6
When I first started playing for Wales, it often felt as if I had stumbled into a black comedy. I was incredibly proud to be involved with the national team but when I joined up with the squad for the first time before a friendly against Jamaica at Ninian Park, I spent most of the days leading up to it in a state of wide-eyed bemusement.
It was well-known that there was friction between the manager, Bobby Gould, and John Hartson, who I had got to know quite well from playing with the Wales Under-21s. At my first training camp, Gould got everyone to form a big circle and then told us all that he and Harts were going to go in the centre of the circle and wrestle each other.
He told Harts that he wanted him to use it to vent all his frustration, to rid himself of the resentment he was feeling by expressing himself in the wrestling. I suppose it was the equivalent of getting a kid to hit a punchbag, except in this case the punchbag was the manager of the national team.
Harts was reluctant. He felt awkward about it. For obvious reasons. But the rest of the players were urging him on and telling him he had to do it and that he couldn’t back down. So in the end, Harts went to the middle of the circle. He’s a big bloke and after a few seconds of grappling, he gripped Bobby Gould in a headlock and then flung him across the circle on to the floor.
Everyone was roaring and shouting. I almost had to pinch myself that this was happening. It was a bizarre sight. When Gould got to his feet, he was holding his nose and looking aggrieved. Blood was streaming out of it. He muttered to everyone that they should go for a jog so we set off around the pitch. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
I came to understand that it wasn’t actually that unusual. I liked Bobby Gould. He was a well-respected man in the game and he was generous to me. I also understood that he was trying to bring new, young players in and that Wales at that time were a comparatively weak football nation but a lot of the new ideas he tried, on and off the pitch, didn’t always work.
He would do things like organise games of charades in the evening. The players didn’t like it. Footballers can be conservative, cautious people in a group and charades never went down particularly well. The only occasions it got animated were when Gould became the object of ridicule in some of the mimes. It was comical but it was heart-wrenching, too, because it was your country. The training, frankly, didn’t impress me.
I made my debut against Jamaica at the ground where I had watched my first football match and seen Wales play for the first time. I was still only 18 and I felt I had achieved something special. At the end of the 1997-98 season, Wales played a couple of friendlies in Malta and Tunisia and I was included in the squads for those games, too.
I started the game against Malta. I played in a three-man midfield alongside Gary Speed and Mark Pembridge and scored my first international goal to put us 1-0 up in a game we went on to win 3-0. The next evening, we were allowed to go into the town for a night out and I went out with Chris Llewellyn and Simon Haworth. Bobby Gould had allowed it but he had asked us to be back at a certain time because we were 18.
We kept our distance a bit from the senior players. Harts was on the trip, too. He was five years older than me and he was out with the senior players. I always thought he was a great guy. He had been in the team when I made my Under-21 debut against San Marino and it was clear then that he was too good to be playing with us. He was at Arsenal and he should have been in the first team. In fact, he was better than three quarters of the first team.
His relationship with Bobby Gould was already poor back then. He scored against San Marino and then booted an advertising hoarding so hard in frustration that he broke it in half. Gould asked him why he had kicked the board, which started a big row about why he had been selected for the Under-21s instead of the senior team in the first place.
Harts is Welsh through and through. He’s a hard boy and confident, too. He would always be on the karaoke and whenever we went out with him, he wouldn’t let anyone else buy a drink. He got every round. Maybe one of the reasons for that was that few others seemed to drink at his pace.
There were a lot of Cardiff fans in Malta that night and there was tension between them and Harts because he was from Swansea. Even though he played for Wales, it sometimes felt there was a chance that the Wales fans might attack him if they bumped into him on a night out. To a lesser extent, it was the same with me. I come from Cardiff but had never played for Cardiff and there were one or two who tried to take me to task because I had left the city to play for Norwich.
I was only a kid and I said something back. Suddenly, there were two or three blokes coming at me and swinging punches. Simon Haworth dragged me into a taxi but I was very close to getting into trouble. It was my first away trip with Wales and it made me realise how careful you have to be, even with your national team. I thought because we were all Welsh, we would all get on but it wasn’t like that. It caught me by surprise.
The next day, we travelled to Tunis. When we arrived at the hotel in Tunis, it was a shocker. Gary Speed said it wasn’t good enough. Bobby Gould agreed and we were moved to another place. It wasn’t the ideal start. Everything seemed to be done on a shoestring with Wales. There was a lot of penny-pinching. Rows like that were not uncommon.
Tunisia had been in England’s group in the 1998 World Cup that was beginning a few days later and they thought British opposition like us would provide them with the perfect test. But I’m afraid we weren’t much of a challenge for them. We had one or two players who weren’t in good shape. They hadn’t ended the season well for their clubs and then they had neglected their fitness before they joined up for international duty.
Those summer games can be difficult. They can be treated as an afterthought. Ryan Giggs and Mark Hughes weren’t there, but there were a few of the younger players who knew we had Italy in the first qualifier for Euro 2000 at the start of the next season and wanted to put themselves in the frame for that. They were hungry to do well – but they were in the minority.
The game kicked off at 3pm in Tunis, so you can imagine the heat. Tunisia gave us a hiding. We played one up front with Harts, who was out of shape and was suffering so much in the heat he could barely move. To make matters worse, we played in this garish green Lotto kit that has never been seen since. I don’t even know where it came from. It was a little bit too small for Harts. None of us looked good in it but he looked worse.
It was a grim afternoon. We were beaten comfortably. Harts and Dean Saunders were substituted midway through the second half and then I got subbed in the last ten minutes.
On the bench, Saunders started moaning about Gould. “What’s he doing, bringing us off? We were the best players,” he said.
Saunders was like that. He liked to start the ball rolling and then sit back. He never said anything to Gould’s face. Deano was always the one at the back of the bus, moaning and chipping away. Gary Speed was the opposite. He would always do it in the open. I loved Speedo for moments like that. He wouldn’t bitch. He said his bit – and he was correct – and then he went quiet. I knew the people who I admired and why.
To be fair to Saunders, a lot of players were unhappy with Bobby Gould before that anyway. After the game, Speedo went ballistic. He said we were a pub team, we were a disorganised rabble who hadn’t got a clue what we were doing. He turned on Gould, too. He told him he had set us back years, that we had been a decent team and now we couldn’t even give sides like Tunisia a game. Gould was reeling. He said Tunisia were a decent team but Speedo went into one. He said England would batter Tunisia and that we should all be ashamed.
I sat there in the dressing room with my head down. I was only 18 and this kind of stuff was new to me in football. ‘This is going to be a tough, tough living,’ I thought to myself. Then the black comedy started again. Gould looked at Chris Coleman.
“There are too many players in this dressing room who think they are better than they are,” he said.
“What are you looking at me for, Bob?” Chris Coleman said.
“I don’t mean you,” Gould said. “I just mean in general.”
The balloon went up again then. All the players were annoyed now and everyone started having a go.
Harts sensed an opportunity to salvage something from a pretty dire afternoon and had a go, too.
“Why did you take me off, by the way?” he said.
“Because you looked overweight, the sun was way too much for you and I thought I was doing you a big, big favour,” Gould said. Harts just looked at him. There wasn’t much of an answer to that and he knew it.
“Okay,” he said.
At least it was never dull with Wales. The following season, I found myself sent back down to the Under-21s squad when the qualifying tie against Italy came around at the beginning of September, 1998. That was fair enough. All the top players who had missed the summer friendlies were back and this was Italy. It was a glamour game. Even the Under-21 match had a smattering of superstars.
We lost 2-1 to our Italian counterparts but that was hardly a disgrace. They had Andrea Pirlo, Gianluigi Buffon and Massimo Ambrosini in their ranks, so they weren’t too shabby. I scored the Wales goal and after the game I was drafted into the senior squad for the match at Anfield the following evening.
We were staying at the Carden Park Hotel, south of Chester, and when I went into the team meeting at 10am, I noticed that Robbie Savage wasn’t there. That didn’t make me particularly observant, by the way. Sav was such a loud presence that you noticed when he was absent. I thought maybe he had been injured in training the previous day.
I have always liked Sav. Behind all the bluster, he’s actually a pretty insecure guy. Because I’d been playing well for the Under-21s and I was creeping closer to a place in the first team, I could tell he was threatened. I wore the number 4 shirt during the friendly in Tunisia and Sav collared me soon afterwards. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be giving that back to me soon enough.” That was typical Sav. He knew I was a better player than him and he knew he was going to be under the cosh for his place.
Bobby Gould walked into the meeting room and went straight into a rant about how he had been watching television the previous evening when he saw Sav doing an interview with Sky. Sav was holding an Italy number 3 shirt, Paolo Maldini’s shirt, and then he scrumpled it up for the benefit of the camera and threw it away. Bobby Gould was appalled by that. He said it showed a complete lack of respect for one of the world’s greatest players.
He told us what he had done. He had rung Sav in his room in the middle of the night and told him to leave the hotel and that he would not be playing any part in the Italy match. He had sent him home. Sav himself said later that the call came at 5am and that Bobby Gould had threatened to call the police if Sav refused to leave. Sav was insistent it was just a prank and he thought Gould was overreacting. Once again, we were lurching into farce.
Speedo spoke up straight away. He asked Gould what he had sent him home for. He said we needed him for the game.
“What can I do?” Gould said. “I’ve sent him home and the media knows I’ve sent him home.
“Well, then go and get him back,” Speedo said. “Ring him. We need him back in the squad.”
Chris Coleman backed Speedo up and Bobby Gould began to retreat. It didn’t make him look very clever. It was another fuss about nothing and it was overshadowing a massive game. It was obvious to me, obvious to everybody, that Sav respected Maldini. It was just Sav’s idea of a joke, his tongue-in-cheek effort at saying the Italians didn’t scare us. It was obvious it was meant to be funny, not derogatory, but now we had made a big drama out of it.
By then, Gould had already given a television interview explaining why he had sent Sav home. “Players must realise that they have a duty to put-up on the field of play and shut-up off it,” he said. “This type of ‘set-up’ interview has caused problems in the past and is totally alien to the true spirit of the game which was so epitomised in the classic picture of Pele and Bobby Moore embracing and exchanging shirts in the Mexico World Cup of 1970. That was true sporting comradeship and what I saw last evening certainly was not, and I have a duty to uphold the good name of Welsh international football.”
It was a total mess. All sorts of rumours started flying around. Sav was still at home. Sav would be on the bench. Sav would be in the first team. Sav would never play for Wales again. Nobody knew what was happening. Everyone was talking about the row, not the fact that we were about to face a team that included Alessandro Del Piero, Fabio Cannavaro and Christian Vieri.
When we arrived at Anfield, Sav was there like a puppy with big eyes. He was very emotional. He was upset about what had happened. It turned out that Gould had backed down up to a point and had put him on the bench. He gave a debut to Nottingham Forest midfielder Andy Johnson instead and Johnson played superbly.
In fact, we did not disgrace ourselves. Giggs was absolutely outstanding up front and he started off by going on this blistering run that took out most of the Italian defence before he was denied by a last-ditch tackle. The crowd was roaring us on, the atmosphere was brilliant and for 20 minutes, everyone was dreaming of an upset.
But then we conceded a silly goal when there was a mix-up between Chris Coleman and the goalkeeper, Paul Jones, and Diego Fuser slid the ball into the net. Giggs hit the bar with a free-kick just before half-time and Cannavaro defended brilliantly in the second half before Roberto Baggio came off the bench and set up Italy’s second for Vieri 14 minutes from the end. By the end of the match, the crowd had begun to turn on Gould. “We want Bobby out,” they sang.
Sav came on for the last 10 minutes but the game was lost by then. I didn’t make it off the bench but I still got a lot out of the game. I looked at some of their players, their attitude, their professionalism, their talent, the way they carried themselves, and it spurred me on. I wanted to get to their level. It made me determined to keep working and keep trying to improve myself.
A month later, we travelled to Copenhagen to play Denmark in the next qualifier and it was billed as Gould’s last game. The press were after him, the fans had lost patience and the players had largely lost faith in him. Most people expected us to get beaten heavily. We were in freefall.
I was on the bench. I had a good view of Denmark battering us in the first half. They finally got the goal they deserved in the 57th minute when Soren Frederiksen put them ahead with a scrappy shot after we failed to clear a corner. But a minute later, we equalised when the Denmark keeper, Mogens Krogh, who was standing in for Peter Schmeichel, somehow let a header from Adrian Williams squirm through his hands.
With 21 minutes remaining, Gould brought me on in place of Nathan Blake. Four minutes from the end, Darren Barnard swung a long cross over from the left, their centre half missed it and I headed it past the goalkeeper and into the corner of the net. I wheeled away, ecstatic, before Sav grabbed me to celebrate. I might have scored against Malta earlier in the year but this felt like my first proper international goal. It was a big game against a decent side and my goal won the game. I was Wales’ new hero.
Not with everybody, though. After the match, Dean Saunders came up to me. “You do realise you’ve just saved this guy’s job,” he said. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
When we got home, I felt like a big star for the first time in my career. And when I got back to Norwich, I was feeling so pleased with myself that my attitude was slack in the next match against Crystal Palace. Bruce Rioch had to have a word with me and remind me that the best players never rest on their laurels or celebrate their achievements for long.
Four days later, we won again, beating Belarus at home. We nearly blew it, going 2-1 down early in the second half. But we equalised and then Kit Symons got the winner five minutes from the end. For a few months, there was an unfamiliar feeling of optimism about our fortunes but that was punctured the following March when we lost 2-0 to Switzerland in Zurich. Next up was Italy in Bologna in June. That was when the fun and games started again.
We prepared for the game in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, about 80 miles away from Bologna. Gould tried to change his approach. He let us do what we wanted to, basically. He abandoned the playing of charades. Even he had begun to realise that wasn’t working. You’d see boys trying to sneak out of the door while it was going on. In Rimini, we were out most nights.
It was hot in training. When the sessions started to get serious, it began to look as though the front line would be Giggs on the left, Hughes in the centre and me on the right. That meant Mark Pembridge, Saunders and Harts would miss out. All three of them had probably been expecting to play. They weren’t impressed and they weren’t shy about showing it.
There was one full-scale training match where one or two disaffected players got the ball and then just booted it into touch. They spat their dummies, basically. I’m not judging them. It was just a way of showing their frustration. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was a 19-year-old kid but I knew things were going to get interesting.
Gould caved in. He moved things around to accommodate the established players and now it looked as if I was out. It didn’t bother me too much but it upset a few other people. So now the ones who felt they were being discriminated against started not to try in training. Gould had had enough of it. So he called everyone in.
“I tell you what, you lot can pick the team,” he said, “and when you’ve done it, come and let me know what it is.”
“You’re paid to pick the team, not us,” Speedo said.
“I’ve just picked it,” Gould said, “and nobody listened to me.”
People started laughing. Maybe Gould was trying to play a mind game but it felt like we were in chaos.
I went back to my room and before long, there was a knock on my door and Gould came in. Neville Southall, who was his assistant, had seen me play in central midfield in a game for Norwich when we had gone down to 10 men and I had run the game. He had mentioned that to Gould, who had now decided he was going to play me in central midfield.
We travelled to Bologna. The day before the game, he sat us all down, got a clipboard out, flicked over a page and showed us the team. Sure enough, I was in a three-man midfield with John Robinson and Speedo. Giggs, Hughes and Saunders were up front. I felt excited. I was going to play against Italy, one of the best teams in the world. I felt quite good about myself.
Then Gould flicked over another page. It was a diagram of the Italy team. Except it wasn’t just their names. Underneath every Italy player, he had written their age and the amount of caps they had won. When he came to Christian Panucci, he mentioned that he had won the Champions League with Real Madrid the previous summer. He also mentioned that he had won it with AC Milan in 1994, too.
Then he moved on to Cannavaro and the goalkeeper, Buffon, and what unbelievably good players they were. He pointed up to the roof. “Cannavaro could jump as high as this ceiling,” he said. Then he got around to Maldini. “Paolo Maldini,” he said, reverently. “Need I say any more?” It went on and on and on like that. He went through every single Italy player.
I was an admirer of the Italians, too, but I started thinking ‘how on earth am I going to make any sort of impression at all against this lot, we’re going to get murdered’. I hardly slept all night.
We got to the stadium the next day and the pitch was beautiful. They were a great team. They even looked incredible in the warm-up. I looked at them in the tunnel with their immaculate hair and their blue kit. I started thinking about everything Gould had said about them.
Soon, it was ‘bang’ and they had scored. Vieri put them ahead after seven minutes. He jumped higher than the crossbar to get to it. Filippo Inzaghi and Maldini added another couple before half-time and the game was over. Their movement was on a different level to anything our defenders had ever seen before.
Gould took Saunders off at half-time. That went down well. Harts played the second half but things didn’t get much better. We stopped shipping goals until Enrico Chiesa added a fourth in the last minute. It was just a bad, bad day. Not being able to compete was difficult. They could have won by as many as they wanted.
“Boys,” Bobby Gould said in the dressing room after the match, “I think I have taken you as far as I can.”
“What,” Speedo said, “you mean as far down the world rankings as you can? We were 27th before you took over.”
Gould said he was going to resign. He said he would not travel on the plane back home with us because we had a game against Denmark at Anfield a few days later and he did not want his presence to be a distraction for whoever took charge (it was Neville Southall, as it happens, and we lost 2-0). A lot of the players seemed relieved Gould had gone but the chaos of it all was making my head swim.
We got to the airport the next day and the first person we saw was Bobby Gould. It turned out there weren’t any other flights. He had to come back with us after all. It was the final indignity.