Journeyman

by Ben Smith

  CHAPTER 3

  IN THE BIG TIME

  SEASONS: 1995/96, 1996/97

  CLUB: ARSENAL

  DIVISION: PREMIER LEAGUE

  MANAGER: PAT RICE (YOUTH TEAM)

  WITHIN A MONTH of finishing my GCSEs in the summer of 1995 I was embarking on my first ever pre-season as a full-time player alongside David Donaldson, Lee Richardson, Jason Crowe and Mark Thorogood – all of whom had also signed two-year YTS contracts. It seems like another lifetime ago, but I can recollect some memories vividly.

  The then assistant youth development officer Steve Rowley gave me a lift to my first day of training and I bounced into the training base at London Colney confident in my own mind that I was going to be a superstar.

  My first day also coincided with the first for new manager Bruce Rioch. He had the unenviable task of taking over from the hugely successful George Graham, who had been relieved of his duties after being found guilty of receiving illegal bungs. I had grown up watching Graham’s team (youth players were given complimentary tickets to every home game) and although the style of football was not aesthetically pleasing, the team was superbly organised and built on strong foundations, with sprinkles of genius from the likes of Ian Wright, Paul Merson and Anders Limpar. But, being honest, Arsenal under Graham did not play my kind of football.

  We were not the only new boys on that first day either. Arsenal had also signed two undeniable superstars who were massive heroes of mine: the mercurial Dennis Bergkamp from Inter Milan for £7.5 million and David Platt from Sampdoria for £4.75 million. I used to watch Bergkamp every Sunday afternoon on Channel 4’s coverage of Italian football and Platt was the sort of box-to-box attacking midfielder I had tried to base my game on.

  I will let you judge who you think was the most successful of all these new signings arriving at London Colney that day, although what I will ask is this: did Bergkamp or Platt ever grace the hallowed turf at Hereford’s Edgar Street?

  My youth-team manager was Pat Rice, the legendary ex-Arsenal right back. He was the ideal youth-team manager – a tough man who would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you stepped out of line but would also build up your confidence when he felt it necessary. I have never really feared authority and have always been pretty cheeky, which I think he quite liked, but he often gave me a bollocking when I crossed the line between being confident and gobby.

  In those days at Arsenal, everyone (first team, reserves and youth-team players) trained together during the first week of pre-season. There were a total of sixty players. I remember this as I was number fifty-eight – I believe it was sorted out via alphabetical order, not ability!

  We were then mixed up into several groups to work at one of the different stations spread around the training ground for thirty minutes at a time. These stations included a body weight circuit, the dreaded perimeter run (around the outskirts of the whole training ground), shorter shuttle runs and head tennis.

  The late George ‘Geordie’ Armstrong was in charge of my group and, while I cannot remember everyone in it, I can recall defender Nigel Winterburn’s behaviour. We were doing some simple weaving in and out of poles but Nigel decided he would just run through them and clothesline them all like a WWE wrestler. I was stunned! All the senior players just laughed at him and Geordie did not say much. I bet he was pissed off though.

  In those days, pre-season was not taken very seriously, especially for the first couple of weeks. A lot of players came back overweight so the first priority was to shift that excess via lots of running – not like it is nowadays where footballs are often incorporated on the first day.

  Having said that, there were balls used for head tennis, of course. It is called ‘head’ tennis but you can use any part of your body to get the ball over the net. I had gone from playing ‘headers and volleys’ with my friends in the park to playing it with experienced Premier League and international players. Suffice to say I was a nervous wreck and my sole aim was to ensure I was not the one to make a mistake.

  Paul Dickov, the fiery Scottish striker, was in my group and prided himself on his head tennis expertise. He could not care less if you were an established player or a spotty teenager – if you made a mistake he deemed preventable, he gave you both barrels. Luckily one of my strengths has always been my first touch so I managed to get through that unscathed.

  On one of those early days my group had just completed its perimeter run and we were waiting for our turn on the head tennis court. Dennis Bergkamp was playing in the group ahead of us and produced a piece of skill that left me open-mouthed. The ball came over the net from about 10 metres in the air, but Bergkamp cushioned and caught it on his foot in one motion and then nonchalantly flicked it back over the net. Everyone went mad! It was amazing and my words probably do not do it justice. Even in those early days it was starting to dawn on me just how good you needed to be to make a career for yourself at the highest level.

  The first few months were a real learning curve. My adolescent body was struggling to adapt to the rigours of full-time football and I had gone from being a top player in every team I had played in to being one of the weakest. Physically and mentally I was still a boy and I soon realised I had a massive challenge on my hands to make a career for myself at any level of professional football, let alone playing in the Premier League.

  My home in rural Essex was geographically on the cusp of Arsenal’s clubrun accommodation boundary. As a result, they let me make my own choice and I decided I wanted to stay with my family and friends.

  This was another mistake.

  I should have moved to north London and immersed myself in trying to be a professional footballer. Instead I spent a lot of time on the train commuting to and from Highbury.

  As an apprentice footballer in those days I was paid the princely sum of £29.50 per week in my first year. On top of that, the club also paid my dad £60 a week to look after me and they covered my travel costs too. As you can see, this was long before the pampered lifestyle of young scholars nowadays.

  My week consisted of training Monday and Tuesday, attending college in King’s Cross on a Wednesday, more training Thursday and Friday and then a game on Saturday mornings. When the first team was playing at Highbury, our week would finish by watching them in the afternoon. However, these were only half of our responsibilities.

  Every player was in charge of looking after three professional players’ match day and training boots. The players who had the dubious honour of me cleaning their boots were David Seaman (at that time the England national team goalkeeper), Ian Selley (who I thought was a brilliant central midfield player before his top-level career was ended prematurely by injury) and Matthew Rose (a young professional who went on to have a good career with the likes of Queens Park Rangers). The best memory I have of Rose is that he had a very attractive girlfriend!

  Now I say it was a dubious honour mainly because I took no pride in cleaning my own boots, let alone anyone else’s (even if they were a current England international!). I have been criticised throughout my career for having dreadfully dirty boots – often having it cited as a lack of professionalism. However, I like to argue that my boots were always dirty because I loved football so much and was always using them.

  To make matters worse, Seaman was very particular about the preparation of his boots. He insisted the Nike logo on each one be painted with a well-known paper correction fluid and that there be no black polish on the logo at all. Now this probably does not sound too taxing but you have to factor in that I am not artistically gifted. Seaman was thankfully one of the more laid-back professionals, however, and would show any displeasure with a loud, deep laugh, accompanied by a headlock. We mutually parted ways early in the New Year of my first season and his boots were passed on to another apprentice who took more pride in his responsibilities. However, this still gave Seaman the opportunity to illustrate his displeasure with me via his Christmas tip.

  At Arsenal there was a tradition where you h
ad to sing a Christmas carol to the whole playing staff in order to get your tip – no song equalled no money. As I am sure you can imagine, this was a pretty daunting prospect for anyone, let alone a seventeen-year-old fresh out of school.

  Legend has it that when Ray Parlour was an apprentice he sang ‘Little Donkey’ to Tony Adams. The defender allegedly showed what he thought of the song by chasing Ray around the training ground – but I never found out whether he caught him or not!

  I got the Cliff Richard classic ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ to murder – and that I did. I am one of those unfortunate people who is tone death but thinks they sound good until they witness the quizzical look on the face of any onlookers, who often cannot tell if I’m being serious or taking the piss. I can’t even compensate with some eye-catching dance moves as they are arguably just as embarrassing.

  So the first team and reserve players would be watching and baying for blood with buckets of freezing water, saliva and God knows what else. If you were good the players would sing along until you finished and you’d escape a soaking. If you were terrible you would get booed off and covered in whatever inhabited those buckets. Needless to say, I suffered the latter.

  Now, if I knew the size of the tip coming my way from England’s No. 1 I do not think I would have bothered at all. I could not believe it when he handed over £50 … £50?! A conservative estimate would say he must have been on £10,000 a week. Probably more. We have established that I was not the best boot boy in the world, but surely he could have given me a couple of hundred quid. Other apprentices were getting bundles of £50 notes, new boots and as much sports clothing as they could carry. Maybe he was teaching me an early lesson?

  Selley gave me £30, which, considering he liked to clean his own boots, was acceptable, although still a little tight in my opinion. Rose gave me £25 – another paltry amount…

  On top of boot-cleaning, we apprentices also had other duties to carry out. Chores included taking all the training kit from Highbury to the training ground, preparing all the equipment for said sessions, packing the players’ boots for away games, cleaning Highbury before and after games and keeping the youth-team bus clean.

  I remember early in my apprenticeship, we had packed the kit and boots for an away youth-team game, arrived at the venue and started to unpack the huge metal skips, and realised one of them seemed really light. Turned out it was empty. The lads on duty that day had picked up the wrong skip and left the kit at home. Laurence, the youth-team kit man, went apoplectic. The lads responsible got a right bollocking. As it was nothing to do with me I found it hilarious, although I’m not sure those sentiments were shared by those involved!

  Highbury would always have to be cleaned on a Thursday before a Saturday home game and, on such days, I would leave home at 7 a.m. and not get back until 9 p.m. – not exactly what I had signed up for. I soon realised that a lot of apprentices are taken on as glorified cleaners. Back then I believe a lot of clubs, especially lower down the leagues, recruited enough players to play in their youth team and carry out all menial jobs, knowing full well that the vast majority of them had absolutely no chance of making any type of career in football.

  That first year as a full-time footballer was a huge learning curve. I could not break into the youth team in my favoured position of central midfield but, due to the fact I was comfortable with both feet, I managed to nail down a place on the left. My performances in the first half of that 1995/96 season were very up and down, though, as I struggled to find any real consistency.

  I either played really well and would be one of the best players on the pitch or play horrendously and be the worst. Unsurprisingly, the latter resulted in me being on the wrong end of Pat Rice’s hairdryer treatment on more than one occasion. This was the first time I had been on the end of such aggression and I was not too sure how to handle it. You have to quickly realise that it is not personal and that at some stage of the season everyone gets a kick up the backside. I just managed to get more than most.

  My most memorable dressing-down came when we played an FA Youth Cup match at Highbury against Wimbledon. Leading up to the game I had been struggling with a hip problem. It was not enough to stop me playing but it was causing me discomfort. The coaching staff was undecided about whether I should play or not, but I insisted I was fit and they took my word for it. In hindsight, I definitely should not have played as the game was a complete disaster, but it was my first opportunity to play in such an iconic arena and the best ground I had played at before then was Colchester United’s Layer Road in an under-10 cup final for Valley Green.

  We were totally outplayed in the first half and were getting comfortably beaten by half-time. I had been at the club long enough to know that a rollicking was coming our way and that there was every opportunity I would be one of its recipients.

  I was not disappointed. Rice initially went mental at everyone and then I had the misfortune of catching his eye. He exploded, saying how I had let him down as I clearly was not fit.

  He was pretty much foaming at the mouth and saliva was going everywhere as he launched into the finale of his dressing-down, which involved him thumping his fist on the treatment table in front of me. He did it with such ferocity that his watch broke and fell onto the floor. Even in my petrified state I had to suppress the laughter swelling inside me. He did not find it amusing and it was the end of my participation in that game.

  It always made me chuckle when I used to hear Arsenal fans on radio phone-in shows saying there seemed to be nobody on the coaching staff giving out criticism when the team was underperforming. Pat Rice, who spent sixteen years as first-team assistant manager until the end of the 2011/12 season, would have had no hesitation in letting his thoughts be known – believe me!

  At that age, such setbacks had a detrimental effect on me. After that game, my form suffered for quite a while, which did not go unnoticed by some of my teammates. Generally in football there is very little sympathy handed out and this case was no different. Players would come out with comments such as, ‘Where were you Saturday?’ or ‘Shock, you gave the ball away again.’ Sometimes it would be under their breath but always loud enough for me to hear. In the long term it spurred me on to improve, but in the short term it made life tough. I remember sometimes during that first year, especially in the early days, dreading going into training.

  The situation was not helped by the fact I also had to handle the embarrassment of getting subbed before half-time in a youth-team game once. It was after that game that I first learnt managers will sometimes be conservative with the truth.

  Thanks to the ever unpredictable British Rail I had missed training on the Friday before the match. The ritual in the youth team on a Friday was to do functional work, which consisted of working on the formation we were going to play, trying some set-piece situations and finishing with a small-sided game. I had missed all this.

  The next day I threw in one of my worst performances and was dragged off after about twenty-five minutes. I thought I was going to get another dressing-down, but Pat must’ve realised how low my morale was and made up some cock-and-bull story about me not knowing the formation we were playing. We were playing 4–4–2, which, even at the age of seventeen, I had played hundreds of times before. I suppose it was his way of protecting me, but I was intelligent enough to know the real reason.

  However, as the season wore on, my confidence both on and off the pitch did begin to grow. I started to feel at home with my teammates and slowly won the respect of the group. I had found a niche for myself in the team on the left side of midfield and began to add some consistency to my play.

  Bruce Rioch seemed to take a liking to me as well. He was a regular at youth-team games when the first team was playing at home. One particular game, I cannot remember the opposition, he seemed to take a real interest in my performance. It may just have been that I was playing on the side of the pitch where he was standing, but he was giving me lots of advice that I attempted to take o
n board.

  I was amazed the manager knew my name, let alone took any interest in my performance, but it gave me a lot of confidence and I felt I was making progress.

  I had always been technically gifted with a football and, even in the youth team at Arsenal, I knew I was one of the better in the group when in possession. In those days I thought that being good with the ball was enough, so, unfortunately, I did no extra fitness work and would regularly cheat when doing the bodyweight circuits. Pat Rice would refer to me as ‘Fatty Arbuckle’ – he said it in jest but it was a dig and I knew it. In those days one of my heroes was Paul Gascoigne and, in my mind, I thought that if Gazza could get away with being a little chubby then so could I. Obviously I was wrong. My diet was terrible too, but I do not blame the club for that. My education on such matters was and always is my responsibility.

  Putting my physical deficiencies aside, I was definitely making progress – although I was acutely aware of the strength of the age group below who were due to be first-year apprentices in the 1996/97 season. A lot of the names will not be as recognisable to you as they should be, but the likes of Andrew Douglas, David Livermore, Julian Gray, Tommy Black, Greg Lincoln and Paolo Vernazza had the ability to become mainstays in Arsenal’s first team. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say those boys could and should have had the same impact as the famous Man United class of ’92. To be fair, the likes of David Livermore and Julian Gray went on to have good careers, but that batch as a whole underachieved.

  The biggest problem I had was that the best of the bunch, in my opinion, was Paolo Vernazza – and he played in my position. When he came to train with us in the school holidays he would do things with the ball that would just make me go ‘wow’.

  Now, anyone who knows me will know that I am my own biggest fan, but even I could not put a convincing argument forward to say that I was a better player than him. In those days I saw things as being very black and white. I thought someone was either better than me or they were not. I did not think about other factors such as desire, determination or attitude – all key ingredients required to become a top player.