into the centre of Rome. We tried to think what we should do next. Suddenly, a police car came screeching round the corner, its blue light flashing, siren wailing. It stopped abruptly. Sitting in the back were Graham Kelly and Pat Smith. We explained our predicament. Helen suggested we both jump in, but the two policemen in the front said there was only room for one. Helen said I should go. I think she was looking forward to an extra night in Rome.
It was a record run. Once we got on the motorway the speedometer never dropped below 150 kph. ‘I don’t think the plane will leave without the chief executive and his deputy,’ said Smith.
‘You wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Kelly, who was sitting with a football on his lap.
‘Is that the match ball?’ I asked him.
‘No, it’s one the players signed for me after I scored a hat-trick this week,’ he said. I had never met Kelly before, and here we were squeezed into the back of a souped-up Fiat at 2.30 am on an Italian motorway being driven at breakneck speed by a policeman who looked fourteen.
‘It’s kind of you to give me a lift,’ I said. ‘How come you left so late?’
‘I wanted to watch exactly what they did to our supporters – and I am not best pleased. The only reason I was given for why they kept them in the stadium half the night was because they feared for their safety if they let them out any earlier. That’s a good one.’
‘What did you think of the organisation generally on the Italian side?’ I asked.
‘What organisation?’ said Kelly. ‘But it was a great night. I am so pleased for Glenn. I think when we look back on Saturday, 11 October 1997, we may just remember it as the night that changed English football forever.’
By the time we boarded Britannia flight 809B, most of the drink had been consumed. But there was not a party atmosphere, more a sense of mission accomplished. And overwhelming fatigue. Ince wandered down to the back of the plane. Everyone liked Ince and I could understand why. Gascoigne chatted away amiably. He was asked what it had been like in the dressing room.
‘The players came in one at a time and we enjoyed the moment. Even the lads who didn’t play got involved. It was great. Now we are just tired, just drained.’
There was a crowd of more than a hundred people to meet the plane when it landed at 4.40 am. As I collected my luggage I looked across at Hoddle. I assumed he was going back to his house in Ascot, where he would be greeted by his wife and children and bathe in the restorative powers of family life. He seemed a supremely fortunate man.
Three days later, Hoddle was on the front page of every newspaper. ‘Hod Divorce Shock’.
It was totally unexpected. The first the FA knew about it was when Hoddle walked into Davies’s office on Tuesday morning and said: ‘I have something to tell you.’ Not even John Gorman was aware of exactly what was going on inside the head and heart of his great friend as they went about their business in Rome – but he had his suspicions. On several occasions, Hoddle had said to Gorman, ‘I want to get something off my chest,’ and Gorman had said: ‘Go on, then, you will feel better for it.’ But he never did.
Davies put out an FA statement at 6 pm on Tuesday evening. ‘This is a personal and private matter. It is unconnected to his football responsibilities. Nobody else is involved. Both Anne and Glenn would request that the privacy of themselves and their three children is respected at this very difficult and painful time.’
The timing of the announcement was impressive, coming so soon after the Italy triumph but more than a month before England’s next game – a friendly against Cameroon. The beauty of Hoddle as a player was the way he would take a difficult ball on his chest and kill it dead, letting it drop quietly at his feet before moving effortlessly forward.
The Hoddles had been married for eighteen years, having met while they were both still at school. They had three children, Zoë, Zara and Jamie, who was only five when the separation was announced. In the current Shredded Wheat advertisement, the Hoddles were depicted as the happiest of happy families, sitting around the breakfast table wearing contented smiles. The ad was immediately pulled.
The next day, Hoddle’s R-reg BMW 735i was seen parked on the driveway of a house in Wokingham owned by Eileen Drewery, a fifty-seven-year-old faith-healer. It was to become his home for the next twelve months. They had first met when he used to go out with her daughter Michelle during his playing days with Spurs. On one occasion he had hobbled into the Drewerys’ house complaining of a torn muscle. When Eileen offered healing Hoddle turned it down, but she went ahead and performed ‘absent healing’, and the next day his muscle was dramatically improved. Two decades later, Mrs Drewery was to become the Mother Superior of the England football team.
Hoddle said nothing for the next three days before breaking his silence in a TV interview shown on Grandstand at lunchtime on Saturday. He was sparing with the details. ‘It has been a very difficult week for me,’ he said. ‘Obviously there have been some ups and downs, but I have had to detach certain things and put them away and it’s all been a bit stressful.’
England’s plucky performance on the pitch in Rome was nothing to the bulldog spirit deployed at home by the FA, high on the adrenalin of victory, or perhaps just basking in the relief of qualifying for a World Cup for the first time in eight years. The Italians were given no quarter. Davies led the charge. After touching down at Luton airport, he was driven straight to Burnham Beeches Hotel, where he had a shower, glanced at the Sunday papers, picked up his car and headed for the BBC to tell David Frost all about it. David Mellor, the newly appointed chairman of the Football Task Force, was also in the studio and quickly teamed up with Davies to deliver a scathing attack on the Italian security operation. Mellor raised his truncheon with additional venom because his seventeen-year-old son, Anthony, had been at the game and had given his father a first-hand account, which Mellor Junior followed up in a letter to The Times. It was precisely the sort of testimony the FA were keen to encourage:
Sir, Along with a few thousand other England fans, I arrived at the Olympic Stadium in Rome at about 6.15 pm on Saturday and was subjected to a rigorous search, with everything from belts to keys to coins to lighters being confiscated. Inside was chaos. We had tickets for the ‘official’ section but were sent to an area for which these were not valid, so the police (there were no stewards) told us to sit wherever we wished … Forty seconds after kick-off the Italians started to throw full water bottles, coins and other objects into our stand. The English could not have thrown anything back – everything had been confiscated. The Italian police did not react to the missiles being lobbed into our area, yet when the English started to return the rubbish thrown at them, the police started a baton charge … The behaviour of both the Italian fans and the police was disgraceful. The latter seemed to bear a grudge against every English fan – their attacks on us were both bizarre and terrifying. English fans certainly retaliated and some threw seats at the police in the stadium; but rather than instilling fear and anger, surely the police should have protected and helped innocent fans in such a situation.
Yours faithfully,
Anthony Mellor
The Times printed a second, shorter, letter just beneath it which made a different but equally valid point:
Sir, As an Irish resident in Rome for the past three years, I am surprised by how press reaction to Saturday’s match has concentrated on the heavy-handedness of the Italian police.
