Bend It Like Bullard Read online

  ‘Wow! Shit!’

  I stared at that team sheet for far too long, then glanced at the Liverpool line-up: James, Heggem, Song, Staunton, Babb, BjØrnebye, Carragher, Redknapp, McManaman, Fowler, Owen; Subs: Riedle, Berger, Friedel, Harkness, Ferri.

  ‘Wow! Shit!’

  Probably the most exciting thing about that day was that I would finally get to find out what went on inside a Premier League dressing room and how different it was to non-league.

  But I was probably a bit naive because it wasn’t particularly different at all. A football dressing room is similar whether you’re playing Sunday League or Premier League – other than an extra lick of paint and a bit more space of course.

  The familiar football smell of Ralgex was the same.

  There were men’s cocks out everywhere, which was the same too.

  And the actual talking from the manager was fairly similar with Harry saying things like ‘We need to get it into Paolo more’ or ‘Rio, bob Eyal [Berkovic] the ball a bit quicker’. Change Paolo to Paul, Rio to Rob and Eyal to Ian, and it could’ve been any non-league dressing room.

  The main difference, however, was everything that was laid on for you in there. All the energy drinks and food you could ever need were ready and waiting when you got into the changing room, as were the neatly laid-out shirts. Seeing mine with my name on was a massive buzz. The tie-ups for the socks were all cut up and ready as were any bits of tape you might need. From that point of view, it was like moving into the Dorchester from a youth hostel.

  Once I’d got over the fact I was a professional footballer at Anfield – the memory of which is something I’m probably still coming to terms with to this very day – I was off to the bench to watch the game.

  It was an exciting match, not that I’d have known that much about it. I’m far more of a football player than a watcher and I was just itching to get on – all footballers will tell you that, but whenever I was on the bench, I would do absolutely anything I could to get on. Short of asking the manager directly (which I did, sometimes), whenever I was within sight of the gaffer, I’d fiddle with my shinpads as if to say, ‘Yes boss, I have the correct attire to play association football so you just throw me in at the first available opportunity.’

  My stretching would also be as deliberately over the top as possible in order to catch the manager’s eye, whether it was Harry Redknapp or Fabio Capello.

  At Anfield, I was sitting next to Holligan, a promising striker, and with the match finely poised at 2-2 with ten minutes left, Harry turned to the bench to look at his options: promising striker plucked out of non-league (Holligan) or promising winger plucked out of non-league (Bullard)? Or as Harry might have thought, ‘Gavin Holligan or, er, whassisname?’

  ‘Please choose me, please choose me’ I thought as I was temporarily transported back to my regular lunchtime games at the school playground. Except in those days, I was always picked early doors. Unlike this time when Harry opted to replace Joe Cole with Holligan.

  ‘Wow! Shit!’

  In fairness, I could see why Harry wanted to go with a striker and try to win the game. And Gavin made an instant impact, almost scoring. I was gutted but, being naive, I assumed my chance would come sooner rather than later – after all, he could so easily have chosen me that day.

  I had to wait a couple of months for my next opportunity but the adrenaline started pumping again when I saw my name at the bottom of the squad list for our away match at Tottenham. Like the Liverpool game, Harry was short of options because of injuries and suspensions but I still saw it as another massive opportunity for me to grab.

  In the dressing room before the game, Harry was talking about the Spurs star David Ginola and how crucial it was to try to keep him quiet.

  ‘He’s a superstar,’ he told us. ‘He looks like a model, you won’t miss him. He’ll be on the left so Steve Lomas, you need to get as close to him as possible from right-back. If he takes you on, I want the centre-back on him, then the other centre-back on him. You’ve got to be on this man.’

  Shortly after, we were in the tunnel waiting to walk on to the White Hart Lane pitch – another wonderful and surreal moment for me. The Spurs boys were stood alongside us and there was the Frenchman Ginola, six feet tall with his long, L’Oréal-coiffured hair resting on broad, muscular shoulders, his manicured hands on his hips, looking worth it in every way. He smelled incredible, as if he’d just been bathing in Jean Paul Gaultier’s new scent – even I couldn’t help thinking what an absolute knockout he was.

  Ian Wright didn’t just think it though, he told Ginola.

  ‘You smell like a million dollars, son.’

  ‘Sank you,’ replied Ginola in his thick French accent.

  Watching from the bench, I had a bird’s-eye view of the man’s football skills too when Tottenham’s right-back Stephen Carr launched a long ball from the right towards Ginola. It looked like it was going out of play and Harry even got up to catch it, but the Frenchman launched himself in the air and controlled it with his chest. In a couple of seconds, he’d gone inside two players and bent an incredible shot right into the stanchion.

  Even Harry couldn’t help but applaud that skill. We all did as it was a ridiculous goal, scored by a marvellous player. ‘Fuck me,’ I thought as I stood there clapping, a bit stunned. ‘I’ve got a hell of a lot of improving to do to reach anywhere near that kind of level.’

  Putting me into that situation was very much like putting a fan in there. I’m not ashamed to admit I was completely awestruck and with good reason too. I’d come from the reality of being a semi-pro to the fringes of the fantasy, the Premier League, in such a short space of time that I had to stop and pinch myself if I was at White Hart Lane or Anfield. And that was the attitude I took with me throughout my career. I would never take anything for granted and was always determined to take in every moment, whether it was pulling up in the team bus outside every ground, seeing and hearing the fans, or just the feeling of being in the dressing room before a match when three points were at stake.

  I would never be one of those players who puts the oversized headphones on and zones out. I wanted to hear, see and smell everything – even if that meant breathing in the burgers, getting the middle finger from rival fans or listening to them telling me to fuck off. It’s what I’d craved from a very young age and I was determined not to let any of it slip through my fingers – although I wasn’t that keen on all the insults; my hair’s lovely, just ask the good people at Wash & Go.

  I never got on the pitch at Spurs and that was it for me in terms of my West Ham career highlights – two games on the bench.

  Looking back, we had such a strong team at that time that it was little surprise I hardly got a sniff. In the early stages, I was still living the dream, feeling like my chance would come. But realistically, I was trying to compete for a first-team place with players like Joe Cole, Michael Carrick and Trevor Sinclair. Even youth players like Adam Newton and Richard Garcia were really promising prospects so I had my work cut out just to get a reserve-team game. Lionel Messi would have had a tough time getting a start there – mind you, he would have been aged twelve at the time.

  To me as a young pro, Harry came across as very strict and I found it hard to play under him. I know that might be at odds with the public perception of him, but he was never going to treat a rookie like me in the same way he would senior pros like Wright or Di Canio.

  In fact, Di Canio was almost part of the management team there; he changed everything when he arrived at Upton Park. He came with a bad reputation – pushing over a referee in the middle of the park was never going to go down well, even if the ref did tumble like Charlie Chaplin – but it couldn’t have been further from the real Paolo. The bloke was immaculate. His kit was tight and fitted him perfectly. He became club captain and his skipper’s armband had claret and blue tassles hanging off it, making him look like a warrior. His socks were rolled up perfectly over his permanently shaved, well-oiled legs.
He oozed Italian class and style. He was a real man. And he was also an utterly terrifying nutcase.

  When he first joined the club he was far from impressed with how we warmed up before training and matches, especially if one of the other lads started taking the piss. He took Harry to one side and said, ‘This warm-up is shit! We are supposed to be stretching and Razor Ruddock is talking about drinking last night. He’s talking about shitting! This is not right!’

  Before long, Paolo had brought over his own fitness coach from Italy to put us through our paces. The guy ended up staying at West Ham for a few years.

  Perhaps I should have taken the bull by the horns like Paolo and insisted that one of my mates looked after training. I’m not sure we would have got much further than the pub, which probably would have suited Razor Ruddock down to the ground.

  He was another senior pro whom Harry treated very differently to the younger players. When we returned for pre-season, Harry had us running circuits of the training ground pitches. Big Razor did one circuit, ran straight back to the dressing room without breaking his stride and yelled to Harry ‘That’ll do for me boss’.

  Razor struggled with his weight throughout his career. I heard one story about how he’d kept a food diary while he was at Liverpool and they worked out that he ate 212 steak and kidney pies per year. He was a law unto himself and, alongside the likes of Wright, Moncur and Kitson, ruled the roost. One of his trademark acts was marking his territory in the dressing room after training.

  He’d walk straight up to one of the enormous team baths, piss straight into it and say: ‘That’s Razor’s bath, no-one’s getting in it.’ Ridiculous behaviour, but it used to make me laugh.

  As did the time he nicked our goalkeeper Shaka Hislop’s motor. Razor was injured that day – I think he’d probably had one too many the night before, a common ‘injury’ in that era – so he was roaming around the dressing room while everyone else was out on the pitch and decided to help himself to the keys to Shaka’s Maserati. The car was his pride and joy and even had ‘Shak’ on the number plate, but Razor wasn’t bothered about any of that and drove the car up the road, walked back to the training ground and put the keys back in Shaka’s pocket.

  Ruddock would have made a great criminal because he looked as cool as a cucumber a couple of hours later when Shaka was desperately asking everyone to help search for his motor. The keeper even called the police to tell them it had gone missing until Razor put him out of his misery and told him what he’d done. Hilarious.

  But I wasn’t laughing that much before my first pre-season, when Harry asked me to do some work on building my physique. ‘You have to come back bigger’ he told me as he wasn’t a fan of my slight build. My body was closer to a sixteen-year-old’s than a twenty-year-old’s and Harry was convinced that the Premier League required players to have a physical presence as well as ability.

  I wasn’t so sure and I felt that he lacked belief in me. He was always after perfection, which I just didn’t have. Whenever I put in a bad cross in training he would be right on my case. With hindsight I can understand that he wanted me to learn so he could get the best out of me, but the longer I stayed at West Ham, the more of an outcast and reject I felt.

  The fact is that most of the younger players and me found Harry to be a very harsh bloke. He was more like a headmaster than a manager to us. We were scared shitless of him and we saw less of him when Glenn Roeder came into coach us because with about forty pros on the books, it was impossible for Harry to take a session with all of us.

  Harry demanded that all the reserve players turn up at the weekend to watch the first team so we could learn from them and improve our games. But, rightly or wrongly, that didn’t interest me in the slightest.

  I’ve never been a great watcher of football. I loved the game and understood it inside out, but I always wanted to play. That’s why when training was over on a Friday, unless some of my mates were involved in the first team, that was it until after the weekend for me.

  One Monday morning, Harry confronted me. He had the right hump because we’d been stuffed 4-0 at the weekend. It was best to stay out of his way after a defeat for at least a couple of days, but he had me cornered so I had to engage.

  ‘Where was you at the weekend? At the game?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I replied. Honesty was always my policy.

  ‘Where was ya then?’

  ‘Fishing!’

  His face turned to thunder, whatever that actually looks like.

  He marched over to Roeder and said, ‘Him! Fucking fishing. Not even watching the game. Fucking fishing!’

  Then he turned round to me and added: ‘And get your fucking hair cut as well, you can’t even see!’

  Harry must’ve seen me constantly flicking my gorgeous, flowing locks away from my face during training. The Alice band hadn’t yet made it into my on-pitch wardrobe as I didn’t have the confidence to wear one. It was only when I started thinking I was a bit of a player while at Wigan that I started to wear it regularly.

  I was tempted to tell Harry that I didn’t like watching football, just playing it, but I thought I’d better bite my lip. It would be one thing if Di Canio had said something like that to him, but not a twenty-one-year-old without a first-team appearance to his name.

  So I swallowed that and made sure I turned up to matches for a few weeks. But I wasn’t getting my hair cut. No bloody chance. I actually grew it longer. My hair was personal, none of his business. I can’t imagine he would ever have said something like that to David Ginola, if he was on our books.

  I was desperate to show Harry that I could play, but my situation wasn’t helped by the fact I didn’t have an agent, which hindered my chances of getting out on loan.

  After six months I started to wonder if it was ever going to happen for me at West Ham.

  After a year, I was certain it never would. But I remained determined to prove myself every time I stepped on to the training pitch or crossed the white line for a reserve game.

  Despite the issues I faced, I remained grateful for my privileged position. There were some extraordinary times in that Hammers changing room, and enjoying the antics of the lunatic senior pros helped my non-playing time pass by far quicker.

  There were two cliques at West Ham. The first was made up of the younger players like Rio, Lampard, Cole and Carrick, who were all quite serious about their football. Rio was only twenty-one but he was already one of the club’s best players so he could afford to muck about a bit. But none of them dared to overstep the mark with the other clique, the senior pros.

  Except Jermain Defoe that is, who took no shit from anyone.

  Jermain was signed from Charlton as a sixteen-year-old and although he was the same age as the youth players, he was on a professional contract. So when Razor asked Jermain to clean his boots, the teenager was having none of it. ‘You come and clean my boots!’ he said. ‘I signed here as a pro, not to clean anyone’s boots.’

  But that kind of thing was very much the exception as those older players were the governors and watching them larking about on a daily basis shaped my career and reputation more than I ever realised at the time.

  Those lads were mad. There were at least half a dozen big characters and to this day, I have no idea how Harry kept them together. They were a dying breed, the last of the old school and I learned so much by watching them from the outside because I was only on the fringes of the first team.

  In a weird way, I probably carried a little bit of their old-school attitude with me throughout my career although I could never have got away with some of their behaviour.

  One cold January morning there was a press call at the training ground and John Moncur asked Eddie the kit man for his gear. Moncs looked through the clothing he was given and noticed he hadn’t been given a hat.

  ‘If you don’t give me a hat, I’m going out there naked,’ he told Eddie.

  It only took a little thing like that to set Moncur off. On
ce he was riled, he’d go off on one and do anything. I was always very wary of him as he was completely unpredictable.

  ‘You ain’t gonna do that,’ said Eddie, knowing how many journos and cameramen were waiting outside.

  That was a challenge that Moncur couldn’t resist, especially with Razor egging him on. He blew up a surgical glove, wrapped it around his head so he looked like a chicken, then sprinted on to the training pitches wearing just his jock strap.

  The gaffer was already out there chatting to the press when he was interrupted by Moncur yelling, ‘Harry, sort your fucking kit man out, he won’t even give me a hat!’

  A shocked Redknapp spluttered, ‘Moncy, get back in son. What’s the matter with you? You’re showing me up!’

  If I’d done something like that at Fulham under Roy Hodgson it would have gone down like a shit sandwich – and that’s not something that tends to go down that well.

  Once Di Canio joined there was always tension between him and Moncur which took up a lot of Harry’s time. I remember soon after Paolo signed, he walked into the dressing room and Moncur was holding court.

  ‘Paolo might be here,’ he told everyone, ‘but it don’t matter how many wands they bring to this football club, I’m still the magician.’ The lads loved it and fell about laughing, but Di Canio wasn’t that impressed and the pair clashed regularly.

  Paolo was big on respect and he would lose the plot if he felt he wasn’t being shown any. We had two masseurs at the training ground, Rupert and Russ, and we’d often go for a rubdown after training. But if it was the day after a game and Paolo came in for a massage to find both tables with reserve players on them, he would do his absolute bollocks, ranting and raving until one of the beds was vacated. Which never took long because if he came in wanting a massage and you were on one of the beds, you moved off it pretty sharpish.

  He was always blowing a gasket about something. After one training session he came into the changing room to find his slightly loud, yellow paisley shirt hanging from one of the aircon ducts on the ceiling.