Screen Break
The prodigious talent of Lee Sharpe - which brought him just eight England caps, but a passport into some of the finest bedrooms in Greater Manchester
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Ryan Giggs, as the BBC's Football Focus pointed out on Saturday, is enjoying a late flowering to what has been a remarkable career. He is one of only five players to play in the Premiership every season since the league was created in 1992-93, and the only one to play all that time for the same club. Giggs is also the leading scorer of goals from midfield in the history of the Premiership, in the light of which he was asked: "Where did it all go right?" Good question, although it seemed a little cruel to ask it with Lee Sharpe - to whom the exact opposite question might be posed - sitting on the pundits' sofa.
Not that Sharpe is short of achievements of his own, not least the contract he has secured to advertise a baldness cure in the newspapers despite having what appears to be a full head of hair. I mean, he's no Russell Brand, but neither does he seem to be in immediate need of a magic potion. Among Sharpe's other accomplishments is a brilliant hat-trick at Arsenal in the Rumbelows Cup in the 1990-91 season which, according to a review on Amazon, is mentioned 43 times in his autobiography.
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| Lee Sharpe and Martin In Grindavik, Iceland. 2003. |
I do not believe that for a moment, although I should declare an interest here. I was commissioned once to write a biography of Lee Sharpe, which a publisher thought would be a cracking story of sex, drugs (alleged) and spats with Alex Ferguson which I, with my minimal experience of all of the above, might be the ideal person to chronicle.
After a few meetings, including a trip to Iceland to watch Sharpey - as it is almost impossible not to call him - at the Icelandic league club Grindavik tossing away one of his many last chances, I abandoned the project simply because he was not in the mood to sit in the psychiatrist's chair and had no intention of answering the question hinted at in the opening paragraph. He was just too damned cheerful, I suppose, ascribing his failure to win more than eight England caps to bad luck with injuries, pernicious rumours about drug-taking, and unimaginative management, which seemed to me a fairly dull tale.
In the end his story appeared as an autobiography, with the gaps left by his reluctance to self-analyse filled with material about the change in the business and culture of football experienced by the player as the old First Division became the Premiership, about which its ghost writer, my estimable colleague David Conn, knows more than most (a few copies of the book are still available, I believe, if you are quick).
If Sharpey was unprepared to break down and cry before me, who had left his car at a Travelodge near Glasgow airport and taken a flight to Reykjavik to see him, he was hardly likely to do so for the children's TV presenter Jake Humphrey - very assured and credible, I thought, on his debut on Football Focus - who asked him to comment on Giggs's success (Giggs replaced Sharpe in the United team, and his rise more or less mirrors Sharpe's fall).
As usual, Sharpey said nothing of any great depth but smiled winningly and looked pleased to be there, which is half the battle on TV. He also suggested impishly that England would win their Euro 2008 qualifier in Israel easily, four- or five-nil, the kind of wrong-headed prediction you never get from your more serious pundit.
When I interviewed him his big hope was that a book about him would kick-start his TV career, which he seems to have achieved in spades. He is cropping up increasingly as a pundit on Sky and BBC, despite appearing to have as much interest in tactical formations as Alan Hansen has in Celebrity Love Island.
Good luck to him, I say. There is room for a lightweight in the world of football punditry. Not everyone can be David Pleat, or Ryan Giggs as it turns out. Maybe if Lee had been more dedicated to the game, Football Focus would have been granting him a retrospective, but his weakness - if it is a weakness - for a laugh and, of course, the ladies put paid to that.
He once said to me that if he had looked like - here he mentioned a particularly unprepossessing footballer of the time, possibly Jaap Stam - he might have won 50 caps, bringing to mind the old gag about spending three quarters of his money on booze and women, and "just frittering away" the rest.
If Sharpe is a prime case of someone who ultimately just did not care enough about his sport, there was a good example of the opposite over the weekend in Great Britain's rugby league captain Jamie Peacock. The effort expended by Peacock in support of a cause any bookmaker could have told him was hopeless was phenomenal. Normally when I hear of players giving 110% I snort dismissively, but now I think I know what it means.
Despite his disappointment, the heartbroken and exhausted Peacock stayed on the pitch after the final whistle to give a dignified TV interview. He took no consolation from the praise heaped upon him by the reporter. He shook his head and said simply: "I really wanted to be in that final." In similar circumstances Sharpe, I feel, might have been back in the changing room with his hair gel.
