BOOK REVIEW

I, Robot: How To Be A Footballer 2 by Peter Crouch (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £12, saving £8 on rrp)

SINCE finishing a professional football career that yielded 42 England caps (seriously), Peter Crouch’s fame has mushroomed. A best-selling book, weekly, perhaps daily, TV appearances, an awardwinning podcast, a permanent seat at the UN…

Where did he find time to write I, Robot? Whenever it was, the big man has hit the jackpot again, lifting the lid on the excesses and ridiculous lifetsyles of the average Premier League footballer. Crouch does this as any sharp-eyed insider would: supplementing observations with very funny anecdotes that prove his point, constantly poking fun at himself. It’s a winning combination.

The format of I, Robot differs little from Crouch’s original best-seller, only here he concentrates on how and where top-flight footballers eat, where they holiday and how they prepare for matches, for instance.

Citing European away trips during his time at Liverpool and Spurs, Crouch would take nothing with him other than his club-issue tracksuit and a bag for his phone, toothbrush and iPad.

“There’d be no plug adapter,” he writes, “because you can’t expect a footballer to know the standard socket arrangement for a place as exotic as Paris or Milan.”

As for reading material, Crouch points out that, “Maybe one man out of twenty might be carrying a book, which will mark him out as a dangerous maverick who should sit with the staff.”

You might imagine that as the average Premier League player earns a seven-figure salary, holidays would be spent on private islands or in hidden villages far from the crowds.

Nope. Where once a young Crouch would head off to Tenerife or Ayia Napa, nowadays, “It’s all about Dubai…the go-to destination” full of good hotels and “nice restaurants.” By contrast, football managers are to be spotted relaxing at all-in resorts in Barbados.

Footballers’ food habits are also given an airing. According to Crouch, if they’re in London, home to more than 40,000 eateries, there’s an excellent chance they’ll go to one of just three, proving the herd mentality is alive and well.

When it comes to paying, the restaurant bill “is frequently settled by a game of credit card roulette, where the card of each player present will be placed in a champagne bucket and the waitress asked to pull one out at random.”

Crouch maintains that the tension “is on a par with a penalty shoot-out” as diners wonder whether they’ll be eating for free or be presented with a bill for 11 ‘black cods’”.

There’s almost 300 pages of this, but as it’s written by Crouchy, we can expect I, Robot to top the sales charts over the next few weeks.