YES, I ENJOYED SAINT Petersburg more and more. And I was performing well, despite the extremely high speed the Russians played at. Had to gasp for a bit of oxygen now and again, but that wasn’t so unusual. After all, I had a six-month hiatus behind me, in terms of playing top-level football. I even started to score, from the right midfield position, as the goalkeepers from FK Rostov and Spartak Nalchik found out.
I was back!
My progress didn’t go unnoticed and soon I was offered a new contract. By the end of November, less than three months after my arrival, they changed my status from ‘hired’ to ‘bought’. They really believed in me.
I signed until the end of 2010, didn’t think twice about that. As I said, I loved life in Saint Petersburg and I was away from the prying eyes of the press. You know, Russian reporters knew a thing or two about me too, but at least they had the decency to keep it to themselves. Like that ring-road incident on my first night, for instance, which definitely would have made the Scottish headlines had it happened in Glasgow. Not so in Russia. Here, they only wrote about how a footballer played his game of football. They simply weren’t interested in the things we did before or after the match. Or, they weren’t allowed to write about those things. It wasn’t unthinkable: a multinational like Gazprom is quite powerful. But what about freedom of the press, I can hear you say. But, to me, it was nice as it was. I wanted to stay here as long as possible.
So, no paparazzi, no tabloids; Fernando could very happily could go into town. Which, of course, he did – a lot. Staying at home I would miss out on the sight of all those women, who were so much more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. Not a single one of those stunners wore jeans. They all had skirts on – short ones. Below that, a pair of dazzling pins with heels the height of a skyscraper. Those chicks walk around as if they are on a catwalk – day in, day out, night in, night out. Russian women visit their hairdresser, pedicure, beauty salon and gym on an almost daily basis. And, boy, they know how to flirt!
And they do it with every single bloke, not just with the rich and famous. You’ve got to have the radar for it. I do. But when I had a Dutch TV crew around me, I really had to point it out to them.
I liked the fact that those TV guys dropped by. Okay, they were in town to shoot an item about Russians and HIV, and I was just an extra item, but I still enjoyed it. It was nice to welcome the occasional Dutch journalist. They didn’t visit me that often, you know. Typically Dutch: things were going fine, so I wasn’t interesting to the public. But after something negative, like that fireworks thing in Scotland, I would be all over the pages. Mind you, back home nobody knew that I was voted Scottish Footballer of the Year!
There was a crew from the Dutch arm of MTV, and one of them was a VJ. Top guy. He told me he’d played football himself at a reasonable level. As we got along well, I invited him and the rest of the crew for a night out with a few of my teammates.
They’d heard a few of my stories about Russian women, so they said yes immediately. I took them to one of my regulars, the Arena Club on Kirpichniy. Loaded with supermodels, and a brilliant VIP area where you could book your own table. The table came with a private toilet – and a curtain. Handy!
Depending on the type of evening, a table cost somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000. Euros, not roubles! But it came with complimentary food and drinks, and they provided you with your own waiter. Top service.
By then, everybody knew me there: the girls behind the bar, the bouncers, the owner even. So there was no need to queue.
It was paradise. What, I’ve used that word before? But it was, dear reader! The women were triple A category – its dancers and female customers – beyond imagination.
Zenit’s two South Koreans agreed on that. I had decided to take them with me, as they were too shy to ask themselves. So, up until I took care of them, the two guys had stayed at home, every single night. Nobody cared about them. Nobody but me.
Before this night, I had taken them on a few introductory trips, first of all to Maximus. I think it was the first time in their lives that they’d come face to face with a stripper. I still remember them going crazy as those naked girls were sitting on their laps. They started some kind of a tap dance, which almost brought tears to my eyes.
Since then, they would be in the club within half an hour of my phone call. They became insatiable. One night, I even gave them two chicks as a takeaway – to enjoy at home. A blonde one and a dark one. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ they said.
So I gave them the key to my apartment – like I did with so many other (married) teammates. I didn’t have any problems with that – after all, Graciela was never around – but it did mean that I constantly had Zenit players in my house. One of our goalkeepers slept at my place at least three times a week! Although he wasn’t sleeping ...
So, the Koreans had their little private party in my not so humble abode. Later on, I heard they enjoyed their treats so much, that they had swapped after round one. Well, bless them.
Rewind to that night at the Arena, with the MTV crew. I could see my friend getting very nervous. All those wild and willing women I had been talking about ... he couldn’t see any.
He couldn’t see them? Well, he noticed their beauty, but he didn’t think they were flirting, at least not with him. I told him he was blind. ‘Look at those blonde babes over there! Can’t you see they’re constantly staring at us?’
I stood up, walked towards them, and gave one of them a VIP lounge bracelet. Now she belonged to us. ‘And you’re gonna sit next to him!’ I said, pointing towards my flabbergasted friend.
That’s Russian etiquette for you. They’re easy to deal with. Easier than in Scotland or the Netherlands. Yup, they’re gold-diggers, but I don’t blame them for that. It’s their way to get out of their relative poverty. So if you’re a rich and good-looking guy, you can do anything.
By now, the guy had got it. He waved over at me. ‘Can you get the other one for me too?’
‘No problem, mate.’ I went fishing for the other beauty, who now joined him as well. And off he went. Not with one, but with two top prizes.
For me, Russia was the Land of Sex. Okay, I was still married to Graciela, but she was never there. She hated the place. Most of the time she was in Alkmaar or in our house in Valencia, which we’d bought so that she could be closer to her Spanish family. It was a beautiful place with a pool, not far from the sea, but I was hardly there. Too many obligations in Russia!
I have to confess that I was glad that Graciela wasn’t with me in Saint Petersburg. It gave me a lot of freedom. Especially after I changed the Corinthia Nevsky Palace Hotel for my own apartment. At 5,000 euros a month it didn’t come cheap, but it was better than living in a hotel. I could bring home one female after the other without getting dirty looks from the hotel staff. I didn’t like that any more. It was one of the reasons I moved out.
The new flat was close to the Arena, Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main shopping street, and the Hermitage. Although the museum wasn’t the reason I picked it, let’s be honest. I know millions of tourists visit the place, to enjoy art created by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but it wasn’t my thing. I was inside the place once, and walked out within minutes. Boring as hell. I have other interests, so to speak.
Eating sushi in the trendy Zima Leto Bar, for instance. And drinking ... Fanta. Yes, the anti-alcohol vaccination was still in my system, so I couldn’t have booze without getting sick as a dog. I didn’t mind, didn’t miss it at all. Sometimes people asked me if I missed drinking a glass of beer, but I never found it weird when somebody ordered a coffee, so why feel sorry for me and my Fanta?
In the meantime I had developed another addiction: watching people. Okay, watching female people, to be more precise. I keep repeating myself – and don’t blame me for that – but it was one supermodel after the other walking by. I could see why Gucci, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton all had shops on Nevsky Prospekt. It’s where their clientele goes!
Despite my Fanta, I was on a high every single time I sat there.
Russia grey and poor? Sure, in certain parts, but not here. Not in the centre of Saint Petersburg. This was para ... No, we’ve been through that already.
So, yes, I’ve seen both sides of the country. One day we went to a town just outside Moscow, for a Cup match against a Third Division team. It was like a trip back in time. Holes in the road the size of a bath tub. Wooden houses like something out of the Middle Ages. It took us two full hours to drive no more than 50 kilometres. It was one of those moments in which you realise how privileged you are to be born in Western Europe.
The big cities are different. There’s still a shell of grey communist suburbs around them, but they have a rich and colourful nucleus. There’s a lot of money going around in places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Sitting in the sun on Nevsky Prospekt, sipping my Fanta, I would count ten Hummers within a few minutes.
Russians like to flaunt their wealth. In the beginning, I thought it was ridiculous. Pure arrogance. But soon I got used to it. Didn’t even blink my eyes if I saw two armed guys in a restaurant. My initial thought was: there must be a very, very rich Russian in here – one with a lot of money and a lot of enemies. Those bodyguards, each one built like a wardrobe, didn’t even bother hiding their weapons. The guns were just lying on the table in front of them.
And it was not just a matter of showing off. They used the bloody things too! Thank God I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve heard the stories about shootings in restaurants. Hence my advice to everybody: please don’t bother those filthy rich bastards. If you hit one of them, it’s your fault if you’re shot down by these gorillas. It’s their job.
I must say, I quickly adapted to the Russian lifestyle. Soon I didn’t feel embarrassed any more. Throwing money around in a club? No problem. I had plenty of it. Especially after beating a club from the capital. A 10,000-euro bonus wasn’t unusual.
I used to spend it in one night.
Much later, I thought to myself, what an enormous waste! But it was the lifestyle there. We would order the most expensive champagne and, I swear, guys would take one swig of the bottle and ... buy a new one! This wasn’t about drinking, it was about showing everybody how much money you had. Madness.
I couldn’t drink at the time. But I didn’t care, with all those delicious damsels around to distract me. They were a bonus too. What made me most happy were the results on the pitch. The fact that I had signed with a damn good football club. I mean, we wiped them off the grass. All of them! We were the best of Saint Petersburg, the best of Moscow, the best of Russia! And we played at twice the speed I was used to with Rangers. No exaggerating!
It wasn’t kick, rush and forget the midfield either, like in Scotland. There was thought behind everything. Only mentality-wise could we improve, but that was a detail. When it came to the noble art of football, we could beat Ajax and PSV ‘with two fingers up our nose’, as we say back home.
Actually, the Russian teams didn’t stand a chance either. That’s how we won the title in 2007, 23 years after Zenit’s last championship, in the Soviet Union. We won ours in the last game of the season, on 11 November, in an away game at Saturn Moscow. A horrid game, but that didn’t affect the celebrations afterwards. Or during the game, for that matter, as we went apeshit after Radek Sirl’s opening goal in the fifteenth minute. And what our goalie Vyacheslav Malafeev did that day was pure magic.
Right after the final whistle, I did a Nobby Stiles in front of the dug-out. Yes, I danced! After my titles in Sittard, Alkmaar and Glasgow, I was now champion of Russia as well! More to the point, I had won titles at every single one of my clubs! How unique is that?
Dick’s achievement was a great one: now he was one of just eleven managers with championships in three different countries. Among them, big names like Giovanni Trapattoni, Tomislav Ivic, Ernst Happel, Christoph Daum, Vujadin Boskov and Eric Gerets.
The title parties in town were out of this world. I’m sorry to say, but they were bigger and better than those in Glasgow. We were driven through the city centre in an enormous double-decker, accompanied by Ukrainian boxing legend Vladimir Klitschko, and it was like Moses and the parting of the Red Sea – the sea being the people who swarmed on to the streets in order to catch a glimpse of their heroes. They even managed to turn our little ride into an American ticker-tape parade, with pieces of blue and white paper floating down on us.
It was as if all seven million inhabitants of Saint Petersburg had turned up to celebrate. Unforgettable!
It had been the first time a club from outside Moscow had won the title in the Russian Premjer-Liga. You could tell from the faces of the people how important that was. They had finally beaten Moscow! I bet a lot of them framed the final table, as there was Saint Petersburg at the number one spot and beneath us, in this order, Spartak Moscow, CSKA Moscow, FC Moscow, Saturn Moscow, Dynamo Moscow and Lokomotiv Moscow!
I was proud to be part of the team that achieved that. Okay, due to my Achilles tendon injury I had only played fourteen games that season, but still. You lose together, and you win together.
Same feeling I had after that memorable night in Manchester, in 2008, when we won the UEFA Cup against, of all clubs, Glasgow Rangers. I didn’t play one single minute in that final and in the build-up I’d only managed to be active in three games, but still I felt part of the winning team. The medal UEFA chairman Michel Platini gave me that evening, in Manchester City’s stadium, was mine.
A consolation prize, the UEFA Cup? Get lost! Maybe if you’re used to winning the Champions League ten years in a row. But for normal people it’s a fantastic trophy.
Right after defeating Villarreal, in the third round, I felt we were going to win the cup. We were like a well-oiled machine. A machine that, later on in the tournament, eliminated Olympique Marseille, Bayer Leverkusen and, in the semi-final, Bayern Munich.
Now, that’s what they call being on form!
It hadn’t been that easy in the qualification round though. We had a 1–1 against AZ, then being trained by the great Louis van Gaal, and we lost 1–0 to Everton. We really thought it would end there, but AZ were eaten by the Toffeemen too (2–3), so we stayed one point ahead of the cloggies. Together with Everton and 1. FC Nürnberg we reached the next stage of the competition.
The semi-final against Bayern was the highlight, without a doubt. Beating them 4–0, thanks to goals by Pavel Pogrebnyak (two), Konstantin Zyryanov and Viktor Fayzulin, does say something in international football. And after the 1–1 in Bavaria it was: auf Wiedersehen, Fritz!
The home game against Bayern was probably our best one ever. Too bad I was suspended. And, no, it wasn’t a second-rate team who faced us, despite the fact that they’d won the German title a few days earlier. Allow me to mention a few names: Franck Ribéry, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm, Oliver Kahn, Luca Toni, Zé Roberto, Miroslav Klose and Mark van Bommel. Not your average pub team, is it?
And it was wonderful to bump into my old buddy Mark van Bommel. Sixteen years earlier we’d both played in the Fortuna youth team. Who on earth would have expected that all those years later the two of us would play each other in the semi-final of the UEFA Cup? We’d talked about it at the time, playing on the highest international level, but thinking that our dreams would come true and the reality are two different things.
Anyway, I had been a bit worried, the night of the final in Manchester. We had a wonder team, for sure, but as soon as the Russians had to play somewhere across the border, it was as if all of a sudden they were paralysed. I’ve rarely seen players as good as Andrey Arshavin and Roman Pavlyuchenko, but away from home they were ... well, not so good. Look how little they achieved later on, at renowned clubs like Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur. It was as if they couldn’t do without their friends, their family and their daily portion of Russian food. I’ve seen with my own eyes that they didn’t even go out at night when we played abroad. Back home they did every godforsaken thing; abroad they seemed to be scared shitless.
Personally, I shouldn’t have been worried about Rangers as an opponent. Okay, they had beaten Fiorentina in the semi-final, but they weren’t too impressive. Their road to the final had been paved with negative football. Thanks to their manager Walter Smith they had been the cowards of the competition. All games ended in scores like 0–0, 1–0 or 1–1. Boring, boring, boring ... For your information, our Pavel Pogrebnyak, with ten goals the top scorer of the tournament, had produced more goals than the whole of Glasgow Rangers!
The only weird thing about the final result was that it ended at 2–0 (with goals by Denisov and Zyryanov). We could have hammered them! Nevertheless, it was a memorable game for Zenit, and for Russia. President Vladimir Putin himself phoned Dick while we were in the dressing room. Normally the president has an assistant who makes his phone calls. Not this time, though. Which shows how important the result was for the country.
I was in tears that night. Although I hadn’t played at all, I was very emotional. There and then, in the stadium of Manchester City, minutes after the final whistle of the European Cup Final between Rangers and Zenit, I found out that, after all, it is possible to have such a thing as friendship in the totally anti-social world of professional football! Before the game I’d talked to former teammates like Nacho Novo, Allan McGregor and Kris Boyd. We laughed and wished each other success. And after the game, the mutual respect was still there. I remember hugging Jim Bell, Rangers’ good old kitman, who was really happy for me, despite the fact that his own team had lost. And, no, he wasn’t bullshitting! I didn’t think twice when he asked me for my shirt. How could you say no to a lovely chap like Jim?
So, a great evening among old friends and completely different from the times I had to play against AZ. Not so much in October 2007, as things were settled by then. No, I’m talking about the meetings before, when I was still defending the colours of Glasgow Rangers. December 2004, once again in the UEFA Cup tournament.
We had to go to Alkmaar. In the days prior to the confrontation José Fortes Rodriguez – remember him? – told everyone and his dog that Ricksen wasn’t welcome any more. According to him, I was the least respectful person he had ever met in his entire life. In the same interview, with Dutch weekly Sportweek, Barry van Galen even called me ‘an imbecile’ who wanted to fight with everybody. And, yes, out came that crappy old story again about me kicking the shit out of Barry Opdam during a training session. Digging the dirt, saying how Opdam was bleeding and how he had cried.
I laughed about it. At the time, Opdam had been an adult. And adults don’t cry after a little clash, do they? Besides, it had been self-defence.
Still, the words of Rodriguez kept jogging through my mind, as if on a treadmill. No respect? Who is showing no respect here? You, Rodriguez! What had I done? I hadn’t stolen your money – nor your girlfriend. I had just shown a winner’s mentality.
Hmmm, maybe he was still pissed off about the fact that girls in general fancied me more than him ... That could be it. Frustration, maybe.
Anyway, no wobbly knees that night in Alkmaar. And, indeed, nothing happened. It had been all mouth and no trousers. Just a pity that we lost that night: 1–0, with a goal by Denny Landzaat, who would end up at Wigan Athletic. We were the better team, but we ended up empty-handed. Eventually we found ourselves in fourth position, behind AZ, AJ Auxerre and Grazer AK, which for us meant the end of the tournament.
But years later I had the honour of visiting the Kremlin, as part of the team that had won that cup. After CSKA Moscow in 2005 we were only the second Russian team to lay its hands on that prize. The Russian PM Dmitri Medvedev, himself a huge Zenit fan, wanted to thank us in person. Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the Russian Orthodox church and the boss of the Moscow Patriarchate were other VIPs who wanted to pay their respects to us.
I didn’t know how special it was to be invited to the Kremlin until I heard that the Catharina Hall, where we were supposed to meet the PM, was normally only used to invite world leaders, like the President of the United States. So, yes, this time I was nervous! I was about to shake the hand of one of the most powerful people on the globe. And where would I do that? In a room where people like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had stood. Not bad for a street kid from Hoensbroek!
My first thought when I saw Medvedev entering the room: what a small guy! Of course the other little fella, Dick Advocaat, was the first one he shook hands with. Much later, after the PM had told us how proud he was, there was a handshake for me too. It was very impressive.
Sometimes people ask me: why didn’t you pull back your hand, Fernando? You’re such a big prankster. It would’ve made great TV!
No, not this time. Too much respect.
Too bad I’ve never met Vladimir Putin, who was born in Saint Petersburg. Dick has. The two became acquaintances. Putin used to call Dick to wish him a happy birthday and even gave him birthday presents; one time, a beautiful and very expensive watch. Quite a contrast to the chocolate ball Zenit gave him, when he turned 59 ...
Putin is the absolute number one person in Russia. You don’t get them more powerful than him. The times we had to stay up in the air above Moscow, because Putin was on the ground and we were not allowed to land until he had gone ...
Medvedev wasn’t the last VIP we would meet. After our visit to the Kremlin, we had an audition at the Mariinsky Palace with the mayor of Saint Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko. Once again it was a memorable moment, not least for Dick, who was made Honorary Citizen of Saint Petersburg, the first foreign one since 1866. The rest of us were given inviolability.
I kid you not.
From that moment on I was inviolable. The chief inspector of Saint Petersburg, the very same one whose number was in Arshavin’s mobile phone, told us. Inviolability. I would never have to worry about the police again.
Unheard of in the Netherlands. Nobody would accept that. But this was Russia. And in Russia, anything’s possible. And not a single politician would object.
From that moment on I was more or less invincible. I didn’t have to pay cops any more; nobody could make me do anything. And you know what? I didn’t even feel embarrassed!