I WAS CONSTANTLY SURPRISED at the things that were happening to me in Russia. And we’re talking about my second day in Saint Petersburg here!
It was the morning of our first training session at the ground in Udelnaya, a neighbourhood as grey as Arsene Wenger’s hair after a string of defeats with Arsenal. I was in top shape. Of course I was; I hadn’t been drinking the night before. No headache. No hangover. Perfect. I hadn’t slept that much, obviously, but I wasn’t tired. To be honest, I’m rarely tired, and can function on just a couple of hours’ sleep a night.
The other guys had a lot more problems. My God, it was like I’d been transferred to Comedy Capers FC! I was expecting Laurel and Hardy any moment.
Arshavin was there, but at the same time he wasn’t. He was still pissed and, because of the state he was in, Russia’s best footballer managed to ... fall over the ball! At first I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. He simply couldn’t stand up straight! And he wasn’t the only one ...
It was ten a.m.
Dick saw it too. I was wondering how long it would take him to put his foot down. Not long. A few more half-baked somersaults later, and he started kicking some balls (leather ones, don’t get me wrong!) before he took off, gesticulating wildly. The man was not amused!
We didn’t see him again that morning. I didn’t even get the chance to tell him how happy I was to be one of the boys again, after all those weeks.
When Dick’s away the boys will play, and that’s exactly what we did: playing a little game of footy without a referee. It was the only option. There simply wasn’t anybody left who could blow the whistle, as Cor had taken off too. Not that he went immediately.
‘Cor?’
‘Cor!’
‘Cor!’
‘Cor, are you coming with me or what?’
Poor Cor was oblivious. And it wasn’t on purpose. He was still a bit intoxicated himself after me dragging him out of club Maximus and putting him to bed. No doubt Dick wasn’t aware of that!
Strangely enough, after this farcical gathering which was meant to be a professional training session, I thought, I’m gonna have one hell of a time playing with these guys. Together we’re gonna win the title. I know it!
Out of the 24 players on the pitch, 20 had been drinking the night before. It was unheard of – and this comes from a guy who has played in Scotland! But, these lads were a single unit. A unit of Fighting Spirits.
They were all international players representing their respective countries. There were the Russians, of course, including Andrey Arshavin, Igor Denisov, Vyacheslav Malafeev and Aleksandr Anyukov, later to be joined by fellow countrymen Pavel Pogrebnyak, Igor Semshov, Roman Shikorov, Oleksandr Horshkov and Konstantin Zyryanov. Then we had South Korean Young-Min Hyun, as well as Martin Skrtel from Slovakia, Ivica Krizanac from Croatia, Radek Sirl from the Czech Republic and Anatoliy Tymoshchuk, the cannonball from Ukraine.
Yes, unknown names to most of you, I’m sure, but, believe me, these guys knew how to play a game of football! Especially Anatoliy, our new captain. Dick called him ‘the best libero in the world’. Later on, he would win the Champions League with Bayern Munich. You can’t do that if you’re a total flapjack!
Yes, there were all sorts and in all conditions, in this squad. But birds of a different feather can still flock together, as we proved. And when, on top of that, the training sessions are good, prizes are up for grabs.
And the training was good! The craftsmanship of Dick and Cor was unsurpassed. I loved the fact that they let us practise with the ball for most of the time, unlike the endless running sessions that were common in Russia.
But Dick wanted high standards – and a lot of the guys had difficulties with that. They were used to Czech coach Vlastimil Petrzela, who did an impersonation of the Invisible Man for most of the time (the players saw him only once a week, on a Friday morning).
With Dick it was a completely different story! He was on the training field every single day. That’s how fanatical the wee man is. Only the day after the match before, he let Cor Pot and Russian assistant Nikolai Vorobjev do the training. Dick wanted perfection, full stop, but the players were allowed to laugh – and that was a novelty too. They were even allowed to talk to each other! Unheard of, up until then. Before Dick they had been drilled like robots.
Another thing Dick introduced was giving each other a compliment once in a while. Applaud after a good performance. Simple things, I agree, but they made a difference. Through it, players were creating a tight bond with each other.
Sometimes Dick got angry. And if Dick gets angry ... Well, ask Arshavin. God in boots in Russia, but Dick didn’t spare him. Nobody would normally dare to do a thing like this, but Dick even suspended him in the middle of the season! But, I have to say, Andrey had asked for it ...
One night before a clash with Spartak Moscow, Arshavin had gone into town, although he wasn’t allowed to. Together with Denisov and Anyukov, they cleansed themselves with vodka. Dick erupted when he found out. He felt hurt; he’d thought he could trust his boys. So, he decided they had to be punished – not with a fine, as the guys were loaded, but by putting them on the bench during one of the biggest games of the season.
Russia was astonished, but Dick wasn’t impressed. Discipline is discipline, and trust is trust. Dick showed the lads who the real hot shot was: not three Russian superstars, but a guy from the streets of The Hague. And it wasn’t until the trio apologised, on Zenit’s website, that Dick put them back in his squad. They learned their lesson well!
Being the little nosy parker he is, Dick clashed with more people than just his players. On certain days, he even felt the urge to shout at Cor. As he let rip in Dutch, I could understand every single word of it. It was highly amusing; still, Dick and Cor agreed on nine out of ten things, so their verbal fights were rare.
Cor had a thick skin, so he could deal with Dick’s displays of unhappiness quite well. Fedor Lunnov couldn’t. After having had the easiest job in Russian football for years, all of a sudden he had to accept the fact that Big Brother, sorry, Little General was watching him – every single day. If Fedor did something that Dick didn’t approve of, he could expect the worse.
According to Dick, Fedor didn’t do anything right. Socks? Wrong. Training shoes? Wrong. Tickets? Wrong. I felt sorry for Fedor, as he was constantly on the receiving end of Dick’s wrath. But what could he do? Nothing! And he knew it. If Dick wanted something to happen, it had to happen. No question. I’d heard stories of chairmen or club owners who entered the dressing room with a view on who was going to play and who wasn’t. Not so at Zenit. Sergey Fursenko, our president who had arrived from mighty sponsor Gazprom, never showed up amidst the smelly socks and sweaty shirts. Rightly so, as Dick wouldn’t have tolerated that. He would have thrown him out, for sure.
He’d done that with Sean Connery already! Shortly before a Rangers match, chairman David Murray thought it would be a nice idea to introduce the one and only James Bond to us. The Little General didn’t agree and sent him away.
The name is Advocaat, Dick Advocaat.
Dick ruled at Zenit. He decided everything. If the pitch wasn’t to his liking, Gazprom gave him new grass. Just like that. It made sense. A good pitch would improve the football and lead to results. And good results were what Zenit wanted from him. It was as simple as that.
Although not quite Michel Roux Jr, Dick even took care of the food. In the Ritz-Carlton, our regular hotel in Moscow, he would discuss the menu with the chefs. It had to be proper athletes’ fare, not just pub grub.
Next step: private hotel rooms for everybody. Just as I was used to with the Dutch national team. The Zenit players were grateful for this. Sometimes, in places outside Moscow, hotels weren’t big enough to give every player his own room. Take Grozny, for instance. Horrid place. I’ve been in, well, thousands of hotel rooms, but this one in the capital of Chechnya was the worst of the lot. It had a star – yes, one! – but even that was overrated. No restaurant, no internet, nothing! Actually, we couldn’t find a decent eating place in the whole of Grozny, so we ended up having dinner at ... an old lady’s down the road!
There we were, a bunch of spoiled-rotten footballing millionaires, waiting for this Grozny granny to serve us whatever she had cooked; at her kitchen table, in the slum that she called home. Top football in Russia ...
She did her best, this old woman, but the food was – how to say this without being rude to her? – well, strange, and it stank! It looked (and smelled) like a pile of zombie body parts after a car crash. Yuck! It was impossible to eat it without heaving it back up involuntarily.
From then on, I always made sure I had some cookies and candy bars with me. If possible, I would have taken my own bed as well. Pigs would have demanded another one too, in that ‘one star’ hotel in Grozny, which was hardly more than a shed. So, when I heard the news that Ruud Gullit was going to be the new manager at Terek Grozny, I was puzzled, to say the least. I thought the former Rasta Man had lost it! Not because Ramzan Kadyrov, the club’s suspicious chairman, paid him with bribe money. I didn’t want any of that. C’mon, whoever objects to that is simply envious. Did this make Ruud a criminal? Had he killed anyone? Please! Some people have all the luck; others don’t have any. That’s life!
I was thinking more about the practical side of his decision. What was he going to do there? After years of war Grozny was reduced to nothing. So Gulliman must have lived somewhere else. Like the players of Guus Hiddink’s FC Anzhi, who didn’t stay in the too-dangerous Daghestan, but in Moscow.
Incidentally Gullit was fired after six months, for spending ‘too much time in Grozny’s nightclubs’. Nightclubs? What nightclubs? I’ve only seen soldiers there. They’d stop our bus every five minutes. Checkpoints galore! Unnecessary, I thought initially, until I heard that one week earlier, on the eve of the Grozny v. Kazan match, the Russian army had found a bomb dangling on the door knob of ... the hotel where we were staying! So the presence of the army did make sense!
We were distracted, to put it mildly, but we won the game against Terek Grozny 4–1. That’s how professional we were. I didn’t feel scared with all those soldiers and tanks around. After all, they weren’t going to kill an entire football team, were they? But I was still delighted when the journey home approached. Back to safe and beautiful Saint Petersburg. I don’t like places where you hardly see a woman. I’m glad Dick agreed and made our obligatory trips to Grozny as short as possible.
Moscow was the other end of the spectrum. A wonderful city, I loved being there! We always stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, a stone’s throw away from Red Square. Now, I’m not the world’s most cultural person, but I’ve always found it a fascinating place. HQ of the Russian Federation – impressive! Sitting there, after dinner, with a cup of coffee, enjoying the view of the Kremlin – brilliant!
Sometimes we visited Lenin’s mausoleum, which really is beyond imagination. Enormous. It was as good as Mao’s grave, which I’d seen during my trip to China in 1993, with Fortuna. So, apart from winning the odd Cup, I can say I’ve seen two of the world’s most famous tombs!
Walking through the streets of Moscow was done in my Zenit outfit. No problem at all. Nobody bothered me. The only people who came up to me were Scots who wanted to have their picture taken with me. And they included Celtic fans, which, I must say, made me very proud.
Dick didn’t mind that we were wandering around town, as long as we were back in our rooms by eleven. He checked. No problem – we were always in on time.
With girls ... that was our little secret.
Dick didn’t know that. He never saw us leaving the lobby with a lady. Of course not, she had her own key! We would leave it in an envelope at reception. Lots of times, as Dick and I were chatting in the hotel lobby over a last cup of coffee, I would hear the sound of high heels trotting towards the elevator. Got him! And her, later on.
Dick always wanted to be the man in charge, and if things were not going his way he would become abusive, with players, officials, anyone.
And I wasn’t an exception. As much as he liked me he could still get very, very angry with me. Like, for instance, on that night in Marbella, January 2007. He was totally fed up with me.
‘I don’t want to see you at Zenit any more. Go and find yourself another club!’
That’s the adrenaline, I thought. In a few hours’ time he’ll have calmed down.
Yes, he calmed down, eventually, but he hadn’t changed his mind. ‘Sorry, Fernando, your Zenit days are over.’
This was six months after I’d arrived. He told me he’d warned me enough. So there I was, in my hotel room, calling my agent Rob Jansen. ‘Rob, we seriously have to search for another club.’
‘What have you done this time?’ he sighed.
I told him that I had fought with Vladislav Radimov during a friendly in Málaga against a local amateur team. I hadn’t KO’d him, but it was a punch Mike Tyson wouldn’t be too ashamed of.
‘Radimov?’ Rob asked. ‘Your teammate?’
‘Yeah,’ I answered. ‘That’s what makes this whole case so, er, complicated.’
No regrets there. The guy had asked for it. I don’t tolerate it when an older player curses at youngsters non-stop. Okay, they have to learn things the hard way. After all, so did I. But it has to be done in a reasonable manner. And, more than that, you should be an example to them. Radimov wasn’t. He was lazy that game, lazy as hell. And that irritated me, until I couldn’t take it any longer.
‘For once, keep your big mouth shut!’ I yelled at him. ‘And if you can’t, try saying those things to me, not to the kids!’ And I reminded him about his stupid behaviour a few months earlier, which had cost us the title.
Out of respect to him, I’d never broached the subject before. But now I had lost my patience with him. It was time to tell him the truth.
He looked at me sheepishly. This made me even angrier. ‘You know what? You’re just a lousy footballer! Totally useless! Time to find another job, you talentless jerk!’
I don’t know if he heard me. What I do know is that he felt the jab that came with it. Actually, it was more than one blow: it was three. I think. In all honesty, I lost count. He was lucky that Erik Hagen and some other guys stepped in, otherwise I would have finished him.
I’d never been that angry before. And I couldn’t calm down. Even after we had been sent off, I still wanted to attack him, but too many teammates were keeping me away from him.
In the dressing room I came to my senses.
The fight was the talk of the town and footage of it was shown all over Spain. No, all over the world! Fighting teammates, that was unique. Big hit on YouTube.
I never liked the guy – he was always badmouthing Dick and me – so it wasn’t our first clash. A few months earlier, during a game against FK Rostov, we ended up face to face. Same reason. I think it was poor Martin Skrtel, later of Liverpool fame, who he was trying to humiliate.
Luckily, a day after the Battle of Málaga, Dick told me I could stay. He’d had a meeting with the squad in which the boys told him that they wanted to keep me. They needed a Fighting Spirit in the race to the first title in ages, and there was only a small fine for Radimov and me in the end.
So I was back on the phone to Rob Jansen. He told me he was relieved that Dick had changed his mind, because it had been impossible for him to find me another club. The press had branded me the bad boy again and no team was interested in me any more.
Because of the incident I rose in Zenit’s hierarchy. People listened more to me than before. I wonder why ... No, I don’t.
I even came to terms with Radimov. We would never be friends, but ‘good colleagues’ was a possibility.
We had been in Spain because of the climate. The Russian winter was simply too cold to play football; that’s why teams escaped to sunnier places. And not for a few days, like Dutch teams do in winter, but for a few weeks.
Money didn’t matter, thanks to our rich sponsor Gazprom. Our training ground in Udelnaya alone, my God! I was used to a locker for my valuables. Unheard of at Zenit – they provided you with an entire room with your own television set! Everybody got dressed and undressed in their private room – very unusual.
And Zenit was ahead of the rest when it came to the medical side of the business too.
I’d noticed that, the day before games, one player after the other would visit our doctor. I was curious. So I decided to do it too. Well, I had a look around the corner and then backed off.
Needles and syringes all over the place. Players hooked up to drips, laughing. It looked like a secret laboratory. I was flabbergasted.
From behind his desk Doctor Pukhov saw me staring. He smiled. ‘Want some too?’
He told me they were vitamins. Liquid preparations. According to him, it was magic. ‘Makes you recuperate a lot faster. Fit to play another game within a day!’
‘Okay, whatever,’ I said, not overly enthusiastic.
Without thinking about the possible consequences, I laid down on a bed. In went the needle and I closed my eyes. Not because of the pain, but more out of fear. It was strange! I didn’t have a clue what Doctor Pukhov was putting in me. He’d talked to me before he prepared the vaccination, but it was all medical lecture and Russian chit-chat.
As I walked back to my room I was annoyed that I hadn’t paid more attention. Okay, it hadn’t been blood, but what was this ‘liquid energy’ that he had given me? All I knew about were vitamin pills, shakes and creatine. But this, this was something I’d never come across before.
I wasn’t too happy about it. I kept thinking about Frank de Boer, Edgar Davids and Jaap Stam, who had been caught for the alleged use of nandrolone (an anabolic steroid), way back in 2001. They’d always denied it, but they had been fined nonetheless. I was scared this would happen to me too.
Still, I couldn’t imagine Dick taking the risk. Not now, on the verge of Zenit’s international breakthrough. He would never allow his players to use dope.
Apart from that, it was no use crying over spilt milk, as the milk was already inside my veins. No way back now. But, man, it worked! I got an energy boost which was beyond imagination. Normally it took me 48 hours to fully recuperate, now I was fit again immediately, ready to play another three games! That came in handy, as we did have to play three games that week.
I liked it so much that I asked for it again. And again and again and again. In the end I was on four fixes a week. After every training session I walked into Pukhov’s medical room, where I spent half an hour on the drip. I loved it. It was good for flu too. One shot and I felt like I was in a sauna, sweating it all out. Magic!
Nobody ever tested positive, so I was convinced that it wasn’t something illegal. Pukhov, I kept telling myself, must know the boundaries. After all, the man had been the official doctor of the Russian Olympic team. Nevertheless, my fellow teammates hated those doping tests, for the simple reason that they wanted to get away as fast as possible after the match. There wasn’t such a thing as a players’ lounge, so fun had to be found elsewhere.
I liked the doping tests when I was at Rangers. No, I loved them! You see, in order to make you pee, they provided cans of beer. Drinking beer tickles your bladder, as we all know, and a lot faster than water does. So I took the opportunity to down a few.
Actually, not just a few ... I made a party out of it, especially when my booze brother Steven Thompson had to submit his urine too. Sometimes we kept drinking until we were completely plastered. And even then I pretended not to be able to piss! I’d swallow another six or seven cans before I could do the trick. Difficult, I can tell you. Hardly capable of standing upright and knowing there’s an inspector breathing down your neck – there are easier ways of seeing a man about a dog.
And all the time there was a coach load of players waiting to go back to the hotel. Sometimes they had to wait a full hour before that Ricksen bastard appeared. I didn’t care. When I was on the bus, I’d fall asleep.
So, back to Zenit and the supplements. I’ve always wondered why Dutch and British clubs never used the same methods as Doctor Pukhov. I mean, could the stuff have been illegal, seeing as we could import it anywhere we went, in the UEFA and Champions League tournaments? His hotel bed was quite a sight. I counted at least sixteen syringes on it every time. Only one or two foreign players didn’t feel the need. Their choice, but the supplements worked for me! From the first moment on the pitch I was sharp as, well, a needle. Without it, it would take me at least half an hour to get into the game. It also felt as if the last match I’d played was over a week ago. In reality, it was only a matter of days.
All this was part of Gazprom’s plans for Zenit Saint Petersburg. Since they had bought 51 per cent of the shares (for 27.9 million euros in 2005), the sky was the limit. No, not even that, as they chartered us our own plane! It was a Boeing, which from the outside looked like an ordinary BA aircraft; the difference was the luxury on board, with fantastic leather seats and, with just us on board, plenty of leg room.
Quite a contrast to my AZ days, when the biggest domestic adventure was a bus drive from Alkmaar to Kerkrade (check your atlas).
Extra bonus: we no longer had to be crammed into a Tupolev, which, as we all know, isn’t one of the most reliable aeroplanes in the world.
Not that I was particularly scared of them; most of the time I was asleep. Only once, when the pilot wanted to land in Rostov upon Don, in the southwest of the country, did I get worried. The wind was so strong the guy couldn’t keep the aeroplane straight. I was expecting a wing to hit the ground any minute, but it didn’t happen, and in the end we landed safely. By the time I was waiting at the conveyor belt I’d forgotten about the incident.
My motto had always been: if we fall down, we fall down. Yeah, simple as that. But I was the only one who thought like that. Most of my mates were terrified of those flying coffins, especially when yet another one fell from the sky, which happened on a fairly regular basis.
Hats off to those pilots, by the way, as some of the landing strips were pretty crappy. Not in Moscow; in the small rural places like Nalchik, Amkar or Tomsk in Siberia. For some reason I always thought their strips wouldn’t be able to handle such a big plane as ours.
But, hey, how else were we going to get to an away game? By moped? We’re talking about Russia, friends! And Saint Petersburg is way up in the north, somewhere between Finland and Estonia. All our away games, minus the six in Moscow, had to be flown to. Like the ones against FC Luch-Energia in bloody Vladivostok. That’s as far southeast as you can get; on the border with China and North Korea! That means a nine-and-a-half-hour flight! That’s like Glasgow to Jamaica. For a league match!
Due to the length of the trip, lots of clubs lost their away games in Vladivostok. Saint Petersburg was one of them. Until Dick arrived. His secret? He kept our time over there as short as possible, so we could focus on the game and only the game itself. No acclimatising: we arrived, went to the hotel for a nap, had a bite to eat, drove to the stadium, played the game and took off again that same evening. Therefore we stayed in our normal, everyday rhythm.
Yes, this was hard going, but at the same time I was having the time of my life. I was visiting places I’d never heard of before: Krasnodar, Samara, Yaroslavl, Khimki ... Or I would go to cities that were totally unappealing to me, like Vladivostok and Grozny. In moments like that, you realise how little you know of this big, wide world. The aforementioned cities are home to millions and millions of people.
Money didn’t matter at Zenit. Just look at the transfers. In the summer of 2008 Zenit paid over 30 million euros for a Portuguese midfielder by the name of Danny. They bought him from Dynamo Moscow. It was the highest transfer sum in the history of Russian football. To me, it was further proof of Gazprom’s big ambitions.
So I wasn’t remotely surprised when, four years later, they spent 80 million Euros in a week, with the purchase of the Brazilian Hulk (yup, that’s his real name) and the Belgian Axel Witsel, whose respective clubs were FC Porto and Benfica. However, I was surprised that those guys chose a city like Saint Petersburg – and not just because Russia is much colder than Portugal.
Don’t get me wrong. Saint Petersburg is a fantastic place, with an almost American-style 24/7 economy. Bars, restaurants, shops, nightclubs, museums: Saint Petersburg has it all. Even beaches! I used to go water-skiing around Ploshad Lenina, in the northwest. Or I’d hire a boat and sail off to Finland. In summer the place felt like paradise. Add to this the famous White Nights in summer, when the sun hardly goes down, and you get the picture.
Er, did I say White Nights? Yes, I did. And it sounds like White Knights, of which Saint Petersburg has a few. A lot, actually. Racists. Skinheads. Thugs who beat you into a pulp because they don’t like the colour of your skin. It’s one of Saint Petersburg’s biggest problems. Once in a while you’d hear a story about an African guy being violently assaulted in one of the city’s outskirts. Terrible, terrible.
Given the fact that lots of Russians are racist, it didn’t surprise me when the Zenit ultras came up with a flyer in which they said they wouldn’t tolerate black and/or homosexual players within their club. The ‘request’ was firmly rejected.
Raised by communist parents, those guys are as patriotic as hell. It will take them years and years until they think the way we do in Western Europe. What I did find strange, however, was their hunt for gay players. Because they didn’t exist. At least, not on the surface. Not a single bloke in Russian football has come out of the closet, but statistically speaking, they must be there. Not that I ever suspected anyone in all my years there.
Professional football is not a safe sport to be in as an openly gay guy. You’d be slaughtered! Unlike in swimming, speed skating or horse racing, homosexuality is still a big taboo in soccer. I can understand it, to tell you the truth. A bisexual footballer? At least he shags women half of the time. As a professional footballer you enjoy a high status when you can say that you’ve bedded loads of women. But a totally gay man? He’d have a hard time in the dressing room – no joke intended. Seriously, it’s sad, but a gay player simply won’t make it in football. It’s a macho world – and not just in Russia.
But back to the racist thugs. Was it really a coincidence that I never had a black teammate during my stay at Zenit? Don’t think so! It would’ve been a hostile environment for well-respected colleagues like Jimmy Hasselbaink and Mario Melchiot. Multicultural Moscow, okay, but conservative Saint Petersburg, no. It was even worse: the fans wanted a 100 per cent Russian squad, in fact 100 per cent local squad – preferably without boys who had ever played for a team in Moscow! Typical.
And they were loud. My God, those supporters were loud! Louder even than the Scots. And it wasn’t just to support the team; it was a display of rebellion against law and order. That’s why the surroundings of the stadium looked like a war zone on match days.
It mainly kicked off when we played against Spartak Moscow. A lot of blood was spilt on those days. People even got killed. Once, at a Cup match a mere ten years ago, no less than twelve Zenit supporters lost their lives. Since then, it’s always been chaotic when the two meet. For instance, in Moscow, in 2008, 700 people got arrested!
Fortunately I’ve never been a target for the Zenit ultras. They saw me as one of them: somebody who was prepared to fight for the club, and not just some overpaid foreigner who only came to collect the cash. They cheered when I kicked an opponent, recognised my Fighting Spirit, and saw me for the tattooed hunter that I am.
And I loved it!