Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ think ‘What did I do to deserve this’. But he never let his commitment to me and my sisters drop. He and my mum used to spend a lot of what is known now as ‘quality time’ with the three of us. After she died, Dad worked hard but he was always there for us. My mum was a good netball player and Dad had played football to a decent amateur standard so we were all encouraged to be sporty.

      Dad was ambitious for me when I was a child. He would drive me here and there. He was a taxi service. But his way of connecting with me was through football. He would get a football out when I was two or three and he felt pretty quickly that I had an eye for it. As I got older, he became much more serious about my football. It helped that I was an outdoor kid. I wouldn’t think twice about going on a two-hour bike ride and I took cross country very seriously. Football, however, soon became all-consuming. I played for my school, St Saviour’s, and for the Island Primary Schools and the Island Cubs. That was the first time I ever came up against Matt Le Tissier, who was from Guernsey. He was right-sided, I was left-sided, so we were always rivals.

      I came up against him time and again and it often seemed our careers shadowed each other’s. We were the first players from the Channel Islands to represent England. He made his debut sixty-six minutes after I made mine. There seemed to be something linking us. He was born on 14 October 1968. I was born on 17 October 1968 – weird. Every time I played against him when we were kids, I used to get that nervous feeling you have when you’re up against someone who you think is better than you. I can’t remember him showing me up too badly but that may just be because I have erased it from my memory. I do remember, though, that when he signed professional forms for Southampton when he was sixteen, it felt like someone had finally burst the dam as far as Channel Islands football was concerned. He was the first from the islands of my generation to get a professional contract. He showed it could be done.

      There was some good schools football in Jersey. At a younger age, there was an Easter primary schools tournament which is still an annual event now and has become very prestigious. Deeside Schools always came down and they were one of the best sides in the country: Ian Rush, Gary Speed and Michael Owen all played for them at different times. So I was exposed to a good standard of football. Later, I went to a secondary school called Hautlieu and continued to play football while I studied. What went against me in terms of the bigger picture and getting a shot at a trial with a professional club was the fact that I lived on the island. For a club to invite me for a trial was a big commitment because they would have to pay for the cost of the flight and put me up in digs. The expense was prohibitive.

      When I was thirteen, my dad paid for me to go to a soccer camp put on by Southampton. I had the accident when I fell off the garage roof a few weeks before the camp was due to start but even though I had all those stitches in my shin, there was no way I was going to miss it. I loved it. I spent a week there. They asked me to stay for a second week and said they would keep an eye on me. My dad had high hopes for what that camp might achieve for me but when I went back the next year, they said I had not developed as much as they had hoped.

      I endured some of the rites of passage many aspiring footballers go through – such as the careers meeting with the sceptical teacher. She had a computer with a fairly basic careers programme. She asked what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to be a footballer. She keyed it in and it was reminiscent of Little Britain – the computer said no. ‘Nothing’s come up,’ she said. So she put ‘sportsman’ in and again nothing came up. In the end, she said ‘What else would you like to do?’ I shrugged. She gave me a printout of how to become a bank manager, just so she could tick her box. When I signed for Chelsea a couple of years later, they took me down to the Lloyd’s Bank at Fulham Broadway. I looked up at the bank manager as I was writing ‘professional footballer’ on the form. I thought of my careers meeting. ‘I could have been you,’ I said.

      Anyway, I kept plugging away. I had had a trial at Notts County when I was thirteen or fourteen and got my picture taken with Howard Wilkinson and Jimmy Sirrell. I played for Southampton in a testimonial with people like Kevin Bond when Chris Nicholl was the manager. But nothing materialized and I began to think nothing ever would. However, when I got to seventeen, I won a soccer scholarship to the Florida Institute of Technology, which is on the Atlantic coast, well north of Miami and not far from Orlando. I still had this determination to put some distance between me and Jersey and all the melancholic memories of the loss of my mum that used to flood over me now and again. Moving to the States for a couple of years, studying marine biology and playing football, seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that. Everything was ready to go. I had a big farewell party and then I went up to London to stay with my aunt the night before I was due to catch the plane to Miami. That night, my dad phoned. There was a last-minute hitch. Florida Tech had been on. There was a problem with my visa at their end – it was something to do with them having miscalculated their numbers of foreign students. Anyway, it was all off. I felt devastated.

      I dealt with it like I’d dealt with a lot of other setbacks: I threw myself into football. I played morning, noon and night, training and playing, training and playing, squeezing in a Saturday morning job on a fruit and veg stall and my A-level homework when I could. And I had a stellar season that year. By then, I was playing for a team called St Paul’s who I thought were the best team in Jersey. I played for their juniors and their seniors and that year both sides won the Jersey league and qualified to play for a Cup called the Upton against the winners of the junior and senior leagues in Guernsey. I won the junior and the senior Upton that year and I also represented the island at junior and senior level against Guernsey in a competition called the Muratti. We won both of those, too. So I won six major trophies. From the outside, it might sound a bit like Channel Islands small fry but for us it was a big deal and it formed an important part of the Channel Islands sporting calendar. It made me a bit of a schoolboy phenomenon in Jersey because nobody before had ever accomplished what I had that season.

      Some time that summer, the Chelsea manager, John Hollins, came down to Jersey to present the end of season prizes for the island’s football clubs. I wasn’t eligible for the Player of the Year award for the senior team because I was under age so I wasn’t even at the ceremony. However, people kept going up to John and telling him about me and all these records I’d set in Jersey football. ‘If he’s as good as you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘I better get him over and have a look at him.’ He wrote my name down on the back of a match box next to the phone number of an official of St Paul’s. When he got back to Chelsea, he made the call and in July 1987, they contacted my dad.

      I went over for a week’s trial and at the end of it, they offered me a professional contract. There was still one more hurdle to overcome, though. I’d failed my biology A-level and my dad asked John Hollins if he would mind if I re-sat it that November and postponed joining Chelsea until December. That was pretty ballsy of my dad and my heart was in my mouth because I thought Chelsea might be offended. But John Hollins didn’t seem to mind and it was all agreed.

      So, eventually, I left Jersey. I didn’t feel I had to be on the island any more. I still loved it but my mum’s death gave me a real determination to get away and fulfil my ambitions. A lot of people who grow up in Jersey feel they would miss the island if they moved to the mainland but emotionally, I was out of there. I couldn’t change what had happened. If only I had known then what I know now. But then we can all look back and regret things. It’s how we deal with them that is important. Perhaps it will help me be an ear for someone who has been through a similar thing. Perhaps it’s already making me value my children with an extra keenness. My mum’s death changed many things in my life but back then, it made me feel as though I had to carve out a life for myself away from Jersey. I felt like I was on a mission.

       THREE First-time Blues

      In theory Chelsea’s training ground at Harlington should have felt as though it was at the centre of the modern world. It was a few hundred СКАЧАТЬ