Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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СКАЧАТЬ we bloody are, look there’s the ground’ and the laughing would start again. I suppose I was pretty gullible. If somebody wanted to know what the time was, I’d tell them the time. I never recognized it as a prank.

      There were cheap shots like that constantly. I felt I came in for quite a bit of stick. I must have seemed very different and so I was an easy target. I had my rucksack and my Walkman; I had jeans with a hole in the knee. I used to get hammered. Now that I’ve stopped playing, I look at the younger players and the ones that stood out were the ones who got the grief. It wasn’t the kind of life I had imagined it would be. There were times when I was very unhappy. It had almost got to the point where I had separated my football life from my life away from the game in order to stay sane.

      I had a few run-ins with people. I had a go at Kerry Dixon about being lazy in training and we both threw punches. I had a ding-dong with Peter Nicholas, too. But those things happened every week. John McNaught and a striker called Billy Dodds were having a massive argument about something and John called him a ‘thick Scottish prick’. When Billy pointed out John was Scottish, too, that kind of shortcircuited John’s brain and they had a punch-up. Fights in training still occasionally happen now but it was a much tougher environment back then.

      Maybe it was partly because Chelsea were going through a tough spell fighting relegation but sometimes training just felt like anarchy. Some of the guys just didn’t care. In the reserves, we used to do shooting practice and the lads would boot the ball over the bar on purpose so that it flew into the field behind the goal. They’d climb over the gate into the field and have a kick-about over there while the coach was trying to put on a shooting session on the pitch. The reserves was a sub-culture. There were players in the reserves who only ever seemed to play for the reserves. For some of them, the idea that it was supposed to be a stepping stone into the first team had ceased to exist – they had gone missing in action. Quite a lot of them had dodgy attitudes. They didn’t want to be at the club. It’s very easy for a young player to get influenced by that and think that’s the way to behave. You’ve got to be single-minded to avoid that trap.

      I earned £120 a week when I first signed. The first thing I bought was a Sony Walkman for £100. It had wind-in head-phones and it was my pride and joy. It got me through the journey to and from my digs in Burnt Oak every day. It was nearly a week’s wages for me so it was like Michael Ballack spending £100,000 on something. My second contract, which I signed in 1990, took me up to £400 a week. That allowed me to have a mortgage of £75,000 at a time when the interest rate was 15 per cent. I wanted to get a fancy car and live the life a bit but prudence got the better of me and I decided to invest everything in a flat.

      My thinking was that whatever happened in my football career, if I could come out of it with a property and no mortgage then that was a worthwhile ambition. So I climbed onto the property ladder and bought a flat and then, later, a fourbedroomed Victorian house in Thames Ditton, Surrey. We were in a recession at the time. When I sold the flat eighteen months later, I only got what I paid for it. I was only twenty-three and I suppose I bought it for the family that I didn’t have. I thought that if I bought this house I could live there if I had a wife and family, too. I wasn’t planning to get married imminently but I was always thinking ahead and planning stuff. I thought I could live there okay if I did find someone.

      So I paid £225,000 for it and I never got my flash car. I imported a Suzuki jeep from Jersey instead. The rest of the lads were driving XR3is and Renault 5 turbos and I had a Suzuki jeep. It had a maximum speed of about 50mph. I drove it to Wales once on the motorway and I had to take a run up of about two miles if I wanted to overtake anything.

      At least the football side of things went okay. I made my debut for the reserves against Portsmouth at a half-frozen Fratton Park and I was awestruck because the former England forward Paul Mariner was in the Portsmouth team. I played left-back that day but on other occasions Gwyn had me playing all over the place. I played at centre-back for three or four months and at one point, I said to Gwyn that I couldn’t play centre-back any more. He said that in that case, he wouldn’t bother picking me – so I played at centre-back. I think that was part of my problem in my first spell at Chelsea: they felt I was so versatile that I never got settled in one position. When the players who played in a set position regularly were fit, I’d find myself out of the team. You become easy to drop: I hadn’t cost them anything and I was part of the furniture so it was easier to drop someone like me than someone they had paid a lot of money for.

      But they were a good group of young players in that Chelsea reserve side. Jason Cundy was sold to Spurs for £800,000 in 1992 and his career was marred first by back problems and then by a struggle with cancer. Dave Lee was a really good player but he broke his leg badly and never really recovered from it. And Graham Stuart, who was a clever, creative player, had a good career at Everton, where he won an FA Cup Winners’ medal, and at Charlton Athletic where he was part of the Alan Curbishley success story. It was a good bunch but sadly most of us had to leave in order to realize our potential.

      The reserve team did okay but the first team was struggling. A couple of months after I arrived, John Hollins began to come under serious pressure. He had fallen out with players like Speedie and Nigel Spackman and team spirit had disintegrated. One day in February 1988, Bobby Campbell suddenly turned up at training. I hadn’t been aware of speculation linking him with the job and he hadn’t been officially given it: he just loitered around a bit at Harlington, watching from the sidelines, that sort of thing. It was very odd. He was supposed to be John’s new assistant but it was obvious he was the manager-in-waiting. After a few days of that, John told him to get lost and that while he was still manager, Campbell wasn’t welcome. In March, John got the sack and Campbell took over.

      Campbell was a Scouser. He was flash, flash a bit like Ron-Manager. He wore a lot of gold. He had a Rolex that didn’t lock properly, which was something that he seemed to like. He used it as a kind of gimmick. Every time he clapped his hands, the strap would come undone and the watch would rattle and it would all draw attention to the fact that he was wearing a Rolex. He was a bit tougher than John and he brought in players like Graham Roberts, Peter Nicholas, Dennis Wise and Dave Beasant and they became powerful people within the club. The club was going through a stage where things were going to have to get worse before they got better and, at the end of the season, we were relegated from the top flight after losing a two-leg relegation play-off against Middlesbrough. To make things worse, there was crowd trouble after the game and an attempted pitch invasion. Chelsea were forced to close the terraces for six matches the following season as a punishment.

      It wasn’t a happy time to be involved at Stamford Bridge but the next season, Campbell did a great job. We were promoted at a canter with ninety-nine points, seventeen clear of our nearest rivals Manchester City, and when the Second Division championship was already won, I finally got my chance in the first team. I’d travelled with the first team a couple of times before that but I hadn’t made it to the bench. On the last day of the 1988/89 season, we were away to Portsmouth at Fratton Park, just like we had been for my reserve debut.

      When Campbell told me to warm up, I did about twenty sprints up and down the touchline. I was hyperactive; I was petrified; I was desperate to get on – all at the same time. I was so nervous, I kept checking to make sure I had my shirt on. Campbell beckoned me over with about fifteen minutes to go and sent me on for Steve Clarke. Tony Dorigo was in the team at left-back and Clive Wilson was playing leftmidfield. Dorigo was an England left-back and Wilson should have been – not much competition there then.

      The line-up that day, just to give an idea of the time warp between then and when I played my last game for Chelsea alongside men like Marcel Desailly and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, went like this: Dave Beasant; Steve Clarke, Joe McLaughlin, Graham Roberts (capt.), Tony Dorigo; Gareth Hall, Peter Nicholas, Kevin McAllister, Clive Wilson; Kevin Wilson, Kerry Dixon (Monkou).

      When I ran onto the pitch, I felt like I was starring in a movie about me. Everything had been building up to this СКАЧАТЬ