The problems will increase. There will be more allegations of rape and sexual assault and there will be more people in the situation I have found myself in more than once, of wanting to cry out for help but not knowing how to do it. Clubs treat their players like children not fit to take responsibility for anything, so when they let them off the leash, they simply don’t know how to make the right decisions.
Show me a young athlete who says his head would not be turned by beautiful women throwing themselves at him and I will show you a liar. All the younger players I know at Premiership clubs are shagging for fun. Availability is unlimited. It’s a free bar. Open all hours. Drink until you drop and the well will never run dry. You think it’s a dream until you find out that it’s actually a nightmare. And you’re trapped in it because it’s distorted your idea of what is required to hold down a regular relationship.
I should know. I started seeing Estelle, who became my wife and from whom I am now estranged, about seven years ago, and throughout all that time I have seen other people. At first it was because we were only supposed to be friends. However, she was always there for me, always supporting me, and we became lovers. But I never knew whether I loved her in a way that really should have stayed platonic or whether I was in love with her. Until soon before we got married, we never really formalised our relationship. Not in my mind, anyway. And that left its own poisonous legacy.
Estelle was there in the background when I was seeing Ulrika Jonsson and Davina McCall and Kirsty Gallagher. Estelle was constant. She was loyal. She stuck by me. But she knew how promiscuous I was. She knew how many women I was sleeping with. She knew that effectively I was choosing them above her. So, of course, when we eventually settled down, even when we had our daughter, Mia, she could not forget that. She could not rid herself of those images and those memories. She was paranoid about the fact that I would be unfaithful to her. She didn’t like the idea of me going to parties without her because she had seen me in action. She is a Cannock girl and she doesn’t like the bright lights. And I want to be satisfied with that but I’m never quite sure if I am. Part of me yearns for the serenity of a home environment. Part of me still enjoys elements of the London scene. When I was caught dogging, that confirmed all Estelle’s worst fears and she walked out.
Amid the chaos of my promiscuity, it was difficult to determine where some relationships ended and others began. Often, I would have a couple of girlfriends at a time. One relationship would hit a bad patch so I would start another one. Then the old relationship would be rekindled and the line between who I was going out with and who I was seeing on the side would become blurred beyond recognition.
That destroyed relationships that might have come to mean something more often than I would care to recount. It certainly finished my affair with Kirsty Gallagher, which was one of the relationships I managed to keep a secret. After we had been seeing each other for almost a year, she found out that Estelle was living at my house in Cannock, even though we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, and our affair fizzled out.
I often think now that that the relationship with Kirsty might have come to something, although I suppose I’m kidding myself there because being the way I am, nothing really ever comes to anything. It had started when I went to Fulham on loan for a few months at the beginning of the 1999–2000 season and got friendly with Stephen Hughes, the former Arsenal midfielder. He told me that Kirsty fancied me and I felt flattered. She was working as a sports presenter for Sky TV then and a lot of players drooled over her. I asked him to get her number but he said he couldn’t because she had sworn him to secrecy, and all she’d wanted him to tell me was that she was a Liverpool fan and she thought I’d been great when I was at Anfield.
I used to go to a club called Ten Rooms in Soho every week around that time, and within a couple of weeks of that conversation with Stephen Hughes I saw Kirsty in there with Gabby Yorath and Kenny Logan, the Scotland rugby international that Gabby went on to marry. I went over and started talking to her and asked her for her number. I might have been insecure in many ways but I wasn’t shy with women. She was a bit coy at first, but towards the end of the night she gave me that number.
We spent a lot of time together. She was living in a flat in Chiswick, in west London, and I would stay there two or three nights a week. She was very needy, too. She was polite and intelligent and unbelievably attractive and charismatic. In fact, back then she was generally perceived as the epitome of what was desirable in a woman: sultry, dark and very sexy. But sometimes she could seem like a little girl lost. Maybe that made us two of a kind.
We spent a bit of time clubbing but she was a very good golfer, too, not surprising since her dad, Bernard, was a former Ryder Cup player and former captain of the European Ryder Cup team. I remember one particular happy afternoon playing with her at the Belfry. I’m not a golfer but I could just about get round with my pride intact. We talked a lot while we were on the course and it was impossible not to be dazzled by how beautiful she was.
The first night I slept with her, we had been on an evening out with one of my mates and we had all gone back to stay at her mate’s flat, which was somewhere on the south bank of the Thames near the London Eye. Sometime during the night, she wandered out of the bedroom in her bra and a thong to make a cup of tea and my mate was lying there on the sofa, wide awake, staring at her with a daft grin on his face. She said it made her feel like Julia Roberts in that scene in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant’s housemate walks in on her as she’s lying in the bath.
She was an incredibly sexy and sexual woman. That first night, she did a few things with some Chocolate Fingers that have stopped me looking at them in quite the same way since. And even though she seemed shy in some ways, she wasn’t averse to experimenting with different things in the bedroom. One night we went out with a friend of hers, and we had all had a bit too much to drink by the time we got back to her mate’s flat. The friend fancied me and one thing led to another and the three of us ended up in bed together. It was a wild, wild night.
I felt very strongly for Kirsty but I never really gave her and me a proper chance because, once again, I failed to define what my relationship was with Estelle. In my own mind I wasn’t committed to either of them, I suppose. I just drifted into a no-man’s-land where the arrangement with Estelle stilted what might have developed with Kirsty. In a curious way, even though we were seeing each other for nearly a year, I never really thought of us as a couple. It was just another case of me letting a shot at a proper relationship slip away in a confusion of affairs.
When Kirsty found out about Estelle, she backed right away. I didn’t blame her. She never told me she didn’t want to see me any more but our sexual relationship turned into a platonic friendship.
That kind of duplicity was not unusual in my life. It was a mess of confused loyalties and diluted love. It was a theme that ran through my existence. I lost my first long-term girlfriend, Lotta, soon after I joined Forest because she grew tired of my infidelities. I had been going out with her for two years since I joined Crystal Palace. I had lived at her mum’s house. Her family had become my family and she had moved up to the Midlands to live with me when I went to Forest. And still I couldn’t repay her with loyalty.
One day in the April of 1995, she called me and said she was going home to Croydon for the weekend. She would do that quite regularly so when I got back to Cannock I didn’t realise anything was wrong. I had a little sleep and when I got up I opened one of the cupboards and all Lotta’s clothes had gone. I looked around a bit more and all her college books had gone, too. I rang her mum and she said that Lotta had just had enough of my womanising. She could hear how upset I was, but she said that if I was so fond of her daughter then why had I been unfaithful to her.
I was 24 and it was the first time I can remember feeling out of control of a situation. I was consumed by pain and hurt. I drove down to Croydon and begged her to come back but she stuck to her guns. Even though I knew she was right, even though I knew I had seen dozens of girls behind her back, I still found it desperately hard to reconcile in my own mind the fact that I had lost her. It might seem unreasonable, but I was distraught.
When I got back from Croydon, I went up and sat in my bedroom, and after a couple of minutes’ staring into