‘The same people who called me a freak would ask for a picture’

Peter Crouch overcame fan abuse to establish himself as one of game’s most popular figures

There are many stories liable to provoke an out-loud snort of laughter from the reader in Peter Crouch’s new book How to be a Footballer, although the one about his secret Santa present for Rafael Benitez back in his Liverpool days might just take the gold medal.

Crouch and his team-mates had noticed that Benitez had begun wearing a leather jacket, and rather like David Brent in The Office seeking to imitate his new, more popular rival, suspected that he might be competing with Jose Mourinho. That Christmas, Benitez unwrapped his present – gifter unknown – to find a leather jacket and a Mourinho biography. “His face just fell,” Crouch recalls. “Oh no, I thought. I’ve actually offended him. It’s all gone wrong. I never told him it was from me. Until now. Sorry, Rafa.”

It is an unconventional autobiography, expertly ghostwritten by the BBC journalist Tom Fordyce, which captures perfectly Crouch’s self-deprecating style and eye for the absurd. It has been one of the bestsellers of the year and is shortlisted for the Telegraph Sports Book Award 2019.

With a high-charting BBC podcast along the same lines and a weekly Daily Mail column, Crouch, 38 next month and in the final year of his Stoke City contract, finds himself with a burgeoning media career just as he contemplates the end of more than 20 years as a professional. No-one has scored more headed goals in the Premier League than Crouch Crouch also holds the record for most substitute appearances in Premier League history I was the ghostwriter for his first autobiography, the 2007 Walking Tall, which – as a few of my colleagues have kindly pointed out – is a bit like producing David Bowie’s eponymous first album (peak chart position, 125th), but having no part in the Ziggy Stardust years.

I always thought that this remarkable footballer, who had played non-league and at World Cup finals, derided by away fans and now an everyman hero, had a great story to tell.

Now, in his more mature years, he has done so.

Crouch himself agrees that 2007, when he was out of favour with Benitez, was not the ideal time to launch a first stab at his life story. “I am probably more comfortable and less nervous about the problems if I start talking out. I am just less guarded, and the less guarded the better things have been.”

The new book’s success has been more about his unblinking assessment of elite football’s essential weirdness and less about the big revelations which had been a key component of his generation of England player autobiographies. Many of those from the likes of Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole were fatally timed to come out after the 2006 World Cup finals and were thus launched in a period when the English public were very much out of love with their underperforming team. For this book, Crouch says that he refused to be controversial for the sake of sales and, indeed, most of the time the butt of his jokes is himself. “Everyone that I have taken the mick out of, or told a story about, is someone I know properly or someone who has been a team-mate and I know can take it. I am not stitching anyone up. I am in a place now towards the end of my career where I just care a bit less.” The early stages of his career, leaving Tottenham Hotspur where he had done his apprenticeship for a first pro contract at Queens Park Rangers, was marked by the abuse he took for his height and body shape.

I reported on his breakthrough game in 2000 against Gillingham at Loftus Road, where even the QPR fans groaned when he came on.

He went on to inspire a two-goal comeback in which he scored and it turned out to be the making of him. Much more troubling were the “freak” taunts, which were very painful for him and his family in those early days.

Crouch has triumphed by always seeing the funny side – a lifetime, he says, “of having to win people over”. One suspects that there would be much swifter condemnation now than there was 18 years ago.

“As we saw recently, for some reason when you are on a pitch it’s regarded as totally fine to be abused,” he says.

“I don’t know why, but if I was walking down the street, the same people who called me freak would probably ask for a picture. It’s a real strange thing.

“That’s the way it was. I found it tough when I was a teenager coming through. There were times when I was like, ‘Do I want to put myself through this every week?’ But I came through it and I feel a lot stronger for the fact that I did.”

The only time he did weights seriously he felt it made him more injury-prone and so he has accepted his natural shape, although in the gym he says he has always been able to lift as much as his friend Jamie Carragher. We joke that he never takes his shirt off on the pitch.

“I wouldn’t want to get my