Peter’s best bits:
“Abbey went mental the first time we met!”
He became an instant legend when asked what he’d be if he wasn’t a footballer and replied “a virgin” – and now 6ft 7 Peter Crouch has the job of entertaining the nation by hosting BBC One’s Save Our Summer. The ex-England player, 39 – who popularised “the robot” dance and whose podcast sits at the top of the charts – has delighted fans by inviting his model wife Abbey Clancy, 34, with whom he shares Sophia, nine, Liberty, five, Johnny, two, and Jack, one,on the show, and even allowed her to give him an eyebrow piercing during one episode. Here, we reveal some of Crouchy’s funniest moments...
MEETING ABBEY FOR THE FIRST TIME
“We met [at a bar] and got on fantastically well. I thought she was out of my league, really. She gave me her number – amazingly – then she went away and I just carried on with my evening. I was talking to someone else, who was also female, when Abbey came back over and said, ‘Look at you! Who do you think you are?’ as if we were married already.
She went mental. And I was like ‘I’m only talking’. I should have known then!”
GETTING RIBBED BY PRINCE HARRY
“I’ve met Prince William and Prince Harry a few times. I remember Harry said to me once – we were in the England changing room – and he said, ‘Crouchy! How did you bag Abbey?’ He genuinely said that. He was dissing me, for sure, and then laughing his head off as he walked off. I looked round and said, ‘Did that just happen?’ I was taken aback at the time so I didn’t have a comeback. But I told Abbey afterwards and she was buzzing. We both get that a lot; I suppose everyone just sees our looks and they don’t know what we’re like together. She’s my best friend. We just like each other. She makes me laugh, and I make her laugh.”
BEING A PAMPERED FOOTBALLER
“Footballers can’t do things for themselves. When we play teams abroad, many players will have no idea what country they’re in. There are drawbacks to being waited on hand and foot. You pack nothing yourself, just a little wash bag. You then give your wash bag to a girl who is there to look after you because you can’t look after yourself, and she puts it in a bigger bag with everyone else’s, which causes a panic because everyone has the same brand of wash bag.”
GHOSTING MICKEY ROURKE
“During a lads’ holiday in Miami, I was at a club and there was a fella there who looked like Mickey Rourke. This guy said to me, ‘You’re Robot Boy’. It WAS Mickey Rourke and we both started doing the robot dance. It ended up being a 4am job. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘let’s do it again’. So we had another great night out. At 9am on the third day, he knocked for me… I pretended I wasn’t in [the hotel room] and went back to bed. He left a note and it was like, ‘Let’s meet here for dinner’… but I left.”
LEARNING HIS PRIORITIES
“I’ve written two books [ Walking Tall and How To Be a Footballer]. In my first, Abbey only read the first page – the dedications – and because I mentioned her last, she was fuming. She said, ‘How dare you, your accountant got a mention before me!’ So for the second, I dedicated it solely to her.”
BEING A COOL FATHER
“My daughters are daddy’s girls, but only up to a point… I’m quite good at being Embarrassing Dad. We were at a summer camp and I went to drop Sophia off, but she told me to stay round the corner as she was embarrassed I was too tall... then she asked me to come in because the boys thought I was cool. She’s seeing the advantage of having a footballer dad now.”
PLOTTING HIS RETIREMENT
“Doing my podcast, I literally sit there in a pub, having a beer, chatting to a couple of lads about football. It’s like the best job ever. But I have got a GNVQ in Leisure and Tourism that I took when I was a young footballer at Tottenham Hotspur, so I could open a swimming pool or something, maybe be a lifeguard.”
TURNING TO WINE DURING LOCKDOWN
“I’ve loved being in lockdown, and I’ve hated it. Maybe I loved it more at the start, but there were days where I thought, ‘Get me out of this house!’ Obviously I’m spending a lot more time with the kids, which is brilliant, and it makes you realise what’s important in life. But with four of them, there’s no letup. When we get them all in bed at night we collapse on the sofa and drink some wine!”
‘I’m quite good at being Embarrassing Dad’