Graeme Saux - Graeme Le Saux - Left Field

Paul and I had always got on really, really well. We were England team-mates and I respected him a great deal. The game against Liverpool was a Sunday afternoon match and afterwards we were due to travel down to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of Glenn Hoddle’s England squad and start the preparations for the make-or-break World Cup qualifying game against Italy in Rome, which was the following Saturday.

Paul was really wound up during the game. He’d get so frantic in matches sometimes that his eyes would change – they’d kind of glaze over. There was a frenetic atmosphere at Anfield and it was an all-action game. They ended up winning it 4–2. I’d been clattered a few times already when Paul launched himself at me with a tackle, took my legs away and left me on the deck.

When I was on the ground, he started jabbering away at me. ‘Come on you fucking poof,’ he said, ‘get up, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ He said it a few times. I let it go. People get called ‘a poof’ all the time in football. It’s a generic term of abuse. But it was loaded when people aimed it at me. A few minutes later, he clattered me again and started yelling the same stuff. I snapped.

I said something that I knew would hurt him. I insulted his wife.

Paul went absolutely ballistic. He was livid. He spent the rest of the match desperately trying to kick lumps out of me. He was in a towering rage. When the final whistle went, I was going down the tunnel when I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye about to try and land a punch on me. I ducked out of the way and scarpered back out onto the pitch. The guy had lost it completely: he wanted to kill me.

Paul was a prime example of a guy who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. He had been calling me all the names under the sun, personal stuff that he must have known would hurt me, stuff that I found offensive. And yet as soon as I retaliated in kind, he couldn’t cope. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d said, and it was out of order. I knew his wife, Claire, and I liked her. It wasn’t about her, though; it was about letting him know what it was like to try to have put up with that kind of abuse.

Paul quickly turned it round in his own mind so that I was the villain. I knew it was going to be very awkward when we got to Burnham Beeches to meet up with the rest of the England squad that night. I got there before him and there was plenty of banter among the lads sitting in the restaurant about what he was going to do to me when he arrived. I laughed nervously. I didn’t want a punch-up with him – he was a lot stronger than me.

I decided I needed to be the adult about it. When it was obvious he had arrived, I phoned him in his room and asked if I could go up and talk to him about it. He was reluctant but he agreed. I got up there and he got into me straight away. ‘You’re out of order talking about my wife like that,’ he said. ‘You know her, and anyway no one talks about my family like that.’

I told him that I hadn’t really known what I was saying but I asked him how he thought it made me feel when he was calling me ‘a fucking poof’. I explained to him that I hadn’t done it to insult his wife. Just to get back at him. But he wouldn’t accept it; it was an honour thing for him. It’s a shame, but ever since then my relationship with him has been very cold.

By then, the gay slurs had become a big part of my career. But the homophobia that surrounded me put me in a desperately difficult situation. It was difficult for me to keep denying I was gay and reacting angrily to any suggestion that I might be homosexual without being disrespectful to the homosexual community. Talking about something that isn’t actually true makes it impossibly difficult to confront. That’s why I didn’t brave the issue in the newspapers.

I have gay friends and I don’t judge them. I am not homophobic. If there was a gay player and he was part of a team I was playing for, that wouldn’t be an issue for me at all. Someone’s private life is entirely up to them. But when supporters and other players accused me of being gay, it got to me. It was complicated. I never believed there was anything wrong with being gay but I felt that if it came to be accepted that I was gay, I would be unable to continue as a professional footballer. That’s how deep-seated the prejudice in the game is. That’s why I fought back as strongly as I did.

Homosexuality really is football’s last taboo. We’ve got past pretty much everything else. The problems with racism that disfigured football for much of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are not over but they are on the wane. An awful lot of good work has been done and attitudes have changed. You don’t get people making monkey noises at English football grounds any more. You don’t get supporters throwing bananas on the pitch as they used to do when John Barnes and Ces Podd were playing.

But there is still terrible prejudice within football. That is part of the culture. People try and pick on other people’s weaknesses. You have to deal with constant mickey-taking and being derided for the most trivial matters: the trainers you have just bought, the haircut you have just had, the piece about you in the newspaper. It is endless and it can be draining. It is part of the competitive nature of the dressing room. Your team-mates are digging away all the time, trying to get one up on each other. If you can make someone else look stupid, that’s the ideal.

Given that kind of peer pressure, I don’t think a modern footballer could ever come out as a gay man. I don’t think anyone could think of any positive reason to do it. It would immediately isolate you from the rest of the team. The group would be too hostile for you to survive. The situation would be too daunting.

Football has not had to deal with a group of gay footballers standing there and saying ‘How are you going to deal with us?’ They haven’t had to confront homophobia yet because the gay footballers that are probably playing in our leagues are understandably too frightened to declare their homosexuality and cope with the backlash they would face. Until there is a powerful voice for a minority group, football will never make provision for it.

The abuse I had to suffer would be multiplied by 100 for a player who was openly gay. The burden would be too much. I think of the stick I had from the fans and it made me feel anxious and nervous even before I got out on the pitch. Sometimes, you go out there not feeling 100 per cent confident anyway and that apprehension is compounded by the fact that you are going to be targeted in the warm-up.

Every time you run to the side of the pitch, there is going to be a little group of people giving you abuse. Suddenly, all the anger and prejudice hidden away under the surface of someone’s everyday life starts spewing out. You start to get a sense of the mentality of the mob and to anticipate the way the collective mind of a hostile crowd works. You know that if the game starts badly for the team you are playing against, then within ten minutes they will turn their anger and their frustration on you. And then a whole stadium of 40,000 or 50,000 people will start singing about how you take it up the arse.

Most of the time, you try and blot that out but sometimes you can’t. On another occasion at Anfield, I went over to the touchline to get the ball when it had gone out for a throw. A kid in the crowd was holding it. He was nine or ten and his dad was next to him. ‘You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,’ he screamed at me. His dad was joining in as well. I got the ball and then I stopped and looked at him.

‘Who do you think you are talking to like that?’ I asked him. I pointed at him and then, of course, everyone else starting piling in. I was all for hauling that kid out of the crowd and putting him on the side of the pitch with me. Sometimes you have just got to draw the line and say ‘That is wrong, you don’t treat people like that’.