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I'll vouch for Crouch

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Red Astaire

Member Of 'The Toilets At The Harry Fan Club..
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I always liked Peter Crouch. He comes across well and was reasonably talented on the pitch. Sure he had that 19 game drought at the start of his LFC career but he always tried hard and soon enough the goals came. I think when he left the club he could hold his head up high (well being him it would be hard not too...) He's 37 now and still playing well albeit as an impact sub but that happens to everyone. Anyway I read this interview The Times put in it's Saturday magazine. He comes across exactly how I imagined he would be. Self deprecating, Funny and smart. Here it is. Enjoy.


First things first: Peter Crouch is incredibly tall. You probably already know this because you’ve seen him playing football, either on the telly or watching from the stands, and he is always, by some stretch, the gangliest presence on any pitch. But observing from a distance doesn’t really do him justice. You’ve got to get up close to fully appreciate the scale and proportions of the man. I am 6ft 2in and not used to feeling short. Crouch is 6ft 7in and rake thin, beyond beanpole, with limbs so long that when he walks towards you, smiling, it looks vaguely uncanny, as if he’s some kind of friendly animatronic being. He’s wearing jeans, a grey sweatshirt and still retains a deep summer tan, even though the football season is now well under way. He folds himself into a chair in the private members’ lounge of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London. Members of the public, he says, regularly feel moved to approach him and tell him how tall he is, as though he didn’t already know. “I get that on a daily basis.” He sighs and shakes his head. “A sad state of affairs.”
To combat this he used to carry around a deck of specially printed business cards, which he would hand to smug-looking strangers the moment they approached him at the bar on a night out and began to open their mouths. They would then pause, frown and look down at the card to see that it bore the following five bullet points:

• Yes, I am tall
• Yes, I am 6ft 7in
• No, the weather isn’t different up here
• No, I don’t play basketball
• I’m so glad we had this conversation

With his wife, Abbey Clancy, in London, 2012GETTY IMAGES
Crouch has always been defined by his height. He has also, for the majority of his 21 years as a player, been defined by his sense of humour. Once, early in his career, he was asked in an interview what he would be if he weren’t a footballer. His answer? “A virgin.” Last year, on Twitter, he posted a photo of himself on holiday, feeding some giraffes. “Summer for me is about spending time with the family,” ran the caption. In his new book, How to Be a Footballer, he describes celebratory post-match beers in communal baths. “It’s like a wet pub,” he writes. “From nipples up, it’s a stag do; from the nipples down, it’s a very weird nightclub.” You get the idea. He’s funny.
This level of self-awareness – a frankly supernatural level of self-awareness by the standards of most Premier League footballers – is inextricably linked to his unique physique. “People saw me on the field and I didn’t look like a footballer,” he says. “I still don’t.” So they would take the piss. And, starting at school, Crouch learnt that if he was able to take the piss out of himself, then he would at least beat everyone else to the punch. “You get a bit of stick as a kid, and being able to give some back helped me,” he says, his voice gentle, measured and mildly estuary. “It made me the person I am today. Made me a little more light-hearted than most people. People, especially in football, take themselves far too seriously.”
This theme – the seriousness with which footballers can take themselves – is one that Crouch will return to often. In the meantime, however, what you have to understand is that from the very beginning he was a magnet for abuse. He remembers making his debut as a teenage striker for non-league Dulwich Hamlet, on loan from Spurs, and hearing opposition fans screaming at him, “Freak! Freak! Freak!” Not long after, having signed for Queens Park Rangers, he was heading towards the tunnel at half-time when he noticed there was some trouble in the stands. He looked closer to see that it was actually his dad, embroiled in a fight, having decided to take on a group of fans who had been giving his son nonstop grief on account of his height.
“Even when I played for England, I remember coming on at Old Trafford and being booed by our own fans. I remember thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ It was probably partly the fact I was playing for Liverpool at the time,” he says, meaning that, given the venue, many of the England fans present would have been rival Manchester United supporters. “But also, there was a preconception about me that I had to prove wrong. I had to play well to combat that and get some respect. At every level, I was getting judged.”
Abbey is not into football. She still calls him at 2.45 on a Saturday to ask where he is​
Today, Crouch has little left to prove. Since starting his career as a gawky teenager to regular chants of, “Does the circus know you’re here?” he has gone on to play more than 700 professional games for clubs including Portsmouth, Aston Villa, Southampton and Tottenham. He’s won the FA Cup with Liverpool and, in 2007, played in the Champions League final. His record for England is exemplary: between 2005 and 2010, he scored 22 goals in 42 appearances and represented his country in both the 2006 and 2010 World Cups. He is now 37, but still playing – and scoring – for Stoke City. He commutes to Staffordshire from Surrey, where he lives with his wife, the model and reality TV star Abbey Clancy, and their three young children, Sophia Ruby, Liberty Rose and baby Johnny.

He first met Clancy when she was working as a waitress in a bar in Liverpool and, he says, she has absolutely zero interest in football. In fact, she’s so oblivious that, even though they’ve been together for 12 years now, she’ll often text or call him at 2.45pm on a Saturday to ask him where he is, not realising that he’s about to, y’know, play football. He grins. Crouch is in charge of curating the pre-match music in the Stoke changing room, plugging his phone into a speaker and providing motivational tunes that will get everyone into the Zone just before kick-off. “And then my phone will start ringing and the music will stop playing and we’ll just all stand there, waiting for Abbey to ring out,” he says. “She still does that now.”
Crouch is here to talk about How to Be a Footballer. I’ve read a good number of books by footballers, both for business and pleasure, and his is easily one of the best, mainly on the grounds that it’s incredibly funny. Less straight autobiography than lid-lifting exercise, its author acts as our guide on a journey through the strange world of top-flight professional football, with all its money, unwritten rules and bizarre social mores. “I wanted to open people’s eyes to what they don’t see. Behind the scenes stuff. Team coaches. Training grounds. People see us on a Saturday, but they don’t know the day-to-day workings of a footballer. So I wanted to open people’s eyes to that. And,” he adds a little bashfully, “I wanted it to be entertaining.”
Only a footballer could forget that he was missing a Porsche​
It really is. In his deadpan telling, the Premier League is a world of extravagance, stupidity and near-constant hilarity. “Madness, everywhere you look,” he writes. “I think of Jermaine Pennant ... He had been at Stoke for several weeks when he got a call from his previous club, Real Zaragoza, asking if he knew that he’d left his sports car parked outside the city’s train station. Only a footballer could forget that he was missing a Porsche.”
Elsewhere, he reflects on the continuing vogue for tattoos – Crouch has none – and worries about the young player who commemorates signing his first pro contract by getting a tattoo of himself literally signing a piece of paper, holding a pen and a football, flanked by his parents. “But what if he doesn’t make it? Signing a contract doesn’t mean you’ll make the first team, stay in the first team or have a career in football. What if he ends up working in a bank? Maybe he’ll get a tat of him shaking hands with the bank’s HR manager on his stomach.”

EDIT: This could do with being 'binnied' I know but frankly I have way more important things to do
 
CONT:

Crouch, unlike the vast majority of professional footballers, comes from a middle-class family. His dad, Bruce, was an executive for the Bartle Bogle Hegarty advertising agency, and Crouch spent three years as a young child living in Singapore before his family returned to Ealing, west London. As he progressed through youth football teams, he was aware that this set him apart. “Everyone I grew up playing football with … a lot of the best players were from rough areas, council estates,” he says. “But they were all good lads and I got on really well with them.” If football hadn’t worked out, he would like to have done the same thing as his dad. “Being creative. Coming up with the adverts. I would have loved to have done that. Loved it.”
Around the age of 11, his parents arranged for him to sit a private-school entrance exam. He failed it. “It wasn’t for me. All my mates were going to the state school in Hanwell. There was no way I was going [to private school].”
It sounds a bit like he failed it on purpose …
“I wouldn’t say that,” he says slowly. “But maybe I didn’t try as hard as I could have. I just didn’t want to go there.”
The practical upshot was that, rather than having to play rugby, Crouch could stick with football. Despite his physique, his skill and knack for goalscoring meant that he was eventually picked up as a youth player by Tottenham Hotspur. One of the main themes that recurs throughout his book is the power of groupthink among footballers, and his own not always successful attempts to break free of it. He talks about a Tottenham youth-team holiday to the Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa, going to nightclubs that only played garage music and wearing the same clothes as all the other lads, even though it mostly involved wearing baggy trousers and sleeveless vests that made his arms look “like pieces of wet spaghetti”.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘Why am I not enjoying this?’ ” he says, frowning. “But it was just what you did.” All the other young players were having a great time. But he was miserable. It was only on his last night that he chanced upon a disco-themed club called Carwash. He went by himself and had the time of his life. “I just thought, ‘I’m home,’ ” he says, beaming, holding two index fingers high in the air.
But the lesson – just to be himself – didn’t necessarily stick. Fast-forward six years or so, and Crouch has just moved from Southampton to reigning European champions Liverpool. He’s 24, in the England squad and he has just bought himself an Aston Martin, which he cruises around in, steering with just two fingers, windows down, sunglasses on, music blaring. “A little voice deep down keeps telling me that an Aston Martin isn’t really me, but a louder voice is telling me that as an England international playing up front for Liverpool, the old rules no longer apply,” he remembers. “Big voice: Peter, you’ve never looked cooler. Little voice: Peter, you’re a monstrous bellend.”
He stops at some traffic lights in Manchester and notices that the car alongside him is being driven by legendarily combative Manchester United captain Roy Keane. “I give him a nod. I give him a wink. I may even point my index finger at him and make a clicking sound at the same time. All of it saying, you and me, eh, Roy? Same game, same level. In it together. Rivals, yet friends who just haven’t met before. All right, Roy?”
We’re children with advanced physical skills. We’ve never had to grow up​
Only, Roy isn’t all right. Roy looks absolutely disgusted. He just shakes his head and goes back to staring dead ahead, hands on his steering wheel. “And when the lights change and he drives off without a backward glance, I’m left there with the handbrake on and an awful realisation: ‘Oh my God, I’ve become one of those twats.’ ”
He laughs at the memory. “God’s honest truth, that’s what happened,” he says. Did he seriously do the trigger-finger thing? “Um, it might not have been quite like that. I looked at him, gave him a little wink, thought, ‘Yeah, he knows what I’m about.’ I genuinely had a wake-up call. It only took one look from Roy Keane. I sold the car that same week.”
It was a road to Damascus moment. But the point is, if even Crouch can fall prey to the gaudy trappings of Premier League life, then so can anybody – with the possible exception of Roy Keane. He talks about the concept of “peak footballer”, of how easy it is to become the cliché, replete with the sports cars and tattoos and a sudden desire to have a house with an orangery, even though you aren’t sure what an orangery is, but you know that Wayne Rooney has one. Part of the problem is a total detachment from the realities of actual adult life. “We’re children with advanced physical skills,” he says. “We’ve never had to grow up. In some ways, that’s the best part of it. You get thrown into an environment where a lot of things are done for you. If you move house, there’s a player liaison officer who will sort you out with a car, with a house, bills, everything really.”
What you need to understand, though, he continues, is that from the footballer’s perspective, this is not cosseting for cosseting’s sake. Instead, it’s a sign that they are valuable. A reflection of their professional worth, a clear indication that they are doing something right. Clubs do not lavish average players with such care. “It’s a cut-throat business. If you don’t perform on the pitch, you’re out.”

The couple with their daughters Liberty Rose and Sophia Ruby in 2016ABBEYCLANCY/INSTAGRAM
Crouch says that, as a rule, the higher you climb in football, the weirder things get. “The Premier League is a mad industry. So much money. It’s great, the best thing in the world. But you’ve got so many different characters from all over the world, so to put them all in a room together and see what unfolds is just hilarious.” He describes the hubris of his former Southampton team-mate, Belgian defender Jelle Van Damme, who drove a huge Hummer 4x4 that was simply too big to be of any practical use as a mode of transportation. “Who else in any other walk of life except football would buy a car you can’t drive and a car you can’t park? Hummers aren’t even nice inside. They were designed for war zones, not Ocean Village Marina in Southampton.”
Crouch can recount dozens of these through-the-looking-glass moments. Having signed for Liverpool in 2005, he says he walked into the changing room to see France striker Djibril Cissé talking on the phone. Only, he’d rigged up his mobile phone’s hands-free kit so that it was plugged into an old-fashioned candlestick telephone, and was holding conversations with an earpiece in one hand and the mouthpiece in the other, like some Twenties butler. “There are few men in this world who could take a hands-free option and turn it into something that actually required two hands. Djibril is one of them.”
There was a period, after joining Liverpool, when Crouch simply couldn’t score. This goal drought lasted 19 games – four full months – and “was a particularly dark time for me”. The ridicule mounted and mounted. “It was everywhere. I had to stop buying newspapers. Stop switching on the TV. No matter where I went, people were taking the piss.”
He says he “just wanted to hide”. Instead, his dad insisted on taking him to the pub after every goalless game. “We just smashed pints after games,” he says. “Pints with my old man.” It might not necessarily have been what top sports psychologists would have recommended, but it cheered him up if nothing else. “It definitely helped. We’d go out and have a laugh and forget about it. And then by Sunday or Monday I’d be like, ‘Oh f***, I still haven’t scored.’ ”
I can sort of see the end now a little bit and it’s really scary. I’ve been doing this every day since I was 16. It’s all I’ve ever done​
He rediscovered his form. In 2006, after scoring for England against Hungary, he celebrated with a stiff, jerky dance that became known as “the Robot”. It wouldn’t have been nearly as funny if Crouch did not look like Crouch. He repeated the celebration after scoring against Jamaica in the last warm-up game before the 2006 World Cup. For a while there was something of a genuine mania for the sight of Crouch doing the Robot. Despite his friends warning him against it, he eagerly agreed to perform it in a Dannii Minogue music video – a cover of Sister Sledge’s He’s the Greatest Dancer. “The script had these handsome guys with amazing moves all trying to impress her, and then right at the end I bang out the Robot and walk off into the sunset with her,” he remembers. Unfortunately, the record label got cold feet and ultimately nothing came of it. But it serves to underline the fact that Crouch is game. An enthusiast. He decries, for example, players who do their best to appear unmoved when they score a goal.
“That non-celebrating and looking cool when you score a goal? I don’t know how you can do that. I wish I could. But it’s the best feeling in the world. How can you not want to share that?” Case in point: in 2012, after scoring a sensational flick-up-and-volley strike against Manchester City, all he could do was run around screaming, “I’ve scored a worldie! I’ve scored a worldie!” – “worldie” being football slang for world-class goal. The only thing worse than not celebrating a goal is being the kind of player who goes to the bench to celebrate with the boss. There is apparently an unwritten rule about that. “Yeah,” he winces. “There are times when someone will run to the manager and you will be a little bit sick.”
In How to Be a Footballer, Crouch talks about “Grey Goose Wankers”, the guys who will sit at a private table in the VIP section of a nightclub and order bottle after bottle of expensive vodka. “It’s a stigma associated with footballers,” he says. “But listen, I’ve been one many a time. I was one on Saturday night. It’s great fun, being a Grey Goose Wanker. As long as you know you’re one.” It’s hard not to be very attracted to the idea of a night out with Peter Crouch. A few years ago, he says he took Clancy to see his favourite band, Kasabian. “We were in the posh seats. But I said to her, ‘I’ve got to get involved,’ ” he says. So he ended up going down into the moshpit and then crowd surfing his way to the front of the stage. “The security pulled me over and then I had to walk back to where we were sitting. My hair was all over the place and my shirt was ripped. And the last thing Abbey had said to me was, ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ ”
The fact that Clancy has various showbiz and reality TV interests is a source of comfort to him. “It’s nice for her to get out and do stuff,” he says. “I’ve seen other players whose wives aren’t well known and, in social settings, they get cut out completely. Everybody just wants to talk to the player, and it’s not nice. Whereas with us, people want to engage with her as well.” Plus, he continues, showbiz and football have a lot in common. “She understands. It’s very fickle. One minute you’re up there,” he says, raising his arm, “and the next minute you’re down there. It’s almost as cut-throat as football.”
A good way of gauging your standing among fans of a football club, he says, is to pay special attention to how the security guards at your training ground respond to you. “The security guards are always local and always fans,” he says. “They’re the only ones who give you a feeling of what the community is saying. At Liverpool, the guy on the gate, whatever he’d say you felt was the general vibe of the fans.”
Regardless of how the fans feel, Crouch knows that, at 37, he doesn’t have long left as a player. “I can sort of see the end now a little bit and it’s really scary. I’ve been doing this every day since I was 16. It’s all I’ve ever done,” he says, chuckling a little absently. “So when it does come to an end, I can see why people do lose the plot a bit. It’s a mad thing to have that taken away from you like that ...” He clicks his long fingers in the air. “But I can see it coming and I’m trying to plan for that.”
I think the truth is that, for the time being, he’s not going to let himself think too hard about a life without football. Not yet. Not so long as there’s another season or two left in his bandy legs. “Every day you go in and you have a laugh. A belly laugh. What a job,” he exclaims with earnest glee. “Although I’m taking the mick out of the Premier League, I love it. I’ve been so fortunate to play in it. I’m taking the mick out of it, but I’m taking the mick out of myself as well. Because I’ve done all these stupid things,” he says, still beaming. “I’m a footballer.”

Peter Crouch’s How to Be a Footballer is published by Ebury Press (£20)
 
Top class bloke. Mind you, the story about Keane only makes him sound an even bigger twat than before. What the hell was Keane driving to prove he was oh so down to earth - a Hillman Imp?
 
Top class bloke. Mind you, the story about Keane only makes him sound an even bigger twat than before. What the hell was Keane driving to prove he was oh so down to earth - a Hillman Imp?
Haha! I clocked that too. Crouch being self-deprecating and Keane being a contemptuous bellend. You know in regards to footballers there is often a transparency with their personality. Crouch's little yarn was a clear example of that.
 
Yes. Basically Keane just has an intimidating scare and people interpret that as evidence of deep intelligence and adamantine integrity, when he's probably only thinking about whether this is a 'bear on' day or a 'beard off' day.
 
Keane's never really embraced the whole celebrity side of it though, it's something he's always condemned. Rightly. I remember ITV coverage of England showing Joe Hart and someone else prancing around in a jacuzzi acting like twats and he basically asked, why do we need to see that? He was right.
 
Yes. Basically Keane just has an intimidating scare and people interpret that as evidence of deep intelligence and adamantine integrity, when he's probably only thinking about whether this is a 'bear on' day or a 'beard off' day.

Someone I know had professional dealings with him when he was at Forest and described him as "mahogany from the neck upwards".
 
I was never a fan of Crouch as a footballer, and was not happy when we signed him, but he did give one of the best displays from a Liverpool striker I've seen, against Arsenal, so there is that.

As for his personality, he has always struck me as one of the nicer, brighter and more appealing footballers around, and funny too. Obviously wont read the book, but the little excerpts are fun.
 
Keane's never really embraced the whole celebrity side of it though, it's something he's always condemned. Rightly. I remember ITV coverage of England showing Joe Hart and someone else prancing around in a jacuzzi acting like twats and he basically asked, why do we need to see that? He was right.

True, but to me it's always been more to do with insecurity than integrity. His 'prawn sandwich' moan came about when he was defending himself from not being able to inspire his teammates in a game at OT - it was good enough as a distraction strategy but he'd never moaned about middle class fans before, and yet when he saw others pick it up as a 'principled' complaint he was happy to accept the publicity it brought. He's never really contributed any other insight since then, he's just learnt to scowl at anything vaguely trendy, like he's Fred Trueman puffing on his pipe and muttering at modern cricket games. He's created this image for himself of the Olympian critic: '6-0, Roy, that's a great result'. Keane (death stare): 'Is it? It's not 10-0, is it? And the opposition wasn't up to much, was it? And why were they all dancing around afterwards, like they've won a trophy?' 'Well, Roy, they've won a trophy...' Keane (death stare) 'Yeah, but it's just one trophy, isn't it? And they're prancing around as if it's the tenth trophy in a row they've won...' The bloke was a crap manager (in spite of his death stares whenever reporters suggested as much), god knows what he does as number two to O'Neill apart from 'grow a beard, shave off a beard, grow a beard, etc etc,' and yet he gets this reverence for being a ridiculously predictable cartoon grump. If he balanced his sneers with positive comments he might merit respect, but it's just remorseless negativity.
 
True, but to me it's always been more to do with insecurity than integrity. His 'prawn sandwich' moan came about when he was defending himself from not being able to inspire his teammates in a game at OT - it was good enough as a distraction strategy but he'd never moaned about middle class fans before, and yet when he saw others pick it up as a 'principled' complaint he was happy to accept the publicity it brought. He's never really contributed any other insight since then, he's just learnt to scowl at anything vaguely trendy, like he's Fred Trueman puffing on his pipe and muttering at modern cricket games. He's created this image for himself of the Olympian critic: '6-0, Roy, that's a great result'. Keane (death stare): 'Is it? It's not 10-0, is it? And the opposition wasn't up to much, was it? And why were they all dancing around afterwards, like they've won a trophy?' 'Well, Roy, they've won a trophy...' Keane (death stare) 'Yeah, but it's just one trophy, isn't it? And they're prancing around as if it's the tenth trophy in a row they've won...' The bloke was a crap manager (in spite of his death stares whenever reporters suggested as much), god knows what he does as number two to O'Neill apart from 'grow a beard, shave off a beard, grow a beard, etc etc,' and yet he gets this reverence for being a ridiculously predictable cartoon grump. If he balanced his sneers with positive comments he might merit respect, but it's just remorseless negativity.

I think he can be pretty positive. He's the perpetual Jake Dee of football punditry, but he's praised Liverpool's positivity enough times and City's too, United's two bitterest rivals. While blasting how United approach games these days. The only things he's really negative about are the things that actually warrant it.

Don't get me wrong, his scowl and general grumpy bastard attitude is grating, but his general point is usually right.
 
I always felt he had a great footballing brain that a combo of his body co-ordination and skills couldn't always match. You could always seem he had great ideas in mind but would get himself in a tangle trying to execute.

However - once he started playing a bit more within himself he was useful and a fun addition to the team. A great professional who knew his levels and always tried his best for the team.

Plus he gave us that epic song.
 
I think he can be pretty positive. He's the perpetual Jake Dee of football punditry, but he's praised Liverpool's positivity enough times and City's too, United's two bitterest rivals. While blasting how United approach games these days. The only things he's really negative about are the things that actually warrant it.

Don't get me wrong, his scowl and general grumpy bastard attitude is grating, but his general point is usually right.
Sorry to go off topic but Jack Dee is a plagiarizing tit. I once saw him do a stand up gig where he blatantly ripped off Jasper Carrott - Pretty much his whole set. I know this because my dad had had the gig on Vinyl from 1974 and I used to listen to it all the time. (back in the day they really did release stand up shows on vinyl..... Weird...) Anyway I was watching Jack Dee with a mate and I told him about it. Just before he left the stage my mate (who was spangled) yelled out "Oh just fuck off Jasper" - He looked around in panic and exited VERY quickly.
 
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It's impossible to rip off Jasper Carrott, as Jasper Carrott wrote almost nothing original himself in the first place.
Huh that's probably true. I wouldn't be surprised. Loads of comics do it. Just look at Timothy Leary. He ripped off Bill Hicks on a daily basis.
 
Jasper Carrott hit on the idea of just reading out odd insurance claims.That kept him going for years.
 
There's a great sitcom yet to be made about Djibril Cisse, the kid from the streets who becomes, 'The Lord of Frodsham'. Candlestick hands-free kit!
 
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