Where’s Your Caravan?: My Life on Football’s B-Roads. Chris Hargreaves
but run we did. Some of us made it back to the hotel but others were less fortunate. Mark Lever, a real joker and a gangly centre-half, decided the beach would be a good escape route. Unfortunately as he was already walking like Parker from Thunderbirds, you can imagine what happened when his drunken body met with sand. He eventually rose from behind a rock with his hands held high, shouting, ‘Arrestica … Arrestica!’
He got his ‘wish’, and, following an uncomfortable night behind bars, the lads were free again – after an ‘unclaimed’ bag full of pesetas had been ‘handed in’, of course.
As with all these summer breaks, we were soon back to pre-season training and ready to run. The summer seems to go very quickly as a player, especially since the introduction of play-offs. Throughout my time at Grimsby Town, and with all the partying and drinking that came with it, my fitness rarely suffered. I was always at the front in the running – the late nights just didn’t seem to affect my capabilities as an athlete at all. I wish now that they had, as it might have brought me to my senses sooner. My love for football was huge; nothing gave me more pleasure than scoring in training or for the first team, but my vulnerability off the field was now evident. The lads I was hanging about with were great if you were not a professional footballer, but I was, and somewhere along the line, I had forgotten this. My decisions off the pitch were often misguided because I didn’t have the one thing I wanted on it, stability. Before the age of nineteen I had already played in a fair few games, so my progress was good, but the next few seasons saw my first team action limited – a couple of long injuries took their toll on me, as did my relationship with the manager.
1991/92
Throughout the 91/92 season my appearances were very limited, which brought with it disappointment and frustration. The normal routine would be to play in the reserves (usually score) and then turn up on the Saturday hoping to be in the squad. If my name was not mentioned I would be gutted, and would turn to my friends for back up. This would usually take the form of ‘Let’s get smashed.’ – not, with the benefit of hindsight, the sort of help I needed. Back then, a manager could only name two outfield players as subs, so it was a difficult decision for him to make. Nowadays, with five players being allowed, and with many managers choosing not to have a keeper on the bench, fewer players are left out on a match day. As any player will tell you, it is bad enough sitting on the subs’ bench, but not being involved at all worsens the situation no end. If you love playing football, and are not selected, match days can be very lonely. How many players have we seen recently sitting on the bench, or in the reserves, and just picking up their money? Perhaps if I’d been happy to do that, and not been so desperate to play, I wouldn’t have played at as many clubs as I did.
Off the field, I had forgotten the lesson of my near-death window mishap. The nights out were becoming longer and wilder. Regular Saturday night trips to The Welly club in Hull and Venus in Nottingham were the norm. I usually drove with five mates in the car all ready (some already were!) to go partying, dance the evening away and then drive back for a few hours sleep, or not even that, sometimes. The Welly club, for those who were crazy enough to frequent it, was a melting pot of drugs, sweat and music. As you entered through the double doors, the floor would be bouncing from the volume of the bass. You would see bikini-clad girls and bare-chested lads rubbing Vicks VapoRub on each other (no, it wasn’t a gay club), boasting about how much ‘gear’ they had done and then giving each other a big hug. Around this time was the start of the Acid house era and dance culture. Huge raves, mostly illegal, and lots of pretty hedonistic clubs emerged, including the Hacienda and Conspiracy in Manchester, Back to Basics in Leeds, and Venus in Nottingham, giving rise to some crazy times.
It was the advent of Ecstasy in the UK, and it turned a nation of youngsters into a frenzied bunch of partygoers. One small tablet would let you forget all your worries, love a complete stranger and dance like a prat. The fact that it could also quite possibly kill you was less talked about. They say (it’s ‘they’ again!) ‘you should try everything once’ but I’m not sure about ‘everything’.
During this season, the fact that my brother Mark had returned abruptly from Liverpool University may have encouraged more nights out than usual. With his return came a new circle of friends, older and wilder than mine. Mark had left for university a quiet and unassuming lad, but hell did he return ready to party. He had morphed into Liam Gallagher, but more aggressive, he was drinking like a fish and was as clued up about gear as Shaun Ryder. I could and should have said no to the endless nights out, but I didn’t, I just gave it the large one and went with it. I suppose there was a bit of peer pressure, but it was definitely weakness on my part. Were I to try to psychoanalyse my behaviour, it was probably a replacement for the thing I felt was missing in my life, regular first team football. I am both disappointed and philosophical about that era in my life, and even though I know I was young and impressionable, as we all have been, I still find it hard to recount some of those memories, because I do feel that my lifestyle off the field cost me a fair bit on it. They say that you only learn from your mistakes though, and I certainly bloody well did that!
I know both Mark and I look back with regret, but him more so than me, as it is only now, after a lot of soul searching, broken relationships and unfulfilling jobs, that he is finally living up to his own expectations. He is currently doing a law degree at the tender age of thirty-eight. In that time I have moved fifteen times, played for ten clubs, got married, and had three children, so perhaps moving away from the area did me good after all!
Even with the nights out and the drinking, I still maintained some focus on football. Incredibly, I would get home after a night out, and go for a run around the local streets, more often than not still in my going out clothes. My mentality was that this would then rid my body of the drink. I would also have a huge glass of water, as if the combination of both acts would somehow help cancel out alcohol consumption.
If our group of lads hadn’t gone out drinking or clubbing, we would sometimes take a drive out into the country where the lads would take an exotic cocktail of mind-bending substances (this was at a time when LSD would cost a fiver). I was the only one with a car, so I could probably see the madness more clearly as I had to be ‘with it’, they didn’t. It all seems like total and utter madness now. I would wholly discourage dabbling in any of these death-risking, career-wrecking vices, and I’m sure some of my old mates would agree. That is, if they are still compos mentis.
Some of our mates spiralled so far out of control that even heroin became a feature of their lives, which is surely the worst possible sign that they had completely lost the plot. I know drugs are rife in a lot of towns and cities across the country, but at that time, and particularly in our area, drugs seemed to be a huge problem. And I’m not sure if you can justify the lads’ behaviour by citing the circumstances they were in – as far as I could tell, they seemed to have decent family upbringings. However, whichever way I look at it now, everybody in our group of lads seemed to be intent on pressing their self-destruct button.
Was it bad luck that led to this? Probably not. Was it bad judgement? Maybe. One of us would manage to get into a fight or do something stupid with almost certain regularity – I lost count of the amount of brand new Ted Baker shirts I ruined after scuffles!
The best example I can give of the lads’ behaviour is that of big Sam Capes. He was the ‘big man’ of the group, to us a gentle giant really, but to everybody else the lad who was always known as the hardest kid around town. Sam loved his motorbikes and, boy, would he push the boundaries. I always had fast cars, and I took some pretty stupid risks at times but Sam was in a different league. He would pull a wheelie at eighty miles an hour and laugh about it; he would fly past us on country roads like Barry Sheene. My brother has had the misfortune of being on the back of Sam’s bike at one hundred and sixty miles an hour. That might sound unbelievable, but the bike could go even faster than that, and my brother’s testament to the story is enough. My brother said he was actually relieved when the police pulled them over for speeding. Sam just chuckled and asked one of the policemen how much he had left in the car, to which the officer replied, ‘Nothing, you were pulling away at a fair rate of knots.’
Sam laughed again and said, ‘Bloody hell! I knew I should have carried on.’
Mark,