Graeme Le Saux: Left Field

That afternoon at West Ham really scared me. I felt it had the potential to ruin everything. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It left me feeling isolated on the pitch. It left me feeling apart from the team, even on the pitch which had been my last refuge. I didn’t know who to be angry with, because it was my own team-mates who had started it.

It made me even more sensitive and my life at Chelsea even more complicated. It was the start of a series of problems for me at the club that ended with me hurling my shirt to the floor when Campbell’s successor, Ian Porterfield, substituted me and my departure from Stamford Bridge soon afterwards. I was very insecure, very nervous. I kept myself to myself because I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.

At Upton Park, no one mentioned the chanting when we got back to the dressing room at half-time, or at full-time. No one spoke about it at all. Maybe it didn’t register with some of them. It was never discussed and I didn’t make a point of saying to any of them ‘Thanks a lot for that boys’. But after that game, the chanting about me grew more and more regular. The pressure I was under when the taunts about being homosexual took hold was immense. I would go out onto the pitch knowing that I was going to get a torrent of abuse before I had even kicked a ball. Normally, as a player, you want to stand out but you want to stand out for the right reasons. If you get stick from the away supporters because you have done something well, you can live with that. It’s actually quite satisfying. But what started happening to me was that if there was some sort of lull in the game, I was the first fall-back option and the taunting would start. If the home fans got bored, they’d start singing about me.

I often wonder whether I could have prevented it. I tried damned hard to prevent it. I stood up for myself and got physically angry with people who pushed it too far, but I also withdrew more and more into my own little world to try and protect myself from the abuse so I wouldn’t have to confront it.

Once the thing about me and Ken spread beyond the dressing room, it went crazy. It became an urban myth. Wisey’s friends from Wimbledon would ask him about it; other players would talk to their mates at their former clubs. Soon, everyone was talking about it as if it was a fact. People said there was no smoke without fire. It was generally accepted – in football and in the media – that Ken and I were in some sort of closet relationship.

It never got to the point where I would go in the showers and someone would say ‘Watch out boys, Graeme’s around, backs to the wall’. But it was enough to give me a sense of isolation and paranoia. Once it really gained momentum, everything I did was used as evidence I was gay. The way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I went to art galleries and read The Guardian all turned into more clues about my sexuality.

The sheer number of people that would ask me about the situation between me and Ken was bewildering. I got bits and pieces of abuse in the street: the odd shout of ‘poof’ or ‘shirtlifter’ from the other side of the road, mainly from lads trying to get a laugh from their mates. No one said it directly to my face unless they were in a crowd at a game but the variety of insults aimed at gay people became my specialist subject. The worst thing was when you’d go to get the ball for a corner or a throw and there would be somebody a couple of feet away from you in the front row. Their faces would be contorted with aggression and they’d be screaming this homophobic abuse at me that was often really vicious stuff. When it was that close and one-on-one, it was shocking.

Pretty soon, opposition players were winding me up about it on the pitch. It didn’t happen that often but there were a couple of occasions when I responded or retaliated and all hell broke loose. When I made it an issue, the lack of action taken against the people responsible said a lot about the reluctance of the authorities to confront the problem, a reluctance that still exists today.

The media hounded me about it, too, particularly the tabloid newspapers. When I first started going out with Mariana while I was playing for Blackburn, she was a press officer for Camelot. The lottery was very high-profile back then and gradually people began to find out that we were seeing each other. A couple of papers started harassing her at work. They phoned up on the pretext of asking something about the lottery but pretty soon they dropped the pretence and started asking her about me.

The Daily Star was particularly persistent. Their reporter kept going on about how there were all these rumours about my sexuality and how the paper wasn’t convinced we were actually seeing each other. Mariana could have lost her job because she was spending so much time fielding these crackpot calls. She had to go and see her boss about it. In the end, this guy from the Star rang again and blurted out ‘Is he gay?’ She just said ‘Of course he isn’t’ and he said ‘Thanks’ and put the phone down. The following Friday, they ran a front page that said ‘Homo Le Saux? Not my Graeme’. On the inside page, it had the rest of the story and there was a picture of me. Underneath the picture, they ran the caption ‘Le Saux: all man’. It’s funny now but at the time I was fuming. It was the day before a game and we were travelling. All the playerswere getting on the Blackburn team bus and Tim Sherwood asked me if I had seen the paper. The guys were upset for me. It felt like I had some support from them. In contrast to the way it had been at Chelsea.

I think they were genuinely mortified that I was having to go through all that kind of stuff. I wondered whether it was defamatory: being called gay if you weren’t. In the context of football, I think it is, because, sadly, it could cost you your career. No manager would want to buy you, in those days, anyway. It’s a terrible indictment of the game but I’m afraid it’s true.

I was in my second spell at Chelsea when the real problems on the pitch began. Ironically, the atmosphere at the club had changed radically in the time I had been away. It was much less threatening, much less intimidating. Most of all, it was much more cosmopolitan. Ruud Gullit was the manager when they brought me back and they had recruited players like Gianluca Vialli, Roberto di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola and Frank Lebouef. It could hardly have been more different from the dressing room I had left behind. From feeling like an alien in my first spell at the club, I fitted in easily second time around. Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment hadn’t yet spread to some of my rivals at other clubs.

I had had four years at Blackburn Rovers by then, four years of an increasingly high profile and four years of taunts from opposition supporters. Everyone assumed that the fight between me and my Blackburn team-mate, David Batty, during an away game against Spartak Moscow in November 1995 had been over a gay insult he’d aimed at me but it wasn’t, not really.

From the time the rumours about me being gay first surfaced that afternoon at West Ham, I got plenty of comments from other players about me being ‘a faggot’ or ‘a queer’. It happened all the time. Robbie Savage was one of the players who seemed to get a particular thrill out of it. I guess that won’t really surprise anyone. I told him he should say it all again to me at the end of the game when I’d tackled him a few times. I told him we could sort it out in a football way and then see if he still wanted to call me a poof. It was irrational really, schoolboy behaviour.

There weren’t many players who went out of their way to keep going on about it. Most of the time, I let it go. But when Chelsea played Liverpool at Anfield in October 1997, Paul Ince started winding me up about it repeatedly and in the end, I gave him a taste of his own medicine.

Paul and I had always got on really, really well. We were England team-mates and I respected him a great deal. The game against Liverpool was a Sunday afternoon match and afterwards we were due to travel down to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of Glenn Hoddle’s England squad and start the preparations for the make-or-break World Cup qualifying game against Italy in Rome, which was the following Saturday.

Paul was really wound up during the game. He’d get so frantic in matches sometimes that his eyes would change – they’d kind of glaze over. There was a frenetic atmosphere at Anfield and it was an all-action game. They ended up winning it 4–2. I’d been clattered a few times already when Paul launched himself at me with a tackle, took my legs away and left me on the deck.

When I was on the ground, he started jabbering away at me. ‘Come on you fucking poof,’ he said, ‘get up, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ He said it a few times. I let it go. People get called ‘a poof’ all the time in football. It’s a generic term of abuse. But it was loaded when people aimed it at me. A few minutes later, he clattered me again and started yelling the same stuff. I snapped.

I said something that I knew would hurt him. I insulted his wife.

Paul went absolutely ballistic. He was livid. He spent the rest of the match desperately trying to kick lumps out of me. He was in a towering rage. When the final whistle went, I was going down the tunnel when I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye about to try and land a punch on me. I ducked out of the way and scarpered back out onto the pitch. The guy had lost it completely: he wanted to kill me.

Paul was a prime example of a guy who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. He had been calling me all the names under the sun, personal stuff that he must have known would hurt me, stuff that I found offensive. And yet as soon as I retaliated in kind, he couldn’t cope. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d said, and it was out of order. I knew his wife, Claire, and I liked her. It wasn’t about her, though; it was about letting him know what it was like to try to have put up with that kind of abuse.

Paul quickly turned it round in his own mind so that I was the villain. I knew it was going to be very awkward when we got to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of the England squad that night. I got there before him and there was plenty of banter among the lads sitting in the restaurant about what he was going to do to me when he arrived. I laughed nervously. I didn’t want a punch-up with him – he was a lot stronger than me.

I decided I needed to be the adult about it. When it was obvious he had arrived, I phoned him in his room and asked if I could go up and talk to him about it. He was reluctant but he agreed. I got up there and he got into me straight away. ‘You’re out of order talking about my wife like that,’ he said. ‘You know her, and anyway no one talks about my family like that.’

I told him that I hadn’t really known what I was saying but I asked him how he thought it made me feel when he was calling me ‘a fucking poof’. I explained to him that I hadn’t done it to insult his wife. Just to get back at him. But he wouldn’t accept it; it was an honour thing for him. It’s a shame, but ever since then my relationship with him has been very cold.

By then, the gay slurs had become a big part of my career. But the homophobia that surrounded me put me in a desperately difficult situation. It was difficult for me to keep denying I was gay and reacting angrily to any suggestion that I might be homosexual without being disrespectful to the homosexual community. Talking about something that isn’t actually true makes it impossibly difficult to confront. That’s why I didn’t brave the issue in the newspapers.

I have gay friends and I don’t judge them. I am not homophobic. If there was a gay player and he was part of a team I was playing for, that wouldn’t be an issue for me at all. Someone’s private life is entirely up to them. But when supporters and other players accused me of being gay, it got to me. It was complicated. I never believed there was anything wrong with being gay but I felt that if it came to be accepted that I was gay, I would be unable to continue as a professional footballer. That’s how deep-seated the prejudice in the game is. That’s why I fought back as strongly as I did.

Homosexuality really is football’s last taboo. We’ve got past pretty much everything else. The problems with racism that disfigured football for much of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are not over but they are on the wane. An awful lot of good work has been done and attitudes have changed. You don’t get people making monkey noises at English football grounds any more. You don’t get supporters throwing bananas on the pitch as they used to do when John Barnes and Ces Podd were playing.

But there is still terrible prejudice within football. That is part of the culture. People try and pick on other people’s weaknesses. You have to deal with constant mickey-taking and being derided for the most trivial matters: the trainers you have just bought, the haircut you have just had, the piece about you in the newspaper. It is endless and it can be draining. It is part of the competitive nature of the dressing room. Your team-mates are digging away all the time, trying to get one up on each other. If you can make someone else look stupid, that’s the ideal.

Given that kind of peer pressure, I don’t think a modern footballer could ever come out as a gay man. I don’t think anyone could think of any positive reason to do it. It would immediately isolate you from the rest of the team. The group would be too hostile for you to survive. The situation would be too daunting.

Football has not had to deal with a group of gay footballers standing there and saying ‘How are you going to deal with us?’ They haven’t had to confront homophobia yet because the gay footballers that are probably playing in our leagues are understandably too frightened to declare their homosexuality and cope with the backlash they would face. Until there is a powerful voice for a minority group, football will never make provision for it.

The abuse I had to suffer would be multiplied by 100 for a player who was openly gay. The burden would be too much. I think of the stick I had from the fans and it made me feel anxious and nervous even before I got out on the pitch. Sometimes, you go out there not feeling 100 per cent confident anyway and that apprehension is compounded by the fact that you are going to be targeted in the warm-up.

Every time you run to the side of the pitch, there is going to be a little group of people giving you abuse. Suddenly, all the anger and prejudice hidden away under the surface of someone’s everyday life starts spewing out. You start to get a sense of the mentality of the mob and to anticipate the way the collective mind of a hostile crowd works. You know that if the game starts badly for the team you are playing against, then within ten minutes they will turn their anger and their frustration on you. And then a whole stadium of 40,000 or 50,000 people will start singing about how you take it up the arse.

Most of the time, you try and blot that out but sometimes you can’t. On another occasion at Anfield, I went over to the touchline to get the ball when it had gone out for a throw. A kid in the crowd was holding it. He was nine or ten and his dad was next to him. ‘You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,’ he screamed at me. His dad was joining in as well. I got the ball and then I stopped and looked at him.

‘Who do you think you are talking to like that?’ I asked him. I pointed at him and then, of course, everyone else starting piling in. I was all for hauling that kid out of the crowd and putting him on the side of the pitch with me. Sometimes you have just got to draw the line and say ‘That is wrong, you don’t treat people like that’.

That has happened a few times: where I have confronted people and made eye contact with them. It never worked because there were always so many people around them. They are usually the kind of so-called fans that will scream personal abuse at a player for ninety minutes and then report them to the police if they look at them the wrong way.

There was another time when I stood up for myself, too, a time when I refused to look the other way. I had a family by then and my wife, Mariana, brought our new-born eldest child, Georgina, to her first game at the end of February 1999. It was Liverpool again but this time it wasn’t Paul Ince who was the problem. This time, it was Robbie Fowler.

I had admired Robbie when he was a young player. He was a magnificent finisher, one of the best natural strikers you would ever see. But as people, he and I are probably about as far apart as it’s possible to be. His trademark was his sarcastic, put-down humour. That’s fine, that’s great; if that’s how you play the game – fine. He had an irreverent, caustic attitude. I didn’t mind that but the thing with Robbie was that he didn’t know when to stop. When things became unacceptable, it felt as if he was ignorant of his social responsibilities and the consequences of his actions.

That Chelsea–Liverpool match at Stamford Bridge was a high-tempo game like all the clashes between the two teams seemed to be and there were a few incidents. Early in the second half, I moved to clear the ball from left-back and as I did so, Robbie tried to block it but ended up coming across me and fouling me. I went down and the referee, Paul Durkin, booked him.

Robbie looked down at me. ‘Get up, you poof,’ he said. I stayed on the turf while the physio was treating me and then got up. By then, Robbie was standing ten yards away. The ball was in front of me, ready for the free-kick. I looked at Robbie. He started bending over and pointing his backside in my direction. He looked over his shoulder and started yelling at me. He was smirking. ‘Come and give me one up the arse,’ he said, ‘come and give me one up the arse.’

He said it three or four times. The Chelsea fans, in the benches where the new West Stand is now, were going berserk. The linesman was standing right next to me. He could see what Robbie was doing but he didn’t take any action. He didn’t call Durkin over. Everyone knew exactly what Robbie’s gesture meant. There wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation. I asked the linesman what he was going to do about it. He just stood there with a look of suppressed panic on his face.

So I stood there with the ball, waiting. Robbie could see he was winding me up and I suppose that gave him a great sense of gratification. So he carried on doing it. I told the linesman I wasn’t going to take the free-kick until he stopped. It was a Mexican stand-off. I wish Paul Durkin had found it in him to decide what was going on and then send Robbie off for ungentlemanly conduct.

It was a big moment. What Robbie did provided a chance for people to confront a serious issue. Some people compared it to sledging in cricket but sledging is still essentially private – an exchange or series of exchanges that stay between the players on the pitch. Only the people on the pitch are aware of the insults that are being hurled. That’s where I believe Robbie crossed the line and betrayed the game. When a fellow professional does something like that to you, when he mocks you for public consumption, it adds credibility to unfounded rumours. That is why it upset me so much. I just cannot accept that that is just part of the game. In my football career, I never saw anyone do something like that to another player.

Whatever happens on the pitch should stay on the pitch. There is a huge amount of pressure not to break that omertà. I don’t know where it comes from but it surrounds you. It is self-protecting. If you’re a player and you talk about things that should be kept private because they happened on the field, you risk losing the trust of team-mates and opponents. As soon as you step out of the circle and expose what actually happens, it’s very difficult to get back in.

I felt that what Fowler did – because it was so blatant – allowed me to step out of the circle and hit back at him in whatever way I needed to. He had betrayed me on the pitch. He had broken the code first. I have felt that conflict of interest on a few occasions and until then I had always taken the stick that came my way and laid low until the fuss blew over.

Black players have had plenty of foul abuse aimed at them over the years but no fellow player has ever made a public gesture like that at any one of them. Robbie wouldn’t dream of making gestures to a black player so why did he feel it was acceptable to incite me by sticking out his backside?

I think football had a chance to make a stand there and then against this kind of thing. The game could have made a strong statement that such blatant homophobia would not be tolerated. Durkin would have been feted for that if he had taken a stand and I believe that maybe it would have taken some of the stigma away for gay footballers who are still petrified of being found out. It could have been a turning point.

But football didn’t make a stand. Durkin ran over and booked me for time-wasting. I was dumbfounded. I asked him if he was just going to let Robbie get away with it. He didn’t say anything. He said later that he hadn’t seen what Robbie was doing but I wonder if it was just that he didn’t want to deal with it. No one wanted to deal with it.

My head filled up with anger. I still didn’t want to take the free-kick. Perhaps I should have taken even more of a stand. Perhaps I should just have refused to take the kick and been sent off. That would at least have forced the issue but it would probably have made me a martyr for the cause and I didn’t want that. In that kind of situation, the pressure to play on is overwhelming. The crowd is screaming and baying, the rest of the players are looking at you expectantly, waiting for play to restart. I looked at Robbie again and he had stopped bending over. So I took the free-kick.

I was consumed with the idea of retribution. I wanted vengeance. I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It was like smacking a punchball. I tried to calm down but I couldn’t. There was no way I could get rid of my anger. I ran up to the halfway line and tried to confront Robbie. I told him my family was in the stand. ‘Bollocks to your family,’ he said.

Robbie revealed a slightly different version of the episode in his autobiography – and a different attitude to it. He wrote that after all his insinuations about me being gay, I had run up to him on the pitch and shouted ‘But I’m married’ and that he had replied ‘So was Elton John, mate’. It’s a nice line and it makes Robbie look funny, which is the most important thing to him. But I’m afraid it’s what’s called dramatic licence – he didn’t say it.

I waited for my opportunity. I should have come off really. My head was gone. I wasn’t even concentrating on the game. I felt humiliated. It was an age until the ball came near us again but I was possessed with the idea of getting my own back. In the cold light of day, it sounds inexcusable but I felt as if the anger of so many years of being taunted was welling up inside me.

Eventually, the ball was played down their left-hand side and Robbie made a run towards our box. I came across and ran straight into him with a swing of the elbow. I clattered him as hard as I could but thankfully I’m not very good at that kind of thing. In fact, it was pathetic. Durkin didn’t see it so I didn’t get punished. Thankfully, it didn’t do Robbie any lasting damage. We had a couple more kicking matches and in the end he caught me on the calf and I had to come off. About eight minutes from the end, Vialli brought Eddie Newton on to replace me and the most traumatic match of my career was over.

I was still incredibly angry after the game. I went to see Durkin. I had already heard that the Match of the Day cameras had captured my elbow on Robbie and I wanted to outline to him exactly why I had done it. Dermot Gallagher was the fourth official and he said he’d seen the whole thing with Robbie jutting out his backside. He started talking about the amount of stick he’d had over the years for being Irish.

I had ten minutes with them, talking about the whole thing. I asked Durkin about the booking. I asked him why I’d be time wasting when we were playing at home and the score was 1–1. He didn’t have an answer. I asked the linesman again why he hadn’t done anything and he didn’t want to engage. He didn’t know what his response should have been: a guy sticking out his backside to taunt another player – it’s not in the rule book is it?