Ray was the ultimate grafter. Even at 40, he still trained like a fucking demon. The only other person who got near him for intensity, in my experience, was Archie Gemmill at Nottingham Forest. Ray couldn’t let go. He had to prove he was still a player. Had to prove he was still as fit as all of us. So for him to see a lazy, black, eminently talented player come on and score a couple of goals for the youth team as a late substitute used to infuriate him.
The bloke was five foot nothing. He had played for Carlisle for five years between 1971 and 1976, a defensive midfielder who was the cornerstone of the success they enjoyed in that period, which even took them into the top flight. He was popular with the fans because of the effort he put in, but people told me the senior pros used to laugh at him because he was this little fucking sergeant major type figure. He was never racist. He didn’t even shout, really. That was what made him so sinister. He would sidle up to me and whisper what he wanted me to do in my ear. I hated him, but most of all he terrified me. He made my life a misery. He always made a point of leaving that little gap between letting me walk away at the end of a session and then calling me back for more. It was psychological torture. And it was only me. It was public humiliation in front of the rest of the lads. I have tried to take my rawness into account, but that little man went out of his way, time and time again, to fuck with my mind.
He would get me to come in an hour before the rest of the lads. He seemed to like the ones who were grafters, particularly a group of three or four who had been released by Celtic. They were all hard-working midfielders. But to me, whether you are the laziest fucker on earth or whether you are a grafter, a coach should do all he can to get the best out of you. That was not quite how Ray saw it. He tormented me but he didn’t get me any fitter.
His favourite mode of torture was to get me to mop the changing rooms at Fellows Park. He developed this fiendish system where he would hide penny-pieces in obscure places like on the outside of the U-bend behind the toilet or on top of the cistern. If you missed one of these penny-pieces he took it as a sign you hadn’t done the job properly and you had to start again. It was pathetic. It was medieval shit. I still feel sad I had to go through it all. I still feel sad that it left its mark on me.
He still haunts me. I think about him and what he did to me most days. I’m still terrified of him. I met him once in New York when I was there with Ulrika. We were in Bloomingdales in the Ralph Lauren section and I caught sight of this little fucking dickhead stretching up, trying to reach some of the T-shirts on the top shelf. It was Ray. He had knitted hair that sprawled over his head like a cardigan. Somehow, he sensed somebody looking at him and turned round. ‘All right, big man,’ he said. I had to get out of there. I was shaking with anger and fear. There I was, a grown man, still brought low by this guy. Ulrika wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
I never complained about him or objected to any of this treatment to his face. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. One day, I thought God had smiled on me because Ray keeled over and had a heart attack on the training pitch. Right there in front of me. It felt like divine retribution. The ambulance came for him and carted him off to hospital, us all standing there in our dirty kits watching. I had never been so happy in my entire fucking life. There was the possibility that he might die, but at the very least we would be rid of him for a few months.
He didn’t die. Little fuckers like him never do. But I thought there was still hope. When he came back, Tommy Coakley, the first-team manager, got the sack and Ray was promoted to caretaker boss. I wished fervently he would be given the post permanently or that the new guy would keep him on as his assistant, but, of course, no one could be that stupid. John Barnwell got the job and booted him back down to the youth team and the torment began all over again.
It was a systematic attempt to break me, and it worked. Instead of leaving me to do the extra work he gave me by myself, he made the other lads stay, too, to watch me. One day, the first team were travelling to an away match and most of the reserve side had gone with them, so the youth team played in the reserve match that night. Except me. I was the only one left out. I had to stay behind and sweep the stands at Fellows Park. By myself.
I wasn’t getting much of a run in the team. I was always on the bench. If I got on, I usually scored. But I was getting more and more unhappy. I dreaded waking up in the morning because I was so scared of what the day was going to hold. Often, I wished I would die in the night just so I could avoid Ray the next day. Sometimes, even if I made it to Fellows Park in the morning I’d head for the phone box outside the ground and call my mum in tears.
In the end, I just called it a day. Ray getting the youth-team job back finished me. I went in to see John Barnwell, said it wasn’t working out and asked him if I could be released from my contract. He was very good about it. I thought I was free of Ray then, but Ray never left me really. I went on to Wolves as an apprentice and I scored 18 goals in 20 games for the reserves. I was devastated when they let me go after less than a season there, but when Graham Turner (who was the manager then) released me, one of the reasons he gave was my inconsistent appearance record at training.
And it was true. Sometimes I just didn’t go in. It wasn’t as if I was skiving off so I could do something else. I didn’t go out on the piss or smoke fags or go in to Birmingham. I just stayed indoors. I’d developed some mental block at Walsall. Ray had infected me. It was the same at Forest. There were four or five occasions when I didn’t go in. Liverpool was exactly the same. It was very unprofessional but I had my reasons.
In training, I loved five-a-sides and I liked to do practical, functional stuff that was relevant to my game. I wanted people putting crosses in for me. I wanted to try to hone my finishing. I wanted to be put in situations where I could take people on. I wasn’t like most of the players because most players are low maintenance when it comes to training. They do what they are told. If they are told to lick their own arsehole, they’ll lick it. No questions asked. But if I was told to do something mundane like sidefoot volley a ball back to someone who kept on throwing it to you time after time from a few yards away, I lost interest. I could do that standing on my head. The Gareth Southgates of this world did it because it could genuinely enhance their game. But for me, that kind of exercise was like white noise. It was minutiae. Doing stuff like running across the width of the pitch doing sidefoot volleys was a piece of piss so I’d just switch off.
Perhaps I was a victim of the increasing premium on supreme physical fitness. I have never been the fittest. Somebody like Robbie Savage could go six months without training, then go on a long run tomorrow and dash through it like a whippet. But if I do long fitness stuff, I just get bored. And if I was either uninspired or if something had happened in my personal life, sometimes I would decide to skip training.
If you get an intelligent coach like Arsene Wenger, he knows how to manage his players. I look at someone like Thierry Henry and think he must have his days sometimes when he can be temperamental. But some of the sessions at Arsenal only last 45 minutes. When I was at Palace, most of them went on for three hours. If you knew that was coming, the temptation was to sit at home and think ‘fuck that’.
My curse is that I’ve always been blessed with a great touch. I don’t need to practise my ball skills. I was born with them. I’m never going to lose them. If someone injected me with a fitness drug and I walked out in the Arsenal team or the Liverpool team tomorrow, no one would ever know that I had not played football for three years. I can guarantee that. But if you took an average player who had been out for the same length of time, you could forget about giving them a ball. You might as well give them a bag of cement to kick around.
The fittest I have ever been was at Nottingham Forest. We had a coach there called Pete Edwards. We used to take the piss out of him because he was a muscle man, but he was superb. He organised very high intensity, short-burst sessions with balls in match environments. Our warm-ups were the equivalent of full sessions for other clubs, but when we finished our matches there was not one Forest player who looked as though he had just played 90 minutes.
It makes me smile now to think of how fit I was then. In my current state, energy is about as hard to find as rocking-horse shit, but back