Bend It Like Bullard Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Jimmy Bullard

  The right of Jimmy Bullard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 6551 7

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London

  NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Book

  Jimmy Bullard may not have had the perfect hair-do, his Granada Ghia may not have been the flashiest of cars, and he definitely didn’t have a string of Page 3 girls trying to sell kiss and tell stories about him to the tabloids. But what he has in spades is a genuine love for The Beautiful Game that few of his peers can match. One of the last graduates from football’s old school, Jimmy actually worked in the real world – including as a painter and decorator – before turning pro. Maybe that’s why he played football with a smile on his face, always says what’s on his mind, and is no stranger to a spot of mischief.

  Having played under the likes of Barry Fry, Harry Redknapp and Phil Brown, appeared alongside names as diverse as Neil Ruddock and Paolo di Canio, and as long as Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, Jimmy has racked up an amazing collection of tales and pranks both on and off the football front-line. Told with candour, Bend It Like Bullard is the extraordinary story of his journey from cable TV fitter to cult hero. It will make you smile, chuckle and, occasionally, ROFL.

  About the Author

  East London-born Jimmy Bullard joined the club he supported as a boy, West Ham, from non-League Gravesend & Northfleet in 1999. He never played a first team game for The Hammers and moved to Peterborough United on a free transfer in 2001, where he started to make a name for himself under manager Barry Fry. A move to Wigan Athletic followed in 2003 and Bullard played his part in securing promotion to the Premier League in 2005 and a League Cup final appearance in 2006. He left The Latics to join Fulham but his time there was blighted by injury, as was his spell at Hull City, the club he joined in 2009. Brief spells at Ipswich Town and Milton Keynes Dons ensued, but Bullard brought his career to an end by announcing his retirement in October 2012. As far as international football was concerned, Bullard was called into the England squad in August 2008 for the World Cup qualifiers against Andorra and Croatia, but did not feature in either match.

  For Diane, Archie, Beau, Mum, Dad, John, Shelley and my nans and grandads; in loving memory of my uncle Johnny Hall

  Acknowledgements

  The publishers told me I could thank everyone involved with the book on this page so this is a bit like my Oscars speech – or the closest I’ll get anyway. Bear with me.

  There are two Jonathans without whom you wouldn’t be reading the book right now and they deserve a massive slap on the back (in a good way), so take a bow Jonathan Conway, my literary agent, and Jonathan Taylor, my publisher at Headline.

  Staying at the publishers, my editors Justyn Barnes and Richard Roper did a great job of correcting all my terrible spelling and grammar, while Tom Noble, Beau Merchant, Ben Willis and Richard (aka Men Who Stare At Books) have all been legends for making sure you found out about the book so you could go and buy it. Also, my manager Jim Erwood deserves a nod for making sure I actually got out of bed and turned up at important meetings.

  Some of my former team-mates, gaffers and friends have been legends for helping me remember stories that I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten, and making sure I embarrassed myself even more. So a huge thanks to Barry Fry, Paul Jewell, Phil Brown, Mike Pollitt, Dean Hooper, Mitchell Crawley and Weirsy.

  I suppose I should also thank my ghostwriter Gershon Portnoi for coming up with the book idea in the first place and helping me to write it – I was hardly going to do it all myself, was I?

  But, most of all, I want to thank my amazing family, without whom my entire career wouldn’t have happened – I’m getting right into the Oscars thing now, aren’t I?

  My mum and dad, Jim and Linda, have always given me the most incredible support and love. Where would I be without them? Well, I wouldn’t have been born for starters.

  My amazing missus Diane, along with my two fantastic kids, Archie and Beau, are the greatest things that ever happened to me. Diane has been there for me before, during and after the rollercoaster ride of my career; she’s an absolute diamond.

  Finally, I’d like to thank Fabio Capello for calling me up to the England squad, but not for giving me a cap. Because he never did. What were you thinking, Fab?

  Oh yeah, one more thing. If I’ve forgotten to thank anyone, forgive me – you know what I’m like.

  * * *

  CELEBRATE EVERY GOAL AS IF IT’S YOUR LAST; DO SO BY MOCKING YOUR MANAGER AND IT PROBABLY WILL BE

  * * *

  ‘Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.’ Aristotle

  Why always me? Mario Balotelli may have claimed that one for himself but I reckon I could justifiably wear that T-shirt too – as long as he washed it first.

  You know your mate who you can always convince to do anything for a laugh because you haven’t quite got the bottle to do it yourself? That’s me. And that’s why when my Hull team-mates and I hatched a plan to perform the goal celebration to end all goal celebrations, it was inevitable that I ended up being the focal point of the whole thing, despite it not even being my idea.

  On the eve of our match away at Man City in 2009, we were having dinner together in the team hotel when Paul McShane came up with a plan.

  ‘If we score tomorrow, let’s rinse the gaffer by doing a celebration taking the piss out of his on-pitch team talk last season,’ he said, as my team-mates and I nodded and laughed enthusiastically. ‘Not if we’re 3-0 down, but if it’s an equalising or winning goal, whoever scores it has to do it.’

  McShane was part of the Hull team who had been humiliated by our gaffer Phil Brown in the corresponding fixture the previous season. Then – playing without me obviously or it would never have happened – Hull trailed 3-0 at the break and Brownie decided to keep the players on the pitch and delivered his half-time words of wisdom to them in front of the stunned visiting supporters.

  If you ask me, that was a liberty and if I’d been a Hull player then I would have walked off the pitch and gone to the toilet. A lot of my future team-mates said he lost the dressing room at that point, and that’s why they were up for a small dose of revenge. But that was Brownie – he was unpredictable and did the most ridiculous things sometimes.

  For better or worse, his very public team talk became one of the most talked-about incidents of the season. What was it that Oscar Wilde said about being talked about or not being talked about? I’ve got no idea. Do you
think I’ve ever read Oscar bloody Wilde?

  A year later, it was me who was being talked about when, with eight minutes left and Hull trailing 1-0, we were awarded a penalty in front of thousands of our fans who had travelled to Eastlands.

  Shortly before, Brownie had asked me to play further up the pitch as we tried to claw something out of the game. I’d been playing in the deepest position of our three-man midfield, but the gaffer encouraged me to get forward and try to cause a few problems for the City defence, or at least give them something else to think about.

  Who knows whether it was that or just fate, but a few minutes later Kolo Touré bundled over Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink and the ref Lee Probert gave us the pen. The City boys went absolutely mental, arguing with him, but I tried to shut all that out.

  I just picked up the ball with only one thing on my mind – scoring and going crazy in front of our fans. I’d completely forgotten about the ‘half-time bollocking’ celebration. I stepped up and smashed the ball to Shay Given’s right to draw us level and reeled off yelling and screaming to the Hull fans.

  I’d completely lost the plot, as I do whenever I score, until one of the boys reminded me about the special celebration. Within a couple of seconds, all my team-mates were sat around me in a circle while I stood in the middle, gesturing, pointing and finger-wagging at the lot of them. It was a pretty convincing impression of the gaffer even if I do say so myself.

  To add to the authenticity of this performance, it was in exactly the same spot at the same end as Brown’s barmy moment the season before – Laurence bloody Olivier couldn’t have done any better.

  I love scoring goals and I love celebrating them. I’d done my bit for the lads and I still wanted to do my own little piece where I run to all four corners of the ground acknowledging the crowd. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much time for that – I once did pretty much that while I was at Peterborough and got booked for my trouble – as, for some weird reason, the referee who had so kindly given us the penalty was now insisting that we should carry on with the last eight minutes of the game.

  As City kicked off again my only thought was ‘I fucking hope this stays 1-1 after that celebration! Imagine if we lost 2-1 now …’

  Fortunately we held on. I still had to face the gaffer back in the dressing room … but only after I’d milked the celebrations with the away fans even more at the final whistle, naturally.

  With Brownie there was no way of second-guessing how he’d react to something like that. He could either be absolutely fine and good-humoured or he could come down on you like a ton of bricks.

  At City the dressing room is split into two, with an area for the coaches and all their technical equipment and a space for us to get changed. By the time I got back there, most of the boys were crowded round a laptop in the coaches’ half watching replays of my celebration. Then the gaffer walked in.

  Brownie looked into the area where all the players would normally be and seemed puzzled that nobody was there, but then he looked round and saw most of us stood by one of the computers. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to spot us seeing as most of the boys were pissing themselves laughing.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I thought as he strode over to see what all the fuss was about.

  A few of us shuffled back into our half of the room as the gaffer watched the incident.

  Then it went silent.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I thought again.

  ‘Oi, Bullard,’ he yelled. ‘What have you been doing?’

  I looked up and was mightily relieved to see a broad smile across his chops. He thought it was absolutely hilarious.

  (As it happens, he hadn’t seen my celebration at the time. He told me later that while I was busy taking the piss out of him, he’d grabbed hold of Richard Garcia to tell him to drop deeper so we’d have a five-man midfield and keep hold of our hard-earned point.)

  ‘That was blinding,’ he said. ‘But that’ll be the end of that though, eh?’

  Message received loud and clear.

  But not before I did a post-match interview about it on Soccer Saturday in which I explained how it had come about and told the reporter, ‘Whoever scored had to do the pointing. Trust it to be me!’

  The press asked the gaffer a lot of questions about it after the game as they were hoping he’d be furious with me and the boys. They’d have been disappointed with Phil’s reaction as he maintained his good-humoured way of looking at it. If anything, he felt that it exorcised the ghost of what he’d done the season before and that we could now all move on.

  I wasn’t that bothered about what he felt; I was just relieved that I’d gotten away with it.

  And not just that, the following day I was on the back pages of pretty much every newspaper and all over the telly. Football fans could not get enough of it – I even picked up a Nuts magazine award for the celebration despite the fact it wasn’t my idea. In reality, Paul McShane and the other lads should also have won it but I just took that one for myself, thanks very much!

  Would any of the other lads have done the celebration if they’d scored? It’s hard to be sure. But it was typical that I was the person in the spotlight at that precise moment.

  The truth is I’m not wired right. At least, I’m wired just a little bit differently to other people and that meant I had an absolute ball as a professional footballer. I can honestly say that not a day went past where I didn’t appreciate what it was that I was doing. Make no mistake, I lived a dream and I loved every second of it.

  Unlike most other Premier League players, I grafted as a part-time footballer, cable TV technician, carpet fitter and painter-decorator while trying to get my big break. And that’s why I was so determined to take it all in, soak it all up and, most importantly, entertain for every minute I was on the pitch.

  I couldn’t help but perform, whether it meant with the ball or just by acting the fool – and if that enhanced people’s enjoyment of the game then so be it.

  To some players football was just a job, to me it was the realisation of a boyhood dream, of hard work, tears, tantrums and plenty more besides.

  That goal celebration is one of three things that football fans always ask me about. There’s that, being on Soccer AM and my, ahem, confrontation with Duncan Ferguson.

  I came. I saw. I went bonkers.

  * * *

  CONFUSE THE OPPOSITION BY HAVING GIRL’S HAIR; BUT NEVER MISTAKENLY ENTER A CONVENT TOPLESS

  * * *

  ‘Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.’ Lao Tzu

  One October afternoon in 1978, my mum and dad went out to their local pub, The Brick, for a bit of Sunday lunch. My mum was heavily pregnant – I was only a week or two from making my first appearance in the world – but she struggled down there with my old man for a drink at the East End boozer which was owned by Frank Lampard Sr. My dad was meeting his cousin, former West Ham player Tommy Taylor, down there and they were all tucking into their Sunday roast, when Bobby Moore walked in.

  He said hello to Tommy, his former team-mate, and then clocked my mum’s bulging stomach – most probably that big because it was full of my curly hair.

  ‘I hope you have a footballer in there,’ said England’s World Cup-winning captain to my parents.

  A couple of weeks later, on 23 October, I made my world debut. Bobby Moore wasn’t there to greet me, but my dad was on hand to inform anyone who cared that his boy had been born on the same day as his football idol, Pelé.

  A blessing from Bobby Moore and a shared birthday with Pelé – could I ever have been anything else but a footballer? (Well yes, I could very easily have been a fireman or the, er, Milkybar Kid, but those are different stories …)

  A year later on 23 October 1979 I celebrated my first birthday. What a night that was.

  Okay, I don’t remember a second of it, but I’m reliab
ly informed that it was the first time I kicked a ball.

  Until that day, I’d never bothered standing up. I just couldn’t see the point – my parents brought me everything I needed anyway so why move? I had a little football in my pram and one in my cot, what more did I need?

  Another one, apparently – that was my dad’s first birthday present to me and I was sitting there quite happily with my new ball in front of me, when another little boy walked in. That’s right, he walked in.

  He might as well have been wearing a sign saying ‘Look at me’.

  It was my birthday and I wasn’t having it, so I chose that moment to get up on my feet for the first time and, in the process, I made my first contact with a ball as I walked straight into the new one that had been sitting in front of me.

  From a sporting point of view, I never looked back. Luckily for me, sport was the only pastime that existed for my old man and he shared his love of every single one with me.

  You name it, we played it together: pool, snooker, darts, fishing, golf and, of course, football.

  I was a competitive little sod, too, and did not take kindly to losing. Pool cues would get hurled across a room or snapped in two; I’d often walk off a football pitch in tears, threatening to kill everyone in the opposing team if my side had lost – that was still happening when I was fifteen years old. Seriously.

  On a family holiday in Greece, a Belgian kid of my age kept beating me at table tennis. My parents never saw me that holiday because I spent the entire two weeks practising until I was good enough to beat that kid – only then was he allowed to go home.

  But I was fortunate enough not to be on the losing side too often in most of the sports I played because of the facilities available to me. My old man ran the bar at West Lodge, the local working men’s club in Bexleyheath, where my parents had moved to when I was three, leaving behind the East End they’d known and loved their whole lives. And my old man being in charge at West Lodge meant I was allowed unlimited games of pool and darts. I wasted little time in trying to perfect both games, despite being even smaller than knee-high to a grasshopper.