THE AWKWARD SITUATION FORTUNA Sittard was in kept worrying me. I could hardly sleep, to tell you the truth. If nobody did anything about it, the club could be finished within months. The demise of two-time Cup winner Fortuna – they grasped the thing in 1957 and 1964 – would be a disaster. For me, for Limburg, for Dutch football. How could it be stopped?
I couldn’t stop fretting. Then, one morning in October, I got it! While I didn’t have enough cash left to give Fortuna a financial injection, there was one thing I could give them. No, two things. My feet.
After a retirement of fifteen months and at the tender age of 34, I decided to make my comeback as a professional footballer. Well, it was better than just watching the ship sink.
Not that they hadn’t asked me before. In August 2010 technical manager Fred van Barneveld had talked about it in a one-to-one with me. I’d decided not to do it. I was too heavy at the time, wasn’t in shape. And, more to the point, I was enjoying my life without the ball. I was going on all these foreign trips with Veronika, and thanks to them I felt better than ever.
Another thing that prevented me from saying yes then was the thought of failure. I didn’t want to be another big star that returns to his old club just to fall flat on his face. I didn’t want to be yet another casualty.
Three months later, things were completely different. I now felt the need to do something. Especially after a flirtation with a Qatari sheikh and a hazy Brazilian investment company went absolutely nowhere. The dude in the white robe backed out at the last moment.
So, one morning in November I called Fortuna’s head coach Wim Dusseldorp. Earlier on, he’d expressed his doubts about a possible comeback, but this time I gave him, well, the benefit of the doubt.
‘Wim, I want to watch the first team’s training sessions.’
Dusseldorp was full of enthusiasm. ‘Bring your boots with you, Fernando, so you can join in!’
That was a bit premature. Still, I put the shoes in my bag, just in case ...
I stepped in, and it went quite well. Dusseldorp was happy too, and told me I could be an addition to the team. I saw that he meant it. We agreed that I had to be careful. You never know how a body will react.
One potential problem wasn’t a problem: the Russian FA told me I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. Money wasn’t a problem either. Okay, I wasn’t going to have a Russian or Scottish salary, but we came to an agreement, just like that. And I did the talking on my own, without Rob Jansen. This time I wasn’t going after the jackpot.
Nothing could stop me now!
Come December, and I had a contract until the end of the season, with an option for another year. In return for my kicks and dribbles, I would receive 2,000 euros net. That was just petrol money – and for the rental of my house in Maaseik, Belgium – but, once again, it excluded any bonuses for games we won! Fifty euros per victory.
But I wasn’t in it for the money. I was here to help Fortuna. And I was happy to be able to play football again. It was nice to earn what I earned with Rangers and Zenit, but I’ve never been a victim of materialism. That’s because of my background. We didn’t have expensive furniture or electronics. We had a fridge, that was the most important thing! And inside the fridge there was stuff to eat and drink.
Despite what you might think, I’ve never sought luxury. I was an exception, especially in Russia. While I preferred a bottle of good champagne, most of my colleagues just spent, spent, spent on the most expensive cars, houses, jewellery and gadgets. Seriously, that’s what happens when you earn six million euros a year ... Even so, some of my teammates would complain that another player was getting more than them. ‘Coach, I think it’s unfair that Anatoliy Tymoshchuk earns six million a year and I get a few million less!’ It was pathetic.
I found it amusing to see how they squandered their cash. When we were in Noordwijk with Zenit, at a training camp, I sometimes took a taxi with Andrey Arshavin, Igor Denisov and Aleksandr Anyukov in order to go to P.C. Hooftstraat, the Fifth Avenue of Amsterdam. On our way back, they had so much stuff we’d need a second cab!
It was all Armani, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Versace. And the logo had to be visible. Then they could show off back home.
The guys absolutely loved P.C. Hooftstraat. It was the main attraction of Amsterdam to them. While the city has so much else to offer! Like the Banana Bar, for instance, where you can eat fruit out of a girl’s ... Okay, enough of that!
I wanted to take them there, but soon changed my mind after a remark Arshavin once made. He said, ‘I know why you love being with us, in Russia.’
‘Oh, why?’ I asked.
He pointed at a crowd of Dutch women who were passing by. Every single one of them was ugly. With all due respect, the way Dutch women dress is not attractive. Hair in a ponytail, feet in a pair of Uggs and off we go. The complete opposite to the stylish Russians.
So, okay, better not take them to a Dutch porn show. It would only disappoint. I mean, when you’re used to the beauty of the Côte d’Azur, why would you swim in the North Sea?
Instead, I took them to the notorious Cooldown Café in the centre of Amsterdam, a party pub that I remembered from my AZ days. They were having the time of their lives. Not because of the women, but because of the booze – lots of it.
They were downing little shots at a ridiculous speed. Now, Arshavin is a bit of a garden gnome, size-wise, so at a certain moment I lifted him up and sat him on top of the bar. From there, the guy threw his empty glasses into the crowd, like a bowler at a cricket game. It was a miracle nobody got hurt.
The reason why he had enjoyed himself so much, he told me afterwards, was that nobody recognised him. Nobody had asked him for an autograph or a photo. He could be completely himself.
Still, a night like that was an exception. Most of the time when abroad, the Russians were only interested in shopping. I didn’t – and still don’t – care about price tags. I never buy terribly expensive stuff. Okay, I admit it: I had a 10,000-euro Rolex and a 200,000-euro Ferrari, but the car was second-hand.
Food and drink, that’s where most of my money went.
Did I finally end up in Belgium as a tax exile? Not at all. It was because of Veronika. Because she’s Russian, she couldn’t just move to Holland. First, they wanted her to go back to Saint Petersburg to do a Dutch ‘acclimatisation course’. Bullshit, but those are the rules. All in all, it would cost us three months. We didn’t fancy the idea. So when we heard it was a lot easier south of the border, we took off. In Belgium you had to do a similar course, but at least you could do it there. You didn’t have to go back to Russia.
That’s why we moved to Maaseik. And because it’s very close to Sittard. The region is even called ‘Belgian Limburg’. We had a lovely house there, with a big garden, and it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Fortuna. Ideal.
And to top things off, Veronika passed her exams just like that and received her residence permit. Still, she was struggling. Of course she was. Life in Belgium is different from that in Russia. Some people think that moving from Western Europe to Eastern Europe is going from good to bad. In the case of Saint Petersburg it’s the other way around! Saint Petersburg is a rich and modern metropolitan city. To swap that for Maaseik with its 25,000 sleepy inhabitants is not easy.
We missed the 24-hour lifestyle of Saint Petersburg. I mean, sometimes we went out for dinner in the middle of the night there. Try to get a steak in Maaseik after nine? Impossible. All the shops close at six. And on Sundays they don’t even open!
So, I began having my usual doubts again. Was it too soon? Should I have let her stay in Saint Petersburg a little bit longer? And why were we in Maaseik?
No, my sweetheart said to me, it was going to be all right. She just needed a bit more time to get used to things. I shouldn’t worry so much. Still, I gave her regular flight tickets so that she could see her mother as much as possible.
I soon sensed that those brief trips to Russia had a positive effect on Veronika. Every time she came back, she was shining like the sun above my Spanish villa. And after a while she even grew to enjoy life in Maaseik. She made her own friends and so on. It was brilliant to see. Fewer trips to Saint Petersburg were needed, and we began doing more and more things together. We’d jump in the car and drive all the way to Brussels, for instance. And when we finally had the internet, she could Skype her mum.
Now that I was playing on a professional basis again, I had to abandon my manager’s course. They demanded that I train various amateur teams all over the country, but I simply couldn’t combine that with my job at Fortuna. I tried it, but I couldn’t stand the fact that it meant coming home late every bloody time. I didn’t want to do that to Veronika.
Fortuna had to play away games in Veendam and Emmen, up north in the Netherlands. Veendam was the furthest away of them all. They’ve now gone, but their stadium was called De Langeleegte, meaning ‘the long emptiness’. A very appropriate name!
We spent hours on the bus, as Fortuna didn’t own a private plane, but I loved being on the road. It was pointless comparing Fortuna with Zenit. And why would I? Why should I think about world-class players like Arshavin, Danny, Denisov, Malafeev, Dominguez or Fayzulin when I was going towards stadium De Baandert with my boots and shin pads? I would just make myself tense.
So, on my way to the Meerdijk ground of FC Emmen, I wasn’t thinking about the times that I checked in at the Kempinsky or the Ritz-Carlton prior to a clash with a bunch of Moscow millionaires. I was now a member of Fortuna Sittard, the worst team in Holland’s Second Division. Fortuna players don’t stay in hotels; they drive home in the hours after the game. Simple as that. Football at its purest. Loved it!
Some minor irritations were creeping in, however. For instance, I couldn’t stand the mentality of some of our younger players. Checking your iPhone instead of joining a group talk? Well, that’s disrespectful and not very professional, in my opinion, but carry on. But, please carry some balls and cones to the training field like everybody else. You’re not feeling above that, I hope, as a simple Fortuna player!
Yes, they did. They didn’t even look at the cones and vests that lay there, ready to be taken to the training pitch. Different generation. But I told them what I thought about their behaviour, and judging by the way they stared at me, they didn’t like what I said.
They were pussies, most of them. Didn’t have any of my Fighting Spirit. A total lack of the good old over-my-dead-body mentality. A lack of skills too. Some of them couldn’t even kick a ball straight. And they weren’t even drunk, like Arshavin!
Some of them really weren’t qualified for professional football. And that’s what I told them in a group meeting. They didn’t appreciate that, especially kids like Wouter Scheelen and Kévin Diaz. They thought I just wanted to take the piss out of them, because I didn’t like them.
I did give them the odd, let’s call it ‘push’, and, yes, I did shout at them, more than I did with the others, but that was because I wanted them to get better. Because I believed in them. I wasn’t teasing you, boys!
Nevertheless, they had different ideas, and at one point they did a Radimov behind my back and complained about me. Ridiculous, totally ridiculous, and it didn’t get them anywhere. Let’s face it. Have you heard of Wouter Scheelen and Kévin Diaz? There you go!
Things were different now. Fifteen years earlier, players used to laugh at times. Now they were all engrossed with their smartphones, the moment they were off the pitch. Football humour had died out completely.
This was a task for Fernando!
In order to put the fun back into Fortuna, I made a plan. And not a vulgar one. I didn’t want to be like Paul Gascoigne, who used to fill up the bath with a ridiculous amount of bubble bath, not because he liked to be super-clean but to hide the fact that he’d had a crap in the water. After having a shit, he’d jump out, leaving the floating turd for the next guy, mostly a youngster, and say, ‘Enjoy the bubble bath, mate, I put a little bit extra in it!’
I didn’t find that amusing at all. Or pissing against your legs in the shower when your eyes are closed, which they do in Holland. I never found that funny either.
What I did was cut out some newspaper headlines which I stuck onto the players’ lockers. There was a suitable headline for everyone.
Ricky Geenen, a young defender with a sense of humour and self-awareness, found the header ‘I AM UGLY, BUT NEVERTHELESS HAPPY’. He got it!
One of the best ones was for Joeri Schroyen. He once had to skip training because he had to help his uncle pick up some old iron. I remembered something about a theft at the local chemical company DSM: ‘TWENTY THOUSAND TONS OF IRON STOLEN’.
I was in stitches, and finally people were laughing again. And, more important, the guys picked it up. One day I found a clipping on my own locker that said: ‘MONEY DOESN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY’.
Mission accomplished!
I always made sure nobody suffered from my pranks. Only once did I fail, with our caretaker Marco Lemmens. He very nearly had a heart attack, and it was all my fault.
Because I didn’t only give but also received – we’re talking about hard kicks on the legs here, reader – I played every match with an injection of Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory. Without it, I would’ve been out of my rhythm after every single whack. Diclofenac made me feel great, for at least three hours. It was always the same ritual: I dropped my pants, the doc put an imaginary cross on my bum and in went the needle. Simple as that. Anyone could do that.
Well, not quite ...
Because of the fact that Fortuna isn’t a super-rich professional club with its own medical staff, our Kick Hamers sometimes had to be at his workplace, in the hospital. That left me two choices: forget about the injection or choose somebody else to violate my buttocks.
Marco Lemmens wanted to give it a try. Anyway, I thought, this is a perfect moment for a good joke! So I dropped my pants, like I always did, and told him about the imaginary cross. ‘About there.’
He nodded.
‘But not too hard, otherwise things could go seriously wrong.’
Up till then, things had been going well. In the fourteen games when I’d been part of the team, we had beaten the likes of Sparta, FC Emmen and RBC. So Marco did exactly what the patient ordered. Right spot, not too hard, not too soft either ... not too deep. He looked relieved.
Until I started to scream. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ouch!’ I looked at him as if I could kill him. ‘Marco, what the hell have you done? I can’t feel anything any more! You’ve paralysed me! I’ll never play football again!’
His face turned as white as Bing Crosby’s Christmas. He really thought he’d screwed it up.
‘Joke!’ I laughed.
No, not that funny actually, if you look back at it.
Another over-the-top incident was the time we put tiger balm into Marc Wagemaker’s socks. Normally we did this with underpants, but after a while everybody became too suspicious, so we decided to go for another item of clothing. Unfortunately we put too much of the stuff in his socks and he burned both his feet. He was out of the team for a while.
The rest of Fortuna were hot too. We played better and won more games than before my arrival. On that memorable day, 13 December 2011, we immediately beat RKC Waalwijk (3–2). No surprise to me, as I knew we had the quality! It was the first away victory since, er, the previous one, which had been 31 matches ago.
Despite being nervous, I played a good game. Maybe I was still a little overweight, but I didn’t have any difficulties with my direct opponent, Donny de Groot. And at the end of the season, we were in sixteenth place. Okay, not enough for a triumphant ticker-tape parade, but at least we weren’t the ugly ducklings of Dutch football any more.
A year later, we were in eleventh place, followed by a ninth place in the 2012/13 season. We even made it to the play-offs then! It had been quite a climb from the cellar! More to the point, Fortuna had been saved from tumbling down to the amateur section. Had that happened the club would have been bankrupt.
I felt proud that I had helped to stop that process. The fans were grateful too. They realised I was not some kind of pensionado who had just come down to earn a few bob. One particular supporter even made a calculation. The outcome was that Fortuna had gained most points when I was playing. It made me as proud as a peacock.
Yeah, Fortuna supporters are the best in the world. Wait a minute! Didn’t I say that about Rangers fans earlier? What a lucky bastard to have played for both teams, then!
Anyway, the Fortuna crowd always managed to cheer me up. Like on 26 April 2013, just before the confrontation with FC Dordrecht. Due to a back injury I wasn’t playing, so I was about to watch the match from the stands.
There was something in the air. I could feel it. A buzz. Something was going on where the Tifosi Giallo Verde were gathered. Those were the guys who always called me Fernando le Commando. There was a bit of green and yellow moving, but I couldn’t work it out.
Suddenly I saw ropes. They hadn’t been there before. Well, okay, never mind. The match was about to begin and I took a gulp of coffee. I almost choked. Not because the coffee was too hot. No, it was the noise that freaked me out. All of a sudden they’d started to make this enormous racket. And up it went, this huge banner! It was at least thirty feet wide and thirty feet high. On it were my face and my name.
It was like looking in a giant mirror. Because, in all honesty, they’d done a great job! It was really me they had painted, not Captain Birdseye.
I was so emotional I even forgot to applaud. So I do it for you now, wonderful fans of Fortuna Sittard!
Anyway, to all those people who kept asking me whether I didn’t find it sad that I was playing there, instead of in big stadiums in Scotland and Russia: no, no regrets at all! I loved football and I loved Fortuna, so I was at the right place.
Just too bad that I ... Yes, you’ve guessed it, another conflict with a manager loomed! This time it was Tiny Ruijs, the successor of Wim Dusseldorp. One of the nicest and friendliest people in Dutch football, I had always liked him, ever since I was in Fortuna’s youth teams. That’s why I decided to warn him about his two assistants, Fuat Usta and Roel Coumans. I suspected them of preparing a coup.
Tiny didn’t believe me when I told him. Well, at least I’d warned him. That was all I could do.
Last game of the season, Eindhoven away (that’s EVV Eindhoven, not its bigger cousin PSV), and Suat Usta, brother of Fuat, was standing next to me. A bigger dribbler than a newborn baby. I passed the ball to him. He started running, lost it, Eindhoven scored. They eventually won the match 4–3.
The indifference of the guy got on my nerves. I started yelling at him during the break. To my surprise Tiny supported him. ‘Don’t curse, Fernando.’
‘What? Wait a minute ... So it was my fault? What’s happening here? Are you trying to say that I ... It was Suat’s fault, not mine! That’s exactly what you have to tell him. And if you don’t have the guts to do that, I’ll do it for you!’
‘Fernando, you’re out.’
‘Sooo ... are we the big bad manager all of a sudden? What a brave man! Tell me, who exactly is the boss in this dressing room: you or those two sidekicks of yours?’
Silence.
Fifteen minutes later everybody had gone. And I was still there, totally on my own. Me, who had wanted to protect his manager.
A week later, against Go Ahead Eagles, I started on the bench. What a humiliation.
Still, we talked it out, Fortuna and me, and that’s why I started my third season with them. Which lasted no more than eight games. After that, my back was killing me. I shouldn’t have started that third season at all.
I think it was because of Fortuna’s dodgy pitches, which were as hard as concrete. They left me with a hernia, and I had to get surgery for it. After the operation, in February, I tried to fight back, but I didn’t succeed.
At that point, I was just happy that I could walk! Now that was something that had really worried me. I remember one terrible morning, in December ... the morning after the slide before. I had fallen on the hard surface and now, in bed, I couldn’t move my leg at all.
I was freaking out.
Veronika looked at me with her big, questioning eyes. It was true: my right leg was completely paralysed! And no, it wasn’t just asleep, as happens to everybody once in a while. In that case you can still move the bloody thing. Now I couldn’t.
The next image I had was that of me in a wheelchair. Career over. Couldn’t even become a manager any more.
I called the doctor, who told me it could be a hernia. Six weeks of rest and I would be all right again. And, yes, after a while I could walk again. But it dawned on me that my footballing days were over. No, they had to be over. It was enough. No more risks, no more pain. One day in March I decided: thank you very much, that’s it.
Looking back, my last ever match was the one on 16 November 2012. It was a home defeat against Sparta, 1–3. After an hour I was replaced by the Belgian, Ramazan Çevik. And that was it.
I didn’t cry, the day I took the decision to stop playing football. ‘Why should I?’ I said to Veronika. ‘I’m not dying!’
My life wasn’t over yet. This day, as they say, was the beginning of the rest of it; the beginning of something else, something new.
My retirement was big news. ‘FORMER INTERNATIONAL RICKSEN CALLS IT A DAY’ was the headline on Teletext. Despite my terrible behaviour in the past, I was still somebody. Holland still respected me.
Meanwhile I’d become a completely different person. I realised there was life after football. It was a life with my dear one, Veronika. We spent a lot of time together in Maaseik. No more drunken antics. I had completely calmed down. Calmed down and settled down.
We even spoke about having a baby. And it wasn’t all talk and no action, because on 6 June 2012 our beautiful little daughter Isabella Kristina was delivered. She was born right after my youth team had won a tournament. While having a victory dinner in a Chinese restaurant, Veronika’s belly started to rumble. So we said goodbye to the crowd and raced to the hospital.
The moment I had Isabella in my arms, I immediately realised she was a special child. Okay, all parents say that about their own offspring, but this was really the case. Just think about it: a Dutch baby, born in Belgium to a Russian mother. It could be less complicated!
Actually it is more complicated. Isabella has a half-brother named Lars. Born on 11 December 1999, in Alkmaar. I was playing for AZ then, and never had any contact with the boy.
I’d only had sex with his mother twice; it was lust, not love. Maaike slipped a piece of paper with her phone number on it under my windshield wiper. I hesitated for quite some time, but eventually I decided to call her. We got together twice: once with a condom, once without.
A few months later I saw her again. This time she wasn’t alone. She was pregnant.
‘Is it mine?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I was angry with her. She’d known this for weeks already and only now did she decide to share the news with me. I told her I didn’t want to be with her and put a large sum of money in a bank account. It was the most I could do.
C’mon, how could I have raised a child while I was a professional footballer? I was 22 and never at home. I was much too young to be a responsible father and I didn’t have a stable relationship.
During his childhood I didn’t want to bother Lars. When he is an adult, I would love to meet him and explain to him why I didn’t see him for all those years. I hope he’ll understand, but I know it won’t be easy.