17

Cursed

Iwas looking forward to playing for Martin O’Neill. I didn’t really have any contact with him when he was the manager at Norwich because I was still an apprentice then but I knew there was an aura about him and something that made players want to play for him. I knew his assistants, John Robertson and Steve Walford, too. I met Steve as soon as I arrived in Glasgow. He hadn’t changed. He didn’t seem to give a shit whether I signed for Celtic or not. I signed anyway.

That was the way Steve operated. He had that rare talent of being able to make people like him despite being rude to everyone he met. Not caring was what he did. Some of the boys who played for Martin at Leicester told me that Walford was the same there. He used to stand on the touchline at training, telling the boys to hurry up and finish because he wanted to get down the pub. He was a very difficult guy to impress but if he’s not slagging you off, you know you’ve done all right.

While I was driving to Glasgow, John Hartson had called me. He warned me that the media up there was different to anything I would have experienced before. He said they were a law unto themselves and that they did whatever they wanted. I laughed at the idea it could be any worse than what I had been through at Newcastle.

There was a little silence at the other end of the line. “It’s worse,” Harts said.

He said they would be out to get me. He said that the poison had already been laid down for me and that some people from my time in England had already been on the phone to some of the press lads telling them to give me stick. And the first few weeks I was there, I was followed relentlessly. Everywhere I went, everything I did, there were photographers and reporters not far behind.

I was looking forward to making a fresh start but it was the first time I had moved clubs in the middle of the season and it was difficult. It didn’t sit easily with me that I had effectively abandoned Claire and the boys in Newcastle. It wasn’t easy for them. They were like the survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to what was left. And there wasn’t a lot left.

Claire felt shunned by some of the other wives. My departure hadn’t exactly been a model of good grace. And Ellis got a bit of stick at school from other kids. Children can be nasty sometimes so he was teased. He still had to finish his school year off. Terry McDermott did an interview in the one of the local papers that slagged me off. Claire and the kids got more grief. There was no point in them coming up to Scotland with me for a few months but they had a rough time.

I was okay. At least I had football to keep me occupied. I was lucky, too, in that I was surrounded by a great bunch of lads. Chris Sutton, Neil Lennon and Alan Thompson really welcomed me into the group and made sure they looked after me. I couldn’t have been with a better bunch of boys. Lennie put his arm round me and said ‘you’ll be okay here kid’. He took it upon himself to make sure I ate with him every night and that I wasn’t on my own. If Lennie was busy, he got his mate Marty to keep me company. I’ve never forgotten that kindness.

The spotlight was intense. About a week after I arrived, I made my debut in an Old Firm match. I’d heard all about the atmosphere in those Glasgow derbies and the build-up and the atmosphere in the ground. I thought I’d take it in my stride. I was used to big games, I had played in other derbies. But everything people had told me was true. The atmosphere got to me.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was being watched everywhere. Glasgow was a tough city. You were adored and you were hated. Even I realised I had to tread carefully. In the papers, I was the favourite to score, the favourite to be the first to be sent off.

The night before the game, people from a neighbouring building rigged up some contraption that allowed them to fire water bombs across on to the balcony of the apartment I was renting. I wasn’t there. I was with the team at a hotel but my family was staying there. It was ingenious but it gave them a hell of a shock.

We had a small lead over Rangers in the SPL when I arrived and when I looked at the Celtic side, I wasn’t surprised.

We had Sutton and Hartson up front, Aiden McGeady and Alan Thompson on the wings, Lennon in midfield. But after everything that had gone on at Newcastle, I didn’t really feel ready to play in that first match against Rangers at Celtic Park. I was still a bit frazzled. We lost 2-0.

Then there was a period of almost three weeks when we didn’t play because bad weather wiped the fixtures out. We went up to Inverness to play against Inverness Caledonian Thistle and the game was called off the next morning. The night we were in Inverness, someone staggered into a police station in Glasgow and said they had just been assaulted by Craig Bellamy.

Inverness is about 200 miles from Glasgow. Funnily enough, they didn’t press charges.

When the weather improved towards the end of February and football resumed, I was ready. I played well. I made a decent contribution. The first game back, we played Clyde away and won 5-0. I got the fifth. I scored again against Hibs a week later and I got a hat-trick against Dundee United at Tannadice in a 3-2 victory. I was desperate to win the league up there. I thought it would be some form of validation for my career so far. Everything seemed set fair.

I loved playing for O’Neill. It’s very basic. There is no miracle to what he does. There was no secret, for instance, to why we were so dangerous at set-pieces. Just get someone with Alan Thompson’s quality who can deliver the ball where he wants to and go and attack it. He would go and buy big defenders who could attack the ball. It was that simple. He had uncomplicated instructions. Make sure you are first to the ball in our box and in theirs. Let the good players play.

Usually, he turned up on the Thursday or Friday before a weekend game, much as Brian Clough used to do when he was at Nottingham Forest. He had great charisma. He was so polite and well-educated, too, way too well-educated for us in football. It was best not to forget he was in charge, though. Sure, he was nice but if you weren’t doing your job properly, he would be scathing. If you ever answered back, he would never forget it. He gave some of the biggest rollickings I had ever seen.

But when you played well for him, you felt brilliant because he told you how good you were. And he told you in front of everyone so that everyone else could hear. He made you feel like you were the best player in the world. And the spirit he fostered at the club was the best I’ve ever seen. Not just among the players but among the entire staff.

If you got fined for being late, you didn’t put it in a kitty. You had to go and give the laundry woman £500 or give it to the cook. That made you feel great then, even though the gaffer had told you to do it. It turned you from feeling you were being punished to feeling that you were doing something good and worthwhile and generous.

Because my family was still in Newcastle and I didn’t want to spend my days in an empty flat, I would stick around at the training ground in the afternoons. I would do my weights and then play pool with Robbo and Stevie Walford even though they spent all day and every day chain-smoking, which wasn’t great for my asthma.

When they weren’t playing pool, they watched the History Channel. They were obsessed with crimes. More accurately, they were obsessed with criminals. They loved mass murderers. They were totally fascinated by them.

Now and again, they’d get into big arguments about how many people one of the murderers had killed or what method he had used.

They shared that hobby with Martin. Martin used to go to court to watch cases unfold sometimes. He was fascinated by the JFK assassination and the story of the A6 murderer James Hanratty. I enjoyed being in his company. He was such a good bloke. The other two could be rude and unpleasant but they were fun. Martin was different. He never looked you in the eye but his manners were outstanding.

We beat Livingston 4-0 away in the middle of April and even though I didn’t score, I had a good game. Harts got a hat-trick and I set a couple of them up for him. I was given the man of the match award but the next week, one of my ex-teammates at Newcastle rang me and said Shearer had been laughing about me.

“What about your mate,” he’d said. “Celtic batter someone 4-0 and he can’t even get on the scoresheet.”

That was Alan all over. If you didn’t score, it didn’t matter how well you played or how much work you did for the team.

The following weekend, we beat Aberdeen 3-2 and I got the winner late on. After the game, we flew to Ireland for a bit of a break. We had a good night out in Donegal that night and the following day, Chris Sutton, Neil Lennon and I went out to a bar to watch the FA Cup semi-final between Newcastle and Manchester United. Manchester United won comfortably. I felt bad for Newcastle. They lost 4-1 and they were never really in it.

Afterwards, Alan did a television interview. He mentioned shortcomings in defence, which made me laugh. Alan needed to look at himself a bit more. He wasn’t the player he had been and now he was trying to pass the buck.

When a player’s time comes, it comes. Alan had become determined to break Newcastle’s all-time club scoring record, which had been held for nearly 50 years by Jackie Milburn but his goals were drying up and I didn’t think he was offering the team enough in general play to justify his place. He was becoming an obstacle to the club’s progress. It was sad because I had so much admiration for him as a player and I learned so much from him. But time had caught up with him.

As I watched him giving his interview, some of the bitterness I felt towards him over Bobby Robson’s departure welled up inside me. I had seen the semi-final. I had seen how poorly he performed personally. I thought it was wrong for him to do an interview afterwards in those circumstances. If I don’t perform anywhere near my level, I’m certainly not going to talk about what we didn’t do as a team. So I got my phone out and texted him.

“Fucking typical of you,” I texted. “Looking at everyone else yet again. You need to look at yourself instead. Your legs are fucking shot. Concentrate on yourself and let the team take care of itself.”

I got one back from him straight away.

“If I ever see you in Newcastle again,” he wrote, “I’ll knock you out.”

“I’m back in Newcastle next week,” I texted back. “Pop round and say hello.”

I certainly wasn’t scared of him. I’ve seen his bite. His big, hard Al act wasn’t for me. I have seen younger men than me stand up to him on the team coach. I watched him digging out Lomana LuaLua once and when LuaLua told him to go to the back of the coach and say it to his face, Al didn’t really respond to that. He didn’t move an inch.

The texts soon got out, which helped Newcastle. Their season wasn’t going well under Souness. They were lower mid-table and there was still a little bit of rumbling about why I was with Celtic when I should be with them. There were still a number of Newcastle fans who were agitating for me to be back at the club the following season. But the fall out with the golden boy meant there would be no return. I wasn’t going back anyway. My days at Newcastle were over.

I was enjoying myself in Scotland. I loved it at Celtic. The standard of football was nowhere near the Premier League but everyone knows that. I would say it is probably below the Championship. But when you talk about clubs of stature and tradition, you have two of the greatest clubs in the world playing in that league and that makes it special.

When I went into my second Old Firm game, I was ready for it. This one was at Ibrox, which is a fantastic ground, but I wasn’t intimidated by it. I knew what to expect. We went 1-0 up through Stiliyan Petrov and then I got the second, which turned out to be the winner in a 2-1 victory. That was a great moment. To score the winner in an Old Firm game was one of the dreams I’d had when I’d made the move.

It felt as though that victory had secured us the league title. We were five points clear with four games to play. Celtic just don’t lose that kind of lead in that time frame. Not in a league where the Old Firm is so dominant.

I was forced to come off towards the end of the match with a hamstring strain and I knew I’d be out for two or three weeks. But I thought the job was done. I thought the league was over. I thought I had done the job I set out to do when I moved to Scotland.

But in the first game after the victory over Rangers at Ibrox, we lost 3-1 to Hibs at Celtic Park. We beat Aberdeen and Hearts in the next two games which meant we went into our final game away at Motherwell with a two-point lead. Rangers, who were away at Hibs, had a better goal difference than us so we knew a draw might not be enough.

Still, we only needed to win at Fir Park and the title was ours. It was going to be a ‘Helicopter Sunday’. The league trophy would be airborne until its destination was decided one way or the other and only then would the helicopter deliver it to the champions.

I had come back from injury in the win over Hearts and I was confident we’d beat Motherwell. We were a good side in a poor league. It was still in our hands. And when Chris Sutton put us a goal ahead after 20 minutes, we were cruising. There was only one team in it. As long as it stayed like that, there was nothing Rangers could do.

But the problem was that it did stay like that. We couldn’t get another goal. We missed chance after chance after chance. And then as the end of the game drew nearer, we started to get nervous because we knew that one mistake or one fluke or one tremendous shot from them would be enough for us to lose the title.

Motherwell weren’t going to give up, either. In some ways, they had nothing to play for but they were managed by Terry Butcher, who was a Rangers hero and who hated everything about Celtic.

There were two minutes left when it happened.

A mishit shot bounced into our area and Scott McDonald cushioned it on his chest and then hooked it over our goalkeeper, Rab Douglas, into the net.

It was a superb goal but we knew what it meant. Rangers were winning 1-0 at Easter Road. A sense of panic swept over us. We had to score again. We threw everybody forward.

We desperately tried to rescue things. We laid siege to the Motherwell goal. But then they broke forward and McDonald scored again with a shot that looped over Douglas via a deflection from one of our defenders.

And then the final whistle blew. We had lost 2-1.

Rangers won at Hibs and that was it. We had lost the league by a point. I was vaguely aware that the noise of a helicopter buzzing overhead had disappeared. It was carrying the SPL trophy with it. It had flown away from Fir Park. It was heading to Easter Road.

It was a desperate, desperate feeling. We went into the changing rooms and there was just silence. I have heard Neil Lennon say in the years that have elapsed since then that it was the most sickening blow of his career. Martin didn’t attempt to disguise his disappointment, either.

We still had the Scottish Cup Final to prepare for the following weekend but nobody wanted to think about that. Martin just muttered something about seeing us on Wednesday or Thursday. That was it.

I was in shock. I went back to my apartment where Claire and the kids were waiting. But I needed to be by myself. I left them at the apartment, went straight to the airport and got a flight to Cardiff. I didn’t sleep for two days.

I felt tormented.

I thought I was cursed, I thought I was destined never to win anything.

That was typical of the rubbish that used to go through my head in those days. I tortured myself for not passing at a certain moment, or not taking a chance I should have taken.

I stayed at my mum and dad’s house and drank. I wallowed in self-pity for a while. I didn’t think about Claire and the kids being by themselves in Glasgow.

Eventually, I snapped out of it and told myself I had to get ready for the final. I still felt distraught about what had happened at Fir Park. I still couldn’t believe it. But I knew there was a chance to salvage something.

There was extra emotion attached to the game because it was Martin O’Neill’s last game as manager. He was going to take some time off so that he could help care for his wife, who was suffering from cancer, and nobody really thought he would be back.

We were up against Dundee United. It was another match we were expected to win but after what happened against Motherwell, no one was taking anything for granted.

We went ahead early. Alan Thompson scored in the 11th minute and we never really felt threatened after that. We couldn’t get a second goal and Chris Sutton missed a penalty but we were not punished for it this time.

I felt a sense of elation when the final whistle blew. Martin went up to lift the trophy himself. He was very popular with the players and everyone was keen to make the gesture because they knew it was the end of an era.

It was the end for me, too, at Celtic.

They made noises about wanting to keep me but Newcastle weren’t willing to extend my loan and I knew it was not realistic to think that Celtic would be able to afford either the transfer fee Newcastle would ask or my wages.

I had loved my time up there but I have never been able to shake the regret about the way we lost the league.

I had finally won a trophy but I did not feel liberated by it.

I felt like a failure. I felt like the process of rebuilding my career had only just begun.