Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign

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 at Bisham Abbey take place in the wood-panelled Warwick Room, where varnished portraits of period women stare out from the walls. There is no furniture as such, just a room full of chairs and three tables with Formica tops. At one time, journalists could talk to whoever they pleased after training, but in the age of managed news in Blair’s New Britain it is Hoddle who decides which of his squad should speak, and when, and to whom.

Today was the turn of Steve McManaman, Gary Neville and Ray Clemence, the goalkeeping coach. Clemence was singled out for this ritualistic chore because he had experience of playing Italy in Rome in 1976. They were not happy memories. Under the caretaker boss Ron Greenwood, England lost 2–0, the game effectively ending any chance of qualification for the 1978 World Cup.

‘It could have been a lot worse than 2–0,’ said Clemence. ‘We had Stan Bowles making his début, and perhaps on reflection it was not the sort of game to have someone playing his first match. I think Glenn will go for experience, pure and simple.’ Which was not what he did against Italy at Wembley a few months earlier when he gave Matt Le Tissier his first full cap – and paid the price.

How much of an influence would Clemence have on Hoddle’s team choice? ‘We have a meeting every evening and Glenn asks us for our views, but he makes all the decisions.’

On these occasions, the players, accompanied by an FA official, sit behind a table, with journalists seated around them. Because most of the people asking the questions know the players well after dealing with them day in and day out while covering the Premier League, the mood is friendly: less confrontational, more informal than I had expected.

McManaman, a back-to-front baseball cap man who had annoyed Hoddle by not making himself available for Le Tournoi in France during the summer, was omitted from the squad for the Moldova game, but had been on sparkling form for Liverpool. He was back.

‘I don’t need any kick up the backside,’ said the twenty-five-year-old, who, with a little help, was writing a column in The Times. ‘Of course I want to be in the team on Saturday. But, there again, so does everyone else.’

At the other table, Gary Neville, who had smelt Italian blood five days previously when Manchester United gave Juventus a spanking in the Champions League, was showing a healthy contempt for the reputation of Italian football. ‘I don’t think they are any better than us. We match them man to man. It’s about time we went there and beat them. I don’t think it will be a nice game, but the country senses that the England team is better than it has been for some time. The boss has brought in a club team spirit.’

Neville has bright brown eyes that enliven an otherwise solemn, drawn face. He was asked how he would feel standing in the tunnel waiting to walk out into the Olympic Stadium, and it never crossed his mind that he might not actually be picked.

‘I love playing for England. There is no higher accolade. I play for Manchester United but there is nothing like walking out there for your country and standing for the National Anthem. To say you are an England international gives you so much confidence.’

Steve Double is Davies’s number two. He had worked for the FA for two years after being on the staff of various tabloids. His last job was investigations editor for the People.

‘I think we come from the same neck of the woods,’ he said. ‘We probably support the same team.’ Which is Reading. There was never a lot of choice. Never is. My father worked for Huntley & Palmers all his adult life, and Reading always used to be known as the Biscuit Men. The Huntley & Palmers name was painted on the roof of the century-old corrugated-iron main stand, and the firm used to provide the match ball most weeks. Huntley & Palmers weren’t a bad side themselves. They were in the Spartan League when I was playing for their under-18 team, which led to a trial for Berkshire schoolboys. That was the summit. I was taken off after half an hour because, frankly, I wasn’t good enough. And that was it. Now it’s the occasional five-a-side game behind the Arndale Centre in Wandsworth.

I told Double all this and wondered why I had burdened him with such a doleful tale. I think it was because when you are somewhere like Bisham Abbey for the first time, with people around you who either play or write about football professionally, you need to justify yourself. But I was pleased he supported Reading. Double, never the most pro-active of press officers, was sorting out applications for tickets from 250 journalists. His Italian counterparts were not making his task easy. ‘I won’t bore you with the details,’ he said. Which was a tactful way of saying what a hideous mess the Italians had got themselves into, and if they couldn’t sort out seats for a couple of hundred journalists God knows what hope there was for the paying punter ending up in the right section of the ground. Double said there had never been so many applications for press tickets to an overseas game. The biggest turn-out before this was 180 for the crucial qualifier against Holland in Rotterdam, 13 October 1993, where, as now, all England needed was a draw. I was one of those 180. It was a brutally depressing evening, made worse by my afternoon encounter with a group of English supporters in the town centre.

‘Are you following us?’ the spotty one had asked me. ‘You are, ain’t you, scumface?’

‘You’re either a plain-clothes copper or a journalist, ain’t yer?’ said Spotty’s mate, who had letters tattooed on his knuckles. I couldn’t read what the letters spelt, but I’m sure he couldn’t either.

Before I could answer, Knuckles screwed up his face and sneered: ‘You’re gonna have to wise up a bit, son. You don’t go following us around if you want to stay out of trouble.’

They closed in and formed a tight circle around me. The brute with the spots raised his hand in the air and slapped me across the face so hard that just for a second I thought I was going to hit him back.

‘Now get down and kneel, you bastard. And kiss the flag of England.’ Spotty had unfolded a Union Jack and down I went.

‘Kiss it, fuck-face.’ And so I did. It was more of a peck, but good enough to earn a reprieve, albeit with a suspended sentence.

‘Now get out of here before we do you some real damage,’ said Knuckles as I made my excuses and ran.

I wondered if anything had changed in four years. No one seemed to believe that the hard-core, hard-drinking football hooligan had disappeared. Trouble was expected in Rome. Then, on the day that the National Criminal Intelligence Service football unit identified 670 known hooligans, almost all of whom had criminal records for violence, David Mellor, head of the Football Task Force, urged the Italians not to treat the English like animals, which must have gone down a treat in the Carabinieri’s canteen. Of those 670, about 70 were thought to be category C, the worst of the worst.

The plan was to search all English fans three times at the stadium, and then inspect their tickets some 300 yards from the main entrance. No alcohol would be on sale anywhere near the ground. But none of this had impressed Pat Smith, the FA’s deputy Chief Executive, who wrote to all corporate hospitality firms warning that the only segregated part of the stadium would be taken up by members of the England Travel Club. Since most of these companies had bought tickets to the match in Rome it was assumed that their clients would be sitting in comfortable seats in neutral areas. But Smith knew that anyone looking like an English supporter would be thrown into an unofficial English pen. The hospitality companies were taking it all in their financial stride. ‘We realise the dangers of heavy drinking on an empty stomach,’ said a spokesman for Flight Options, which was taking out 800 fans on a £349 day-return package from Gatwick. ‘So we always ensure there is a hot breakfast on our flights.’ That would do the trick.

Behind the scenes, the position was far worse than anyone realised. The Italian Football Federation was refusing to answer letters from its English counterpart, the first of which was written by Smith on 26 September, after it became obvious that the Italian police intended to shovel English supporters into unreserved seats even if they were official members of the England Members Club. In other words, it mattered not one bit whether you were a member or not. You would sit where you were told.

With little more than a week to go, Smith fired off a stinging letter to Stephano Caira of the Italian Football Federation, demanding a reply by return to her earlier missives. ‘You must understand the seriousness of this matter,’ she wrote. ‘We are very worried that you seem to have chosen to stop communicating directly with us about these extremely important matters.’ No reply. Graham Kelly, the FA’s Chief Executive, then wrote to Dr Giorgio Zappacosta, the Italian Federation’s General Secretary, pleading for some kind of response. He sent a copy of his letter to FIFA – which seemed to put the wind up the Italians. The next day, a fax was winging its way from Rome to Smith – but the contents were far from reassuring.

‘We apologise for not having informed you day by day about the situation,’ it said, ‘but our silence was due to the fact that no final decision was taken to solve the matter and all the suggestions and hypotheses were subject to frequent changes … we kindly ask you to communicate all the necessary information you have regarding the transfer of your supporters directly to the attention of Mr Francesco Tagliente.’

A fiasco was assured. The only question was whether it would be a bloody fiasco.

At Bisham, Hoddle was living up to his reputation as being expansive when he wanted to be and virtually monosyllabic when he didn’t. ‘Are you aware of this business involving Paul Gascoigne and an Italian photographer?’ was the opening gambit in the Warwick Room.

‘That’s private and I won’t discuss it.’

What Hoddle wished not to discuss was the rumour that Paul Gascoigne would be served with a writ on landing in Italy. Lino Nanni, a photographer who Gazza had attacked in Rome on 27 January 1994, during his Lazio days, had instructed lawyers to seek compensation. Gascoigne was convicted in his absence and given a suspended jail sentence of three months, but Nanni, a well-known paparazzi snapper, wanted personal revenge.

Hoddle’s plans for Gascoigne in Rome were simple. No one would talk to him before the match and he would only be seen in public during the team’s one open training session twenty-four hours before the game. ‘But will you take extra security for him?’ Hoddle was asked.

‘We will take security but not extra security.’

‘He’s going to get pretty hyped up, isn’t he?’

‘Actually,’ said Hoddle, ‘before the Moldova game he was far more mature. He wasn’t getting carried away by all the hype. As a result I think he could be a better player now. He used to run a lot with the ball. Now he plays delicate one-twos. He’s reaching that age, around twenty-nine or thirty, when there is a new set of curtains that opens for a footballer.’