Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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СКАЧАТЬ out of the capital when you walked from your car to the changing rooms. On the other side, it was bounded by the runways at Heathrow. You could see the planes queuing up to land as they glided in over the west London suburbs, and the roar from Concorde as it took off sometimes stopped training in its tracks. Harlington and being part of Chelsea Football Club should have felt like a launch pad. It should have felt like a hub. But to me, it was a desolate place. It was no man’s land.

      I saw it first in the summer of 1987 when John Hollins, who was a manager heading into a storm, invited me over for a week’s trial. I arrived so full of energy and enthusiasm and determination. It makes me smile now to think of how naive and raw I was. I ran myself into the ground that week. I was determined to seize my opportunity – I thought I might never get another. So I hurtled around like a madman in training and the first teamers loved it. They probably recognized that wide-eyed enthusiasm from the time they had it, the time before the routine of being a professional footballer gripped them.

      One of the most popular training drills was for the first team to form a big circle and stick one of the trialists in the middle of it. We had to try and get the ball off them and they had immense amounts of fun with that. They were like matadors with a young bull. I charged around and flew at them. They knew they had a live one. They were doing olés every time they touched it and kept the ball away from me. There were cheers and whoops. Roy Wegerle, who also played for Blackburn, QPR, Luton and the USA and was one of the most skilful players I’ve ever seen, did this trick where he received the ball on his right foot, dragged it behind his left foot and then flicked it out the other side all in one movement. I couldn’t get anywhere near the ball. Every day that week, I was utterly exhausted at the end of training. I gave it absolutely everything.

      After seven days, I went back to Jersey. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me saying that I had failed one of my A-levels. The amount of football I had been playing that year, it was a miracle I could even read. A few days later, John Hollins phoned my dad and said they wanted to offer me a contract. I couldn’t believe it. But my priorities were slightly different to a lot of footballers even then: my dad told John that I wanted to resit my biology A-level that November and that I’d like to postpone joining the club until then. John was relaxed about it. It wasn’t as if he was planning to rush me into the first team. So he said that was fine. I re-took biology and passed it and at the beginning of December I became a Chelsea player. I had just turned nineteen.

      The club was going through a difficult period and its future was uncertain. Ken Bates, the chairman, was fighting to buy Stamford Bridge and save it from the developers. John Hollins was a good manager but I soon realized that he was a gentle man in charge of a very strong dressing room and that that was not a good combination. There was nothing sophisticated about Chelsea in those days, certainly not among the players. It was staffed by tough, unyielding men some of whom played hard and drank hard and then came to training. These men did not eat pasta salads and florets of broccoli.

      These men were not King’s Road dandies like Alan Hudson and Peter Osgood and the playboys of a previous Chelsea generation. I was scared witless of some of them. There was a bloke called John McNaught, a really rough, tough, Scottish central defender who was literally hardnosed. He was terrifying. He only played thirteen times for the first team but I played plenty of reserve football with him. Pat Nevin, who I respected, liked McNaught for his honesty but he just scared me rigid.

      Some of my team-mates in club football in Jersey had played their football in Scotland and Wales and Ireland so it wasn’t as if people like McNaught and Peter Nicholas, when he arrived later, were aliens to me. Nonetheless it amazed me that people like them were professional players. I was expecting professional footballers to be professional in every sense of the word but there were players there for whom football was all about the lifestyle off the pitch. Their work had to fit into their lifestyle rather than the other way around. McNaught would arrive in the morning a bit hungover and ragged. You could tell he had been out. He would turn up late for reserve games. He was a good centre-half, tough as old boots, but I was taken aback by his approach. I thought that if you were professional, you needed to be in top condition. Back then, before the influx of foreign players made English football much more driven and professional, you could just about disguise the fact that you lived your social life to the full. Some of these guys could get away with it.

      The minute I signed my contract, I really appreciated what I was doing; I felt so fortunate. But with some of these players it was a way of life. They had grown up with it. They had always gone out and they had still made it. I didn’t feel the two were compatible for me. I knew that if I did that, I’d be shot to pieces; I knew I couldn’t afford to do it. To be honest, I didn’t want to do it, anyway: it wasn’t me.

      I found it hard to make good friends at Chelsea. I was caught between the apprentices and the battle-hardened professionals. That’s what I mean about the no man’s land. I hadn’t come up through the ranks at the club with good apprentices like Jason Cundy, David Lee, Damian Matthew and Graham Stuart; and I was regarded as an over-earnest young swot by blokes like Nicholas, Steve Wicks, Kerry Dixon, David Speedie and Andy Townsend, the men who called the shots at the club and ran the dressing room.

      I don’t know how much of my alienation at the club was about class. I have always shied away from class issues and I have never judged anyone on class. But I think I was judged. Some of the lads told me I was a bit posh. In England, unlike in Europe, I’ve always noticed that there seems to be an issue with young players who have been educated academically, purely because they are so much in the minority. Those players find it hardest to fit in, particularly when they are trying to fit in with a group of young lads. It has changed a lot now and improved but some footballers still have a very insular mentality.

      Class wasn’t obvious in Jersey. I didn’t consider my family privileged in any particular way. I didn’t consider myself middle class. I wasn’t privately educated, for instance, but apart from the fact that my parents couldn’t have afforded it, there wasn’t really any need for private education in Jersey: there were no problems with lack of books or facilities. The class boundaries weren’t defined there. We all played rugby and football. I played football with some really street-wise guys in Jersey: builders, plumbers, electricians and other labourers. I grew up in a team that had quite a solid base of Scottish and northern English players and rather than scorning me, they took me under their wing.

      But when I arrived at Chelsea, everything felt very closed off. There was a lot of intimidation. Suddenly I was involved constantly with people who were alien to me. In Jersey, most of my routine was about school and I only saw the lads now and again. Now, the main part of my life was about mixing with players at Chelsea with whom I had nothing in common. I wasn’t a poor little rich boy but I think some of them regarded me like that. Also, there was no respite from it: the micky-taking seemed absolutely relentless and it gets hard when you’re always the target.

      It was a tough environment. By the time I got back there in December, the club was sliding towards relegation and John Hollins was in trouble. People look after themselves, particularly when a club is in trouble, and the lads ran the show. Anything went. The management did not solve the problems I had, they didn’t tackle my isolation – in fact, they helped to perpetuate it. Once, in training, we were sitting round in a big circle talking something through as a team and I said something that Bobby Campbell, who succeeded Hollins, took exception, too. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he joked. ‘You’re just the product of a German rape.’

      He didn’t know that my mother had died, of course, so he couldn’t know quite how deeply that comment hurt me, but I was still astonished he could say something like that. He was clearly aware that the Channel Islands had been invaded by the Germans during the Second World War and I suppose that was his idea of humour. Comedy was different then: he was mates with Jimmy Tarbuck, and people like Freddie Starr were considered funny at the time. But Campbell didn’t make anyone laugh. Even the other lads looked surprised by what he said; most of them just looked СКАЧАТЬ