Hard as Nails: The Graham Roberts Story
by Graham Roberts with Colin Duncan
Black and White Publishing, £17.99
BROADCAST football is genteel. Nanny is in the press box, nobody swears; calling a foul “dirty” might be actionable. So lunging tackles are “cynical”, stamping on knees “very cynical”. “He was fucking good” has become, quite wonderfully, “He did ever so well”!
Were she with us and briefed on the point of it all, Jane Austen would cope nicely. “It is a truth universally agreed that a man in possession of skills above the middling sort must necessarily acquire a gratifying fortune. However, Mr Gomes dropping the ball into the net arouses reservation.”
Graham Roberts isn’t like that. At Spurs, Rangers, Chelsea and West Bromwich Albion, he was a stopper centre half. He talks like a stopper centre half; and after the Mary Poppins-speak of the old women at the BBC, it comes like a breath of bad language – and sounds like a real footballer talking.
“From that moment [crunching Arsenal’s Kenny Sansom] I became the hard man of the Spurs defence.” “Kerry [Dixon] was a nutter, and it was a relief when I ended up on the same side.”
Is there a ground where he hasn’t had a row or loathed someone? But then the people he loathes: David Pleat, a “total prat”; Ken Bates, see passim; Vinnie Jones, a ‘talentless idiot”, tally with a wider view.
There, is though, warm praise obviously meant. Keith Burkinshaw was as straight as he was professional. Roberts knew Glenn Hoddle before he was a virgin and regrets the change, but thinks him the most brilliant English talent ever.
He escaped the oil of Pleat for the cleated boot of Graeme Souness, saluted as a great dynamic force, visibly lifting Scottish football – and a man taking defeat 0-1 by Hamilton Academicals to heart. “One minute James Alexander Gordon was going through the scores, the next the TV had exploded and was lying smashed to smithereens on the floor.”
Shiningly incorrect, Southampton boy of no fixed theological views, apart from embarrassment at Hoddle, Roberts had gone to Scotland, specifically Rangers, and enlisted in the war. He would, absurdly, be prosecuted for incitement.
But he adores antipathies – hardly the word in Glasgow – and reports from his earliest career the comment of a Weymouth director: “We don’t want any of you Dorchester lot down here.” He would have enjoyed the moment, at Portman Road or Carrow Road, when the half time score for Ipswich or Norwich read “Scum losing 1-0.”
Roberts has had a hard time. Clubs, wives (rows, not second parties), jobs and money – he was pre-Abramovich – all tend to get rid of him, and he is relieved to be commenting on Setanta and Sky – he would never do at the BBC.
But he tells the rough truth. Football is a boozy, violent, horse-backing, heterosexual and dreadfully male business. Lawrie Sanchez kicked his knee, he returned a right hook. Sanchez was red-carded. So, on his stretcher, was Roberts. “Lawrie said: “No hard feelings, mate?” That was the end of the matter and we moved on.”
Edward Pearce
