Hammered

by Mark Ward

  He wasn’t the only one who had to treat his team-mates that night, though. I can’t recall what misdemeanour I’d committed this time, but I had to pay for the champagne.

  17. FIGHTING BACK

  THE inaugural FA Premier League campaign started well with a 3-0 win over the 1992-93 champions-elect Manchester United at Old Trafford. That was our first away fixture and there was talk of us finishing in the top six but my season was brought to an abrupt and very painful end after just eight matches.

  We were playing at Blackburn Rovers in an evening game on September 15. It was early in the first half and I remember the ball being played in to me and letting it run across my body, so I could pass it on to Barry Horne with the outside of my right foot.

  The tackle from Mark Atkins was late and brutal. My foot was planted on the turf as the reckless Rovers midfielder lunged at me with both feet, hitting me from the side.

  The pain was instant and I just lay motionless, too scared to move. I knew instantly that my right ankle was fucked. I laugh to myself now when I see players – usually foreigners – rolling around pretending they are hurt. Let me tell you, when you break bones you don’t roll around as if you’ve been shot by a sniper – you are in too much pain to even move.

  I was carried off on a stretcher and Howard, realising it was serious, came down from the stands and onto the pitch to see how bad my injury was. I was rushed to Blackburn Royal Infirmary accompanied by Dr Ian Irvine, the Everton club doctor. He was giving me gas and air, trying his best to ease the agony by telling me it was ‘better than sex!’

  X-rays confirmed a fracture to the fibula and tibia just above the ankle. After much consultation, it was agreed that club surgeon Dr Johnson would perform the operation the next day at the Arrowe Park Hospital on The Wirral.

  If the pain was intense immediately after the tackle, it was nothing compared to how bad I felt after surgery. I awoke with a plaster cast stretching from my ankle up to my knee. The pain was like nothing else. It was if the ankle was trying to explode out of the plaster.

  My arse was like a dart-board after all the morphine the nurses had given me to try and ease the pain. As soon as Everton physio Les Helm came to visit me, he demanded that the hospital medics removed the plaster and when they did I felt instant relief. I still hurt but at least it was manageable now.

  Les and I had a good talk and he told me the extent of the damage. The surgeon had to insert two metal plates, held together by eight screws, to knit the bones back together.

  He told me it was going to be a long, hard journey back to fitness and warned me that I’d have to learn to walk again, never mind think about running or kicking a ball.

  I was very down, being injured was a new thing to me. I’d had a great injury-free run over the years but now my luck had run out.

  I started to feel a lot of anger and resentment towards Mark Atkins. It was a terrible, late tackle and I knew he meant to hurt me – if not quite to the extent that he did. Only he can say.

  Atkins’ actions hadn’t stopped Everton leaving Ewood Park with a 3-2 away victory – but I was hell bent on revenge.

  My rehabilitation with Les Helm was going to be crucial to my comeback attempt but we got off to a bad start due to the difficulty I had coming to terms with the seriousness of the injury and what was going to prove the longest lay-off I’d ever experience.

  Les wanted me in the swimming pool to get some movement back in the ankle, so we arranged to meet at the Liverpool Moat House hotel, which has its own pool. I’d been drinking on the Saturday and failed to turn up, as arranged, at the Moat House the next morning. Big mistake.

  Les bollocked me, big-time, when I saw him on the Monday and then refused to talk to me for a whole week. He then stressed the fact that only I could put the necessary work in to get myself back playing again. He was spot on, of course, and I promised him I wouldn’t let him down again and that I’d become the model injured player.

  The swelling and scar tissue resulting from surgery was a big problem at first. When I looked at the state of my ankle, I had doubted whether I’d ever play football again. But Les worked hard every day to break down the scar tissue. We became close and I found out he’d been in the same army regiment as my father. Les was old school but he knew his stuff and proved very entertaining. I never had a day off, spending every day in the gym and continuing to have treatment.

  I set myself a target of making it back in time for the start of the 1993-94 season. Every week that went by I was feeling stronger. I’d done weight-lifting before and enjoyed it but now it became almost an obsession with me and I was pushing my body to extremes.

  Dave Ash, the training ground janitor, also helped me a lot. He was fit as a fiddle, a martial arts expert and part-time bouncer who looked after the Everton lads whenever we needed a favour.

  I was told that the two plates and screws had to be removed before I could start jogging and kicking a ball but nothing stopped me trying to bench-press more and more weights as the days and weeks went by. I got to a stage where Dave Ash put 230 pounds on the bar in the gym at Bellefield and I was going for a new personal best in one lift. It was a big weight, especially for somebody who weighed only 140 pounds.

  I let the bar hit my chest and pushed the weight gradually up to lock out my arms. I did it – a new personal best. I got up quickly and the effort it took to push the weight caused me to collapse. Good job Dave was there to stop me hitting the floor and possibly doing myself further damage.

  By this time I felt unbelievably strong and after the operation to remove the metal from my ankle, I was ahead of schedule to resume playing.

  After three Premiership wins on the bounce in January ’93, February was to be a terrible month for the team with four defeats. I couldn’t wait to get back and push to regain my first team place.

  By now I was sprinting and doing light ball work. I still had a slight limp and the lads jokingly called me ‘The Gimp’.

  After a draw against Oldham Athletic at Goodison on the February 27, which ended a run of four consecutive defeats, the midweek home match against Blackburn Rovers was another we had to win. I’d trained with the first team squad on the Friday before the Oldham game and after my second day back on the Monday, I felt good – even though my touch was a bit rusty after such a long time on the sidelines.

  Following training on the Tuesday morning I was summoned to Howard’s office. We were playing Blackburn that evening and he said: ‘Do you fancy it tonight?’

  I nearly fell off the chair. Before I could react, Howard added: ‘You’re the fittest man at the club and we badly need a lift. I want to start you tonight if you’re up for it.’

  I’d only been training with the first team for two days. It was just short of six months since I suffered that horrific injury at Blackburn.

  I told Howard I was in and very much looking forward to it. I knew, deep down, that there would be nobody fitter then me walking on to the Goodison turf that night. If my touch was still a little off, I’d make up for it with my work-rate. I was going to do my job and help the team secure a much needed victory. And that’s what we did.

  Considering how long I’d been out, I felt amazingly fit, which was testimony to the masterful job performed by the surgeon, the patience and dedication of Les Helm and the help I had from Dave Ash as well as my own determination. I got through my comeback game on pure adrenalin and we had come from behind to virtually seal a 2-1 victory when, with five minutes remaining, Blackburn made a substitution.

  Mark Atkins, the player who had nearly ended my career, was coming on. I’ll admit, my head was ready to explode and I wanted revenge on him.

  Ian Snodin gave me a look and said ‘leave it to me.’ I just wanted a 50-50 – me and Atkins – and I was going to cut him in two. I wanted retribution for the pain and anguish he had caused me, without even offering the courtesy of an apology. It was payback time.

  But before I got another touch of the ball, I could see m
y No. 7 being held up. I trudged off the pitch, straight past Howard and got into the bath. Minutes later the dressing room was filled with the buzz of a well-deserved victory.

  I was hauled out of the bath by Colin Harvey and sat down with the rest of the lads. Howard looked straight at me and asked me why I thought he’d taken me off. I responded by admitting: ‘I’d have cut Atkins in half if you hadn’t.’

  Howard couldn’t take a chance by leaving me on for the final five minutes because he knew what I was capable of doing.

  He went on to say in front of all the others that I’d shown what can be achieved in the face of a serious injury if the player concerned dedicates himself to working hard.

  It got better for me on the Saturday at Coventry, where, in front of the live Sky TV cameras, who were seen for the first time at all top flight grounds that season, I scored a spectacular volley to clinch a 1-0 victory.

  My right ankle was never the same again, though. It now lacks the same degree of movement I had in my left ankle before my worst-ever injury.

  But, looking back to the spring of 1993, I was just so relieved to be playing after realising how close I could have been to ending my career. I was still only 30 and had a lot of football left in me. With the care and support of my club, a dedicated physio and a will to win, I had managed the impossible. When I look back over my career, I rate this as my biggest achievement. My desire to play in the blue shirt was the main reason for me getting back so incredibly soon after such a horrific injury.

  18. SHOOTING THE POPE

  FOOTBALLERS and secrets go hand in hand. On a sporting level, that’s often a necessity. Many professional sports people truly believe the old adage that what happens in the dressing room, stays there. It works perfectly until such time as a player or manager needs some self-serving publicity – a transfer, a backhander or simply a favour.

  It is perfectly legitimate for people to spill the beans on trivia such as who spends the longest time in the shower and other rubbish like that. Arguments and fights carry a different agenda and in any case they happen all the time. It’s part and parcel of the game and you can’t let every cough and splutter be aired for public consumption. Away from the pitch, the wrong kind of publicity can cause serious damage to clubs and individual players. In exceptional circumstances, it can even end a person’s career.

  That is one reason I’m glad that, although I once shot a man, it never made it into the papers. It is also why I was relieved that an unrelated saga around the same time, in which I became embroiled in a six-month feud with a notorious gangster, was never exposed to the glare of publicity.

  That particular episode started with a hoodlum pinching my chair in a nightclub restaurant and ended only when the man involved – a major Liverpool crime figure with accusations of murder on his charge sheet – decided not to pursue his vendetta. He had been trying to blackmail me and Everton knew all about it.

  Both incidents – the ‘Shooting of the Pope’ and the gangster saga – happened within the space of a few months at the end of 1992, and both had a common venue as a starting point – The Continental nightclub, or ‘The Conty’, as we all knew it. Both incidents were also more related to the social scene rather than football issues.

  Christmas time as a professional footballer is vitally important. There are a lot of league points to play for and the balance of a team’s whole season can go either way depending on results. Christmas with the family is not the norm. Training, travelling and playing matches are a player’s priorities.

  Jane loved Christmas and everything that went with it, and I suppose I never really showed much seasonal spirit. On every Christmas Day for about 15 years I was training. As long as everyone close to me had their presents and could enjoy themselves at home, I was happy, but it was the football that was paying for all the nice presents at that time of year, so football always came first for me. Jane would give me ear ache about it at first but she got used to the pitfalls of being married to a footballer and got on with Christmas without me.

  The one non-football aspect of the festive season that I always looked forward to was the players’ annual Christmas party. No matter which club I was at, the agenda and the conclusion was the same: booze, birds and mayhem, all with the aim of fostering a good team spirit. I went to some memorable bashes over the years, the best nights coming with the players of West Ham and Everton.

  One stands out above all the others, and not just because it was full of the usual hilarity. It turned into something altogether much more surreal.

  Let’s go back to the Everton Xmas party of 1992. Our Christmas gatherings were always held at The Conty, in the city centre, the frequently favoured venue of Everton and Liverpool players at any time of the year. The main attraction was simple: the best looking women were always to be found there. They were darlings. On any given Tuesday night, you’d be hard pressed to find more gorgeous women anywhere else in the country.

  A lot of the girls seemed to be there for one reason only – to ensnare a footballer. To be fair, a lot of the time the players didn’t take much catching. Why would they? Whenever I took some mates to the Conty, we were always well looked after by the bouncers and staff. There was a restaurant upstairs and Franco, the manager, always made room for and welcomed the Everton and Liverpool players.

  Our Christmas parties were always fancy dress affairs. If you didn’t arrive in a costume, you didn’t get in. It had been that way for years. I remember my brother Billy dressing up as a naughty nun one year. From the front he was perfect, he looked just like a nun, or at least a transvestite nun.

  But viewed from the back, there was no costume at all – just the sight of his black knickers and suspenders. The lads spent ages groping him. After a few drinks and with his patience wearing thinner by the minute, he turned to me and said: ‘If anyone else feels my arse again, Mark, I’m going to chin them.’

  It was a ludicrous scene, with nearly 200 men all dressed in ridiculous costumes. One year our captain, Dave ‘Waggy’ Watson, brought along his clan all dressed as Hawaiian girls. There wore grass skirts, flip-flops and a lovely pair of coconuts each. Well, two hairy coconuts anyway. Looking at Waggy, my first thought was, ‘Are those skirts flammable?’ Only one way to find out …

  I borrowed a cigarette lighter, sneaked up behind him, and put the flame to the skirt. What they were made of, I don’t know, but his skirt ignited pretty spectacularly. One whoosh and his arse was ablaze. That gave us both a bit of a fright but after putting out the flames, Waggy chased me around the reception area with no back to his skirt and his singed bum on display to all!

  The tickets for the Christmas party cost £25 per head and were allocated to the players in early December, so we had time to distribute them to our relatives and friends. They were like gold dust. The usual mob I took included brother Billy and his sparring partner Kevin Kennedy, plus my two old school mates, Kevin Hayes and Peter McGuinness.

  It was good value, because that got you entry into the nightclub, a buffet, a stripper, and a free bar until about 11pm. From 9.30 on the night, the management would allow free entry to a select group of attractive women who’d been handpicked and provided with tickets in the weeks running up to the event. Wives and girlfriends were banned. That wasn’t unusual at Everton players’ functions at the time, nor on any trips arranged by Howard Kendall.

  The Christmas party culture is another part of the game that seems to have changed over the past decade. Every year you hear of another club, especially in the Premier League, who have decided to ban the party or whose players have decided voluntarily to skip it. It’s all go-karting and double tonic waters now.

  Actually, I’m sure the antics still go on, but players these days know they simply cannot get away with any bad behaviour, particularly big-name players at top clubs who are constantly under the media microscope.

  Our Everton parties were well organised in every respect. It was vital that absolutely no dickheads – apart from us –
should be allowed in to potentially cause any trouble. We didn’t have mobile phones with their built-in cameras in those days, while normal cameras were frowned upon. Yet it’s still amazing how few incidents ever leaked to the press.

  The party proper would be in the evening but we’d all congregate at the Moat House hotel, across the road from The Conty, for a preparty session. Between 2pm and 3pm, a steady stream of Everton players and their mates would arrive dressed up as Batman, Spiderman, Popeye, nuns, ra-ra girls or whatever. We’d spend four or five hours drinking there before making our way to the club.

  At this stage, any new players who had never attended a Christmas party before would have to take to the dance floor and sing in front of everyone. This would always be a test of character. At my first Everton party I practiced for ages beforehand and then sang Summertime, the George Gershwin classic, which is still my party-piece.

  After the sing-song ended at about 10pm, it was time for the stripper, and it was at this point in 1992 that our party took its first bizarre turn. As the stripper started her act, Billy Kenny, one of the youngest members of the squad, also started to undress. To the amazement of everyone present, he kept on going until he was totally naked, and then he started dancing in front of this girl with his wedding tackle in his hands, trying desperately to get some response from it, but to no avail whatsoever.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that Billy was the best up and coming footballer in Liverpool at that time, and causing a massive buzz way beyond Merseyside. He was the next big thing, a wonderkid and sure-fire certainty to make it to the top.

  Billy had joined Everton as a boy, made it to the first-team squad when he was 17, and by the time of that party he was 19-years-old and apparently on the verge of a major breakthrough in the game. I got on well with him and rated him highly as a talented midfielder who was good on the ball. He was a funny lad, always making people laugh and a typical Scouser.