Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign. Mark Palmer
Abbey, the national training centre near Marlow. Which is not to say that Hodgson wasn’t to play a part. In fact he had been asked to act as interpreter to Hoddle. ‘I know we could find thousands of people with better Italian than Roy, but the danger is that they translate everything too literally. Roy will make sure, from a footballing sense, that the Italians hear exactly what Glenn wants them to hear.’
I wondered what Hodgson would be paid for this little sideline.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Davies, ‘but don’t tell Roy that.’
It was a big week. Before the Dylan concert I told my ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter that it seemed inevitable we would sell the house and that his mother and I would buy two separate homes.
‘Well, I imagined something like that would happen,’ said the oldest.
We didn’t speak again for fifteen minutes, and I feared what he was thinking. His world was falling apart and soon it would be Christmas. Then he piped up: ‘Is the England–Italy game live on television?’
Dylan’s gift had always been to remind you that however bad you feel you could so easily feel a lot worse. And then you feel a lot better.
Bisham Abbey on Monday morning was England at its best. Slight crispness to the autumnal air, leaves gently on the turn, unblemished sky, warm sun. Officially regarded as an Ancient Monument, the house and grounds of the Abbey are now home to the National Sports Centre, which is run by the Sports Council. It is set back from the road on the Berkshire side of the Thames, in a village lined by beech woods and brick-and-timber cottages dating from the eighteenth century. Here we were in 1997 with half a dozen Italian camera crews parked on the lawns training their lenses on the silvery-grey building and speculating about whether England had the skill and discipline and desire to win a match in Rome for the first time. Or would Rome do for Hoddle what Rotterdam did for Graham Taylor in 93?
Gascoigne was doing sit-ups. Hoddle was walking around with his hands behind his back. Paul Ince was throwing water over David Beckham, and Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler were lounging on plastic chairs on the touchline after being excused doing their prep because they had played a League match the day before and needed time to recover. Tony Adams, Graeme Le Saux and Gareth Southgate were also rested. The remainder of the crew looked sprightly but the first-time shooting was woeful. Each player pushed the ball up to either Hoddle or his assistant John Gorman and got it back – sometimes on the ground, sometimes on the bobble, sometimes on the full. Most shot high or wide or straight at Seaman. Except Ian Wright, who was deadly.
Davies worked for the BBC for twenty-three years before being recruited by the FA to sharpen up its public relations. He reminded me of a middle- to high-ranking police officer at the Met, a deputy commissioner perhaps. Neatly turned out in functional lightweight suits or blazer and beige trousers – and always wearing a huge gold ring inscribed with the initials DD – he was part minder to Hoddle, part spin doctor to the FA and full-time fixer to the media. The word was that he had eyes on Graham Kelly’s job as chief executive.
That day there was the small matter of a Mini Cooper sitting on the lawn outside the house. Green Flag, England’s main sponsors, brought it down from Leeds as a prop for photographers wanting to reconstruct a scene from The Italian Job. Fair enough, but then Rob Shepherd of the Express, the paper for which I was now working, began berating Davies on the telephone, claiming that the Mini Cooper idea was his and his alone and that he wanted three Mini Coopers to be brought down, and the picture was going to be exclusive to the Express. Hoddle wouldn’t have been interested if there had been 33 Mini Coopers on the lawn. He wasn’t going to pose. Why pretend you’re in some half-forgotten movie when you’re the star of a new one? ‘He’s not trying to be difficult or anything,’ Davies explained to me, ‘it’s just that this is such a big, one-off match and he is so 100 per cent focused that the last thing on his mind is whether to lark about behind the wheel of a Mini. Frankly, he can see through all that kind of stuff. Thank God.’
That first training session at Bisham had to be stopped short fifteen minutes early because Hoddle felt it was too intense. ‘My job’, said Hoddle, at the first of his daily press conferences, ‘is to make sure that when the team is waiting in the tunnel on Saturday every single one of them will go out believing they can win.’ And he already knew who those eleven men would be. He picked the team on Sunday evening but would not make it public until an hour before kick-off. The guessing-game had begun.
‘Was Paul Merson’s call-up anything to do with giving Tony Adams moral support?’ Hoddle was asked.
‘No, it was entirely football-related.’
‘But will they room together?’
‘No, most of the guy’s single-up nowadays.’
‘But Adams was having counselling on the telephone before the Georgia match, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, but he’s better now. As an individual his character has changed a lot.’
Adams had been injured and had only played four or five games for Arsenal since the start of the season. Off the field, he was sorting out his addiction to alcohol, his impending divorce and what he described as ‘the enemy within’.
An Italian moved the conversation away from Adams. ‘Do you realise’, said Giancarlo Gavarotti, Gazzetta dello Sport’s man in London, ‘that there is a feeling in Italy that you could actually win this match?’ What he meant – and what was clear from his tone – was something like: ‘Some Italians may now see England as an efficient, hard-working unit, but they know nothing, poor things. Whereas I, Signor Giancarlo Gavarotti, still believe your team is heavy on perspiration and light on inspiration, big on graft but devoid of craft. And my job as the long-term London correspondent of Italy’s premier sports newspaper is to remind everyone of that.’ ‘He hates us,’ said the Daily Star’s Lee Clayton.
Interviews at Bisham Abbey take place in the wood-panelled Warwick Room, where varnished portraits of period women stare out from the walls. There is no furniture as such, just a room full of chairs and three tables with Formica tops. At one time, journalists could talk to whoever they pleased after training, but in the age of managed news in Blair’s New Britain it is Hoddle who decides which of his squad should speak, and when, and to whom.
Today was the turn of Steve McManaman, Gary Neville and Ray Clemence, the goalkeeping coach. Clemence was singled out for this ritualistic chore because he had experience of playing Italy in Rome in 1976. They were not happy memories. Under the caretaker boss Ron Greenwood, England lost 2–0, the game effectively ending any chance of qualification for the 1978 World Cup.
‘It could have been a lot worse than 2–0,’ said Clemence. ‘We had Stan Bowles making his début, and perhaps on reflection it was not the sort of game to have someone playing his first match. I think Glenn will go for experience, pure and simple.’ Which was not what he did against Italy at Wembley a few months earlier when he gave Matt Le Tissier his first full cap – and paid the price.
How much of an influence would Clemence have on Hoddle’s team choice? ‘We have a meeting every evening and Glenn asks us for our views, but he makes all the decisions.’
On these occasions, the players, accompanied by an FA official, sit behind a table, with journalists seated around them. Because most of the people asking the questions know the players well after dealing with them day in and day out while covering the Premier League, the mood is friendly: less confrontational, more informal than I had expected.
McManaman, a back-to-front baseball cap man who had annoyed Hoddle by not making himself available for Le Tournoi in France during the summer, was omitted from the squad for the Moldova game, but had been on sparkling form for Liverpool. He was back.
‘I don’t need any kick up the backside,’ said the twenty-five-year-old, who, with a little help, was writing a column in The Times. ‘Of course I want to be in the team on Saturday. But, there again, so does everyone else.’
At the other table, Gary Neville, who had smelt Italian blood five days previously