Читать книгу Stan: Tackling My Demons - Stan Collymore - Страница 6

Everybody thinks I underachieved as a footballer. Everybody always says I could have done so much more. I could have been one of the greats. I could have had 80 caps for England instead of three. I could have been a stalwart of the national side. I could have won a hatful of medals and the admiration of my peers. They say it’s such a shame it turned out the way it did and that I walked away from football when I was 30, when I should have been in my prime, not burned out, my mind frazzled.

Well, I want to nail all that. I didn’t underachieve. I overachieved. I had a great career. I played for Aston Villa, the club I had always wanted to play for. I played for Liverpool, one of the most famous names in world football. And I played for my country. I scored the winning goal in the best match of the 1990s, Liverpool’s 4–3 win over Newcastle at Anfield in 1996. I scored goals that got people up off their seats. I was an entertainer. The fans of the clubs I played for loved me. That will always mean more to me than any one of the medals that public opinion has deemed the arbiter of success in a footballer’s career.

I don’t agree with that criteria. Alan Shearer has never won a winner’s medal in all his time at Newcastle, and yet the enjoyment and the satisfaction he has provided for Geordie supporters who worship him is worth a million medals. You don’t have to have little bits of silver hidden away in a bank vault somewhere to convince you that you were a success. All you need are memories that make your chest puff out and your eyes glisten when you think of them. That’s why I count helping to keep Southend United in the First Division in my season there as one of my finest achievements. That’s success to me.

But that’s not the main reason why I look back at my playing years with pride, and not with regret. If you want to understand me, if you want to put what I did in its proper context, you need to know what I was up against. You need to know what was going on inside my mind. You need to know about my thought processes and how they tortured me. You need to know about the mental illness I suffer from and how I have struggled to overcome that all my life. You need to know how I’m fighting Borderline Personality Disorder. And how, essentially, that often feels like a losing battle.

When people talk about me and how I wasted my talent, there are usually two favourite themes they trot out. Firstly, they talk about how, wherever I went, I never got on with my team-mates. They talk about me being a loner. They recall apocryphal stories about team-mates not celebrating goals with me. They repeat rumours about players not talking to me in the dressing room at Nottingham Forest. They say I was arrogant and aloof and that I was bad news for team spirit wherever I went.

The other strand is my attitude to training. The common perception is that I damned myself by being an incorrigibly lazy twat. The stories go that I left behind a trail of infuriated managers who had grown increasingly exasperated by my reluctance to fall into line on the training pitch. It’s almost like football was the fucking army and I was guilty of serial insubordination. Failing to obey some fuckwit officer who never had a tenth of my talent as a player and who catered his sessions to the lowest common denominator. Well, I’m not a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ person. I don’t respect automatons and drones.

If clubs failed to get the best out of me, that is their failure. Not mine. If they paid millions of pounds for me and then tossed me into the general pile of players, if they treated every personality alike rather than catering for individual needs, then why should they be surprised if someone like me doesn’t react well? Man-management isn’t rocket science, but because I was fragile mentally I needed loyalty and care. When I got that, at Southend, Nottingham Forest and Leicester, I flourished and the team prospered. When I didn’t get it, I withered.

Training and I have always been strange bedfellows. Part of that stems from the fact that my first experience of a professional club was mutilated by a horror of a human being called Ray Train, who was the youth-team coach at Walsall when I joined as an apprentice on £29 a week at the age of 17. Being an apprentice under Ray Train was like a baby coming out of the womb and the first thing it sees is people firing guns or battering the fuck out of each other. This was my first taste of professional football and training at a league club.

The man terrified me. It’s a strong word but I use it intentionally. He inspired terror in me. My first day under his tutelage set out the pattern for the rest of my career as far as a distaste for training goes. It was a template for cynicism about training. I still associate training with him. Even when I’m sitting in my car today outside the health club I use in Great Barr, I start to sweat and get the shakes before I go for a work-out because I associate working out with him.

That first day at Walsall was a beautiful, sunny day in June and I had caught two buses from our house in Cannock to get there early, one from Cannock to Walsall Bus Station, the other from there to Fellows Park, the predecessor to the Bescot Stadium. I got to the ground, washed the kit and swept up. Then we went over to the training ground and the first thing we did was a long cross-country run. And I struggled.

More than that, I struggled badly. I hadn’t done four to six weeks’ preparation. Nobody had told me I had to. I was lagging behind. I was so far behind everyone else you wouldn’t believe it, and from thereon in, Ray decided he was going to have me for his bunny. At the end of every session he would allow us all to walk back towards the dressing rooms and then, just when I thought I was free, he would shout: ‘Not you, Stan.’

Ray was the ultimate grafter. Even at 40, he still trained like a fucking demon. The only other person who got near him for intensity, in my experience, was Archie Gemmill at Nottingham Forest. Ray couldn’t let go. He had to prove he was still a player. Had to prove he was still as fit as all of us. So for him to see a lazy, black, eminently talented player come on and score a couple of goals for the youth team as a late substitute used to infuriate him.

The bloke was five foot nothing. He had played for Carlisle for five years between 1971 and 1976, a defensive midfielder who was the cornerstone of the success they enjoyed in that period, which even took them into the top flight. He was popular with the fans because of the effort he put in, but people told me the senior pros used to laugh at him because he was this little fucking sergeant major type figure. He was never racist. He didn’t even shout, really. That was what made him so sinister. He would sidle up to me and whisper what he wanted me to do in my ear. I hated him, but most of all he terrified me. He made my life a misery. He always made a point of leaving that little gap between letting me walk away at the end of a session and then calling me back for more. It was psychological torture. And it was only me. It was public humiliation in front of the rest of the lads. I have tried to take my rawness into account, but that little man went out of his way, time and time again, to fuck with my mind.

He would get me to come in an hour before the rest of the lads. He seemed to like the ones who were grafters, particularly a group of three or four who had been released by Celtic. They were all hard-working midfielders. But to me, whether you are the laziest fucker on earth or whether you are a grafter, a coach should do all he can to get the best out of you. That was not quite how Ray saw it. He tormented me but he didn’t get me any fitter.

His favourite mode of torture was to get me to mop the changing rooms at Fellows Park. He developed this fiendish system where he would hide penny-pieces in obscure places like on the outside of the U-bend behind the toilet or on top of the cistern. If you missed one of these penny-pieces he took it as a sign you hadn’t done the job properly and you had to start again. It was pathetic. It was medieval shit. I still feel sad I had to go through it all. I still feel sad that it left its mark on me.

He still haunts me. I think about him and what he did to me most days. I’m still terrified of him. I met him once in New York when I was there with Ulrika. We were in Bloomingdales in the Ralph Lauren section and I caught sight of this little fucking dickhead stretching up, trying to reach some of the T-shirts on the top shelf. It was Ray. He had knitted hair that sprawled over his head like a cardigan. Somehow, he sensed somebody looking at him and turned round. ‘All right, big man,’ he said. I had to get out of there. I was shaking with anger and fear. There I was, a grown man, still brought low by this guy. Ulrika wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

I never complained about him or objected to any of this treatment to his face. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. One day, I thought God had smiled on me because Ray keeled over and had a heart attack on the training pitch. Right there in front of me. It felt like divine retribution. The ambulance came for him and carted him off to hospital, us all standing there in our dirty kits watching. I had never been so happy in my entire fucking life. There was the possibility that he might die, but at the very least we would be rid of him for a few months.

He didn’t die. Little fuckers like him never do. But I thought there was still hope. When he came back, Tommy Coakley, the first-team manager, got the sack and Ray was promoted to caretaker boss. I wished fervently he would be given the post permanently or that the new guy would keep him on as his assistant, but, of course, no one could be that stupid. John Barnwell got the job and booted him back down to the youth team and the torment began all over again.

It was a systematic attempt to break me, and it worked. Instead of leaving me to do the extra work he gave me by myself, he made the other lads stay, too, to watch me. One day, the first team were travelling to an away match and most of the reserve side had gone with them, so the youth team played in the reserve match that night. Except me. I was the only one left out. I had to stay behind and sweep the stands at Fellows Park. By myself.

I wasn’t getting much of a run in the team. I was always on the bench. If I got on, I usually scored. But I was getting more and more unhappy. I dreaded waking up in the morning because I was so scared of what the day was going to hold. Often, I wished I would die in the night just so I could avoid Ray the next day. Sometimes, even if I made it to Fellows Park in the morning I’d head for the phone box outside the ground and call my mum in tears.

In the end, I just called it a day. Ray getting the youth-team job back finished me. I went in to see John Barnwell, said it wasn’t working out and asked him if I could be released from my contract. He was very good about it. I thought I was free of Ray then, but Ray never left me really. I went on to Wolves as an apprentice and I scored 18 goals in 20 games for the reserves. I was devastated when they let me go after less than a season there, but when Graham Turner (who was the manager then) released me, one of the reasons he gave was my inconsistent appearance record at training.

And it was true. Sometimes I just didn’t go in. It wasn’t as if I was skiving off so I could do something else. I didn’t go out on the piss or smoke fags or go in to Birmingham. I just stayed indoors. I’d developed some mental block at Walsall. Ray had infected me. It was the same at Forest. There were four or five occasions when I didn’t go in. Liverpool was exactly the same. It was very unprofessional but I had my reasons.

In training, I loved five-a-sides and I liked to do practical, functional stuff that was relevant to my game. I wanted people putting crosses in for me. I wanted to try to hone my finishing. I wanted to be put in situations where I could take people on. I wasn’t like most of the players because most players are low maintenance when it comes to training. They do what they are told. If they are told to lick their own arsehole, they’ll lick it. No questions asked. But if I was told to do something mundane like sidefoot volley a ball back to someone who kept on throwing it to you time after time from a few yards away, I lost interest. I could do that standing on my head. The Gareth Southgates of this world did it because it could genuinely enhance their game. But for me, that kind of exercise was like white noise. It was minutiae. Doing stuff like running across the width of the pitch doing sidefoot volleys was a piece of piss so I’d just switch off.

Perhaps I was a victim of the increasing premium on supreme physical fitness. I have never been the fittest. Somebody like Robbie Savage could go six months without training, then go on a long run tomorrow and dash through it like a whippet. But if I do long fitness stuff, I just get bored. And if I was either uninspired or if something had happened in my personal life, sometimes I would decide to skip training.

If you get an intelligent coach like Arsene Wenger, he knows how to manage his players. I look at someone like Thierry Henry and think he must have his days sometimes when he can be temperamental. But some of the sessions at Arsenal only last 45 minutes. When I was at Palace, most of them went on for three hours. If you knew that was coming, the temptation was to sit at home and think ‘fuck that’.

My curse is that I’ve always been blessed with a great touch. I don’t need to practise my ball skills. I was born with them. I’m never going to lose them. If someone injected me with a fitness drug and I walked out in the Arsenal team or the Liverpool team tomorrow, no one would ever know that I had not played football for three years. I can guarantee that. But if you took an average player who had been out for the same length of time, you could forget about giving them a ball. You might as well give them a bag of cement to kick around.

The fittest I have ever been was at Nottingham Forest. We had a coach there called Pete Edwards. We used to take the piss out of him because he was a muscle man, but he was superb. He organised very high intensity, short-burst sessions with balls in match environments. Our warm-ups were the equivalent of full sessions for other clubs, but when we finished our matches there was not one Forest player who looked as though he had just played 90 minutes.

It makes me smile now to think of how fit I was then. In my current state, energy is about as hard to find as rocking-horse shit, but back then I had too much of it. The night before a game against Sunderland, I even felt I had to go to the gym to do an hour on the treadmill just to get rid of some of the excess energy that was coursing through me. I went out the next day against Sunderland and I was still flying around. After Forest, I went to Liverpool, where the regime was not as intense. It was like pulling a thread on my fitness. It all started to unravel.

Maybe I just don’t look like I’m trying. Sometimes, it clearly appears as if I don’t care. Glenn Hoddle criticised me once in training before England’s World Cup qualifying tie in Rome in 1997. The forwards were queueing up for finishing practice and Ian Wright had just lunged for a cross and prodded it in. When it was my turn, the cross came in and it just evaded me. I didn’t lunge for it because I wouldn’t have got it anyway. ‘You see,’ Hoddle shouted. ‘You see, that’s the difference between you and Wrighty. Wrighty lunged for it even in training. You didn’t lunge for it.’ What a ridiculous thing to say. The problem with Hoddle was that he would get exasperated by people who couldn’t do what he had once been able to do. He would still run around the training pitch, tapping the ground as he ran with the point of his boot like a fucking dick. That just lost him the respect of the players.

The press called Hoddle’s assistant, John Gorman, ‘Coneman’. There’s always a fucking Coneman but Gorman acted like a pre-pubescent teenager, just excited to be there. He always called me ‘big man’, too, and tried to give the impression he knew what was going on. But if I’d asked him anything important, he would have shit himself and hedged around it. He knew halves of bits of stuff that were discussed in the bar late at night. But, really, that amounted to nothing. His role meant not asking Glenn any awkward questions. He was a yes man.

And football’s full of them. Full of people scared to be different. Full of people only too happy to let you down and turn you into a fall guy. Something as simple and as harmless as heading home to Cannock after training was enough to put me out there in freak-show territory at a string of clubs. Football doesn’t deal very well with anybody who strays from the norm. It’s suspicious of anyone who doesn’t aspire to the norm. Think of what happened to Graeme Le Saux just because he read the Guardian and said he liked going to see art-house movies now and again. Football gave its snap judgement: the guy must be a faggot.

Football’s full of contradictions and hypocrisies like that. The players moan about the media, and the tabloids in particular, but they all read The Sun and the Mirror. If they hate the tabloids so much, why don’t they read the Guardian or The Times? They’re too scared to be different. Worried they might get the piss ripped out of them for being a lah-di-dah smart-arse gay boy. Much easier to fit in and toe the party line and do what the others do. Much easier to conform.

It wasn’t that I had a problem with authority. I just had a problem with bad management. I couldn’t understand why a football club would spend millions and millions of pounds on a new asset and then not try to get the best out of them. Clubs knew what they were getting when they bought me, so why didn’t they make plans for me? Why do you break the British transfer record for a player and then try and force him into a style of football that is foreign to him?

From Ray Train at the start to Raddy Antic at the close of my career with Real Oviedo, I feel I have been ill-served by the men who have been in a position of power over me. I know there’s a danger of that sounding self-righteous and self-pitying but it was also business suicide on the part of the clubs. There have been honourable exceptions like Colin Murphy and Barry Fry, my two managers at Southend, and Martin O’Neill at Leicester, but for the most part these men who had often paid lavish amounts of money to bring me to their club gave every impression of being disappointed they had signed an individual and not an automaton.

That was one of the things that shortened my life as a footballer. In the end, I’d just had enough of betrayal and bullshit and double-speak and the empty friendships that flourish in football dressing-rooms and die the moment you move on to another club. That kind of friendship is no friendship at all, and by the time I had reached my late twenties I had grown weary of it. By the end, I’d had enough of being treated like a circus curiosity, the sensitive, difficult footballer no one could manage.

Football’s full of people who are scared to challenge you. By that, I don’t mean it’s full of people scared to bollock you. There are plenty of men who think that’s enough to establish their authority. But to gain authority over me, you have to interest me, and football’s full of people taking the safe option, full of coaches putting on piss-poor training sessions for men who are supposed to be trained athletes every week of the year. There’s too much uniformity. Not enough variety. Too many players with ability are allowed to stagnate. As a player, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle seeking worthwhile stimulation from training.

But maybe the clubs were fighting a losing battle with me, too. I know now that I have been suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder since I was young. It’s called Borderline because it was first used to describe people who lived on that edge between psychosis and neurosis. That’s where I live. Right on that line. I sit astride it. I exhibit all the symptoms. I’m a textbook study in this particular offshoot of being fucked up.

You’ll recognise me, and the way my career has fallen away at times when it should have kicked on, from some of the Borderline sufferer’s traits. The chronic disturbance with self, others and society. The ambivalence towards all directions, aims and goals. I didn’t have the hunger other players have. Just didn’t have it. Not always, but sometimes. Not because I was lazy but because it just didn’t feel right to me to behave in certain ways at certain times.

One of the most common characteristics of someone with BPD is the subconscious search for different states of chaos. In my personal life and in my football career, I have gravitated towards situations that are bound to end in schism and conflict. Other people try and avoid discord. My illness propels me towards it. One way or another, we always seem to find each other. We like hanging out together.

People look at me and scoff at this idea that I’ve got any sort of mental problem, partly because I’ve got a lot of money, which most people associate with happiness, and partly because they can’t see me doing anything extreme like playing paintball in my front room or throwing cats into trees. I wish that made me normal. I really do.

Let me try and give you an idea of how my mind can torture me just as surely as if I was strapped to the rack in one of the seven circles of Hell. Maybe you’ll start to see why the longest time I ever spent at one club was two full seasons. Maybe you’ll start to see why it often ended in tears. Maybe you’ll start to understand why I can’t hold down a steady relationship with a woman, why I flit from one to another like a honeybee.

I feel I must be loved by all the important people in my life at all times or else I am worthless. I must be completely competent in all ways if I am to consider myself to be a worthwhile person.

I feel nobody cares about me as much as I care about them, so I always lose everyone I care about, despite the desperate things I do to try to stop them from leaving me.

I have difficulty controlling anger. I have chronic feelings of emptiness and worthlessness. I exhibit recurrent suicidal behaviour. I’m reckless sexually.

When I am alone, I become nobody and nothing. When I am alone, when I have no work to structure my day, I take to my bed. Since I stopped playing football, apart from my work for Five Live, I have slept for three years.

I will only be happy when I find an all-giving, perfect person to love me and take care of me no matter what. But if someone like that loves me, then something must be wrong with them.

My life, like that of most sufferers from Borderline Personality Disorder, has been defined by a pervasive pattern of unstable relationships and a tendency to act on impulse. Since I used to wait by the window at night for my mother to come home from the swimming baths, I have always made frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, another BPD classic trait.

One passage from a book by a guy called Jerry Kreisman, called I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me, seemed unusually relevant to my behaviour and my failure to make anything, from a relationship to a spell at a football club, more than ephemeral. ‘The world of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, Dr Kreisman writes, ‘is split into heroes and villains. A child emotionally, the BP cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities. He cannot reconcile good and bad qualities with a constant coherent understanding of another person. At any particular moment, a friend is either good or evil. There is no in-between. No grey area. People are idolised one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.

‘When the idealised person finally disappoints, the borderline must drastically restructure his one-dimensional conceptualisation. Either the idol is banished to the dungeon or the borderline banishes himself to preserve the all-good image of the other.’

I fit these descriptions like a hand fits a glove. I have heroes who can’t do any wrong. Martin O’Neill would be one. And there are men who I have come to regard as sworn enemies and devil figures. John Gregory and Ray Train would fit that part of the equation. I recognise it all so clearly that it is unsettling in itself. But it was only earlier this year that I was diagnosed with it. It coexists with the bouts of depression that I have been sinking into for the past six or seven years, but it predates my depression, too. I think it’s always been with me.

Let me try to give you an idea of how my thought process contrasts with the way someone deemed to be normal might think. Let’s say somebody tells you they love you. A normal reaction would be to process that thought and assimilate the normal, positive benefits that come with it. But somebody like me hears ‘I love you’ and the reaction sets off on a thousand different routes through my mind. Suddenly, I’m asking myself a billion questions. I have that reaction to every single thought, every single day.

I was talking to someone on the phone recently and they told me they loved me. I got aggressive with them and they became exasperated. They told me to accept it for what it was, a simple statement of affection. ‘But that’s the whole fucking point,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’ I know I should be able to react appropriately but I can’t. I’m unable to express myself emotionally. I can’t deal with my emotions. My connection between thinking something and reacting to it is all to cock.

Sometimes I get so tired trying to analyse all the thoughts that are racing around inside my mind, that I have to go to bed for a day to sleep it off. It’s always like the thermometer in my brain is about to reach boiling point.

A lot of the personality disorder, I’m sure, is rooted in my childhood. The army of Richard Littlejohns out there will say that this personality disorder mumbo-jumbo is just another way of evading personal responsibility for what they like to see as my sick sexual depravity and my failure to knuckle down for a succession of managers. It’s almost as if they think I want to be like this. It’s as if they think I want my life to feel like one long fucked-up day.

If my neuroses had a radical effect on my career, they also distorted my personal life into a litany of flings that were usually devoid of real feeling and affection. I have been out with people such as Kirsty Gallagher for around a year, and yet I never felt I was in a proper relationship with them. I have maintained several girlfriends at the same time. And through all of it, I have continually feared abandonment and remained obsessed with being loved.

Maybe, at the root of it all, it comes back to the fact that there has been no dominant male figure in my childhood or my youth. That’s a classic cause of BPD, often accompanied by the possibility that the mother was depressed in the first year of the child’s life. If my mother had had petticoats when I was a kid, I would have been clinging to them. I spent all my formative years in her company and with her female friends. I didn’t have any exposure to adult men. Perhaps that was the basis of the gnawing distrust that distanced me from elements of football’s aggressively male world.

The inevitable corollary of that was that I craved the affection of women. I had, and I still have, an insatiable desire to be loved and to have women tell me that they love me. In the context of my disorder, when celebrity brought me as many women as I wanted, I made the mistake of thinking I could use sex as a kind of selection policy. I confused sex and love, not exactly an unusual error, I know. I thought that if I had sex with enough women, sooner or later I would find the solace and the reassurance and the love that I was searching for.

It didn’t work, of course. There was a time when I was sleeping with four or five women a day. Terrified of loneliness, I had them coming to my house in Cannock on something approximating a rota system. One would arrive, we would have sex and then she would go. Another one would arrive, we would have sex and then she would go. The ones I wanted to leave would stay. The ones I wanted to stay would go. It was all fucked up.

When that cloying neediness that was the legacy of my disfunctional childhood collided with the pop-star celebrity that Paul Gascoigne’s tears and Rupert Murdoch’s billions had conferred on Premiership footballers, it turned me into the prototype for a new generation of players where everything, particularly sex and money, came easy. Suddenly, I found myself in a world where fame fed upon fame. If two celebrities started going out with each other, a relationship turned into a media monster.

Some people thrived on that. David Beckham and Victoria Adams seemed to relish the double helpings of attention. They lived their lives at the heart of a media circus of magazine front-covers, newspaper splashes, sarongs and hairstyles and an OK! wedding where they sat on matching thrones. Both their careers benefited from the sky-high profile and they took all the attention in their stride.

I felt uneasy with that kind of scrutiny. It exaggerated my insecurities and shone a light on the agonies that were darting around my mind. I didn’t have a solid-enough background to carry it off. At first, I just liked to go out, have a few beers and get a bird at the end of the night on the back of my so-called celebrity. I knew that girls were coming at me for the wrong reason, but when I was a young lad just starting out in football there was a novelty to that. Soon, though, I began to feel uncomfortable with the amount of girls I was having casual relationships with. I didn’t stop, I didn’t even rein back, but I didn’t really like myself.

My mates in Cannock all told me I was living the dream. They got exasperated with me for moaning about how I couldn’t meet anyone real, but deep down I knew that because it was so easy for me as a prominent footballer to get girls, it was damaging my ability to form a proper long-term relationship. It’s funny, isn’t it: I was shagging girls for fun, which is every bloke’s idea of the model of machismo, and yet, emotionally, I remained a desperately insecure person who couldn’t deal with his feelings.

From time to time, the emptiness of it all would hit me. When I was at Villa, I went to London one weekend and invited a girl I had met the previous week in Birmingham to come down with me. I’d booked a room at the Halkin hotel, just off Hyde Park Corner, which was a favourite haunt of Premiership footballers down in the capital for a weekend on the town. We spent most of the weekend in there shagging. When she fell asleep, I sat on the end of the bed and began writing things down. I’d just finished my treatment for depression at the Priory hospital in southwest London and they encouraged us to put our thoughts down on paper. I scribbled out two or three pages of thoughts. I was berating myself, asking myself what the fuck I was doing.

I was sitting on the end of a bed in a hotel room having just shagged a girl. I had absolutely no interest in her, and, apart from what I did for a living, she had absolutely no interest in me. I didn’t feel dirty but I just felt it was all a futile exercise. What I wanted was intimacy, not just sex. I wanted someone I could cook dinner with and have a laugh with, but all I was doing was sending myself further and further away from what I was looking for.

When I look around me now at the way the new generation of young footballers behave, I see so many of them falling into the same trap. I wonder, behind the gory stories of roasting and group sex and scandals in nightclubs and hotels, how many lonely young men there are in the game now, cut off from their own background by their wealth, haunted by hangers-on and armies of false friends who will slither away when the player’s fifteen minutes of fame is exhausted.

Perhaps I led the way for this new generation of debauchery, but I think it has got even more difficult now for players to do the right thing, even if they want to. Shagging a Premiership footballer seems to have become an art form now. They are objects of desire for a new breed of groupies whose ambitions do not end at sleeping with them. Now, being a football groupie is seen as a legitimate way of becoming a celebrity, too. If there’s a scandal attached, so much the better. Notoriety is good. Notoriety is desirable.

The problems will increase. There will be more allegations of rape and sexual assault and there will be more people in the situation I have found myself in more than once, of wanting to cry out for help but not knowing how to do it. Clubs treat their players like children not fit to take responsibility for anything, so when they let them off the leash, they simply don’t know how to make the right decisions.

Show me a young athlete who says his head would not be turned by beautiful women throwing themselves at him and I will show you a liar. All the younger players I know at Premiership clubs are shagging for fun. Availability is unlimited. It’s a free bar. Open all hours. Drink until you drop and the well will never run dry. You think it’s a dream until you find out that it’s actually a nightmare. And you’re trapped in it because it’s distorted your idea of what is required to hold down a regular relationship.

I should know. I started seeing Estelle, who became my wife and from whom I am now estranged, about seven years ago, and throughout all that time I have seen other people. At first it was because we were only supposed to be friends. However, she was always there for me, always supporting me, and we became lovers. But I never knew whether I loved her in a way that really should have stayed platonic or whether I was in love with her. Until soon before we got married, we never really formalised our relationship. Not in my mind, anyway. And that left its own poisonous legacy.

Estelle was there in the background when I was seeing Ulrika Jonsson and Davina McCall and Kirsty Gallagher. Estelle was constant. She was loyal. She stuck by me. But she knew how promiscuous I was. She knew how many women I was sleeping with. She knew that effectively I was choosing them above her. So, of course, when we eventually settled down, even when we had our daughter, Mia, she could not forget that. She could not rid herself of those images and those memories. She was paranoid about the fact that I would be unfaithful to her. She didn’t like the idea of me going to parties without her because she had seen me in action. She is a Cannock girl and she doesn’t like the bright lights. And I want to be satisfied with that but I’m never quite sure if I am. Part of me yearns for the serenity of a home environment. Part of me still enjoys elements of the London scene. When I was caught dogging, that confirmed all Estelle’s worst fears and she walked out.

Amid the chaos of my promiscuity, it was difficult to determine where some relationships ended and others began. Often, I would have a couple of girlfriends at a time. One relationship would hit a bad patch so I would start another one. Then the old relationship would be rekindled and the line between who I was going out with and who I was seeing on the side would become blurred beyond recognition.

That destroyed relationships that might have come to mean something more often than I would care to recount. It certainly finished my affair with Kirsty Gallagher, which was one of the relationships I managed to keep a secret. After we had been seeing each other for almost a year, she found out that Estelle was living at my house in Cannock, even though we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, and our affair fizzled out.

I often think now that that the relationship with Kirsty might have come to something, although I suppose I’m kidding myself there because being the way I am, nothing really ever comes to anything. It had started when I went to Fulham on loan for a few months at the beginning of the 1999–2000 season and got friendly with Stephen Hughes, the former Arsenal midfielder. He told me that Kirsty fancied me and I felt flattered. She was working as a sports presenter for Sky TV then and a lot of players drooled over her. I asked him to get her number but he said he couldn’t because she had sworn him to secrecy, and all she’d wanted him to tell me was that she was a Liverpool fan and she thought I’d been great when I was at Anfield.

I used to go to a club called Ten Rooms in Soho every week around that time, and within a couple of weeks of that conversation with Stephen Hughes I saw Kirsty in there with Gabby Yorath and Kenny Logan, the Scotland rugby international that Gabby went on to marry. I went over and started talking to her and asked her for her number. I might have been insecure in many ways but I wasn’t shy with women. She was a bit coy at first, but towards the end of the night she gave me that number.

We spent a lot of time together. She was living in a flat in Chiswick, in west London, and I would stay there two or three nights a week. She was very needy, too. She was polite and intelligent and unbelievably attractive and charismatic. In fact, back then she was generally perceived as the epitome of what was desirable in a woman: sultry, dark and very sexy. But sometimes she could seem like a little girl lost. Maybe that made us two of a kind.

We spent a bit of time clubbing but she was a very good golfer, too, not surprising since her dad, Bernard, was a former Ryder Cup player and former captain of the European Ryder Cup team. I remember one particular happy afternoon playing with her at the Belfry. I’m not a golfer but I could just about get round with my pride intact. We talked a lot while we were on the course and it was impossible not to be dazzled by how beautiful she was.

The first night I slept with her, we had been on an evening out with one of my mates and we had all gone back to stay at her mate’s flat, which was somewhere on the south bank of the Thames near the London Eye. Sometime during the night, she wandered out of the bedroom in her bra and a thong to make a cup of tea and my mate was lying there on the sofa, wide awake, staring at her with a daft grin on his face. She said it made her feel like Julia Roberts in that scene in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant’s housemate walks in on her as she’s lying in the bath.

She was an incredibly sexy and sexual woman. That first night, she did a few things with some Chocolate Fingers that have stopped me looking at them in quite the same way since. And even though she seemed shy in some ways, she wasn’t averse to experimenting with different things in the bedroom. One night we went out with a friend of hers, and we had all had a bit too much to drink by the time we got back to her mate’s flat. The friend fancied me and one thing led to another and the three of us ended up in bed together. It was a wild, wild night.

I felt very strongly for Kirsty but I never really gave her and me a proper chance because, once again, I failed to define what my relationship was with Estelle. In my own mind I wasn’t committed to either of them, I suppose. I just drifted into a no-man’s-land where the arrangement with Estelle stilted what might have developed with Kirsty. In a curious way, even though we were seeing each other for nearly a year, I never really thought of us as a couple. It was just another case of me letting a shot at a proper relationship slip away in a confusion of affairs.

When Kirsty found out about Estelle, she backed right away. I didn’t blame her. She never told me she didn’t want to see me any more but our sexual relationship turned into a platonic friendship.

That kind of duplicity was not unusual in my life. It was a mess of confused loyalties and diluted love. It was a theme that ran through my existence. I lost my first long-term girlfriend, Lotta, soon after I joined Forest because she grew tired of my infidelities. I had been going out with her for two years since I joined Crystal Palace. I had lived at her mum’s house. Her family had become my family and she had moved up to the Midlands to live with me when I went to Forest. And still I couldn’t repay her with loyalty.

One day in the April of 1995, she called me and said she was going home to Croydon for the weekend. She would do that quite regularly so when I got back to Cannock I didn’t realise anything was wrong. I had a little sleep and when I got up I opened one of the cupboards and all Lotta’s clothes had gone. I looked around a bit more and all her college books had gone, too. I rang her mum and she said that Lotta had just had enough of my womanising. She could hear how upset I was, but she said that if I was so fond of her daughter then why had I been unfaithful to her.

I was 24 and it was the first time I can remember feeling out of control of a situation. I was consumed by pain and hurt. I drove down to Croydon and begged her to come back but she stuck to her guns. Even though I knew she was right, even though I knew I had seen dozens of girls behind her back, I still found it desperately hard to reconcile in my own mind the fact that I had lost her. It might seem unreasonable, but I was distraught.

When I got back from Croydon, I went up and sat in my bedroom, and after a couple of minutes’ staring into space I picked a vase up off a chest of drawers and hurled it at a window. It smashed and sent shards of glass and pottery into the next-door garden. I looked out and there was a bloke digging his lawn. He just looked up at me and said ‘all right, Stan’, as if nothing had happened.

When Lotta left, that just gave me even more free time for shagging. I’d pick up girls’ numbers at nightclubs or even when they were wandering down the street or browsing in shops. Then I’d phone them and get them to come round to my house. I’d organise my time so that I would never be alone. I had girls in on shifts, and in the mornings I would be waking up with strangers.

I even started to grow a conscience. The volume of girls just got ridiculous. It was horrible. It was grotesque. I have slept with a huge number of women and it still hasn’t given me what I wanted. Part of it was that I began to worry about hurting these girls’ feelings, but sometimes they knew I was seeing other people and they didn’t care. Where the guilt really came in wasn’t about hurting people: it was about spreading the emptiness of my life to so many others and seeing it reflected back in them.

Gradually, I have stopped sleeping with women in quite such a prolific way, but I didn’t really learn my lesson in terms of simplifying my relationships. In some ways, the anarchy of my various liaisons continued to grow until it reached some sort of dubious celebrity zenith when I was seeing Ulrika Jonsson and Davina McCall at the same time and still having sex with Estelle and a Villa groupie called Linsey, just to make things a little bit more complicated.

I seemed to have a particular talent for pulling television presenters. There was this weird crossover between our worlds. One world would feed the ego of the other in the service of the great god Television. Back in the mid-Nineties, when I was at the peak of my ability, football had suddenly become mainstream mass entertainment, as popular and glamorous as pop and the movies. Television presenters wanted to talk to footballers and, if they were female, I wanted to talk to them.

I became an integral part of the lads and ladettes thing, that people like Ulrika and Chris Evans popularised. I knew Robbie Williams. I was mates with Jay Kay of Jamiroquai. He came to watch me at Liverpool. I got backstage passes at his concerts. I even had a fling with Sara Cox, Zoe Ball’s best mate, who used to present a Channel Four programme called The Girlie Show. It was usually her and a couple of other girls slagging off blokes as much as they could. Somebody had told me that she fancied me, so when she invited me on the show while I was playing for Forest, I accepted.

We swapped numbers after the show and I went out with her a few times in London. She stopped off in Cannock once when she was on her way up to see her parents in Bolton. I only slept with her twice, but the next week there was a lot of gossiping in our incestuous little world that we might be seeing each other. The following Friday, John Barnes was a guest on TFI Friday and Chris Evans asked him if it was true I had a big willy. Digger played dumb but Chris Evans wouldn’t let it go. ‘Sara Cox calls him “Stan the Can”,’ he said, ‘because his dick is as wide as a can of Coca-Cola.’ I went into training the next day and I was a legend with the rest of the lads. Nothing was secret in that world. Nothing was private. Everybody knew the details of what you were doing and who you were doing it with.

There were other celebrity flings, too. I had an affair with Jenni Falconer, the GMTV presenter, after I chatted her up at an airport arrivals gate. She said she was waiting for her boyfriend, but when I asked her if I could have her number she gave it to me without hesitating. I had a brief liaison with the model Sophie Dahl, too, after we met at the Brit awards when I was there presenting a prize. That was after yet another falling out with Ulrika.

But my relationship with Davina McCall was an altogether more serious affair. It was my great lost opportunity, a chance of real happiness that I threw away. As usual, I only realised that when it was too late and I had plenty of time to dwell on the fact that I had turned my back on something very special.

I first met Davina in April 1998, when my relationship with Ulrika felt again as though it was unravelling and we were having a period where we weren’t talking. Strictly speaking, we were together, but it was a sham. Events in Paris were just around the corner and I probably should have seen them coming. When I think now that I went back to Ulrika instead of staying with Davina, I know that I made a terrible, terrible mistake. Drawn back to chaos again. My curse. If Ulrika hadn’t been around, messing with my head, Davina and I would have got married. I have got no doubt about that.

I spotted her at An Audience with Julian Clary where we were both among the invited guests. We clocked each other in that way you do and I asked her out. Davina was different. She was sorted. She didn’t play silly games. If she said something, you trusted her. She had been a heroin addict and a coke addict – you name it – and she had been saved by counselling. She had faced her demons and moved beyond them. She had been clean for ten years. She knew what she wanted out of life and she was always straightforward and honest with me. Even when I left her to go back with Ulrika, she was incredibly generous with her advice to me. In the minutes after I hit Ulrika, when I was panicking with the shame of it all, she was the first person I called.

Even now she’s still helping me. When she heard about the dogging scandal, she phoned me and told me about the counsellor who carried her through her own troubles. She said this man had saved her life, which was about as good a recommendation as you can get. She gave me his number and I started having therapy with him. A little later, Davina told me how great she felt because she had started working out. That struck a chord with me, too. I started getting myself fit and that seemed to alleviate my mood. It gave me an aim in my life.

When we met, Davina was on the brink of the presenting stardom she has achieved subsequently with shows like Big Brother. She was doing stuff for MTV but she still had her feet on the ground. She made me feel comfortable and secure. She was pretty but she wasn’t overtly glamorous and, unlike Ulrika, she didn’t have to be the centre of attention whenever she walked into a room. She was a self-contained, confident person. She was homely, she was kind, she was warm.

I took her out a couple of times and it was such a refreshing change to be seeing someone who was honest. She was honest. I wasn’t. I went to New York with Estelle, and even though she was technically a friend we were sleeping together as well. When I got back I went to Davina’s place and a reporter from the Mirror turned up and told her he had pictures of me and Estelle together in New York. Davina was cool about it because she thought Estelle was just my mate. She was absolutely golden but I told her soon after that that I didn’t want to see her any more because I was missing Ulrika. I don’t know why I was missing her. I suppose it was just what I was used to. I was addicted to a fucked-up relationship where it wouldn’t be a normal day unless Ulrika and I had had a row before training every morning. Davina took it really well and I consoled myself with that, but a few years later she told me it had devastated her. She was convinced that if I could have just got over Ulrika, she and I would have been married.

Instead of that, I got back with Ulrika. That relationship lurched on from one crisis to another until Paris and beyond. In fact, in the days after Paris, when I was public enemy number one and I was practically in hiding, Davina invited me out to Nice with her family, who had rented a house somewhere on the outskirts of the city for a few weeks. When I was at such a low ebb, that house and its grounds were like a haven for me. I ran up a £1,000 mobile-phone bill ringing Ulrika from out there, desperately trying to repair some of the damage and pleading with her to forgive me. She was in St Etienne for the England V Argentina game where David Beckham was sent off for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In a bizarre way, that gave me a respite from the attention. Suddenly, everybody wanted to hang Beckham, not me. They called the dogs off and set them chasing him around America.

I started sleeping with Davina again while we were in Nice, but even then I hadn’t got Ulrika out of my system and Davina and I never got back together properly. I still regret that. I regret it bitterly. I walked away from a relationship with Davina that was solid and steady and positive for something that drove me to the brink of insanity.

I was still caught up in football’s maelstrom then; still chasing the adrenaline buzz of scoring goals; still chasing famous, beautiful women. I was a member of the glitterati. I was a symbol of that age when suddenly everyone and everything seemed within a footballer’s reach. I know now that that was just a grand illusion.