Bend It Like Bullard Read online

  Later on, we were all in the bar and so were quite a few of the Madrid lads, including Becks and Raúl. ‘Right lads, what are you all drinking?’ I said as I proceeded to order one of the most enormous rounds of drinks in history. Beckham and his team-mates were staring at me with, ‘Who is this madman?’ looks written across their faces, but we all had a drink, courtesy of Cookie.

  Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I called Becks over for a chat, although my team-mates were all reluctant as if they were somehow scared of him, or of an embarrassing situation developing: ‘No Jim, don’t get him over,’ said a couple of them as they scarpered.

  But they were soon back in the thick of the action when I asked the England captain about the rumours that he’d had an affair with the Beckhams’ former nanny Rebecca Loos.

  ‘What’s happening with Loosy and all that then?’ I said to him. ‘Come on, open up!’

  He started to laugh.

  ‘To be honest, she fancied Victoria, not me!’ was his reply.

  We all started to laugh.

  ‘That’s a great “Get Out of Jail Free” card, that is, Becks,’ I said. ‘Don’t give me that, what’s the true story?’

  But he told us he was being serious – we laughed even more. What a great lad.

  That was the highlight of the Cookie room card scam, which went on all week until we checked out of the hotel and the gaffer had a look at the extras on his bill – £5,500 worth of extras to be precise. As soon as he saw that, he yelled, ‘Bulllllaaaaaaaard!’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ I said. I didn’t bother trying to protest my innocence, and luckily it didn’t matter anyway as he had no intention of making me pay him back – and that’s just one of many reasons why Cookie was the nicest manager I ever played for.

  Anyway, back at The Grove, I finally made it to my correct room and lay my England training kit and tracksuit on the bed, still struggling to believe that I was really part of the national squad. I stopped for a moment and thought to myself: ‘I’m here now. I’ve got to show people what I can do.’

  From then on, I was less overwhelmed and more focused, full of belief that I belonged with England’s finest.

  I had received my call-up a few days earlier, via a phone call from the FA. I’d been playing really well for Fulham since my comeback from injury at the beginning of the year (2008) but I didn’t have the slightest inkling that I might be anywhere near the England squad.

  A lovely woman from the FA called to tell me that Fabio Capello was considering involving me in the squad and I was on a list of thirty players for the World Cup qualifiers against Andorra and Croatia, which would be cut to twenty-four by the weekend.

  I was helped a little by the circumstances as three midfielders were injured – Steven Gerrard, Michael Carrick and my old mate Owen Hargreaves – but even without those three, I was still surprised to be so close to the squad. Then again, it was obviously no coincidence that Mr Capello, a lover of art and the finer things in life, was also a fan of mine.

  As exciting as the recognition was, I played it right down to avoid disappointment. My attitude was that it was already an enormous achievement to be included in a squad of thirty and I could at least tell all my mates that. I was ninety-five per cent certain that I wouldn’t make the final twenty-four, but still held that little bit of hope that I might.

  The lovely woman from the FA told me that she would try to contact me before the final squad was confirmed, but that it might be announced on TV first as they had so many calls to make.

  Someone else might have taken it all in their stride, but I couldn’t possibly have done that. For all the acting I was doing pretending this was a perfectly ordinary few days as I waited to find out whether I’d made the final squad, I could think of nothing else.

  Finally, Sunday lunchtime arrived and I sat in front of the telly with my phone right next to me and Diane and my boy, Archie, not much further away.

  Over in Crayford, my parents had invited a load of mates to their pub for a drink, hoping to see my name included in the England squad. No pressure then.

  They put the telly on at The One Bell and we were watching Sky Sports News in Cobham.

  On the stroke of twelve noon, a list of names who had made the squad appeared at the bottom of the screen. My phone hadn’t rung and my heart was sinking until there, right on the telly in front of me, was my name – BULLARD.

  Unmistakably, one hundred per cent my name in great big capital letters.

  But was this the final twenty-four? Diane and I started counting the names to see if there was a total of twenty-four. That way, I could be certain I’d made it.

  I don’t think we’d got further than twelve or thirteen when my phone rang. It was the even lovelier woman from the FA, confirming that I was in the squad, I’d be travelling to Andorra and Croatia and that she’d be in touch with further details.

  I could’ve kissed her. Instead I kissed my missus, which was far more appropriate. The Bullard household went absolutely crazy. Over at The One Bell, the party was in full swing, too. Apparently, a huge roar went up in the pub when my name appeared on the screen and many glasses were raised.

  I felt like celebrating myself, but turning up drunk to my first England squad gathering might not have impressed Mr Capello too much even though he was my new biggest fan. My phone didn’t stop ringing, beeping and buzzing after that as friends and family got in touch to congratulate me.

  It’s hard to explain how much this meant to me. It was the pinnacle of my career and I don’t think I’ve ever had a higher footballing high. It all came from out of nowhere as well, which made it all the more amazing. I often think I’m still celebrating that call-up now and I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

  My ambition as a boy was to play at as high a level as I possibly could. When I was playing non-league I thought to myself that if I really gave it a hundred per cent and made it to the lower professional leagues or even the Championship, then I’d have had a great career. Most boys playing non-league would have given their right leg for that … although they wouldn’t have been able to play then, but you know what I mean.

  When I progressed to the lower leagues and Championship I thought how chuffed I’d be to make it to the Premier League and it happened for me. But that wasn’t enough. Somehow, I now had an England call-up too and I was thinking, ‘How much higher can I go now? Imagine if I get on the pitch and get an England cap …’

  These thoughts were racing through my mind as I headed off to The Grove to join the rest of the squad. My head was spinning with excitement, but I was still quite nervous when I met everyone for the first time.

  Players like Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and Becks were my idols so, even though they knew what I could be like as they’d have seen me playing the fool on Soccer AM or on the pitch, I was hardly going to arrive in that environment and be straight in everyone’s faces: ‘Waaaaaaaahhhhhh, Jimmy’s here!’

  I don’t think so. Instead I played it cool by trying to break into Beckham’s room by mistake. Nice start, Jim.

  My first training session with England was an unforgettable experience. A bus took us over to nearby London Colney and as it parked up, I could see that Rooney was itching to get off. The door opened and he flew out of it like a dog that had just been let off its leash. He pegged it straight over to one of the goals, picked a few balls out of the net and started shelling them at the crossbar, hitting it every single time.

  While he was doing that, the rest of us were stretching and loosening up and I just couldn’t help thinking how weird it was to be doing that alongside all those huge names.

  ‘Wayne!’ screamed Capello, snapping me out of my daydreaming. ‘You’ll pull a muscle!’

  ‘Behave Fab, I’ve not pulled a muscle since I was thirteen,’ said Rooney, or something like that anyway. Nothing stopped that boy from playing football, certainly not warming up.

  Before long, David Bentley had joined him too and t
here was only so long I could stay out of the action before I had to get involved.

  Soon after, everyone had the balls out for passing drills and I felt like I’d entered a different planet altogether. The pace of the training was at least twice as quick as I was used to at Fulham – and bear in mind that I was training with a load of internationals there on a daily basis.

  England was a class above that and what struck me the most was that all those players knew they were the governors and that they belonged there. They didn’t have to do anything special as their normal game was so bloody good.

  We started with a five versus five keep-ball session in an area that seemed not much bigger than the average tablecloth. At Fulham, we would’ve done that in a space twice as big. With England, you barely had room to move, never mind pass. We might as well have been playing keep-ball in a lift.

  Yet the ball was still pinging about like a pinball machine as pass after pass was completed. It was a fucking joke (in a good way), the talent was unreal and I immediately thought, ‘I really don’t belong here.’ The ball was getting spanked around twice as hard as I was used to and players like Becks, Rooney and Rio knew exactly where it was going before it had even reached them – they even read the random ricochets.

  As I was wondering what I was doing there, the ball bounced off my leg and happened to find its way to a team-mate. ‘Oh yeah,’ I thought, ‘I can play one-touch with the best of them!’

  After taking part in a training drill like that, I couldn’t believe that England would ever get slagged off by the pundits for not being able to pass the ball. Maybe, our problem is that we need to play internationals on pitches the size of tablecloths.

  Another myth that was put to bed after my first England training session was that Becks was all about the looks and didn’t have much ability. Utter nonsense. You can’t get anywhere in football without ability, no matter how good-looking you are – and I should know!

  Watching him train that day made me realise just how talented the bloke was. He had the sickest strike of a ball I’d ever seen and his vision was an absolute joke (again, in a good way). He’d played around the world’s best players for so long, which definitely takes you to another level as I found out. At each stage of my career I was learning more from playing with better players. After only a couple of weeks with the England squad, I returned to Fulham a better player. My team-mates even commented they could see the difference – unless they were taking the piss, of course.

  The trick is staying on top of it. I couldn’t train with England the whole time and then it wears off. But it’s definitely the players around you who make you the player you are. For example, if you took a sixteen-year-old parks player and made him train with the world’s best players for five years, by the age of twenty-one, I guarantee you he’d be among the best in the world himself.

  I’d imagine that was what Capello was hoping for me, but I never really found out. There was something of the schoolteacher about him, which made him difficult to warm to let alone talk to. He was a real disciplinarian, a very stern, strict man.

  Having said that, I do remember having two very in-depth conversations with him.

  The first time was after one training session where we’d been playing on a pitch that was a third of the size of a normal one and I hadn’t really done as much as I’d have liked.

  He approached me after the game and said: ‘Jimmy, why aren’t you getting on the ball more?’

  ‘I’m much better on a bigger pitch,’ I explained. ‘If I’ve got more space to run into then I’ll get on the ball more.’

  ‘Oh.’

  And that was the end of that one.

  The other one was when we were playing golf at The Grove. There’s a half-decent nine-hole course there and we were all set to tee off. Fabio walked up to me and said: ‘One handicap, huh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied with a smile. ‘One handicap.’

  And he marched off to talk to someone else.

  He ran a tight ship and was big on rules. Punctuality was crucial – you could not be late for any meal, training session or team meeting. Mobile phones were banned from mealtimes, room service was banned and we all had to dress appropriately.

  The whole squad always had to eat together but we had supper at 7pm, the same time my kids have it. That was never going to last me until the following morning. If I was at home and I got peckish later in the evening, I’d go to the fridge and have a bite to eat. But with room service off limits, Fabio left us to starve until breakfast.

  That was way too strict for my liking. It would get to about 9pm or 10pm every night and I’d be starving. Something had to be done. So I paid a visit to David Bentley’s room.

  Bents was a great lad. Don’t get me wrong, the bloke is an absolute wrong ’un, make no mistake about that, but a lot of fun nonetheless. He was always laughing and I mean, always laughing. It wasn’t necessary for anything funny to actually happen, Bents would just laugh for the hell of it. That’s what he was like. I once went on a night out with him and he laughed all night. It got to the point where I ended up laughing along with him and even I didn’t know what we were laughing about.

  I stepped out of my hotel room – my one this time, not David Beckham’s – and walked towards Bentley’s. There was always heavy security surrounding the England team and I noticed there was a bouncer at both ends of the corridor. I had no idea how we were going to get food in there, but it had to be done because I was starving.

  I knocked on Bentley’s door which he immediately opened and he burst out laughing: ‘Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’

  ‘Bents,’ I said, ‘I haven’t even said anything.’

  ‘Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’

  ‘Listen Bents, I’m starving. I’ve got to eat something.’

  ‘Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Funny you should say that. So am I.’

  ‘How can we eat something?’ I asked him.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ he said as he grabbed his phone and called a mate of his.

  Within half-an-hour, there was a knock at the door and Bentley’s mate was standing there with a large McDonald’s brown paper bag full of Big Macs and chips. You fucking beauty!

  Bents stuck his head out of the door in the direction of one of the huge security men at the end of the corridor. ‘Cheers boy!’ he called out as the bouncer nodded back. The nutcase had the security blokes on tap, didn’t he?

  I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a Big Mac as much as that one and, given that McDonald’s were an FA sponsor, it’s what both parties would have wanted.

  Bentley was also my partner in crime when it came to taking the piss out of Mr Capello. I remember looking at the gaffer on my first day and thinking, ‘I can’t believe how much he looks like Postman Pat; it’s him!’ The only thing that was missing was the black and white cat.

  Because I was new to that whole environment, I didn’t want to make too much of my discovery so I did it on the sly and used it as an icebreaker, letting some of the boys know that we had a TV personality running the show.

  Bentley obviously loved it – ‘Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ – and when we were on the team coach, we sat at the back and started singing the Postman Pat theme tune. A few of the boys joined in – I think Rio, Ashley Cole and Jermaine Jenas might have had a quiet little sing-along – but most of the other dry lunches weren’t really up for it.

  Another daft scheme Bents and I came up with was seeing who could say ‘Postman Pat’ as loud as possible within earshot of the gaffer. It was based on a game I used to play at school with my mates where we’d have to say something louder and louder in front of a teacher and the winner was the person who didn’t bottle it.

  I can safely say that I was the bottler on this occasion because Bents was an utter lunatic. I’d walk past Capello and say ‘Postman Pat’ out of the corner of my mouth, but Bentley took it to another level when he would walk straight up to the boss and scream ‘Postman Pat!’ in his face before adding ‘And
his black and white cat!’ for good measure.

  I had an idea to borrow a black and white cat, give it to Fabio and say ‘Hold this for five minutes, would you?’ but I didn’t dare share that with Bents because he would’ve been on the phone to his mates sorting it out.

  Bentley had just as much front on the training pitch. Capello set up a training exercise in which he sent three players out wide to put crosses into the penalty area. He asked David Beckham, Stewart Downing and Joe Cole to do the honours but Bents just followed them to the far side of the pitch.

  ‘No,’ Capello shouted to Bentley. ‘Just three, you come back.’

  But Bentley was having none of it.

  ‘Leave it out, send one of them back,’ he told Capello. ‘This is my game. I’m one of the best crossers in the country!’

  The pair of us weren’t involved on the pitch as we won the two qualifiers against Andorra and Croatia, but all was not right with that squad.

  I travelled with them for both games and the England fans got right on the team’s backs as they struggled to break down a very poor side. England were booed off at half time which I totally understood, but we’re not always going to smash six or seven past teams like Andorra.

  However, I never felt that Fabio gave the boys a lot of direction. For starters, his English was poor and it was very difficult to understand what he was going on about most of the time.

  The only thing he said that stuck was: ‘Let’s all attack together, let’s all defend together.’ Not terrible advice, but when I remembered that this was international football, the pinnacle of the game, I thought it was just a little bit basic. To be frank, I’d had better coaching when I was playing non-league.

  The other problem was that the man-management side of things didn’t really exist in that England set-up either. When I first arrived at The Grove, at no point did Fabio put his arm around me or welcome me into the fold. I never felt particularly loved and he just seemed harsh and standoffish. A few times he mentioned to me that I shouldn’t run beyond play and that I should sit back and provide a supporting role instead. But, other than that, he never really asked me to play in any particular position or style. From the coaching side of things, it was ever so slightly disappointing.