Why I’m playing for the Grenfell Tower victims
PETER CROUCH looks out towards west London from the vantage of Primrose Hill. In the distance, beneath the summer haze, is the place where he grew up and the football ground where he made his professional debut. There is also the charred shell of Grenfell Tower.
‘One of my best friends is a firefighter and he was there the day after,’ says Crouch, whose childhood home in Ealing is just five miles from the residential block where more than 80 people died in a fire on June 14.
‘Gregg told me about some dark things, firemen being so close but not being able to save people. The loss of life, the effect on families and the emergency services who responded, it’s devastating.
‘It really hit home, growing up so close. Mum drove past the next day and called me, she just could not believe it. You feel helpless, you want to do something.’
That is why Crouch will be back at Loftus Road this Saturday, when Queens Park Rangers host the Game4Grenfell charity match.
‘Football has the power to help,’ says the Stoke striker. ‘We’ve got two legends as captains, Les Ferdinand and Alan Shearer. I can play because it’s during the international break — and I’m a washed-up international now.
‘Going back to QPR as well, where it all began, will be special, so this means a lot to me.’ NOT all memories of Loftus Road are instantly happy ones. In the summer of 2000, aged 19, Crouch signed for second-tier QPR for £60,000, having failed to make the grade at Spurs.
‘It wasn’t a nice period,’ he says. ‘Because of how I looked, there was definitely a prejudice against me. People didn’t think I could play. I could see why, I weighed about eight stone and was six foot bleeding seven.
‘I didn’t know where to go when I was warming up because I was getting stick from both sets of fans. But I remember the night of Gillingham at home as if it were yesterday.
‘I’d missed a couple of sitters in my first few games and was on the bench. I was told to get stripped and heard someone behind the dug-out, “What the f*** you bringing him on for?”. That was a boost . . . I’d only played six times.
‘We were 2-0 down and the fans were p***** off anyway. A cross came in and I chested it down. As the ball dropped, I slipped. I heard the whole stadium groan.’
With that, Crouch throws his arms in the air and mimics the collective disappointment, before adding: ‘I was heading for the deck so I just swung a leg and lashed at it. Back of the net.
‘What a feeling. I then set up the equaliser and the place was bouncing. My belief changed with that.’
Indeed, Crouch stayed in the team for the rest of the season, scored 12 goals and was club player of the year.
‘Looking back,’ he adds, ‘that was perhaps the most important goal I’ve ever scored.’
We have met in The Queen’s pub at the foot of Primrose Hill.
‘At least I don’t have to go all the way to the top to get a good view,’ he says. This area of north London is one of many he has previously called home during his 36 years. Born in Macclesfield when his parents were in their early twenties, the family moved to Singapore for work.
Having escaped a kidnap attempt by communist guerrillas during a holiday in Malaysia, they returned to London. With nowhere to live, they stayed in a YMCA hostel on Tottenham Court Road for six months.
By the time of his first day at primary school, Crouch was already ‘a full head above everyone else’. But with that came attention, not all of it well intended.
‘I’ve always been the tallest, I didn’t shoot up. That’s who I am,’ says Crouch, who has a younger sister.
‘It helped me. If you’re different in any way at school then you’re going to get a bit of abuse. You learn to deal with it in a way where people don’t come back at you again.
‘Nothing can prepare you fully for how harsh football fans can be, but it makes you more robust, able to deal with a lot of what is thrown at you in life. You learn to cope.’
Crouch, it would seem, has always found a way to deal with life’s challenges. Such as the time his parents — Bruce and Jayne — arranged for him to sit the entrance exam at a private school. His dad had by now forged a successful career in advertising.
‘I had a total disregard for that exam,’ he says. ‘I didn’t even finish half the questions, there was no way I was going to that school. ‘It was the best thing I ever did. They would have made me play rugby — look at me, I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes.’ Tennis, however, he could handle. And at 14 he was made to choose which sport he wanted to pursue. Was the dream Wembley or Wimbledon? ‘I think I could have made it pro because I would have thrown myself into it, like I did with football,’ he says. ‘My serve was big. The problem was, when it came back I was in serious trouble. I just used to hope it never did. So maybe I did make the right choice.’ His decision was aided by a season at Stamford Bridge a few years earlier. In the early 90s, Chelsea’s home had an unfamiliar look. Not only were there cars parked behind the goal, there was a ballboy who almost scaled six feet.
‘I was always crawling under those bloody cars, it was like playing in the park,’ says Crouch.
‘I remember one game when they were getting beat and Gareth Hall had a right pop at me because I was taking too long to get the ball.
‘They turned it around and were winning — then Dennis Wise started having a go at me for being too quick! It must have looked strange, Dennis was staring up at
‘But it was great to be that close to it in the tunnel, the smell of the Deep Heat. I knew then I wanted to be part of that, it was such a buzz.’ ‘IF I had to show my children one match from my career and say, “Look, that was me at my very best”, it would be my hat-trick for Liverpool against Arsenal,’ says Crouch, who was signed by Rafa Benitez for £7million from Southampton in 2005 and is remembering his perfect treble — right foot, left foot, header — from a 4-1 victory two years later.
‘It was just a great time. We finished third, reached the Champions League final and I was the first player postwar to score 10 goals in a calendar year for England.
‘One regret, we should have won the World Cup in 2006. That was our time. I look back at that side and think, “How did we not get to a final at least?”
‘Personally, I was flying, every time I pulled on an England shirt I thought I would score.’
That, though, could not be said of his first four months at Anfield, when his goal drought extended to 24 hours of football.
The coverage felt like it was around the clock too.
‘Every newspaper, every day on TV . . . it was sending me a bit mental,’ he says.
‘I just wanted to stay indoors until I had scored. But my dad got hold of me and said, “Listen, you have to get out there and face it”. So he kept taking me on these drinking sessions . . . and remember, that was a long goal drought, I was nearly an alcoholic come the end!
‘After games we’d go for a few beers and talk things through.
‘I wouldn’t necessarily advise it, but it helped me so much. Dad was brilliant.’
It is late afternoon and the sun is out, does he fancy a beer now?
‘No thanks, finely tuned athlete, aren’t I?’ he replies, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
It is not hard to see why Crouch is admired far beyond the clubs he has represented.
A dad of two girls — Sophia, six, and Liberty, two — Crouch is 37
A cross came in, I chested it down . . . as the ball dropped I slipped and the whole stadium groaned
in January. His wife, the model Abigail Clancy, is expecting their third child.
Is now the time to consider retirement?
‘Definitely not,’ he says, ‘I’ll play until I’m 40. I can still do what I’ve always done, I was never quick. I love it, every day, I never miss training.
‘I’ve also noticed that it’s a much harder job at home, so that’s another very good reason to play as long as I can!’
Crouch has recently finished a two-week stint as a guest DJ on Radio X. It is, he admits, an option for when he does finally retire. ‘I loved it, it’s a passion,’ says the man who once crowdsurfed at a Kasabian gig.
‘I said to them, “If I do it, then I want to do it my way”, it would be my music.’ So what was his first record? ‘Ah no, I played that safe: Oasis — Live Forever,’ he smiles.
It is, then, almost an afterthought when the question is put to him about management. After all, of his 13 team-mates from the 2006 World Cup squad who have since retired, only one of them — Steven Gerrard — is even coaching.
Crouch’s response comes as a surprise. ‘ Absolutely,’ he says. ‘I’ve worked with some of the best managers and have seen good things and bad.
‘For 10 years maybe I’ve been thinking about how I would do it my way.
‘I’ve got a lot of experience and I’m good with people. I don’t just want to step away from the game, I’ve got too much to pass on.’
This takes our conversation in a different direction. Crouch has some advice for the young players of today.
He draws breath, and starts: ‘The likes of (Wayne) Rooney and Gerrard always knew they were right up there, ready. But they are the exception.
‘I wasn’t like that, I had to work. I had to go on loan to Dulwich Hamlet and the Swedish second division, take the stick, come back stronger. And trust me, there weren’t many people at those games, I could hear everything.
‘I wasn’t really ready for the Premier League until I was 23, but I never gave up.
‘I see far too many now playing in what they think are big games against Manchester United Under 23s, but they’re not.
‘You have to take yourself out of that comfort zone.
‘A lot of them are being well paid to play academy matches.
‘ With some, the weaker characters, maybe that has affected their desire. You can earn a good living and get away with not doing a lot.
‘They’re like, “Why on earth would I go and play non-League and travel on a coach for seven hours eating a cold sandwich?” They prefer the luxury coach, a hot meal and playing at Old Trafford.
‘The lads who want to get out there and push themselves, they are the ones who invariably succeed.
‘You don’t want to sound like a bitter old man and some of the younger lads I love. But the thing I can’t stand is the Instagram training video where they film themselves running up a hill or doing weights at home with the caption, “No days off”.
‘Well, I’ve been watching them train and they weren’t lifting a leg and are never in the gym. Then it’s all over social media that they don’t have a day off and I’m like, “Yeah, because you’ve just had a day off at training”, it’s all for show.’
Stoke’s academy players would do well to listen. The club may now boast five Champions League winners, but none of them can match Crouch when it comes to his 700-plus career games, 104 Premier League goals and 22 for his country.
Considering all of that, how much would he be worth at his peak in today’s transfer market?
‘I’m not putting a price on it,’ he says.
OK, we’ll do it for you — £30m? He shoots straight back: ‘England centre forward, scoring goals in the Champions League . . . There are players going for £10m and they’ve barely played in the Premier League. So £30m? I’d be worth much more!’
I’ll play on until I’m 40. I love it. I never miss a day’s training. I can still do what I’ve always done . . . I was never quick!