EMILE HESKEY
THE EX-ENGLAND STRIKER, 44, TELLS TOM WIGGINS ABOUT VAR, STATS AND BECKS THE EARLY ADOPTER
Who was the most techsavvy player you shared a dressing room with?
I remember when the first ever iPod came out I hadn’t got a clue what it was. I saw David Beckham had it. He was telling me how it does this and how it does that. I was used to having CDs and now there was this thing with all your tunes on. I just didn’t get it but now look! Becks was more tech-savvy than a lot of us.
Is there anything you really hate about technology?
Not really. It helps my memory to try and remember every password that I put into different things. I think I’ve got about eight. The funny thing is, I don’t actually know my passwords as such, it’s more muscle memory. I kind of remember my passwords by where my fingers go.
How do you feel about VAR in football?
We begged for something like this for years so we can’t just get rid of it because of a few teething problems. There’s always going to be a progression, and it’s always going to get better and better, and I think it is getting better. We’re spending less time talking about it and more time praising it. You’ve just got to tweak things every now and again. I think it’s here to stay but it needs to be tweaked so there’s less time between the stopping and starting.
There are a lot of stats in football now. How would you have fared with that?
We were using stats back then but not to the same extent so it’s nothing new as such, it’s just that the level of detail now has got a lot higher. It’s used differently. Inevitably your eye will tell you certain things anyway. You only use the stats to back it up or it might tell you to look at it a particular way. I probably wouldn’t have been top of many stats tables because I was a forward. The midfielders should be top when it comes to running and stuff like that. I remember playing for the national team and one of the coaches said I kept the ball 90 per cent of the time when it came in to me, and I just went, ‘OK.’ I think he thought I’d think it was fantastic but ain’t that what I’m supposed to do?
Heskey worked with LG Electronics on its Laptop Library, helping to improve young people’s digital education