Читать книгу Welcome to My World - Coleen McLoughlin - Страница 8

Who else did I get on with? Elen, Frank Lampard’s girlfriend, I got on really well with her. They’ve got a little girl, but she had a nanny so Elen could do a lot more than some of the other mothers. Elen is Spanish but also speaks fluent English – however, sometimes she didn’t understand everyone’s accents and just laughed at us.

Then there was Cheryl. Cheryl Tweedy (well, it’s Cheryl Cole now). I’d met her at another match a while back but this was her first trip away with the team. A few months before, I’d actually been to see Girls Aloud perform in Manchester and she’d invited us – me, my friend and my cousin – backstage afterwards. She’s so funny and has a great sense of humour.

The first time I met Cheryl we were in a box watching one of the England matches. There was me, Victoria Beckham, Paul Robinson’s wife Rebecca, and then Cheryl came in all on her own. Victoria saw her and asked her to come and sit with us. People don’t appreciate how hard it is to go to a match for the first time when everyone’s in little groups and seems to know one other. It’s intimidating.

Before the Euros in Portugal in 2004 we had all gone to La Manga in Spain for the build-up to the tournament. I was seventeen years old, and I hadn’t flown out with the rest of the wives and girlfriends because I’d had to stay behind in Liverpool to sit my AS exams. So when I arrived Wayne met me at the hotel, helped me take my stuff up to the room and then we went down to the pool. I’d never met any of the girls before, didn’t know who anyone was, and Wayne turned round and said, ‘Oh, I’m going off to play golf now.’ I didn’t know anyone, so I said, ‘You can’t do that!’ So Wayne pointed to a group of people lying round the swimming pool and said, ‘’Ere y’are, go and sit with them over there.’

There were two girls with their boyfriends: one of the couples was the Chelsea footballer Wayne Bridge and his girlfriend, and the other was Everton’s James Beattie and his partner. My Wayne went off to play golf for hours and I went over to sit with these people without having a clue what to say. I didn’t even know their names. I ended up asking stuff like what day had they turned up at the hotel, even though I knew exactly when they’d arrived – with everyone else! So it’s hard when you’re the new girl.