Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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СКАЧАТЬ wider problem I felt I had at the club: no one ever stood up for me. You expect to feel nurtured when you go to a club like that but I wasn’t. I felt alone most of the time.

      If you have not come through the ranks from fourteen or fifteen, it becomes more and more difficult to integrate. You’re an outsider to the players who have been there together for a few years. You’re a threat to them and you’re a threat to their mates. No one could put me into a definite category which also made them suspicious of me. That created mistrust. I didn’t relate or conform to fit into a group. I didn’t compromise enough. I challenged a lot of stereotypes and I didn’t have any allies. I couldn’t compete in a talk-off with the smarter guys because I wasn’t quick enough or confident enough to take them on verbally. I certainly couldn’t challenge them physically. If you have got a little group of players you are friendly with, you are safe within that group. I never had that. I had been at school with my friends and protected within that environment. There were confrontations as at any other school but I was popular and confident when I was in Jersey. However, as soon as I came into football, I was getting stick from all angles. Over a period of time, it wore me down.

      Of course, there were happy moments within it all. I was there for more than five years in my first spell. I couldn’t have survived if there was no respite at all. There is always laughter at football clubs. There are incidents every day. Once, at the end of a five-a-side game on one of Harlington’s muddy pitches, David Lee slid in to prod home a goal. He opened his mouth to shout ‘Yeah’ as his momentum carried him into the goal and then suddenly he started clutching his face. One of his teeth had got hooked by the net as he shouted; it had twisted the tooth and flicked it clean out. I was doubled up with laughter like the rest of the lads. For some reason, we spent several minutes scrambling around in the mud trying to find it. What were we going to do with it? Give it to the tooth fairy? I don’t know if we thought they could screw it back in if we got it. But we never did.

      The same thing happened to Craig Burley when he was an apprentice. He had two front teeth missing most of his career. Know how he did it? A ball came to him chest high and he got caught in two minds about whether to stoop to head it or do a falling volley. In the end, he did neither. In the end, he tried to knee it and he just kneed himself in the face and knocked out his two front teeth. Cue more scrabbling around in the mud. It was funny at the time.

      I’m not saying I felt I had a lot of enemies at Chelsea, either. I liked lads like Graham Stuart and Damian Matthew and Jason Cundy. Graham and Jason used to pick me up from the bus stop at Hampton Court, near the digs in Kingston I’d moved into after I left Burnt Oak, and drive me into training. We got on fine and they used to laugh about what Indie band I’d been to see the night before. Some of the lads gave me a nickname, Berge, after the television detective Bergerac, who gave the impression that my beautiful island was riddled with violent crime.

      Mostly, however, I struggled. Perhaps I was a bit homesick as well but I found many of the aspects of my new life intimidating and hostile. At Harlington there were separate dressing rooms and groups of players were separated off into their own little space. That made integration even harder. It was like a little passport control system. If you did well, you moved into the next dressing room and up the food chain as it were. The young lads were down at the far end, furthest away from the entrance. The first teamers were just inside the door. There was another one for the also-rans.

      There was scope for moving onwards and upwards within that strange little hierarchy but places in the coveted dressing rooms didn’t come up until a player left. So if you wanted to be in a dressing room with The Lads, you needed to wait for someone else to be sold and then jump in before the replacement came. If you knew someone when you signed for Chelsea, you might get fast-tracked. That kind of separation meant I never really got to know a lot of my team-mates in the first team. I might train with them occasionally but when you are training you are focusing on that. It was really disruptive.

      In the early years, I never really thought I was going to be good enough to make it at Chelsea and if I analyse it, a lot of my success was based on insecurity. A lot of ambition is based on fear of failure. I have seen so many players get dispirited, walk away and give up before they should have done. I’ve wanted to say to some of them: ‘You are too good to give up.’ But the one thing you can’t do is change that desire in someone. You have either got the will to succeed or you haven’t. It’s not going to happen unless you make it happen

      For a long time at Chelsea, I felt I was way behind people like Graham and Damian because, when I first arrived, they had been playing football at that level for two or three years as apprentices. I felt like an outsider looking in. There were plenty of moments when it would have been easier for me to jack it in. That’s why I never signed a long-term contract at Chelsea. I always gave myself targets. I signed for two years and got through that. Then I signed for three years and got through that. I had a little bit of security but not too much. I’m such a safety first guy normally but I took a risk by signing short-term contracts because I wanted to play football on my terms. I didn’t want to be tied into something that I couldn’t get out of if it wasn’t working.

      I played the first six months in the reserves under Gwyn Williams, one of Chelsea’s great survivors, a Bates man who only bit the dust when Roman Abramovich took over. Gwyn held plenty of positions at Chelsea down the years – mainly because he was a good coach and because he was always upbeat and lively. At different times, he ran the academy, the reserves, he was assistant manager, he did the travel, and he was chief scout. When I was there, he was really hard on the players – he used to hammer us. His idea was to try and prepare everyone for the profession. In some ways, I liked him but he destroyed a few people.

      He was always very hard on the black lads but I know he didn’t see it as racist – he was hard on everyone and didn’t single them out in particular. It was very much a product of its time. It seems harsh and brutal now but even then, less than 20 years ago, it was seen as acceptable. Racism in the game was more of a problem then and I suppose Gwyn could argue that he was just trying to steel the Afro-Caribbean guys for the stick they would receive from their fellow professionals and from sections of the crowd at away games. Thankfully, racial abuse has dwindled in English football now to the point where Gwyn’s kind of education isn’t acceptable any more.

      Frank Sinclair and Eddie Newton still liked Gwyn despite all the insults he levelled at them but there were others like Nathan Blake who found it more difficult. That brings us back to the Robbie Fowler dictum: football is a tough business and if anyone has a weakness, it gets picked on.

      Some players can handle it and others can’t. I could take it – at least most of the time. But it changed me. I found it very hard when I was younger. The atmosphere was so intimidating. People would play on your weaknesses and really get stuck into you – more psychologically, but also as a player. At Chelsea in the late Eighties, there was a tradition that if you were judged to have been the worst player at a training session, you were awarded a yellow bib at the end and you would have to wear it at the start of the next one. Once I had the bib, even if I had a brilliant training session the next time, I tended to get it again – because that amused The Lads. That got demoralising and it was quite isolating – it made you feel like an outcast. I noticed that Dennis Wise introduced that ritual at Swindon when he was manager there. I saw a newspaper article about how Paul Ince had had to wear the yellow bib once or twice when he played there for a spell. I bet he took that well.

      When the accusations about my sexuality started and I took it seriously, that snowballed. But even apart from that, the taunting and the mickey-taking and the picking on people was relentless. Some of the lads had this routine they thought was hilarious. We’d be on the mini bus to a reserve game and we’d be driving through Parliament Square, say, and past Big Ben. Nobody would mention Big Ben but then one of the boys would say to me, ‘What’s the time, Graeme?’ I’d say, ‘Quarter to seven,’ and they’d fall about laughing and go on about Big Ben being right there. Or we’d get onto the forecourt at Old Trafford and one СКАЧАТЬ