Bend It Like Bullard Read online

Steady told me this time I was looking at nine months out. I was devastated. Even though it was less than the first time, psychologically I wasn’t prepared for it. I’d accepted the first one as the kind of thing that can happen to anyone once in their career; I was not expecting this.

  But, once I’d got my head round it, it seemed obvious to me that my knee could never have been as strong again after that first injury. In a way, the knee is like an elastic band and once it’s been snapped, it will never be as strong (I told you I learned loads about knees). One of the theories is that you build your leg up to be twice as strong to support the knee, hence all those bloody leg weight drills. But, even with all that, I can’t believe the ligaments would ever be the same.

  And that’s why I was back in rehab in freezing cold, mid-winter Colorado. I walked in and look who’s there – Owen Hargreaves.

  ‘Hello mate, how are you doing?’

  Obviously not so good given that he was now renting a place and living out there. He’d done both his knees, the poor sod, but he put a hell of a lot of graft in, trying to save his career.

  Looking at him, I suppose I was lucky to have one good knee and had a much better chance of making a good recovery. But I was so worried about whether I’d be able to perform like a £5 million Premier League player even if I did make it back.

  It was time to reacquaint myself with my old friends: the man with no legs and the slice of bread.

  Back at Hull, the recovery process felt much harder than at Fulham, where I’d known a lot more of the players and staff. I’d only been on the pitch for half an hour at Hull so hadn’t really had time to make friends with anyone, and there I was stuck in the gym with Liam and Simon.

  I didn’t even have Diane and my family up there with me permanently as they divided their time between Humberside and Cobham. When it was just me up there on my own trying to do the rehab, I experienced some of the lowest moments of my career. I’m no good on my own at the best of times, but in that situation I was awful.

  Simon and Liam were brilliant though and really helped get me through it, although we had our disagreements. I’d often refuse to do any exercises which caused my knee too much pain, remembering Steady’s advice from the first time. But the physios were employed by the club and their job was to get me back on the pitch as soon as possible. Especially when I was costing the club about £45,000 a week. My concern was for my body – I’d rather take an extra few weeks and make sure that I was completely ready than come back too early and do myself more damage, and that was surely in everyone’s long-term interests. And given how much of an impact I made when I returned from sixteen months out for Fulham, I like to think I was right to err on the side of caution again.

  I felt ready by October, which also happened to be nine months on from my disastrous debut. This time, the Roy of the Rovers bit happened in a reserve game I played against Bolton as part of my recovery.

  It was a freezing night with a howling wind blowing across the pitch and I was wearing tights, gloves and a snood. I didn’t care what I looked like as I was taking no chances with my recent track record.

  We won an indirect free kick about twenty-five yards out and I really fancied it so I told one of my team-mates to roll the ball back to me. I flicked it up and volleyed it first time with the wind, sending the ball dipping over the keeper, who barely moved, and straight into the net. Maybe I did have George Best’s ligament after all?

  I wouldn’t put myself in the same bracket as him or Matt Le Tissier, but they’d both done that trick and now I had as well – no matter that mine was in a reserve game, they all count.

  The incredible thing was that about a month after that glorious reserve match moment, I was playing for the first team in a Premier League game in front of a packed KC Stadium when we won a free kick in a similar position.

  There were 30,000 pairs of eyes on me as I stood over the ball with our full-back Andy Dawson, who had a fantastic left foot on him and would definitely have fancied his chances.

  ‘Roll it back to me and I’ll try to volley it,’ I said to him.

  ‘Jim, we haven’t practised it, we can’t do it,’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t care, it’ll go in. We’ll catch them off guard,’ I insisted.

  ‘No, I’m not doing it!’ said Dawson.

  The risk was all mine. All I was asking him to do was roll the ball back to me. Finally, after what seemed like about five minutes of intense negotiations, I made him realise that and we were all set.

  The pressure was even greater after that standoff, but that didn’t bother me. I was supremely confident – I had Bestie’s ligament after all.

  Dawson rolled the ball back, I flicked it up and smashed it straight in.

  To the fortieth row of the stand behind the goal.

  Some you win, some you lose.

  One of the essential qualities a footballer needs is a big pair of bollocks to try things like that. You cannot be afraid of making an idiot of yourself.

  As it happens, that was a mere blip on my comeback trail. I’d made my first appearance a few weeks earlier as a substitute against my old side Fulham and followed that up with a decent run as we took five points from three games.

  Coming off the bench against Fulham was weird. There was no sympathy that it was my first game for nine months from any of my old fans, but that was to be expected. Instead, they started up a chorus of ‘There’s only one greedy bastard!’ It took me a few minutes to work out what they were singing. Once I did, I could hear it loud and clear and thought, ‘Oh, here we go, it’s about me!’

  I had no problem with that either as, in the version of events they’d been told, I had been a greedy bastard. They just didn’t know the full story – but more about that later.

  Soon after I came on, Diomansy Kamara barged into me and sent me tumbling to the ground – that produced the biggest cheer of the game, but I just got on with it. What else could I do?

  Things improved massively in my next match against Stoke when their goalkeeper Thomas Sørensen couldn’t hold my shot and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink slammed in the rebound to hand us the three points.

  We then drew with West Ham, a game in which I scored a penalty, and I scored from the spot again the following match as we grabbed a fantastic draw at Man City – and followed it up with that goal celebration.

  Things couldn’t have been going better as a few days later I found out that I’d been named the Premier League player of the month for November – the man with no legs and the slice of bread had done the business again.

  The next match was away at Villa and we started badly, going a goal down early on. Soon after, I went up for an aerial challenge with James Milner and ended up going right over the top of him, landing on the ground with a double thud as my back and legs hit the deck.

  I was badly winded and struggling for breath so Simon the physio helped me off the pitch. But as I was walking off I felt something wobbling inside my left knee and knew instantly it was my medial ligament – as I keep telling you, all the time spent with Steady had turned me into a leading authority on knees.

  Once I’d got my breath back, I tried to carry on playing. I ran back on to the pitch but felt the same looseness in my knee. I tried to run again but my knee wouldn’t let me.

  Enough was enough.

  I was royally pissed off.

  I sat down in the middle of the Villa Park pitch and had a huge tantrum. If I’d had a pram with toys in, I would’ve hurled them across the pitch. As it was, I only had my boots so I took them off and chucked them across the turf instead.

  Even when I landed on my back, I had still somehow managed to smash my knee up.

  I’d been playing for less than two months since my second serious injury and here I was again, back at sodding square one. I left the pitch in tears again. I just couldn’t take any more of this. My right knee twice and now my left knee – I was starting to think I’d been spending too much time with Owen Hargreaves.


  I told Simon my diagnosis and he could see there was little point in disagreeing with me as my head was completely gone. I just needed to get out of the ground and back to my loved ones as soon as possible, so someone from Villa called me a cab which took me all the way back to Cobham. My team-mates were ringing me nonstop but I just wasn’t in the mood to speak.

  Once I’d calmed down, I was able to think a little more rationally about the whole thing. I knew I had to see Steady again, but this time Hull tried to persuade me to go elsewhere. I stood firm though because, despite the ongoing problems, I knew my man in Colorado was the best in the world and I kept faith in him.

  So I flew back out to what was fast becoming my second home. The lights went out, Steady did his thing, no surgery required, phew, ‘Hello Owen, how are you doing?’ and I was back home as quick as a flash.

  It wasn’t all plain sailing though as I still had three months of rehab ahead of me to recover from the injury. Just because there was no surgery didn’t mean there was no hard work.

  Out came the man with no legs, the breadcrumbs and crusts and all that – it felt like they’d hardly been away – as I hit the leg weights. Groundhog Day!

  Compared to the previous two injuries, three months didn’t seem like a long time and I was ready for action again by late February. But the fact is, it was still a third of a season out, and when you add that to a nine-month layoff and a sixteen-month break that’s pretty much two-and-a-half years without football.

  A football career is not that long, especially if you have to come through non-league and work your way up the football pyramid, and that’s a massive chunk of time out of it which, not only would I never get back, but also had a massive impact on my ability.

  Most of what I learned on my journey from Dartford to the Premier League was the improved skill level required, which I only achieved through practice. By playing 123 straight, games for Wigan, I was able to get better and better. Sadly for me, the reverse was true. Being out of the game and not being able to practise the skills required to play at the highest level meant that I was always going to be losing ability to some extent. If I wasn’t playing, I was certainly not getting any better and the chances were I was getting worse.

  On top of that, I was now playing with fifty per cent of one knee gone and twenty per cent off the other so, inevitably, I found it that much harder to manoeuvre my body the way I used to. The slightest tweak caused by an awkward movement on the pitch would cause me huge pain.

  And then there was the mental side of it. If you think I approached games after my injuries in the same way as I did before, you’d be mistaken. In the back of my mind, there was always that self-preservation instinct, stopping me from going into tackles in a one hundred per cent full-blooded way. Show me a player with similar injuries who says otherwise, I’ll show you a liar. The knees might take the physical damage but the mind takes a huge psychological hit from those injuries too.

  That’s not to say I didn’t give my all in every game I played in. Knowing there was that little something missing from my game, I tried my best to make up for it in other ways by using my experience, but I never felt like I truly got back to where I was at my peak.

  But there were still plenty of amazing moments – one of my comeback games (yes, another one) against my old club Fulham being another good example. Because one of the great joys of being injured is playing again. If anything, you appreciate that incredible buzz even more. I’d loved every second of every game after my journey to make it as a pro, but those matches where I’d fought back from career-threatening injuries were even more special.

  Hull were in desperate trouble near the bottom of the league when I was fit enough to play again, but I still relished the opportunity even though we were up against it on the pitch. That game against Fulham gave us some rare hope as we won and I opened the scoring from the penalty spot.

  It was a weird game because it felt a bit like a training session to me as I was up against so many of my former team-mates. At one point, Simon Davies clattered into me with a heavy tackle and I said, ‘You bastard, you did that on purpose!’ He looked at me and nodded his head to confirm that’s exactly what he’d done.

  Because I was so familiar with everyone on the pitch, I felt a lot more relaxed, which helped me play better and, when our striker Jozy Altidore was brought down in the box by Chris Smalling, I grabbed the ball to take the spot-kick.

  I loved Fulham but I was a Hull player and I had no qualms about celebrating after I smashed that ball into the net past my old mate Mark Schwarzer to give us the lead.

  I’ve seen loads of players score against their former clubs then ham it up by giving it the old stone arms and legs and push their team-mates away as they refuse to celebrate the goal. I don’t really get it, especially if they’ve chosen to take a penalty. If they’re that bothered about it, don’t take the penalty in the first place.

  I wasn’t that fussed and I ran off to celebrate as I always did, but perhaps with a bit more emotion than usual as this was soon after returning to full fitness – which probably explains why I ended up celebrating in front of the Fulham fans. Oops. Mind you, I usually go to all four corners of the ground when I score if time (and the ref) allows so I was always going to end up in front of them at some point.

  Even if I did go over the top, after the frustration I had put up with I couldn’t help it. Any footballer will tell you how short their career is. For the sake of the man with no legs and Owen Hargreaves (the man with no knees), I had to make the most of the good times.

  * * *

  LOVE YOUR COUNTRY AND IT WILL LOVE YOU BACK

  * * *

  ‘At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.’ Lao Tzu

  I was walking down the corridor of The Grove, one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever been in, looking for my room. Across my arms I had some England training kit and sticking out of my hand was the key card to get into my room.

  Looking back on it now, I was a bit like the Gavin & Stacey character Smithy played by James Corden in that Comic Relief sketch when he stumbles upon the England squad. Except the important difference was that I was actually in the England squad. The painter and decorator from Bexleyheath had hit the big time.

  If I could only have found my sodding room, I’d have been in business.

  I walked up and down the corridor, 292, 294 … Aha, got it!

  Room 296. The temporary abode of England footballer Jimmy Bullard. It felt good saying it, never mind writing it.

  I was still a bit overwhelmed by the whole experience, but I was trying to do my best impression of someone who wasn’t a bit overwhelmed by the whole experience.

  I wiggled my key card into the door and turned the handle but nothing happened. No green light. No electronic whirring. Not a bloody thing.

  So I did it again. And again. And again.

  If I had to go back to reception carrying all this gear because I can’t get into my room, I might not even make it out on to the training pitch because they’d probably throw me out for being too blinking thick.

  I gave it another go and, as I wiggled the card in the slot again, I heard someone coming down the corridor – hopefully a member of hotel staff who could get me into my room.

  I looked down the corridor but couldn’t make out who it was from a distance, although it wasn’t anyone from the hotel as they were also carrying gear so it must be another player.

  The figure finally emerged from the shadows of the hotel corridor and my heart skipped a beat when I realised it was David Beckham. Goldenballs! He was going to think I was a right spanner.

  ‘I’ve heard about you,’ said Becks as he got close enough for me to hear him. ‘I suppose that’s my room, is it?’

  ‘Naah, no, no …’ I replied, but before I could say anymore, Becks looked up at the door number and down to the envelope for his key card and said: ‘It is my room!’

  I looked down at my
envelope and saw that it said 269, not 296.

  What a total donut. To make matters worse, I immediately felt guilty for no reason: ‘I know you think I was going to do something in there, but I wasn’t, honestly,’ I kind of pleaded.

  Becks grinned at me and replied: ‘Go on, hop it you!’

  I was so embarrassed, completely mortified.

  As I went off towards my real room I kept thinking, ‘He’s never going to believe that I wasn’t trying to pull some kind of prank.’

  The problem was that Becks and I had a little bit of previous which would certainly have raised his suspicions. So not only did he now think I was trying to break into his room, he also knew I had a history of practical jokes and wasn’t afraid to ask him questions about his private life.

  It all stemmed back to a pre-season trip I’d been on with Fulham a couple of years before.

  I’d just joined the club from Wigan and we were on a tour of Austria and Germany. We were staying in the same plush hotel as Real Madrid, who Becks was still playing for, as we were playing them in a friendly.

  Although I hadn’t been at Fulham for long, I’d bonded pretty quickly with a few players, including Michael Brown, and I let him in on a little plot I’d worked up since we arrived at the hotel. When we checked in, I was stood behind our gaffer Chris ‘Cookie’ Coleman and I clocked his room number, 206. ‘Right,’ I thought. ‘This will be a classic.’

  I have no idea why I did it, other than that I just thought it would be really funny, but for the entire six days we stayed there, I put everything on Cookie’s room. Actually, I do know why I did it. It was because I didn’t want to pay for anything myself.

  Apart from Brownie, my roommate, none of the other lads knew what I was up to. So when we went to play golf and I said to them, ‘Don’t worry boys, I’ll get this and you can all have buggies too’, there were a few quizzical looks. But most of them thought I was just trying to make a generous gesture as I was new to the team. That all went on Room 206 as did the new Vokey pitching wedge and a load of golf gloves I ordered for myself.