That night I watched MOTD2 and there he was again, outspoken as usual, only this time Zarco — who was a Jew — had been asked about the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in Qatar:
‘Speaking for myself I don’t really want to visit a country where I can’t drink a glass of wine with a friend from Israel, perhaps. Or a gay friend. Yes, I have gay friends. Who doesn’t? I am a civilised person. Being civilised requires that you are also tolerant of people who are different. And who enjoy a drink. Maybe too many drinks. That is everyone’s choice, unless you live in Qatar. Perhaps Qatar will be different in ten years’ time. But I doubt it. Meanwhile I read in the Guardian that almost a hundred Nepalese workers have already died on construction sites in Qatar. Think about that. A hundred people are dead just so one little country can host a meaningless football tournament. This is madness. It’s a meaningless tournament because it’s no longer anything to do with football and everything to do with big money and politics. To my mind the last World Cup that meant anything was won by West Germany in 1974, which was also the host country that year. Since Argentina, in 1978, everything has been one big sick joke. There should never have been a World Cup held in a country that was a dictatorship like that one and where the cup was won by cheating.
‘But everything about this host country Qatar strikes me as wrong. It’s a well-known fact that to be a woman in an Arab country is not easy. So perhaps it’s a good thing that the main stadium in Qatar looks like a giant vagina. Certainly it strikes me as ironic that the biggest vagina in the world should now be in Qatar. Personally speaking, I am in favour of vaginas. I started my life in one; we all did. And I think it’s about time that an Arab country faced up to the fact that half the world has a fanny.
‘Also, you have to wonder why a country where you can be flogged for drinking alcohol wants to play host to a lot of English, Dutch and German football fans. But am I surprised that FIFA picked Qatar? No. I’m not at all surprised. Nothing about FIFA ever surprises me. Maybe no one told them it gets very hot in Qatar. Even in winter it’s too hot to do anything very much except flog some poor man because he’s gay. Now I hear that the Qataris are planning to use solar power to cool the effect of the sun’s rays in their newly built stadia; but I don’t think solar power can cool the allegations of bribery quite so easily. Of course, it’s easy to make me shut up about all this. You just have to pay me a million dollars like some of those FIFA officials. On second thoughts, make it two million. Then you know what? I, too, think everything in 2022 will be extremely wonderful.’
That was typical of João Zarco. The man was always good copy, although sometimes he said too much; even he would have conceded that. Sometimes he said too much and people kicked back. Literally. In a now infamous interview on Sky Sports, Zarco described the Irish football pundit and former player-manager, Ronan Reilly — who was sitting alongside him at the time — as ‘a piece of crap’ and ‘someone who couldn’t run a train set let alone a football team’. Reilly replied that Zarco had the biggest mouth in football and that one day the Portuguese would put his foot in his mouth, and if that didn’t happen then Reilly would gladly oblige with his own foot. A week or two later, at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year after-party in the ExCel Arena, the two traded punches and kicks and had to be separated by security staff. But not everyone Zarco criticised publicly was able to fight back like Ronan Reilly.
Take Lionel Sharp, who refereed a UEFA match we played against Juventus last October — an away tie that City lost. Interviewed on ITV after our 1–0 defeat, Zarco half suggested that Juventus — who are not without form in the skulduggery department — had ‘influenced’ Sharp at half time to give a penalty in the second half. Sharp was subsequently the subject of a lot of vicious trolling on Twitter, which caused him to take a fatal overdose of sleeping tablets.
Love him or loathe him, João Zarco was always interesting.
5
After a hard training session at Hangman’s Wood I have an ice bath and a sports massage, but a good sports massage given by the club’s full-time masseur, Jimmy Gregg, is always excruciatingly painful. Jimmy has fingers like fire-tongs. That’s why they call it a sports massage: because you have to be a bloody good sport to endure that level of pain without punching Jimmy in the face. And the older I get the more painful it is. Much as I try to behave like a Spartan and stoically take the pain without a sound, I always squeal like a frightened guinea pig. Everyone does. And because footballers will gamble on anything, bets are often taken among the lads on who can endure thirty minutes on the table without uttering a groan or a moan; until now no one has come through the experience without uttering a sound. Jimmy takes pride in his work. I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree with me when I say that there are occasions when the massage seems worse than the training session. Perhaps that’s why they call Jimmy’s treatment room the London Dungeon.
So sometimes when I get home and before I go to bed, Sonja sets up a massage table in my bathroom, puts on a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, a little white tunic that doesn’t quite cover her stocking-tops and tiny G-string, and plays the rub-joint whore, with the happy ending included. She has wonderful, light fingers and has fully mastered the technique of touching without quite touching, if you know what I mean. But if the caressing touch of her hands is magical — and it is — it can’t begin to compare with her sweet and loving mouth; she likes to drink a very cold martini before putting my cock in her mouth, and the combination of the alcohol, her lips and her teeth is nothing short of transfiguring. Christ ascending into heaven could not have felt better than I feel as she waits patiently for my ejaculations to end in her mouth, and she always swallows every last drop as if it’s the most expensive Manuka honey.
‘Now that’s what I call therapy,’ I said as I climbed down off the table and stepped into the shower beside her. ‘If they ever put that on the National Health the whole of fucking Romania will be living here.’
After that I slept like a hibernating bear. My iPhone started ringing, just before midnight.
Normally I switch off my phone at night and put the landline on answer-machine; sports reporters think nothing of ringing you up at all hours to ask you this or that. That was before Twitter, mind. Nowadays the press are lazier and just use player tweets for all the ‘tributes were being paid’ quotes they could ever need. But during the January window I tend to pick up the phone at all hours, in case it’s related to a transfer. Players’ agents are more nocturnal than their clients, as befits their vampire-like nature. Some of the best deals I’ve helped make have been as a result of midnight negotiations.
I have individual ring tones for different people, of course. Viktor Sokolnikov has the Red Army singing a famous Russian folk song called ‘Kalinka’. Zarco’s is the Clash song ‘London Calling’. Sonja has the Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’. But this time it was none of these. The Stranglers song ‘Peaches’ meant that it was Maurice McShane, after Ian McShane who was in Sexy Beast; Maurice was City’s life-coach and fixer and the club’s first line of defence in any off-the-field crisis. It was his job to help our overpaid and often naïve players do everything from open an offshore bank account to pay off some skank who they’d knocked up. This meant that Maurice was one of the busiest men at the training ground. Players tend to bring problems to the coach that they wouldn’t dream of mentioning to the manager; only now they bring them to Maurice, who sometimes — if the matter is serious — brings them back to me. It had been my idea to hire Maurice; I’d met him in the nick and in the five months we’d been together at City we’d already seen off several scandals. I won’t go into these right now. Suffice to say that we never did anything illegal. Just stuff that kept some of our stupid fuck-head players out of the newspapers, for one thing or another.