The minute I signed my contract, I really appreciated what I was doing; I felt so fortunate. But with some of these players it was a way of life. They had grown up with it. They had always gone out and they had still made it. I didn’t feel the two were compatible for me. I knew that if I did that, I’d be shot to pieces; I knew I couldn’t afford to do it. To be honest, I didn’t want to do it, anyway: it wasn’t me.
I found it hard to make good friends at Chelsea. I was caught between the apprentices and the battle-hardened professionals. That’s what I mean about the no man’s land. I hadn’t come up through the ranks at the club with good apprentices like Jason Cundy, David Lee, Damian Matthew and Graham Stuart; and I was regarded as an over-earnest young swot by blokes like Nicholas, Steve Wicks, Kerry Dixon, David Speedie and Andy Townsend, the men who called the shots at the club and ran the dressing room.
I don’t know how much of my alienation at the club was about class. I have always shied away from class issues and I have never judged anyone on class. But I think I was judged. Some of the lads told me I was a bit posh. In England, unlike in Europe, I’ve always noticed that there seems to be an issue with young players who have been educated academically, purely because they are so much in the minority. Those players find it hardest to fit in, particularly when they are trying to fit in with a group of young lads. It has changed a lot now and improved but some footballers still have a very insular mentality.
Class wasn’t obvious in Jersey. I didn’t consider my family privileged in any particular way. I didn’t consider myself middle class. I wasn’t privately educated, for instance, but apart from the fact that my parents couldn’t have afforded it, there wasn’t really any need for private education in Jersey: there were no problems with lack of books or facilities. The class boundaries weren’t defined there. We all played rugby and football. I played football with some really street-wise guys in Jersey: builders, plumbers, electricians and other labourers. I grew up in a team that had quite a solid base of Scottish and northern English players and rather than scorning me, they took me under their wing.
But when I arrived at Chelsea, everything felt very closed off. There was a lot of intimidation. Suddenly I was involved constantly with people who were alien to me. In Jersey, most of my routine was about school and I only saw the lads now and again. Now, the main part of my life was about mixing with players at Chelsea with whom I had nothing in common. I wasn’t a poor little rich boy but I think some of them regarded me like that. Also, there was no respite from it: the micky-taking seemed absolutely relentless and it gets hard when you’re always the target.
It was a tough environment. By the time I got back there in December, the club was sliding towards relegation and John Hollins was in trouble. People look after themselves, particularly when a club is in trouble, and the lads ran the show. Anything went. The management did not solve the problems I had, they didn’t tackle my isolation – in fact, they helped to perpetuate it. Once, in training, we were sitting round in a big circle talking something through as a team and I said something that Bobby Campbell, who succeeded Hollins, took exception, too. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he joked. ‘You’re just the product of a German rape.’
He didn’t know that my mother had died, of course, so he couldn’t know quite how deeply that comment hurt me, but I was still astonished he could say something like that. He was clearly aware that the Channel Islands had been invaded by the Germans during the Second World War and I suppose that was his idea of humour. Comedy was different then: he was mates with Jimmy Tarbuck, and people like Freddie Starr were considered funny at the time. But Campbell didn’t make anyone laugh. Even the other lads looked surprised by what he said; most of them just looked at the floor. I raged inside. I didn’t say anything but I never forgot what he had said. It was part of the wider problem I felt I had at the club: no one ever stood up for me. You expect to feel nurtured when you go to a club like that but I wasn’t. I felt alone most of the time.
If you have not come through the ranks from fourteen or fifteen, it becomes more and more difficult to integrate. You’re an outsider to the players who have been there together for a few years. You’re a threat to them and you’re a threat to their mates. No one could put me into a definite category which also made them suspicious of me. That created mistrust. I didn’t relate or conform to fit into a group. I didn’t compromise enough. I challenged a lot of stereotypes and I didn’t have any allies. I couldn’t compete in a talk-off with the smarter guys because I wasn’t quick enough or confident enough to take them on verbally. I certainly couldn’t challenge them physically. If you have got a little group of players you are friendly with, you are safe within that group. I never had that. I had been at school with my friends and protected within that environment. There were confrontations as at any other school but I was popular and confident when I was in Jersey. However, as soon as I came into football, I was getting stick from all angles. Over a period of time, it wore me down.
Of course, there were happy moments within it all. I was there for more than five years in my first spell. I couldn’t have survived if there was no respite at all. There is always laughter at football clubs. There are incidents every day. Once, at the end of a five-a-side game on one of Harlington’s muddy pitches, David Lee slid in to prod home a goal. He opened his mouth to shout ‘Yeah’ as his momentum carried him into the goal and then suddenly he started clutching his face. One of his teeth had got hooked by the net as he shouted; it had twisted the tooth and flicked it clean out. I was doubled up with laughter like the rest of the lads. For some reason, we spent several minutes scrambling around in the mud trying to find it. What were we going to do with it? Give it to the tooth fairy? I don’t know if we thought they could screw it back in if we got it. But we never did.
The same thing happened to Craig Burley when he was an apprentice. He had two front teeth missing most of his career. Know how he did it? A ball came to him chest high and he got caught in two minds about whether to stoop to head it or do a falling volley. In the end, he did neither. In the end, he tried to knee it and he just kneed himself in the face and knocked out his two front teeth. Cue more scrabbling around in the mud. It was funny at the time.
I’m not saying I felt I had a lot of enemies at Chelsea, either. I liked lads like Graham Stuart and Damian Matthew and Jason Cundy. Graham and Jason used to pick me up from the bus stop at Hampton Court, near the digs in Kingston I’d moved into after I left Burnt Oak, and drive me into training. We got on fine and they used to laugh about what Indie band I’d been to see the night before. Some of the lads gave me a nickname, Berge, after the television detective Bergerac, who gave the impression that my beautiful island was riddled with violent crime.
Mostly, however, I struggled. Perhaps I was a bit homesick as well but I found many of the aspects of my new life intimidating and hostile. At Harlington there were separate dressing rooms and groups of players were separated off into their own little space. That made integration even harder. It was like a little passport control system. If you did well, you moved into the next dressing room and up the food chain as it were. The young lads were down at the far end, furthest away from the entrance. The first teamers were just inside the door. There was another one for the also-rans.
There was scope for moving onwards and upwards within that strange little hierarchy but places in the coveted dressing rooms didn’t come up until a player left. So if you wanted to be in a dressing room with The Lads, you needed to wait for someone else to be sold and then jump in before the replacement came. If you knew someone when you signed for Chelsea, you might get fast-tracked. That kind of separation meant I never really got to know a lot of my team-mates in the first team. I might train with them occasionally but when you are training you are focusing on that. It was really disruptive.
In the early years, I never really thought I was going to be good enough to make it at Chelsea and if I analyse it, a lot of my success was based on insecurity. A lot of ambition is based on fear of failure. I have seen so many players get dispirited, walk away and give up before they should have done. I’ve wanted to say to some of them: ‘You are too good to give up.’ But the one thing you can’t do is change that desire in someone. You have either got the will to succeed or you haven’t. It’s not going