#2Sides: My Autobiography (13 page)

Almost half the talent in the Premier League is made up of black or mixed-race players. For there to be no representation of this at executive level and among coaches makes no sense. Why don’t we have more black managers? Is it because of racism, as some people reckon? Or is there a more prosaic answer?

The question comes up when I’m talking to older black players or recently retired black players, I ask: ‘Have you got your coaching badges yet?’ ‘Nah, no point man, I’m not going to get a job am I?’ I understand the feeling because there are very few black managers to look to as an example. But I think it’s a defeatist attitude. First, go and get your badges, then go for the job. Then, if you get turned down, you can start looking at the reasons why. If you’ve not got your badges and say ‘I’m not going to get a job,’ that’s like saying: ‘I want to play for that team because I’m great.’ So are you going to try out for them? ‘Nah, no point. The manager will never pick me.’ How do you know if you’ve not tried?

A lot of black players and players coming to the end of their careers do feel they’ll be denied the opportunity to coach. But maybe the problem is different. Management and coaching tends to be a
‘friend’ business. If you’re a mate of someone, you’ll get a job. That’s what often happens and sometimes it’s not the best man who gets the job. The deciding factor is if you or your agent know a chairman. Have guys like Paul Ince and Chris Hughton suffered in their coaching career because they’re black? Chris did an unbelievable job at Newcastle then went to Norwich, did a very good job, established them solidly in the Premier League and then, when they started struggling, got the sack. That was normal manager stuff. I don’t think it would’ve made any difference what colour he was. I don’t think if he were white he’d have got more time. Your team is doing badly – you’re the scapegoat. I don’t really know Chris, but he’s a genuinely nice guy. He sent me a letter around that time of the stuff with my brother and John Terry and he’s always going to have a job in football because he’s a real football man and carries himself the right way. Why has Paul Ince had difficulties? I don’t know. Maybe he just picked funny jobs. He certainly did well at MK Dons, but from there it was a bit of a rollercoaster. Chris Powell was doing well at Charlton and then all of a sudden things changed at that club. But was that because he’s black? I don’t think so.

But it is striking that previous generations of great black British football men like Ian Wright, John Barnes, Des Walker and Viv Anderson haven’t made their mark as managers. John Barnes tried a bit at Celtic but he’s never had a sniff since. That generation seems to have slipped past and, of course, once you leave the game for a couple of years, it’s hard to get back in.

Nevertheless, I think change is in the air. Recently-retired players with obvious potential to be good managers such as Sol Campbell are now doing their badges. Hopefully my generation will be the generation that changes the picture. Hopefully we can start to break through and dispel any feeling that there is a glass ceiling for players of colour.

Lots of people are curious about how players actually spend their days, so I’ll just give you a rundown of how a typical week at Man United would go.

Let’s say we’ve got a Champions League game at Old Trafford on the Wednesday, I’d start with my own hour-long routine in the gym: some stretching to maintain stability in my back, some loosening up exercises over hurdles and a bit of core work for the abdominals which support the back. That would take about an hour. And then I’ll go out to training which would be a short, light, sharp training session. There wouldn’t be any tactical work, just a short five-a-side type keep-ball game just to get everyone’s legs moving for about an hour. After that, I’d go back in the gym, and probably do some upper body work, again for my back:
pull-ups, press-ups, dips. In the gym, I’d mostly be on my own, but maybe with one of the physios for the stretching stuff. One of the sports science team would always be in the gym anyway. Maybe I’d do a bit of yoga, too, depending how I feel.

The main event would be a really short field session with a bit more emphasis on tactics than the previous day. Then we’d do between 10 and 20 minutes working on their phases of play: how they move the ball from back to front. Do they work it through the lines? Do they work it as a long ball? Which of their players trigger certain movements. On the day of the game we’d be shown more detailed videos of which of their players we need to be more wary of, which areas do they like to play, that sort of stuff, but that would be backing up what we’d already done in the field. Sometimes it would be helpful. A situation would come up in the game and you’d think: ‘Oh, I know what this is.’ Every day after training – at least 90 per cent of the time – I have a sleep for about an hour or an hour and a half in the afternoon. When I get home I’ll be spending most of my time thinking about the opponent I’ll be playing against. How does he like to attack? I’ll be thinking about details, but not too much. And I’ll probably be thinking about the stuff I’ve seen in the videos. At home, food is very important: I’ll eat well, load some carbohydrates, pasta and rice, wholemeal.

We wouldn’t do anything too intense in training: just a little mini warm-up then and watch a video of the opposing team. That
would focus on how they attack, a few bits on their danger man, how they concede goals, maybe some set pieces and that would be it, really. The coach would talk us through the video, pointing out little quirks of players: ‘So and so is dominant left foot, he likes to shoot in such-and-such a way, he’s got a quick trigger …’ that kind of thing. After that we head to the hotel where we have lunch, sleep, wake up, then have a pre-match meal about three hours before kick-off. The meal would be heavy carbohydrates, pasta. Well, mine is normally pasta. So: a big bowl of pasta, a plain piece of chicken with a little bit of mashed potato and maybe a couple of bread rolls. Then I’ll have a yogurt with honey, and a banana, and then a cup of coffee.

Then we go to the stadium and prepare for the game.

Music has always been important for me. At United I made it an important part of our pre-match ritual as well. When I first started I liked really hard hip-hop but over the years I adapted the playlist to take account of the fact that different people had different musical tastes. There’d be older guys like the physios and Albert, the kit man, who didn’t like hip hop. Fergie was always good-naturedly complaining: ‘This isn’t real music! Haven’t you got any Sinatra?’ But he was brilliant about it. His attitude was that if music was good for the team he was happy. So I created a mix of different genres for all tastes, from ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman, or Stone Roses’s ‘Fools Gold’, which is my favourite song by the Manchester band, to more current stuff by people like Jay-Z and Drake. The way it worked was that we would get to the dressing room about an hour and a half before kick-off. First we’d have a meeting and after that everyone would start getting changed – and on goes the music. I’d put it on loud and the lads would be doing their pre-match routines: stretching, having massages, putting on strappings. The music would be on in the background, making everyone feel good, relaxing us. Of
course, you’d get the odd person saying: ‘this song is rubbish! Get it off!’ so I’d move on to the next one! Over the years these were the playlist favourites:

I’d always have someone to play two-touch in the changing room. At one time it was Ronaldo, for four or five years it would be Scholesy. In my last season it would have been Adnan or Mata or sometimes Vidić. Just two-touch, keeping the ball up, three games of ten, normally. We’d just find a place in the changing room or in the hallway, depending on how big the changing room was if we were playing away. The idea, of course, is just to get a good
feel of the ball. Sometimes I’d do it with bare feet, sometimes in socks, sometimes with my boots on. Scholesy was the best. If he was losing he’d just smash the ball at you so you couldn’t get it back. Really it should be to feet and thighs only. But sometimes he would smash it so hard and low near the floor that it was almost impossible for you to get it back.

Then you go out and do the warm-up.

Then you play the game.

Then you don’t sleep.

Or at least you don’t sleep very much. After a game the adrenaline just keeps pumping through your body and you can’t stop thinking about how the game went, especially if you’ve lost. You think about what you could have done differently, all the ifs, buts and maybes constantly running the game through your mind again and again. If you’re lucky you might get to sleep about three or four o’clock in the morning. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big game or a small game. It just goes round and round and round in your mind.

The next morning is mainly about recovering from the night before. You’ll do a small run, then a warm-down session where you go on the bike for 20 minutes, then do a stretching routine on the mats. But that’s just for the team that played last night. The lads who didn’t play go out and do a full, normal training session. After the stretching you go to the pool and basically just float for half an hour. We call it ‘deep floating’, sitting in the water on a float. It flushes the lactic acid out of your muscles and loosens you up. Then you finish training with massages … and then home again.

There’s a league game coming up tomorrow, so the team prepares for training with a ‘quick feet’ exercise to get us moving again and then we’d play a little match. Often this would be an old v. young versus game, which is usually a battering for the young lads. Then we’d go in and get ready for the game in much the same way as we had in midweek. Same balance of rest and work, same food, sleep, same tactical preparation with videos.

In my last three seasons at United, when I was more susceptible to injury, if I played on a Wednesday, then on the Friday, the second recovery day, while the lads went out for hard training, I’d join in the piggy-in-the-middle session before training, then just do some strides: running from box to box probably about eight times. And then take part in the match at the end. I’d limit myself to movement and make sure I don’t do anything too ballistic. There were claims in the media that Moyes over-trained us but I wouldn’t say that.

For a Saturday game, whether we’re playing home or away, we’d always go to a hotel. After training I’d have a couple of hours of sleep at home then I’d go to the hotel with the team. My Friday evening meal would be a bowl of pasta with a little bit of Bolognaise on top, then chicken or a little bit of steak maybe and – in Fergie’s time – low-fat chips with vegetables like broccoli. Then I’d have a nice pudding, normally a little bit of sponge and ice-cream. In my room, just before I go to bed I’d usually have a chocolate bar or some chocolate biscuits.

On match days, I wake up at about 7.30 or 8.00am, go down for breakfast straightaway and have either an omelette or a fried egg
on toast, then a yogurt and probably a banana. That’s all there for us on the buffet-type service at the hotels. Sometimes I have porridge instead of eggs. The pre-match meal is always three hours before kickoff. So, if the game starts at 3 o’clock, we eat at 12pm. If it’s 5 o’clock, the meal is at 2pm. The tough ones are the games played early for TV. If we have to play at 1pm, say, we miss breakfast and just have the pre-match meal. It’s disgusting to sit there and eat a big bowl of pasta at 10am. But you’ve got to force it down so that you’ve got the right food in your system to perform. (It’s strange now to look back and remember that as an 18-year-old at West Ham my pre-match meal basically consisted of beans on toast, a bit of chicken, and maybe a banana and loads of water. Part of the reason I ate so little must have been down to nerves. I had so much nervous energy I wasn’t hungry. The amount I eat now is huge compared to that!)

At United we developed a silly ritual of asking for coffees. There were four of us: me, Jonny Evans, Wayne Rooney and Giggsy, and one of us would go, ‘Can I have a coffee?’ And then the others would go, ‘Yeah, me too, me too, me too’ in sequence, like dominos falling. Sometimes there’d be other people at the table. It might be Paul Scholes, Robin van Persie, Vidić, Carrick, Fletcher. Whoever it was, I’d put my hand up and then we all would. And we’d all have our coffee. Then in the changing room, I’d go and have a Red Bull as well. It all adds to the adrenalin.

Then we do our normal pre-match stuff and then we play the game.

After the game we get given loads of goody bags, loads of chocolates and sweets because they want us to get a lot of sugar back in our systems immediately after the games. So, on the coach on the way home from the game or something, it’s like a sweet shop, with sweets and chocolate and fizzy drinks and supplement drinks
with loads of protein and carbohydrates in them which we have to drink straightaway in the changing room. On a Saturday night after a game I get insomnia. Win, lose, or draw I can be tweeting at three or four in the morning sometimes because I can’t sleep. That’s because the game is still ticking over in your mind and the adrenalin is still pumping through my system. The early kickoffs are easier sleep-wise because you’ve got whole day to wear off, but it’s still difficult.

The day after the game I’d go in for a warm down. Get on the bikes, go in pool to flash all the lactic acid and tightness out of your legs. I would normally do a gym session as well. Then I’d go home and play in the garden for a couple of hours with the kids, have a sleep and then a roast dinner. If the kids let me, I’ll try and get on the sofa and watch the Sunday football.

And then the week starts again.