#2Sides: My Autobiography (7 page)

Then it became a thing in the media. They were talking about me. ‘Rio’s going to wear the T-shirt!’… ‘Rio’s NOT going to wear the T-shirt!’ I heard lots of players say, ‘I ain’t wearing that fucking T-shirt. No way!’ Then they went out and wore them! When push comes to shove, you find out who your mates are. It changed my opinion a little bit about some people who disappeared under rocks. But I didn’t let it affect my relationships and I certainly wouldn’t want to
out
them for it. I mean, I didn’t ask anyone to boycott the T-shirt. Just don’t tell me you’re not going to wear it, then wear it. Lip service, again. At the same time, some people were as good as their word. Jason Roberts didn’t wear one; Joleon Lescott didn’t wear one. I heard the entire Wigan and Swansea squads didn’t wear any either.

But inevitably there was a focus on me. The manager had announced in a press conference the day before the game against Stoke: ‘all my players will wear it.’ I couldn’t understand that. I thought, he never asked me. Next day, as we were going out for the warm-up, the kit man, Albert Morgan, comes to me with a T-shirt and gives it to me. I was upset straight away. I said, ‘fuck off, Albert.’ We had that relationship. I could swear at him and he could swear at me, and the next day it’d be forgotten.

‘
Fuck off, Albert
!’

‘No, the manager wants you to wear it.’

‘I ain’t fucking wearing it.’

‘No, the manager
wants
you to put it on. You’ve got to put it on.’

‘Listen, Albert: FUCK. OFF.’

So I went out onto the pitch not wearing it. I came back in from the warm-up… and the gaffer fucking exploded.

‘
Who do you fucking think you are?
Not wearing that fucking shirt? I’ve told everyone yesterday you’re wearing it! You’re fucking meant to wear it. Fucking going out on your own and doing your own thing – who do you think you are?’ Blah, blah…

I said, ‘you didn’t ask me. I was
never
going to wear that fucking T-shirt. I didn’t tell you to go on TV and fucking speak about it.’

‘That’s it,’ came the reply. ‘You’re fined a week’s wages.’

‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, you fucking will see me tomorrow, you’re fined.’

And that was it. I went out and played and we won the game.

The next day, I had to go and see him in his office and I walked in expecting both barrels. I went in with my hard hat on. He sat down. I didn’t even sit down. He said, ‘listen, I don’t agree with what you’ve done. I know it’s your family and everything, but I just don’t agree with you not wearing the T-shirt. You’ve got to support campaigns like this and organisations like that… I’m a union man.’

‘Yeah, but, boss, you never spoke to me about it. You never understood my situation. You don’t know what’s going on and why I didn’t wear it.’ I tried to explain that I didn’t wear it because Kick It Out hadn’t gone to the court case, and I didn’t believe in what they do. ‘If you didn’t believe in an organisation, you’d never put their badge on, would you? If something happened and they didn’t
do what you expected of them, you would never,
ever
back that organisation, I
know
you wouldn’t, boss!’

Then he amazed me. He said, ‘listen, I spoke to my wife last night and she said to me, um … she asked me, “did you ask the boy about it?” And I said no. And she said, “There’s your mistake there.”’ He told me that!

Then he said, ‘I don’t often admit mistakes. But I understand a little bit why you didn’t wear it now. I’m not going to fine you. I should have spoken to you. That’s my mistake and I accept that. I still believe you should have worn the T-shirt. But I respect that you didn’t.’

And that was it. I was so impressed. My respect for him just went up even more. I think maybe he respected me a little bit more, because I had a belief and I’d stuck to it, even when there was so much pressure on it. It’s a question of solidarity. He was seeing it from a team perspective: ‘we do everything together, why are you going out on your own?’ I understand that because he wants to win and he wants to show that we’re united as a squad. But he hadn’t asked me how I felt.

But then Fergie’s a man of principle and substance, and there aren’t too many like that. One thing I can’t bear is the people in positions of influence who just pay lip service, like FIFA with their ‘RESPECT’ and stupid fines. I just don’t believe they’re sincere. People like Sepp Blatter and others in positions of power who fail to make the right decisions. After the Suarez and Terry incidents, Blatter said a handshake between the two players should be enough to settle an argument when it comes to racial insults! Just shake hands and walk away, he said. What an idiot! I hammered Blatter on Twitter for that. Here was the head of our game, and he obviously doesn’t understand it at all. Other people criticised him as well and he had to backtrack. Hopefully he educated himself a
little bit. A year or so later, in Italy, the AC Milan team walked off a pitch in solidarity with Kevin Prince Boateng when he was insulted by racist fans. First Blatter said Boateng was wrong to do it. Later, he invited him to Zurich and praised him. It would be nice to think Blatter finally understood the issue. But my impression was that was all public relations.

Here, Kick It Out and Show Racism The Red Card had their chance to shine but they didn’t take it. They weren’t alone.

‘Deal with it…’ What does that mean exactly? I’ve spoken about the shortcomings of individuals and authorities. But as a family we weren’t too keen on some of the approaches on the other side of the argument either. It was an emotional time and some idiots were saying ‘you should go round John Terry’s house and beat him up’ or ‘send someone round to fuck him up.’ I just got cross about that. Are you crazy? That’s not the way to do things! That’s not what we are about! We’re not that type of family! Meanwhile, people in the black community were saying ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ or ‘Rio has to do something politically.’ But we never
ever
wanted to make it a political thing about blacks versus whites.

There were also plenty of discussions going on between black footballers about how to ‘deal with’ the situation. People like Jason Roberts and Darren Moore were passionate about getting more black people with powerful voices and status in the game to be involved with decision-making. I totally agreed that something had to change. In the past the FA have cherry-picked people they can dictate to and use as puppets. It would be better to have people inside the power structures who the black community can trust and respect.

One of the reasons I agreed to work on the FA commission on the future of the national team was to understand the organisation better and to get closer to the people making decisions. Who were they? I wanted to identify them.

It also bothered me that, when it comes to questions of discrimination, there were no players of the current generation involved in making decisions. I’m talking here about players of every color and creed and culture. For example, when it came to my ‘choc ice’ tweet, why did the FA turn to Lord Ouseley as an ‘expert’? The FA should have been consulting people who are closer to our generation and have a better understanding of today’s language. Words that meant something in his generation have a totally different meaning for mine. They used his interpretation. When I went to the hearing, I said: ‘Why is Lord Ouseley even part of this conversation? He’s an old man who’s got no idea what we mean.’ But it wasn’t his fault. He was asked a question which he answered in the most honest way he could, I’m sure. It’s complex because there are many minority groups all with different voices and opinions and feelings. When you talk about inclusion you have to think about girls playing football and discrimination and exclusion against gay players. It all needs to be updated and I think the FA may be in the process of trying to do that. The problem is that as an organisation it is always reactive rather than proactive.

Some black footballers saw the Terry case as a chance to ‘make a stand’ and ‘let people know we’re not happy.’ There was talk of setting up a separate organisation, a sort of black players’ pressure group. I could see what they were getting at. But separatism of any kind just isn’t my thing. I don’t think segregation bodes well for the future. I don’t want people cutting themselves off from each other. There has to be no boundaries; you have to be inclusive of everybody. That’s the way I’ve been brought up. To me the John
Terry and Luis Suarez cases had nothing to do with being pro black or pro white. I’m not pro black or white, or pro Jewish, or pro Muslim. I respect
everyone
, wherever they’re from, whatever their culture. I’m not saying it because I’m a black guy. I’m saying: everyone, please just respect each other! That’s all I want for my kids. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to ask for.

John Barnes, who I respect greatly, says it’s possible for someone to make a racist remark without necessarily being 100 per cent racist. He says if someone says ‘black bastard’ it’s not absolutely conclusive. The way he sees it, it might just be the emotion of the moment and first thing that came to mind. Back in the day I would have completely disagreed with that. I would have said there were certain totally unacceptable words and if a person says them, well, that’s it: they are racist and I would write them off immediately. But John was a hero of mine when I was a kid. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he made me think. Obviously, if someone makes that mistake a couple of times, then it’s something in them. It’s not a mistake. And I really don’t understand how a person doesn’t have a switch in their body, or a light that comes on and says, ‘that one’s a no-go.’ Perhaps that person just never had discipline at home when they were growing up, or they’re just ignorant. On the other hand, if it’s just a one-off, maybe they do deserve the benefit of the doubt.

One thing I totally agree with John Barnes about is that racism comes from sheer ignorance. I used to say that football is a great tool for making people aware of racism – but it can’t stop racism. If someone comes to the stadium and says something racist he knows he might be banned for a long time, so he’ll be quiet during that 90 minutes – and then go somewhere else and be racist. It just changes his behavior in that very small context. In other words, football’s not educating him to be a better person. That has to be
part of a wider education and social education, so we need that education in the home, and the schools and in the media.

The only thing we wanted out of the whole John Terry affair was to get people talking about racism not in an antagonistic way but in a thoughtful way. We wanted people to understand that racism was still a problem. Everyone thought we’d dealt with it but it’s not dealt with! It’s still there! And we never attacked John Terry. We never said – and never will say – that John Terry is this or that. Never! That’s why I couldn’t understand why there was so much hatred directed at us. The media stoked up the idea of ‘us versus them’ but as a family we always said: this isn’t about Anton or about John Terry. This is about racism as a whole. It’s about the next generation. I don’t want my children or anyone else’s children to grow up thinking it’s normal to be racially abused whether they’re white, black, Indian, Asian… it doesn’t matter what race you are. That was our whole approach. To borrow a Nelson Mandela-era idea from South Africa, what we wanted was not a court case but something more like a truth and reconciliation commission, something to create light rather than heat, a way to use the incident to help educate people.

But that never happened. We told the FA to deal with it quickly. The incident happened on a football pitch and should never have ended up in court. It was absolutely obvious what had happened and the FA should’ve dealt with the situation before a complaint even came in from a member of the public. It wasn’t difficult. Go and see Anton; go and see John Terry; look at the video; make a decision. Simple. But the FA made it sound like it was the most complicated, difficult case they’d ever seen. And they passed the buck for almost a year.

When England does badly in a World Cup the jokes start. They’re all basically the same joke. After the 0–0 with Algeria in South Africa it was:
I can’t believe we only managed a draw against a rubbish team we should have beaten easily … I’m ashamed to call myself Algerian.

I love a laugh as much as anyone, but I want these jokes to be obsolete. I want England to be good again. I think we can make it happen, but to do that we need to understand where things have gone wrong in the past – and what’s wrong now.

To play for your country is the greatest thing you can do as a footballer but most of my experiences were tinged with the feeling that we could have been doing so much better. England’s biggest problem is that we don’t produce nearly enough top-level players. Another is that we haven’t worked out how the national team should play. The days when anyone thought we could do well with old-fashioned blood and thunder are long gone. But we’ve never developed a new philosophy. What is the ‘English style’ these days? No one knows. It’s frustrating and after nearly 50 years of hurt, I
reckon it’s time we sorted it out. I’ll explain more about my ideas on that in a later chapter. But first I’ll give you my impressions of the England managers I played under.

By far the best was Glenn Hoddle. I was lucky enough to work with him in the late 1990s when I was still a teenager. He had a crystal clear vision of how he wanted us to play, and how to get us there and I still think it was a tragedy for us when he was sacked for his religious beliefs. If he’d stayed I would have been a different player – and a better player – for England.

Hoddle encouraged me to come out with the ball and sometimes even played me as a sweeper. He had a vision for me as a creative centre-back – not just defending but starting attacks, like I did at West Ham. He’d say to me, ‘When you get the ball, drive out of the back, commit someone, go past them! Don’t worry about leaving a gap – someone will fill in for you when you go forward.’ It was refreshing.

I also loved his imaginative training methods. He’d talk to me about skills I’d done, and encourage me to do more: ‘Try things. Don’t worry about making mistakes. That’s not a problem, as long as you don’t make the same ones over and over.’

He was only just getting started, and I’m sure if he’d stayed he would have had England playing his way. It would have been good, progressive football but with a real winning mentality. Sometimes we’d play with three at the back, other times we’d have four. Sometimes we’d go with four midfielders, sometimes five. All the players enjoyed it because it wasn’t just about passing and attacking more; it was about playing with purpose, with a real focus on being flexible and tactically creative.

Glenn Hoddle contributed a great deal to my football education. He painted mental pictures so we could visualise the game in front
of us. He also had a knack of simplifying things and breaking things down. The manager would say: ‘If you come out of defence and take one of their midfielders with you it creates problems for them here, and here, and here … and when you move forward someone else in the team will drop in to your position, so don’t worry about that.’

Hoddle would spot a weakness in our next opponent and gear training towards that. If their fullbacks were weak, we’d work for two or three days on how to attack them. He might box that part of the pitch in training and make us route all our attacks through that area. He was one of our greatest-ever technical players and his training mirrored the way he played: loads of fun skill stuff, and lots of keep ball and one-touch. One part of the warm-up was going through cones with the ball and having to chip it back, or keeping the ball up and volleying it back without letting the ball touch the floor. It annoyed some players who weren’t great with their touch. Michael Owen used to moan his head off: ‘Fucking hell, not this skill shit again.’ His game was about scoring goals. He was brilliant at it, and that’s all he wanted to work on. But I loved it – I’d happily do skills all day long.

Hoddle took me to the 1998 World Cup in France and even though I didn’t play, he’d started to trust me and said he wanted me to build the defence around me. It’s the only time I’ve thought to myself, yeah, I can see a future for England, I can see what he wants to do. He had a clear vision of what he wanted and you saw the beginnings of it at the Tournoi de France in 1997. By 1998 the team was starting to take shape: young players were coming through and we were on the cusp of getting really good. Then he got sacked. It killed us and I don’t think we’ve ever recovered. Ever since, I’ve been hoping someone would come in and continue what he started but it has never happened.

Kevin Keegan took over in 1999 and I knew straight away he didn’t fancy me as a player. Coming up to the European Championships in 2000, he came to my room and said: ‘Listen, Rio, I’m not going to take you. You’re a great player, and you’ve got a big future, but I don’t think you’ve got the experience and I need to take experience.’ Then he took Gareth Barry who was younger than me! Even more ridiculous was that he said ‘if you were Italian, or Brazilian, or French you’d have 30 caps by now, the way you play.’ I thought: ‘Well you just spoke about the World Champions, the European Champions, and one of the best teams in the world … But I can’t get in the England squad!’ Suffice to say I didn’t get on too well with Kevin Keegan as a coach.

Before and after Keegan, Howard Wilkinson took charge for a couple of games and that was just bizarre. He was like a school teacher or an army sergeant. He had us out doing set pieces the morning of the game in a field next to the hotel and all he wanted to talk about was set pieces. ‘Set pieces win games,’ he’d announce, and then he’d tell us the percentages of games won by set pieces and… well, I’m afraid he lost me completely.

Compared to those two, Sven-Göran Eriksson seemed a huge step up. When he was appointed in 2001 I thought, ‘Wow, he’s been a great manager in Italy, he must be cultured and sophisticated and we’ll be back to the days of Glenn Hoddle again!’

I remember going to our first meeting with him. I was so eager and excited. I thought: what magic has he got to sprinkle on us? I came out and remember saying to Frank Lampard: ‘That guy just made football sound more basic than any manager I’ve ever played for!’

The first conversation I had with Sven he said to me: ‘I don’t want my centre-backs running with the ball.’ I couldn’t believe it. But he was the England manager and I wanted play for England,
so if he told me to lick his boots ten times in order to play for my country I’d have done it. Tactically he was very unimaginative: ‘I want you to go here; I want you to go there. I don’t want my centre-backs running with the ball. I want you to get the ball, pass it here.’ But he was also charming and had a good, human side which created a nice atmosphere in the squad and meant we always wanted to play for him.

I think Sven was a bit over-awed by David Beckham. If truth be known, he was a bit too much of a Beckham fan. But, still, Sven was a genuinely nice fellow. I remember one time Wayne Rooney and I were on the massage table just after the story came out about Sven’s affair with Faria Alam. The TV was on and, as we’re lying there, Faria Alam appears on the screen. There were quite few people milling about and people coming in and out of the room. I was going, ‘Look at her! I bet Sven … I mean, can you
imagine
? I bet he was throwing her
all over the gaff
!’ All of a sudden I notice it’s very quiet and Sven, standing behind me, goes, ‘Well, it wasn’t
quite
like that’; he then starts to laugh, says ‘Good night’ and walks out. I’m lying there thinking: ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ while all the lads are cracking up. But that’s what Sven was like: he made everyone feel comfortable. I liked him a lot and got on really well with him. Tactically, he wasn’t sophisticated like I expected and he didn’t bring us on; but maybe I was expecting too much.

Steve McLaren, who followed Sven, was a much better coach than people give him credit for. It’s actually quite hard to say why things went wrong with him and we failed to qualify for Euro 2008. Again, when he first came in I was excited. I’d heard great things about him when he’d been at Manchester United and he’d been our trainer under Sven. One problem, I think, was he was just too pally with the players. There wasn’t that distance you normally get between manager and players, like we had with Ferguson. Yes,
sometimes we can be joking around, but at a certain point it’s clear: ‘I’m the manager, and this is how it goes.’

McLaren didn’t have that. He’d call John Terry ‘JT’ and Frank Lampard ‘Lamps’, and play two touch with us during training. A lot of the squad saw that not as weakness, exactly, but as something strange: that’s the kind of thing you do that as a coach, not as a manager. With the best managers, I find, there’s always a distance from the players.

But, again, Steve McLaren was a decent, good guy. He got hammered later for that interview he did in Holland where he spoke with a Dutch accent. But I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I thought it was very human. I used to do something similar in training with foreign lads at United. It’s a way of trying to help people understand me. If it can help them understand a bit better, I’ll speak slowly and try to use their accent. My Dad used to work with a lot of Turkish people in the rag trade and he’d do that. He’d be like ‘
Sevela, come on, come on. Why you talking? Come on, please …
’ so they would understand him a little bit better. I respected that; it’s a nice trait to have. But at the same time, managers seem to have to be a bit more resolute to succeed. I’m not a manager yet, so I don’t know.

People criticised McLaren for his tactics but I’m not sure I’d go along with that. It’s very hard to put my finger on why things didn’t work. Stuff just seemed to go wrong, like in Croatia when the ball bobbled and went under Paul Robinson’s foot. That was hardly the manager’s fault! The truth is that we just didn’t play particularly well throughout that qualifying tournament and I think the players have to take a lot of the blame for that. We didn’t perform. It’s as simple as that.

Then it was time for Don Fabio, who was appointed in 2007. I think Capello was the manager who disappointed me the most.
He came to us with a sky-high reputation and I couldn’t wait. He’d coached the AC Milan team I loved as a kid, with Marco van Basten and Gullit and Rijkaard and people like that. I knew he was going to be progressive – I mean, he’d been at Real Madrid. And Roma. He’d been everywhere, done everything, won everything. When he first arrived I asked him about the great players he worked with and he’d start talking about the Baresis and Maldinis. I thought: ‘This is going to be so great! I’m going to learn so much! He’s got all this fantastic knowledge and experience, he’s going to bring great stuff to this team. Now we’re definitely going to improve.’

And … what a let-down! He had us playing the most rigid, basic 4–4–2, with no deviating allowed under any circumstances. One game against Spain he had us playing with two central midfielders against the three best midfielders in the world. I thought: ‘The game has evolved, man! This is not possible! Please get some bodies in here to stop us getting overrun!’ It wasn’t rocket science.

But what could we do? With Capello you have to just do what you’re told or you’re out. I should also stress that it wasn’t my best period because I was struggling with my back problem and was injured a lot. You want everyone to see you in your best light, especially someone you’ve respected for years. Then again, I think most of the players felt let down. I remember Jamie Carragher being disappointed as well. He’d just come out of retirement from England, to work with this man. We expected ideas and creativity, but what we got was a stifling prison camp mentality.

Capello’s attitude was ‘I’m the boss and you’ll do what I say all day, every day.’ There was never much warmth. He seemed to need to show us how strong and disciplinarian he could be and was so aggressive sometimes it was just ridiculous. There was a definite divide between him and his coaching staff and us, which
we respected. But some of it wasn’t very clever – like the way he chose the captaincy, giving John Terry and Steven Gerrard and me a game each. He made an absolute circus of the situation.

Part of it could have been a cultural problem; mostly, though, I just think he hadn’t moved with the times. Playing 4–4–2 was getting us outnumbered in midfield
all
the time. Rubbish teams were passing the ball around us, like Algeria at the World Cup. They kept the ball better than us and played better than us.

I know people back home were expecting us to win the World Cup in 2010  but that was ridiculous. There was no
chance
of doing anything. Tactically, we were all over the place, and even if we’d got past Germany in the second round, our midfielders would have been exhausted by the quarter finals because of the amount of ground they had to cover. We never had any respite in any of the games because Capello would always be shouting: ‘Press! Press! Press!’ even when it was hot. I’ve got nothing against pressing; it’s an essential part of the modern game. But you’ve got to be intelligent about it.

Remember, this is a team of players who’ve played a brutally hard season in the Premier League. Our league is so exhausting it leaves everybody knackered for the big tournaments. Look at the statistics for the distances our players run; the intensity and sheer number of games we play really works against us. By the time we get to the quarter-finals of a tournament, we’re on our last legs.

Added to that, most of us are carrying injuries. That was certainly the case with every tournament I went to. In Japan and South Korea in 2002, I had a groin injury and I don’t even know how I played a couple of the games. My main memory of that tournament is
treatment
. Treatment, treatment, treatment … you needed vigorous treatment sessions just to get fit for a game. I do
think a Premier League season is harder than a season in any of the other big leagues – and we don’t have a winter break like they do in Germany. It’s just another thing that works against us.