The Second Half Read Free Page A

thirty-two and you’re coming to the edge of the cliff. A sports psychologist who once came to United said that the descent could be gradual, or ‘Bump!’ – you’re over the cliff. You just hope it will be gradual.
    I went downhill at United, in a nice way. I was still playing. I was doing okay; I wasn’t embarrassing myself. But I wasn’t dominating games like I used to. The great thing about top players coming to your football club is, you want to impress them. It’s their job to impress you, but you want to impress them. That’s why there’s a lift when a top player arrives. ‘Fuckin’ hell, I don’t want him to think I’m crap. I don’t want him thinking, “He’s on his way out”.’
    The dynamics of the club were changing. Huge figures had left. Peter Schmeichel went in 1999, and he was very hard to replace. We’d had Fabien Barthez, Mark Bosnich, Taibi, RoyCarroll. Now we had Tim Howard. But it would be 2005, when Edwin van der Sar arrived, before Schmeichel was really replaced.
    I had a bust-up with Peter when we were on a pre-season tour of Asia, in 1998, just after I came back from my cruciate injury. I think we were in Hong Kong. There was drink involved.
    Myself and Nicky Butt had had a night out, and we bumped into Peter at the hotel reception desk. It was about two in the morning. We said a few words to one another – a bit of banter, a bit of stick. I went to Nicky’s room for some room service, had a sandwich, got up to go – and Peter was waiting for me, outside the room.
    There’d been a little bit of tension between us over the years, for football reasons. Peter would come out shouting at players, and I felt sometimes that he was playing up to the crowd – ‘Look at me!’ He was probably also doing it for his concentration levels, keeping himself on his toes. But I felt he did it too often, as if he was telling the crowd, ‘Look at what I have to deal with.’ I wouldn’t say we disliked each other, but we weren’t best buddies either.
    He said, ‘I’ve had enough of you. It’s time we sorted this out.’
    So I said, ‘Okay.’
    And we had a fight. It felt like ten minutes. There was a lot of noise – Peter’s a big lad.
    I woke up the next morning. I kind of vaguely remembered the fight. I was sharing with Denis Irwin, and we were a few minutes late for the bus going to the airport. We got a call from the physio: ‘Where are you?’ Denis was one of the best pros you could ever come across, so being late for the bus tarnished him; you’d have thought he’d been caught with drugs or something. He was having a go at me.
    I remember saying to him, ‘I think I was fighting last night.’
    My hand was really sore and one of my fingers was bent backwards.
    The manager had a go at us as we were getting on the bus, and people were going on about a fight in the hotel the night before. It started coming back to me – the fight between myself and Peter.
    Throughout the flight, Peter wore his sunglasses. He never took them off, and it wasn’t very sunny.
    We landed – I don’t remember where. When the team arrived at a new destination for a game, two of the players had to go and do a press conference. And this time, it just happened to be myself and Peter.
    In the meantime, Nicky Butt had been filling me in on what had happened the night before. Butty had refereed the fight. He even got a new nickname for it – Mills Lane, after the famous boxing referee. Anyway, Peter had grabbed me, I’d head-butted him – we’d been fighting for ages.
    At the press conference, Peter took his sunglasses off. He had a black eye. The questions came at him.
    ‘Oh, Peter, what happened to your eye?’
    He said, ‘I just got an elbow last night, at training.’
    And that was the end of it. The tour finished eight or nine days later and nobody said anything – none of the staff, nobody. My hand had recovered, and Peter’s black eye had faded. But the first day back at the training ground,