How to be an ex Footballer – Peter Crouch

It’s the third of Crouch’s books exploring the hinterlands of his footballing life. I enjoyed the first, How to be a Footballer, and the second, I Robot, and found this one was ok – a relaxing and easy read.

I doubt there’ll be another- it’s pretty clear by the end that Crouch has squeezed all the juice out of this particular orange. How to be a Footballer was brim full of gossip about the crazy escapades Crouch and his colleagues got up to as young men. Many of them were well known figures – and I’m nosey enough to be interested. And some of the tales – like the one about Stephen Ireland’s pink Range Rover – appealed because they were players from my club. The book was fresh and up to date.

In How to be an ex Footballer Crouch and his ghost writer Tom Fordyce have had to dig a little deeper. There’s a short bibliography of newspaper articles used as sources, and a few old pros that Crouch knew from his early days of football have chipped in by giving interviews and offering advice. There’s still plenty of entertainment, lots of anecdotes accompanied by Crouch’s usual pithy descriptions of footballing characters. He’s good at telling a joke, preparing the reader for the punch line or sizing a character up in a few precise and well chosen words, and the whole thing is light hearted, sure to buoy you up, and take you to a better place if life is getting you down. Caricatures and stereotypes abound, as in the first of these volumes, and that’s partly what makes them such an easy read: everything fits nicely into your preconceptions.

As before, the chapter headings group together different types of post football career – Manager, Pundit, Actor, Grafter and so on – and it’s interesting to see how these men, many of them quite familiar to soccer fans – ended up. By the way, they are all men!

The section on actors of course includes Cantona, one of the great characters of the modern game – and I say that as a Manchester City fan. And then there’s the serious side: stories about players like Lee Hendrie of Aston Villa, who lost all his money to cheats and hangers on, details about lives spent as plumbers or builders that show that it’s not all glamour and glory. To be frank some of these sections were a bit flat, and it seemed that Crouch, running out of ideas, was padding the final chapters out with well meaning but fairly banal comments about the dangers facing young players entering the game, and the problems faced by those whose careers are coming to a close.

I suppose the footballer who achieved the most when his professional career was over was George Weah, who became President of Liberia, but the ex-player who intrigued Crouch the most was Gavin Peacock. Crouch watched him from the stands as a teenager, and played on the same team as him at QPR. Later Peacock went on to become a pastor at Calvary Grace Church in Calgary, Canada, and Crouch devotes a whole chapter to him and other footballers who lived out their Christian faith in one way or another. He is clearly intrigued, dipping his toe into the water of religious faith. There’s a little less sarcastic humour here, and a definite respect for the choices these men have made, so let’s hope Crouch takes the next step.