ANY SEMBLANCE OF A truce between the FA and Manchester United will end when hostilities resume over Rio Ferdinand this week. After weeks of claim and counter-claim, the defender’s “alleged” failure to comply with a routine drugs test will be dealt with at a two-day hearing in Bolton, beginning on Thursday. Depending on whom you believe, he will be suspended from competition for anything between three and six months.
Footballers are quite often ignorant and blasé about rules and regulations. Some players strut around with an attitude that they are untouchable, and this immaturity does not always wear off as they get older, a source of ill-feeling among the public. If Ferdinand is guilty of anything, it is of ignorance, not to mention stupidity. I am sure that he has not taken performance-enhancing drugs, but he can have little excuse for what has happened; then again, neither did I when I was repeatedly injected with a substance during my time at Marseilles.
To this day, I don’t have a clue what it was. The club doctor would only tell me that it would give me an adrenalin boost, and I never felt inclined to ask the rest. Besides, my chairman at the time was Bernard Tapie, an imposing man in everything but physical stature. His wishes were not to be disregarded. Whatever the substance was, my performances improved. That didn’t make it acceptable. I cling to the sliver of hope that it was legal, though in reality, I’m 99 per cent sure it wasn’t.
I was fortunate that I was never caught. Most of the Marseilles players were participating, so it seemed silly and embarrassing to decline and make a fuss. Although Marc Bourier was the team manager, Tapie did all the talking before the game. He was intimidating and aggressive, touring the dressing-room and forcefully slapping the players, growling and thrusting his groin at us. Tapie could act like a complete lunatic at times . He revelled in the initiation ceremony when a new player was to have his first jab, lifting up the back of his shirt and waiting for a staple-gun, laden with 20 needles, to be injected into his lower back. He stretched his arms, clenched his fists and roared with approval.
Then it was my turn. “Don’t worry, you will feel good after,” a couple of players said. With Tapie making it clear my place in the team rested upon me partaking, I chose to have a go. I already felt self-conscious and vulnerable, exposed to a new dressing-room and unable to speak the language.
Maybe the effect would just be physiological, but I definitely noticed the difference. I felt sharper, more energetic, hungrier for the ball. The pain lasted seconds. The jab left blotchy marks at the bottom of my back for a couple of days and my wife, then my mistress, was so shocked that she asked her father, who was a surgeon, to have a look.
But he couldn’t fathom what the injection was. When one day I showed the slimmest signs of reservation, Tapie lifted his shirt up and blasted himself in the back. Other players, anxious at the contents of the syringe, pretended to have taken their jabs or went to the toilet at the appropriate moment. On another occasion, Tapie summoned his personal physician from Paris, we lined up and rolled up our sleeves for a booster injection.
The shots in the back were delivered by a club doctor between 45 and 60 minutes before games in a room adjacent to the dressing-room, where players in the middle of changing were howling with approval or laughing at the sound of a team-mate’s stinging pain. The shots were only given before home games and never in training. I asked the club masseur if it was legal.
“Of course, it is OK,” he smiled. I reasoned he meant it was safe, rather than legal, reflecting that nearly ten years ago, drug-testing was largely ignored and the Marseilles club doctor conveniently conducted the club’s testing. Additionally, Tapie boasted that he ran French football. I refused to take the jabs in European matches, where Uefa conducted drug testing, for fear of a lengthy ban had I been tested and an illegal drug found.
I scored 61 league goals for Marseilles in two seasons, most of them coming at home, and with those goals came the adulation I had always craved in England. I felt good about myself. It would have been easy for me to turn down the injections, but I reflected on the criticism I had endured when I played for Chelsea, among other clubs, and the embarrassment my family must have felt as supporters chanted abuse at me. Now suddenly I was a star, however superficial that may sound. I was a hero in Marseilles, nicknamed “Tony Goal”.
Sat in restaurants in Marseilles, I would be offered champagne for free. My former wife also became aware that the adoration had changed me. I had confidence. My performances, helped too by my change in lifestyle and training harder in France, had reached a higher level. I didn’t want to let that drop, but with the praise came increased pressure to continue playing well. In my desire not to disappoint, I submitted to injections more frequently.
The quality of my football was a release at a time when my personal life was muddled. I was constantly bickering with my former wife. My mistress was pregnant. Approaching 32, and the end of my two-year contract, I could not financially afford for Marseilles not to offer me a new deal. I was ignorant, greedy. Once I signed a new contract, I refused to have the injections immediately. Then, I was in a position to say “no”.
It may sound as if I am excusing taking drugs, if it can offer an emotional benefit. I’m not. I knew I was possibly doing wrong. Had I been tested, and an illegal substance found, I would have had to accept the punishment. It was a risk I was prepared to take. I console myself now with the small chance that whatever I was given was legal. That, I reason, is my saviour, however much in my heart I know it probably wasn’t.
