REUNIONS ARE DISAPPOINTING affairs. You catch up with old schoolmates you never liked, get drunk on flat punch and, while Kajagoogoo blasts out from the PA, you make an ill-judged pass at your French teacher. Never go back. But sometimes it is different. Take Steve Claridge. His has been an itinerant career, a maverick trawl through the underbelly of football. He is an outlaw, refusing to lose his eccentricities to any established code, and as such is loved wherever he has been.
If Claridge ever made it to his school reunion he would be the centre of attention. “So, what happened to you, Steve?” “Oh, I played football for a soft-porn magnate, lost a million quid and had this heart problem that brought me out in a nasty rash in hot weather.” How can you not like that? That is the glory of an inglorious career that has been spent almost entirely in the lower divisions. Claridge is a winner because he is a lovable loser. He is Del Boy with screw-in studs.
Rules have never bothered him. He is unaware that playground law states strikers are poseurs. They wear their collars up, use moisturiser and believe the earth revolves around them. By contrast, his partnership with Ian Marshall at Leicester City was more a mix of Stig of the Dump, scurvy and second-hand shopping.
Claridge, now 36 and still defying logic and fashion at Millwall, was sponsored by the poshest of gentlemen’s tailors when plying his trade at Filbert Street. He knew it was ironic, that someone was gently taking the mickey, but he did not care. This was his way. The modus operandi has never changed: one sock rolled down, sub-Subbuteo shin pads in there somewhere, hair either cropped to squaddie status or unkempt like a Seventies throwback.
He is so loved because he exudes an utter lack of vanity in a plastic world. This was why his biography, Tales From The Boot Camps, is still one of the best football books of them all. Not for him the mealy-mouthed dross of the bestsellers list or wearisome self-justification. Of his gambling, he said: “When you go into a bookmakers it feels like being a character in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: you’re going through the wardrobe into another world. It’s just like a fantasy.” Roy Keane may be the sort of man who could get road rage watching Top Gear, but he could not lace Claridge’s mismatched boots for brutal honesty.
There are no airs or graces with Claridge. He was just as happy at Aldershot — where dog dirt littered the makeshift training pitch on the car park and the players received rotten turkeys as Christmas bonuses — as he was during his two seasons in the top flight. He has never changed from the man who sold fruit and veg from the back of the battered old Escort in which he also hid bundles of cash.
These are the stories that have endeared Claridge to the hopeless romantic that festers deep within every gnarled and bitter football fan. His soundbites — likening pre-season training on Dunstable Downs to a scene from Zulu because of Birmingham City’s amorphous squad — also fuelled the myth that Claridge was a pub player who had got lucky. Even the last-minute goal that took Leicester into the Premiership flew in off his shin. The fairytale was always laced with a self-deprecating rider.
But it was a myth and it irked Claridge. He knew he was far more than a hard-working journeyman. His first touch was excellent and he created as well as scored. But his unwillingness to play the fame game provided others with delusions of mediocrity. He proved he could cut it at the top as he helped Leicester to shrug off the mantle of yo-yo club. By the time he won the Coca-Cola Cup for Martin O’Neill’s side, the iconoclast had become an icon.
And just about everyone loved him for it. He may have gone his own way, had an apathetic approach to training and squandered his money, but his vulnerability only added to his popularity. Claridge once did a spot of house-sitting for Iwan Roberts, his team-mate. Roberts returned to find his house a wreck. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes, clothes were discarded on the floor and a flock of stray cats scavenged in the garden. Nevertheless, Roberts recalled: “My wife still thinks the sun shines out of Steve’s backside.”
But sometimes reunions do not work out, even for favourite rogues. Claridge went back to his roots when he rejoined Portsmouth, his hometown club. He even graduated to player-manager. Three-and-a-half months later, it ended in tears. Claridge was devastated when Milan Mandaric, the chairman, said he was not wanted. Graham Rix took over and Claridge nursed yet more wounds.
Becoming a manager should be the next step. The fans will love him but chairmen may be less giving. Claridge is tainted by his own reputation. Will anyone take a chance on Gambling Man? Will Millets Man be able to work with the suits? It can only be hoped that someone does take a punt. This is a man who thought he had ME or MS a few years back. The problem proved to be the pills he had been popping to ease his heart condition. Even such a serious scenario became tinged with humour when Claridge escaped a pre-season outing in Greece, insisting the heat would set off an allergic reaction.
If there is one thing that Claridge does not have a problem with it is heart. That is all there is to him. It is why he is respected and why he will always be welcome back.
1984 Makes league debut for Bournemouth
1996 Joins Leicester City for £1.2 million
1996 Scores extra-time winning goal in first division play-off final against Crystal Palace
1997 Leicester beat Middlesbrough to win League Cup
1997 Publishes autobiography, Tales from the Boot Camps
1998 Moves to home club Portsmouth and becomes player-manager
2000 Fined £900 by FA after betting on Portsmouth to beat Barnsley, a game in which he scored a hat-trick
2001 Joins Millwall
