#2Sides: My Autobiography (15 page)

If Paul Scholes had the showmanship or outgoing personality of a Thierry Henry or a David Beckham there wouldn’t have been a bigger star on the planet. Ask any of the greats in the game. Go to Barcelona and speak to the Xavis and Iniestas. Speak to Patrick Vieira. Speak to Zidane. Or go online and see what all those guys thought. They all say their hardest, most respected opponent in the Premier League was Paul Scholes. He is in everyone’s top three. He was absolutely amazing.

He was always undervalued when it came to things like voting for Player of the Year because he was quiet. But here’s something that tells you how highly thought of he was at Manchester United. He wasn’t the best tackler and in training he used to kick people. But somehow no one ever said anything to him. If anyone else did the kind of things Scholesy did, they’d have been lamped! But everyone liked him and respected him so much he just seemed to get away with it. No one even seemed to mind too much when he got sent off. In one important game away at Inter Milan he got a red card after about ten minutes and you thought, well … that’s not so bad because Scholesy’s got us out of trouble loads of times.
It was the same with the manager. He’d give Scholesy a long leash in a way he never did with other people.

That was because Paul Scholes was quite simply the best player who played for Man United. It was just a dream to play alongside him. He was just a great,
great
player. Everything he did was without fuss. But what he did was unique.

People talk about one of his trademarks: the long switch pass from one side of the pitch to the other. Yeah, there’s a lot of players who can do a version of that. Lots of people can hit the ball from right to left or left to right. But there’s very few who can do that and
take two or three defenders out of the game
at the same time! Scholesy did that continually. He never played the safe ball on the defender’s safe side. He always played the ball to
hurt
the defender, taking him out of the game and putting our winger through on goal or into a position to cross unopposed. People talk about Xabi Alonso or Pirlo or Toni Kroos. Yeah, they’re all great passers and everything, and they can play that ball as well. But they play it on the safer side. They don’t play it as often or with such pinpoint accuracy as Scholes. He’s The Human Sat Nav! Scholesy could score 30-yard goals in training that were just ridiculous beyond belief. Just have a look at some of them on YouTube. They’re works of art.

He was always available. Always wanted the ball. No matter what the score was he wasn’t afraid to come and get it. For me as a central defender he always gave me an option to pass the ball to, even if he was under pressure. You just can’t put a price on someone like that. And at the same time he scored so many important goals. He did everything with such great integrity and quietness.

He is the most naturally talented player I’ve seen. You saw that in pre-season when we’d all been away for one month, six weeks or whatever it was. For everyone else it would be normal
to take a couple of weeks to get their rhythm going again, to find their range in passing and shooting. Not Scholesy. He comes and on the first day he is the best player in training. Always. And he hadn’t kicked a ball all summer! He still might be off the pace a bit but his technique and touch was like the day he left for his holidays.

After he retired, he came back and trained with us for a couple of days. We had no idea he was coming back until we saw him on the bus before a game against City. I said ‘What you doing here?’ He said ‘I’m just coming to watch.’ I said ‘Oh, cool.’ In the changing room the manager names the team … and Scholesy’s a sub. Fantastic! Scholesy is back! He hasn’t played for seven or eight months but as soon as he starts training with us again he’s the best player in training again! It was ridiculous. He went straight back into it at his old level.

I remember often running the length of the pitch to celebrate with him after a goal and saying to him ‘This is just a pleasure, man! It’s an honour just to play on the same pitch as you.’ I used to say that to Giggsy as well. And it was. They would both do impossible things and just laugh about it! If that had been me or anyone else, we’d have been screaming and celebrating but he would just trot off like it was completely normal.

People didn’t understand Scholesy. They thought he was bland but he could be one of the most cutting people I’ve met in football. He is not a vindictive person but every now and then he would make little comments or observations about people. Very dry. Very quick-witted. I never thought I’d see him on television, but when he appeared on Sky for the first time near the end of the 2014 season I thought: ‘woah, he could open up on a few people here.’ And he did. He laid into Arsenal, criticised Jack Wilshere, but was also critical of us. We were watching it together and the lads were laughing. What else could we do? It wasn’t anything we didn’t
expect. Scholesy’s an honest lad and he said what he thought. We couldn’t complain because he wasn’t wrong. We had to take it on the chin. He was just being honest.

I owe the Lampards a lot. Frank Lampard Senior, who’d been a great full back for West Ham in the 1970s and 1980s, scouted me for the club. Later the whole family welcomed me and helped me more than I can say. Frank Senior saw me playing for Blackheath District when I was 15 and he asked me to come to West Ham for a training session. I arrived about 45 minutes late because of the traffic and I hated it; I really didn’t fancy going back. But he persisted. He came to see me again and told me the club was planning to invest money and time to find and develop young players and bring them into the first team. And he was true to his word: they made it happen for me. He used to pick me up from my estate – but would always have the doors of his black Mercedes locked when I came to the car. It made me laugh! What I never realised at the time was that Frank Lampard’s son Frank Lampard Junior would become my close friend, teammate … and rival.

Frank Junior – I’ll just call him ‘Frank’ from now to avoid confusion – was different from me in that he went to a private school, was very good academically and lived in a huge, luxurious house in Essex. But those sorts of things never came between
us – we immediately hit it off. We were alike in our approach to football: both hugely competitive and deadly serious about improving as players. We were always the last two to come in after training. Harry Redknapp or the youth team coach Tony Carr would shout at us: ‘Come in! Save your energy for the game!’ and we’d hide and carry on playing where he couldn’t see us. It wasn’t exactly that Frank and I were trying out-do each other but there was a healthy rivalry and it was a part of our friendship. If he did some sprinting I’d think I can’t
not
do that – I can’t have him getting one up on me there! If he stayed outside for half an hour longer practising his passing or shooting, I’d think I should go and do some as well because I don’t want him to get better than me at that. Frank’s one of the hardest working professionals I’ve ever met – always doing extras, always working on his shooting and that’s why, later, he scored so many goals.

We were good mates, but more importantly Frank was my driving force, my best
workforce
mate. We were both determined to reach the first team and always pushed each other in that direction, and, of course, we ended up playing for England together. But first we were apprentices and we played in the youth and reserves team together, before we broke into the West Ham first team. When he scored his first goal away at Barnsley we did a dance together to celebrate. We talked about it the night before: ‘If you score, Frank, we’ve got to do a little dance.’ It ended up as a really stupid jig. You look back at it now and think: ‘What were we doing?’

It wasn’t all work. We roomed together when we travelled away and Frank was funny! He used to get up in the middle of the night – religiously – and have the longest wee I’ve ever heard in my life! I’m sure it was just to make me laugh. We were always going out to clubs and pubs together. We were so much a double act that if anybody saw one of us without the other they’d go: ‘Where’s
Frank?’ or ‘Where’s Rio?’ There was a good group of us in the youth team. Frank was the poster boy and probably the girls’ favourite at that time – but I had the banter, so we made a good partnership. Much later he became a real West End Chelsea boy. But at that time he preferred to stay in Essex.

He and his family really looked after me. Because it was such a long way from Peckham I used to often stay at their house, which was near Romford. When I first went I thought flipping hell! These people are living in sheer luxury. They were so warm and welcoming and generous. Frank’s Mum Pat was an absolutely lovely lady – she was Lamps’s diamond, really, and was brilliant with him. While Frank Senior provided the drive and intensity, she had this lovely soft touch: the encouraging mum you’d love to have. Frank really loved his Mum and looked up to her more than anyone. She made me feel so welcome and always looked after me, cooking unbelievable breakfast fry-ups for us on Sundays. And, well, everyone knows what happened with her: she suddenly fell ill and passed away. It was an absolute tragedy.

Meanwhile, Frank’s Dad was pushing him and always being very strict with him, football-wise. When we played, you’d hear him berating Frank from the sidelines. If Frank had a bad game his father would provoke him: ‘What’s the matter with you? You didn’t want the ball!’ Yet one of the great things about Frank is he never goes into his shell. At the beginning, I think, his career was all about proving to his Dad that he could make it; being Frank’s son was tough, after all. When he was young, Bobby Moore, his Dad’s old teammate, used to pop round to their house for tea. And not only was Frank’s Dad a club legend, his Uncle Harry was the manager (Frank’s Mum’s sister married Harry Redknapp). Frank could never escape being from football aristocracy.

Fortunately, Harry rated both of us. Whenever they needed a couple of youth players team to train with the first team he’d invariably call for me and Frank. Some of the older players used to give Frank a bit of stick for it – and, later, a lot of the fans reckoned he was getting preferential treatment because of his family. For instance the club arranged ‘fan forums’ at a conference centre: they were question and answer sessions with the manager, players and club officials. At one of these events a guy was hammering Frank, saying: ‘He’s not good enough! You’re biased towards him because of who he is. There are better players in the reserves.’ It turned out that the man’s nephew was in the reserve team with Frank, but Harry came to his defence, saying: ‘mark my words, this boy Frank Lampard will play for England, don’t you worry about that!’

And of course he did.

Frank has had a great career and ended up outstripping the football achievements of his Dad. I was always a fan. Frank saw the game clearly and knew when and where to run and pass. He did everything quickly – one touch a lot of the time. But the word that defines him as a player is ‘efficient’: he was never interested in dribbling; pass and move was his game and he had this amazing ability at the edge of the box to shuffle his feet and get a shot off. He would make himself a bit of space and … BANG! That was the product of years and years of hard work.

People argue about whether he or Steven Gerrard was the greater player. Stevie always seemed a bit more natural to me, but in terms of timing, getting in the box and scoring vital goals, there was no comparison with Frank. I always say if I were a manager, I’d take Frank every time: yes Gerrard can win a game on his own, and in his prime he won quite few like that. He won the FA Cup practically single-handed, and the European Cup Final
against Milan in 2005. If I was paying to watch, I’d probably pick Gerrard because he’s a bit more explosive and does a greater range of different things in a game. I’d watch him do things in training and in matches and think, fuck me, that’s high-level! He’d hit precise, raking 30- or 40-yard passes like Scholes or Beckham. Or he’d drop a shoulder, beat someone and bang it in the top corner. He was explosive – he could get you out of your seat. Paul Scholes in his heyday is perhaps the only person who gets close to Frank in terms of timing his runs into the box from midfield. But, as I say, if I was a manager, I’d take Frank all day long. He was the coldest finisher in front of goal; he’d guarantee you 20 goals a season and you can’t put a price on that. He’d get two chances in the game, score with one and the other one would be on target. Ridiculous! He broke the Chelsea goal-scoring record … as a
midfielder
. That says it all.

Frank was so clever. He worked out that he’d get into the opponent’s penalty area three or four times in a half, and the ball would fall to him once or twice, and he would score from one of those chances. He never had any weird or elaborate ideas about the game. He just played the odds: ‘If I keep making these runs, I’ll get one chance … and I’ll score.’ And he worked hard enough in training to make sure he was efficient and accurate enough to make that work. For five seasons for Chelsea he was scoring 20 goals a season.
From midfield!
That’s unbelievable. It can’t be matched. He more or less won Chelsea the league one year, scoring two goals against Bolton on one of the last days of the season.

But the way our friendship went was difficult. And a lot of it was my fault.

When I left West Ham to go to Leeds we were still close but I was up the motorway so it wasn’t easy to see each other. Things changed after he went to Chelsea in 2001, just as they
were becoming a strong team; they were nowhere near winning the league back then, but their time was coming. I then went to Manchester United in 2002 and we became direct rivals. United won the league in my first year, then José Mourinho arrived and Chelsea won it a couple of times. We were now playing against each other.

Frank and I never spoke about it directly when we met up to play for England. But we were kind of drifting apart because of the United–Chelsea thing. If you’d asked me at the time I would just have put it down to a healthy rivalry of playing for the top two teams in the country. I wouldn’t want to give him any information about what we were doing or planning because I’d worry he might feed that back to his team. And if Chelsea were winning I wouldn’t want to speak to him anyway because I’d be jealous. I’m sure he felt the same way: he was competitive like me, and he always played his cards close to his chest. When we were winning, there’d been a little bit of ‘I want that to be me, I don’t want anyone else to win it.’ I think it’s just the way we’re built.

It might have been even worse if he’d been at Arsenal because there was more animosity between us and them. But these days I see Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry, and Martin Keown and we have a good laugh about old times. Hopefully that will happen with me and Frank.

It could just have been me. I know other people manage to maintain friendships with rivals. Wayne Rooney, for example, is good mates with Joe Hart. But I don’t seem to be able to open up and be real pally with people I’m playing in direct competition with. I don’t know why but I just can’t do it. I felt the tension especially when we were with England together. If Chelsea had won the league, or beaten us in the cup or something I’d find myself sitting with Frank or John Terry or Ashley Cole and
somewhere at the back of my mind would be the thought: are they fucking laughing at me? It’s something they probably never felt at all. I only recognise it now as I’m looking back. Perhaps it’s the dark side of being obsessed with winning. After all, you have to be a bit nutty to have that drive to keep winning trophies all the time. You don’t want to show any kind of weakness. I wasn’t even really aware of the feelings at the time. And they probably weren’t laughing at me at all. But that was part of why it meant so much to me to beat them in the Champions League Final. I couldn’t bear the thought of life afterwards if they beat us. I don’t know if they ever thought like that or even imagined I was thinking those type of things. But, looking back I think: fuck me! That’s how I was thinking! I don’t think it was healthy and it strikes me now as a bit weird. Perhaps Frank felt something like that as well. But I do regret in terms of our friendship.

In fact I rather regret that I tended not to allow myself to have friendships with people I was in direct competition with. If anything other players were more like acquaintances. There were a couple of exceptions to that: I went on holiday a few times with Ashley Cole, but he had a very different personality: a happy-go-lucky kind of free spirit. But among the footballers who played in my era Jody Morris is my best mate in football and there are others I get on really well with like Michael Carrick. I’ll definitely stay in contact with a lot of the United lads. Ian Dowie, who’s a bit older than me, was a mentor to me at West Ham and we’re still in touch. He’s a nice fella; he looked after me when I was a young player, helped toughen me up. He’s always been there for me if I needed advice.

At United I was close to Nemanja Vidić. We used to have a lot of deep conversations about football and life. But with a teammate it’s different. You’re not fighting against each other to win trophies.

Of course, outside of football I still have the same close friends like Gavin, Ray, my cousin Bernard and my agent Jamie. But they weren’t competitors so there was no problem. I can see now how I shut out most people or didn’t really get involved after I went to Manchester United. I don’t know how Frank feels because we never spoke about this and in fact I’ve only thought about it since I left United. He might feel completely differently. In his book he had nothing but nice things to say about me. He said we’d ‘Lost a bit of that closeness we used to have’ when I moved north but things were fine when we met up with England. Anyway, I hope now that we’re not rivals any more things will change. We are both in our 30s now and even when I saw Frank at the England team hotel in Brazil I sensed a change. It was the first time we’d seen each other since we’d been released by our clubs and our guards had gone down. When we’re back and both living in London I’m sure our friendship will develop again.