Brilliant Beattie needed help from football
tHE journey started with a small clipping, gleaned from the Daily Star. Kevin Beattie, the former England footballer, had been detained at a ferry port in the east of England. He had been attempting to return to Norway to play for a lower division club there, Nybergsund, and a library fine had shown up on his record. It was no more than a few quid, but Beattie didn’t have the money to pay. My sports editor thought there was a story behind that. there was. When I eventually tracked Beattie down to his scandinavian home near the swedish border, he told me they had 10 metres of snow. I laughed. ‘You’ve been away too long,’ I said, ‘you mean 10 feet.’ ‘No,’ he said earnestly, ‘10 metres.’ A few days later I arrived at Oslo Airport to collect the hire car. the staff behind the counter laughed when I told them the destination. then they went out back and got chains for the wheels, which already had metal studs in to prevent skidding. ‘You might need to put these on,’ they said, as if I knew how. Unpromisingly, pre-satellite navigation, I began by driving an hour in the wrong direction, arriving in Nybergsund very late. Despite this, Kevin came to meet me at my hotel, shared a beer, arranged to talk further the following day. He was right about the snow, and my sports editor was right about the story. the interview Beattie gave, holed up in a modest house in Norway’s east, remains among the most honest and revelatory I have heard. He spoke frankly of suicidal emotions, of how money ran through his hands like water, with no-one to advise or control. ‘If the car got a puncture I’d buy a new one,’ he said. ‘If the television stopped working, I bought another. It wouldn’t occur to me to get it repaired.’ And he only earned, at best, £275 a week. the injuries that had forced him out of the professional game in England were horrendous but football was all he knew so he played where he could, for a pittance. After Nybergsund, he signed for Clacton town. Beattie died this week, aged 64, and it is meaningless to say what a great player he was because better judges — sir Bobby Robson, terry Butcher, Mick Mills — have vouched for that. He is rightly revered as Ipswich’s finest talent, one who would have made many more than nine appearances for England had injury not destroyed some of the best years of his career. With nostalgia such a growth industry, however, Beattie is also a reminder that much about the good old days wasn’t so good with hindsight. that players are now better advised, better managed and better protected than they were when he played. It suits us to recall Beattie as a monster, a man made of granite, but what I heard that day suggested otherwise. He needed help; he needed guidance; he probably needed counselling. What you see on the field is the athlete; it isn’t always the man. On the day Beattie was told his career was over at 28, he sat with the doctor alone, no-one from the club, no-one from a management team, no outside support at all to console him or reassure him about what the future might hold. Advances in medicine may have made life different for Beattie, but advances in football certainly would. One imagines he would have been handled differently today. And how Ipswich could do with a fraction of that talent now.