Soccer Men (29 page)

Other teams—most notably Arsenal, Germany, and increasingly also Brazil—like to strike the moment the opposition loses the ball. In basketball, this is known as the moment of “turnover.” When the ball is turned over from one team to the other, the team that has lost it is fractionally out of position. That’s when you need to move play forward in three quick passes. But England’s galloping midfielders do that too rarely. That’s one reason England has gotten so little use out of Michael Owen—the ultimate “turnover” striker—since his hat trick in Munich in 2001. Nor has England found much purpose for the nippy counterattackers Theo Walcott and Aaron Lennon, beyond Walcott’s hat trick in Croatia in 2008. England just doesn’t open spaces for its speedsters with three swift passes. The image of England in the matches it loses is either hefty center-backs punting the ball upfield or Gerrard lumbering forward with it.

Most good coaches surely know that Lampard and Gerrard do too much. The first time Rafael Benitez met Gerrard, he told him, “I’ve watched your games on video. Your problem is you run around too much.” Jamie Carragher, present in the room, recalls that he “stared at Stevie and could see the deflation.” After all, running around is precisely what Gerrard has always been praised for. English fans love it. A month after the World Cup of 2010,
I attended a meeting of the LondonEnglandFans supporters’ club, and the fans themselves briefly debated whether they shared any blame for England’s failure in South Africa. One woman noted that when England was passing the ball around at the back, fans would shout, “Get it forward!” or “Get stuck in!” They tended to like players who ran around a lot. So do the fearsome tabloids. Lampard and Gerrard are responding to English cues. At the
moment suprême
, they will tend to forget the words of Hiddink and Benitez (and presumably Fabio Capello) and do too much.

Yet Lampard and Gerrard perform better with Chelsea and Liverpool than they do with England. I asked Hiddink why that might be. He raised the issue of “coaching” on the field. At big clubs, great players coach wayward colleagues: “Drop back!” “Take it easy,” or simply, “Stop running around so much and stay in your zone.” At Chelsea or Liverpool, experienced continental players reinforce the coach’s message in real time. But watching England labor in South Africa, Hiddink had noticed almost none of that. He said, “If you look at [Gareth] Barry, he could have played more intelligently. He ends up swimming because he’s not coaching in midfield, and so is forced into playing left-back or right-back. You don’t see that internal coordination in the English team. The center of your team, defensive midfield and central defense, is really the nerve center. England wasn’t sending out any impulses saying, ‘This is how we must do it.’ You can see if coaching is happening, and there was none or almost none.”

Hiddink thought he knew why that didn’t happen. Players like Lampard and Gerrard had become demigods in their own country, he pointed out. “At a certain point players get a status—sometimes rightly, sometimes forced—that creates a sort of screen around them. Others think, ‘Oh, I can’t touch him or make demands on someone who’s such a big name in England.’” The demigods themselves might want to be coached, Hiddink said, but their teammates don’t dare. And so the demigods are allowed to run around too much.

Lampard’s flaw—and the golden generation’s—isn’t a lack of spirit. It’s an excess of it.

October 2010

F
rank Lampard emerges naked from the showers after a training session with Chelsea. Suddenly, his new manager, José Mourinho, pops up and looks him meaningfully in the eye. “All right, boss?” asks Lampard

“You are the best player in the world,” replies Mourinho.

The naked player doesn’t know quite what to say.

“You,” continues Mourinho, “are the best player in the world. But now you need to prove it and win trophies. You understand?”

Now Lampard is thrilled or, as he recalls in his autobiography, “walking on air.” He calls his mother to tell her what Mourinho said.

“Yes,” she replies, “I already knew you were the best in the world.”

For the next couple of days, says Lampard, “I felt ten feet tall and trained harder than ever. Everything I tried came off.” Mourinho had actually lifted him.

It’s one of the odder scenes in this collection of autobiographies by five leading members of England’s golden generation.
³
Players’ autobiographies are a much-derided genre—“Is there a more debased literary currency?” asks the game’s chief historian, David Goldblatt—and certainly there was something bizarre about HarperCollins paying Wayne Rooney $9 million for his story in five volumes, only one fewer than Winston Churchill’s complete history of World War II. “Hopefully there will be a lot of things to read about,” said Rooney, signing his contract in tracksuit bottoms and a hood.

Yet the strange thing is: There
are
a lot of things to read about in these books. Even though most of them didn’t sell and are already out of print, taken together they illuminate what it is like to be a leading English player today.

Of course, some of the books are worse than others. You close Ashley Cole’s
My Defence
feeling dirty and stupid for having read it, your main emotion surprise that his agent let him write it. Rooney’s book reads a bit like an essay that a child has been forced to write in elementary school. Even with family photographs and school reports, he can barely get up to book length. The experience must have been a comedown for his ghostwriter, Hunter Davies, a former biographer of the Beatles (he got to sit in on Lennon and McCartney’s composing sessions) and of Wordsworth (a sort of eighteenth-century forebear of Rooney’s). Yet even Cole’s and Rooney’s books reveal a lot about their subjects, sometimes inadvertently. Lampard’s book is the dullest and smuggest of the five, yet that fact too seems to be a true reflection of the man as well as of his ghostwriter.

All these five players already have very clear public images, shaped by the tabloid newspapers that they despise (yet read). This is their chance to reach us without their words getting distorted. That must have been why they wrote these books. Only Rooney presumably did it for the money; the others can scarcely have been paid enough even to feed a journalist.

Lampard, Gerrard, and Carragher are positively eager to speak to us. It’s questionable how many people need five hundred pages of Jamie Carragher, but his is the best of these books. In part,
Carra
is a reflection on the whole genre. “I’ve read most players’ autobiographies,” he claims. “I had a fair idea in my mind what makes a good read.” Lampard is keen to demonstrate that he was in the right in every dispute of his career, and Gerrard’s effort was actually named Sports Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. These three men gave us more pages than their publishers probably wanted. In other words, players’ autobiographies aren’t all empty. The very fact that agents, lawyers, and club media officers will have taken a red pencil to every line helps the players speak. They can trust this medium. Usually, the most we get from them is thirty seconds of platitudes after a match. These books are the longest public statements that they will make during their careers.

Reading them, you get to know these players rather as they seem to get to know each other during long weeks in team hotels abroad before England gets eliminated. “I suppose that’s the upside of boredom,” Cole reflects. “It makes you talk more and get to know each other better. I came away from Germany knowing more about Stevie Gerrard, Wazza and Lamps than I ever
did.” These books help you understand the stages of a player’s life, from boyhood to media victim. And they even make you feel slightly sorry for these men (though perhaps not for Cole).

“I was nearly called Adrian” are the first words of Rooney’s projected five volumes. “That was what my father wanted. A bit posh, I suppose, and doesn’t quite sound like me. In the end, though, my mum talked my Dad out of it.”

All these books are keen to establish the author’s social origins at once: as a member of a tight-knit, loving working-class family. The message is that however much the player earns per week, he remains anchored and authentic. Early on in each book, each writer offers a long paean to his family. “I’m looking for my Mum in the jubilant crowd” is how Cole opens his story, while Lampard tells us he has inherited “my Mum’s perception, humanity and sensitivity,” and “my Dad’s ambition, hard work and vision.” Gerrard, like Rooney, has happy memories of childhood summer vacations at Butlins with the extended family.

You inevitably suspect pretense, yet it makes sense that the players should feel this way. After all, childhood in the family home was about the only time in their lives that they were not treated as celebrities. Only then did people relate naturally to them. Almost everyone they meet afterward has ulterior motives for the relationship. No wonder the players feel nostalgic for childhood. “Family means everything to me, all together, sitting around and laughing, under one roof,” says Gerrard. “However crazy my life became with Liverpool and England, I wanted that protective wall of my family around me.”

Reading about their origins is strangely repetitive in another way, too: The five of them between them come from just two regions, Liverpool and East London. (The Northeast seems to have had its day as a source of English talent.) Cole’s first club, Senrab in the East End of London, also produced Ledley King, Lee Bowyer, John Terry, and Bobby Zamora; Lampard played for Senrab’s local rival, Heath Park, in greener Essex suburbia. Another future member of the golden generation soon shows up, too. When Lampard is thirteen or fourteen and playing for West Ham, he is sent to the training pitch
to “watch a young boy play because he was so good. We were told he was the best prospect to come to the club in years.” Joe Cole was ten at the time.

By that sort of age, the players are spending much of their time among future professionals. Lampard has been doing so since birth: his father is Frank Lampard Sr., the West Ham stalwart, his uncle is Harry Redknapp, and his elder cousin is the future England international Jamie Redknapp. Lampard grows up playing keep-away with Jamie in Uncle Harry’s garden and going to the local park for fierce private training sessions with his dad, who also scouts Rio Ferdinand for West Ham. (Ferdinand and the other children in his neighborhood are most impressed when Lampard Sr. pulls up at his family apartment in poor Peckham in a black Mercedes.) Sometimes Bobby Moore drops by the Lampard home for tea, biscuits, and a chat about soccer. “It never occurred to me,” Lampard says, “that the man who had lifted the World Cup as captain of England was sitting on my couch.”

The other players break into this world not much later. At eight, Gerrard is already training at Liverpool with Jason Koumas and a brilliant goalscorer named Michael Owen, who soon becomes a close friend. Cole and Rooney join the respective academies of Arsenal and Everton at nine, though all these five players seem to have played most of their early soccer informally with friends; you can’t get to the 10,000 hours of practice required to achieve mastery if you rely on the academy. Lampard is underwhelmed by West Ham’s famous academy anyway, even if around this time it also produced Michael Carrick, Jermain Defoe, and Glen Johnson, the supporting cast of the golden generation.

By their teens, the five authors are already on a career track. The schoolboy Gerrard is courted by Alex Ferguson (“top man,” adds Gerrard), and letters from other clubs keep landing on the family doormat. A crucial staging post—their equivalent of university entrance exams—is trying to get into the then national academy at Lilleshall. Gerrard is rejected. “Me! Captain of Liverpool Boys! Rated by Liverpool!” He admits that the brush-off hurts to this day. Lampard doesn’t get in, either, but curiously their contemporary Carragher does. Pretty soon, Carragher makes his debut for England schoolboys playing up front (“A shy striker called Emile Heskey [sat] on the bench”). Of course, Carra scores, “the Italian keeper Gianluigi Buff on having no answer to my lethal finishing.”

With all this going on, school cannot matter much. The five are not necessarily stupid—well, Carragher, Lampard, and Gerrard aren’t. Rather, as budding stars they are taught to view anything outside soccer as a distraction. That’s why players are seldom complete human beings. The only one of the five who seems to show any interest in his education is Lampard, who (almost uniquely among England players since World War I) attends private school. One of several kids “from ‘new money’” at exclusive Brentwood in Essex, he plays soccer matches at schools like Eton. However, he is keen to emphasize to the reader that he was pretty nifty with a book, too. Aged sixteen he gets a very impressive ten General Certificates of Secondary Education, including, famously, a starred A in Latin, before Lampard Sr. tells him to leave school to concentrate on soccer.

None of the four others need much encouraging. Life away from soccer doesn’t seem a natural home for any of them: Gerrard, for instance, “never had many mates” at secondary school but did at Liverpool FC. He passes nine General Certificates of Secondary Education, yet spends his last school exam pondering “exactly how I would burn my uniform.” Most of Rooney’s school reports (perhaps the best thing in his book, and one unarguable benefit of New Labour’s famous “targets”) describe him as a popular and sociable child. However, his results are disappointing, even in the one subject where you would think he’d do quite well. At eleven, he gets a B for phys ed, with the comment, “wayne is a very agile sportsman who’s worked hard throughout the year. he needs to maintain this level of work next year.” What does it take to get an A in PE?

Rooney leaves school and becomes a star. (He makes his debut for Everton at sixteen years and ten months, yet is disappointed that the club waited so long.) The other four leave school and become apprentices. “Only now do I realize that it was one of the happiest times of my career, a life without the constant pressure I would come to know later,” says Lampard. Gerrard feels much the same way. He particularly likes the practical jokes of the locker room. The boys at Liverpool cut off bits of each others’ socks, punish each other for wearing unfashionable clothes, hit each other with towels, and lock up the club podiatrist for three hours. It’s all hilarious (especially when the furious podiatrist leaves his job), except sometimes when it isn’t. Gerrard writes: “If someone couldn’t take the banter or a prank, arguments would
erupt. Rucks were part of my daily life. If I ruined someone’s trainers and they weren’t happy, I reacted. Pushing and shouting broke out. ‘Can’t you fucking well take a joke?’ I’d scream at Greggo or Wrighty . . .”