley Cole as wing-backs, we weren’t exactly set up to cut Croatia apart. We had no width high up the field to provide support for Rooney and Crouch. Carrick, Parker and Lampard were tripping over themselves in midfield. We were slow and predictable.
We deserved to lose, and I saw more mistakes in selection watching from home when Croatia came to Wembley for the return. I couldn’t understand why Owen Hargreaves wasn’t playing. With an opponent like Luka Modric off the front, it was made for him. Steve went with Gareth Barry. It didn’t make sense.
I’d play one more game, a friendly defeat by Spain at Old Trafford in February 2007, but that was my lot. Because of my ankle injury I wouldn’t have gone to Euro 2008 even if we had qualified.
I felt sorry for Steve. I hoped things would work out for him. I knew he was a good coach and I thought he could thrive in international football. The players respected him and it seemed a very shrewd appointment to have Terry alongside him. But managing England is a monster of a job.
I liken it to being a goalkeeper at Old Trafford. If you have any insecurities, if you aren’t confident in your work, it will kill you. I’ve seen goalkeepers eaten alive in that penalty area because they have too much time to think, to fret over what they should be doing. England managers are the same.
Steve is a really good coach, but sometimes with England managers coaching is the smallest part of the job, and that must have been difficult for someone who loves to be out working with the players.
It would also turn out to be a mistake dropping Becks, Sol Campbell and David James from his first squad. We could all see what he was trying to do. He was trying to start a new regime. But to drop Becks altogether didn’t make sense. He was never going to become a bad influence – that’s not his character. He’s not going to be a cancer in the dressing room. He just wanted to play.
Becks rang me with the news, and I was shocked. Very shocked. They were three big calls, and with hindsight Steve would have been better leaving it for a few months and seeing what he needed. He ended up recalling Becks, but by then he was under big pressure.
Steve was criticised in the media for being too chummy, but I wouldn’t say that at all. Yes, he organised the occasional dinner with groups of players, but it was well-intentioned. There was a long time between matches and Steve wanted to go through his thoughts and make us feel like we were all in it together. I thought it was a good idea, but that all becomes ir
relevant when you don’t win your big matches.
I would have one more call-up under Fabio Capello, in June 2009, for the trip to Kazakhstan. That’s a long way to go not to play. I never made it on to the pitch, and a few days later I sat on the bench as we thrashed Andorra 6–0, but I liked what I saw around the camp. Training was sharp and focused. Capello didn’t tolerate lateness or slackness in any way. A couple of players were late for a stretch and he pulled them up. Someone had a mobile at lunch and he snapped. On the training pitch, everything was ‘quicker, quicker’. He was pushing people even when warming up. There was a real focus in training.
I was impressed with everything he did, which made it even more bizarre when he became so erratic in the build-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Even the way he named his squad seemed chaotic.
He brought in Jamie Carragher instead of Wes Brown, who is quicker and more suited to international football. Then he rang up Scholesy the day before he was about to announce his squad having not spoken to him for two years. He left out Walcott who had been an ace in his pack, even if he hadn’t had a great six months. Then he called Phil at Everton, totally out of the blue. It looked desperate.
In the World Cup he never recovered from it, and made the biggest mistake of all. I’ve been advocating 4–3–3 with England for years and I couldn’t understand why Capello didn’t turn to it. He went with the traditional two banks of four, and it looked predictable and out of date. I’m not saying we’d have won the tournament with better tactics, but we’d have got closer than we did. We might not have been overrun in midfield by the Germans and we’d have kept hold of possession. As soon as Capello switched to 4–3–3 in the Euro 2012 qualifiers the team looked a much better shape. Why didn’t he even look at that formation a year earlier?
But for injury I’d have been out there myself and would have won well over a hundred caps. There was a spot at right-back for quite a few years. To be blunt, there’s a spot there today. Instead, I fell one short of Kenny Sansom’s record of eighty-six for a full-back, though overtaking him wouldn’t have meant much to me.
The truth is I was honoured to play for my country and I would have loved to have been part of a successful team. Winning the World Cup with England would have been incredible. The country would have come to a standstill; there’d have been millions out on the streets. It would have been bedlam.
I regard myself as patriotic but, truth be told, playing for England was a bonus. Winning for my club was always the most important thing, and given a straight choice of a European Cup with United or a European Championship with England, it’s United every time. It was United who were my heart and soul as a kid. They are the team I will watch when I am ninety, God willing.
As a kid, England meant very little. England was Bryan Robson. He was the only reason I watched the 1982 World Cup. England had no pull on me whatsoever. Going to Old Trafford on a Saturday was the big deal in my life. Wembley was on a distant planet.
None of this ever stopped me giving my all for my country, or being gutted every time we went out of a tournament. But I almost feel a bit sorry for the England players coming through now because they are caught between these massive expectations and the reality of being good, sometimes very good, but probably not of tournament-winning quality.
Jack Wilshere is a fantastic young talent of true international calibre, but it is going to be a while before we are producing enough players of his class. I think we are heading in the right direction, though. The Premier League years have seen a rise in technique and skills and tactical intelligence. When I started at United we were playing balls into the channels. That’s not happening now.
Kids have had role models like Zola, Henry, Bergkamp. There’s been change at the top end and I think it’s filtering down through most clubs and most academies to the park pitches and the kids.
But it’s not a transformation that can happen overnight. It will take time. We have our football culture in this country based on the traditional power player and I don’t see us competing seriously for a major tournament for at least ten years. We are heading the right way, but I’m afraid we still have a lot of catching up to do.
Money Talks
I’VE BEEN LUCKY. I never wanted to play for any club except United. I never lost sleep thinking about a transfer or plotting how to get away. My contract negotiations at Old Trafford would literally take about five minutes, especially because I never had an agent worrying about his cut. I’d walk in with my dad to see Peter Kenyon or David Gill with a number in my head, and, give or take a few quid, they’d have the same figure in mind too. Check the wording, give me a pen, where do I sign.
The only time I had a problem was when Phil was offered less than me when he wasn’t in the team every week. I told Kenyon that wasn’t fair and the club added some incentives to bring Phil level.
As for my teammates, I never worried for a moment if I was on the same money. I never had a clue what the likes of Scholesy or Giggsy were earning in all my time at Old Trafford. I just hope it was a lot more than me.
My life was simple when it came to money and contracts. I wish it was the same for more footballers but every day we hear about the influence of leeching agents. There are even some so-called super-agents. Super at what? Counting their take?
Everyone in football, apart from agents themselves, agrees that far too much money goes out of the game to middlemen, so why aren’t we doing more about it? The Premier League has started publishing what clubs pay to agents to shame them into bringing down the huge sums leaking out of the game – but it is the players who should really take a lead.
Many players have become so reliant on agents it’s ridiculous. I’m not going to damn every agent and, certainly for the top players, there is work to be done in terms of commercial contracts and sponsorships. A big-name player at United is a business. And massive moves, especially abroad, need to be handled by someone who can be trusted and who has contacts. There is a place for good representation, but too many footballers end up relying on an agent just to fix a lightbulb. They stop thinking for themselves. They get lazy and they get careless. They turn their whole life over to an agent, and in doing so they lose track of whether advice given is in their best interest.
For years I’ve been banging on about this. I’ve been wanting the various football organisations – the PFA, FA, LMA and the clubs – to come together to try and look at ways of weeding out this cancer.
The players themselves can do more. I always tell young players to employ a good accountant or lawyer who can deal with contracts. If you are renegotiating, why do you need an agent taking a slice that you’ve worked so hard to earn, practising since the age of six? Why should agents ever take a percentage? You can pay an accountant or a lawyer by the hour for the service they provide. That shouldn’t cost more than a few thousand quid – much less than the fortunes going to some agents.
I can’t understand why clubs and players agree to pay them so much. Just because a deal is worth £30 million it’s not necessarily ten times the work of a £3 million move. But clubs and players don’t demand value for money.
It’s time for players to do their bit, and to make a start I’d take the radical step of publicising every player’s wage in this country. We always hear in the media what a player earns so why not be transparent like they are in American sports? Let’s take the mystery out of it.
It will cause initial envy – ‘Look at what he’s earning!’ – but everyone will get accustomed to it soon enough. And hopefully it will get players to think, ‘I don’t need an agent to tell me what I should be on, or what a club’s pay-scale is.’ It should tell them they don’t need to bother with Mr Ten Per Cent.
I signed quite a few long-term contracts – the longer the better as far as I was concerned. My 2004 contract was the biggest because I was captain, at my peak. I found a simple way of working out a fair rate: I would speak to the PFA and they would give me a ballpark figure based on what t
he going salary was for international defenders.
At that time I was more established than any other right-back in the country. I’m sure there were plenty of other defenders, including Rio at United, earning much more, but I never worried about pushing too hard. Money was never a huge thing for me.
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Because I’ve found negotiations so simple, being so committed to United, it has sometimes been hard for me to accept that other players could have their heads turned by rival clubs or want to leave Old Trafford. But 2009 would see Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez deciding that they were better off elsewhere.
In the case of Cristiano, a move had become inevitable. We had known that he wanted to leave since the summer of 2008. He would talk openly in the dressing room about Madrid. He wanted to play in the warmth, and the history of Real was always a draw. When someone is set on a dream, it’s difficult to stop him. Cristiano dreamt of playing in the white shirt.
‘I need to get out of this place and go somewhere hot,’ he would say.
I’d have a go back. ‘You don’t know how good you’ve got it here. You’ll miss us more than you know.’
‘Why should I listen to you?’ he’d come back. ‘You’d never leave Manchester, even on holiday.’
He was totally open about his ambitions and I never had a problem with Cristiano for that. How could you? He stayed totally professional through 2008/09 even though he was counting down the months to his departure. Maybe his form wasn’t quite as spectacular as the previous couple of seasons, but we’d had six years out of him – three when the club had given him everything in terms of education, polishing the diamond, and three when he’d sparkled and been truly sensational.
I was sure he would miss us, and I’m sure he has. With all the chopping and changing at the Bernabéu, how can they possibly have the special camaraderie we’d built at Old Trafford? As for the adulation, Ronaldo couldn’t be more popular than he’d been among United supporters. And then there is the small fact that we have carried on winning honours and reaching Champions League finals. Real haven’t found that easy, for all their money.