Graeme Le Saux: Left Field

But when I arrived at Chelsea, everything felt very closed off. There was a lot of intimidation. Suddenly I was involved constantly with people who were alien to me. In Jersey, most of my routine was about school and I only saw the lads now and again. Now, the main part of my life was about mixing with players at Chelsea with whom I had nothing in common. I wasn’t a poor little rich boy but I think some of them regarded me like that. Also, there was no respite from it: the micky-taking seemed absolutely relentless and it gets hard when you’re always the target.

It was a tough environment. By the time I got back there in December, the club was sliding towards relegation and John Hollins was in trouble. People look after themselves, particularly when a club is in trouble, and the lads ran the show. Anything went. The management did not solve the problems I had, they didn’t tackle my isolation – in fact, they helped to perpetuate it. Once, in training, we were sitting round in a big circle talking something through as a team and I said something that Bobby Campbell, who succeeded Hollins, took exception, too. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he joked. ‘You’re just the product of a German rape.’

He didn’t know that my mother had died, of course, so he couldn’t know quite how deeply that comment hurt me, but I was still astonished he could say something like that. He was clearly aware that the Channel Islands had been invaded by the Germans during the Second World War and I suppose that was his idea of humour. Comedy was different then: he was mates with Jimmy Tarbuck, and people like Freddie Starr were considered funny at the time. But Campbell didn’t make anyone laugh. Even the other lads looked surprised by what he said; most of them just looked at the floor. I raged inside. I didn’t say anything but I never forgot what he had said. It was part of the wider problem I felt I had at the club: no one ever stood up for me. You expect to feel nurtured when you go to a club like that but I wasn’t. I felt alone most of the time.

If you have not come through the ranks from fourteen or fifteen, it becomes more and more difficult to integrate. You’re an outsider to the players who have been there together for a few years. You’re a threat to them and you’re a threat to their mates. No one could put me into a definite category which also made them suspicious of me. That created mistrust. I didn’t relate or conform to fit into a group. I didn’t compromise enough. I challenged a lot of stereotypes and I didn’t have any allies. I couldn’t compete in a talk-off with the smarter guys because I wasn’t quick enough or confident enough to take them on verbally. I certainly couldn’t challenge them physically. If you have got a little group of players you are friendly with, you are safe within that group. I never had that. I had been at school with my friends and protected within that environment. There were confrontations as at any other school but I was popular and confident when I was in Jersey. However, as soon as I came into football, I was getting stick from all angles. Over a period of time, it wore me down.

Of course, there were happy moments within it all. I was there for more than five years in my first spell. I couldn’t have survived if there was no respite at all. There is always laughter at football clubs. There are incidents every day. Once, at the end of a five-a-side game on one of Harlington’s muddy pitches, David Lee slid in to prod home a goal. He opened his mouth to shout ‘Yeah’ as his momentum carried him into the goal and then suddenly he started clutching his face. One of his teeth had got hooked by the net as he shouted; it had twisted the tooth and flicked it clean out. I was doubled up with laughter like the rest of the lads. For some reason, we spent several minutes scrambling around in the mud trying to find it. What were we going to do with it? Give it to the tooth fairy? I don’t know if we thought they could screw it back in if we got it. But we never did.

The same thing happened to Craig Burley when he was an apprentice. He had two front teeth missing most of his career. Know how he did it? A ball came to him chest high and he got caught in two minds about whether to stoop to head it or do a falling volley. In the end, he did neither. In the end, he tried to knee it and he just kneed himself in the face and knocked out his two front teeth. Cue more scrabbling around in the mud. It was funny at the time.

I’m not saying I felt I had a lot of enemies at Chelsea, either. I liked lads like Graham Stuart and Damian Matthew and Jason Cundy. Graham and Jason used to pick me up from the bus stop at Hampton Court, near the digs in Kingston I’d moved into after I left Burnt Oak, and drive me into training. We got on fine and they used to laugh about what Indie band I’d been to see the night before. Some of the lads gave me a nickname, Berge, after the television detective Bergerac, who gave the impression that my beautiful island was riddled with violent crime.

Mostly, however, I struggled. Perhaps I was a bit homesick as well but I found many of the aspects of my new life intimidating and hostile. At Harlington there were separate dressing rooms and groups of players were separated off into their own little space. That made integration even harder. It was like a little passport control system. If you did well, you moved into the next dressing room and up the food chain as it were. The young lads were down at the far end, furthest away from the entrance. The first teamers were just inside the door. There was another one for the also-rans.

There was scope for moving onwards and upwards within that strange little hierarchy but places in the coveted dressing rooms didn’t come up until a player left. So if you wanted to be in a dressing room with The Lads, you needed to wait for someone else to be sold and then jump in before the replacement came. If you knew someone when you signed for Chelsea, you might get fast-tracked. That kind of separation meant I never really got to know a lot of my team-mates in the first team. I might train with them occasionally but when you are training you are focusing on that. It was really disruptive.

In the early years, I never really thought I was going to be good enough to make it at Chelsea and if I analyse it, a lot of my success was based on insecurity. A lot of ambition is based on fear of failure. I have seen so many players get dispirited, walk away and give up before they should have done. I’ve wanted to say to some of them: ‘You are too good to give up.’ But the one thing you can’t do is change that desire in someone. You have either got the will to succeed or you haven’t. It’s not going to happen unless you make it happen

For a long time at Chelsea, I felt I was way behind people like Graham and Damian because, when I first arrived, they had been playing football at that level for two or three years as apprentices. I felt like an outsider looking in. There were plenty of moments when it would have been easier for me to jack it in. That’s why I never signed a long-term contract at Chelsea. I always gave myself targets. I signed for two years and got through that. Then I signed for three years and got through that. I had a little bit of security but not too much. I’m such a safety first guy normally but I took a risk by signing short-term contracts because I wanted to play football on my terms. I didn’t want to be tied into something that I couldn’t get out of if it wasn’t working.

I played the first six months in the reserves under Gwyn Williams, one of Chelsea’s great survivors, a Bates man who only bit the dust when Roman Abramovich took over. Gwyn held plenty of positions at Chelsea down the years – mainly because he was a good coach and because he was always upbeat and lively. At different times, he ran the academy, the reserves, he was assistant manager, he did the travel, and he was chief scout. When I was there, he was really hard on the players – he used to hammer us. His idea was to try and prepare everyone for the profession. In some ways, I liked him but he destroyed a few people.

He was always very hard on the black lads but I know he didn’t see it as racist – he was hard on everyone and didn’t single them out in particular. It was very much a product of its time. It seems harsh and brutal now but even then, less than 20 years ago, it was seen as acceptable. Racism in the game was more of a problem then and I suppose Gwyn could argue that he was just trying to steel the Afro-Caribbean guys for the stick they would receive from their fellow professionals and from sections of the crowd at away games. Thankfully, racial abuse has dwindled in English football now to the point where Gwyn’s kind of education isn’t acceptable any more.

Frank Sinclair and Eddie Newton still liked Gwyn despite all the insults he levelled at them but there were others like Nathan Blake who found it more difficult. That brings us back to the Robbie Fowler dictum: football is a tough business and if anyone has a weakness, it gets picked on.

Some players can handle it and others can’t. I could take it – at least most of the time. But it changed me. I found it very hard when I was younger. The atmosphere was so intimidating. People would play on your weaknesses and really get stuck into you – more psychologically, but also as a player. At Chelsea in the late Eighties, there was a tradition that if you were judged to have been the worst player at a training session, you were awarded a yellow bib at the end and you would have to wear it at the start of the next one. Once I had the bib, even if I had a brilliant training session the next time, I tended to get it again – because that amused The Lads. That got demoralising and it was quite isolating – it made you feel like an outcast. I noticed that Dennis Wise introduced that ritual at Swindon when he was manager there. I saw a newspaper article about how Paul Ince had had to wear the yellow bib once or twice when he played there for a spell. I bet he took that well.

When the accusations about my sexuality started and I took it seriously, that snowballed. But even apart from that, the taunting and the mickey-taking and the picking on people was relentless. Some of the lads had this routine they thought was hilarious. We’d be on the mini bus to a reserve game and we’d be driving through Parliament Square, say, and past Big Ben. Nobody would mention Big Ben but then one of the boys would say to me, ‘What’s the time, Graeme?’ I’d say, ‘Quarter to seven,’ and they’d fall about laughing and go on about Big Ben being right there. Or we’d get onto the forecourt at Old Trafford and one of the lads would say innocently ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I’d say ‘Of course we bloody are, look there’s the ground’ and the laughing would start again. I suppose I was pretty gullible. If somebody wanted to know what the time was, I’d tell them the time. I never recognized it as a prank.

There were cheap shots like that constantly. I felt I came in for quite a bit of stick. I must have seemed very different and so I was an easy target. I had my rucksack and my Walkman; I had jeans with a hole in the knee. I used to get hammered. Now that I’ve stopped playing, I look at the younger players and the ones that stood out were the ones who got the grief. It wasn’t the kind of life I had imagined it would be. There were times when I was very unhappy. It had almost got to the point where I had separated my football life from my life away from the game in order to stay sane.

I had a few run-ins with people. I had a go at Kerry Dixon about being lazy in training and we both threw punches. I had a ding-dong with Peter Nicholas, too. But those things happened every week. John McNaught and a striker called Billy Dodds were having a massive argument about something and John called him a ‘thick Scottish prick’. When Billy pointed out John was Scottish, too, that kind of shortcircuited John’s brain and they had a punch-up. Fights in training still occasionally happen now but it was a much tougher environment back then.

Maybe it was partly because Chelsea were going through a tough spell fighting relegation but sometimes training just felt like anarchy. Some of the guys just didn’t care. In the reserves, we used to do shooting practice and the lads would boot the ball over the bar on purpose so that it flew into the field behind the goal. They’d climb over the gate into the field and have a kick-about over there while the coach was trying to put on a shooting session on the pitch. The reserves was a sub-culture. There were players in the reserves who only ever seemed to play for the reserves. For some of them, the idea that it was supposed to be a stepping stone into the first team had ceased to exist – they had gone missing in action. Quite a lot of them had dodgy attitudes. They didn’t want to be at the club. It’s very easy for a young player to get influenced by that and think that’s the way to behave. You’ve got to be single-minded to avoid that trap.

I earned £120 a week when I first signed. The first thing I bought was a Sony Walkman for £100. It had wind-in head-phones and it was my pride and joy. It got me through the journey to and from my digs in Burnt Oak every day. It was nearly a week’s wages for me so it was like Michael Ballack spending £100,000 on something. My second contract, which I signed in 1990, took me up to £400 a week. That allowed me to have a mortgage of £75,000 at a time when the interest rate was 15 per cent. I wanted to get a fancy car and live the life a bit but prudence got the better of me and I decided to invest everything in a flat.

My thinking was that whatever happened in my football career, if I could come out of it with a property and no mortgage then that was a worthwhile ambition. So I climbed onto the property ladder and bought a flat and then, later, a fourbedroomed Victorian house in Thames Ditton, Surrey. We were in a recession at the time. When I sold the flat eighteen months later, I only got what I paid for it. I was only twenty-three and I suppose I bought it for the family that I didn’t have. I thought that if I bought this house I could live there if I had a wife and family, too. I wasn’t planning to get married imminently but I was always thinking ahead and planning stuff. I thought I could live there okay if I did find someone.

So I paid £225,000 for it and I never got my flash car. I imported a Suzuki jeep from Jersey instead. The rest of the lads were driving XR3is and Renault 5 turbos and I had a Suzuki jeep. It had a maximum speed of about 50mph. I drove it to Wales once on the motorway and I had to take a run up of about two miles if I wanted to overtake anything.

At least the football side of things went okay. I made my debut for the reserves against Portsmouth at a half-frozen Fratton Park and I was awestruck because the former England forward Paul Mariner was in the Portsmouth team. I played left-back that day but on other occasions Gwyn had me playing all over the place. I played at centre-back for three or four months and at one point, I said to Gwyn that I couldn’t play centre-back any more. He said that in that case, he wouldn’t bother picking me – so I played at centre-back. I think that was part of my problem in my first spell at Chelsea: they felt I was so versatile that I never got settled in one position. When the players who played in a set position regularly were fit, I’d find myself out of the team. You become easy to drop: I hadn’t cost them anything and I was part of the furniture so it was easier to drop someone like me than someone they had paid a lot of money for.

But they were a good group of young players in that Chelsea reserve side. Jason Cundy was sold to Spurs for £800,000 in 1992 and his career was marred first by back problems and then by a struggle with cancer. Dave Lee was a really good player but he broke his leg badly and never really recovered from it. And Graham Stuart, who was a clever, creative player, had a good career at Everton, where he won an FA Cup Winners’ medal, and at Charlton Athletic where he was part of the Alan Curbishley success story. It was a good bunch but sadly most of us had to leave in order to realize our potential.

The reserve team did okay but the first team was struggling. A couple of months after I arrived, John Hollins began to come under serious pressure. He had fallen out with players like Speedie and Nigel Spackman and team spirit had disintegrated. One day in February 1988, Bobby Campbell suddenly turned up at training. I hadn’t been aware of speculation linking him with the job and he hadn’t been officially given it: he just loitered around a bit at Harlington, watching from the sidelines, that sort of thing. It was very odd. He was supposed to be John’s new assistant but it was obvious he was the manager-in-waiting. After a few days of that, John told him to get lost and that while he was still manager, Campbell wasn’t welcome. In March, John got the sack and Campbell took over.

Campbell was a Scouser. He was flash, flash a bit like Ron-Manager. He wore a lot of gold. He had a Rolex that didn’t lock properly, which was something that he seemed to like. He used it as a kind of gimmick. Every time he clapped his hands, the strap would come undone and the watch would rattle and it would all draw attention to the fact that he was wearing a Rolex. He was a bit tougher than John and he brought in players like Graham Roberts, Peter Nicholas, Dennis Wise and Dave Beasant and they became powerful people within the club. The club was going through a stage where things were going to have to get worse before they got better and, at the end of the season, we were relegated from the top flight after losing a two-leg relegation play-off against Middlesbrough. To make things worse, there was crowd trouble after the game and an attempted pitch invasion. Chelsea were forced to close the terraces for six matches the following season as a punishment.

It wasn’t a happy time to be involved at Stamford Bridge but the next season, Campbell did a great job. We were promoted at a canter with ninety-nine points, seventeen clear of our nearest rivals Manchester City, and when the Second Division championship was already won, I finally got my chance in the first team. I’d travelled with the first team a couple of times before that but I hadn’t made it to the bench. On the last day of the 1988/89 season, we were away to Portsmouth at Fratton Park, just like we had been for my reserve debut.

When Campbell told me to warm up, I did about twenty sprints up and down the touchline. I was hyperactive; I was petrified; I was desperate to get on – all at the same time. I was so nervous, I kept checking to make sure I had my shirt on. Campbell beckoned me over with about fifteen minutes to go and sent me on for Steve Clarke. Tony Dorigo was in the team at left-back and Clive Wilson was playing leftmidfield. Dorigo was an England left-back and Wilson should have been – not much competition there then.

The line-up that day, just to give an idea of the time warp between then and when I played my last game for Chelsea alongside men like Marcel Desailly and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, went like this: Dave Beasant; Steve Clarke, Joe McLaughlin, Graham Roberts (capt.), Tony Dorigo; Gareth Hall, Peter Nicholas, Kevin McAllister, Clive Wilson; Kevin Wilson, Kerry Dixon (Monkou).

When I ran onto the pitch, I felt like I was starring in a movie about me. Everything had been building up to this point and now that I was living it, part of me wondered whether it was real. But I felt so alert, hypersensitive. It was as if everything around me had a different perspective. I was so wired that I was absorbing everything around me. I felt quicker than I had ever felt – I had so much energy I felt I could run past anybody. On an entirely different level, I also knew that if we beat Portsmouth, I’d get a win bonus that would pretty much double my salary for the month. It seemed like a vast amount of money to me at the time. We won 3–2 and I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. It was the only league game I ever played outside the top flight.

I had moved from Burnt Oak by then. I was renting a room from a friend’s parents in Kingston-upon-Thames. John and Carole Denvir were antique clock dealers and they were wonderful people to stay with. Being with them gave me back my perspective when I got home from training and I felt they were a very positive part of my life, so when I had some spare time, I used to go up to Portobello Road and go to antiques fairs. I loved hearing about the history of something – where it had been made and who had owned it and the character of the carver or the manufacturer. I collected antique tins and old football boots. For a while, funded by the Professional Footballers Association, I even took an evening class in antiques in Oxford Street. Most of the people there had double-barrelled surnames and wanted to open their own antiques shop. I was the footballer at the back of the room. I’d also started a part-time degree in sociology and environmental studies at Kingston Poly, which took up another two nights a week, but I didn’t finish it. When I broke into the first team, I didn’t have the time any more.

In 1989/90, I trained with the first team before the season began and then played in the reserves until Christmas. I got back into the first team for a game against Crystal Palace. Andy Gray, Palace’s midfielder, spat at me – which was nice. I shoved him and regretted it immediately. He was a scary guy. I spent the rest of the game thinking my life was probably in danger. We both got booked. Then, in the last minute, when we were 1–0 down, I scored an equalizer. For the first time, I felt like I really belonged with The Lads. They were so pleased in the dressing room afterwards and I had never seen that before. I suddenly felt…not popular, but part of it, and accepted more, because I had done something that had had an effect on them.

It didn’t really last. There were still plenty of times when I felt like jacking it in. I felt intimidated by my own peers. Peter Nicholas was one. He was the club captain and he could be really sarcastic. Then there was Graham Roberts, the former Tottenham player, who would throw his weight around.

I remember my full first-team debut in a Full Members Cup third-round tie against West Ham three days before Christmas 1989. There were 8,418 hardy souls there to see it. It was auspicious for me, but probably not for them, although we did win 4–3. But it was overshadowed by the behaviour of Roberts, who was captain at the time. As captain, it was his job to hand out the players’ complimentary tickets before each match. The rule was that each player got five tickets for a game he was playing in to hand out to friends and relatives. He only gave me two so I asked him where the rest were and he said he was taking those. I told him I had people coming to watch because it was my debut so I needed all of them. He kept saying he needed a couple of extras for himself and I kept telling him I needed my full allocation.

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