When Sonja puts her tracksuit on it’s all I can do not to put my hands inside her bottoms, so I usually don’t bother trying to resist the temptation; unless it’s the day of a big game when, out of solidarity with my players — who are supposed to refrain from sex on the day of a match in order to keep their testosterone levels high — I do my best not to touch her. Testosterone helps players remain aggressive and it’s generally held that aggression helps sportsmen to win. Of course, Sonja knows I find her sexy when she’s wearing the tracksuit and, on a match-day morning, she often wears it anyway and then goes out of her way to be sexually provocative; I don’t know what else you’d call it when she wears the tracksuit bottoms a little too far down her butt and with a tiny bit of dental floss that masquerades as a pair of knickers. Then again she never has knickers like that on for very long; not when I’m around.
You wouldn’t believe how different Sonja looks when she goes off to her Knightsbridge consulting rooms to listen to girls discuss their eating disorders — anorexic girls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, fat girls on Mondays and Wednesdays: it wouldn’t ever do for them to be in the same waiting room. She doesn’t think my jokes on that subject are very funny, however.
Sonja wears a lot of nice Max Mara suits, good shoes and stockings. It’s her Dr Melfi look, which I find almost as sexy as her arse in an orange tracksuit. Unlike a lot of the girls she treats, Sonja has a great-looking arse — she works out a lot — and if I mention her arse so fondly it’s because the part of me that’s still a player seems to find it easier talking about how attractive and sexy my girlfriend is than saying how much I love her, which I do. Like a lot of men in football I find it hard to discuss my feelings; being a shrink she’s aware of that and makes allowances. At least I think she does. She knew I was already upset about what had happened to Didier Cassell and then to Drenno, which was why I didn’t talk about it; and until the day of the Newcastle match I really thought that the worst had already happened. But in truth it hadn’t, not by a long chalk.
I expect Ukrainians like Viktor Sokolnikov have all sort of poetic proverbs and sayings for it, but where I come from we just say this: that troubles come in a packet of three.
14
Zarco and I always picked the team in his office at Hangman’s Wood before boarding the coach to Silvertown Dock. Organising a squad of overpaid, often intellectually challenged young men can be like herding cats and it’s always better if everyone arrives at the stadium as a team to avoid any confusion.
There’s a lot of bullshit talked about choosing the tactics before you choose the team but here’s a truth: unless you want to rest someone for a more important fixture you always pick the very best players available to you. It’s really that simple. Anything else is just Fantasy fucking Football. The press loves to speculate that one player has been picked at the expense of another — to cause trouble, if they can — but if someone has been left on the bench there’s usually a damn good reason, and more often than not it’s simply to do with fitness and attitude. Attitude is even more important than fitness because even when a player is fully fit, he’ll sometimes get it into his head that he’s not playing well. And if there’s one thing that a manager or a coach is paid to do, it’s to try and fix whatever is going wrong in a player’s mind. To that extent it’s useful living with a psychiatrist, as she gives me some good tips on motivation.
Of course, now and then you get a player who pulls a sickie and claims that he’s not fully fit, although this isn’t nearly as common these days. Thankfully physios are better able than ever to find out if a player is bullshitting you about a niggling muscle or hamstring, and to treat it, too: electrotherapy, ultrasound, lasers, magnetotherapy, diathermy and traction therapy can fix a lot of problems in a short period of time. If all else fails you can always inject some cortisone into a joint that’s giving pain, and few players are even remotely keen on that solution; the truth is it hurts to have a needle pushed four or five millimetres into a leg. It hurts like buggery.
After we’d picked the team, Zarco left early in his own car to attend Viktor’s lunch, grumbling about how he had better things to do on the day of a match than meet with a lot of Greenwich planning officers and town councillors. Apart from that he was in a very good mood and loudly confident that we were going to stuff it to the Toon.
I waited for the team to show up at the training ground and boarded the coach with them. There are always one or two who manage to be late and in those cases I have to order them to pay a fine. But today was different; two players were late for the team coach but these were my two Africans — Kwame Botchwey and John Ayensu were both from Ghana — and I had a very good reason for wanting them on my side so for once, fines were not imposed.
We arrived at Silvertown Dock at about the same time as the Newcastle team and let them go in first in order to avoid confusing the sports reporters, who were waiting in the players’ tunnel to watch the yobs walk into the dressing room. In their woolly hats and big Dr Dre headphones, and dragging carry-on luggage containing all their personal items, our yobs looked much like the Toon yobs. Besides, I had an extra reason to want to keep the two teams apart for as long as possible.
Fit or not, everyone in the team is obliged to turn up for the team coach on a match day; that’s how it works. Even the players who are injured or on the transfer list like Ayrton Taylor are required to put in an appearance, although generally speaking they can remain in their normal clothes. In Taylor’s case this seemed to involve looking like a tramp, which, after the match, was going to cost him a fine: at Silvertown Dock it’s jackets and ties for players who aren’t playing through injury or for disciplinary reasons.
I shook hands with the Newcastle management and coaching team: Alan Pardew, John Carver, Steve Stone and Peter Beardsley. I have a lot of time for Beardsley. People talk about Lionel Messi but, in his prime for the Toons, Beardsley was very like Messi. Like him, Beards could beat three men, get tripped, stay on his feet and score a beauty with either foot. Christ, he even looked like Messi. Some of these arrogant young bastards today should be honoured just to be on the same coach as Peter Beardsley.
Team sheets were exchanged and I gave theirs and ours to a club spokesman to read them out to the waiting reporters. As usual it was all filmed for London City TV and must have made some very boring television; then again, some fans will watch anything to do with football.
Feeling the butterflies now — I always get them before a match, even more now that I’m no longer playing — I went along to our dressing room and waited for Zarco to show up and do his pre-match talk. He was pretty good at this kind of thing. There was no one better at understanding and motivating men; he inspires loyalty and players just want to do well for him. If he hadn’t been a football manager he’d have made a very good general, I think. But not a politician: he was much too direct and straight-talking to be a politician, although in my humble opinion what this country needs most is someone to tell us that we’re all a bunch of lazy cunts.
The game was supposed to kick off at 4 p.m. but it was now nearly three and Zarco still wasn’t here, so I picked up the dressing-room landline and I was about to call the dining room when Phil Hobday put his head around the door; he might have been club chairman but he wasn’t above running the odd errand for Viktor Sokolnikov. Phil was smooth and talked the same language as Viktor; he was fond of comparing football clubs to big companies like Rolls-Royce, or Jaguar, or Barclays Bank. For Phil, London City was a company just like Thames Water. I’d learned a lot from Phil Hobday.