Graeme Le Saux: Left Field

For Mariana, Georgina and Lucas. I’m proud of my professional achievements, but nothing could make me more proud than our family

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

One Camping with Ken

Two A Secret

Three First-time Blues

Four Glory in the North

Five Going Batty and Turning Sour

Six International

Seven England under Hoddle

Eight Ruud, Luca and Sexy Football

Nine Chelsea and Ranieri

Ten Farewell to England

Eleven Going South Again

Twelve Into the Mist

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

I am a lucky man. I’ve got a wife I adore and two children I dote on. I have a loving father and two sisters of whom I’m very proud. Once, I had a mother who doted on me. I’ve got a good life and a lovely house and I know I have an awful lot to be thankful for. I owe my material possessions to my career in football. The opportunities that are coming my way in the media and in business now also stem from the fact that I was a high-profile sportsman. And I’m proud of the links I still have with Chelsea and the ambassadorial role I have been asked to fulfil for them. I have every reason to be grateful to the game for the things it has brought me, but it hasn’t come easy. I was a man apart for much of my career. I came out of left field and, for a long time, I stayed there.

I was regarded as an irritating curiosity when I first signed as a professional footballer with Chelsea in late 1987. I was ridiculed for reading The Guardian rather than staring at the half-naked women on page 3 or raging at the stories on the back pages of the tabloids that the players reading them swore were lies. But they kept reading them. Partly because of me, partly because of them, I didn’t fit in. Partly because of an experience that had affected me in Jersey when I was thirteen, there was an urge to succeed inside me that made me more sensitive than I might otherwise have been. I was coming out of left field, a callow kid raised in the Channel Islands who knew nothing of the wider world, and most people didn’t know quite what to make of me.

Because I had different interests to the rest of my team-mates, because I didn’t feel comfortable in the pre-Loaded laddish drinking culture that was prevalent in English football in the late Eighties, it was generally assumed by my team-mates that there was something wrong with me. It followed from that, naturally, that I must be gay. For fourteen years, I had to listen to that suggestion repeated in vivid and forthright terms from thousands of voices in the stands. I seemed to be everybody’s favourite whipping boy.

My colleague at Stamford Bridge, Graham Stuart, who had a fine career with Chelsea, Everton and Charlton, says now that I was ahead of my time when we played for Bobby Campbell in the late Eighties. Off the pitch, he meant, obviously – a renaissance footballer in a dark age. Well, I was certainly in a minority. He was right about that. I just liked different things, ironically the kind of things footballers like now: a nice meal, an afternoon’s shopping, a trip to the cinema or a gig at The Fridge in Brixton, getting ready for the next game, feeling the intensity of a life in sport. Now, the traditional English approach I grew up with, where men were men and only women wore sarongs and used moisturizer, has been completely shattered. The pendulum has swung. It’s more acceptable for players to talk about the clothes they wear, the restaurants they frequent, the bars they go to. And, yes, the latest game for their PlayStation or the latest innovation on their iPod.

It would have been easier for me back in the early days if I could have found it inside me to subordinate my personality to the group and do what it took to blend in. But I was taking care of my diet when the team coach was still stopping at the fish and chip shop on the way back from away matches. I was hanging out at an Armenian café called Jakob’s in Gloucester Road in west London while ‘The Lads’ were organizing pub crawls. Again, it wasn’t that one was better than the other. Jakob’s wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of fun; I know that. But I liked it. It was just that I fell out of their ‘norm’. As far as the culture off the pitch was concerned, I pitched up ten years too early.

My Chelsea career spanned different worlds. I started it playing with Kerry Dixon, Steve Wicks and John McNaught. I ended it alongside Marcel Desailly, Gianfranco Zola and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. I gravitated towards the couple of foreign lads at the club in my first spell and people called me a homosexual. I gravitated towards the mass of foreign lads at the club in my second spell and people called me cosmopolitan.

That was the funny thing about my life in football, the theme that runs through it. Football began to move towards me; events conspired to help me. In 1995, when I was winning the Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers, the Bosman ruling came into force and changed the face of the game in this country. Bosman swept away the quota system that had limited the number of foreigners allowed to play in each team and, flooded by players from all over Europe, our game entered an age of enlightenment.

I wasn’t an outsider any more; I wasn’t perceived as being different. Football old-schoolers like former Chelsea captains Peter Nicholas and Graham Roberts, who had regarded me as a dork, a swot and a pretentious weirdo, didn’t hold sway any more. Traditional bastions of English football clubs – men who ruled by intimidation and bullying – began to be marginalized, and a culture that rewarded professionalism, instead of pouring scorn on it, took hold.

There were more changes in the three decades in which I played football in England than there have been in any other era of the game. The horrors of Heysel and Hillsborough were washed away by Gazza’s tears in the 1990 World Cup and the football boom that England’s run to the semi-finals in Italy engendered. The Fever Pitch generation rose up in the Nineties and suddenly it was trendy to be a football obsessive. There was the Britpop influence, too. A lot of the successful bands of the Nineties were made up of football fans who were always making reference to the sport they loved. I was friends with one of the lads in the Inspiral Carpets who was an Oldham fan, Noel and Liam Gallagher were Man City fans and Tim Booth from James was a Leeds fan. Together, they crossed the music–student–football divide and broadened the appeal of the game. The Lightning Seeds did the theme tune for Euro 96 and the separation between footballers and pop stars became more and more blurred. The Taylor Report forced football stadia into a brave new world, too, and when the Premier League was formed in 1992 and soon flooded with money from Sky TV, it made players into millionaires pretty much overnight.

I was part of that; I rode the wave. I went from an era when people like Ken Bates, David Moores and Doug Ellis owned football clubs to the age of Roman Abramovich and the invasion of the international oligarchs. I played for the only team apart from Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea who has ever won the Premiership. I played thirty-six times for England. I didn’t get carried away with it. I never lost my obsession with winning and my hunger to keep moving forward as a player. I was relentless about it. I never looked back. I didn’t like looking back – not after what had happened to my mum.

It wasn’t as if I had it easy, either. For a start, I had people chanting ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’ wherever I played. What an incentive that was never to make a mistake. Even in the winter of my career, playing for Southampton in a reserve game against West Ham at Upton Park, this young kid in the West Ham side started yelling abuse at me, spitting ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ at me. I told him that when he’d achieved what I’d achieved in the game, he could come back and talk to me. At half-time, I heard him getting a bollocking from West Ham’s reserve team boss.

I enjoyed highs and I saw lows. I heard the snap of Robbie di Matteo’s leg breaking in Chelsea’s UEFA Cup match against St Gallen. When Pierluigi Casiraghi’s career came to a terrible end at West Ham, I ran off the pitch and grabbed the stretcher from the St John’s Ambulance men who were standing in the tunnel while he was in agony on the floor with terrible injuries to his leg. I saw the grief and the pain that football can bring as well as the riches and the glamour. I saw the last snapshot of Chelsea before the revolution: its extravagance cheek by jowl with its miserliness, and the fantastic idiosyncrasies of the Ken Bates era. I was man of the match in the game that took Chelsea into the Champions League and made it viable for Abramovich to buy them.

I went to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. That was in the summer of 1998 after the World Cup in France when we had been knocked out in the second round. The squads from the Commonwealth countries involved in the tournament – England, Scotland and Jamaica – were invited to the palace and being driven into the courtyard behind the railings felt to me as if the gates of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory were swinging open and I was being ushered into a secret world that I had long imagined but never glimpsed.

Once we were inside, we were led up to one of the reception rooms and we all stood around in small groups, chattering away nervously until Her Majesty arrived. Soon enough, a door opened and the Queen walked in and made straight for the group that I was part of. She came up to me and asked the first of what I am sure are her standard questions. She asked me who I played for and when I said Chelsea, she seemed quite pleased. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘local.’

On the other side of the room, Sol Campbell was being introduced to Prince Phillip.

‘What part of Jamaica are you from?’ the Duke of Edinburgh enquired.

‘Walthamstow,’ Sol said.

At the other end of the scale, I remember the simple, visceral thrill of wrapping the white tape around my socks when I was preparing for games, just like one of my heroes, John Robertson, had once done. I loved Robertson as a player. He was left-footed like me and he was part of Brian Clough’s great Nottingham Forest side that carried all before it when I was growing up.

I chipped Peter Schmeichel once, too. I played my first stand-out game for Chelsea against Spurs in 1991 and rushed home to catch the highlights on the television but the Gulf War had broken out and the programme had been cancelled. I scored my only England goal against Brazil; it wasn’t a bad one, either. I played against some great opponents; if I had to pick my most difficult one, I’d say Brian Laudrup.

I did have my own share of injuries. I missed Euro 96 and Euro 2000 but at least I made it to the World Cup in France in 1998. Apart from the moment when I broke my ankle in 1995, that World Cup gave me my worst moment in football – when I was blamed for the late Dan Petrescu goal that gave Romania a 2–1 win over England in our second group game. Generally, though, I felt I over-achieved in football. I gave it everything and it gave back to me a lot more than I ever dared hope for.

In the end, I even learned the gift of being able to laugh at myself. I wish I’d been able to do that earlier. I wish I’d been able to ignore it back in 1991 when people started sniggering about how they thought I must be gay. In my second spell at Chelsea, I was at the core of the dressing room. I was secure in myself. People even laughed at my jokes and I laughed at theirs.

I used to take the mickey out of Gianfranco Zola, who was a particular friend of mine during my second spell at Chelsea. I used to tease him about his image of being the White Knight of Stamford Bridge, adored by all for his ready smile and his sublime skill. People had such a fantastic image of Franco, they could not imagine him being anything other than honest and truthful and the epitome of good sportsmanship, but I knew different.

One day in training, we were all square in a five-a-side game and Franco and I were running for a ball that was heading out of play. It went out so I turned around to shout something to one of my team-mates. When I looked back around, Franco had retrieved the ball and was in the act of curling a beautiful shot around our goalkeeper for the winner. He was adamant that the ball hadn’t gone out and when I disputed it, the other guys looked at me as if I was disputing the word of a saint.

‘Franco,’ I said, ‘you’re a cheating, low-down Sardinian git. When I write my book, I’m going to tell the truth about you and let everyone know what a sneaky, low-down, horrible little man you are.’

‘That’s fine,’ Franco said. ‘And when I write my book, I’m going to say that you look at me in the showers.’

ONE Camping with Ken

A sad and ugly irony lay at the heart of my career as a professional footballer. I represented my country thirty-six times, won a Premiership title with Blackburn Rovers and the Cup Winners’ Cup and Super Cup with Chelsea, played in an FA Cup Final and won the League Cup, and all of it was accompanied by the soundtrack of a lie. Even though I have never been gay, for a fourteen-year stretch of my eighteen seasons in the game, I became the leading victim of English football’s last taboo.

It started in the summer of 1991 soon after we reported back for pre-season training. I was in my first spell at Chelsea. We had what is known as ‘a strong dressing room’ – which is usually a euphemism for a group of players who were very good at dishing out a lot of stick. It was not a place for shrinking violets. The banter was flying around more than ever in those first few days back at our Harlington training ground. There was a lot of talk about where people had been for their holidays.

I’d had a good summer. I was twenty-two and had just broken into the first team. Over the previous eighteen months, I’d got matey with two of the forerunners of Chelsea’s foreign legion: Ken Monkou and Erland Johnsen. Ken, who was originally from Surinam, had signed from Feyenoord in the spring of 1989 and we made our first-team debuts within a fortnight of each other that May. Erland, who was Norwegian, arrived from Bayern Munich the following December. During that season and the next one, the three of us became good pals.

Erland invited Ken and me to go and visit him in Norway once the 1990/91 campaign was over. He wanted us to go and put on a few coaching sessions for some kids in a town on the border with Russia. So when the season finished, I took Ken down to Jersey, where I’d grown up. We spent a couple of days there and then we drove up through France, Belgium and Holland. Then we flew up to Norway. We had a good time. When the trip was over, Ken headed back to London, Erland went on his honeymoon around the Caribbean and I went off on holiday with my girlfriend.

When I got back to Chelsea and the boys asked me where I’d been, I told them. Somebody – I can’t remember who – said ‘Oh, so you went camping with Ken’. There was a bit of chortling and sniggering. It got to me straight away. I was sensitive about it immediately. I bit on it. I told them we hadn’t gone camping. I told them we’d been staying in hotels. But it stuck. It became a bit of a running gag. And soon, to my horror, it was out there on the grapevine that Ken and I were an item.

I was insecure enough as it was. I had come over from Jersey a couple of years earlier when I was eighteen and signed a professional contract. I felt isolated from the start. I didn’t belong to any of the groups or cliques I found at Chelsea. I didn’t do an apprenticeship so there was no group of lads that I’d come through the ranks with. And just because I had signed a professional contract didn’t really make me a professional footballer or part of the established group.

There were a lot of old-school footballers there when I arrived: men like Steve Wicks, Joe McLaughlin, Colin Pates and John Bumstead. They were soon joined by lads like Vinnie Jones, who arrived at the start of that 1991/92 season from Sheffield United, Andy Townsend, John Spencer and Dennis Wise. Some of them were good guys but I never got to know them during that time. They were footballers and I was this kid fresh out of Jersey. They would go back to their homes in Hemel Hempstead or wherever it was and I would get the tube back to my digs in Burnt Oak.

The club had stuck me in there. It was one stop away from the northern end of the Northern Line, about as far away from Harlington as you could get. It took me an hour and a half and two trains and two buses to get into training each day. It was ridiculous. It was one of these situations where the assistant manager, Gwyn Williams, knew a friend of a friend who had a spare room and was doing him a favour. But he wasn’t doing me any favours at all.

Everybody regarded me as an outsider. I was an easy target because I didn’t fit in. The only couple of people I knew in London were students so I turned up at training with my student look. I had my jeans rolled up and my Pringle socks on and my rucksack with The Guardian in it.

For much of my career, reading The Guardian was used as one of the most powerful symbols of how I was supposed to be weirdly different. It was pathetic really. It was used to give substance to the gossip that I was homosexual: Guardian reader equals gay boy. Some people really thought that added up. Most of the rest of them read The Sun and The Mirror and complained about how they were being stitched up all the time by those papers.

Andy Townsend got on the bus to an away game once and saw me reading The Guardian. He picked it up and said he wanted to look at the sport. He threw it back down a couple of seconds later. ‘There’s no fucking sport in here,’ he said. The rest of the lads laughed. I tried to laugh, too, but I felt a bit embarrassed – not embarrassed enough to stop reading it and conform to what they wanted but embarrassed nonetheless. I don’t know, maybe they were just trying to help me fit in.

By the time I broke into the first team at the end of that 1988/89 season, the other players had pigeonholed me as a bit of a loner. I wasn’t a loner. In fact, away from football I was pretty sociable. It was just that because of my background, I wasn’t what footballers regarded as typical. I got the impression they hadn’t really come across anyone like me before and that was the basis of a fair amount of stick I used to get.

Everything that led up to the spread of the rumours that I was gay stemmed from the fact that I didn’t fit in. Teammates looked at me and thought I was a bit different, a bit odd. So I became the target of day-to-day ribbing which just got worse and worse. I’d never had any problem with bullying at school. I never had any sort of problems of that type. I wasn’t the main kid but I wasn’t unpopular. Being a pariah was new to me.

I was sensitive and pretty naive and my greatest fault was that I stuck up for myself and took things a bit more seriously than I should have done. I reacted to jibes when I can see now that I should have just laughed them off or come back with a decent riposte. But I didn’t do that. And by the time I started to try and laugh them off, it was too late.

Going into training became an ordeal. I was trying to get used to London, trying to get used to living away from the tight-knit community in Jersey. And I was trying to persuade myself that I really could make it as a professional footballer. All the people I was competing against seemed so much older than me. So I lived in my own world with my Walkman and my newspaper and spent my spare time discovering London, like anyone new to a big city.

Ken and Erland used to get plenty of stick, too. This was partly because they were doing their own thing; they didn’t fit the stereotype. Foreign players had a better attitude to diet even back then. The British lads used to take the mickey out of Erland and pretend he was from a different planet just because he had a Scandinavian accent. But I had more in common with Erland and Ken, and so when the three of us went on this trip, it was manna from heaven for the piss-takers.

I think Ken probably got some ribbing about the gay stuff. He was a good-looking guy, single, did his own thing. In the programme that season, he listed his hobbies as ‘swimming, reading and meditation’. He probably ticked some of the boxes the bigots look at; but I don’t think it ever got to the same level that it reached with me. He was guilty by association with me but that was it. The more successful I got, the more it became an issue. The focus was more on me than Ken because I gradually became more newsworthy. I was also a lot easier to rile.

Once all the taunts about homosexuality started, Ken and I drifted apart. We stopped being friends, really. You succumb to the pressure, I think. When I left Chelsea, he went his way and I went mine. It’s not anything we ever spoke about which is quite strange in a way. None of the other players ever sympathized with me about it. I suppose they were just glad none of it was aimed at them; or perhaps the people who had initiated it felt embarrassed about it.

I took the homosexuality stuff very seriously very quickly. In those days, if anyone thought you had the slightest hint of the effeminate about you, you were in trouble. It was such a delicate stage of my life anyway. I already felt like the odds were stacked against me without being pitched into a world of double entendres and nudging and winking about being gay. I didn’t feel comfortable in my environment unless I was playing football. But the more my supposed homosexuality became a topic of humour, the more upset about it I became. I started confronting people about it all the time. It felt like everyone else in the dressing room was in on it. It even extended to people like Gwyn who would wander up to me before training and say ‘Come on poof, get your boots on’. It chipped away at me.

Bobby Campbell had succeeded John Hollins as manager by then but neither he nor anyone else in authority said ‘Lads, look, this is getting a bit silly’. By now the rumours were out of control. The piss-taking about camping with Ken started some time around the beginning of July and eight weeks later, my worst fears were realized.

On 7 September, we went to play a league game against West Ham at Upton Park. I got the ball on the left flank some time in the first half and played it upfield. Then the chant started. It came from the hard-core fans in the North Bank and was set to the tune of the Village People’s ‘Go West’: ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse, Le Saux takes it up the arse,’ they yelled – again and again and again. I stood there in shock. ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘It’s reached the terraces.’ I knew fans everywhere were going to try and make my life a misery.

Justin Fashanu had ‘come out’ in the News of the World a year earlier and even though his career was practically over, he was ridiculed and scorned for his admission. A few years later, he committed suicide. There also had been rumours about Trevor Morley and Ian Bishop, two West Ham players. They probably had about as much foundation as the rumours about me and Ken. I didn’t think I could afford for people to think there was the slightest hint of me being gay. Everything I was worried about, my preoccupation with being isolated and ostracized, was now turning into reality. Suddenly, I had something else to cope with as I tried to make it as a footballer, something else I had to fight against.