felt I was way behind people like Graham and Damian because, when I first arrived, they had been playing football at that level for two or three years as apprentices. I felt like an outsider looking in. There were plenty of moments when it would have been easier for me to jack it in. That’s why I never signed a long-term contract at Chelsea. I always gave myself targets. I signed for two years and got through that. Then I signed for three years and got through that. I had a little bit of security but not too much. I’m such a safety first guy normally but I took a risk by signing short-term contracts because I wanted to play football on my terms. I didn’t want to be tied into something that I couldn’t get out of if it wasn’t working.
I played the first six months in the reserves under Gwyn Williams, one of Chelsea’s great survivors, a Bates man who only bit the dust when Roman Abramovich took over. Gwyn held plenty of positions at Chelsea down the years – mainly because he was a good coach and because he was always upbeat and lively. At different times, he ran the academy, the reserves, he was assistant manager, he did the travel, and he was chief scout. When I was there, he was really hard on the players – he used to hammer us. His idea was to try and prepare everyone for the profession. In some ways, I liked him but he destroyed a few people.
He was always very hard on the black lads but I know he didn’t see it as racist – he was hard on everyone and didn’t single them out in particular. It was very much a product of its time. It seems harsh and brutal now but even then, less than 20 years ago, it was seen as acceptable. Racism in the game was more of a problem then and I suppose Gwyn could argue that he was just trying to steel the Afro-Caribbean guys for the stick they would receive from their fellow professionals and from sections of the crowd at away games. Thankfully, racial abuse has dwindled in English football now to the point where Gwyn’s kind of education isn’t acceptable any more.
Frank Sinclair and Eddie Newton still liked Gwyn despite all the insults he levelled at them but there were others like Nathan Blake who found it more difficult. That brings us back to the Robbie Fowler dictum: football is a tough business and if anyone has a weakness, it gets picked on.
Some players can handle it and others can’t. I could take it – at least most of the time. But it changed me. I found it very hard when I was younger. The atmosphere was so intimidating. People would play on your weaknesses and really get stuck into you – more psychologically, but also as a player. At Chelsea in the late Eighties, there was a tradition that if you were judged to have been the worst player at a training session, you were awarded a yellow bib at the end and you would have to wear it at the start of the next one. Once I had the bib, even if I had a brilliant training session the next time, I tended to get it again – because that amused The Lads. That got demoralising and it was quite isolating – it made you feel like an outcast. I noticed that Dennis Wise introduced that ritual at Swindon when he was manager there. I saw a newspaper article about how Paul Ince had had to wear the yellow bib once or twice when he played there for a spell. I bet he took that well.
When the accusations about my sexuality started and I took it seriously, that snowballed. But even apart from that, the taunting and the mickey-taking and the picking on people was relentless. Some of the lads had this routine they thought was hilarious. We’d be on the mini bus to a reserve game and we’d be driving through Parliament Square, say, and past Big Ben. Nobody would mention Big Ben but then one of the boys would say to me, ‘What’s the time, Graeme?’ I’d say, ‘Quarter to seven,’ and they’d fall about laughing and go on about Big Ben being right there. Or we’d get onto the forecourt at Old Trafford and one of the lads would say innocently ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I’d say ‘Of course we bloody are, look there’s the ground’ and the laughing would start again. I suppose I was pretty gullible. If somebody wanted to know what the time was, I’d tell them the time. I never recognized it as a prank.
There were cheap shots like that constantly. I felt I came in for quite a bit of stick. I must have seemed very different and so I was an easy target. I had my rucksack and my Walkman; I had jeans with a hole in the knee. I used to get hammered. Now that I’ve stopped playing, I look at the younger players and the ones that stood out were the ones who got the grief. It wasn’t the kind of life I had imagined it would be. There were times when I was very unhappy. It had almost got to the point where I had separated my football life from my life away from the game in order to stay sane.
I had a few run-ins with people. I had a go at Kerry Dixon about being lazy in training and we both threw punches. I had a ding-dong with Peter Nicholas, too. But those things happened every week. John McNaught and a striker called Billy Dodds were having a massive argument about something and John called him a ‘thick Scottish prick’. When Billy pointed out John was Scottish, too, that kind of shortcircuited John’s brain and they had a punch-up. Fights in training still occasionally happen now but it was a much tougher environment back then.
Maybe it was partly because Chelsea were going through a tough spell fighting relegation but sometimes training just felt like anarchy. Some of the guys just didn’t care. In the reserves, we used to do shooting practice and the lads would boot the ball over the bar on purpose so that it flew into the field behind the goal. They’d climb over the gate into the field and have a kick-about over there while the coach was trying to put on a shooting session on the pitch. The reserves was a sub-culture. There were players in the reserves who only ever seemed to play for the reserves. For some of them, the idea that it was supposed to be a stepping stone into the first team had ceased to exist – they had gone missing in action. Quite a lot of them had dodgy attitudes. They didn’t want to be at the club. It’s very easy for a young player to get influenced by that and think that’s the way to behave. You’ve got to be single-minded to avoid that trap.
I earned £120 a week when I first signed. The first thing I bought was a Sony Walkman for £100. It had wind-in head-phones and it was my pride and joy. It got me through the journey to and from my digs in Burnt Oak every day. It was nearly a week’s wages for me so it was like Michael Ballack spending £100,000 on something. My second contract, which I signed in 1990, took me up to £400 a week. That allowed me to have a mortgage of £75,000 at a time when the interest rate was 15 per cent. I wanted to get a fancy car and live the life a bit but prudence got the better of me and I decided to invest everything in a flat.
My thinking was that whatever happened in my football career, if I could come out of it with a property and no mortgage then that was a worthwhile ambition. So I climbed onto the property ladder and bought a flat and then, later, a fourbedroomed Victorian house in Thames Ditton, Surrey. We were in a recession at the time. When I sold the flat eighteen months later, I only got what I paid for it. I was only twenty-three and I suppose I bought it for the family that I didn’t have. I thought that if I bought this house I could live there if I had a wife and family, too. I wasn’t planning to get married imminently but I was always thinking ahead and planning stuff. I thought I could live there okay if I did find someone.
So I paid £225,000 for it and I never got my flash car. I imported a Suzuki jeep from Jersey instead. The rest of the lads were driving XR3is and Renault 5 turbos and I had a Suzuki jeep. It had a maximum speed of about 50mph. I drove it to Wales once on the motorway and I had to take a run up of about two miles if I wanted to overtake anything.
At least the football side of things went okay. I made my debut for the reserves against Portsmouth at a half-frozen Fratton Park and I was awestruck because the former England forward Paul Mariner was in the Portsmouth team. I played left-back that day but on other occasions Gwyn had me playing all over the place. I played at centre-back for three or four months and at one point, I said to Gwyn that I couldn’t play centre-back any more. He said that in that case, he wouldn’t bother picking me – so I played at centre-back. I think that was part of my problem in my first spell at Chelsea: they felt I was so versatile that I never got settled in one position. When the players who played in a set position regularly were fit, I’d find myself out of the team. You become easy to drop: I hadn’t cost them anything and I was part of the furniture so it was easier to drop someone like me than someone they had paid a lot of money for.
But they were a good group of young players in that Chelsea reserve side. Jason Cundy was sold to Spurs for £800,000 in 1992 and his career was marred first by back problems and then by a struggle with cancer.