When the England football team reached the Euro 2020 final in July, Peter Crouch encouraged his wife – the model Abbey Clancy – to join him for the big match against Italy. The retired striker was working as a pundit for the BBC in its studio next to Wembley Way, the pedestrianised street leading to the famous stadium. “It’s been a festival atmosphere the whole tournament,” he told her. “Come down for the show.”
Unfortunately, says Crouch, “that game was different”. As an official report by Baroness Casey concluded this month, “ticketless, drunken and drugged-up thugs” stormed Wembley in an “appalling scene of disorder” that could have led to fans or staff being killed.
Crouch, 40, could see trouble was brewing during his journey that morning, seeing hooligans coming “out of the woodwork” and recognising “all the old element that I thought we’d got rid of”.
“People were drinking from 10am. It was always going to end in tears,” he tells i. “Bottles were getting smashed outside and you could hear the chanting was different. I sent Ab home at 4pm, hours before the game kicked off, because I’ve been around football all my life and I could just could sense it.
“As a fan, growing up in west London, I used to go a lot of Chelsea games, a lot of QPR games, and you felt it could boil over at any point. I’m talking about hooliganism, fighting, chanting – none of it is nice.”
It was therefore with pride that Crouch joined a very different football club this summer – becoming a director at non-league, semi-professional side Dulwich Hamlet. LGBT rainbow flags and scarves are a common sight among fans at their south London stadium and their forward Danny Mills was included on the 2021 Football Black List for his part in combating racism.
“Dulwich feels very inclusive, no one’s judged, everyone can come and enjoy the atmosphere,” he says. “I would quite happily take Abbey and the kids.” And as Crouch makes clear: “There are not a lot of football grounds where I would do that – you could probably count them on one hand… There are places that I would tell people not to go to.”
Despite being lauded for their socially progressive policies, Dulwich Hamlet were facing a “bleak” future when Crouch joined them. The ban on fans attending matches early in the pandemic left them “in a lot of trouble” financially. His new documentary, Peter Crouch: Save Our Beautiful Game, streaming on discovery+ after Christmas, examines the problems still threatening the UK’s 40,000 grass-roots clubs and follows his attempts to help at Dulwich Hamlet’s Champion Hill stadium.
It shows how important clubs can be to their local communities, how they have to survive on tiny budgets and how they can help train future Premier League stars.
Heading risks Peter Crouch on his dementia scans
Peter Crouch, who retired in 2019, is 6ft 7in. His appearance often led to abuse from fans. “I was on the receiving end of a hell of a lot for being different, looking-wise,” he says. “As a young, impressionable player who’s not quite comfortable with themselves, to get an absolute barrage of abuse from the terraces from the moment I walked on to a football pitch was hard.”
His height gave him an advantage for heading the ball, but following scientific research revealing the damage that heading can cause to the brain – increasing the risk of dementia – Crouch has said he plans to have a scan for the progressive brain condition chronic traumatic encepalopathy every year.
Recalling repeatedly heading balls in training, he says: “I’d see stars and I’d think, ‘I’d better stop now’ – and I’d do that most days.” He adds: “I remember looking at stats and I’d headed more balls than anyone in Europe for about five or six years on the trot. So I always think, in the modern day if anyone’s going to have this issue, it’ll be me.”
It was Crouch’s history at Dulwich Hamlet – albeit a brief one – that made him want to help. Before retiring in 2019, Crouch played at the World Cup, scored vital goals for Spurs and won the FA Cup with Liverpool – but before all that, his career began as a teenager on loan at Dulwich, then in the seventh tier of English football.
He can just about remember his only goal for the team, which he “bundled home” in his first game – or was it his second? “I didn’t set the world alight,” he admits. Still, Crouch remained grateful to the club for the chance it gave him to learn his trade.
His show is timely, coming in the wake of a review of English football governance by the Conservative MP and former sports minister Tracey Crouch (no relation, though she is a Spurs fan). He met her at Dulwich alongside Prince William, president of the Football Association, while filming the documentary.
Her report, published last month, made 47 recommendations, including the creation of a new independent regulator for English football and a “solidarity transfer levy” being established. This would lead Premier League clubs to pay lower-league and grass-roots teams up to 10 per cent of any fees when buying players from overseas or other top-flight sides.
“The Premier League is the most-watched league in the world, so it deserves the most money,” Peter Crouch says. But he agrees that “money should drip down to the non-league clubs” better than it does now. He makes clear that teams like Dulwich Hamlet are “not asking for handouts – they just want to be self sufficient”.
He argues that being able to sell alcohol during games is crucial to this – but points out that from the fifth-tier National League upwards, clubs are banned from selling or allowing consumption of alcohol in view of their pitch.
Dulwich are hoping to win a place in the National League next year, but as last month’s review states, the alcohol law “would cost the club around 40 per cent of its income… the club could therefore not afford to be promoted – a perverse outcome”. The problem is compounded because promotion would compel Dulwich to spend more money improving their stadium and pitch, punishing success.
To outsiders, relaxing this law may itself seem perverse, given the problems with drunken fans at Wembley in the summer. But as Crouch says, it’s not the two pints a spectator would have during a game that is the problem, “it’s the 10 you have before you go in”. This is no exaggeration, he says with a laugh. “I’ve done it myself!”
The report agrees, stating that “the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act 1985 does not prevent fans who want to drink alcohol from drinking on match days, often to excess. Instead it leads to fans ‘loading up’ ahead of matches and largely consuming alcohol away from stadiums in a way that has implications for individual policing operations and police budgets”. The review recommends a small pilot of alcohol sales in view of pitches at clubs up to the fourth tier, League Two.
Crouch is glad the issue is being looked at, as he cares deeply about Dulwich Hamlet and insists his role there is not just for show. “It’s a difficult job, a hard job, a proper job,” he says. “That’s something I’m not used to.”
Crouch and Clancy Fame and sexism
Thanks to his chat show appearances and the BBC’s That Peter Crouch Podcast, the former striker’s self-effacing humour has won him many fans, even outside football.
When I tell three people that I’m going to meet him, separately they all quickly repeat their favourite Crouch joke: when asked in an interview, “What would you be if you weren’t a footballer?”, he replied: “A virgin.” (The comedian Jack Whitehall told Crouch this gag was “the greatest moment of your career”.)
His marriage to Abbey Clancy has also boosted his profile. Clancy features in Peter Crouch: Save Our Beautiful Game and the couple appear together on TV adverts and on his podcast – a laddy, light-hearted examination of life as a footballer.
Crouch has noticed how the media cover him and his wife differently, however, suggesting sexist attitudes to celebrity.
“I feel if I say a joke, it’s OK. If Abbey says something, it’s taken seriously and it’ll be in Now magazine as a headline. If I said it, it wouldn’t be a headline. I think it’s how sometimes we treat men and women differently in that scenario,” he says.
He cites tabloid stories such as “Abbey Clancy reveals shock moment Peter Crouch threatened to leave home in dramatic showdown”, which centred around a disagreement about their new puppy Jeffrey.
“We were on a podcast together and she said, ‘I wanted to kill Pete’, like every other husband and wife have said – it’s a phrase. She didn’t really want to kill me because we’ve got another dog!”
Crouch adds: “It’s part and parcel of the job, and the perks far outweigh the negatives, so I’m not going to sit here and complain about it… It doesn’t bother me but it sometimes bothers her.”
‘Peter Crouch: Save Our Beautiful Game’ is available to stream on discovery+ from 28 December
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3IM4uow
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