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

By the time we boarded Britannia flight 809B, most of the drink had been consumed. But there was not a party atmosphere, more a sense of mission accomplished. And overwhelming fatigue. Ince wandered down to the back of the plane. Everyone liked Ince and I could understand why. Gascoigne chatted away amiably. He was asked what it had been like in the dressing room.

‘The players came in one at a time and we enjoyed the moment. Even the lads who didn’t play got involved. It was great. Now we are just tired, just drained.’

There was a crowd of more than a hundred people to meet the plane when it landed at 4.40 am. As I collected my luggage I looked across at Hoddle. I assumed he was going back to his house in Ascot, where he would be greeted by his wife and children and bathe in the restorative powers of family life. He seemed a supremely fortunate man.

Chapter 3 XAIPEO (#ulink_7c598133-90ef-57fb-8d23-60e6bec8ef06)

Three days later, Hoddle was on the front page of every newspaper. ‘Hod Divorce Shock’.

It was totally unexpected. The first the FA knew about it was when Hoddle walked into Davies’s office on Tuesday morning and said: ‘I have something to tell you.’ Not even John Gorman was aware of exactly what was going on inside the head and heart of his great friend as they went about their business in Rome – but he had his suspicions. On several occasions, Hoddle had said to Gorman, ‘I want to get something off my chest,’ and Gorman had said: ‘Go on, then, you will feel better for it.’ But he never did.

Davies put out an FA statement at 6 pm on Tuesday evening. ‘This is a personal and private matter. It is unconnected to his football responsibilities. Nobody else is involved. Both Anne and Glenn would request that the privacy of themselves and their three children is respected at this very difficult and painful time.’

The timing of the announcement was impressive, coming so soon after the Italy triumph but more than a month before England’s next game – a friendly against Cameroon. The beauty of Hoddle as a player was the way he would take a difficult ball on his chest and kill it dead, letting it drop quietly at his feet before moving effortlessly forward.

The Hoddles had been married for eighteen years, having met while they were both still at school. They had three children, Zoë, Zara and Jamie, who was only five when the separation was announced. In the current Shredded Wheat advertisement, the Hoddles were depicted as the happiest of happy families, sitting around the breakfast table wearing contented smiles. The ad was immediately pulled.

The next day, Hoddle’s R-reg BMW 735i was seen parked on the driveway of a house in Wokingham owned by Eileen Drewery, a fifty-seven-year-old faith-healer. It was to become his home for the next twelve months. They had first met when he used to go out with her daughter Michelle during his playing days with Spurs. On one occasion he had hobbled into the Drewerys’ house complaining of a torn muscle. When Eileen offered healing Hoddle turned it down, but she went ahead and performed ‘absent healing’, and the next day his muscle was dramatically improved. Two decades later, Mrs Drewery was to become the Mother Superior of the England football team.

Hoddle said nothing for the next three days before breaking his silence in a TV interview shown on Grandstand at lunchtime on Saturday. He was sparing with the details. ‘It has been a very difficult week for me,’ he said. ‘Obviously there have been some ups and downs, but I have had to detach certain things and put them away and it’s all been a bit stressful.’

England’s plucky performance on the pitch in Rome was nothing to the bulldog spirit deployed at home by the FA, high on the adrenalin of victory, or perhaps just basking in the relief of qualifying for a World Cup for the first time in eight years. The Italians were given no quarter. Davies led the charge. After touching down at Luton airport, he was driven straight to Burnham Beeches Hotel, where he had a shower, glanced at the Sunday papers, picked up his car and headed for the BBC to tell David Frost all about it. David Mellor, the newly appointed chairman of the Football Task Force, was also in the studio and quickly teamed up with Davies to deliver a scathing attack on the Italian security operation. Mellor raised his truncheon with additional venom because his seventeen-year-old son, Anthony, had been at the game and had given his father a first-hand account, which Mellor Junior followed up in a letter to The Times. It was precisely the sort of testimony the FA were keen to encourage:

Sir, Along with a few thousand other England fans, I arrived at the Olympic Stadium in Rome at about 6.15 pm on Saturday and was subjected to a rigorous search, with everything from belts to keys to coins to lighters being confiscated. Inside was chaos. We had tickets for the ‘official’ section but were sent to an area for which these were not valid, so the police (there were no stewards) told us to sit wherever we wished … Forty seconds after kick-off the Italians started to throw full water bottles, coins and other objects into our stand. The English could not have thrown anything back – everything had been confiscated. The Italian police did not react to the missiles being lobbed into our area, yet when the English started to return the rubbish thrown at them, the police started a baton charge … The behaviour of both the Italian fans and the police was disgraceful. The latter seemed to bear a grudge against every English fan – their attacks on us were both bizarre and terrifying. English fans certainly retaliated and some threw seats at the police in the stadium; but rather than instilling fear and anger, surely the police should have protected and helped innocent fans in such a situation.

Yours faithfully,

Anthony Mellor

The Times printed a second, shorter, letter just beneath it which made a different but equally valid point:

Sir, As an Irish resident in Rome for the past three years, I am surprised by how press reaction to Saturday’s match has concentrated on the heavy-handedness of the Italian police. From Friday night until kick-off I saw many groups of English fans parading around the centre of Rome, shouting abuse at locals, especially women, and in some cases throwing bottles and other implements at mopeds, cars, police and in one case smashing the window of a bar. All this in the capital city of the country which was the main victim of the Heysel disaster in 1985.

I have never seen anything like this behaviour in Rome, even though many European teams play here on a regular basis. When will the FA learn that the root of the problem still lies with their fans and not the authorities of the other countries? I believe that the French authorities will react in the same way at the World Cup finals next year unless the English fans can prove that they can act in a civilised manner.

Yours etc,

Ronan Donoghue

For the next two weeks you could hardly turn on the television without seeing a clip of English fans being bashed by Italian riot police. It was either that or the trial of teenager Louise Woodward, both cases in which objectivity got lost in the swelter of debate. The FA’s hastily drafted report returned a guilty verdict on all counts, concluding that the police had been variously inefficient, provocative and brutal.

The Italians struck back – none more so than dear old, roly-poly Giancarlo Gavarotti who, in a Gazetta dello Sport editorial, described English supporters as ‘vomit on the beautiful face of Rome’. Verbal warfare continued until FIFA eventually came out with its own inconclusive but predictable conclusion: both sides were to blame. As a result, England and Italy would each be fined for contributing to what FIFA described as the ‘deplorable’ events in Rome. It was a vintage example of fence-sitting, complete with the tamest of warnings that a repeat of such behaviour, either by England fans or Italian police, would result in ‘a lot stiffer punishments’.

Sepp Blatter, the FIFA General Secretary, who did not wish to fall out with England or Italy since he was hoping to win their vote as successor to Joao Havelange, the FIFA President, made things charmingly clear. ‘While FIFA did not have authority over the police forces, the methods used by the police should be better adapted to the specific requirements of football,’ he said, scrubbing the whitewash from his suit as he spoke.

Woodward was freed on the day Hoddle’s England players voluntarily put themselves under lock and key at the team hotel in Berkshire in preparation for the Cameroon game, the first of a series of friendlies during which the players would strut their stuff in front of the coach in the hope of securing a place in the final squad of twenty-two, to be announced on 2 June. It was to be a long and tense and at times tedious beauty contest, with some contestants dropping out of the reckoning and one refusing to take part altogether. Others were to claw their way on to the catwalk at the last minute.

This is what Phil Neville had to say about it: ‘There are only four players that you can look at and safely say that only injuries could keep them out of the final squad, and they are David Seaman, Paul Gascoigne, Paul Ince and Alan Shearer. For the rest of us, the fight is on. We’ve qualified for the finals but this is where the pressure really starts. I think we’re all worried about whether we will make it to France. I’m thinking about it every time I go on to the training field with England and it’s going to get worse.

‘You look at every training session as a step nearer the World Cup, and if you play and perform well you think of that as another step forward. At the moment I’d say my main rivals for the wing-back places are Graeme Le Saux and Andy Hinchcliffe. Then there’s David Beckham if I’m pushing for a place on the right.’

The last time Cameroon came to London, in 1991, the so-called Lions of Africa refused to leave their hotel until they were paid £2,000 each in cash. On this occasion, the FA guaranteed around £150,000 to the Cameroon FA, plus a share of the TV rights. The lions were tamed in an instant.

Hoddle’s squad included the rehabilitated Rio Ferdinand and Chris Sutton, Blackburn’s top scorer. Both had been called up for the first time. A seventeen-year-old called Michael Owen was also there – on work experience from Liverpool FC, where he was taking the Kop by storm. I had seen him on the first day of the season when Liverpool played Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, and I noticed before the kick-off that Hoddle was sitting a couple of rows behind me. Halfway through the second half, Owen was fouled in the penalty area and the referee pointed to the spot. Owen didn’t bother to look across to the bench or consult his captain. He simply picked up the ball, placed it on the small white circle and whacked it past the goalkeeper.

After the first day’s training session at Bisham Abbey, someone thoughtfully passed Rio Ferdinand a glass of orange juice, and he managed a knowing smile. ‘You can’t call me an alcoholic. I don’t need counselling or anything,’ said Ferdinand, who had just turned nineteen. ‘Glenn told me I would get another chance. He stood by me. He’s an honest person and I have to be honest with him now. Everything he has said to me has made a difference. He has told me how to conduct myself off the pitch and what he’s told me has stayed in. What happened with Tony Adams was more of a conversation really. I just found that I was sitting next to him on the bus and we started talking. He simply told me what had happened to him. The truth is that I don’t really drink.’

I asked him if he had ever seen a video of Bobby Moore, and how it felt to be compared, however obliquely, to such a master craftsman. ‘He was probably the greatest centre-back in the world, so it’s a bit over the top to compare me with him. I try to do my own thing. I like to pass the ball and I like to have it at my feet. It’s flattering the things people have been saying, but I have to make sure I don’t get big-headed.’

Hoddle already had the spine of a team in his mind, and was looking at about thirty or thirty-five players who had a chance of making it by June. Rio Ferdinand’s recall raised the question of whether Hoddle still hoped to play a sweeper system or if he would stick to his three central defenders and two wing-back formation. Much to Adams’s displeasure, England had abandoned the flat back four. ‘If I had fourteen games in which to experiment it might be different, but I don’t,’ Hoddle said. ‘You can play with a sweeper in training and think to yourself, this is fine, but then you try doing it at Wembley in front of 75,000 people or during a World Cup and it can all go horribly wrong. I don’t think we’ve got the players at the moment to do it – although Rio might do it in the future.’

Not one question was asked about Hoddle’s personal life, and how the break-up of his marriage might affect his work.

It was an uninspiring game on a damp, uninspiring North London evening. The lions failed to roar. England won 2–0, with well-taken goals shortly before the end of the first half by Paul Scholes and Robbie Fowler. For Fowler it was particularly important to make an impression and move up a notch in the striker’s stakes, especially with Shearer still injured and Wright suddenly finding it impossible to score for Arsenal.

But it’s all so unfair. Chris Sutton came on with just over ten minutes of the match left, and could so easily have walked into the departure lounge for France if a cross from Fowler had been a few inches more accurate.

Hoddle gave Nigel Martyn an outing in goal, but he hardly got a touch. As it happened, his only real contribution was when he went down on one knee to stop an innocuous shot and let the ball roll out of his arms. He grabbed it again and managed a rueful grin.

There was one significant moment in the thirty-ninth minute when Rio Ferdinand trotted on to replace the injured Southgate. Suddenly there was a buzz about the place. Hinchcliffe shook his hand and then immediately passed him the ball. Ferdinand’s international career was effortlessly into its stride.

England were now ranked sixth in the world – 100 places higher than Italy – and FIFA said they would take that into consideration when deciding which countries would be given one of the eight seeded places. Past World Cup performances were going to come into the equation, which meant England’s failure to qualify last time round could cost them dear. The ghost of Graham Taylor was about to haunt Hoddle as the FIFA suits deliberated in Zurich. Everyone put a brave face on it. Sir Bert Millichip, the FA’s former Chairman who now sat on the all-important FIFA committee, was banging the drum for England. Hoddle appeared unfazed, even suggesting that if England were not seeded it might be an advantage to be in the same group as Brazil – which was tempting fate, especially if that group was also to include countries such as Nigeria and Croatia. In the end it was a choice between Holland, Romania and England for the two last seeded places.

Holland and Romania got the nod. ‘A shade disappointed’ was Hoddle’s immediate response, before taking solace in the traditional chirpy get-out that ‘Come what may you have to go out there and beat whoever you come up against.’ Manager and captain stood shoulder to shoulder. Shearer, who dropped into Marseille for twenty-four hours shortly before the draw to sign the world’s second biggest boot deal – £15 million with Umbro until the year 2000 – played Hoddle’s parrot. ‘You have to meet the best in the end anyway, so it doesn’t really matter which group you are in,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Graham Taylor, now back where he belonged as manager of Watford, emerged from his vegetable patch to defend himself. ‘I’m used to getting blamed for many things, but it is not my fault this time. If people think England have been left out of the seeding because of what happened in 1994 they should look at the rules. It’s not just about non-qualification in 94. You have to take friendly games since then into account, because every international match counts.’

For the French, the Tirage au Sort de la Compétition Finale – The Final Draw – was a chance to road-test their organisational machinery. The media centre at the Stade Vélodrome was big, but not nearly big enough to accommodate the 1,200 visiting journalists. There were smiling girls with badges pinned to their chests, and goodie bags stuffed with watches, calculators, pens and key-rings – stocking-fillers galore. There was red carpet everywhere. The woolly baseball cap with flaps to cover the ears came in handy during the exhibition match between Europe and the Rest of the World before the draw, when the temperature at the top of the arched main stand plummeted. Europe scored within the first minute to begin a goal-fest. Gabriel Batistuta scored a couple, as did Ronaldo, who looked awesome. The 38,000-odd crowd seemed to enjoy it, but they could have done without the French cheer-leader who only highlighted the lack of competitive edge by urging spectators to join him in an inane chant for one side or the other.

It felt more like the opening ceremony than the draw, with a big blue stage at one end where glass pots into which the names of the competing countries would be poured were installed in front of an oversized football. Thousands of schoolchildren sporting different coloured T-shirts filled one stand, VIPs and the media in the other, and the rest sat behind the goal opposite the stage. There was a reproduction of an ancient mosaic in one corner, with XAIPEO in Greek lettering written on it. Greetings.

More than 1,500 people from the worlds of football, politics and show business were invited. Many of them had been in Marseille most of the week, being wined and dined by the sponsors who make sure FIFA’s cup is always full to overflowing. During the second half I wandered through the sponsor’s village just outside the stadium and was handed a Snickers bar and a Coke. And then another Snickers bar and another Coke. A man at the Adidas stand with an American accent was longing to talk to someone. He told me that most of the matches would be broadcast to more than 120 countries and that some games would be seen by 500 million people worldwide. I told him that only that week I had read somewhere that Nike was willing to spend £20 million – almost exactly what Adidas was paying to be an official sponsor – in an attempt to steal the limelight from their rivals. ‘That’s none of my business,’ he said. ‘What I know is that this is going to be far bigger than any Olympics, and with the extra teams in the final this will be the biggest sporting event the world has ever known. No one really knows exactly what it’s costing us but I know it’s worth it. Do you want a sticker?’

At the end of the match, there was a pitch invasion. Sepp Blatter would not have been pleased, since only twenty-four hours earlier he had called for all perimeter fences to be taken down by June because, he said, ‘prisoners and wild animals should be behind bars, not football supporters.’

It took the stewards more than fifteen minutes to clear the pitch. One boy came on with his football and dribbled the length of the field until he got to the penalty spot in front of the empty goal. This was his moment. He missed, shooting high and wide into the stand, and no one would give his ball back. Others performed cartwheels and danced around in the centre circle until the stewards were told to show some muscle. France’s superstar Zinedine Zidane had his shirt ripped from his back and had to be escorted off the field by police. And all of this from a hand-picked crowd, made up mainly of schoolchildren.

In the official programme, Michel Santini and Fernand Sastre, the joint tournament chiefs, made much of the decision to hold the draw outdoors in front of such a large crowd, but I am not sure the plan had been for Blatter and the Chairman of the French FA to be roundly booed whenever they appeared on stage. There was already a hostile atmosphere brewing in Marseille.

Dividing the thirty-two countries into eight groups of four could be done in a matter of minutes, but that would spoil Blatter’s fun. A short, tubby man with a round, jovial face, Blatter was on course to succeed Havelange. He slowly unscrewed the little balls and pulled out small strips of paper bearing each of the countries’ names. England had missed Brazil, Italy, France, Spain and Holland. That left groups headed by Germany, Argentina and Romania. It was Romania we wanted and it was Romania we got, along with Tunisia and Colombia. No one was complaining.

Immediately after the draw I made my way towards the VIP section, where I flashed my AA membership card and walked into the lobby. I found Graham Kelly and Pat Smith trying hard to disguise their relief at what was a kind draw. And it helped that they were going to be in Marseille for another twenty-four hours, where England were to play their opening game against Tunisia. It would give them an opportunity to count the number of glass-fronted bars around the Vieux Port where thousands of England supporters would gather for refreshment six months later.

‘Where do you expect the English fans to stay?’ I asked Smith.

‘Well, the French like camping, don’t they?’ she said.

Hoddle was doing his best to make the group look tougher than it was. ‘It could have been a lot easier,’ he said.