The Red Football Boots

In 1998, I wore red football boots.

That will not sound remarkable to anyone who has walked into a changing room recently. Boots now come in every colour imaginable: fluorescent yellow, orange, pink, purple, green. Some look as though they were designed to be seen from space.

But in 1998, football boots were black. Occasionally they had white stripes. That was about as adventurous as things got.

So when I walked onto a pitch in red boots, people noticed.

That was precisely the point.

I had not bought them because I particularly liked red. I had bought them because I had begun to understand something about football that had very little to do with kicking a ball.

Before you play against someone, you have already started playing against their mind.

Carnaby Street

This was before internet shopping was part of everyday life. You could not search for unusual boots, scroll through a hundred options and have them delivered the next morning. If you wanted something different, you had to go and find it.

I wanted something different.

Somehow I discovered a shop on Carnaby Street that sold coloured football boots. Carnaby Street had a long reputation for fashion and individuality, for people who had no particular interest in looking like everybody else. Perhaps it was fitting that this was where I found them.

I knew immediately what I wanted the boots to do. I wanted the opposition to notice me before I had touched the ball. I wanted the defender marking me to wonder who I was, and to conclude that anyone confident enough to wear red boots in 1998 must have something about him.

Whether I did was a question the next ninety minutes would answer.

But I would have made an impression first.

The Maradona effect

I had watched Diego Maradona, and it was not only the goals and the dribbling that fascinated me. It was what he did before matches.

There were occasions when he would entertain himself near the halfway line, juggling the ball, keeping it in the air with different parts of his body, performing tricks most professionals would struggle to reproduce in a game. He made it look effortless.

I always wondered what the opposition made of it.

Imagine being a defender preparing to face him. You are warming up, trying to concentrate on the afternoon ahead, and there he is, casually demonstrating that he can do things with a football you can barely imagine. He has not tackled you. He has not gone past you. He has not scored.

But he has already told you something. You are going to have a difficult afternoon.

Maradona, of course, had the ability to justify the performance. I was not Maradona.

But I understood the principle. Confidence could be communicated before the contest began, and that confidence could shape the way other people approached you.

I did not have his talent.

I had red boots.

The player to watch

My intention was simple. I wanted the opposition to believe I was the player they needed to worry about.

If they looked at the boots and thought, who does he think he is?, that was fine. If they thought, he must be good, even better. Either way, they were thinking about me.

And if they were thinking about me, they were perhaps thinking a little less about everyone else. Football is a team game. We had other good players, some technically better than me, some faster or stronger. If the boots drew an extra defender or a little more attention, that created space for somebody else.

But the boots were not only for the opposition.

They were for me.

Putting them on was a statement I made to myself: today, you are going to play like somebody worth watching.

It did not guarantee a good game. Football has a wonderful way of exposing anyone who believes confidence alone is enough. You can arrive in the brightest boots in the world and spend ninety minutes chasing shadows.

But I had made a commitment. I was not going to hide. I was not going to spend the match avoiding the ball. I was going to demand it, take chances, try things, and give the opposition a difficult time.

The danger of standing out

There was, of course, a risk.

Red boots in 1998 invited attention, and attention is not always friendly. If I played badly, people would notice. If I missed an easy chance, somebody would have something to say. If I tried a trick and lost the ball, I could almost hear the commentary: perhaps he should spend less time choosing his boots and more time practising.

That was the bargain.

The boots raised expectations. They made it impossible to disappear into the background. Every touch would be watched, and every mistake would be remembered a little longer than it would have been in black.