I dealt with it like I’d dealt with a lot of other setbacks: I threw myself into football. I played morning, noon and night, training and playing, training and playing, squeezing in a Saturday morning job on a fruit and veg stall and my A-level homework when I could. And I had a stellar season that year. By then, I was playing for a team called St Paul’s who I thought were the best team in Jersey. I played for their juniors and their seniors and that year both sides won the Jersey league and qualified to play for a Cup called the Upton against the winners of the junior and senior leagues in Guernsey. I won the junior and the senior Upton that year and I also represented the island at junior and senior level against Guernsey in a competition called the Muratti. We won both of those, too. So I won six major trophies. From the outside, it might sound a bit like Channel Islands small fry but for us it was a big deal and it formed an important part of the Channel Islands sporting calendar. It made me a bit of a schoolboy phenomenon in Jersey because nobody before had ever accomplished what I had that season.
Some time that summer, the Chelsea manager, John Hollins, came down to Jersey to present the end of season prizes for the island’s football clubs. I wasn’t eligible for the Player of the Year award for the senior team because I was under age so I wasn’t even at the ceremony. However, people kept going up to John and telling him about me and all these records I’d set in Jersey football. ‘If he’s as good as you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘I better get him over and have a look at him.’ He wrote my name down on the back of a match box next to the phone number of an official of St Paul’s. When he got back to Chelsea, he made the call and in July 1987, they contacted my dad.
I went over for a week’s trial and at the end of it, they offered me a professional contract. There was still one more hurdle to overcome, though. I’d failed my biology A-level and my dad asked John Hollins if he would mind if I re-sat it that November and postponed joining Chelsea until December. That was pretty ballsy of my dad and my heart was in my mouth because I thought Chelsea might be offended. But John Hollins didn’t seem to mind and it was all agreed.
So, eventually, I left Jersey. I didn’t feel I had to be on the island any more. I still loved it but my mum’s death gave me a real determination to get away and fulfil my ambitions. A lot of people who grow up in Jersey feel they would miss the island if they moved to the mainland but emotionally, I was out of there. I couldn’t change what had happened. If only I had known then what I know now. But then we can all look back and regret things. It’s how we deal with them that is important. Perhaps it will help me be an ear for someone who has been through a similar thing. Perhaps it’s already making me value my children with an extra keenness. My mum’s death changed many things in my life but back then, it made me feel as though I had to carve out a life for myself away from Jersey. I felt like I was on a mission.
In theory Chelsea’s training ground at Harlington should have felt as though it was at the centre of the modern world. It was a few hundred yards south of the M4. You could hear the hum of the traffic streaming in and out of the capital when you walked from your car to the changing rooms. On the other side, it was bounded by the runways at Heathrow. You could see the planes queuing up to land as they glided in over the west London suburbs, and the roar from Concorde as it took off sometimes stopped training in its tracks. Harlington and being part of Chelsea Football Club should have felt like a launch pad. It should have felt like a hub. But to me, it was a desolate place. It was no man’s land.
I saw it first in the summer of 1987 when John Hollins, who was a manager heading into a storm, invited me over for a week’s trial. I arrived so full of energy and enthusiasm and determination. It makes me smile now to think of how naive and raw I was. I ran myself into the ground that week. I was determined to seize my opportunity – I thought I might never get another. So I hurtled around like a madman in training and the first teamers loved it. They probably recognized that wide-eyed enthusiasm from the time they had it, the time before the routine of being a professional footballer gripped them.
One of the most popular training drills was for the first team to form a big circle and stick one of the trialists in the middle of it. We had to try and get the ball off them and they had immense amounts of fun with that. They were like matadors with a young bull. I charged around and flew at them. They knew they had a live one. They were doing olés every time they touched it and kept the ball away from me. There were cheers and whoops. Roy Wegerle, who also played for Blackburn, QPR, Luton and the USA and was one of the most skilful players I’ve ever seen, did this trick where he received the ball on his right foot, dragged it behind his left foot and then flicked it out the other side all in one movement. I couldn’t get anywhere near the ball. Every day that week, I was utterly exhausted at the end of training. I gave it absolutely everything.
After seven days, I went back to Jersey. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me saying that I had failed one of my A-levels. The amount of football I had been playing that year, it was a miracle I could even read. A few days later, John Hollins phoned my dad and said they wanted to offer me a contract. I couldn’t believe it. But my priorities were slightly different to a lot of footballers even then: my dad told John that I wanted to resit my biology A-level that November and that I’d like to postpone joining the club until then. John was relaxed about it. It wasn’t as if he was planning to rush me into the first team. So he said that was fine. I re-took biology and passed it and at the beginning of December I became a Chelsea player. I had just turned nineteen.
The club was going through a difficult period and its future was uncertain. Ken Bates, the chairman, was fighting to buy Stamford Bridge and save it from the developers. John Hollins was a good manager but I soon realized that he was a gentle man in charge of a very strong dressing room and that that was not a good combination. There was nothing sophisticated about Chelsea in those days, certainly not among the players. It was staffed by tough, unyielding men some of whom played hard and drank hard and then came to training. These men did not eat pasta salads and florets of broccoli.
These men were not King’s Road dandies like Alan Hudson and Peter Osgood and the playboys of a previous Chelsea generation. I was scared witless of some of them. There was a bloke called John McNaught, a really rough, tough, Scottish central defender who was literally hardnosed. He was terrifying. He only played thirteen times for the first team but I played plenty of reserve football with him. Pat Nevin, who I respected, liked McNaught for his honesty but he just scared me rigid.
Some of my team-mates in club football in Jersey had played their football in Scotland and Wales and Ireland so it wasn’t as if people like McNaught and Peter Nicholas, when he arrived later, were aliens to me. Nonetheless it amazed me that people like them were professional players. I was expecting professional footballers to be professional in every sense of the word but there were players there for whom football was all about the lifestyle off the pitch. Their work had to fit into their lifestyle rather than the other way around. McNaught would arrive in the morning a bit hungover and ragged. You could tell he had been out. He would turn up late for reserve games. He was a good centre-half, tough as old boots, but I was taken aback by his approach. I thought that if you were professional, you needed to be in top condition.