The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

Graeme Le Saux, when all’s said and done, had a pretty good innings. Very successful stints at Blackburn and Chelsea, a long run as England’s first-choice left-back, and a few medals to show for it at the end. “Not Bad For a Jersey Lad” an altogether different autobiography could have been called, a dependable footballing narrative of Childhood Disappointment, Renewed Resolve, Success, Failure, Bouncing Back. That Le Saux and his ghostwriter chose not to further wear that well-travelled road is understandable; he is no hero for a bildungsroman, no kid ever cried his eyes out for “LE SAUX” on his shirted back. Let’s get to the pitch, “One man’s struggle with….” Well. With what?

Le Saux was widely considered homosexual during his career. (Note that I don’t say “believed” – of that more later.) As a result he was treated terribly by crowds and even by his fellow professionals, an indubitable and well-documented fact further documented by Le Saux in the entirety of his second chapter and hefty chunks of all subsequent chapters. His team-mates at Chelsea didn’t like him, he explains repeatedly, because he read The Guardian and liked cafes. He didn’t fit in with their idea of a proper footballer, so they bullied him and teased him and spread rumours about his sexuality. Soon everybody inside and outside of football knew that he was supposedly gay. And nobody did a thing about it.

Because (as Le Saux normally seems suddenly to remember and tack on) there’s nothing wrong with being gay, it’s just that he’s not and wasn’t. Still, the FA should have done something about the abuse, which was homophobic, even though he wasn’t gay. Somebody should have made a stand against homophobia in football, even though Le Saux wasn’t gay. What kind of environment is English football for gay supporters or even players, if that sort of thing happens to someone?

Even though he wasn’t gay?

You get the idea. Le Saux’s whirling finger of accusation points out the culprits like a spinning bottle and decries the appalling discrimination in English football whilst all the while making it drearily obvious that Le Saux has no interest whatsoever in the lot of the footballing homosexual, but only in the fact that people didn’t like him because they thought he was gay.

Never occurs to him it might have been the other way round.

Interestingly, the gay community themselves are completely silent in this book. Le Saux has no gay friends to offer commentary, no group for LGBT rights offers to take up the cudgel. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that actual homosexuals might have had something to say about the whole thing. You wouldn’t know from Le Saux. There’s an interesting aspect to it all, though, which may illuminate a lot more about social attitudes to homosexuality than Le Saux’s incessant self-pity ever could. At almost no point in the entire narrative, or in my recollection, does anybody actually BELIEVE Le Saux is gay. And there’s the rub. His team-mates might shout “Arses to the wall, boys!” when Le Saux walks into the shower, but no-one actually DOES it. People might shout abuse at him, but no-one ever treats him with the same kind of quiet, venomous disgust or distaste that, say, Justin Fashanu encountered. To compare his experiences with what an actual gay footballer might go through is to grossly trivialise; besides, it’s almost certain that there ARE homosexual footballers in the professional ranks, and if we don’t hear 50,000 fans shouting that so-and-so takes it up the shitter it’s not because they don’t know if they’re gay – since when has the truth ever got in the way of a good singsong? – it’s because nobody dislikes them enough to pretend that they are. People call Le Saux gay because he doesn’t like it and they don’t like him. That’s all there is to it.

Le Saux has an Alan Partridge-esque capacity for failing to identify and eliminate the details of any story which make him look like a prick. As a result, his self-pitying narratives of victimisation convey all too well what is going on, and what is normally going on is that someone is winding him up because he is a smug, boring knob with no emotional intelligence whatsoever; and very little intelligence of any other kind. Everywhere Le Saux goes, someone is treating him badly, unjustly, unfairly. Players, fans, directors, managers, all of them, picking on him, for no plausible reason that Le Saux can intuit. Normally we would take these tales of woe with a pinch of salt, and yet we believe everything Le Saux says about the shoddy treatment dished out to him, normally with a quiet exhalation of “And no fucking wonder….”

What it all boils down to is class. Le Saux waltzes off the tax-haven of Jersey into a working-class changing-room and finds it hard going. When he returns to Chelsea during the Gullit revolution to find the club run by a bunch of cosmopolitan polyglots, why, he’s as happy as a sandboy. Before then, well, it is too much to say he struggles to adapt – he doesn’t EVEN struggle – but then, most of us can empathise with what it’s like to be an outsider. Those of us who are actually from the working classes are made to feel like outsiders everywhere we go. Le Saux only gets left out by his workmates – working class folk in middle class environments get bullied by the fucking furniture.