Stan isn’t like him. Just because he has been a womaniser doesn’t mean he is like him. Stan has got friends. Stan tries to do his best for others. I was ashamed of him when he hit Ulrika but that’s the only time I have been ashamed of him. I had always pleaded with him, ‘be kind to ladies’. But that one incident doesn’t make him like his dad. Not by a million miles.
I know wives who have been victims of violent husbands sometimes say this, but in many ways I blame myself. You see, I never loved Stan’s dad. Even my first husband, I never missed him after I left him. I think that’s just my way. Perhaps it’s just that I never met the right fella, but I don’t think I’m capable of loving anybody apart from my kids.
I’ve never tried to find my dad. But just after Christmas last year, he found me. He sent me an e-mail after I’d written a piece in the Daily Mirror touching on some of the abuse he had handed out to my mum. He said that he considered I was lost to the black side of my family and that I had been corrupted by white ways of thinking. He said that if I ever criticised the black race as a whole, I had better keep looking over my shoulder because he would be coming for me.
It made me laugh really. Partly because he hadn’t wasted any time trying to renew my acquaintance ten years or so ago when he suddenly realised I might be earning a decent wedge at Nottingham Forest. Funny that, isn’t it? Him and my Uncle Don, who’d combined to make life so difficult for my mother, united by a love of money that conquered all their hostility towards my mother in a trice. What a pair of sad bastards. Pathetic specimens of humanity.
I laughed, too, because my dad’s threats made me think of the time when I was at Forest and I had my hair dyed blonde. I looked like a right twat, to be honest with you. Frank Clark, the Forest manager, said I should spend more time on the training pitch and less at the hair salon and I might improve myself as a player. Point taken.
A couple of days later, I opened a newspaper to see a picture of my dad staring out at me as large as life. I hadn’t seen him, even a picture of him, for more than 10 years. He had a handsome face and he was wearing smart, elegant, Seventies-style clothes. He wasn’t being very complimentary about me, though. It was the same sort of stuff. How I was trying to turn myself into a white boy. How he had always wanted me to play cricket for the West Indies, not be a common footballer. What struck me most was that I did not feel a thing. No hurt. No hatred. No despair. Why should I after what he had done to us? Why should I after the legacy he had bequeathed to me? If he had a soul left, my dad had just sold it. And I didn’t feel a thing.
Everybody thinks I underachieved as a footballer. Everybody always says I could have done so much more. I could have been one of the greats. I could have had 80 caps for England instead of three. I could have been a stalwart of the national side. I could have won a hatful of medals and the admiration of my peers. They say it’s such a shame it turned out the way it did and that I walked away from football when I was 30, when I should have been in my prime, not burned out, my mind frazzled.
Well, I want to nail all that. I didn’t underachieve. I overachieved. I had a great career. I played for Aston Villa, the club I had always wanted to play for. I played for Liverpool, one of the most famous names in world football. And I played for my country. I scored the winning goal in the best match of the 1990s, Liverpool’s 4–3 win over Newcastle at Anfield in 1996. I scored goals that got people up off their seats. I was an entertainer. The fans of the clubs I played for loved me. That will always mean more to me than any one of the medals that public opinion has deemed the arbiter of success in a footballer’s career.
I don’t agree with that criteria. Alan Shearer has never won a winner’s medal in all his time at Newcastle, and yet the enjoyment and the satisfaction he has provided for Geordie supporters who worship him is worth a million medals. You don’t have to have little bits of silver hidden away in a bank vault somewhere to convince you that you were a success. All you need are memories that make your chest puff out and your eyes glisten when you think of them. That’s why I count helping to keep Southend United in the First Division in my season there as one of my finest achievements. That’s success to me.
But that’s not the main reason why I look back at my playing years with pride, and not with regret. If you want to understand me, if you want to put what I did in its proper context, you need to know what I was up against. You need to know what was going on inside my mind. You need to know about my thought processes and how they tortured me. You need to know about the mental illness I suffer from and how I have struggled to overcome that all my life. You need to know how I’m fighting Borderline Personality Disorder. And how, essentially, that often feels like a losing battle.
When people talk about me and how I wasted my talent, there are usually two favourite themes they trot out. Firstly, they talk about how, wherever I went, I never got on with my team-mates. They talk about me being a loner. They recall apocryphal stories about team-mates not celebrating goals with me. They repeat rumours about players not talking to me in the dressing room at Nottingham Forest. They say I was arrogant and aloof and that I was bad news for team spirit wherever I went.
The other strand is my attitude to training. The common perception is that I damned myself by being an incorrigibly lazy twat. The stories go that I left behind a trail of infuriated managers who had grown increasingly exasperated by my reluctance to fall into line on the training pitch. It’s almost like football was the fucking army and I was guilty of serial insubordination. Failing to obey some fuckwit officer who never had a tenth of my talent as a player and who catered his sessions to the lowest common denominator. Well, I’m not a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ person. I don’t respect automatons and drones.
If clubs failed to get the best out of me, that is their failure. Not mine. If they paid millions of pounds for me and then tossed me into the general pile of players, if they treated every personality alike rather than catering for individual needs, then why should they be surprised if someone like me doesn’t react well? Man-management isn’t rocket science, but because I was fragile mentally I needed loyalty and care. When I got that, at Southend, Nottingham Forest and Leicester, I flourished and the team prospered. When I didn’t get it, I withered.
Training and I have always been strange bedfellows. Part of that stems from the fact that my first experience of a professional club was mutilated by a horror of a human being called Ray Train, who was the youth-team coach at Walsall when I joined as an apprentice on £29 a week at the age of 17. Being an apprentice under Ray Train was like a baby coming out of the womb and the first thing it sees is people firing guns or battering the fuck out of each other. This was my first taste of professional football and training at a league club.
The man terrified me. It’s a strong word but I use it intentionally. He inspired terror in me. My first day under his tutelage set out the pattern for the rest of my career as far as a distaste for training goes. It was a template for cynicism about training. I still associate training with him. Even when I’m sitting in my car today outside the health club I use in Great Barr, I start to sweat and get the shakes before I go for a work-out because I associate working out with him.
That first day at Walsall was a beautiful, sunny day in June and I had caught two buses from our house in Cannock to get there early, one from Cannock to Walsall Bus Station, the other from there to Fellows Park, the predecessor to the Bescot Stadium. I got to the ground, washed the kit and swept up. Then we went over to the training ground and the first thing we did was a long cross-country run. And I struggled.
More than that, I struggled badly. I hadn’t done four to six weeks’ preparation. Nobody had told me I had to. I was lagging behind. I was so far behind everyone else you wouldn’t believe it, and from thereon in, Ray