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Graeme Le Saux: Left Field
Graeme Le Saux
A former Southampton, Blackburn, Chelsea and England full-back, the erudite and engaging Graeme Le Saux is far removed from the archetypal British footballer. His distinctive commentary on all the major issues in football, on the pitch and beyond, promises to challenge everyone's perception of the game in this country.Graeme Le Saux made an outstanding international debut for Terry Venables' new-look England side in a 1-0 win over Denmark at Wembley in March 1994, becoming the first Channel Islander ever to be capped for England.After joining Chelsea direct from Jersey, where he used to spend his Saturdays on his father’s fruit and vegetable stall, his career flourished under the guidance of Kenny Dalglish at Blackburn Rovers where they won the Premiership title in 1994-95. Graeme transferred back to Chelsea in 1997 for a record fee of £5.5 million before joining Southampton in 2003. He retired as a player in 2005.In his book, Le Saux addresses the gay slurs that dogged his career – including the infamous Robbie Fowler exposure – how he was vilified by a minority that labelled him a Guardian reader and too smart for football, and life at Stamford Bridge before Roman Abramovich millions changed the club and the game. His thoughtful manner and views on the modern game (he is now consulted for comment regularly by BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel Five) are expanded upon here, with particular focus on the huge amounts of money in top-flight football, players’ agents and the spiralling debts of countless football clubs.As a player, Le Saux was always seen as different – someone who broke the mold, an individual with his own agenda who sought more to life than playing 90 minutes of football. His insight into the game is informed by those experiences.
Graeme Le Saux
Left Field
HarperSport An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
For Mariana, Georgina and Lucas. I’m proud of my professional achievements, but nothing could make me more proud than our family
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud43079ac-70b9-5fea-a0a7-b85fca150645)
Title Page (#u46b96292-f0c7-516f-8136-55bb1e75727f)
Dedication (#u8d385a5b-b5ed-5036-92b0-23c8901455fb)
Introduction (#u0b6fe533-fa30-54de-9b6f-d2131557bd9c)
One Camping with Ken (#u28ebe3cd-80c1-5690-852a-0aa6781c1f47)
Two A Secret (#uab36ed82-fbe9-566d-a7ef-7053ee1dabc4)
Three First-time Blues (#u12ed5a64-bfcc-5024-a92f-00f112c35cac)
Four Glory in the North (#litres_trial_promo)
Five Going Batty and Turning Sour (#litres_trial_promo)
Six International (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven England under Hoddle (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight Ruud, Luca and Sexy Football (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine Chelsea and Ranieri (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten Farewell to England (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven Going South Again (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve Into the Mist (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_1ec30b7b-6adb-5297-956d-c4ee63f9b85c)
I am a lucky man. I’ve got a wife I adore and two children I dote on. I have a loving father and two sisters of whom I’m very proud. Once, I had a mother who doted on me. I’ve got a good life and a lovely house and I know I have an awful lot to be thankful for. I owe my material possessions to my career in football. The opportunities that are coming my way in the media and in business now also stem from the fact that I was a high-profile sportsman. And I’m proud of the links I still have with Chelsea and the ambassadorial role I have been asked to fulfil for them. I have every reason to be grateful to the game for the things it has brought me, but it hasn’t come easy. I was a man apart for much of my career. I came out of left field and, for a long time, I stayed there.
I was regarded as an irritating curiosity when I first signed as a professional footballer with Chelsea in late 1987. I was ridiculed for reading The Guardian rather than staring at the half-naked women on page 3 or raging at the stories on the back pages of the tabloids that the players reading them swore were lies. But they kept reading them. Partly because of me, partly because of them, I didn’t fit in. Partly because of an experience that had affected me in Jersey when I was thirteen, there was an urge to succeed inside me that made me more sensitive than I might otherwise have been. I was coming out of left field, a callow kid raised in the Channel Islands who knew nothing of the wider world, and most people didn’t know quite what to make of me.
Because I had different interests to the rest of my team-mates, because I didn’t feel comfortable in the pre-Loaded laddish drinking culture that was prevalent in English football in the late Eighties, it was generally assumed by my team-mates that there was something wrong with me. It followed from that, naturally, that I must be gay. For fourteen years, I had to listen to that suggestion repeated in vivid and forthright terms from thousands of voices in the stands. I seemed to be everybody’s favourite whipping boy.
My colleague at Stamford Bridge, Graham Stuart, who had a fine career with Chelsea, Everton and Charlton, says now that I was ahead of my time when we played for Bobby Campbell in the late Eighties. Off the pitch, he meant, obviously – a renaissance footballer in a dark age. Well, I was certainly in a minority. He was right about that. I just liked different things, ironically the kind of things footballers like now: a nice meal, an afternoon’s shopping, a trip to the cinema or a gig at The Fridge in Brixton, getting ready for the next game, feeling the intensity of a life in sport. Now, the traditional English approach I grew up with, where men were men and only women wore sarongs and used moisturizer, has been completely shattered. The pendulum has swung. It’s more acceptable for players to talk about the clothes they wear, the restaurants they frequent, the bars they go to. And, yes, the latest game for their PlayStation or the latest innovation on their iPod.
It would have been easier for me back in the early days if I could have found it inside me to subordinate my personality to the group and do what it took to blend in. But I was taking care of my diet when the team coach was still stopping at the fish and chip shop on the way back from away matches. I was hanging out at an Armenian café called Jakob’s in Gloucester Road in west London while ‘The Lads’ were organizing pub crawls. Again, it wasn’t that one was better than the other. Jakob’s wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of fun; I know that. But I liked it. It was just that I fell out of their ‘norm’. As far as the culture off the pitch was concerned, I pitched up ten years too early.
My Chelsea career spanned different worlds. I started it playing with Kerry Dixon, Steve Wicks and John McNaught. I ended it alongside Marcel Desailly, Gianfranco Zola and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. I gravitated towards the couple of foreign lads at the club in my first spell and people called me a homosexual. I gravitated towards the mass of foreign lads at the club in my second spell and people called me cosmopolitan.
That was the funny thing about my life in football, the theme that runs through it. Football began to move towards me; events conspired to help me. In 1995, when I was winning the Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers, the Bosman ruling came into force and changed the face of the game in this country. Bosman swept away the quota system that had limited the number of foreigners allowed to play in each team and, flooded by players from all over Europe, our game entered an age of enlightenment.
I wasn’t an outsider any more; I wasn’t perceived as being different. Football old-schoolers like former Chelsea captains Peter Nicholas and Graham Roberts, who had regarded me as a dork, a swot and a pretentious weirdo, didn’t hold sway any more. Traditional bastions of English football clubs – men who ruled by intimidation and bullying – began to be marginalized, and a culture that rewarded professionalism, instead of pouring scorn on it, took hold.
There were more changes in the three decades in which I played football in England than there have been in any other era of the game. The horrors of Heysel and Hillsborough were washed away by Gazza’s tears in the 1990 World Cup and the football boom that England’s run to the semi-finals in Italy engendered. The Fever Pitch generation rose up in the Nineties and suddenly it was trendy to be a football obsessive. There was the Britpop influence, too. A lot of the successful bands of the Nineties were made up of football fans who were always making reference to the sport they loved. I was friends with one of the lads in the Inspiral Carpets who was an Oldham fan, Noel and Liam Gallagher were Man City fans and Tim Booth from James was a Leeds fan. Together, they crossed the music–student–football divide and broadened the appeal of the game. The Lightning Seeds did the theme tune for Euro 96 and the separation between footballers and pop stars became more and more blurred. The Taylor Report forced football stadia into a brave new world, too, and when the Premier League was formed in 1992 and soon flooded with money from Sky TV, it made players into millionaires pretty much overnight.
I was part of that; I rode the wave. I went from an era when people like Ken Bates, David Moores and Doug Ellis owned football clubs to the age of Roman Abramovich and the invasion of the international oligarchs. I played for the only team apart from Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea who has ever won the Premiership. I played thirty-six times for England. I didn’t get carried away with it. I never lost my obsession with winning and my hunger to keep moving forward as a player. I was relentless about it. I never looked back. I didn’t like looking back – not after what had happened to my mum.
It wasn’t as if I had it easy, either. For a start, I had people chanting ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’ wherever I played. What an incentive that was never to make a mistake. Even in the winter of my career, playing for Southampton in a reserve game against West Ham at Upton Park, this young kid in the West Ham side started yelling abuse at me, spitting ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ at me. I told him that when he’d achieved what I’d achieved in the game, he could come back and talk to me. At half-time, I heard him getting a bollocking from West Ham’s reserve team boss.
I enjoyed highs and I saw lows. I heard the snap of Robbie di Matteo’s leg breaking in Chelsea’s UEFA Cup match against St Gallen. When Pierluigi Casiraghi’s career came to a terrible end at West Ham, I ran off the pitch and grabbed the stretcher from the St John’s Ambulance men who were standing in the tunnel while he was in agony on the floor with terrible injuries to his leg. I saw the grief and the pain that football can bring as well as the riches and the glamour. I saw the last snapshot of Chelsea before the revolution: its extravagance cheek by jowl with its miserliness, and the fantastic idiosyncrasies of the Ken Bates era. I was man of the match in the game that took Chelsea into the Champions League and made it viable for Abramovich to buy them.
I went to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. That was in the summer of 1998 after the World Cup in France when we had been knocked out in the second round. The squads from the Commonwealth countries involved in the tournament – England, Scotland and Jamaica – were invited to the palace and being driven into the courtyard behind the railings felt to me as if the gates of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory were swinging open and I was being ushered into a secret world that I had long imagined but never glimpsed.
Once we were inside, we were led up to one of the reception rooms and we all stood around in small groups, chattering away nervously until Her Majesty arrived. Soon enough, a door opened and the Queen walked in and made straight for the group that I was part of. She came up to me and asked the first of what I am sure are her standard questions. She asked me who I played for and when I said Chelsea, she seemed quite pleased. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘local.’
On the other side of the room, Sol Campbell was being introduced to Prince Phillip.
‘What part of Jamaica are you from?’ the Duke of Edinburgh enquired.
‘Walthamstow,’ Sol said.
At the other end of the scale, I remember the simple, visceral thrill of wrapping the white tape around my socks when I was preparing for games, just like one of my heroes, John Robertson, had once done. I loved Robertson as a player. He was left-footed like me and he was part of Brian Clough’s great Nottingham Forest side that carried all before it when I was growing up.
I chipped Peter Schmeichel once, too. I played my first stand-out game for Chelsea against Spurs in 1991 and rushed home to catch the highlights on the television but the Gulf War had broken out and the programme had been cancelled. I scored my only England goal against Brazil; it wasn’t a bad one, either. I played against some great opponents; if I had to pick my most difficult one, I’d say Brian Laudrup.
I did have my own share of injuries. I missed Euro 96 and Euro 2000 but at least I made it to the World Cup in France in 1998. Apart from the moment when I broke my ankle in 1995, that World Cup gave me my worst moment in football – when I was blamed for the late Dan Petrescu goal that gave Romania a 2–1 win over England in our second group game. Generally, though, I felt I over-achieved in football. I gave it everything and it gave back to me a lot more than I ever dared hope for.
In the end, I even learned the gift of being able to laugh at myself. I wish I’d been able to do that earlier. I wish I’d been able to ignore it back in 1991 when people started sniggering about how they thought I must be gay. In my second spell at Chelsea, I was at the core of the dressing room. I was secure in myself. People even laughed at my jokes and I laughed at theirs.
I used to take the mickey out of Gianfranco Zola, who was a particular friend of mine during my second spell at Chelsea. I used to tease him about his image of being the White Knight of Stamford Bridge, adored by all for his ready smile and his sublime skill. People had such a fantastic image of Franco, they could not imagine him being anything other than honest and truthful and the epitome of good sportsmanship, but I knew different.
One day in training, we were all square in a five-a-side game and Franco and I were running for a ball that was heading out of play. It went out so I turned around to shout something to one of my team-mates. When I looked back around, Franco had retrieved the ball and was in the act of curling a beautiful shot around our goalkeeper for the winner. He was adamant that the ball hadn’t gone out and when I disputed it, the other guys looked at me as if I was disputing the word of a saint.
‘Franco,’ I said, ‘you’re a cheating, low-down Sardinian git. When I write my book, I’m going to tell the truth about you and let everyone know what a sneaky, low-down, horrible little man you are.’
‘That’s fine,’ Franco said. ‘And when I write my book, I’m going to say that you look at me in the showers.’
ONE Camping with Ken (#ulink_ad5b883f-1a14-50bf-8899-63e4fb8e9973)
A sad and ugly irony lay at the heart of my career as a professional footballer. I represented my country thirty-six times, won a Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers and the Cup Winners’ Cup and Super Cup with Chelsea, played in an FA Cup Final and won the League Cup, and all of it was accompanied by the soundtrack of a lie. Even though I have never been gay, for a fourteen-year stretch of my eighteen seasons in the game, I became the leading victim of English football’s last taboo.
It started in the summer of 1991 soon after we reported back for pre-season training. I was in my first spell at Chelsea. We had what is known as ‘a strong dressing room’ – which is usually a euphemism for a group of players who were very good at dishing out a lot of stick. It was not a place for shrinking violets. The banter was flying around more than ever in those first few days back at our Harlington training ground. There was a lot of talk about where people had been for their holidays.
I’d had a good summer. I was twenty-two and had just broken into the first team. Over the previous eighteen months, I’d got matey with two of the forerunners of Chelsea’s foreign legion: Ken Monkou and Erland Johnsen. Ken, who was originally from Surinam, had signed from Feyenoord in the spring of 1989 and we made our first-team debuts within a fortnight of each other that May. Erland, who was Norwegian, arrived from Bayern Munich the following December. During that season and the next one, the three of us became good pals.
Erland invited Ken and me to go and visit him in Norway once the 1990/91 campaign was over. He wanted us to go and put on a few coaching sessions for some kids in a town on the border with Russia. So when the season finished, I took Ken down to Jersey, where I’d grown up. We spent a couple of days there and then we drove up through France, Belgium and Holland. Then we flew up to Norway. We had a good time. When the trip was over, Ken headed back to London, Erland went on his honeymoon around the Caribbean and I went off on holiday with my girlfriend.
When I got back to Chelsea and the boys asked me where I’d been, I told them. Somebody – I can’t remember who – said ‘Oh, so you went camping with Ken’. There was a bit of chortling and sniggering. It got to me straight away. I was sensitive about it immediately. I bit on it. I told them we hadn’t gone camping. I told them we’d been staying in hotels. But it stuck. It became a bit of a running gag. And soon, to my horror, it was out there on the grapevine that Ken and I were an item.
I was insecure enough as it was. I had come over from Jersey a couple of years earlier when I was eighteen and signed a professional contract. I felt isolated from the start. I didn’t belong to any of the groups or cliques I found at Chelsea. I didn’t do an apprenticeship so there was no group of lads that I’d come through the ranks with. And just because I had signed a professional contract didn’t really make me a professional footballer or part of the established group.
There were a lot of old-school footballers there when I arrived: men like Steve Wicks, Joe McLaughlin, Colin Pates and John Bumstead. They were soon joined by lads like Vinnie Jones, who arrived at the start of that 1991/92 season from Sheffield United, Andy Townsend, John Spencer and Dennis Wise. Some of them were good guys but I never got to know them during that time. They were footballers and I was this kid fresh out of Jersey. They would go back to their homes in Hemel Hempstead or wherever it was and I would get the tube back to my digs in Burnt Oak.
The club had stuck me in there. It was one stop away from the northern end of the Northern Line, about as far away from Harlington as you could get. It took me an hour and a half and two trains and two buses to get into training each day. It was ridiculous. It was one of these situations where the assistant manager, Gwyn Williams, knew a friend of a friend who had a spare room and was doing him a favour. But he wasn’t doing me any favours at all.
Everybody regarded me as an outsider. I was an easy target because I didn’t fit in. The only couple of people I knew in London were students so I turned up at training with my student look. I had my jeans rolled up and my Pringle socks on and my rucksack with The Guardian in it.
For much of my career, reading The Guardian was used as one of the most powerful symbols of how I was supposed to be weirdly different. It was pathetic really. It was used to give substance to the gossip that I was homosexual: Guardian reader equals gay boy. Some people really thought that added up. Most of the rest of them read The Sun and The Mirror and complained about how they were being stitched up all the time by those papers.
Andy Townsend got on the bus to an away game once and saw me reading The Guardian. He picked it up and said he wanted to look at the sport. He threw it back down a couple of seconds later. ‘There’s no fucking sport in here,’ he said. The rest of the lads laughed. I tried to laugh, too, but I felt a bit embarrassed – not embarrassed enough to stop reading it and conform to what they wanted but embarrassed nonetheless. I don’t know, maybe they were just trying to help me fit in.
By the time I broke into the first team at the end of that 1988/89 season, the other players had pigeonholed me as a bit of a loner. I wasn’t a loner. In fact, away from football I was pretty sociable. It was just that because of my background, I wasn’t what footballers regarded as typical. I got the impression they hadn’t really come across anyone like me before and that was the basis of a fair amount of stick I used to get.
Everything that led up to the spread of the rumours that I was gay stemmed from the fact that I didn’t fit in. Teammates looked at me and thought I was a bit different, a bit odd. So I became the target of day-to-day ribbing which just got worse and worse. I’d never had any problem with bullying at school. I never had any sort of problems of that type. I wasn’t the main kid but I wasn’t unpopular. Being a pariah was new to me.
I was sensitive and pretty naive and my greatest fault was that I stuck up for myself and took things a bit more seriously than I should have done. I reacted to jibes when I can see now that I should have just laughed them off or come back with a decent riposte. But I didn’t do that. And by the time I started to try and laugh them off, it was too late.
Going into training became an ordeal. I was trying to get used to London, trying to get used to living away from the tight-knit community in Jersey. And I was trying to persuade myself that I really could make it as a professional footballer. All the people I was competing against seemed so much older than me. So I lived in my own world with my Walkman and my newspaper and spent my spare time discovering London, like anyone new to a big city.
Ken and Erland used to get plenty of stick, too. This was partly because they were doing their own thing; they didn’t fit the stereotype. Foreign players had a better attitude to diet even back then. The British lads used to take the mickey out of Erland and pretend he was from a different planet just because he had a Scandinavian accent. But I had more in common with Erland and Ken, and so when the three of us went on this trip, it was manna from heaven for the piss-takers.
I think Ken probably got some ribbing about the gay stuff. He was a good-looking guy, single, did his own thing. In the programme that season, he listed his hobbies as ‘swimming, reading and meditation’. He probably ticked some of the boxes the bigots look at; but I don’t think it ever got to the same level that it reached with me. He was guilty by association with me but that was it. The more successful I got, the more it became an issue. The focus was more on me than Ken because I gradually became more newsworthy. I was also a lot easier to rile.
Once all the taunts about homosexuality started, Ken and I drifted apart. We stopped being friends, really. You succumb to the pressure, I think. When I left Chelsea, he went his way and I went mine. It’s not anything we ever spoke about which is quite strange in a way. None of the other players ever sympathized with me about it. I suppose they were just glad none of it was aimed at them; or perhaps the people who had initiated it felt embarrassed about it.
I took the homosexuality stuff very seriously very quickly. In those days, if anyone thought you had the slightest hint of the effeminate about you, you were in trouble. It was such a delicate stage of my life anyway. I already felt like the odds were stacked against me without being pitched into a world of double entendres and nudging and winking about being gay. I didn’t feel comfortable in my environment unless I was playing football. But the more my supposed homosexuality became a topic of humour, the more upset about it I became. I started confronting people about it all the time. It felt like everyone else in the dressing room was in on it. It even extended to people like Gwyn who would wander up to me before training and say ‘Come on poof, get your boots on’. It chipped away at me.
Bobby Campbell had succeeded John Hollins as manager by then but neither he nor anyone else in authority said ‘Lads, look, this is getting a bit silly’. By now the rumours were out of control. The piss-taking about camping with Ken started some time around the beginning of July and eight weeks later, my worst fears were realized.
On 7 September, we went to play a league game against West Ham at Upton Park. I got the ball on the left flank some time in the first half and played it upfield. Then the chant started. It came from the hard-core fans in the North Bank and was set to the tune of the Village People’s ‘Go West’: ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse, Le Saux takes it up the arse,’ they yelled – again and again and again. I stood there in shock. ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘It’s reached the terraces.’ I knew fans everywhere were going to try and make my life a misery.
Justin Fashanu had ‘come out’ in the News of the World a year earlier and even though his career was practically over, he was ridiculed and scorned for his admission. A few years later, he committed suicide. There also had been rumours about Trevor Morley and Ian Bishop, two West Ham players. They probably had about as much foundation as the rumours about me and Ken. I didn’t think I could afford for people to think there was the slightest hint of me being gay. Everything I was worried about, my preoccupation with being isolated and ostracized, was now turning into reality. Suddenly, I had something else to cope with as I tried to make it as a footballer, something else I had to fight against.
That afternoon at West Ham really scared me. I felt it had the potential to ruin everything. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It left me feeling isolated on the pitch. It left me feeling apart from the team, even on the pitch which had been my last refuge. I didn’t know who to be angry with, because it was my own team-mates who had started it.
It made me even more sensitive and my life at Chelsea even more complicated. It was the start of a series of problems for me at the club that ended with me hurling my shirt to the floor when Campbell’s successor, Ian Porterfield, substituted me and my departure from Stamford Bridge soon afterwards. I was very insecure, very nervous. I kept myself to myself because I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.
At Upton Park, no one mentioned the chanting when we got back to the dressing room at half-time, or at full-time. No one spoke about it at all. Maybe it didn’t register with some of them. It was never discussed and I didn’t make a point of saying to any of them ‘Thanks a lot for that boys’. But after that game, the chanting about me grew more and more regular. The pressure I was under when the taunts about being homosexual took hold was immense. I would go out onto the pitch knowing that I was going to get a torrent of abuse before I had even kicked a ball. Normally, as a player, you want to stand out but you want to stand out for the right reasons. If you get stick from the away supporters because you have done something well, you can live with that. It’s actually quite satisfying. But what started happening to me was that if there was some sort of lull in the game, I was the first fall-back option and the taunting would start. If the home fans got bored, they’d start singing about me.
I often wonder whether I could have prevented it. I tried damned hard to prevent it. I stood up for myself and got physically angry with people who pushed it too far, but I also withdrew more and more into my own little world to try and protect myself from the abuse so I wouldn’t have to confront it.
Once the thing about me and Ken spread beyond the dressing room, it went crazy. It became an urban myth. Wisey’s friends from Wimbledon would ask him about it; other players would talk to their mates at their former clubs. Soon, everyone was talking about it as if it was a fact. People said there was no smoke without fire. It was generally accepted – in football and in the media – that Ken and I were in some sort of closet relationship.
It never got to the point where I would go in the showers and someone would say ‘Watch out boys, Graeme’s around, backs to the wall’. But it was enough to give me a sense of isolation and paranoia. Once it really gained momentum, everything I did was used as evidence I was gay. The way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I went to art galleries and read The Guardian all turned into more clues about my sexuality.
The sheer number of people that would ask me about the situation between me and Ken was bewildering. I got bits and pieces of abuse in the street: the odd shout of ‘poof’ or ‘shirtlifter’ from the other side of the road, mainly from lads trying to get a laugh from their mates. No one said it directly to my face unless they were in a crowd at a game but the variety of insults aimed at gay people became my specialist subject. The worst thing was when you’d go to get the ball for a corner or a throw and there would be somebody a couple of feet away from you in the front row. Their faces would be contorted with aggression and they’d be screaming this homophobic abuse at me that was often really vicious stuff. When it was that close and one-on-one, it was shocking.
Pretty soon, opposition players were winding me up about it on the pitch. It didn’t happen that often but there were a couple of occasions when I responded or retaliated and all hell broke loose. When I made it an issue, the lack of action taken against the people responsible said a lot about the reluctance of the authorities to confront the problem, a reluctance that still exists today.
The media hounded me about it, too, particularly the tabloid newspapers. When I first started going out with Mariana while I was playing for Blackburn, she was a press officer for Camelot. The lottery was very high-profile back then and gradually people began to find out that we were seeing each other. A couple of papers started harassing her at work. They phoned up on the pretext of asking something about the lottery but pretty soon they dropped the pretence and started asking her about me.
The Daily Star was particularly persistent. Their reporter kept going on about how there were all these rumours about my sexuality and how the paper wasn’t convinced we were actually seeing each other. Mariana could have lost her job because she was spending so much time fielding these crackpot calls. She had to go and see her boss about it. In the end, this guy from the Star rang again and blurted out ‘Is he gay?’ She just said ‘Of course he isn’t’ and he said ‘Thanks’ and put the phone down. The following Friday, they ran a front page that said ‘Homo Le Saux? Not my Graeme’. On the inside page, it had the rest of the story and there was a picture of me. Underneath the picture, they ran the caption ‘Le Saux: all man’. It’s funny now but at the time I was fuming. It was the day before a game and we were travelling. All the playerswere getting on the Blackburn team bus and Tim Sherwood asked me if I had seen the paper. The guys were upset for me. It felt like I had some support from them. In contrast to the way it had been at Chelsea.
I think they were genuinely mortified that I was having to go through all that kind of stuff. I wondered whether it was defamatory: being called gay if you weren’t. In the context of football, I think it is, because, sadly, it could cost you your career. No manager would want to buy you, in those days, anyway. It’s a terrible indictment of the game but I’m afraid it’s true.
I was in my second spell at Chelsea when the real problems on the pitch began. Ironically, the atmosphere at the club had changed radically in the time I had been away. It was much less threatening, much less intimidating. Most of all, it was much more cosmopolitan. Ruud Gullit was the manager when they brought me back and they had recruited players like Gianluca Vialli, Roberto di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola and Frank Lebouef. It could hardly have been more different from the dressing room I had left behind. From feeling like an alien in my first spell at the club, I fitted in easily second time around. Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment hadn’t yet spread to some of my rivals at other clubs.
I had had four years at Blackburn Rovers by then, four years of an increasingly high profile and four years of taunts from opposition supporters. Everyone assumed that the fight between me and my Blackburn team-mate, David Batty, during an away game against Spartak Moscow in November 1995 had been over a gay insult he’d aimed at me but it wasn’t, not really.
From the time the rumours about me being gay first surfaced that afternoon at West Ham, I got plenty of comments from other players about me being ‘a faggot’ or ‘a queer’. It happened all the time. Robbie Savage was one of the players who seemed to get a particular thrill out of it. I guess that won’t really surprise anyone. I told him he should say it all again to me at the end of the game when I’d tackled him a few times. I told him we could sort it out in a football way and then see if he still wanted to call me a poof. It was irrational really, schoolboy behaviour.
There weren’t many players who went out of their way to keep going on about it. Most of the time, I let it go. But when Chelsea played Liverpool at Anfield in October 1997, Paul Ince started winding me up about it repeatedly and in the end, I gave him a taste of his own medicine.
Paul and I had always got on really, really well. We were England team-mates and I respected him a great deal. The game against Liverpool was a Sunday afternoon match and afterwards we were due to travel down to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of Glenn Hoddle’s England squad and start the preparations for the make-or-break World Cup qualifying game against Italy in Rome, which was the following Saturday.
Paul was really wound up during the game. He’d get so frantic in matches sometimes that his eyes would change – they’d kind of glaze over. There was a frenetic atmosphere at Anfield and it was an all-action game. They ended up winning it 4–2. I’d been clattered a few times already when Paul launched himself at me with a tackle, took my legs away and left me on the deck.
When I was on the ground, he started jabbering away at me. ‘Come on you fucking poof,’ he said, ‘get up, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ He said it a few times. I let it go. People get called ‘a poof’ all the time in football. It’s a generic term of abuse. But it was loaded when people aimed it at me. A few minutes later, he clattered me again and started yelling the same stuff. I snapped.
I said something that I knew would hurt him. I insulted his wife.
Paul went absolutely ballistic. He was livid. He spent the rest of the match desperately trying to kick lumps out of me. He was in a towering rage. When the final whistle went, I was going down the tunnel when I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye about to try and land a punch on me. I ducked out of the way and scarpered back out onto the pitch. The guy had lost it completely: he wanted to kill me.
Paul was a prime example of a guy who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. He had been calling me all the names under the sun, personal stuff that he must have known would hurt me, stuff that I found offensive. And yet as soon as I retaliated in kind, he couldn’t cope. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d said, and it was out of order. I knew his wife, Claire, and I liked her. It wasn’t about her, though; it was about letting him know what it was like to try to have put up with that kind of abuse.
Paul quickly turned it round in his own mind so that I was the villain. I knew it was going to be very awkward when we got to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of the England squad that night. I got there before him and there was plenty of banter among the lads sitting in the restaurant about what he was going to do to me when he arrived. I laughed nervously. I didn’t want a punch-up with him – he was a lot stronger than me.
I decided I needed to be the adult about it. When it was obvious he had arrived, I phoned him in his room and asked if I could go up and talk to him about it. He was reluctant but he agreed. I got up there and he got into me straight away. ‘You’re out of order talking about my wife like that,’ he said. ‘You know her, and anyway no one talks about my family like that.’
