Barclay in the Sunday Telegraph had interviewed Paolo Maldini, the Italian captain and son of Cesare Maldini, the coach, and was impressed. ‘His smile’, wrote Barclay, ‘greets a familiar list of additional endowments: talent and temperament in such measure that he is surely the finest left-back of all time.’ High praise from Barclay. I played on the same side as him at Wembley during a media tournament when I was on his paper. It was a shock watching him – one of the fiercest critics of hustle-and-bustle-style English football – scampering back and forth on the wing with no compass whatsoever.
Reports elsewhere gave the impression that all was not well in the Italian camp. Maldini senior had been hailed as the saviour of Italian football when he took over at the beginning of the year from Arrigo Sacchi, but after the goalless draw in Georgia the knives were out. ‘Maldini, what have you done?’ screamed a headline in Rome’s Corriere dello Sport, while Gazzetta dello Sport concluded that Maldini was ‘living in the clouds’. Italy had never failed to qualify for the World Cup finals, but there is always a first time, and in Rome it might come down to who wanted it most. And England wanted it badly.
One intriguing development was the news that Roy Hodgson, the Blackburn Rovers manager, was acting as secret agent without portfolio. Hoddle, it was reported, had asked him to compile a special dossier, of which the News of the World had been given an ‘exclusive’ sneak preview. According to Hodgson, Maldini would play with a ‘3–5–1–1 system – three central defenders, two of them as markers, picking up the England forwards, the other playing as a spare man’. According to Hodgson, according to the News of the World, that is.
‘There is no dossier. There never was. There never will be. I don’t know where that idea came from,’ David Davies told me, as the England squad assembled at Bisham Abbey, the national training centre near Marlow. Which is not to say that Hodgson wasn’t to play a part. In fact he had been asked to act as interpreter to Hoddle. ‘I know we could find thousands of people with better Italian than Roy, but the danger is that they translate everything too literally. Roy will make sure, from a footballing sense, that the Italians hear exactly what Glenn wants them to hear.’
I wondered what Hodgson would be paid for this little sideline.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Davies, ‘but don’t tell Roy that.’
It was a big week. Before the Dylan concert I told my ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter that it seemed inevitable we would sell the house and that his mother and I would buy two separate homes.
‘Well, I imagined something like that would happen,’ said the oldest.
We didn’t speak again for fifteen minutes, and I feared what he was thinking. His world was falling apart and soon it would be Christmas. Then he piped up: ‘Is the England–Italy game live on television?’
Dylan’s gift had always been to remind you that however bad you feel you could so easily feel a lot worse. And then you feel a lot better.
Bisham Abbey on Monday morning was England at its best. Slight crispness to the autumnal air, leaves gently on the turn, unblemished sky, warm sun. Officially regarded as an Ancient Monument, the house and grounds of the Abbey are now home to the National Sports Centre, which is run by the Sports Council. It is set back from the road on the Berkshire side of the Thames, in a village lined by beech woods and brick-and-timber cottages dating from the eighteenth century. Here we were in 1997 with half a dozen Italian camera crews parked on the lawns training their lenses on the silvery-grey building and speculating about whether England had the skill and discipline and desire to win a match in Rome for the first time. Or would Rome do for Hoddle what Rotterdam did for Graham Taylor in 93?
Gascoigne was doing sit-ups. Hoddle was walking around with his hands behind his back. Paul Ince was throwing water over David Beckham, and Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler were lounging on plastic chairs on the touchline after being excused doing their prep because they had played a League match the day before and needed time to recover. Tony Adams, Graeme Le Saux and Gareth Southgate were also rested. The remainder of the crew looked sprightly but the first-time shooting was woeful. Each player pushed the ball up to either Hoddle or his assistant John Gorman and got it back – sometimes on the ground, sometimes on the bobble, sometimes on the full. Most shot high or wide or straight at Seaman. Except Ian Wright, who was deadly.
Davies worked for the BBC for twenty-three years before being recruited by the FA to sharpen up its public relations. He reminded me of a middle- to high-ranking police officer at the Met, a deputy commissioner perhaps. Neatly turned out in functional lightweight suits or blazer and beige trousers – and always wearing a huge gold ring inscribed with the initials DD – he was part minder to Hoddle, part spin doctor to the FA and full-time fixer to the media. The word was that he had eyes on Graham Kelly’s job as chief executive.
That day there was the small matter of a Mini Cooper sitting on the lawn outside the house. Green Flag, England’s main sponsors, brought it down from Leeds as a prop for photographers wanting to reconstruct a scene from The Italian Job. Fair enough, but then Rob Shepherd of the Express, the paper for which I was now working, began berating Davies on the telephone, claiming that the Mini Cooper idea was his and his alone and that he wanted three Mini Coopers to be brought down, and the picture was going to be exclusive to the Express. Hoddle wouldn’t have been interested if there had been 33 Mini Coopers on the lawn. He wasn’t going to pose. Why pretend you’re in some half-forgotten movie when you’re the star of a new one? ‘He’s not trying to be difficult or anything,’ Davies explained to me, ‘it’s just that this is such a big, one-off match and he is so 100 per cent focused that the last thing on his mind is whether to lark about behind the wheel of a Mini. Frankly, he can see through all that kind of stuff. Thank God.’
That first training session at Bisham had to be stopped short fifteen minutes early because Hoddle felt it was too intense. ‘My job’, said Hoddle, at the first of his daily press conferences, ‘is to make sure that when the team is waiting in the tunnel on Saturday every single one of them will go out believing they can win.’ And he already knew who those eleven men would be. He picked the team on Sunday evening but would not make it public until an hour before kick-off. The guessing-game had begun.
‘Was Paul Merson’s call-up anything to do with giving Tony Adams moral support?’ Hoddle was asked.
‘No, it was entirely football-related.’
‘But will they room together?’
‘No, most of the guy’s single-up nowadays.’
‘But Adams was having counselling on the telephone before the Georgia match, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, but he’s better now. As an individual his character has changed a lot.’
Adams had been injured and had only played four or five games for Arsenal since the start of the season. Off the field, he was sorting out his addiction to alcohol, his impending divorce and what he described as ‘the enemy within’.
An Italian moved the conversation away from Adams. ‘Do you realise’, said Giancarlo Gavarotti, Gazzetta dello Sport’s man in London, ‘that there is a feeling in Italy that you could actually win this match?’ What he meant – and what was clear from his tone – was something like: ‘Some Italians may now see England as an efficient, hard-working unit, but they know nothing, poor things. Whereas I, Signor Giancarlo Gavarotti, still believe your team is heavy on perspiration and light on inspiration, big on graft but devoid of craft. And my job as the long-term London correspondent of Italy’s premier sports newspaper is to remind everyone of that.’ ‘He hates us,’ said the Daily Star’s Lee Clayton.
Interviews
