Graeme Le Saux: Left Field

That was one of the saddest aspects of it. Through all the various milestones of my life and my career, I always had a moment when I wished she could see it. It would have made all the sacrifices and the hardships that she had endured for me worthwhile. And I know, just like any mother, she would be proud of me and my sisters.

My mum’s death changed me. It strengthened my drive and my outlook. I was always single minded anyway. I was always feisty and ambitious but when she died it made me want to leave Jersey. It is such a small island and it was such a traumatic experience that it turned parts of Jersey into unhappy places for me for a few years. Whenever I went down certain roads or visited certain beauty spots or beaches or shops, it brought back memories of my mum. It just used to upset me. Now, I can look back on them as happy memories and happy associations but for a long time those memories just upset me deeply.

I love my island. It’s only nine miles wide and five miles north to south but I loved growing up there. My identity is Jersey. Even though my dad wanted to call me Jean-Pierre (he was overruled by my mum), I feel more English than French – but more Jersey than English. Life seemed uncomplicated and happy there in the years before Mum died. I would cycle down the hill from my house to St Ouen’s Bay, with its dramatic dunes and its miles of beach and the warren of underground tunnels the Germans built after they invaded Jersey at the start of the Second World War. I’d play football for hours on the firm sand. Then, for a real challenge, I’d cycle back up the steep hill past Stinky Bay, where the smell of seaweed wafted up from the rocks below, and past the trees bent over by the sea breeze and the signs advertising Jersey Royal Potatoes back to my house on the hill.

It’s such a beautiful place, such a stark contrast to what I had to confront in London. No wonder I felt the culture shock so badly when I swapped Jersey for Burnt Oak. Often, in the evening, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I would drive my car to the headland at Grosnez, the most northwesterly point of the island, and park it by the ruins of the fourteenth-century arch there. I’d get out, stare over the water to Sark and then lie on the bonnet, listening to the waves and staring up at the stars. Sometimes, going to those places still makes me melancholy but back then it would bring tears to my eyes. I suppose it was part of coming to terms with letting go of my mum. I never said goodbye to her. I never had that raw sort of emotion. I kept it all within me.

People can psychoanalyse me as much as they want and it would be very easy to pin all my emotional baggage onto this one massive event. It would be easy to say I reacted to Robbie Fowler because my mum died or I hit David Batty because my mum died. But I might have been like that anyway. I don’t know. One of the reasons I believe I kept it from everyone at Chelsea and was glad that no one knew about it was because I had this fear that if people knew about my mum, then at some point someone would have made reference to it to try to use it against me. And I knew that that would have made me uncontrollably furious.

That would have been worse than anything I experienced, worse than any of the homophobic taunts. That’s one of the reasons I have never spoken about it. I never told anyone at Chelsea about it. In that way, I used football as a valid reason not to talk about her death. It was part of my process of denial. I told myself I couldn’t talk about it because people would use it against me and that meant I didn’t have to talk about it.

At various points during my playing career, I might get a casual question about what my parents did. I’d say my dad was a chartered quantity surveyor and my mum was a housewife. I just never talked about it publicly because I wanted to protect what I had. Some people would probably say it was a classic case of denial but it wasn’t that. I shared my thoughts with my friends in Jersey, friends like Jason and Susie, and now that I have moved away from football, I don’t feel as uncomfortable talking about it with people outside the game.

It’s strange. I have a close relationship with my dad and my sisters. We’re a loving family but we don’t talk about that time much. There are times when I think we ought to talk about it. My younger sister was only seven, just a bit younger than my own daughter is now, when Mum died. She never knew her mum. She deserves to know more.

When I became a footballer, it was my decision not to say anything about my mum so it’s always been my responsibility to deal with people that don’t know about her death and therefore say something inappropriate. But with any problem I’ve ever had, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to blame it on the fact that my mum died when I was a kid. I have never used her death as an excuse. That’s one thing I find hard to accept about some people: there is a type of person that uses things that have happened to them as an excuse to fail. Some circumstances cause people to implode. Equally, you can try and be determined to cope with adversity and get over it. I went through a stage of just feeling utterly lost. I questioned everything. I questioned the fundamentals of my life and there probably was a time when I could have made some bad decisions that derailed me.

However, I avoided that. It is a huge credit to my dad and my two sisters, and to my school and friends, that things happened that way. Football was always a huge release for me, too. It was just there. That was my time – I was never distracted. It allowed me to block out all the stuff about my mum. It helped me focus. I was desperate to win anyway but this made me even more absorbed in my football. And my mum’s death had another effect: I’ve been through bad times in my career and I’ve been able to cope because none of it was as traumatic as my mum dying.

I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the woman who became my dad’s partner in the years after Mum died. Her name was Alice and she became a mother figure to me and my sisters. There was no sense of resentment towards her because she had taken our mum’s place or anything like that. I only feel a deep and lasting appreciation towards her. In many ways, she kept our family together. She and my dad never lived together but we always went round to her house for Sunday lunch and she became a steadying, stabilising influence in all our lives. She was a lovely, loving, caring, gentle and kind lady.

Alice knew my mum and dad when they were younger but after Mum died, Dad was working on a building contract at Jersey Potteries and he bumped into Alice again while she was working in the gift shop there. She was like a saint to us. She had a massive role in a lot of people’s lives: she gave her life to other people. Her sister and her own mother completely and utterly relied on her. She had met my dad again when he was a widower with three children. Why on earth did she take us on when she already had so many responsibilities?

Sadly, Alice has now gone as well. One Tuesday in August 2002, I was in London having lunch with Gianfranco Zola when Mariana rang me and told me I had to come straight home. I asked her what the matter was. Had something happened to the kids? Was she alright? She kept telling me to come home and that there was something she had to tell me. When I got back, she told me Dad had called and that Alice had died. She had gone to bed the night before and she hadn’t woken up. It seems her heart had just given out and they never discovered what caused it. A partnership of twenty years with my dad came to an end with shuddering suddenness.

I spoke at her funeral which was at St Martin’s Methodist Church. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But I had to do it: I had to do it for her; I had to do it for me; and I had to do it for my mum. After what I had been through with my mum, I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t done that last thing for Alice. All the emotion that I went through on that day counted for double and in a way, it gave me some closure about my failure to attend my mum’s own funeral. I told myself that day that I had to stop taking small things so seriously. I told myself I had to remember what was important in life. I told myself I had to enjoy every moment because life can be so fleeting and brutal. We have all these constant reminders of our mortality and yet we still get so upset and stressed about the most ridiculous things. All great thoughts and then the next day you have a row about whose fault it is you’ve run out of milk.

I don’t know what my dad must have gone through. After Alice died, he said he felt lucky to have known both her and my mum but he must sometimes think ‘What did I do to deserve this’. But he never let his commitment to me and my sisters drop. He and my mum used to spend a lot of what is known now as ‘quality time’ with the three of us. After she died, Dad worked hard but he was always there for us. My mum was a good netball player and Dad had played football to a decent amateur standard so we were all encouraged to be sporty.

Dad was ambitious for me when I was a child. He would drive me here and there. He was a taxi service. But his way of connecting with me was through football. He would get a football out when I was two or three and he felt pretty quickly that I had an eye for it. As I got older, he became much more serious about my football. It helped that I was an outdoor kid. I wouldn’t think twice about going on a two-hour bike ride and I took cross country very seriously. Football, however, soon became all-consuming. I played for my school, St Saviour’s, and for the Island Primary Schools and the Island Cubs. That was the first time I ever came up against Matt Le Tissier, who was from Guernsey. He was right-sided, I was left-sided, so we were always rivals.

I came up against him time and again and it often seemed our careers shadowed each other’s. We were the first players from the Channel Islands to represent England. He made his debut sixty-six minutes after I made mine. There seemed to be something linking us. He was born on 14 October 1968. I was born on 17 October 1968 – weird. Every time I played against him when we were kids, I used to get that nervous feeling you have when you’re up against someone who you think is better than you. I can’t remember him showing me up too badly but that may just be because I have erased it from my memory. I do remember, though, that when he signed professional forms for Southampton when he was sixteen, it felt like someone had finally burst the dam as far as Channel Islands football was concerned. He was the first from the islands of my generation to get a professional contract. He showed it could be done.

There was some good schools football in Jersey. At a younger age, there was an Easter primary schools tournament which is still an annual event now and has become very prestigious. Deeside Schools always came down and they were one of the best sides in the country: Ian Rush, Gary Speed and Michael Owen all played for them at different times. So I was exposed to a good standard of football. Later, I went to a secondary school called Hautlieu and continued to play football while I studied. What went against me in terms of the bigger picture and getting a shot at a trial with a professional club was the fact that I lived on the island. For a club to invite me for a trial was a big commitment because they would have to pay for the cost of the flight and put me up in digs. The expense was prohibitive.

When I was thirteen, my dad paid for me to go to a soccer camp put on by Southampton. I had the accident when I fell off the garage roof a few weeks before the camp was due to start but even though I had all those stitches in my shin, there was no way I was going to miss it. I loved it. I spent a week there. They asked me to stay for a second week and said they would keep an eye on me. My dad had high hopes for what that camp might achieve for me but when I went back the next year, they said I had not developed as much as they had hoped.

I endured some of the rites of passage many aspiring footballers go through – such as the careers meeting with the sceptical teacher. She had a computer with a fairly basic careers programme. She asked what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to be a footballer. She keyed it in and it was reminiscent of Little Britain – the computer said no. ‘Nothing’s come up,’ she said. So she put ‘sportsman’ in and again nothing came up. In the end, she said ‘What else would you like to do?’ I shrugged. She gave me a printout of how to become a bank manager, just so she could tick her box. When I signed for Chelsea a couple of years later, they took me down to the Lloyd’s Bank at Fulham Broadway. I looked up at the bank manager as I was writing ‘professional footballer’ on the form. I thought of my careers meeting. ‘I could have been you,’ I said.

Anyway, I kept plugging away. I had had a trial at Notts County when I was thirteen or fourteen and got my picture taken with Howard Wilkinson and Jimmy Sirrell. I played for Southampton in a testimonial with people like Kevin Bond when Chris Nicholl was the manager. But nothing materialized and I began to think nothing ever would. However, when I got to seventeen, I won a soccer scholarship to the Florida Institute of Technology, which is on the Atlantic coast, well north of Miami and not far from Orlando. I still had this determination to put some distance between me and Jersey and all the melancholic memories of the loss of my mum that used to flood over me now and again. Moving to the States for a couple of years, studying marine biology and playing football, seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that. Everything was ready to go. I had a big farewell party and then I went up to London to stay with my aunt the night before I was due to catch the plane to Miami. That night, my dad phoned. There was a last-minute hitch. Florida Tech had been on. There was a problem with my visa at their end – it was something to do with them having miscalculated their numbers of foreign students. Anyway, it was all off. I felt devastated.

I dealt with it like I’d dealt with a lot of other setbacks: I threw myself into football. I played morning, noon and night, training and playing, training and playing, squeezing in a Saturday morning job on a fruit and veg stall and my A-level homework when I could. And I had a stellar season that year. By then, I was playing for a team called St Paul’s who I thought were the best team in Jersey. I played for their juniors and their seniors and that year both sides won the Jersey league and qualified to play for a Cup called the Upton against the winners of the junior and senior leagues in Guernsey. I won the junior and the senior Upton that year and I also represented the island at junior and senior level against Guernsey in a competition called the Muratti. We won both of those, too. So I won six major trophies. From the outside, it might sound a bit like Channel Islands small fry but for us it was a big deal and it formed an important part of the Channel Islands sporting calendar. It made me a bit of a schoolboy phenomenon in Jersey because nobody before had ever accomplished what I had that season.

Some time that summer, the Chelsea manager, John Hollins, came down to Jersey to present the end of season prizes for the island’s football clubs. I wasn’t eligible for the Player of the Year award for the senior team because I was under age so I wasn’t even at the ceremony. However, people kept going up to John and telling him about me and all these records I’d set in Jersey football. ‘If he’s as good as you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘I better get him over and have a look at him.’ He wrote my name down on the back of a match box next to the phone number of an official of St Paul’s. When he got back to Chelsea, he made the call and in July 1987, they contacted my dad.

I went over for a week’s trial and at the end of it, they offered me a professional contract. There was still one more hurdle to overcome, though. I’d failed my biology A-level and my dad asked John Hollins if he would mind if I re-sat it that November and postponed joining Chelsea until December. That was pretty ballsy of my dad and my heart was in my mouth because I thought Chelsea might be offended. But John Hollins didn’t seem to mind and it was all agreed.

So, eventually, I left Jersey. I didn’t feel I had to be on the island any more. I still loved it but my mum’s death gave me a real determination to get away and fulfil my ambitions. A lot of people who grow up in Jersey feel they would miss the island if they moved to the mainland but emotionally, I was out of there. I couldn’t change what had happened. If only I had known then what I know now. But then we can all look back and regret things. It’s how we deal with them that is important. Perhaps it will help me be an ear for someone who has been through a similar thing. Perhaps it’s already making me value my children with an extra keenness. My mum’s death changed many things in my life but back then, it made me feel as though I had to carve out a life for myself away from Jersey. I felt like I was on a mission.

THREE First-time Blues

In theory Chelsea’s training ground at Harlington should have felt as though it was at the centre of the modern world. It was a few hundred yards south of the M4. You could hear the hum of the traffic streaming in and out of the capital when you walked from your car to the changing rooms. On the other side, it was bounded by the runways at Heathrow. You could see the planes queuing up to land as they glided in over the west London suburbs, and the roar from Concorde as it took off sometimes stopped training in its tracks. Harlington and being part of Chelsea Football Club should have felt like a launch pad. It should have felt like a hub. But to me, it was a desolate place. It was no man’s land.

I saw it first in the summer of 1987 when John Hollins, who was a manager heading into a storm, invited me over for a week’s trial. I arrived so full of energy and enthusiasm and determination. It makes me smile now to think of how naive and raw I was. I ran myself into the ground that week. I was determined to seize my opportunity – I thought I might never get another. So I hurtled around like a madman in training and the first teamers loved it. They probably recognized that wide-eyed enthusiasm from the time they had it, the time before the routine of being a professional footballer gripped them.

One of the most popular training drills was for the first team to form a big circle and stick one of the trialists in the middle of it. We had to try and get the ball off them and they had immense amounts of fun with that. They were like matadors with a young bull. I charged around and flew at them. They knew they had a live one. They were doing olés every time they touched it and kept the ball away from me. There were cheers and whoops. Roy Wegerle, who also played for Blackburn, QPR, Luton and the USA and was one of the most skilful players I’ve ever seen, did this trick where he received the ball on his right foot, dragged it behind his left foot and then flicked it out the other side all in one movement. I couldn’t get anywhere near the ball. Every day that week, I was utterly exhausted at the end of training. I gave it absolutely everything.

After seven days, I went back to Jersey. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me saying that I had failed one of my A-levels. The amount of football I had been playing that year, it was a miracle I could even read. A few days later, John Hollins phoned my dad and said they wanted to offer me a contract. I couldn’t believe it. But my priorities were slightly different to a lot of footballers even then: my dad told John that I wanted to resit my biology A-level that November and that I’d like to postpone joining the club until then. John was relaxed about it. It wasn’t as if he was planning to rush me into the first team. So he said that was fine. I re-took biology and passed it and at the beginning of December I became a Chelsea player. I had just turned nineteen.

The club was going through a difficult period and its future was uncertain. Ken Bates, the chairman, was fighting to buy Stamford Bridge and save it from the developers. John Hollins was a good manager but I soon realized that he was a gentle man in charge of a very strong dressing room and that that was not a good combination. There was nothing sophisticated about Chelsea in those days, certainly not among the players. It was staffed by tough, unyielding men some of whom played hard and drank hard and then came to training. These men did not eat pasta salads and florets of broccoli.

These men were not King’s Road dandies like Alan Hudson and Peter Osgood and the playboys of a previous Chelsea generation. I was scared witless of some of them. There was a bloke called John McNaught, a really rough, tough, Scottish central defender who was literally hardnosed. He was terrifying. He only played thirteen times for the first team but I played plenty of reserve football with him. Pat Nevin, who I respected, liked McNaught for his honesty but he just scared me rigid.

Some of my team-mates in club football in Jersey had played their football in Scotland and Wales and Ireland so it wasn’t as if people like McNaught and Peter Nicholas, when he arrived later, were aliens to me. Nonetheless it amazed me that people like them were professional players. I was expecting professional footballers to be professional in every sense of the word but there were players there for whom football was all about the lifestyle off the pitch. Their work had to fit into their lifestyle rather than the other way around. McNaught would arrive in the morning a bit hungover and ragged. You could tell he had been out. He would turn up late for reserve games. He was a good centre-half, tough as old boots, but I was taken aback by his approach. I thought that if you were professional, you needed to be in top condition. Back then, before the influx of foreign players made English football much more driven and professional, you could just about disguise the fact that you lived your social life to the full. Some of these guys could get away with it.

The minute I signed my contract, I really appreciated what I was doing; I felt so fortunate. But with some of these players it was a way of life. They had grown up with it. They had always gone out and they had still made it. I didn’t feel the two were compatible for me. I knew that if I did that, I’d be shot to pieces; I knew I couldn’t afford to do it. To be honest, I didn’t want to do it, anyway: it wasn’t me.

I found it hard to make good friends at Chelsea. I was caught between the apprentices and the battle-hardened professionals. That’s what I mean about the no man’s land. I hadn’t come up through the ranks at the club with good apprentices like Jason Cundy, David Lee, Damian Matthew and Graham Stuart; and I was regarded as an over-earnest young swot by blokes like Nicholas, Steve Wicks, Kerry Dixon, David Speedie and Andy Townsend, the men who called the shots at the club and ran the dressing room.

I don’t know how much of my alienation at the club was about class. I have always shied away from class issues and I have never judged anyone on class. But I think I was judged. Some of the lads told me I was a bit posh. In England, unlike in Europe, I’ve always noticed that there seems to be an issue with young players who have been educated academically, purely because they are so much in the minority. Those players find it hardest to fit in, particularly when they are trying to fit in with a group of young lads. It has changed a lot now and improved but some footballers still have a very insular mentality.

Class wasn’t obvious in Jersey. I didn’t consider my family privileged in any particular way. I didn’t consider myself middle class. I wasn’t privately educated, for instance, but apart from the fact that my parents couldn’t have afforded it, there wasn’t really any need for private education in Jersey: there were no problems with lack of books or facilities. The class boundaries weren’t defined there. We all played rugby and football. I played football with some really street-wise guys in Jersey: builders, plumbers, electricians and other labourers. I grew up in a team that had quite a solid base of Scottish and northern English players and rather than scorning me, they took me under their wing.