Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign. Mark Palmer
with the ball. Now he plays delicate one-twos. He’s reaching that age, around twenty-nine or thirty, when there is a new set of curtains that opens for a footballer.’
Exit Hoddle, enter David Beckham and Graeme Le Saux, who took up their respective places behind the tables. I joined the Beckham huddle. You don’t get a lot of circumspection from Becks, but he has a mischievous grin that frequently breaks into a huge smile. He had a reputation for petulance, but as he sat sheepishly at that table he came across as nothing other than Posh Spice’s almond-eyed little lamb.
Beckham is the son of a kitchen maintenance man and a hairdresser. He left Chingford High at sixteen, having failed all his GCSEs, but he didn’t care because he had known since the age of eight when he played for Ridgeway Rovers on Sunday mornings that he wanted to be a footballer. And here he was sitting in front of a dozen scribblers all hanging on his every word, every nuance. Because, deep down, every man in the room would have given anything to be David Beckham.
‘You’ve got a bit of a cold, David.’
‘Nah, not really. Nothing serious. Bit bunged up.’ He was asked to describe what it had been like in the last few months when his face had stared out from the back, front and middle pages of newspapers and magazines. When sponsors and ad-men had been queuing outside his gate. And when Bobby Charlton had called him a sensation.
‘It’s been incredible. People now expect a lot from me. When I don’t score they say something is wrong with me, but I don’t mind. I would rather people were talking about me than not talking about me at all. I haven’t scored for England yet and I would love to grab one on Saturday. A long shot – something spectacular. As a young boy I had dreams of doing something like that. It would be amazing.’
That afternoon, some of the players went to see the film Spawn, a sci-fi romp about a government assistant who returns from hell half-man, half-demon. Gascoigne went fishing. Le Saux read his book. And Adams went further into himself. Hoddle could not wait to get his players out of the country and into their Italian camp forty-five minutes from Rome, where they would not read English newspapers, not be offered alcohol, and would eat only food prepared by the team chef, Roger Narbett, on loan from the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds.
It was pouring at Luton Airport. The under-21 squad arrived first, greeted by about forty admirers, mostly schoolgirls and professional autograph-hunters. A man with a centurion hat was waiting in the rain to have his picture taken. Then an FA official swept up in a blue Rolls-Royce Corniche. Rio Ferdinand led a charge into the airport newsagents to begin a run on strawberry splits, while other members of the squad stocked up on reading material – Loaded and FHM and Maxim. Several of the schoolgirls followed the players into the terminal and no one turned down requests for autographs or refused to pose for photographs. All were unfailingly polite with the woman at the till. ‘They always come in here on their way out to big games’, she told me, ‘but this time I didn’t recognise any of them. Where was Gazza and that David Seaman?’
If you blinked you would have missed them. Hoddle was running the operation like some secret underground mission. He was about to take his men deep behind enemy lines, where they would be immunised from the outside world.
There was just enough time to raid the shop in the departures lounge, where Gascoigne, Ince and Merson headed for the pick’n mix sweet stand. Gazza began to pop sweets into his mouth, but spotted a security camera on the wall staring at him. He found it unbearably funny. Merson was into mags in a big way. Hello!, in which he had starred recently after being taken back by his wife following his drug, drinking and gambling rehabilitation course, was on top of his pile.
Hoddle and his backroom staff wore Paul Smith suits and gold ties – and obligatory World Cup 2006 badges pinned to their lapels. The players were allowed to wear tracksuit bottoms and sponsored jackets. David Seaman was taller than I had imagined, Ian Wright shorter. Walking across the wind-swept tarmac in driving rain to board Britannia Flight 808, I discussed the blustery weather with Seaman. When I told him it was close to 80 degrees in Rome, he seemed pleased. He climbed the steps at the front and I went up the ones at the back. That’s the way it is. Players in the front, media at the back, and FA officials and assorted bottle-washers in the middle.
Shortly before landing, the captain gave his team-talk: ‘I want to wish you the best of luck on Saturday,’ he said, and then added, ‘But it’s not luck of course. It’s skill. Thank you and goodbye.’
The Italian staff at Rome’s Ciampino airport were pleased to see Gascoigne and Gascoigne seemed pleased to see them. He signed his name a few times and went merrily on his way. It could not have been more different to the only other time I had travelled on the same plane as Gascoigne. It was the summer of 1992 when, after recovering from his self-inflicted injury sustained in the Cup Final, he finally went out to join Lazio.
It was some arrival. The pandemonium began immediately on landing at Leonardo da Vinci airport, where TV crews had been allowed into the arrivals area to film the man who was meant to lead Lazio to the top of Serie A. Once we had shown our passports it was like being sucked into one of those water flumes where you twist and turn out of control before being spat out at the bottom on your backside. There were at least a thousand fans waiting to hail Caesar, the most important of whom was a bearded giant called Augusto, who used to be a wrestler. He had been appointed Gazza’s bodyguard. Augusto was no intellectual, but he didn’t need to be to steer his charge through the crowd and into a waiting limo, which was then escorted by police outriders to the hotel near the Villa Borghese.
Gazza had brought his brother Carl and friend Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardner with him to help adjust to life as an employee of Lazio. You feared the worst, but as Carl and Jimmy cracked open the Peroni, Gazza sipped mineral water, and there was a steely determination about him. I had booked into the same hotel as them. His sense of humour had flair. Within hours of arriving, Gazza had made his brother ring the front desk to tell the concierge to get hold of Augusto because Lazio’s star signing had gone missing. The words escape and kidnap were mentioned. Augusto raced up the stairs and into Gazza’s room, where he found the window wide open and a pair of trainers sitting on the sill. Gascoigne was hiding in the cupboard.
There was no such messing about this time. Within ten minutes of setting foot on Italian soil, Gazza and the rest of the squad were on a coach heading for La Borghesiana hotel complex, on the outskirts of the city. Customs, passport control, baggage collection were all waived as Hoddle whisked his team into the night through a side-door. A getaway bus was waiting, watched over by security men with barking dogs. And there was no sign of Signor Nanni.
On the coach, I came across Charlie Sale, from the Express. He wasn’t on the plane because he had spent a couple of days at the Italian FA’s technical headquarters at Coverciano, near Florence, where Italy were staying in five-star comfort amid saunas, tennis courts and a fully equipped injury clinic. Charlie had turned native.
‘They look remarkably confident and relaxed,’ he said. ‘I didn’t detect any signs of pressure. They think they will win and I agree with them.’ So I bet him £20 that England would beat Italy, with no bet if it ended in a draw. Charlie made much of the way Italy seemed so at ease with the press. Unlike England’s, their training sessions were open to the media and reporters were allowed to collar anyone they wanted afterwards. This was a refrain that could be heard day in and day out among the English media pack, who resented the lack of access to players.
The England coach believed in control and secrecy and subterfuge. At the beginning of the week there was a danger of this strategy getting out of hand when an FA official telephoned the sports editors of every national newspaper asking them to resist speculating on what the England line-up might be (‘Could you fray the edges a little, please,’ were the exact words) in case it gave an advantage to the Italians. Speculation went ballistic.
England’s hotel was out of bounds. The daily press conferences were held on neutral ground in a hotel roughly equidistant between the players’ out-of-town resort and the media’s accommodation near the main railway station. On Thursday morning, Hoddle brought along Tony Adams, Teddy Sheringham and David Seaman. There wasn’t a lot to ask Sheringham, and Seaman found himself