We can’t play in fear
JAMES COLLINS ON THAT PITCH INVASION:
There’s an assumption from many Premier League players that you must know who they are. If they offer you a welcome at the training ground, you can count yourself lucky.
so when James Collins looms into view, extends a hand and declares: ‘hi, I’m Ginge,’ you sense that he just might be a very good man for West ham’s current predicament.
It seems quite appropriate that his well-established nickname at the club — ‘the Ginger Pele’ — is an ironic one.
he once had pretensions to be something more sophisticated than a utilitarian British centre half. he started his career as a centre forward and scored on his first start for Lennie Lawrence’s Cardiff City, at home to Colchester, on a Tuesday night in November 2001. But that didn’t last long. ‘I soon realised I was better at keeping them out. Lads up front and in midfield are on a lot more money than me to score goals, so I’ll let them get on with it,’ he jokes.
Defensive bulwark, leader and warrior: that’s what Collins is — though it would be unwise to imagine that one so unpretentious is not also uncompromising.
Collins has become so emotionally attached to West ham since arriving as a 21-year-old that he once watched them play from the away end at stoke. so he does not mind saying he was infuriated by the supporters who ran on to the London stadium pitch after the club fell behind to Burnley three weeks ago.
‘It’s like nothing else I’ve experienced in football,’ Collins says of that extraordinary afternoon, which saw him remonstrating on the pitch with a fan who seized the corner flag and planted it on the centre spot.
‘You can obviously sense that the fans are disappointed and frustrated at the minute but that certainly didn’t help anyone. And certainly not us on the pitch.
‘We went 1-0 down, then all that happened in the stands and before you know it we’re 2-0 down and the game’s gone.
‘so yes, obviously it affected us. We’ve got vital games coming up. And to play in fear of going 1-0 down and for that to happen again or something to go off in the stand . . . well, that’s not great, is it?’
The acid test comes today, as fourthbottom West ham entertain southampton — a place and two points behind them. Collins hopes to shrug off a hamstring niggle to start. The most surreal part of the pitch invasion was the on-field conversation Collins found himself having with the corner flag-bearer who, it later transpired, was 61-year-old travel operator Paul Colborne.
‘ I just said, “What do you think you’re doing?”,’ he says. ‘I have to say I was surprised to see this was an older gentleman.
‘he said, “sorry Ginge, this is what I feel I’ve got to do”. I said, “You can’t do that. If you want to do something this isn’t the way to do it. We’re still trying to win the game”.’
Collins has his own thoughts about an age in which so many more people want to make a public demonstration of their feelings. ‘I think a lot of it has come from social media. That element has changed the game,’ he explains.
Yet his description of all this is underpinned by an unflinching honesty about West ham’s inadequacies over the past two seasons, which he sees as the reason why the London stadium has become so despised by so many.
Fully five times in the course of this conversation, in a room at the club’s rush Green training ground, Collins describes his own performances as lacking. he has no quarrel with the club for not offering him the new contract beyond this summer which many fans feel is his entitlement.
You felt that David Moyes’s players would have been less than pleased when he claimed at his inaugural press conference in November that they had simply not been fit enough under slaven Bilic. Collins concedes he could not disagree with a word Moyes said.
‘Yes, he was probably right,’ the 34year-old reflects. ‘You’ve got all the stats you want, so it’s there in black and white. I think we were probably bottom of all the running stats, which clearly wasn’t good enough.’
But shouldn’t every Premier League player be fit, considering the wages they command? ‘I agree with you,’ he says. ‘They should be. But I think looking back, no disrespect to slav and his staff, we probably weren’t fit enough, got a bit lazy and as soon as the gaffer came in he changed that. he put a stop to that straight away. Performances changed.’
WITHIN a month, results did, too. West ham lost only one Premier League game between December 9 and February 3 and rediscovered the organisational core that had been missing — advancing and retreating as a unit. But the last three games have brought straight defeats, the concession of 11 goals and a particularly brutal loss at swansea.
‘It’s really hard to put your finger on what’s changed in the past few games,’ Collins says.
‘People think about confidence as something that comes with winning. But when you concede fewer, keep some clean sheets, that brings confidence, too, and we’ve lost a bit of that again.
‘I’ve said to the boys that clean sheets are massive. That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on and with a bit of confidence we can score goals and get the ball rolling, in terms of staying up.’
It’s 11 years since Collins was part of West ham’s extraordinary ‘ Great escape’ — the recovery from near certain Premier League relegation. Back then, they also had a handful of games to save themselves, and they went to Arsenal and secured the 1-0 win Collins views as the most sublime moment of a run-in that saw Alan Curbishley’s side win seven out of nine.
West ham were still 19th that evening and four of their remaining six games were against top- six sides. There are symmetries. After today, three of the remaining six are against the current top six. It was the legendary win at Old Trafford which saw them home 11 years
ago. Collins relates: ‘I remember it being 70 minutes, I’m flat out, blowing badly and then they made a triple substitution — [Ryan] Giggs, [Cristiano] Ronaldo and [Paul] Scholes came on. And I’m thinking, “If we hold on here, it will be one of the greatest things ever”.
‘We got on a roll at the end of that season. That’s what I’ve told the lads we’ve got to do now.’
They discussed this and more during West Ham’s six- day break to Florida earlier this month, and it is with the same conviction that Collins insisted the break was necessary. The images of the players enjoying themselves on Miami Beach were no reflection of the hard work they put in, he says.
‘Yes, the last thing people want to see — or West Ham fans want to see — is us on the beach looking like we’re having a jolly. But maybe that’s the problem nowadays. Everyone wants to catch you doing something that they probably think you shouldn’t be doing.
‘I think the trip’s going to have a positive effect and coming back here now, there’s a buzz about the place.’
Moyes evidently did not attempt to prevent the players taking in the full gamut of social opportunities on offer at the beachside Fontainebleau complex where they stayed — including the LIV nightclub — but to Collins’s mind there were no problems.
‘The gaffer said we’re grown men, we train flat out, and after that do what you do. No one took the Michael out there and broke curfew. We were professional and trained really hard. We had four or five really hard training sessions.’
The world of a Premier League central defender is a different and far more complex one than when he first arrived in London 13 years ago, met the woman who would become his wife, Samantha, at Starbucks on Loughton High Road, and proceeded to become an east Londoner with a Newport accent.
Being asked to play out from the back in the modern way is not really for him, truth be told. ‘That’s modern football,’ he reflects. ‘If I’m asked to play out I’ll play out, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I watched Juventus a few weeks back against Tottenham at Wembley and I don’t know if it’s my age or the way I was brought up, but I was enjoying the defending. You saw those Juventus lads celebrating clearances.
‘The pure passion of being an out-andout defender has gone out of the game. It’s a dying breed I’d say.’
YET
here comes the kind of day which Collins was built for and why the West Ham fans who one day found him among them at the Britannia Stadium embraced him. He only remembers that he was injured that day, visiting relatives in Birmingham with his wife that weekend and ‘ just couldn’t resist it’.
His wife’s family are all West Ham fans. So, too, his elder children — seven-year- old Dylan and four-year- old Myla. His youngest, twoyear-old Jesse, surely will be, too.
‘I left this club to go to Aston Villa a few years ago and to leave here was gut-wrenching at the time,’ Collins says. ‘It’s to perform on days like this that you’re here.
‘It’s on days like this we need 100 per cent togetherness. When our fans get behind us and we’re all pulling in the same direction this a massive football club and a club I will always love. This is such a massive game.
‘ We can get through it if we stay together.’