Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign. Mark Palmer
We knew that. He went regularly to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, we knew that too. We knew he had done time in jail for drink-driving. We knew he was estranged from his wife, who was battling against a drug habit; that he had started reading books and was considering sitting for an exam; that he had shown an interest in the piano and that he was heavily involved in a course of psychotherapy. What we didn’t know was how all these things had combined to affect the man.
‘How is the mood in the camp, Tony?’
‘The mood?’ he said, rocking gently back and forth, staring at his audience without looking at anyone in particular. ‘I would say it is … serene.’
Adams looked so calm, so detached, that I thought he must be on medication.
‘You seem a different man, Tony.’
‘Thank you,’ replied Adams, after a long pause. ‘What you are seeing is a released man. I am not being eaten up any more. And I have taken the good points from my professional life and brought them into my private life. I have a different type of addiction now – an addiction to life. An addiction that makes me want to get up every Monday morning to try to prove myself as a person and on the football field. You don’t get many opportunities to play in World Cup finals, and I’m running out of time.’
‘Did you in the past take your professional life for granted?’
He stared into the middle of the room and paused.
‘It’s not that I took things for granted. I always realised I was a lucky guy. It was just that I got lost along the way.’
‘You used to be known for going round the dressing room banging your head against the walls. You don’t do that any more, do you?’
‘Banging on doors has never won football matches.’
Hoddle, with Hodgson seated next to him, then gave his version of events inside the England bunker. Beckham still had a heavy cold and was resting in bed, and Southgate was carrying an injury. Then Hodgson stood up and began rubbing his thigh as he translated Hoddle’s words into Italian. Davies looked on benignly as the Italian journalists scribbled down details of Southgate’s not very secret injury, which turned out not to be an injury at all.
Hoddle was expected to announce in the next twenty-four hours that Adams would captain the side. He seemed quite content with his frame of mind, revealing that he had written to him in prison but that Adams at the time was not ready to receive any advice. ‘But he is now,’ Hoddle said. Adams was reading The Celestine Prophecy during the Rome trip. So was Hoddle. They appeared to be on the same wavelength.
The Italians, led from the front by Gavarotti, wanted to know why Gascoigne was not allowed out to meet the gentlemen of the press, given his former connection with the Romans. The answer was implicit in the question. All it needed was Gazza to see a past enemy in the back row for all hell to be let loose.
‘We are here to win a football match,’ said Hoddle. ‘I told Gascoigne he can’t do a press conference and he accepts that.’
‘But’, said Gavarotti, ‘if Gascoigne is, as you suggest, a changed man, showing a new maturity, why is it you think that he could not cope with answering a few questions?’
‘That is what I have decided,’ said Hoddle.
‘You seem to be insisting on an old Soviet-style regime,’ Gavarotti replied.
Afterwards, I sat next to Gavarotti on the coach back to the hotel and invited him to expand on his thoughts about Hoddle’s England. He did so with relish.
‘It has to be like this,’ he said, ‘because Britain is unlike any other country in Europe. How many drug-addicts, wife-beaters and alcoholics are there in any other team? There’s your answer. I can understand Hoddle not wanting to let Gascoigne out of the camp. The man is a nutter. Gascoigne has been a nutter all his life and always will be a nutter. Did you see him at the airport last night? As soon as he saw a policeman he began shaking and acting like a madman. Hoddle knows that if he brought him here he would be a gibbering wreck and then would not be in any condition to play the match. That is the reality. Hoddle says he has matured, but he has obviously not matured enough to behave as a normal human being. We should not be surprised by this.
‘I was talking to someone yesterday at the Italian embassy who was saying that Britain is ranked forty-fourth in the world when it comes to general standards of education. Italy is considerably higher than forty-fourth. So we should not be amazed that Italian football players are better-educated, better-mannered and generally more civilised than their English counterparts. It is one of the great myths of the modern world that England is a sophisticated country. It is a myth reinforced by other countries who still like to see England as it was in 1850, when it could genuinely claim to have international influence. The tabloid press is one such symptom of the breakdown within English society. We do not have a tabloid press, so the players can come to a press conference and say what they like without thinking that anyone will twist their words into something completely different. You could see what a helpless country Britain has become by the reaction to Princess Diana’s death. People were lost. They did not even know what to do during the funeral. Should they clap or remain silent? People have been clapping at funerals in Italy for years and years.’
We were getting off the point.
‘Well, in football terms England has taken great steps to improve. You have gone from thinking some years ago that you have nothing to learn from foreigners to thinking now that only foreigners are worth having in your teams.’
It was only when I asked him who he thought would prevail on Saturday evening that he clambered on to the fence. ‘Pound for pound, Italy have more ability, more flexibility, more skill, but the difference now is not as great as it was. Anything could happen on Saturday night.’
That evening I had dinner with Jeff Powell, from the Daily Mail, David Miller, from the Daily Telegraph, Roy Collins from the People and James Lawton, from the Express. We all named the team we would like to play on Saturday and then we named the eleven we thought Hoddle would play. None of us got it right. Powell and Miller thought Hoddle might easily do something stupid, as he did for the home game against Italy when he picked Le Tissier. Powell went as far as saying that he thought Shearer might become to Hoddle what Lineker was to Graham Taylor, because the England coach ‘doesn’t want anyone to become too big a star while he’s around’. There seemed little evidence of this, but whereas the majority of the main football writers – known as the Number Ones or The Groins, as in groin strains – had swung four-square behind Hoddle. Commentators like Powell, Miller, Collins and Lawton – the elder statesmen – were a long way from being convinced. They doubted he had the character for the job. They disliked his haughtiness, his lack of clubbability. ‘We are not fans with typewriters,’ said Powell.
Italians woke on Friday to discover that they were without a prime minister. Romano Prodi had resigned after his far-left Communist cohorts withdrew their support over the government’s 1998 budget proposals. No one seemed overly concerned in the Stadio Olimpico when the Italians arrived for training. It was a glorious morning and an awe-inspiring sight as twenty-two footballers ambled around the pitch looking like lions on the prowl. The huge empty stands made these millionaires look even more impressive, more dangerous. They trained for ninety minutes, concluding with an eleven-a-side game using only half of the pitch. Afterwards, I wandered down the tunnel and waited for the players to emerge from their dressing room. They were polite and patient. Gianfranco Zola looked so at ease that you had to remind him that Italy could possibly fail to qualify for a World Cup for the first time in their history.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Really, I don’t think so.’
I began to see Charlie Sale’s point. Then Lawton started reminiscing about the days when he used to give Bobby Charlton a lift home after training.
‘Now no one trusts anyone,’ he said. ‘I live in Cheshire, just down the road from Liverpool’s young sensation Michael Owen. The other day I was thinking how I would like to go and knock on his door and tell him we