Always Managing: My Autobiography (24 page)

Dale Gordon organised the players’ Christmas party in 1994. We were near the bottom of the league at the time, and I can remember listening with mounting astonishment as he set out the plans for the day. They were going to get an open-top bus from our training ground in Chadwell Heath, with a jazz band on the top deck, and take it through the East End, down Green Street, past Upton Park and on to a nightclub in the West End. We were bottom of the league and they were going to drive a glorified disco past where our fans lived, with all the players hanging out the windows getting absolutely plastered. ‘Dale, all of those people that pay your wages, they’ll be watching,’ I told him. ‘There’ll be blokes digging the road, people working hard in shops to make ends meet, and you’re going by with a jazz band, and an open-top bus. They’ll aim house bricks at you, Dale. They’ll abuse you. And you know what? You’ll deserve it for being so stupid. An open-top bus, son? You should be hiding. You’re not going. Cancel it.’

But they still had their Christmas party: cancelled the band, the bus, and hired minivans instead. That caused more aggravation because Jeroen Boere – a Dutch striker Billy Bonds had bought from Go Ahead Eagles – set fire to the seats. He was a strange guy, Jeroen. I was in Spain with Sandra a number of years later, and a man came up, smartly dressed in a suit, and introduced himself in a ‘remember me?’ sort of way. I didn’t recognise him. It was Jeroen, but he only had one eye. Apparently he had been stabbed
in the face by two men, in the Roppongi district of Tokyo some years earlier. The next I heard, in 2007, he had died. There were conflicting reports – a car crash, suicide, in his home in Marbella, on the road in Ibiza; some people said he had got involved with drugs. He was only 39.

So Jeroen set fire to the seats, for which we had to pay compensation, and, frankly, the evidence of hooligan behaviour was beginning to mount. That testimonial in Dorchester was the gift that kept giving because we then got a bill from the Dormy hotel in Bournemouth. It transpired that while the players were getting drunk they had managed to knock a pint of beer over the snooker table and also rip the baize. We received a letter of complaint from the manager. Another golf trip, to Ferndown, where I play, ended up with a minor riot in the bar, which was personally embarrassing. I’d had enough. I think those early years at West Ham helped push me in the direction of recruiting more foreign players. We needed discipline. We needed good examples for the youngsters. It couldn’t carry on like this. The high jinks were going to come at a cost.

The final straw came when Dale Gordon broke his leg on a pre-season golf trip. We had gone away down to Devon to train and the players had an afternoon off; Dale was driving a buggy, and it tipped over and landed on his leg, trapping him. I don’t know if he was messing about at the time but, when he returned, the bone hadn’t knitted properly and he walked with a slight limp. He barely played again, after that.

So, while Paolo may have been a challenge, it was a least a positive challenge for a manager. Some days he’d have the hump, other times he would be in a great mood. You never knew what you would get with him, but I’d have paid to watch him train, let
alone play. He was a genius, with such fantastic ability. You always felt you had a chance of winning with Paolo on the pitch. He could get the ball and change the game; he could hurt any team, any defence, even Manchester United. Score a great goal, make a great goal, you were always involved. At home, in particular, he was our match-winner.

I don’t think anyone who played with Paolo ever forgot the experience. Certainly not our goalkeeper, Shaka Hislop. He was a giant, Shaka, but the most amiable, lovely guy in the world. He ended up playing in the World Cup with Trinidad and Tobago and it is no surprise that he has since made a successful career in retirement as a summariser on American television. He was a very smart man. We were playing away at Birmingham City in the League Cup in 1999; it was 1–1 just before half-time when they got a free-kick outside our area. Paolo’s job was always to line the wall up, but he didn’t get it right and Martin Grainger scored. Shaka came into the dressing room and, obviously, he was upset, but being Shaka he wasn’t about to rant and rave. ‘Paolo, man,’ he said in his deep Caribbean drawl, ‘you supposed to line up the wall, man. You didn’t line the wall up.’ The reaction he got was extreme even by Paolo’s standards. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted ‘You blame me for the goal?
Argh!
Fuck you!’ And he marched across the dressing room and picked up this giant barrel of the sports drink Gatorade. It was a ridiculous sight. The container was huge and he could barely lift it. His knees were buckling like a weightlifter when he has taken too much on, and at first we all stayed seated, merely curious as to what would happen next. Then, somehow, Paolo got it over his head, full with gallons and gallons of thick, sticky orange liquid and that’s when we knew we were in trouble. He was walking
around the dressing room with it, shouting and screaming, his legs trembling with the strain. ‘Fuck you! My fault? Fuck you!’ All the players were diving for cover under the benches; I had a brand new suit on, so I scarpered quicker than most, under the table in the middle of the room. And from there I heard it – whoosh. He threw it. We all watched it, as if in slow motion, sail through the air until it landed on Shaka’s lovely white linen suit, which took the brunt, but there was plenty of collateral damage.

Even then Shaka wasn’t fazed. He just stared at him. ‘Paolo, man, why did you do that?’ he said, as the rest of us surveyed the wreckage of our flooded dressing room.

‘Fuck you! I don’t play no more. You blame me. Fucking hell,’ Paolo screamed. He took his boots off, his socks off, and sat with his arms folded, sulking like a kid. Oh dear. What the hell were we going to do?

‘Paolo,’ I said. ‘You’re out of order. Come on, get your gear on, get your boots on.’

‘No, fuck off, I don’t play. He blame me.’

‘No, he didn’t blame you. He just said you should have lined the wall up. Look, it’s a big game, let’s just get on with it. We need a result.’

In the end, he put his boots on and went out. We didn’t even have time to talk about the second-half plan. We scored two goals in the last three minutes and won 3–2 and, after the match, Paolo came in as if nothing had happened: no apology, no mention of his previous behaviour at all. He didn’t think there was anything to discuss, so we carried on from there.

Goalkeepers seemed a special nuisance for Paolo. Another day he took against our number two, Stephen Bywater, and wanted
to bash him up, as big as he was. Once the fuse had been lit he really didn’t care who he was up against. I remember Steve Lomas, who was a really tough boy from Northern Ireland, having a go at him one day, and Paolo chased him into the shower for a fight. Nobody messed with Steve, but Paolo didn’t care. Once he had lost it, nothing was going to stop him, and the lads had to pull the pair of them apart.

The only thing that scared him was flying. He didn’t like it at the best of times, but when we turned up at Stansted Airport one afternoon to discover there was a problem with the plane, that was the final straw. We were flying up to play Bradford City, but Paolo decided he was staying behind. As the lads sat patiently waiting for the mechanical fault to be fixed, Paolo raged on: ‘I don’t like this plane. It is shit, this plane. Harry, why are we on this shit plane?’

‘It’s OK, Paolo,’ I told him. ‘The plane is fine. It’s a tiny problem and then we’ll be on our way. We can’t get there by road now, it’s too late.’

At that point a van pulled up and two skinheads got out. They were the mechanics, come to fix the fault: shaved barnets, shorts, big ear-rings, tattoos everywhere, up their legs, down their arms. Paolo was frantic. ‘Fucking hell, boss, look at these two! I fucking told you boss. This plane is shit. They couldn’t fix my kid’s bike let alone an aeroplane! I don’t want to die, I have children. I get off.’

‘Calm down, Paolo,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t put us on a plane that is going to crash.’ By now, looking at these mechanics, I was coming round to his way of thinking. But we had a game to play and a plane to catch. ‘Look, none of us want to die, Paolo,’ I soothed. ‘I’ve got a wife and children, too.’ Eventually we took off –
with Paolo complaining at every bump all the way up to Leeds Bradford Airport.

We won 2–1 but when we came to go home there had been heavy snow in the West Yorkshire area. The nearer we got to the airport the worse it got, and the forecast was very poor. As we checked in we received the bad news. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to get on the plane otherwise the airport will close,’ said an official. So now we started running to get out in time. You can imagine the state of Paolo. ‘I don’t get on this fucking plane. We’re all going to die.’ I didn’t have time for it anymore. ‘Paolo,’ I told him, ‘we just want to get home. Whether you want to come or not is up to you.’ I turned to Paul Aldridge, the club secretary. ‘Fuck him,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’ Paolo stayed behind and got a car to drive him home. It wasn’t the most pleasant journey back. All the way down I was thinking of the headlines: Entire West Ham team killed – ‘I told you so, you stupid bastards,’ says Paolo Di Canio.

But I loved working with him most times. He was a character, he was fun; and every day was different when he was around. Mind you, he was lucky to survive the afternoon he caught the ball at Everton. I thought Stuart Pearce was going to kill him. If he thought the plane to Bradford was a near-death experience, he should have seen Stuart rampaging around the dressing room in frustration. It has gone down as one of the most famous examples of fair play in modern sport, yet anyone who had been in earshot after it happened wouldn’t have known that. The players were ready to strangle Paolo. They thought he had been conned, good and proper.

We were at Goodison Park, 16 December 2000. The score was tied 1–1 when Paul Gerrard, their goalkeeper, came out of
the penalty box to collect a ball over the top under pressure but succeeded only in clearing it straight to Trevor Sinclair on the wing. Gerrard was stranded, halfway to the corner flag. He appeared to have been injured trying to make the save and had collapsed to the ground. Sinclair crossed to Paolo who had the goal at his mercy – but caught the ball so Gerrard could receive treatment instead. It wasn’t the open goal people remember – he would still have had to volley the ball in from around twenty yards and there were two Everton defenders nearby, but it was certainly a very sporting gesture. Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, it was hard to see it that way. Pearce was first into our dressing room. ‘Don’t let me near him,’ he said. ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.’ I wasn’t in much better humour. I think my first words to Paolo were, ‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Then it was time to go on television.

‘Fantastic sportsmanship,’ said the interviewer. ‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘that’s brilliant, really. Great to see. It’s what the game’s all about.’

Meanwhile, in the dressing room, Paolo was surrounded by angry teammates telling him he could have won us the game. They didn’t give a monkey’s about good sportsmanship. Being Paolo, he couldn’t care less, either. He had made his decision and he wasn’t backing down. He ended up winning a FIFA Fair Play Award, but I would rather have had the extra two points. How often do West Ham go to Everton and win?

Another time, we were playing Bradford at home and losing 4–2. Bywater was our goalkeeper and he hadn’t stopped one. Under his body, through his legs, every time Bradford had a shot it was in the net. At the other end, Paolo had three blatant penalty shouts rejected. The last one tipped him over the brink. He looked at the bench, shrugged, pouted and made the rolling hand gesture
to signify that he wanted to come off. I ignored him. Next, he walked over to the touchline. I wouldn’t look at him. ‘Boss, I no play,’ he said. ‘I come off.’ Now I had to do something. ‘Paolo, just get on with it,’ I told him. With that, he sat down, on the pitch, arms folded. Then he put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t play no more,’ he said. ‘I finished.’ It was getting embarrassing. ‘Paolo,’ I hissed. ‘We’re losing 4–2 to Bradford. Everyone’s looking. Get up, Paolo. Get up, quick.’ With that the play came over to our side and started going on around us. Bradford dribbled past him, charged up our end, and Dean Saunders missed the sitter of the season to make it five.

Incredibly, Paolo could do no wrong with the fans, though, and they started singing his name. That was it: suddenly, he was up and off down the wing. He won the penalty. Frank Lampard went over to take it. Now Paolo wanted the ball. The pair of them were having a tug of war for about a minute until Frank realised he was never going to win. Paolo ran up like he was going to break the net, the goalkeeper dived so far he nearly knocked himself unconscious on a post, and Paolo chipped it down the middle: 4–3. Then he beat about four players and set up Joe Cole: 4–4. Finally, Frank scored our winner with seven minutes to go. Paolo left the field with the fans still singing his name. He was certainly unique.

Sir Alex Ferguson was very close to taking him to Manchester United and I think he would have been magnificent there, perhaps another Eric Cantona. Against Wimbledon, on 16 March 2000, he scored the Goal of the Season. Marc-Vivien Foé played the ball across field to the right, Sinclair centred and Paolo at the far post hit a right-foot volley while completely airborne that went in like a missile. I went to present him with the award at the restaurant San
Lorenzo’s, but we had one further surprise lined up. The Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet. A little secret: Paolo is the biggest Spandau Ballet fan in the world, and his face when they walked in was a picture. He was up, singing all the songs, telling them how he saw their concert in Rome and got beaten up by a policeman because he tried to sneak into the second night without a ticket. It was as if he had won the lottery. I’ve never seen him so excited. But that was Paolo, full of surprises. You could come in one day and he’d be buzzing; the next day he’d be in a mood because he didn’t like the new kit.

We got an all navy blue away strip and he thought it looked like Wimbledon. I told him if he could reimburse the club for the twenty thousand replicas that were already on sale, they would change it. Yet Paolo, like Julian Dicks, has ended up a West Ham hero. I am sometimes asked to compare the two. They were both fantastic players, both had incredible skill, both would get very close to any all-time West Ham XI – and both could drive a manager mad. The difference, I think, is that at the end, when the craziness had subsided, you could have a laugh with Paolo – and that wasn’t always the case with Julian, or some of his teammates.