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Mostly, he would drag me up to our bedroom by the hair and beat me there. I think his logic was that the bed sagged when he was hitting me so the punches wouldn’t bruise me as badly and it wouldn’t be so obvious what he was doing. The lady that lived next door to us always knew when there was a problem, because when I knew I was going to get a beating I would beg Stan’s dad to let me close all the windows first so the neighbours wouldn’t hear. I’d plead with him not to shout, so the neighbours wouldn’t know I was being beaten up.

He was such a strange mix, Stan’s dad, very formal and always immaculately dressed to the point where he might change his shirt two or three times a day. He would ring me from work and tell me when I could go shopping but that I mustn’t be away more than an hour. And I would have to be back, because if he rang and I wasn’t there he would come and look for me and I would get knocked about again at home.

And then, of course, there was the abuse we used to get as a family, the racial abuse that almost hurt more than my husband’s punches. Jeff’s mum was one of the worst. It was always stuff about how I should move away because I had married a black man. The things she said to me were so dreadful that once, when she had said something particularly cruel to Stan, I went round and asked her to come out into the garden so I could give her what she deserved. I’m ashamed of that now. I wonder if she’s ashamed. She wouldn’t come out into the garden anyway.

Stan won’t talk about it much but they used to do terrible things to him, too. One day, I was walking over to the garages at the other end of our circle of houses and I saw a group of boys coming across the field, making another boy crawl through the grass on his hands and knees. The boy on his hands and knees was Stan and they were weeing on him, actually weeing on him, as he crawled.

Stan used to get it from his dad, too. Not physical abuse, but he would do really strange things. He bought Stan a toy cat once and then one day when he came round he took the cat upstairs with him and disappeared for ages. When he had gone, I went to look for it and he had cut it up into tiny pieces and left it scattered across the bed.

People always wonder why I didn’t leave him earlier but where was I going to go? My mother lived with us and by that time she had Alzheimer’s disease. There was nowhere to go. They didn’t have refuges for battered wives then. And I felt I had made my choice and I had to live with it. I’d lost a lot of my friends, too, because they were too ashamed to come round and see me any more. I found out afterwards he had been visiting a few of them and they … well, they liked him.

Eventually, though, I just couldn’t put up with it any longer. He started hitting one of my daughters, too, so I got a divorce and got him kicked out. Even after that he would prowl around on the land at the back of the house. He rang me and threatened to cut my throat, and I had to make Stan a ward of court to keep him away. Sometimes, I could just sense his presence outside. I just knew he had come to watch us. They stopped him coming into Cannock but he never disappeared. He kept writing to me, kept saying he knew that I had never married again because I still loved him.

Stan isn’t like him. Just because he has been a womaniser doesn’t mean he is like him. Stan has got friends. Stan tries to do his best for others. I was ashamed of him when he hit Ulrika but that’s the only time I have been ashamed of him. I had always pleaded with him, ‘be kind to ladies’. But that one incident doesn’t make him like his dad. Not by a million miles.

I know wives who have been victims of violent husbands sometimes say this, but in many ways I blame myself. You see, I never loved Stan’s dad. Even my first husband, I never missed him after I left him. I think that’s just my way. Perhaps it’s just that I never met the right fella, but I don’t think I’m capable of loving anybody apart from my kids.

I’ve never tried to find my dad. But just after Christmas last year, he found me. He sent me an e-mail after I’d written a piece in the Daily Mirror touching on some of the abuse he had handed out to my mum. He said that he considered I was lost to the black side of my family and that I had been corrupted by white ways of thinking. He said that if I ever criticised the black race as a whole, I had better keep looking over my shoulder because he would be coming for me.

It made me laugh really. Partly because he hadn’t wasted any time trying to renew my acquaintance ten years or so ago when he suddenly realised I might be earning a decent wedge at Nottingham Forest. Funny that, isn’t it? Him and my Uncle Don, who’d combined to make life so difficult for my mother, united by a love of money that conquered all their hostility towards my mother in a trice. What a pair of sad bastards. Pathetic specimens of humanity.

I laughed, too, because my dad’s threats made me think of the time when I was at Forest and I had my hair dyed blonde. I looked like a right twat, to be honest with you. Frank Clark, the Forest manager, said I should spend more time on the training pitch and less at the hair salon and I might improve myself as a player. Point taken.

A couple of days later, I opened a newspaper to see a picture of my dad staring out at me as large as life. I hadn’t seen him, even a picture of him, for more than 10 years. He had a handsome face and he was wearing smart, elegant, Seventies-style clothes. He wasn’t being very complimentary about me, though. It was the same sort of stuff. How I was trying to turn myself into a white boy. How he had always wanted me to play cricket for the West Indies, not be a common footballer. What struck me most was that I did not feel a thing. No hurt. No hatred. No despair. Why should I after what he had done to us? Why should I after the legacy he had bequeathed to me? If he had a soul left, my dad had just sold it. And I didn’t feel a thing.

CHAPTER TWO
WALSALL: A MIXED BAG

Everybody thinks I underachieved as a footballer. Everybody always says I could have done so much more. I could have been one of the greats. I could have had 80 caps for England instead of three. I could have been a stalwart of the national side. I could have won a hatful of medals and the admiration of my peers. They say it’s such a shame it turned out the way it did and that I walked away from football when I was 30, when I should have been in my prime, not burned out, my mind frazzled.

Well, I want to nail all that. I didn’t underachieve. I overachieved. I had a great career. I played for Aston Villa, the club I had always wanted to play for. I played for Liverpool, one of the most famous names in world football. And I played for my country. I scored the winning goal in the best match of the 1990s, Liverpool’s 4–3 win over Newcastle at Anfield in 1996. I scored goals that got people up off their seats. I was an entertainer. The fans of the clubs I played for loved me. That will always mean more to me than any one of the medals that public opinion has deemed the arbiter of success in a footballer’s career.

I don’t agree with that criteria. Alan Shearer has never won a winner’s medal in all his time at Newcastle, and yet the enjoyment and the satisfaction he has provided for Geordie supporters who worship him is worth a million medals. You don’t have to have little bits of silver hidden away in a bank vault somewhere to convince you that you were a success. All you need are memories that make your chest puff out and your eyes glisten when you think of them. That’s why I count helping to keep Southend United in the First Division in my season there as one of my finest achievements. That’s success to me.

But that’s not the main reason why I look back at my playing years with pride, and not with regret. If you want to understand me, if you want to put what I did in its proper context, you need to know what I was up against. You need to know what was going on inside my mind. You need to know about my thought processes and how they tortured me. You need to know about the mental illness I suffer from and how I have struggled to overcome that all my life. You need to know how I’m fighting Borderline Personality Disorder. And how, essentially, that often feels like a losing battle.

When people talk about me and how I wasted my talent, there are usually two favourite themes they trot out. Firstly, they talk about how, wherever I went, I never got on with my team-mates. They talk about me being a loner. They recall apocryphal stories about team-mates not celebrating goals with me. They repeat rumours about players not talking to me in the dressing room at Nottingham Forest. They say I was arrogant and aloof and that I was bad news for team spirit wherever I went.

The other strand is my attitude to training. The common perception is that I damned myself by being an incorrigibly lazy twat. The stories go that I left behind a trail of infuriated managers who had grown increasingly exasperated by my reluctance to fall into line on the training pitch. It’s almost like football was the fucking army and I was guilty of serial insubordination. Failing to obey some fuckwit officer who never had a tenth of my talent as a player and who catered his sessions to the lowest common denominator. Well, I’m not a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ person. I don’t respect automatons and drones.

If clubs failed to get the best out of me, that is their failure. Not mine. If they paid millions of pounds for me and then tossed me into the general pile of players, if they treated every personality alike rather than catering for individual needs, then why should they be surprised if someone like me doesn’t react well? Man-management isn’t rocket science, but because I was fragile mentally I needed loyalty and care. When I got that, at Southend, Nottingham Forest and Leicester, I flourished and the team prospered. When I didn’t get it, I withered.

Training and I have always been strange bedfellows. Part of that stems from the fact that my first experience of a professional club was mutilated by a horror of a human being called Ray Train, who was the youth-team coach at Walsall when I joined as an apprentice on £29 a week at the age of 17. Being an apprentice under Ray Train was like a baby coming out of the womb and the first thing it sees is people firing guns or battering the fuck out of each other. This was my first taste of professional football and training at a league club.

The man terrified me. It’s a strong word but I use it intentionally. He inspired terror in me. My first day under his tutelage set out the pattern for the rest of my career as far as a distaste for training goes. It was a template for cynicism about training. I still associate training with him. Even when I’m sitting in my car today outside the health club I use in Great Barr, I start to sweat and get the shakes before I go for a work-out because I associate working out with him.

That first day at Walsall was a beautiful, sunny day in June and I had caught two buses from our house in Cannock to get there early, one from Cannock to Walsall Bus Station, the other from there to Fellows Park, the predecessor to the Bescot Stadium. I got to the ground, washed the kit and swept up. Then we went over to the training ground and the first thing we did was a long cross-country run. And I struggled.

More than that, I struggled badly. I hadn’t done four to six weeks’ preparation. Nobody had told me I had to. I was lagging behind. I was so far behind everyone else you wouldn’t believe it, and from thereon in, Ray decided he was going to have me for his bunny. At the end of every session he would allow us all to walk back towards the dressing rooms and then, just when I thought I was free, he would shout: ‘Not you, Stan.’

Ray was the ultimate grafter. Even at 40, he still trained like a fucking demon. The only other person who got near him for intensity, in my experience, was Archie Gemmill at Nottingham Forest. Ray couldn’t let go. He had to prove he was still a player. Had to prove he was still as fit as all of us. So for him to see a lazy, black, eminently talented player come on and score a couple of goals for the youth team as a late substitute used to infuriate him.

The bloke was five foot nothing. He had played for Carlisle for five years between 1971 and 1976, a defensive midfielder who was the cornerstone of the success they enjoyed in that period, which even took them into the top flight. He was popular with the fans because of the effort he put in, but people told me the senior pros used to laugh at him because he was this little fucking sergeant major type figure. He was never racist. He didn’t even shout, really. That was what made him so sinister. He would sidle up to me and whisper what he wanted me to do in my ear. I hated him, but most of all he terrified me. He made my life a misery. He always made a point of leaving that little gap between letting me walk away at the end of a session and then calling me back for more. It was psychological torture. And it was only me. It was public humiliation in front of the rest of the lads. I have tried to take my rawness into account, but that little man went out of his way, time and time again, to fuck with my mind.

He would get me to come in an hour before the rest of the lads. He seemed to like the ones who were grafters, particularly a group of three or four who had been released by Celtic. They were all hard-working midfielders. But to me, whether you are the laziest fucker on earth or whether you are a grafter, a coach should do all he can to get the best out of you. That was not quite how Ray saw it. He tormented me but he didn’t get me any fitter.

His favourite mode of torture was to get me to mop the changing rooms at Fellows Park. He developed this fiendish system where he would hide penny-pieces in obscure places like on the outside of the U-bend behind the toilet or on top of the cistern. If you missed one of these penny-pieces he took it as a sign you hadn’t done the job properly and you had to start again. It was pathetic. It was medieval shit. I still feel sad I had to go through it all. I still feel sad that it left its mark on me.

He still haunts me. I think about him and what he did to me most days. I’m still terrified of him. I met him once in New York when I was there with Ulrika. We were in Bloomingdales in the Ralph Lauren section and I caught sight of this little fucking dickhead stretching up, trying to reach some of the T-shirts on the top shelf. It was Ray. He had knitted hair that sprawled over his head like a cardigan. Somehow, he sensed somebody looking at him and turned round. ‘All right, big man,’ he said. I had to get out of there. I was shaking with anger and fear. There I was, a grown man, still brought low by this guy. Ulrika wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

I never complained about him or objected to any of this treatment to his face. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. One day, I thought God had smiled on me because Ray keeled over and had a heart attack on the training pitch. Right there in front of me. It felt like divine retribution. The ambulance came for him and carted him off to hospital, us all standing there in our dirty kits watching. I had never been so happy in my entire fucking life. There was the possibility that he might die, but at the very least we would be rid of him for a few months.

He didn’t die. Little fuckers like him never do. But I thought there was still hope. When he came back, Tommy Coakley, the first-team manager, got the sack and Ray was promoted to caretaker boss. I wished fervently he would be given the post permanently or that the new guy would keep him on as his assistant, but, of course, no one could be that stupid. John Barnwell got the job and booted him back down to the youth team and the torment began all over again.

It was a systematic attempt to break me, and it worked. Instead of leaving me to do the extra work he gave me by myself, he made the other lads stay, too, to watch me. One day, the first team were travelling to an away match and most of the reserve side had gone with them, so the youth team played in the reserve match that night. Except me. I was the only one left out. I had to stay behind and sweep the stands at Fellows Park. By myself.

I wasn’t getting much of a run in the team. I was always on the bench. If I got on, I usually scored. But I was getting more and more unhappy. I dreaded waking up in the morning because I was so scared of what the day was going to hold. Often, I wished I would die in the night just so I could avoid Ray the next day. Sometimes, even if I made it to Fellows Park in the morning I’d head for the phone box outside the ground and call my mum in tears.

In the end, I just called it a day. Ray getting the youth-team job back finished me. I went in to see John Barnwell, said it wasn’t working out and asked him if I could be released from my contract. He was very good about it. I thought I was free of Ray then, but Ray never left me really. I went on to Wolves as an apprentice and I scored 18 goals in 20 games for the reserves. I was devastated when they let me go after less than a season there, but when Graham Turner (who was the manager then) released me, one of the reasons he gave was my inconsistent appearance record at training.

And it was true. Sometimes I just didn’t go in. It wasn’t as if I was skiving off so I could do something else. I didn’t go out on the piss or smoke fags or go in to Birmingham. I just stayed indoors. I’d developed some mental block at Walsall. Ray had infected me. It was the same at Forest. There were four or five occasions when I didn’t go in. Liverpool was exactly the same. It was very unprofessional but I had my reasons.

In training, I loved five-a-sides and I liked to do practical, functional stuff that was relevant to my game. I wanted people putting crosses in for me. I wanted to try to hone my finishing. I wanted to be put in situations where I could take people on. I wasn’t like most of the players because most players are low maintenance when it comes to training. They do what they are told. If they are told to lick their own arsehole, they’ll lick it. No questions asked. But if I was told to do something mundane like sidefoot volley a ball back to someone who kept on throwing it to you time after time from a few yards away, I lost interest. I could do that standing on my head. The Gareth Southgates of this world did it because it could genuinely enhance their game. But for me, that kind of exercise was like white noise. It was minutiae. Doing stuff like running across the width of the pitch doing sidefoot volleys was a piece of piss so I’d just switch off.

Perhaps I was a victim of the increasing premium on supreme physical fitness. I have never been the fittest. Somebody like Robbie Savage could go six months without training, then go on a long run tomorrow and dash through it like a whippet. But if I do long fitness stuff, I just get bored. And if I was either uninspired or if something had happened in my personal life, sometimes I would decide to skip training.

If you get an intelligent coach like Arsene Wenger, he knows how to manage his players. I look at someone like Thierry Henry and think he must have his days sometimes when he can be temperamental. But some of the sessions at Arsenal only last 45 minutes. When I was at Palace, most of them went on for three hours. If you knew that was coming, the temptation was to sit at home and think ‘fuck that’.

My curse is that I’ve always been blessed with a great touch. I don’t need to practise my ball skills. I was born with them. I’m never going to lose them. If someone injected me with a fitness drug and I walked out in the Arsenal team or the Liverpool team tomorrow, no one would ever know that I had not played football for three years. I can guarantee that. But if you took an average player who had been out for the same length of time, you could forget about giving them a ball. You might as well give them a bag of cement to kick around.

The fittest I have ever been was at Nottingham Forest. We had a coach there called Pete Edwards. We used to take the piss out of him because he was a muscle man, but he was superb. He organised very high intensity, short-burst sessions with balls in match environments. Our warm-ups were the equivalent of full sessions for other clubs, but when we finished our matches there was not one Forest player who looked as though he had just played 90 minutes.

It makes me smile now to think of how fit I was then. In my current state, energy is about as hard to find as rocking-horse shit, but back then I had too much of it. The night before a game against Sunderland, I even felt I had to go to the gym to do an hour on the treadmill just to get rid of some of the excess energy that was coursing through me. I went out the next day against Sunderland and I was still flying around. After Forest, I went to Liverpool, where the regime was not as intense. It was like pulling a thread on my fitness. It all started to unravel.

Maybe I just don’t look like I’m trying. Sometimes, it clearly appears as if I don’t care. Glenn Hoddle criticised me once in training before England’s World Cup qualifying tie in Rome in 1997. The forwards were queueing up for finishing practice and Ian Wright had just lunged for a cross and prodded it in. When it was my turn, the cross came in and it just evaded me. I didn’t lunge for it because I wouldn’t have got it anyway. ‘You see,’ Hoddle shouted. ‘You see, that’s the difference between you and Wrighty. Wrighty lunged for it even in training. You didn’t lunge for it.’ What a ridiculous thing to say. The problem with Hoddle was that he would get exasperated by people who couldn’t do what he had once been able to do. He would still run around the training pitch, tapping the ground as he ran with the point of his boot like a fucking dick. That just lost him the respect of the players.

The press called Hoddle’s assistant, John Gorman, ‘Coneman’. There’s always a fucking Coneman but Gorman acted like a pre-pubescent teenager, just excited to be there. He always called me ‘big man’, too, and tried to give the impression he knew what was going on. But if I’d asked him anything important, he would have shit himself and hedged around it. He knew halves of bits of stuff that were discussed in the bar late at night. But, really, that amounted to nothing. His role meant not asking Glenn any awkward questions. He was a yes man.

And football’s full of them. Full of people scared to be different. Full of people only too happy to let you down and turn you into a fall guy. Something as simple and as harmless as heading home to Cannock after training was enough to put me out there in freak-show territory at a string of clubs. Football doesn’t deal very well with anybody who strays from the norm. It’s suspicious of anyone who doesn’t aspire to the norm. Think of what happened to Graeme Le Saux just because he read the Guardian and said he liked going to see art-house movies now and again. Football gave its snap judgement: the guy must be a faggot.

Football’s full of contradictions and hypocrisies like that. The players moan about the media, and the tabloids in particular, but they all read The Sun and the Mirror. If they hate the tabloids so much, why don’t they read the Guardian or The Times? They’re too scared to be different. Worried they might get the piss ripped out of them for being a lah-di-dah smart-arse gay boy. Much easier to fit in and toe the party line and do what the others do. Much easier to conform.

It wasn’t that I had a problem with authority. I just had a problem with bad management. I couldn’t understand why a football club would spend millions and millions of pounds on a new asset and then not try to get the best out of them. Clubs knew what they were getting when they bought me, so why didn’t they make plans for me? Why do you break the British transfer record for a player and then try and force him into a style of football that is foreign to him?

From Ray Train at the start to Raddy Antic at the close of my career with Real Oviedo, I feel I have been ill-served by the men who have been in a position of power over me. I know there’s a danger of that sounding self-righteous and self-pitying but it was also business suicide on the part of the clubs. There have been honourable exceptions like Colin Murphy and Barry Fry, my two managers at Southend, and Martin O’Neill at Leicester, but for the most part these men who had often paid lavish amounts of money to bring me to their club gave every impression of being disappointed they had signed an individual and not an automaton.

That was one of the things that shortened my life as a footballer. In the end, I’d just had enough of betrayal and bullshit and double-speak and the empty friendships that flourish in football dressing-rooms and die the moment you move on to another club. That kind of friendship is no friendship at all, and by the time I had reached my late twenties I had grown weary of it. By the end, I’d had enough of being treated like a circus curiosity, the sensitive, difficult footballer no one could manage.

Football’s full of people who are scared to challenge you. By that, I don’t mean it’s full of people scared to bollock you. There are plenty of men who think that’s enough to establish their authority. But to gain authority over me, you have to interest me, and football’s full of people taking the safe option, full of coaches putting on piss-poor training sessions for men who are supposed to be trained athletes every week of the year. There’s too much uniformity. Not enough variety. Too many players with ability are allowed to stagnate. As a player, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle seeking worthwhile stimulation from training.

But maybe the clubs were fighting a losing battle with me, too. I know now that I have been suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder since I was young. It’s called Borderline because it was first used to describe people who lived on that edge between psychosis and neurosis. That’s where I live. Right on that line. I sit astride it. I exhibit all the symptoms. I’m a textbook study in this particular offshoot of being fucked up.

You’ll recognise me, and the way my career has fallen away at times when it should have kicked on, from some of the Borderline sufferer’s traits. The chronic disturbance with self, others and society. The ambivalence towards all directions, aims and goals. I didn’t have the hunger other players have. Just didn’t have it. Not always, but sometimes. Not because I was lazy but because it just didn’t feel right to me to behave in certain ways at certain times.

One of the most common characteristics of someone with BPD is the subconscious search for different states of chaos. In my personal life and in my football career, I have gravitated towards situations that are bound to end in schism and conflict. Other people try and avoid discord. My illness propels me towards it. One way or another, we always seem to find each other. We like hanging out together.

People look at me and scoff at this idea that I’ve got any sort of mental problem, partly because I’ve got a lot of money, which most people associate with happiness, and partly because they can’t see me doing anything extreme like playing paintball in my front room or throwing cats into trees. I wish that made me normal. I really do.

Let me try and give you an idea of how my mind can torture me just as surely as if I was strapped to the rack in one of the seven circles of Hell. Maybe you’ll start to see why the longest time I ever spent at one club was two full seasons. Maybe you’ll start to see why it often ended in tears. Maybe you’ll start to understand why I can’t hold down a steady relationship with a woman, why I flit from one to another like a honeybee.

I feel I must be loved by all the important people in my life at all times or else I am worthless. I must be completely competent in all ways if I am to consider myself to be a worthwhile person.

I feel nobody cares about me as much as I care about them, so I always lose everyone I care about, despite the desperate things I do to try to stop them from leaving me.

I have difficulty controlling anger. I have chronic feelings of emptiness and worthlessness. I exhibit recurrent suicidal behaviour. I’m reckless sexually.

When I am alone, I become nobody and nothing. When I am alone, when I have no work to structure my day, I take to my bed. Since I stopped playing football, apart from my work for Five Live, I have slept for three years.

I will only be happy when I find an all-giving, perfect person to love me and take care of me no matter what. But if someone like that loves me, then something must be wrong with them.

My life, like that of most sufferers from Borderline Personality Disorder, has been defined by a pervasive pattern of unstable relationships and a tendency to act on impulse. Since I used to wait by the window at night for my mother to come home from the swimming baths, I have always made frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, another BPD classic trait.

One passage from a book by a guy called Jerry Kreisman, called I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me, seemed unusually relevant to my behaviour and my failure to make anything, from a relationship to a spell at a football club, more than ephemeral. ‘The world of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, Dr Kreisman writes, ‘is split into heroes and villains. A child emotionally, the BP cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities. He cannot reconcile good and bad qualities with a constant coherent understanding of another person. At any particular moment, a friend is either good or evil. There is no in-between. No grey area. People are idolised one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.