Gazza: My Story (17 page)

Before the FA Cup final of 1991, two things had happened, or were happening, in fact – they kept on happening for quite some time after the Cup final. Each had quite an important effect on my life.

First, there was Sheryl Failes, who came into my life early in 1991. By that time I had long since finished my relationship with Gail, and she had gone home to the north-east. So as far as girlfriends were concerned I was fancy-free. But I wasn’t really looking for anyone. Mainly I was just enjoying myself going out with the lads, having a few drinks, and a few more drinks, and only then, if I had the energy left – if I could walk
straight, or see straight – might I take an interest in the opposite sex.

I met Sheryl in a wine bar in Hoddesdon, not far from my home in Dobbs Weir. I’d gone there with Mitchell Thomas and Paul Stewart. There was a live band on and I had quite a bit to drink, but the moment I saw Sheryl, I fell for her. She was stunning-looking. I asked her for her phone number, but she wouldn’t give it to me.

I think at the time I might have been dancing on a table. That’s what Sheryl said later, anyway, but I’m not sure. Whatever I was doing, I was no doubt messing around, and probably drunk. She says she didn’t know who I was, but she wasn’t very impressed by how I was behaving. She was with a friend, Wendy. Wendy knew straight away who I was, because she had three football-mad little boys. I gave her some autographs for her lads, and offered some to Sheryl as well, which was how, as I remember it, we finally came to exchange phone numbers.

Sheryl maintains she never gave me her number. She says it was Wendy who rang me and gave it to me. Wendy told Sheryl that she might as well have a bit of fun, but Sheryl was furious, so she says. Anyway, one
way or another I got her number, and eventually I rang her.

We met up a few times, but it was on and off for a while, and I had other girlfriends. I wasn’t put off when I discovered Sheryl was married, because I was told the marriage was over. The fact that she had two bairns didn’t bother me, either.

Before long, it started to get more serious. One night I went round to her place, it got late, and Sheryl said I could stay the night, so I did. I was worried in the morning, when I came down to breakfast, that her kids would recognise me. She was, after all, still married to this other bloke, and I was concerned that if the kids started talking about me it might complicate her divorce.

Her son, Mason, was only about two years old at the time, so he was no problem. But her daughter Bianca was about five. When I appeared at the breakfast table, she just stared at me, stared and stared. Eventually she said, ‘Mum, what’s Gazza doing in our house?’

I knew she would be bound to tell her father – you couldn’t expect a five-year-old not to talk about having breakfast with a footballer – and I did for a time get dragged into the divorce proceedings, even though the break-up had occurred long before Sheryl ever met me.

Shel had grown up locally in Hertfordshire, in a council house, just like me. Her dad worked as a welder. Unlike me, she had had a decent education. She went for a while to a ballet boarding school in Sussex. She was awarded some sort of grant, but her dad had to pay fees as well. She hadn’t really liked it, and had run away once. Her dad had offered to move house, to be near her, if that would help. Whenever she came home, she felt she had grown apart from her old friends. They thought she had a plum in her mouth, as she spoke with a posher accent than they had, and that she believed she was better than them, which she didn’t.

She wasn’t really the right height to be a ballet dancer or a catwalk model, but she did become a fashion model, doing demonstrations in department stores. She also worked part-time in a hotel till she got married. When her marriage, to an estate agent, ended, she worked hard to support herself and her kids.

We argued a lot. We fell out and separated, and I would go my own way for a few weeks. It was usually when I got depressed, when I was injured and fed up with hanging around all day, eating too much and getting drunk just to cheer myself up, to forget things. Obviously, putting up with that kind of behaviour wasn’t much fun
for Shel. But in the end she would take me back, when I apologised and pleaded with her. Women do. I suppose she thought she could help me and believed all my promises that I’d improve. And I meant them when I made them. I meant to be good to her, because I really loved her. I grew to love the kids as well, and looked upon them as my own.

The second drama in my life in 1991 unfolded even more slowly. In fact, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on for some time, and even now I don’t know all the details. Spurs had somehow got themselves into a financial mess, and they were running out of cash and building up debts. In 1983, they had floated the club on the Stock Exchange, which seemed to have solved their problems for a while. But then they had diversified, going into other businesses, such as clothing, which had done badly. The sale of Chris Waddle to Marseille for £4.25 million in 1989 had helped, but now they were desperate for money once again.

It looked at one stage as if Robert Maxwell might buy the club, which would have been terrible, so everyone said. As manager, Terry Venables was obviously caught up in all this, because it meant he had no funds to spend
and instead had to look around for ways of bringing in more money. He tried to set up a deal to buy the club himself. It was that deal which, in the end, brought in Alan Sugar as chairman on what the press called a dream ticket: the brilliant football brain allied with the brilliant business brain. What could go wrong?

It was around February 1991 that I first heard that an Italian club called Lazio was interested in me. I didn’t know what or where Lazio was at the time, but I remember being pissed off that discussions had been going on between Spurs officials and Lazio people, plus a lot of intermediaries and so-called experts who were sticking their oars in, looking for a piece of any action there might be, without my knowledge. I was upset that Tottenham had even contemplated selling me behind my back without talking to me first about any of it. I began to feel like a piece of baggage, just another load of goods for sale.

I imagine the interest from Lazio had probably been stimulated by my World Cup exploits in Italy. Various top Italians, like Gianni Agnelli, the famous industrialist and president of Juventus, had said nice things about me. Gian Marco Callieri, the owner of Lazio, had apparently fallen in love with me during the finals. He loved my image, that’s what I was told.

Spurs said they wanted £10 million for me, which was of course ridiculous – five times what they had paid for me – but obviously it would have solved their financial problems. Lazio had offered £5 million, and so the negotiations started. Mel and Len went out to Rome to check it all out. Maurizio Manzini, Lazio’s general manager, was on the blower all the time. They eventually seemed to reach agreement on a price of £8.5 million, by which time news of the negotiations had leaked to the press.

A lot of Spurs fans were very upset. They thought I was being disloyal and was just trying to make a lot of money, but none of these talks had been my doing. Spurs and Lazio had begun it all without reference to me. Spurs desperately needed money, while Lazio had new owners with a lot of cash to spend and were desperate for a big signing. The Lazio people had been going round in public saying they were going to buy a new star. When the story hit the press in Italy, they were even more determined to keep their promise. When I was asked what little extras it would take to attract me to Lazio, apart from the money, I said, half-jokingly, that a trout farm would be nice, and they instantly said fine, no problem.

Discussions and arguments and secret meetings, in London and in Rome and elsewhere, went on for months, against the backdrop of the struggle between Irving Scholar and Terry Venables for control of Tottenham Hotspur. Venables was now saying that if his bid was successful he would like to keep me, but of course by this stage he couldn’t afford the kind of personal deal which was on offer from Lazio. I had enough to worry about with my hernia, and then trying to get fit for the Cup final, in which we were due to meet Nottingham Forest. I knew it was going to be my last game for Spurs, but I hadn’t actually signed the forms. They were all there, ready and waiting, with all the details agreed, but I wanted to go into the final feeling that I was still a genuine Tottenham player.

I was determined to go out on a high, to show the world how good I was, to please the Tottenham fans and my own family, too. I bought about seventy extra tickets for practically all the people in Dunston I had ever known in my life. So not surprisingly, I was a bit revved up, even before I got on the pitch.

People said later that Terry Venables should have calmed me down, not let me run out to play a Cup final in such a state, but that hyped-up condition was normal
for me. It was how I usually went on to the field: desperate to do well, all wound up. Terry knew that, and he knew how to handle me.

Within minutes of the start, I charged into Garry Parker. It wasn’t a nasty or vicious challenge. I got the ball, but my leg carried through and banged into his chest. The referee told me off. Perhaps it might have been better if he’d given me a yellow card there and then.

Ten minutes later, Gary Charles, Forest’s young full-back, powered through and cut across the edge of the penalty area. It looked to me as if he would have a clear run on goal, with no one else to stop him, so I lunged in. I thought I had got the ball, but he was too quick for me and I just scythed him down. At first I worried that I had hurt him, a young player just beginning his career, but he got up and seemed OK. Our trainer, Dave Butler, came on to check my leg and I told him I was OK, I’d manage. Somehow, I struggled to my feet, assuring him I’d run it off.

The ref had given a free kick so I lumbered towards our wall and joined in, though I was feeling groggy and didn’t quite know what I was doing. Stuart Pearce, my World Cup team-mate, was taking the kick. The ball
flew past our goalie, Erik Thorstvedt, and into the net. I toppled over, unable to stay upright. I just sort of collapsed in a heap, like a rag doll. We were 1–0 down and I was out of it – out of the game and also out of my head. I couldn’t quite concentrate on what was happening around me. I just felt numb. As they put me on a stretcher silly things came into my head. Where had I parked my car? Who would collect my loser’s or winner’s medal?

The doc had a look at my knee. He was obviously very worried. As I lay there, waiting for an ambulance, I could hear the roars of the crowd. In the ambulance there was a radio on, so I listened to the commentary as the lads fought back. Nayim had come on for me and he helped set up Paul Stewart’s equalising goal. The massive cheer from the fans was ringing in my ears as the ambulance made its way to the Princess Grace Hospital.

I even managed to catch the last bit of the game on TV from my hospital bed, as it had gone to extra time. I saw poor old Des Walker head the ball into his own net from a corner. We had won the Cup, the biggest achievement in my football life so far, in that I’d ended up with a winner’s medal. But I felt I didn’t deserve it. I’d acted like a mad bastard.

All the players came to visit me in hospital straight after the game, bringing me the Cup and my medal, but I could hardly look at them. It’s true I’d probably done more than anyone to get them to the final, with all those Cup goals, but I felt I’d let them down when it mattered most.

It turned out I’d shattered the cruciate ligament in my right knee. It would have to be operated on and I was told I could be out for months, if not for ever. Officials from Lazio had been in the crowd to watch their new star. Would they now want me? Would Spurs want me? Would anyone? I spent my twenty-fourth birthday in my hospital room, feeling pretty sorry for myself, terrified that I had finally buggered everything up for good, all through my own stupidity.

A lot of people at the time said that was it, my career was finished, but I honestly never thought that for one moment. Once I knew it was my cruciate ligament I was concerned, but not too much because I knew other players who had recovered from it. As for those people in the press who still say that I never properly recovered from that injury, that it was downhill from then on, that’s total bollocks. My career got better and better after that, and so did I as a player. No question.

But at that time, I was shitting myself. I was in a right state – but mainly because I thought I’d mucked up the Lazio deal, that it would now never happen.