Always Managing: My Autobiography (26 page)

It always felt good to get one over on Tottenham, or one of our bigger London rivals. We were the poor relations at the time.
Alan Sugar, the chairman of Tottenham, was so confident his club would get Berkovic, being a good Jewish boy, that he started bragging about it even before the deal was done. We were due to meet Berkovic with Pini Zahavi, his agent, at Heathrow Airport. ‘Why are you wasting your time?’ Sugar goaded Peter Storrie. ‘Why would he go to West Ham, when he can come to us?’

Yet we had one advantage over Spurs. I knew where I wanted Eyal to play and told him at our meeting, ‘I will use you free off the front. I just want you to get on the ball and make us play. Everything will come through you.’

Eyal then sat down with Sugar and Gerry Francis, the manager of Tottenham. ‘I can’t guarantee you a place in the team, but you’ll definitely be in the squad,’ said Gerry, and the deal swung instantly in West Ham’s favour. Sugar couldn’t believe it – an Israeli international turning down Tottenham – but Gerry missed a trick. Eyal could have walked into Tottenham’s team. He was an amazing player, a great little footballer. He was another that would never have contributed to the drinking culture – Eyal was a loner. He certainly wouldn’t have been in big John Hartson’s gang. Not after what happened between them, anyway. John was very lucky he did not cause lasting damage that day.

It is hard to imagine two more different characters than John and Eyal but no matter the appalling nature of John’s attack on his fellow teammate, I still cannot bring myself to think badly of him. With Paul Kitson, he kept us up in the 1996–97 season, but my affection cuts deeper than that. I thought he was a top bloke and, for sure, if I’d been a player at that time I’d have wanted to be his mate.

I can remember going to the chairman that Christmas and announcing that unless we got two strikers, we wouldn’t stay up.
On 1 February we were 18th and Southampton, two points behind us, had a game in hand. We found £5.5 million from somewhere, bought Hartson and Kitson and never looked back. John was on the fringes of the Arsenal team, Paul was going nowhere with Newcastle United, so it was a gamble, but they turned it around. They played fourteen matches together that year and scored thirteen goals – one or the other always got on the scoresheet and from 12 March to 6 May we lost one game.

The next season John, in particular, was even better. When he was fit and on form he was close to unbeatable. He was one of those strikers that would just bash defenders up. He was a dream to work with – powerful, aggressive and hungry. He could play back to goal, he could get on the end of crosses, and his leap put him in the clouds. There wasn’t a centre-half in the country that could handle him, even the great ones, like Sol Campbell, and you knew goalkeepers didn’t fancy coming off their line when he was about. John was old school. Even the best still got battered by him, and it was fantastic to have a striker like that at the club, giving us variation in our approach to goal. John’s touch wasn’t bad, either. He had scored seventeen goals by 3 December, a crazy amount for West Ham. He just tore the league to pieces.

I like Danny Baker, but I’ll never forget listening to his radio show at the time we signed John. ‘West Ham have bought a donkey,’ he said. ‘John Hartson – what a waste of money. West Ham fans, get down there on Saturday and make donkey noises.’ Yet John changed everything about the team in that first year.

And then, in one summer, everything changed. John came back for pre-season and he had just blown up – he was way, way, way overweight. He had battled it throughout his career, but this
was the beginning of a serious problem. He was going through a very bad time in his life. He was drinking, he was gambling heavily, and it was catching up with him as a player. Plus, he was big pals with Vinnie Jones, and he probably enjoyed the celebrity life a bit too much. He always liked his food, but he just couldn’t keep the pounds off. He was going downhill fast. He came back for pre-season training two stone overweight. Frank Lampard Senior used to take him running over Epping Forest to try to get him fit, but it was no use. ‘I’m going at fifty-year-old man pace, and he can’t keep up, Harry,’ Frank said. ‘I look round and he’s collapsed on a log. He can’t do it.’ In the middle of this personal crisis, he took all his frustration out on little Eyal Berkovic.

It was a familiar story, to those who remembered the Julian Dicks era. John made a crunching tackle, to which Eyal objected, and while he was trying to help Eyal up, Eyal punched him in the leg. I don’t know what John was thinking to make him lose control so badly, but he just kicked Eyal, full force, in the face. His jaw was so badly damaged he could not eat for two days. Physical confrontations have always happened between players on the training ground, but this was different. This was the worst I have seen between teammates. It wasn’t even a fair fight: a tiny little fella versus big John, as hard as nails and a monster of a man. It was a total mismatch. I’m sure John felt like a horrible bully after he’d done it. I hope he did.

What made it even more difficult was that the whole thing was captured by a fan on a video camera, and he turned the film over to a national newspaper. Sky television had been at the training ground but had agreed not to run their footage, although once the story was out, they as good as put it on a loop. Any hope we had of
keeping the problem in-house ended. It was all over the back pages and shown repeatedly on television news programmes. I was under real pressure to sack John – to sling him out of the club. Eyal, understandably, felt strongly about it, too. Yet there was never any heat from the directors and I did not consider terminating John’s contract for one second. I know some people won’t like me saying this, but he was simply too valuable an asset to discard. People ask why I stuck with John, the way they ask why Liverpool stuck with Luis Suárez. The reason is that football managers are pragmatists. If a great player and a crap player commit the same crime, the club finds a reason to keep the great player, and uses the transgression as an excuse to sack the crap one. Sorry, but it’s true. We sold John to Wimbledon later and doubled our money. How could West Ham have afforded to just write off that amount? There was never a discussion about cancelling John’s contract. We fined him £10,000, two weeks’ wages, which went straight to a leukaemia charity, and John apologised to Eyal, first in public and then at a private dinner we held. I have no doubt he meant it, and that the apology was accepted. John knew he had made a huge mistake, one that proved hard to live down. And it left a stain on us all. Eyal departed soon after, and we had to start rebuilding again. Only at West Ham could we lose a great partnership like Hartson and Berkovic over a training-ground spat.

To be fair, there had been an early sign that John had to be handled very carefully. One day I got a call from some local businessmen who were starting up a betting shop in Ilford. They wanted me to be a guest at the grand opening. I didn’t fancy it, so they asked if John would go in my place. I knew he liked a bet, like me, and I couldn’t see the harm in it. ‘We’ll pay him,’ I was told.
‘Tell him, we’ll give him an account with £5,000 in it.’ So off John went and I never gave it another thought until about three months later when the same people called again. ‘It’s about John Hartson,’ they said. ‘He owes us £100,000.’ I managed to get them all to do a deal for about a third of that – but I knew from that moment that I couldn’t treat John like any other player.

After the Berkovic incident it was obvious that he was on his way out of the club, but first I had to get him fit. I took him to a Frenchman, a big bull of a trainer who had worked with Arsène Wenger at Arsenal. We met at Sopwell House hotel near St Albans, and he didn’t mess about. He turned to John. ‘You want to get fit?’ he asked. ‘Don’t waste my time. I don’t have time to waste on an idiot like you. If you want to work, you work. If you want to get fit, I get you fit. But don’t waste my time. You understand?’

He took John back to France with him, got him up at six in the morning, did four punishing fitness sessions each day, made him stay at his house. In ten days, he knocked him back into shape. I’ve never seen results like it. John came back as happy as I’d seen him. He realised the mistake he had made and was delighted to be fit again – but I was worried that, back in London, he would fall into bad habits again.

John was very friendly with Joe Kinnear, the Wimbledon manager, through Vinnie Jones, and they came up with a £7 million bid for him. I jumped at it. I knew we’d had the best of John, and it seemed a fantastic deal for our club. He was a wonderful talent, but I suspected his personal weaknesses meant he wouldn’t fulfil his potential – and I was right.

You might imagine from this that I bear a grudge against John for letting such an opportunity slip away. Not one bit. I could never
stay angry at John for long, and he remains one of my favourite players. He was honest, he was good company; he wanted to be mates. I’ll admit, I cared about him as a fella and wanted to help him in any way I could. I still do. What he has been through since with his illness, overcoming cancer, says everything about him. I’m sure lots of people wouldn’t have beaten it as he did. He’s a survivor, and I’ve got so much time for him. You couldn’t meet a lovelier bloke, despite what happened between him and Eyal, and, from my experience, his actions that day were completely out of character. I went up to a charity match for John recently, and he knows he only has to pick up the phone to me. I’d do anything for him.

It is easy to look at the incident between John and Eyal Berkovic as a black and white issue, a straightforward example of right and wrong. Certainly I would never attempt to defend John’s actions and, I’m sure, neither would he. Yet it also came at a time when English football was volatile, when there was a clash of cultures. Not that all English players were thugs and all foreign players soft, more a meeting of different attitudes and beliefs. As a manager I saw that collision every day on the training field. To Di Canio, fitness was everything, and even a light-hearted remark during a stretching exercise could send him into a fit of anger. British players like Dicks and Hartson, meanwhile, were not averse to a full-blooded tackle in training when, to a player like Berkovic, such physicality seemed ridiculous. In the middle was the manager, trying to marry and make sense of these different principles. It wasn’t easy, but I learned a lot.

The foreign legion at West Ham taught the players new standards of professionalism, but they improved the man-management techniques of English coaches, too. I also came to understand that
if you have too many players from a particular group or country you risk a clique developing, and I have tried to avoid this since. If you have too many French or African players, they will separate from the rest and the camp will become easily divided. That can even apply to having too many players who are under one agent, and I’d like to think I have become more adept at the difficult challenge of developing team spirit at a modern football club as I have got older. Towards the end at West Ham, I think cliques became more of a problem. Players get very close to others of the same nationality – and then if one isn’t playing he starts to chip away at his friend. That is one of the big changes from my playing days. It didn’t used to be like that. We all grew up as kids in the East End and we got on with our lives and careers. We all felt for a mate who was going through a rough time, but we didn’t rely on each other the same way. Now, a group from France will all stick together and if one’s not having it off, then two are not having it off, the other two are dragged down with them and soon you’ve got a core of players who are dissatisfied in the dressing room, destabilising the rest. That was the biggest lesson to me at West Ham.

And then there was Stuart Pearce. A one-off, he bridged the gap. He had the professionalism of the foreign players but the ferocious attitude of the British. He was 37 when I took him, he played two seasons for us and ended up as the Hammer of the Year in 2001. He was some guy – the only player I’ve seen turn out with a broken ankle.

It was his second season at the club, we played Chelsea on a Wednesday in March and Stuart went over awkwardly after eleven minutes, and had to come off. We knew it was a bad one because of the way the injury swelled up. I’ve not seen an ankle go like
it. The physiotherapist said, straight away, that he would be out for six to eight weeks. He gave me a list of problems: ligament damage, muscle damage, bone damage. We had Tottenham in an FA Cup quarter-final on the Sunday. It was a huge blow to be without Stuart. By Thursday evening, we had the doctor’s report. He agreed with the physio – anything up to two months. The next morning, I saw Stuart at the training ground. ‘I think I’ll be all right Sunday,’ he said. I told him about the physio’s verdict. ‘I don’t give a fuck what the physio reckons,’ said Stuart. ‘I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.’

Saturday came and Stuart was straight in to see me in my office. ‘Don’t do any team work yet,’ he said. ‘Just give me half an hour. I’ll go and have a fitness test over the back. I’ll take one of the young kids to work with me and get back to you.’ His ankle was so swollen that he had cut his boot down the side to get his foot in. Our physio, John Green, was going mad. ‘There’s no way he can play,’ he said. ‘He’s talking rubbish. He’s out for six weeks, minimum.’ Yet in the distance, I could see him. The kid was running at Stuart with the ball, Stuart was smashing into him, knocking him six feet in the air. He saw me looking over and gave me the thumbs-up. He had injections on both sides of his ankle before that Tottenham game, and it was still killing him, so he had them again at half-time. Joe Cole walked off the back post for a Tottenham set-piece and the ball trickled into the goal behind him. We lost 3–2. Our man of the match? Stuart Pearce.

Yet of all the players I used at West Ham, there was one that would probably have given even Stuart Pearce a run for his money for pure commitment. You won’t find him in any record books or on any squad list. His name wasn’t even in the programme, but he
did play, and score, for West Ham against Oxford City, on 28 July 1994. His name was Steve Davies – and he was in the crowd.