Now Crouchie’s a primetime player
Launching his first Saturday night show on BBC1, Peter Crouch talks about life after football – and why he’s found the perfect match in his model wife Abbey Clancy
Peter Crouch has always been known as the most chilled-out man in football. In February one sports commentator suggested the former player was so laid-back he could serve as a draft excluder (given that he’s 6ft 7in tall). That was February though. Pre-lockdown. In the meantime, the father-of-four has discovered the joys of home schooling. There have been tears, tantrums and theatrical stomping from the room – and that’s from him!
He tells me he and his wife Abbey (Clancy, the model and former Strictly winner) played paper-scissors-stone to decide who would have which child in their home ‘classroom’. Their schoolaged children are Sophia, nine, and Liberty, four. ‘I got the nine-yearold – the more taxing one. Actually, I’ve been enjoying that. I love the English. The maths is OK. It takes a bit of patience, but we’re OK. I’m learning, actually.’
What about little Liberty? Poor Abbey, it seems. ‘The four-year-old’s attention span is slightly lower, let’s put it like that. I’ve had a go but I ended up storming out. That’s bad, isn’t it? You look back and see this little girl with her head on the desk, breathing upside down or something.’
There are two more children in the mix. Johnny is two and baby Jack will turn one next month. Blimey. So how would he sum up lockdown parenthood? Perhaps he speaks for us all. ‘I love it. And I hate it. Maybe I loved it more at the start, but there are days when I think, “Get me out of this house!”
‘Obviously I’m getting to spend a lot more time with the kids, which is brilliant. It makes you focus, realise what’s important in life. But with four of them there’s no let-up. When we get them all in bed at night we collapse on the sofa and open some wine. It’s like a minicelebration – every night! – that we’ve survived another day.’
How true! How funny! How very Peter Crouch. This is the man whose column Ask Crouchie! sees him not only reveal footie secrets like his own hand of God moment, but also address left-field questions from readers such as which flavour of crisps should go in a sandwich (answer, cheese and onion with cheese, roast chicken with chicken, obviously).
It’s hard to have a conversation with him and not come away thinking one thing: someone please give this man his own show. Abbey should be a part of it too. On paper their marriage – millionaire footballer and leggy model – sounds predictably yawn, but the way Peter, 39, tells it, it’s charming and hilarious. He confides that Abbey’s need to have a tidy house, even with four kids and a hulking ex-footballer in it, drives him up the wall.
‘She wants everything to be tidy. Every room has to be perfect. She tries to tidy the play room when the kids are in it! I had to tell her to calm down with the cleaning. “Leave it! It’s carnage, but it’ll be carnage again tomorrow.” Does she listen? No. She’s in charge of all the house stuff.’ I suspect Abbey is in charge, full stop.
Thankfully, someone has now given Crouchie, as the fans know him, his own show – and it’s a primetime Saturday-night BBC1 show to boot. A year after he retired from the game, with 42 international appearances for England and 108 Premier League goals, the ex-striker has landed a show that isn’t a niche sports one but more mainstream.
Yes, Save Our Summer seems designed to entertain all those football fans who have nothing to watch, but it’s much wider in scope. It’s not exactly a chat show, more a TV party. There’ll be music, comedy, banter and possibly a bit of dancing, given his wife’s Strictly triumph and his own ‘Robot’ goal celebrations.
The series is billed as a ‘onestop shop of summery entertainment’. The presenting team will consist of Peter, former BBC Radio 1 presenter Maya Jama and comedian Alex Horne and his band the Horne Section. It’ll be quite heavy on the music, aiming ‘to fill the gap left by all those cancelled music festivals,’ says Peter. Mud will be missing too, obviously. ‘The whole idea is that it’s just a great laugh,’ he says. ‘We all need that.’
There’ll be big-name guests too, with Crouchie trawling through his own phone contacts list. Can he name names? Sadly, no. ‘But we’ve got some good names. Surprisingly so, really. That’s the thing about trying to get people at the moment
– no one’s doing any of their normal work. The big musicians aren’t touring. It’s quite good for us!’
The timing is indeed off-the-scale lucky. The show was planned anyway, but the Covid-19 pandemic meant a hasty reworking of the format to accommodate social distancing.
For Peter Crouch it’s quite a coup,
and an unusual one. While it’s not unheard of for footballers to segue into TV when they’ve hung up their boots (Match Of The Day’s Gary Lineker being the most successful example), they do tend to stick to sports telly. Crouchie, though, is a hard man to contain. His more mainstream trajectory began with his book How To Be A Footballer, which was published in 2018. Neither a how-to manual nor a traditional autobiography, the book was a revelation – a witty, insightful (and at times laugh-out-loud funny) account of the football world with all its bad tattoos and even worse haircuts. The man who’d been there (and almost bought the Ferrari to drape himself over) told it as it was.
This was a world where ludicrously paid young men were mollycoddled to the point where they were not expected (or trusted) to bring their own passports to an
‘Abbey tries to tidy the play room with the kids in it’
airport, nor pack their own phone chargers or even underpants. He spoke, intelligently, about what it is to find yourself in such a world, and what you need to survive it (or at least not be sucked so far down the ego-excess-lapdancer route that there is no return).
The secret of his current success is no secret at all. I suspect it’s the same thing that bagged him (he doesn’t quibble with the term) his supermodel wife. He is simply funny. He was famously once asked what he’d have been if he hadn’t been a footballer. ‘A virgin,’ he replied. Genius, really.
He says today that he has always understood the power of humour. You do when you’re a 6ft 7in teenager, it seems, because it deflects the bullies. So does being a star member of a football team. On the Graham Norton show last year it was revealed that even Prince Harry has found it OK to poke fun at him. During a charity football match, Harry apparently shouted, “Crouchie, how did you bag Abbey?” Entirely true, he says. ‘I get a lot of that. I thought it was very funny but I was shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say. Abbey and I do get that – both of us. I suppose people don’t really know us – all there is to know about us is how we look.’
Wasn’t he insulted though, even a bit? He could have pointed out to Prince Harry that Abbey was with him for his charm, charisma and the fact he made her laugh? ‘And don’t forget my dashing good looks,’ he says. Of course he does.
Anyway, part of the reason Crouchie seems such a novelty is that the bar isn’t that high with footballers. Very few of them are as impressive off the pitch as they are on it. He agrees, but defends the breed, up to a point, saying it’s part of the training to come across as brain-dead. ‘When you’re playing and doing interviews you’re trained to say nothing, to give nothing away. It’s how it is. It’s changing a bit now, with social media. You can sometimes see the personality coming through.’
Yes, and you can sometimes see the stupidity coming through too. ‘There is that. Some people let themselves down. I think you get that in every walk of life. Footballers do get a bad rap. There are ones who are ridiculous, there are some I don’t like, but it’s the same with bankers, with anyone really. There will be those who let themselves down, who give them all a bad name.’
He does have huge sympathy for the youngsters in the game, particularly those who get catapulted up the ranks, high and fast. ‘They’re expected to be role models, and they never asked for that. They’re adored, completely adored, and in this crazy world of testosterone, money, all that.’
He says he’s ‘no saint’ and has had his moments, but he’s never veered too far into that dangerous territory. Why? ‘I think I came into the game at just the right time. There was a lot of money around, but not as much as there was later.’ He also reckons that he didn’t go off the rails because he had years of struggle before success came. ‘It was slow progress. The ones I feel sorry for are the ones where it happens fast. That’s when the wheels come off.’
There is another reason, perhaps a key one. He had, and still has, a father who adored him and has been a part of every professional decision. ‘It was down to my dad, definitely. I’ve had the same management team since I was 14, but also my dad was there at every meeting then, and he’s still part of every decision. I talked through my retirement with him. I value his advice, and I feel sorry for players who don’t have a dad like mine. The higher up you go, the more you have people who want a part of you. I knew that my dad was only thinking about
‘Footballers get a bad rap, but some of them are ridiculous’
what was good for me – not himself.’
Perhaps his next book should be called How To Be A Retired
Footballer, because that chapter of a professional sportsperson’s life is always a fascinating – maybe pivotal – one. The success of his first book (there was a second one last year, I, Robot, which detailed further the madness of the professional footballer’s life) did give him the confidence to leave the game convinced that there was a second career in the wings.
He still admits to trepidation though. ‘When football’s been your whole life you worry you won’t adapt. I’ve seen it go wrong so many times. Players don’t have that structure, that discipline, and they fall into depression. I see why it happens. You’re not institutionalised exactly, but something like it. Coming out isn’t easy.’
He’s not a natural depressive – he says he’s a glass-half-full type – but still he was nervous. ‘I talked to Abbey, and my dad of course, and they said, “You’ll be fine. We know you.”’ Immediately the offers flooded in. He started to do a podcast (That Peter Crouch Podcast, and yes, that’s very funny too). There was a flurry of TV appearances. He was a man in demand – maybe too much.
‘I’d kind of sold Abbey the dream I’d be at home more, we’d be able to do stuff as a family, then immediately afterwards it didn’t work out like that because I was so busy. It meant being away more than I’d expected to be.’
And then... lockdown. ‘It has been fantastic for just spending time with the family. I know we’re lucky. We have a big garden, a nice house, but it has just made me appreciate the things that matter. It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s your family that’s important.’
The fact that he and Abbey defied all the critics (let’s face it, the footballer-model combo isn’t always a lasting one) is, he says, down to the fact that they’re both similar at heart. ‘She’s my best friend,’ he says simply. ‘We just like each other. She makes me laugh, and I make her laugh.’
How was that first meeting with her family then? Being a footie fan is one thing, having your daughter bring home a footballer she’s dating is another. ‘Ha ha, well, maybe there was a bit of tredipation at first,’ he says. ‘But once they got to know me...’
They always wanted a big family. They planned the first three, then came a little extra one. ‘I can’t say he was planned, no, but we wouldn’t have it any other way now.’
His daughters are daddy’s girls, but only up to a point. His eldest is a talented swimmer and he says he turns into a nightmare pushy parent at the poolside. ‘I’m the one screaming,’ he laughs. He’s quite good at being Embarrassing Dad too. ‘We were at a summer camp and Sophia said I was too tall, I was embarrassing her. I went to drop her off and she told me to stay round the corner and not be seen.’ Alas, the boys there did see him, and practically fainted that an football star was in their midst. ‘Then she changed her tune and asked me to come in, because the boys suddenly thought I was cool. She’s seeing the advantage of having a footballer dad.’ And if his girls want to bring home a footballer? ‘Well, it’ll depend which footballer,’ he says. ‘I’ll have to vet them.’