I, Robot (How to Be a Footballer 2) by Peter Crouch

Author:Peter Crouch [Crouch, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473569157
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2019-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

NERVES

You hate nerves as a footballer and you love them too. You grow accustomed to them and you never really learn how to lose them. They come in the big games and the small games. When they go, you know deep inside that maybe your time with football is coming to an end.

When I played for England we were often told to have a little sleep in the empty hours before games, particularly when it was an evening kick-off. The hotel would be quiet, the bed large and comfy. You’d lie there after your doze, all warm and cosy under the thick duvet, no one to bother you, understanding that in three hours’ time you would be running out into a cauldron of 80,000 screaming fans, half of the country watching on television. And then the thought popped up in your head: I could just stay in this bed. I could just stay here and not have to face those nerves, not have those knots in my stomach, not have the sick feeling fizzing round my guts. What if I don’t answer my phone, or the knock on my door? What if I just don’t go out? Later, having played the game, you ride a wave of adrenaline so strong you can’t sleep again until close to dawn. You forget all about the nerves, until the next match comes around, and they begin again, and you remember once more that they never end.

There was a night, up in Manchester, with England playing at Old Trafford while Wembley was being redeveloped, when I almost gave in to them. We were on the team coach from the Lowry hotel, driving slowly through the traffic around Salford Quays, when I glanced out of the window at a pub by the side of the road. At a table by the door was a bloke about my age, sipping a pint, messing about on his phone. In that precise moment, I would have done anything to swap places with him – to be sitting there with a beer, not a care in the world, ready to enjoy watching England on the telly and then go home without millions of people discussing every aspect of what you’d done. I’m pretty certain everyone in the pub would have given anything to have taken my place, on the England coach on the way to play for their country, getting very generously rewarded for it too. It was a ridiculous, stupid thing. But for about thirty seconds, it seemed like the most attractive idea in the world.

I got it again during the World Cup finals in Germany in the summer of 2006. Playing in the World Cup is the pinnacle of any Englishman’s career, something I’d dreamed about as a kid and had hoped for desperately for the previous few years as I’d tried to establish myself in the Premier League. In the dressing-room before our opening group game, I looked at the players getting changed around me – David Beckham, Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, John Terry.

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