After a tip-off from the News of the World, four men and a woman had been arrested in London. They were part of a gang of art thieves – four more people were picked up that night and the following morning – believed to be planning to kidnap Victoria, Brooklyn and Romeo and hold them to a £5 million ransom.
Victoria had already heard all this and she was doing her best to be strong about it. She’d jokingly said if they were going to kidnap her, they’d have to kidnap her hairdresser as well. Now, she was listening to the detail again, and watching me take it all in. And I was really upset. I felt my stomach turn over: it’s anybody’s worst kind of nightmare, although not many people will have to listen to policemen talking them through a threat that’s very real indeed. Right at the start, the guys from Scotland Yard were telling us that they took this thing seriously. They’d already made those arrests and, as of right now, they were putting officers outside the houses at Alderley Edge and Sawbridgeworth.
Sure enough, by the time we got home, there was a police car at the end of the lane and a couple of policemen were on duty at the gate. We went in and there was another car in the drive, right outside our front door. I think Victoria and I were trying hard not to panic and, I’ve got to say, it helped that the police seemed so in control of things so quickly. That evening and the next morning, as we read the papers and watched the television coverage of it all, the truth of what might have happened started to hit home. We might have been used to seeing and hearing stories about ourselves, often to do with things we’ve had no idea about beforehand, but this was different. There were the pictures of the gang at the gates of the house down south and details of the threats they’d made about what might happen to Victoria if I didn’t pay up: that kind of wickedness and on my own doorstep made my blood run cold. I think it was overnight that the shock really sank in for both of us.
We were upset and scared, but you can’t just hide and hope it will all go away. My family’s safety is the most important thing in the world; it’s the same for any dad. So in the days after, it was a case of trying to work out what we could do. I lost count of the number of experts that we took advice from. Some of the time, it felt like we were just getting more and more confused: everybody had different ideas and I even had the feeling that a certain amount of politics was behind some of it, people staking claims for their own reputations at the same time as offering to help. It came down to not being sure exactly who we could trust.
In the end, the person we turned to was Tony, Victoria’s dad. He’d always taken an interest in security equipment in connection with his own work and, when we bought the house in Sawbridgeworth, he’d put in alarm systems without us, until now, ever having to know the details. These security measures were sophisticated enough to impress the officers from Scotland Yard when they began looking at what improvements they thought we could make to our arrangements.
We’ve now got levels of security in our lives, from day to day, which we’d not even considered before the kidnap plot was uncovered. It’s not easy: never mind going to work or out to social engagements, we’ve always wanted to be able to go down to Marks & Spencer or McDonald’s like any other family. Now we have to be careful like never before. At the same time as making sure the boys are safe, we’ve tried not to make life too strange for them. In the day or two just after the plot was uncovered, I told Brooklyn that the policeman parked outside had come down especially to show him his car. You can imagine what a three-year-old made of that: he was out there every ten minutes wanting to sit behind the wheel and turn the patrol car’s lights on and off.
If you’d asked me then, I’d have said that I’d rather not play against Leicester in the Worthington Cup on the Tuesday night after that Saturday afternoon. The manager had said he was going to rest those players who he thought needed a break. And I felt like I was one of those players. Over the years, we’ve sometimes not played our strongest side in that competition. It’s been an opportunity for younger players to come in and make their mark, like I did, down at Brighton, nearly ten years ago. But my name was on the teamsheet against Leicester; and, if I was picked to play for United, the boss knew he’d get no argument from me.
There’s always a very good reason behind every decision the manager makes. You may not like it at the time – like when he’d left me out against Leeds – but, when you stop and think, you remember that all he’s focused on is what’s right for the team. And often that turns out to be the right thing for the player as well. It drives you mad sometimes: you feel almost like he knows you better than you know yourself. He knows that playing football is what I’m all about and decided, I think, that me captaining the team that night would help the other lads and, at the same time, give me a break from the chaos of the previous few days away from Old Trafford. Once I’m out on the park, nothing’s ever got in the way of me doing my job. The manager knew it wouldn’t that night either, and I got the first goal, from the penalty spot, in a 2–0 win.
I got a break in that game, too, but not the kind I needed. A few minutes before the end, I went in for a challenge with their centre-forward, Trevor Benjamin, who’s a big lad, and he fell on top of me. I was left sitting there knowing something serious had happened: I could hardly breathe. Afterwards and over the next few days, the United medical staff said I’d just bruised my ribs. I trained. I even played at the weekend. They thought that, if there’d been a fracture, I’d not have been able to do either. I was convinced the pain meant there was more to this than bruising though and, when we followed it up, the scan showed I had actually broken a rib.
I’ve never had trouble with injury beyond little niggles but this was my second in less than a year: This particular knock was maybe a blessing in disguise. I never want to miss games, but even before the season started I’d been feeling tired, mentally and physically, after coming back from Japan and, now, I didn’t have any choice but to rest. I joined up with England for a get-together during the international week. The whole squad was invited to Buckingham Palace, which was something I couldn’t miss out on. I felt unbelievably proud, being introduced to Her Majesty the Queen again as the England captain. She asked about my injury – last season’s foot, I think she meant, not this season’s rib – and about our arrangements since the kidnap plot. She obviously took an interest in that, personal security being something she knows all about herself.
For what seemed like the first time in ages, we took the boys on holiday, just us for a week in Barbados. Arranging it was a bit stressful: where to go, who to tell about it and the rest. We decided at the very last minute and just told the family but, by the time we got to the hotel, the papers had tracked us down. Who knows how it happens? Someone on the plane, or at the airport, sees you and passes the word along? It meant we spent almost the whole time by the pool, which was fenced off and private. The very last day I took Brooklyn to the beach, which was only a few yards away from our villa, and the cameras were already out there, waiting. I know I’m lucky to be able to fly off to a beautiful place in the sun and enjoy the luxury; not so lucky, maybe, that I can’t spend a few hours playing in the sea with my family while I’m there. Anyway, it was great to have some time to relax and just be with each other while, I imagined, life rolled on back at home.
I came back fresh and couldn’t wait to be playing again, although I was still a couple of weeks short of being ready for a game. Something had changed, though, while I’d been away. Almost as soon as I started work on building up my fitness at Carrington, I began to feel a chill in the atmosphere: not around the club, but between me and Alex Ferguson. It’s often like that when you’re injured. You’re not involved and so it’s as if you don’t really exist. Obviously, the gaffer has to get on with winning football matches with the players he’s got.
This felt like something different, though. Perhaps if I’d known what was going to happen over the next few weeks, I’d have been able to do something about it before events spun out of control. After the ten happiest year
s of my life at Old Trafford, how could I ever have imagined that things were going to unravel, and so quickly, to a point where I’d find myself wondering whether my future didn’t lie away from United, or even away from football altogether?
The boss hardly said a word to me at training or anywhere else. After a month of getting the cold shoulder, I decided I needed to find out what was going on. In the past, any kind of meeting with the boss would have been intimidating just to think about. I’d be standing in front of him and, before I’d said a word, my bottom lip would be starting to go. I’ve always been stubborn but I’m older now and more mature as a person. Most important of all, I’m surer of myself. I’ve got my wife believing in me to thank for that. I asked the gaffer if I could see him and said it straight out:
‘Is there a problem? Have you got a problem with me?’
He did. A big problem. To be specific, it was that, instead of going straight off on holiday, I’d gone to Buckingham Palace with the rest of the England players. He reckoned I’d have been fit sooner if I hadn’t waited those extra couple of days before going away. I tried to argue my case. As I understood it from the doctors, there’s nothing you can do that will hurry a recovery from a broken rib: it’s four weeks’ rest and that’s that. As for going to Buckingham Palace, I tried to explain:
‘I’m England captain. Never mind that I was proud to be asked to go and meet The Queen, I’d have been ripped apart in the papers if I hadn’t been there. The whole World Cup squad was there. I felt it was my duty to be there too. Ashley Cole got stick because he turned up wearing trainers. What would it have been like if I hadn’t turned up at all?’
What the gaffer said next, I’ll never forget:
‘When I saw you turn up there, I questioned your loyalty to Manchester United.’
That stung. I couldn’t believe I was hearing it, to be honest. I’d been at the club for thirteen years.
‘I love United. I want to be here. But if you don’t want me to be, you should tell me.’
The boss didn’t answer. I walked out. And, in the days afterwards, it was like the conversation hadn’t happened at all. In training, it felt like I was on the end of the worst criticism, whatever I did, for no real reason at all. The gaffer’s never been afraid to change things at United. I got my chance in the first team, after all, because he sold Andrei Kanchelskis. Now it was beginning to feel like I was the one being set up for the chop. We were all used to getting stick from the gaffer: for years it had been one way of him getting the best out of his players. This wasn’t like that, though. It was personal and it was humiliating. Try as I might to carry on as normal, the situation got to me. Ask Victoria: she had her own worries with Romeo being so young. And she hated the fact that I was so down and depressed the whole time. It wasn’t her fault was it? But she was the one who got it in the ear day after day from an unhappy husband.
That meeting with the gaffer hadn’t resolved anything. Even after I’d got back to full fitness and was playing again in the team, it seemed I couldn’t do anything right in his eyes. I got more than my fair share of stick on the training ground and, away from football, it felt like the slightest thing was enough to get me into more trouble. Before Christmas, the players would go to local hospitals, taking in presents for the kids. The previous couple of years, we’d spread things around a bit by me and Victoria going to a different hospital, the Christie Cancer Hospital in Manchester, and I made the mistake of asking whether we should do the same thing again. The boss saw that as me snubbing the rest of the team, wanting to be different and wanting to be treated differently – none of which was anything like the truth – and pulled me to one side to give me a piece of his mind about it.
The day of our game against Chelsea at Old Trafford in the Worthington Cup, Brooklyn had his first nativity play at nursery school. We trained in the morning and were due to meet up at one o’clock to prepare for the game. I asked the gaffer if I could report a few minutes late: the play started at midday and lasted about an hour. Maybe I should have known not to even ask. If I’d been another kind of character, I’d have gone off anyway and then blamed traffic for me being fifteen minutes late getting to work. I’m not the only dad in the world who’d be desperate to be at his son’s nursery school for something like that and I hoped the boss would understand. At worst, I thought, he might just say no; that we had a big game and he didn’t want me to go. But he was furious:
‘Hell, David, what are you after? What more do you want?’
Before I could say anything he just turned on his heel and walked away. I had to take that as my answer. I was sorry to miss Brooklyn’s play but I understood a manager not wanting his player to be there on the day of a game. What I didn’t understand was why it was such a big deal that I’d asked. Winding the gaffer up was the last thing I’d wanted to do.
I didn’t have to. This standoff just seemed to drag on. They were the worst three months I’d ever had at Old Trafford. The boss, when he wasn’t having a go at me, seemed to be ignoring me. I got more and more depressed. At training, at home, I felt like just withdrawing into my shell. I’d be really quiet. Things people said to me would go in one ear and out the other. He was ignoring me and I found myself ignoring him and pretty well everything else, too. Obviously I talked to Gary, to Victoria, and to Tony Stephens about what was going on. But I really missed there being someone at the club to act as an intermediary between me and the gaffer: a Brian Kidd, a Steve McClaren or an Eric Harrison who could see things from the gaffer’s perspective as well as the players’, who really understood what the situation was and could advise you accordingly. The new number two, Carlos Queiroz, was a great coach, no question, but maybe because of a language barrier or because of his own background as a top-flight manager himself, he wasn’t someone I’d have felt comfortable having that kind of conversation with. I don’t think Carlos would have recognised it as part of his job, either. The boss himself, obviously, didn’t want to talk to me. For the first time in my United career, I felt like I didn’t have anybody on the staff I could turn to for help.
I’ve already mentioned how difficult I’ve found it to cope with my parents’ splitting up. It goes without saying, though, that with the situation between them coming to a head and, then, the divorce going through, my own relationship with Mum and Dad couldn’t help but be affected too. Any son, or daughter, who’s lived through a family breaking up, will know how disorientating and confusing it is. With Dad, especially, things changed over that time. In the past, he’d have been the first person I’d have talked to about what was happening at Old Trafford. Now, he had his own problems and pressures to deal with and it didn’t feel right to be looking to him for advice. Because she and Jackie – Victoria’s mum – are the world’s best babysitters, I was still seeing a lot of my mum around the time things started to go wrong for me at United. I’ve always known that she and Dad were there for me but, as far as football was concerned, Mum had given me support while Dad, I suppose, had been the one to give me guidance. Now, though, she could see for herself how this standoff with the boss was torturing her son; and how me being upset was hurting her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren too. Without me knowing, Mum decided to take it on herself to do something about what was happening.
We played West Ham in the FA Cup and Mum was at Old Trafford to watch. For the first time, I felt the depression affecting my game. I played, and we won 6–0, but there wasn’t much pleasure to be got from it, especially as the boss had had a go at me about something at half-time. I remember getting changed and leaving the ground as quick as I could. By the time I was in the car with Victoria, it felt like something had to give. I felt completely powerless and just sat there, staring out into the rain, and choking back the tears. Mum came away from Old Trafford a bit later – she and Joanne were driving back to London separately – and phoned from their car:
‘I’ve been to see him.’
My first reaction was: ‘Been to see who?’
&nbs
p; Without Mum saying, I knew she meant the boss. And then I was angry. The idea of my mum going to see my boss seemed totally wrong, somehow. She explained that it hadn’t been planned, that she’d run into the gaffer by chance in the corridor and felt she had to tell him what she thought. At 27, it seemed to me that I should be able to sort out my own problems at work. It was a real surprise to me that she’d done what she had. I’d guess it was for the gaffer, too. She told me a bit about what had been said and one thing stuck in my mind:
‘Do you know Sandra, the trouble with David is that everybody sucks up to him now.’
Nothing the gaffer could have said about me could have hit harder than that. I’ve always believed, whatever anyone else says or thinks about you, that you have to be true to yourself. When I was a kid – playing for Ridgeway, training with Spurs, starting out at United – whenever Dad had been angry with me about something, had decided my attitude wasn’t right, he’d known just what to say to really get to me:
‘You’ve changed.’
Those words, coming from him, always stung me like nothing else: they suggested I was cheating with my football and with my life by pretending to be someone or something I wasn’t. Dad knew how to get to me and so did Alex Ferguson. What he told my mum after that West Ham game was his way of saying the same thing Dad had said years ago. I knew how alike they were: stubborn, for a start. Maybe what neither of them really knew was how much I’d inherited that stubbornness as part of my own character. I couldn’t let myself buckle under, anyway. I was angry, at first, that Mum had been to see the boss but it made me realise that if I was this upset and this frustrated, I needed to face up to the situation instead of just letting it grind me down.
A few days later, the boss asked to see me. He wanted to talk about the arrangements for the England friendly against Australia: the understanding with Sven was that the senior players would only be involved for 45 minutes. Of course, as England captain, I needed to know what was going on. All that was fine. Now it was my turn. I’d thought long and hard since the West Ham game about what I wanted to say to the gaffer and what I wanted to hear from him. We’d had a couple of days off and that had given me time to get a few things straight in my own mind. I needed to know if he wanted me to leave United. And, if he didn’t but was going to carry on treating me the way he had been, I wanted him to know that I had one other option. I couldn’t imagine myself actually doing it but it was possible: I had enough in the bank to make sure that my decisions didn’t have to be about money. Rather than have my life broken apart by the game I loved, I had a choice: I could retire from football altogether. I got as far as discussing it with Victoria. I didn’t want to believe, though, that things might come to that:
David Beckham: My Side Page 33