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I told him that I hadn’t really known what I was saying but I asked him how he thought it made me feel when he was calling me ‘a fucking poof’. I explained to him that I hadn’t done it to insult his wife. Just to get back at him. But he wouldn’t accept it; it was an honour thing for him. It’s a shame, but ever since then my relationship with him has been very cold.
By then, the gay slurs had become a big part of my career. But the homophobia that surrounded me put me in a desperately difficult situation. It was difficult for me to keep denying I was gay and reacting angrily to any suggestion that I might be homosexual without being disrespectful to the homosexual community. Talking about something that isn’t actually true makes it impossibly difficult to confront. That’s why I didn’t brave the issue in the newspapers.
I have gay friends and I don’t judge them. I am not homophobic. If there was a gay player and he was part of a team I was playing for, that wouldn’t be an issue for me at all. Someone’s private life is entirely up to them. But when supporters and other players accused me of being gay, it got to me. It was complicated. I never believed there was anything wrong with being gay but I felt that if it came to be accepted that I was gay, I would be unable to continue as a professional footballer. That’s how deep-seated the prejudice in the game is. That’s why I fought back as strongly as I did.
Homosexuality really is football’s last taboo. We’ve got past pretty much everything else. The problems with racism that disfigured football for much of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are not over but they are on the wane. An awful lot of good work has been done and attitudes have changed. You don’t get people making monkey noises at English football grounds any more. You don’t get supporters throwing bananas on the pitch as they used to do when John Barnes and Ces Podd were playing.
But there is still terrible prejudice within football. That is part of the culture. People try and pick on other people’s weaknesses. You have to deal with constant mickey-taking and being derided for the most trivial matters: the trainers you have just bought, the haircut you have just had, the piece about you in the newspaper. It is endless and it can be draining. It is part of the competitive nature of the dressing room. Your team-mates are digging away all the time, trying to get one up on each other. If you can make someone else look stupid, that’s the ideal.
Given that kind of peer pressure, I don’t think a modern footballer could ever come out as a gay man. I don’t think anyone could think of any positive reason to do it. It would immediately isolate you from the rest of the team. The group would be too hostile for you to survive. The situation would be too daunting.
Football has not had to deal with a group of gay footballers standing there and saying ‘How are you going to deal with us?’ They haven’t had to confront homophobia yet because the gay footballers that are probably playing in our leagues are understandably too frightened to declare their homosexuality and cope with the backlash they would face. Until there is a powerful voice for a minority group, football will never make provision for it.
The abuse I had to suffer would be multiplied by 100 for a player who was openly gay. The burden would be too much. I think of the stick I had from the fans and it made me feel anxious and nervous even before I got out on the pitch. Sometimes, you go out there not feeling 100 per cent confident anyway and that apprehension is compounded by the fact that you are going to be targeted in the warm-up.
Every time you run to the side of the pitch, there is going to be a little group of people giving you abuse. Suddenly, all the anger and prejudice hidden away under the surface of someone’s everyday life starts spewing out. You start to get a sense of the mentality of the mob and to anticipate the way the collective mind of a hostile crowd works. You know that if the game starts badly for the team you are playing against, then within ten minutes they will turn their anger and their frustration on you. And then a whole stadium of 40,000 or 50,000 people will start singing about how you take it up the arse.
Most of the time, you try and blot that out but sometimes you can’t. On another occasion at Anfield, I went over to the touchline to get the ball when it had gone out for a throw. A kid in the crowd was holding it. He was nine or ten and his dad was next to him. ‘You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,’ he screamed at me. His dad was joining in as well. I got the ball and then I stopped and looked at him.
‘Who do you think you are talking to like that?’ I asked him. I pointed at him and then, of course, everyone else starting piling in. I was all for hauling that kid out of the crowd and putting him on the side of the pitch with me. Sometimes you have just got to draw the line and say ‘That is wrong, you don’t treat people like that’.
That has happened a few times: where I have confronted people and made eye contact with them. It never worked because there were always so many people around them. They are usually the kind of so-called fans that will scream personal abuse at a player for ninety minutes and then report them to the police if they look at them the wrong way.
There was another time when I stood up for myself, too, a time when I refused to look the other way. I had a family by then and my wife, Mariana, brought our new-born eldest child, Georgina, to her first game at the end of February 1999. It was Liverpool again but this time it wasn’t Paul Ince who was the problem. This time, it was Robbie Fowler.
I had admired Robbie when he was a young player. He was a magnificent finisher, one of the best natural strikers you would ever see. But as people, he and I are probably about as far apart as it’s possible to be. His trademark was his sarcastic, put-down humour. That’s fine, that’s great; if that’s how you play the game – fine. He had an irreverent, caustic attitude. I didn’t mind that but the thing with Robbie was that he didn’t know when to stop. When things became unacceptable, it felt as if he was ignorant of his social responsibilities and the consequences of his actions.
That Chelsea–Liverpool match at Stamford Bridge was a high-tempo game like all the clashes between the two teams seemed to be and there were a few incidents. Early in the second half, I moved to clear the ball from left-back and as I did so, Robbie tried to block it but ended up coming across me and fouling me. I went down and the referee, Paul Durkin, booked him.
Robbie looked down at me. ‘Get up, you poof,’ he said. I stayed on the turf while the physio was treating me and then got up. By then, Robbie was standing ten yards away. The ball was in front of me, ready for the free-kick. I looked at Robbie. He started bending over and pointing his backside in my direction. He looked over his shoulder and started yelling at me. He was smirking. ‘Come and give me one up the arse,’ he said, ‘come and give me one up the arse.’
He said it three or four times. The Chelsea fans, in the benches where the new West Stand is now, were going berserk. The linesman was standing right next to me. He could see what Robbie was doing but he didn’t take any action. He didn’t call Durkin over. Everyone knew exactly what Robbie’s gesture meant. There wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation. I asked the linesman what he was going to do about it. He just stood there with a look of suppressed panic on his face.
So I stood there with the ball, waiting. Robbie could see he was winding me up and I suppose that gave him a great sense of gratification. So he carried on doing it. I told the linesman I wasn’t going to take the free-kick until he stopped. It was a Mexican stand-off. I wish Paul Durkin had found it in him to decide what was going on and then send Robbie off for ungentlemanly conduct.
It was a big moment. What Robbie did provided a chance for people to confront a serious issue. Some people compared it to sledging in cricket but sledging is still essentially private – an exchange or series of exchanges that stay between the players on the pitch. Only the people on the pitch are aware of the insults that are being hurled. That’s where I believe Robbie crossed the line and betrayed the game. When a fellow professional does something like that to you, when he mocks you for public consumption, it adds credibility to unfounded rumours. That is why it upset me so much. I just cannot accept that that is just part of the game. In my football career, I never saw anyone do something like that to another player.
Whatever happens on the pitch should stay on the pitch. There is a huge amount of pressure not to break that omertà. I don’t know where it comes from but it surrounds you. It is self-protecting. If you’re a player and you talk about things that should be kept private because they happened on the field, you risk losing the trust of team-mates and opponents. As soon as you step out of the circle and expose what actually happens, it’s very difficult to get back in.
I felt that what Fowler did – because it was so blatant – allowed me to step out of the circle and hit back at him in whatever way I needed to. He had betrayed me on the pitch. He had broken the code first. I have felt that conflict of interest on a few occasions and until then I had always taken the stick that came my way and laid low until the fuss blew over.
Black players have had plenty of foul abuse aimed at them over the years but no fellow player has ever made a public gesture like that at any one of them. Robbie wouldn’t dream of making gestures to a black player so why did he feel it was acceptable to incite me by sticking out his backside?
I think football had a chance to make a stand there and then against this kind of thing. The game could have made a strong statement that such blatant homophobia would not be tolerated. Durkin would have been feted for that if he had taken a stand and I believe that maybe it would have taken some of the stigma away for gay footballers who are still petrified of being found out. It could have been a turning point.
But football didn’t make a stand. Durkin ran over and booked me for time-wasting. I was dumbfounded. I asked him if he was just going to let Robbie get away with it. He didn’t say anything. He said later that he hadn’t seen what Robbie was doing but I wonder if it was just that he didn’t want to deal with it. No one wanted to deal with it.
My head filled up with anger. I still didn’t want to take the free-kick. Perhaps I should have taken even more of a stand. Perhaps I should just have refused to take the kick and been sent off. That would at least have forced the issue but it would probably have made me a martyr for the cause and I didn’t want that. In that kind of situation, the pressure to play on is overwhelming. The crowd is screaming and baying, the rest of the players are looking at you expectantly, waiting for play to restart. I looked at Robbie again and he had stopped bending over. So I took the free-kick.
I was consumed with the idea of retribution. I wanted vengeance. I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It was like smacking a punchball. I tried to calm down but I couldn’t. There was no way I could get rid of my anger. I ran up to the halfway line and tried to confront Robbie. I told him my family was in the stand. ‘Bollocks to your family,’ he said.
Robbie revealed a slightly different version of the episode in his autobiography – and a different attitude to it. He wrote that after all his insinuations about me being gay, I had run up to him on the pitch and shouted ‘But I’m married’ and that he had replied ‘So was Elton John, mate’. It’s a nice line and it makes Robbie look funny, which is the most important thing to him. But I’m afraid it’s what’s called dramatic licence – he didn’t say it.
I waited for my opportunity. I should have come off really. My head was gone. I wasn’t even concentrating on the game. I felt humiliated. It was an age until the ball came near us again but I was possessed with the idea of getting my own back. In the cold light of day, it sounds inexcusable but I felt as if the anger of so many years of being taunted was welling up inside me.
Eventually, the ball was played down their left-hand side and Robbie made a run towards our box. I came across and ran straight into him with a swing of the elbow. I clattered him as hard as I could but thankfully I’m not very good at that kind of thing. In fact, it was pathetic. Durkin didn’t see it so I didn’t get punished. Thankfully, it didn’t do Robbie any lasting damage. We had a couple more kicking matches and in the end he caught me on the calf and I had to come off. About eight minutes from the end, Vialli brought Eddie Newton on to replace me and the most traumatic match of my career was over.
I was still incredibly angry after the game. I went to see Durkin. I had already heard that the Match of the Day cameras had captured my elbow on Robbie and I wanted to outline to him exactly why I had done it. Dermot Gallagher was the fourth official and he said he’d seen the whole thing with Robbie jutting out his backside. He started talking about the amount of stick he’d had over the years for being Irish.
I had ten minutes with them, talking about the whole thing. I asked Durkin about the booking. I asked him why I’d be time wasting when we were playing at home and the score was 1–1. He didn’t have an answer. I asked the linesman again why he hadn’t done anything and he didn’t want to engage. He didn’t know what his response should have been: a guy sticking out his backside to taunt another player – it’s not in the rule book is it?
The aftermath was awful. I got buried by television and the newspapers because I had tried to take him out off the ball. That was fair enough. But it seemed bizarre that they were focusing on that rather than the extreme provocation I had been subjected to. Because I had reacted, a lot of people seemed to want to excuse Robbie for what he had done. Three days after the game, the FA charged us both with misconduct.
I sent him a letter of apology for thwacking him over the head. I got a letter from him, too. It was a non-committal explanation of what he had done. It wasn’t an apology as such. It was an attempt to save face, couched in legal niceties, drafted by a lawyer or an agent, and designed to appease the FA tribunal before they sat in judgment on us. It was a sad excuse of a letter really. It was an insult to everyone’s intelligence:
Dear Graeme,
I am in receipt of your without prejudice letter about what occurred on Saturday, February 27 at Stamford Bridge.
I am sorry if you misinterpreted my actions during the game, which were not meant to cause any offence to yourself or anyone else. Hopefully this unhappy incident can now be brought to an end.
I am sure you share my hope that when we play together again either on opposite sides or on international duty, people have no reason to judge us other than on our footballing abilities.
Best wishes,
R. Fowler
It was supposed to be a private letter but Robbie released it to the press. He did make one serious point about the incident in his autobiography, though. ‘Football’s a tough sport,’ he wrote, ‘and to get to the top, you have to be incredibly thick-skinned. A bit of name-calling never hurt anyone and the truth is that I wasn’t being homophobic, I was merely trying to exploit a known weakness in an opponent who had done me a number of times.’
It’s an interesting line of defence. According to Robbie’s rationale, then, it’s okay to call a black man a ‘nigger’ on the pitch and pretend it’s all in the line of duty. I don’t think so. I don’t think even Robbie would try and argue that. Maybe he just didn’t think about his argument. It’s more likely he didn’t really have any defence and that that was the best he could come up with. It wasn’t a very good effort.
The television and radio presenter Nicky Campbell produced an article about what Fowler had written: ‘I bet what Fowler did that day at Chelsea made thousands of youngsters feel pretty crappy about themselves,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine if he had performed a craven Uncle Tom shuffle of subordination to a black player. A bit of name calling never hurt anyone?
‘But it is unfair to blame Fowler. The insular and impenetrable culture of football is the fundamental problem. There, difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned. This is the world of the institutionally incurious.’
A month after Robbie offered me his backside, we both found ourselves in another England squad. There was another awkward reunion at Burnham Beeches. By now, Kevin Keegan was the manager and we were preparing for his first match in charge, a home European Championship qualifying tie against Poland. Kevin summoned us both to his room. He wanted us to stage a public reconciliation for the press. Robbie didn’t have quite as much bravado in that situation. He looked like a naughty little boy. He seemed shy and tongue-tied. Kevin wanted us to do a photo-call for the media but I said immediately that unless Robbie apologized to me first, that wasn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there was no way I was going to go out there and pretend we had resolved the situation – no chance.
I made it clear that I didn’t want a public apology from Robbie; just a private word would do. But he refused. He said he had done nothing wrong, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Keegan started to back off at that point. He wasn’t qualified to deal with it but I felt more confident about it. By now, I felt bolstered by the debate the incident had caused, and in a strange kind of way I felt relieved that the issue was totally out in the open. Now, at least, everyone knew the kind of taunting I had to put up with from the fans every week. Now, they could guess at the routine abuse I had to deal with on the pitch. From that moment on, there seemed to be less animosity about the chants that were directed at me. The debate about the incident with Fowler took some of the mystery out of it all and exposed it for the puerile cruelty it was.
I don’t feel any animosity towards Robbie now but you cannot do that to people. Because of the kind of stuff that he sought to justify, sometimes during my career it felt as if the whole world was against me. It was hard to deal with. It’s starting to sound like a sob story now, I know, and that’s not my intention. But this was like bullying, out and out bullying.
I was determined to stand up for myself. I confronted Robbie about it while we were in Keegan’s room. I pointed out to him that if he’d taken the piss out of someone like that in the middle of Soho where all the gay clubs are, he would have got chased down the street and beaten up. Even then, Robbie couldn’t resist it. When I mentioned the gay clubs in Soho, he muttered: ‘You’d know where they are.’ I laughed, I admit it. He can be a funny guy. I told him I’d be professional with him on the training pitch but that there was no way I was going to shake his hand.
On 9 April, six weeks after the original incident and six days after Robbie had got himself in more trouble by pretending to snort the white lines on the pitch at Goodison Park during a goal celebration in a Merseyside derby, we were both told to attend our separate FA disciplinary hearings at Birmingham City’s St Andrews ground. I took a barrister called Jim Sturman with me to act in my defence and the Chelsea managing director, Colin Hutchinson, came along to support me. Jim had put a dossier together to show the disciplinary committee which detailed the homophobic abuse I had suffered from crowds over the years. We had video footage of some of the more extreme incidents and Jim also brought some of the hundreds of letters of support I received from members of the public.
Jim presented my case very eloquently and the panel seemed surprised by our approach. It wasn’t so much punishing Robbie that I was after. I didn’t want to get him into more trouble. He seemed to be doing pretty well by himself without any extra help from me. It was more about illustrating to them the problem with homosexual abuse that still existed in English football and the extent of what I had had to deal with.
If they had given me a punishment based on what I did, I would not have accepted it. I felt it was important to make a stand. I also saw it as an opportunity to get the whole thing off my chest. I had put up with it for so long and this was like a chance to exorcize a demon. In my mind, it wasn’t about Robbie Fowler. It was all about me. It didn’t matter who had done it to me. It wasn’t personal. It was about the victimisation and the lies.
I expected a token punishment for the fact that I had done something wrong on the pitch. If they had tried to make an example out of me, though, I would have taken it further. I would have made the FA accountable for what had happened. In the end, they banned me for a game and gave me a £5,000 fine.
They hammered Robbie. He was suddenly dealing with the fall-out from his mock-cocaine-snorting antics as well as what he did to me. In a way, it got the FA off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.
I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.
Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.
But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.
It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.
The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.
The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having to run up and down the touchline in front of the Main Stand. I was scared stiff. I thought the fans were going to kill me.
In the second half, Luca told me to go and warm up. Because the linesman was running the line in the half to our right, we had to warm up at the Kop end. So when I ran down the touchline towards the Kop, the entire Kop started singing ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’. I think it was the loudest I’d ever heard it. Then the wolf whistles started. But something really had changed. For the first time ever, it didn’t upset me. For the first time, I felt I had the confidence to see it as the wind-up it was and take the sting out of it without getting upset.
During my stretching, I was in the corner near the Kop and I turned my back to them. I did a hamstring stretch where you open both your legs out wide and you get really low and touch your elbows on the floor. As I did it, I looked between my legs at the supporters and winked and smiled. And they all started applauding me. There was nothing pre-meditated about it. It’s funny, but it made me feel as though the pressure was lifting a bit. It took the edge off everything. It was a catharsis.
In the end, I got there. But it didn’t wipe out what I’d been through. It didn’t wash it away. Let’s be blunt: it was awful; it nearly drove me out of the game. The homophobic taunting and the bullying made me feel left out and misunderstood. People have read me wrong because they thought I wasn’t a team player just because I was different, just because I didn’t conform to the stereotype of a laddish footballer.
In my first spell at Chelsea, I was so close to walking away from football. I went through times that were like depression. I would get up in the morning and I wouldn’t feel good and by the time I got into training I would be so nervous that I felt sick. I dreaded going in. I was like a bullied kid on his way into school to face his tormentors.
Sometimes, when I look back at what I went through, I don’t know why I carried on – other than this singlemindedness and some sort of belief that I had a destiny to make it as a professional footballer. I can’t work out why I didn’t pack it all in but it was like I was on a path and despite all the baggage I was carrying, I never let myself stray from that path.
It’s an indictment of our game and the prejudice it allows, but I felt a great surge of relief when I retired. Playing was such an emotional drain. I had to get myself up for the game and then I had to prepare myself for being singled out by opposition supporters. That’s another notch altogether.
Abuse is abuse, whatever it is. I never understood why, if you could be kicked out of a football ground and prosecuted for racism, why not for other forms of prejudice? Early in 2007, the FA finally said that homophobic abuse should be treated in the same way as racial abuse inside football grounds. Given the abuse that I, and others, suffered, it feels like it was about twenty years too late. Perhaps that’s their idea of a rapid response unit. Still, better late than never.
The result of football’s strange tolerance of the homophobic victimization is that for somebody in the game to admit they are gay just couldn’t happen. If somebody came to me and said they were a gay footballer and asked my advice about whether they should be open about it, I would find it difficult to give them an honest answer.
I would find it difficult to say to a gay man that he ought to be true to himself and to the community he is representing. That’s what I’d want to tell him but the reality is that if you are a footballer and you want to do well, keep your mouth shut about being gay. That’s a terrible indictment of the English game but football is a society within a society. It’s another country.
TWO A Secret (#ulink_7119b612-a9a8-5616-ab9e-90aeac120905)
The thing is, I did have a secret; a secret I kept all through my playing career. I thought of it as a guilty secret. I was ashamed of my part in it and sometimes the guilt ate me up. Sometimes, it still does. Maybe that’s why I haven’t spoken publicly about it until now. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really even spoken to my dad, Pierre, about it, why I’ve tried to blank it out for so long. It had a big effect on me as a man and as a player. I was always concerned that it might be used as a reason for why I was so sensitive and quick to anger when I was on the pitch. For a long time, my secret went to the very heart of me.
My secret is this: when I was thirteen, my mother, Daphne, died. I know now that she had developed breast cancer a couple of years earlier and had a mastectomy. I know now that she thought she had beaten it but that it came back more deadly than ever. I know now that when I went away on a school football trip to northern France, my dad knew that my mum might have died by the time I got back to our home in Jersey. I know now that he had agreed with the doctors that it would be better for my mum if it was kept a secret from her. He was told that it might benefit her if she didn’t know how seriously ill she was. And obviously, if he wasn’t allowed to tell her, he couldn’t tell me or my two sisters.
So I didn’t even really realize my mum was ill. I was full of life and energy and busy chasing all my football dreams, haring to matches and training sessions all over the island. As a youngster, you don’t think about life or death. Anyway, mums and dads are always there. The thought of mum being ill never really crossed my mind. Perhaps I blinded myself to how poorly she was. Perhaps I shrugged off the signs I saw and I suppose everyone else helped me with my denial. It was only twenty-five years ago but people weren’t as open about cancer back then as they are now. It was still talked about in hushed tones.
My mum didn’t have chemotherapy so she didn’t lose her hair. She didn’t show too many outward signs of being ill. There were a couple of occasions when I walked into the room and found her crying but I just put it down to Mum being emotional. Even when an ambulance came to pick her up from our house in St Ouen, I failed to appreciate the seriousness of what was happening. I thought it was a bit of an adventure and my best mate, Jason, and I cycled furiously down to the parish hall and waited on the steps so we could see the ambulance driving past on its way to the hospital in St Helier. That was the last time I saw her. She was forty-one.
My poor dad: what a burden it must have been for him to carry. On the day he was in the hospital being told that my mum’s cancer had come back and that she had approximately nine months to live, I climbed onto the flat roof of the garage next to our house to retrieve a football. When I was getting down, I slipped and fell and gashed my shin so badly on a breeze block that it needed fifty stitches. It was a pretty dramatic injury and I was taken to hospital, too, without knowing of the terrible events that were unfolding there. Jason’s mum took me and bumped into my dad on the hospital steps. He thought she had come to inquire after my mum. When she told him what had happened and that the doctors were saying it might impede the use of my leg, the combination of it all was almost too much for him to bear. He says now it was the worst day of his life.
My mum was in and out of hospital in the weeks before her death. Then, that ambulance took her away and I went off on a football exchange trip to Caen for a long weekend. It was Easter and I was incredibly excited about it. I had an amazing time in France. We won the tournament we were playing in and some scouts from Caen, who were then in the French first division, were talking about me going over there for trials for their youth team.
When I got back to Jersey, I was euphoric. I’d bought some Easter chocolates for everyone and I couldn’t wait to give them to Mum and tell her all about my trip. We got the boat back to Jersey and I ran off it with my friend James Robinson, who was one of my close mates from school, when it docked. I spent a lot of time round at his house so I thought it was a bit weird when his dad looked straight through me on the quayside.
Soon, I caught sight of my dad. I was full of myself. I showed him the trophy I’d won and I gabbled out all the stuff about the trip. I was yakking away and we got in the car. We got about five minutes down the coast road from St Helier heading towards St Aubin. Out there in the bay was Elizabeth Castle on its rock. I suddenly thought ‘Oh Mum, how’s Mum?’ I asked Dad and he drew the car slowly into one of the lay-bys overlooking the beach.
He muttered something like ‘Just a second’ while he was stopping the car.
So I said ‘How’s Mum’ again.
‘Mum died whilst you were away,’ he said.
I couldn’t comprehend it. I said: ‘What?’
‘Mum’s died,’ Dad said. ‘She’s not with us any more.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It all seemed horribly unreal. As much as I tried to comprehend it, I just couldn’t accept it. I burst into tears while Dad tried to comfort me. As we drove home, fear gripped me. What was I going to say to my sisters? Who would I turn to now that Mum wasn’t ever going to be home again? Arriving at the house we walked into the lounge and there were all these cards of condolence – bizarrely it reminded me of Christmas. Mum was a very popular lady. She was a great netball player. She had loads of friends. And I just felt so lost. I looked around and I thought: ‘Everyone knows and I don’t. I’m their son and I’m the last one to know.’ Both my sisters were there – Jeanette is two years older than me and Alison is six years younger – and I felt that I hadn’t even been there for them. I can’t really express how difficult it was or how desperate I felt. I suppose you just spend time trying to come to terms with it.
I couldn’t even go to my own mother’s funeral – I was too embarrassed. I felt guilty because I suddenly saw it with such clarity after the event. It was like when someone throws a surprise party for you and you genuinely don’t know about it until you walk in. It’s that instant when you realize what has happened and suddenly all these pieces fit together.
Suddenly I knew why James Robinson’s dad couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew why we had been asked to go to church in France on the school trip the previous Sunday when we weren’t even a religious school. The teacher knew mum was seriously ill so he was desperate for us all to go to church and say a prayer for our loved ones. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I was distracted because I had a game of tennis organized for that Sunday morning and I didn’t want to go to the church. So the teacher let me off church and allowed me to play tennis. I thought that was unusually generous. I thought I’d got the best of the deal because everyone else was going to church while I was hurtling round a tennis court.
On reflection, all these pieces came together and I just couldn’t deal with it. I regret not going to the funeral more than anything now because it stopped me coming to terms with my mum’s death. On the day of the funeral, I went down to a hotel in St Brelade’s Bay with Jason, where his father worked, and just sat by the side of the swimming pool, staring into the water. I grieved and I went through a lot of emotions but I never had any support in those early years. I’m not blaming anyone – it wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just didn’t speak about it and it wasn’t until later in my life, when I met Mariana, that I felt I could open up about it. I did grieve at the time. I cried – a lot. It was more shock than anything. I found it really difficult to let go of her. I tried to remember her and relive things that happened before she died as part of trying to preserve her memory. But that made me even more upset. I’d transport myself back to a time when she was there and then, when I was forced to come out of it, it just accentuated the loss. I was a thirteen-year-old kid having to deal with that kind of emotional baggage. It added a complicated layer to my psychology.
It certainly wasn’t my dad’s fault. He didn’t have anyone to tell him the best way of dealing with the situation. It all happened a generation ago and cancer was still a bit of a taboo subject back then. You were supposed to deal with tragedies like that with a stiff upper lip and just get on with it.
I went back to school after the Easter holidays. I can still see the look in people’s faces now: their sympathy. When people said how sorry they were it used to annoy me. I wanted to say to them ‘Why are you sorry; it wasn’t anything to do with you; you’re not to blame’. Emotionally, I became a lot more sensitive. Add the sensitivity from my mum’s death to the alienation I felt at Chelsea when I first arrived there in my late teens and it made me particularly vulnerable.
My mum had been so supportive of me as a child. One of the things that upset me most about not having her around was that I could no longer share my experiences and achievements with her. She was the one who picked us up from school. She took so much interest in us. Some of the things I did, I felt I was doing for her. We couldn’t wait to tell her what we’d done at school when she was there waiting for us at the school gates. She was so interested in our lives. After she died, I felt this huge hole because she was no longer there. From the age of seven upwards, I always played football on the school pitches during lunch hour. Because I was left-footed, every day I used to come home with eight inches of mud down my right trouser leg, a crusty, muddy mark that mapped out the trajectory of a slide tackle and invariably ended with a hole in the trouser knee. Mum used to wash them and mend them patiently. She had a rota with my school trousers because I got them muddy every day. I often think now ‘Thank God she let me carry on ruining my trousers’. I wish I could communicate that to her but I can’t.
That was one of the saddest aspects of it. Through all the various milestones of my life and my career, I always had a moment when I wished she could see it. It would have made all the sacrifices and the hardships that she had endured for me worthwhile. And I know, just like any mother, she would be proud of me and my sisters.
My mum’s death changed me. It strengthened my drive and my outlook. I was always single minded anyway. I was always feisty and ambitious but when she died it made me want to leave Jersey. It is such a small island and it was such a traumatic experience that it turned parts of Jersey into unhappy places for me for a few years. Whenever I went down certain roads or visited certain beauty spots or beaches or shops, it brought back memories of my mum. It just used to upset me. Now, I can look back on them as happy memories and happy associations but for a long time those memories just upset me deeply.
I love my island. It’s only nine miles wide and five miles north to south but I loved growing up there. My identity is Jersey. Even though my dad wanted to call me Jean-Pierre (he was overruled by my mum), I feel more English than French – but more Jersey than English. Life seemed uncomplicated and happy there in the years before Mum died. I would cycle down the hill from my house to St Ouen’s Bay, with its dramatic dunes and its miles of beach and the warren of underground tunnels the Germans built after they invaded Jersey at the start of the Second World War. I’d play football for hours on the firm sand. Then, for a real challenge, I’d cycle back up the steep hill past Stinky Bay, where the smell of seaweed wafted up from the rocks below, and past the trees bent over by the sea breeze and the signs advertising Jersey Royal Potatoes back to my house on the hill.
It’s such a beautiful place, such a stark contrast to what I had to confront in London. No wonder I felt the culture shock so badly when I swapped Jersey for Burnt Oak. Often, in the evening, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I would drive my car to the headland at Grosnez, the most northwesterly point of the island, and park it by the ruins of the fourteenth-century arch there. I’d get out, stare over the water to Sark and then lie on the bonnet, listening to the waves and staring up at the stars. Sometimes, going to those places still makes me melancholy but back then it would bring tears to my eyes. I suppose it was part of coming to terms with letting go of my mum. I never said goodbye to her. I never had that raw sort of emotion. I kept it all within me.
People can psychoanalyse me as much as they want and it would be very easy to pin all my emotional baggage onto this one massive event. It would be easy to say I reacted to Robbie Fowler because my mum died or I hit David Batty because my mum died. But I might have been like that anyway. I don’t know. One of the reasons I believe I kept it from everyone at Chelsea and was glad that no one knew about it was because I had this fear that if people knew about my mum, then at some point someone would have made reference to it to try to use it against me. And I knew that that would have made me uncontrollably furious.
That would have been worse than anything I experienced, worse than any of the homophobic taunts. That’s one of the reasons I have never spoken about it. I never told anyone at Chelsea about it. In that way, I used football as a valid reason not to talk about her death. It was part of my process of denial. I told myself I couldn’t talk about it because people would use it against me and that meant I didn’t have to talk about it.
At various points during my playing career, I might get a casual question about what my parents did. I’d say my dad was a chartered quantity surveyor and my mum was a housewife. I just never talked about it publicly because I wanted to protect what I had. Some people would probably say it was a classic case of denial but it wasn’t that. I shared my thoughts with my friends in Jersey, friends like Jason and Susie, and now that I have moved away from football, I don’t feel as uncomfortable talking about it with people outside the game.
It’s strange. I have a close relationship with my dad and my sisters. We’re a loving family but we don’t talk about that time much. There are times when I think we ought to talk about it. My younger sister was only seven, just a bit younger than my own daughter is now, when Mum died. She never knew her mum. She deserves to know more.
When I became a footballer, it was my decision not to say anything about my mum so it’s always been my responsibility to deal with people that don’t know about her death and therefore say something inappropriate. But with any problem I’ve ever had, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to blame it on the fact that my mum died when I was a kid. I have never used her death as an excuse. That’s one thing I find hard to accept about some people: there is a type of person that uses things that have happened to them as an excuse to fail. Some circumstances cause people to implode. Equally, you can try and be determined to cope with adversity and get over it. I went through a stage of just feeling utterly lost. I questioned everything. I questioned the fundamentals of my life and there probably was a time when I could have made some bad decisions that derailed me.
However, I avoided that. It is a huge credit to my dad and my two sisters, and to my school and friends, that things happened that way. Football was always a huge release for me, too. It was just there. That was my time – I was never distracted. It allowed me to block out all the stuff about my mum. It helped me focus. I was desperate to win anyway but this made me even more absorbed in my football. And my mum’s death had another effect: I’ve been through bad times in my career and I’ve been able to cope because none of it was as traumatic as my mum dying.
I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the woman who became my dad’s partner in the years after Mum died. Her name was Alice and she became a mother figure to me and my sisters. There was no sense of resentment towards her because she had taken our mum’s place or anything like that. I only feel a deep and lasting appreciation towards her. In many ways, she kept our family together. She and my dad never lived together but we always went round to her house for Sunday lunch and she became a steadying, stabilising influence in all our lives. She was a lovely, loving, caring, gentle and kind lady.
Alice knew my mum and dad when they were younger but after Mum died, Dad was working on a building contract at Jersey Potteries and he bumped into Alice again while she was working in the gift shop there. She was like a saint to us. She had a massive role in a lot of people’s lives: she gave her life to other people. Her sister and her own mother completely and utterly relied on her. She had met my dad again when he was a widower with three children. Why on earth did she take us on when she already had so many responsibilities?
