Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ