Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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СКАЧАТЬ off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.

      I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.

      Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.

      But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.

      It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.

      The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.

      The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having to run up and down the touchline in front of the Main Stand. I was scared stiff. I thought the fans were going to kill me.

      In the second half, Luca told me to go and warm up. Because the linesman was running the line in the half to our right, we had to warm up at the Kop end. So when I ran down the touchline towards the Kop, the entire Kop started singing ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’. I think it was the loudest I’d ever heard it. Then the wolf whistles started. But something really had changed. For the first time ever, it didn’t upset me. For the first time, I felt I had the confidence to see it as the wind-up it was and take the sting out of it without getting upset.

      During my stretching, I was in the corner near the Kop and I turned my back to them. I did a hamstring stretch where you open both your legs out wide and you get really low and touch your elbows on the floor. As I did it, I looked between my legs at the supporters and winked and smiled. And they all started applauding me. There was nothing pre-meditated about it. It’s funny, but it made me feel as though the pressure was lifting a bit. It took the edge off everything. It was a catharsis.

      In the end, I got there. But it didn’t wipe out what I’d been through. It didn’t wash it away. Let’s be blunt: it was awful; it nearly drove me out of the game. The homophobic taunting and the bullying made me feel left out and misunderstood. People have read me wrong because they thought I wasn’t a team player just because I was different, just because I didn’t conform to the stereotype of a laddish footballer.

      In my first spell at Chelsea, I was so close to walking away from football. I went through times that were like depression. I would get up in the morning and I wouldn’t feel good and by the time I got into training I would be so nervous that I felt sick. I dreaded going in. I was like a bullied kid on his way into school to face his tormentors.

      Sometimes, when I look back at what I went through, I don’t know why I carried on – other than this singlemindedness and some sort of belief that I had a destiny to make it as a professional footballer. I can’t work out why I didn’t pack it all in but it was like I was on a path and despite all the baggage I was carrying, I never let myself stray from that path.

      It’s an indictment of our game and the prejudice it allows, but I felt a great surge of relief when I retired. Playing was such an emotional drain. I had to get myself up for the game and then I had to prepare myself for being singled out by opposition supporters. That’s another notch altogether.

      Abuse is abuse, whatever it is. I never understood why, if you could be kicked out of a football ground and prosecuted for racism, why not for other forms of prejudice? Early in 2007, the FA finally said that homophobic abuse should be treated in the same way as racial abuse inside football grounds. Given the abuse that I, and others, suffered, it feels like it was about twenty years too late. Perhaps that’s their idea of a rapid response unit. Still, better late than never.

      The result of football’s strange tolerance of the homophobic victimization is that for somebody in the game to admit they are gay just couldn’t happen. If somebody came to me and said they were a gay footballer and asked my advice about whether they should be open about it, I would find it difficult to give them an honest answer.

      I would find it difficult to say to a gay man that he ought to be true to himself and to the community he is representing. That’s what I’d want to tell him but the reality is that if you are a footballer and you want to do well, keep your mouth shut about being gay. That’s a terrible indictment of the English game but football is a society within a society. It’s another country.

       TWO A Secret

      The thing is, I did have a secret; a secret I kept all through my playing career. I thought of it as a guilty secret. I was ashamed of my part in it and sometimes the guilt ate me up. Sometimes, it still does. Maybe that’s why I haven’t spoken publicly about it until now. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really even spoken to my dad, Pierre, about it, why I’ve tried to blank it out for so long. It had a big effect on me as a man and as a player. I was always concerned that it might be used as a reason for why I was so sensitive and quick to anger when I was on the pitch. For a long time, my secret went to the very heart of me.

      My secret is this: when I was thirteen, my mother, Daphne, died. I know now that she had developed breast cancer a couple of years earlier and had a mastectomy. I know now that she thought she had beaten it but that it came back more deadly than ever. I know now that when I went away on a school football trip to northern France, my dad knew that my mum might have died by the time I got back to our home in Jersey. I know now that he had agreed with the doctors that it would be better for my mum if it was kept a secret from her. He was told that it might benefit her if she didn’t know how seriously ill she was. And obviously, if he wasn’t allowed to tell her, he couldn’t tell me or my two sisters.

      So СКАЧАТЬ