Читать книгу Graeme Le Saux: Left Field - Graeme Saux Le - Страница 6

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.

That afternoon at West Ham really scared me. I felt it had the potential to ruin everything. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It left me feeling isolated on the pitch. It left me feeling apart from the team, even on the pitch which had been my last refuge. I didn’t know who to be angry with, because it was my own team-mates who had started it.

It made me even more sensitive and my life at Chelsea even more complicated. It was the start of a series of problems for me at the club that ended with me hurling my shirt to the floor when Campbell’s successor, Ian Porterfield, substituted me and my departure from Stamford Bridge soon afterwards. I was very insecure, very nervous. I kept myself to myself because I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.

At Upton Park, no one mentioned the chanting when we got back to the dressing room at half-time, or at full-time. No one spoke about it at all. Maybe it didn’t register with some of them. It was never discussed and I didn’t make a point of saying to any of them ‘Thanks a lot for that boys’. But after that game, the chanting about me grew more and more regular. The pressure I was under when the taunts about being homosexual took hold was immense. I would go out onto the pitch knowing that I was going to get a torrent of abuse before I had even kicked a ball. Normally, as a player, you want to stand out but you want to stand out for the right reasons. If you get stick from the away supporters because you have done something well, you can live with that. It’s actually quite satisfying. But what started happening to me was that if there was some sort of lull in the game, I was the first fall-back option and the taunting would start. If the home fans got bored, they’d start singing about me.

I often wonder whether I could have prevented it. I tried damned hard to prevent it. I stood up for myself and got physically angry with people who pushed it too far, but I also withdrew more and more into my own little world to try and protect myself from the abuse so I wouldn’t have to confront it.

Once the thing about me and Ken spread beyond the dressing room, it went crazy. It became an urban myth. Wisey’s friends from Wimbledon would ask him about it; other players would talk to their mates at their former clubs. Soon, everyone was talking about it as if it was a fact. People said there was no smoke without fire. It was generally accepted – in football and in the media – that Ken and I were in some sort of closet relationship.

It never got to the point where I would go in the showers and someone would say ‘Watch out boys, Graeme’s around, backs to the wall’. But it was enough to give me a sense of isolation and paranoia. Once it really gained momentum, everything I did was used as evidence I was gay. The way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I went to art galleries and read The Guardian all turned into more clues about my sexuality.

The sheer number of people that would ask me about the situation between me and Ken was bewildering. I got bits and pieces of abuse in the street: the odd shout of ‘poof’ or ‘shirtlifter’ from the other side of the road, mainly from lads trying to get a laugh from their mates. No one said it directly to my face unless they were in a crowd at a game but the variety of insults aimed at gay people became my specialist subject. The worst thing was when you’d go to get the ball for a corner or a throw and there would be somebody a couple of feet away from you in the front row. Their faces would be contorted with aggression and they’d be screaming this homophobic abuse at me that was often really vicious stuff. When it was that close and one-on-one, it was shocking.

Pretty soon, opposition players were winding me up about it on the pitch. It didn’t happen that often but there were a couple of occasions when I responded or retaliated and all hell broke loose. When I made it an issue, the lack of action taken against the people responsible said a lot about the reluctance of the authorities to confront the problem, a reluctance that still exists today.

The media hounded me about it, too, particularly the tabloid newspapers. When I first started going out with Mariana while I was playing for Blackburn, she was a press officer for Camelot. The lottery was very high-profile back then and gradually people began to find out that we were seeing each other. A couple of papers started harassing her at work. They phoned up on the pretext of asking something about the lottery but pretty soon they dropped the pretence and started asking her about me.

The Daily Star was particularly persistent. Their reporter kept going on about how there were all these rumours about my sexuality and how the paper wasn’t convinced we were actually seeing each other. Mariana could have lost her job because she was spending so much time fielding these crackpot calls. She had to go and see her boss about it. In the end, this guy from the Star rang again and blurted out ‘Is he gay?’ She just said ‘Of course he isn’t’ and he said ‘Thanks’ and put the phone down. The following Friday, they ran a front page that said ‘Homo Le Saux? Not my Graeme’. On the inside page, it had the rest of the story and there was a picture of me. Underneath the picture, they ran the caption ‘Le Saux: all man’. It’s funny now but at the time I was fuming. It was the day before a game and we were travelling. All the playerswere getting on the Blackburn team bus and Tim Sherwood asked me if I had seen the paper. The guys were upset for me. It felt like I had some support from them. In contrast to the way it had been at Chelsea.

I think they were genuinely mortified that I was having to go through all that kind of stuff. I wondered whether it was defamatory: being called gay if you weren’t. In the context of football, I think it is, because, sadly, it could cost you your career. No manager would want to buy you, in those days, anyway. It’s a terrible indictment of the game but I’m afraid it’s true.

I was in my second spell at Chelsea when the real problems on the pitch began. Ironically, the atmosphere at the club had changed radically in the time I had been away. It was much less threatening, much less intimidating. Most of all, it was much more cosmopolitan. Ruud Gullit was the manager when they brought me back and they had recruited players like Gianluca Vialli, Roberto di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola and Frank Lebouef. It could hardly have been more different from the dressing room I had left behind. From feeling like an alien in my first spell at the club, I fitted in easily second time around. Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment hadn’t yet spread to some of my rivals at other clubs.

I had had four years at Blackburn Rovers by then, four years of an increasingly high profile and four years of taunts from opposition supporters. Everyone assumed that the fight between me and my Blackburn team-mate, David Batty, during an away game against Spartak Moscow in November 1995 had been over a gay insult he’d aimed at me but it wasn’t, not really.

From the time the rumours about me being gay first surfaced that afternoon at West Ham, I got plenty of comments from other players about me being ‘a faggot’ or ‘a queer’. It happened all the time. Robbie Savage was one of the players who seemed to get a particular thrill out of it. I guess that won’t really surprise anyone. I told him he should say it all again to me at the end of the game when I’d tackled him a few times. I told him we could sort it out in a football way and then see if he still wanted to call me a poof. It was irrational really, schoolboy behaviour.

There weren’t many players who went out of their way to keep going on about it. Most of the time, I let it go. But when Chelsea played Liverpool at Anfield in October 1997, Paul Ince started winding me up about it repeatedly and in the end, I gave him a taste of his own medicine.

Paul and I had always got on really, really well. We were England team-mates and I respected him a great deal. The game against Liverpool was a Sunday afternoon match and afterwards we were due to travel down to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of Glenn Hoddle’s England squad and start the preparations for the make-or-break World Cup qualifying game against Italy in Rome, which was the following Saturday.

Paul was really wound up during the game. He’d get so frantic in matches sometimes that his eyes would change – they’d kind of glaze over. There was a frenetic atmosphere at Anfield and it was an all-action game. They ended up winning it 4–2. I’d been clattered a few times already when Paul launched himself at me with a tackle, took my legs away and left me on the deck.

When I was on the ground, he started jabbering away at me. ‘Come on you fucking poof,’ he said, ‘get up, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ He said it a few times. I let it go. People get called ‘a poof’ all the time in football. It’s a generic term of abuse. But it was loaded when people aimed it at me. A few minutes later, he clattered me again and started yelling the same stuff. I snapped.

I said something that I knew would hurt him. I insulted his wife.

Paul went absolutely ballistic. He was livid. He spent the rest of the match desperately trying to kick lumps out of me. He was in a towering rage. When the final whistle went, I was going down the tunnel when I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye about to try and land a punch on me. I ducked out of the way and scarpered back out onto the pitch. The guy had lost it completely: he wanted to kill me.

Paul was a prime example of a guy who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. He had been calling me all the names under the sun, personal stuff that he must have known would hurt me, stuff that I found offensive. And yet as soon as I retaliated in kind, he couldn’t cope. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d said, and it was out of order. I knew his wife, Claire, and I liked her. It wasn’t about her, though; it was about letting him know what it was like to try to have put up with that kind of abuse.

Paul quickly turned it round in his own mind so that I was the villain. I knew it was going to be very awkward when we got to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of the England squad that night. I got there before him and there was plenty of banter among the lads sitting in the restaurant about what he was going to do to me when he arrived. I laughed nervously. I didn’t want a punch-up with him – he was a lot stronger than me.

I decided I needed to be the adult about it. When it was obvious he had arrived, I phoned him in his room and asked if I could go up and talk to him about it. He was reluctant but he agreed. I got up there and he got into me straight away. ‘You’re out of order talking about my wife like that,’ he said. ‘You know her, and anyway no one talks about my family like that.’

I told him that I hadn’t really known what I was saying but I asked him how he thought it made me feel when he was calling me ‘a fucking poof’. I explained to him that I hadn’t done it to insult his wife. Just to get back at him. But he wouldn’t accept it; it was an honour thing for him. It’s a shame, but ever since then my relationship with him has been very cold.

By then, the gay slurs had become a big part of my career. But the homophobia that surrounded me put me in a desperately difficult situation. It was difficult for me to keep denying I was gay and reacting angrily to any suggestion that I might be homosexual without being disrespectful to the homosexual community. Talking about something that isn’t actually true makes it impossibly difficult to confront. That’s why I didn’t brave the issue in the newspapers.

I have gay friends and I don’t judge them. I am not homophobic. If there was a gay player and he was part of a team I was playing for, that wouldn’t be an issue for me at all. Someone’s private life is entirely up to them. But when supporters and other players accused me of being gay, it got to me. It was complicated. I never believed there was anything wrong with being gay but I felt that if it came to be accepted that I was gay, I would be unable to continue as a professional footballer. That’s how deep-seated the prejudice in the game is. That’s why I fought back as strongly as I did.

Homosexuality really is football’s last taboo. We’ve got past pretty much everything else. The problems with racism that disfigured football for much of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are not over but they are on the wane. An awful lot of good work has been done and attitudes have changed. You don’t get people making monkey noises at English football grounds any more. You don’t get supporters throwing bananas on the pitch as they used to do when John Barnes and Ces Podd were playing.

But there is still terrible prejudice within football. That is part of the culture. People try and pick on other people’s weaknesses. You have to deal with constant mickey-taking and being derided for the most trivial matters: the trainers you have just bought, the haircut you have just had, the piece about you in the newspaper. It is endless and it can be draining. It is part of the competitive nature of the dressing room. Your team-mates are digging away all the time, trying to get one up on each other. If you can make someone else look stupid, that’s the ideal.

Given that kind of peer pressure, I don’t think a modern footballer could ever come out as a gay man. I don’t think anyone could think of any positive reason to do it. It would immediately isolate you from the rest of the team. The group would be too hostile for you to survive. The situation would be too daunting.

Football has not had to deal with a group of gay footballers standing there and saying ‘How are you going to deal with us?’ They haven’t had to confront homophobia yet because the gay footballers that are probably playing in our leagues are understandably too frightened to declare their homosexuality and cope with the backlash they would face. Until there is a powerful voice for a minority group, football will never make provision for it.

The abuse I had to suffer would be multiplied by 100 for a player who was openly gay. The burden would be too much. I think of the stick I had from the fans and it made me feel anxious and nervous even before I got out on the pitch. Sometimes, you go out there not feeling 100 per cent confident anyway and that apprehension is compounded by the fact that you are going to be targeted in the warm-up.

Every time you run to the side of the pitch, there is going to be a little group of people giving you abuse. Suddenly, all the anger and prejudice hidden away under the surface of someone’s everyday life starts spewing out. You start to get a sense of the mentality of the mob and to anticipate the way the collective mind of a hostile crowd works. You know that if the game starts badly for the team you are playing against, then within ten minutes they will turn their anger and their frustration on you. And then a whole stadium of 40,000 or 50,000 people will start singing about how you take it up the arse.

Most of the time, you try and blot that out but sometimes you can’t. On another occasion at Anfield, I went over to the touchline to get the ball when it had gone out for a throw. A kid in the crowd was holding it. He was nine or ten and his dad was next to him. ‘You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,’ he screamed at me. His dad was joining in as well. I got the ball and then I stopped and looked at him.

‘Who do you think you are talking to like that?’ I asked him. I pointed at him and then, of course, everyone else starting piling in. I was all for hauling that kid out of the crowd and putting him on the side of the pitch with me. Sometimes you have just got to draw the line and say ‘That is wrong, you don’t treat people like that’.

That has happened a few times: where I have confronted people and made eye contact with them. It never worked because there were always so many people around them. They are usually the kind of so-called fans that will scream personal abuse at a player for ninety minutes and then report them to the police if they look at them the wrong way.

There was another time when I stood up for myself, too, a time when I refused to look the other way. I had a family by then and my wife, Mariana, brought our new-born eldest child, Georgina, to her first game at the end of February 1999. It was Liverpool again but this time it wasn’t Paul Ince who was the problem. This time, it was Robbie Fowler.

I had admired Robbie when he was a young player. He was a magnificent finisher, one of the best natural strikers you would ever see. But as people, he and I are probably about as far apart as it’s possible to be. His trademark was his sarcastic, put-down humour. That’s fine, that’s great; if that’s how you play the game – fine. He had an irreverent, caustic attitude. I didn’t mind that but the thing with Robbie was that he didn’t know when to stop. When things became unacceptable, it felt as if he was ignorant of his social responsibilities and the consequences of his actions.

That Chelsea–Liverpool match at Stamford Bridge was a high-tempo game like all the clashes between the two teams seemed to be and there were a few incidents. Early in the second half, I moved to clear the ball from left-back and as I did so, Robbie tried to block it but ended up coming across me and fouling me. I went down and the referee, Paul Durkin, booked him.

Robbie looked down at me. ‘Get up, you poof,’ he said. I stayed on the turf while the physio was treating me and then got up. By then, Robbie was standing ten yards away. The ball was in front of me, ready for the free-kick. I looked at Robbie. He started bending over and pointing his backside in my direction. He looked over his shoulder and started yelling at me. He was smirking. ‘Come and give me one up the arse,’ he said, ‘come and give me one up the arse.’

He said it three or four times. The Chelsea fans, in the benches where the new West Stand is now, were going berserk. The linesman was standing right next to me. He could see what Robbie was doing but he didn’t take any action. He didn’t call Durkin over. Everyone knew exactly what Robbie’s gesture meant. There wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation. I asked the linesman what he was going to do about it. He just stood there with a look of suppressed panic on his face.

So I stood there with the ball, waiting. Robbie could see he was winding me up and I suppose that gave him a great sense of gratification. So he carried on doing it. I told the linesman I wasn’t going to take the free-kick until he stopped. It was a Mexican stand-off. I wish Paul Durkin had found it in him to decide what was going on and then send Robbie off for ungentlemanly conduct.

It was a big moment. What Robbie did provided a chance for people to confront a serious issue. Some people compared it to sledging in cricket but sledging is still essentially private – an exchange or series of exchanges that stay between the players on the pitch. Only the people on the pitch are aware of the insults that are being hurled. That’s where I believe Robbie crossed the line and betrayed the game. When a fellow professional does something like that to you, when he mocks you for public consumption, it adds credibility to unfounded rumours. That is why it upset me so much. I just cannot accept that that is just part of the game. In my football career, I never saw anyone do something like that to another player.

Whatever happens on the pitch should stay on the pitch. There is a huge amount of pressure not to break that omertà. I don’t know where it comes from but it surrounds you. It is self-protecting. If you’re a player and you talk about things that should be kept private because they happened on the field, you risk losing the trust of team-mates and opponents. As soon as you step out of the circle and expose what actually happens, it’s very difficult to get back in.

I felt that what Fowler did – because it was so blatant – allowed me to step out of the circle and hit back at him in whatever way I needed to. He had betrayed me on the pitch. He had broken the code first. I have felt that conflict of interest on a few occasions and until then I had always taken the stick that came my way and laid low until the fuss blew over.

Black players have had plenty of foul abuse aimed at them over the years but no fellow player has ever made a public gesture like that at any one of them. Robbie wouldn’t dream of making gestures to a black player so why did he feel it was acceptable to incite me by sticking out his backside?

I think football had a chance to make a stand there and then against this kind of thing. The game could have made a strong statement that such blatant homophobia would not be tolerated. Durkin would have been feted for that if he had taken a stand and I believe that maybe it would have taken some of the stigma away for gay footballers who are still petrified of being found out. It could have been a turning point.

But football didn’t make a stand. Durkin ran over and booked me for time-wasting. I was dumbfounded. I asked him if he was just going to let Robbie get away with it. He didn’t say anything. He said later that he hadn’t seen what Robbie was doing but I wonder if it was just that he didn’t want to deal with it. No one wanted to deal with it.

My head filled up with anger. I still didn’t want to take the free-kick. Perhaps I should have taken even more of a stand. Perhaps I should just have refused to take the kick and been sent off. That would at least have forced the issue but it would probably have made me a martyr for the cause and I didn’t want that. In that kind of situation, the pressure to play on is overwhelming. The crowd is screaming and baying, the rest of the players are looking at you expectantly, waiting for play to restart. I looked at Robbie again and he had stopped bending over. So I took the free-kick.

I was consumed with the idea of retribution. I wanted vengeance. I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It was like smacking a punchball. I tried to calm down but I couldn’t. There was no way I could get rid of my anger. I ran up to the halfway line and tried to confront Robbie. I told him my family was in the stand. ‘Bollocks to your family,’ he said.

Robbie revealed a slightly different version of the episode in his autobiography – and a different attitude to it. He wrote that after all his insinuations about me being gay, I had run up to him on the pitch and shouted ‘But I’m married’ and that he had replied ‘So was Elton John, mate’. It’s a nice line and it makes Robbie look funny, which is the most important thing to him. But I’m afraid it’s what’s called dramatic licence – he didn’t say it.

I waited for my opportunity. I should have come off really. My head was gone. I wasn’t even concentrating on the game. I felt humiliated. It was an age until the ball came near us again but I was possessed with the idea of getting my own back. In the cold light of day, it sounds inexcusable but I felt as if the anger of so many years of being taunted was welling up inside me.

Eventually, the ball was played down their left-hand side and Robbie made a run towards our box. I came across and ran straight into him with a swing of the elbow. I clattered him as hard as I could but thankfully I’m not very good at that kind of thing. In fact, it was pathetic. Durkin didn’t see it so I didn’t get punished. Thankfully, it didn’t do Robbie any lasting damage. We had a couple more kicking matches and in the end he caught me on the calf and I had to come off. About eight minutes from the end, Vialli brought Eddie Newton on to replace me and the most traumatic match of my career was over.

I was still incredibly angry after the game. I went to see Durkin. I had already heard that the Match of the Day cameras had captured my elbow on Robbie and I wanted to outline to him exactly why I had done it. Dermot Gallagher was the fourth official and he said he’d seen the whole thing with Robbie jutting out his backside. He started talking about the amount of stick he’d had over the years for being Irish.

I had ten minutes with them, talking about the whole thing. I asked Durkin about the booking. I asked him why I’d be time wasting when we were playing at home and the score was 1–1. He didn’t have an answer. I asked the linesman again why he hadn’t done anything and he didn’t want to engage. He didn’t know what his response should have been: a guy sticking out his backside to taunt another player – it’s not in the rule book is it?

The aftermath was awful. I got buried by television and the newspapers because I had tried to take him out off the ball. That was fair enough. But it seemed bizarre that they were focusing on that rather than the extreme provocation I had been subjected to. Because I had reacted, a lot of people seemed to want to excuse Robbie for what he had done. Three days after the game, the FA charged us both with misconduct.

I sent him a letter of apology for thwacking him over the head. I got a letter from him, too. It was a non-committal explanation of what he had done. It wasn’t an apology as such. It was an attempt to save face, couched in legal niceties, drafted by a lawyer or an agent, and designed to appease the FA tribunal before they sat in judgment on us. It was a sad excuse of a letter really. It was an insult to everyone’s intelligence:

Dear Graeme,

I am in receipt of your without prejudice letter about what occurred on Saturday, February 27 at Stamford Bridge.

I am sorry if you misinterpreted my actions during the game, which were not meant to cause any offence to yourself or anyone else. Hopefully this unhappy incident can now be brought to an end.

I am sure you share my hope that when we play together again either on opposite sides or on international duty, people have no reason to judge us other than on our footballing abilities.

Best wishes,

R. Fowler

It was supposed to be a private letter but Robbie released it to the press. He did make one serious point about the incident in his autobiography, though. ‘Football’s a tough sport,’ he wrote, ‘and to get to the top, you have to be incredibly thick-skinned. A bit of name-calling never hurt anyone and the truth is that I wasn’t being homophobic, I was merely trying to exploit a known weakness in an opponent who had done me a number of times.’

It’s an interesting line of defence. According to Robbie’s rationale, then, it’s okay to call a black man a ‘nigger’ on the pitch and pretend it’s all in the line of duty. I don’t think so. I don’t think even Robbie would try and argue that. Maybe he just didn’t think about his argument. It’s more likely he didn’t really have any defence and that that was the best he could come up with. It wasn’t a very good effort.

The television and radio presenter Nicky Campbell produced an article about what Fowler had written: ‘I bet what Fowler did that day at Chelsea made thousands of youngsters feel pretty crappy about themselves,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine if he had performed a craven Uncle Tom shuffle of subordination to a black player. A bit of name calling never hurt anyone?

‘But it is unfair to blame Fowler. The insular and impenetrable culture of football is the fundamental problem. There, difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned. This is the world of the institutionally incurious.’

A month after Robbie offered me his backside, we both found ourselves in another England squad. There was another awkward reunion at Burnham Beeches. By now, Kevin Keegan was the manager and we were preparing for his first match in charge, a home European Championship qualifying tie against Poland. Kevin summoned us both to his room. He wanted us to stage a public reconciliation for the press. Robbie didn’t have quite as much bravado in that situation. He looked like a naughty little boy. He seemed shy and tongue-tied. Kevin wanted us to do a photo-call for the media but I said immediately that unless Robbie apologized to me first, that wasn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there was no way I was going to go out there and pretend we had resolved the situation – no chance.

I made it clear that I didn’t want a public apology from Robbie; just a private word would do. But he refused. He said he had done nothing wrong, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Keegan started to back off at that point. He wasn’t qualified to deal with it but I felt more confident about it. By now, I felt bolstered by the debate the incident had caused, and in a strange kind of way I felt relieved that the issue was totally out in the open. Now, at least, everyone knew the kind of taunting I had to put up with from the fans every week. Now, they could guess at the routine abuse I had to deal with on the pitch. From that moment on, there seemed to be less animosity about the chants that were directed at me. The debate about the incident with Fowler took some of the mystery out of it all and exposed it for the puerile cruelty it was.

I don’t feel any animosity towards Robbie now but you cannot do that to people. Because of the kind of stuff that he sought to justify, sometimes during my career it felt as if the whole world was against me. It was hard to deal with. It’s starting to sound like a sob story now, I know, and that’s not my intention. But this was like bullying, out and out bullying.

I was determined to stand up for myself. I confronted Robbie about it while we were in Keegan’s room. I pointed out to him that if he’d taken the piss out of someone like that in the middle of Soho where all the gay clubs are, he would have got chased down the street and beaten up. Even then, Robbie couldn’t resist it. When I mentioned the gay clubs in Soho, he muttered: ‘You’d know where they are.’ I laughed, I admit it. He can be a funny guy. I told him I’d be professional with him on the training pitch but that there was no way I was going to shake his hand.

On 9 April, six weeks after the original incident and six days after Robbie had got himself in more trouble by pretending to snort the white lines on the pitch at Goodison Park during a goal celebration in a Merseyside derby, we were both told to attend our separate FA disciplinary hearings at Birmingham City’s St Andrews ground. I took a barrister called Jim Sturman with me to act in my defence and the Chelsea managing director, Colin Hutchinson, came along to support me. Jim had put a dossier together to show the disciplinary committee which detailed the homophobic abuse I had suffered from crowds over the years. We had video footage of some of the more extreme incidents and Jim also brought some of the hundreds of letters of support I received from members of the public.

Jim presented my case very eloquently and the panel seemed surprised by our approach. It wasn’t so much punishing Robbie that I was after. I didn’t want to get him into more trouble. He seemed to be doing pretty well by himself without any extra help from me. It was more about illustrating to them the problem with homosexual abuse that still existed in English football and the extent of what I had had to deal with.

If they had given me a punishment based on what I did, I would not have accepted it. I felt it was important to make a stand. I also saw it as an opportunity to get the whole thing off my chest. I had put up with it for so long and this was like a chance to exorcize a demon. In my mind, it wasn’t about Robbie Fowler. It was all about me. It didn’t matter who had done it to me. It wasn’t personal. It was about the victimisation and the lies.

I expected a token punishment for the fact that I had done something wrong on the pitch. If they had tried to make an example out of me, though, I would have taken it further. I would have made the FA accountable for what had happened. In the end, they banned me for a game and gave me a £5,000 fine.

They hammered Robbie. He was suddenly dealing with the fall-out from his mock-cocaine-snorting antics as well as what he did to me. In a way, it got the FA off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.

I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.

Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.

But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.

It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.

The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.

The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having to run up and down the touchline in front of the Main Stand. I was scared stiff. I thought the fans were going to kill me.

In the second half, Luca told me to go and warm up. Because the linesman was running the line in the half to our right, we had to warm up at the Kop end. So when I ran down the touchline towards the Kop, the entire Kop started singing ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’. I think it was the loudest I’d ever heard it. Then the wolf whistles started. But something really had changed. For the first time ever, it didn’t upset me. For the first time, I felt I had the confidence to see it as the wind-up it was and take the sting out of it without getting upset.

During my stretching, I was in the corner near the Kop and I turned my back to them. I did a hamstring stretch where you open both your legs out wide and you get really low and touch your elbows on the floor. As I did it, I looked between my legs at the supporters and winked and smiled. And they all started applauding me. There was nothing pre-meditated about it. It’s funny, but it made me feel as though the pressure was lifting a bit. It took the edge off everything. It was a catharsis.

In the end, I got there. But it didn’t wipe out what I’d been through. It didn’t wash it away. Let’s be blunt: it was awful; it nearly drove me out of the game. The homophobic taunting and the bullying made me feel left out and misunderstood. People have read me wrong because they thought I wasn’t a team player just because I was different, just because I didn’t conform to the stereotype of a laddish footballer.

In my first spell at Chelsea, I was so close to walking away from football. I went through times that were like depression. I would get up in the morning and I wouldn’t feel good and by the time I got into training I would be so nervous that I felt sick. I dreaded going in. I was like a bullied kid on his way into school to face his tormentors.

Sometimes, when I look back at what I went through, I don’t know why I carried on – other than this singlemindedness and some sort of belief that I had a destiny to make it as a professional footballer. I can’t work out why I didn’t pack it all in but it was like I was on a path and despite all the baggage I was carrying, I never let myself stray from that path.

It’s an indictment of our game and the prejudice it allows, but I felt a great surge of relief when I retired. Playing was such an emotional drain. I had to get myself up for the game and then I had to prepare myself for being singled out by opposition supporters. That’s another notch altogether.

Abuse is abuse, whatever it is. I never understood why, if you could be kicked out of a football ground and prosecuted for racism, why not for other forms of prejudice? Early in 2007, the FA finally said that homophobic abuse should be treated in the same way as racial abuse inside football grounds. Given the abuse that I, and others, suffered, it feels like it was about twenty years too late. Perhaps that’s their idea of a rapid response unit. Still, better late than never.

The result of football’s strange tolerance of the homophobic victimization is that for somebody in the game to admit they are gay just couldn’t happen. If somebody came to me and said they were a gay footballer and asked my advice about whether they should be open about it, I would find it difficult to give them an honest answer.

I would find it difficult to say to a gay man that he ought to be true to himself and to the community he is representing. That’s what I’d want to tell him but the reality is that if you are a footballer and you want to do well, keep your mouth shut about being gay. That’s a terrible indictment of the English game but football is a society within a society. It’s another country.