Maybe I just don’t look like I’m trying. Sometimes, it clearly appears as if I don’t care. Glenn Hoddle criticised me once in training before England’s World Cup qualifying tie in Rome in 1997. The forwards were queueing up for finishing practice and Ian Wright had just lunged for a cross and prodded it in. When it was my turn, the cross came in and it just evaded me. I didn’t lunge for it because I wouldn’t have got it anyway. ‘You see,’ Hoddle shouted. ‘You see, that’s the difference between you and Wrighty. Wrighty lunged for it even in training. You didn’t lunge for it.’ What a ridiculous thing to say. The problem with Hoddle was that he would get exasperated by people who couldn’t do what he had once been able to do. He would still run around the training pitch, tapping the ground as he ran with the point of his boot like a fucking dick. That just lost him the respect of the players.
The press called Hoddle’s assistant, John Gorman, ‘Coneman’. There’s always a fucking Coneman but Gorman acted like a pre-pubescent teenager, just excited to be there. He always called me ‘big man’, too, and tried to give the impression he knew what was going on. But if I’d asked him anything important, he would have shit himself and hedged around it. He knew halves of bits of stuff that were discussed in the bar late at night. But, really, that amounted to nothing. His role meant not asking Glenn any awkward questions. He was a yes man.
And football’s full of them. Full of people scared to be different. Full of people only too happy to let you down and turn you into a fall guy. Something as simple and as harmless as heading home to Cannock after training was enough to put me out there in freak-show territory at a string of clubs. Football doesn’t deal very well with anybody who strays from the norm. It’s suspicious of anyone who doesn’t aspire to the norm. Think of what happened to Graeme Le Saux just because he read the Guardian and said he liked going to see art-house movies now and again. Football gave its snap judgement: the guy must be a faggot.
Football’s full of contradictions and hypocrisies like that. The players moan about the media, and the tabloids in particular, but they all read The Sun and the Mirror. If they hate the tabloids so much, why don’t they read the Guardian or The Times? They’re too scared to be different. Worried they might get the piss ripped out of them for being a lah-di-dah smart-arse gay boy. Much easier to fit in and toe the party line and do what the others do. Much easier to conform.
It wasn’t that I had a problem with authority. I just had a problem with bad management. I couldn’t understand why a football club would spend millions and millions of pounds on a new asset and then not try to get the best out of them. Clubs knew what they were getting when they bought me, so why didn’t they make plans for me? Why do you break the British transfer record for a player and then try and force him into a style of football that is foreign to him?
From Ray Train at the start to Raddy Antic at the close of my career with Real Oviedo, I feel I have been ill-served by the men who have been in a position of power over me. I know there’s a danger of that sounding self-righteous and self-pitying but it was also business suicide on the part of the clubs. There have been honourable exceptions like Colin Murphy and Barry Fry, my two managers at Southend, and Martin O’Neill at Leicester, but for the most part these men who had often paid lavish amounts of money to bring me to their club gave every impression of being disappointed they had signed an individual and not an automaton.
That was one of the things that shortened my life as a footballer. In the end, I’d just had enough of betrayal and bullshit and double-speak and the empty friendships that flourish in football dressing-rooms and die the moment you move on to another club. That kind of friendship is no friendship at all, and by the time I had reached my late twenties I had grown weary of it. By the end, I’d had enough of being treated like a circus curiosity, the sensitive, difficult footballer no one could manage.
Football’s full of people who are scared to challenge you. By that, I don’t mean it’s full of people scared to bollock you. There are plenty of men who think that’s enough to establish their authority. But to gain authority over me, you have to interest me, and football’s full of people taking the safe option, full of coaches putting on piss-poor training sessions for men who are supposed to be trained athletes every week of the year. There’s too much uniformity. Not enough variety. Too many players with ability are allowed to stagnate. As a player, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle seeking worthwhile stimulation from training.
But maybe the clubs were fighting a losing battle with me, too. I know now that I have been suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder since I was young. It’s called Borderline because it was first used to describe people who lived on that edge between psychosis and neurosis. That’s where I live. Right on that line. I sit astride it. I exhibit all the symptoms. I’m a textbook study in this particular offshoot of being fucked up.
You’ll recognise me, and the way my career has fallen away at times when it should have kicked on, from some of the Borderline sufferer’s traits. The chronic disturbance with self, others and society. The ambivalence towards all directions, aims and goals. I didn’t have the hunger other players have. Just didn’t have it. Not always, but sometimes. Not because I was lazy but because it just didn’t feel right to me to behave in certain ways at certain times.
One of the most common characteristics of someone with BPD is the subconscious search for different states of chaos. In my personal life and in my football career, I have gravitated towards situations that are bound to end in schism and conflict. Other people try and avoid discord. My illness propels me towards it. One way or another, we always seem to find each other. We like hanging out together.
People look at me and scoff at this idea that I’ve got any sort of mental problem, partly because I’ve got a lot of money, which most people associate with happiness, and partly because they can’t see me doing anything extreme like playing paintball in my front room or throwing cats into trees. I wish that made me normal. I really do.
Let me try and give you an idea of how my mind can torture me just as surely as if I was strapped to the rack in one of the seven circles of Hell. Maybe you’ll start to see why the longest time I ever spent at one club was two full seasons. Maybe you’ll start to see why it often ended in tears. Maybe you’ll start to understand why I can’t hold down a steady relationship with a woman, why I flit from one to another like a honeybee.
I feel I must be loved by all the important people in my life at all times or else I am worthless. I must be completely competent in all ways if I am to consider myself to be a worthwhile person.
I feel nobody cares about me as much as I care about them, so I always lose everyone I care about, despite the desperate things I do to try to stop them from leaving me.
I have difficulty controlling anger. I have chronic feelings of emptiness and worthlessness. I exhibit recurrent suicidal behaviour. I’m reckless sexually.
When I am alone, I become nobody and nothing. When I am alone, when I have no work to structure my day, I take to my bed. Since I stopped playing football, apart from my work for Five Live, I have slept for three years.
I will only be happy when I find an all-giving, perfect person to love me and take care of me no matter what. But if someone like that loves me, then something must be wrong with them.
My life, like that of most sufferers from Borderline Personality Disorder, has been defined by a pervasive pattern of unstable relationships and a tendency to act on impulse. Since I used to wait by the window at night for my mother to come home from the swimming baths, I have always made frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, another BPD classic trait.
One passage from a book by a guy called Jerry Kreisman, called I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me, seemed unusually relevant to my behaviour and my failure to make anything, from a relationship to a spell at a football club, more than ephemeral. ‘The world of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, Dr