Andy Cole interview

YOU can always count on kids to do the things adults wished they dare.

As 40 grown-ups stood in the tunnel at Old Trafford, waiting to go into the players’ lounge – the next step on our Legends Tour – a group of school children on a different tour walked past our group and fixed their collective gaze on one of our party.

“It’s Andy Cole!” they whooped. “Look! Andy Cole!” I think he prefers Andrew now, but neither side seemed to be bothered about that.

Cole, who scored 93 goals in 195 appearances for United, was our tour guide for the day, and despite what you may think, was charming, easy-going and engaging company. It was his first Legends tour, and chatting as we walked through the cavernous underbelly of Old Trafford, he seemed to be enjoying it.

You look at a lot of the younger players coming up now and you have to ask if they’re in it for the right reasons. A lot of them don’t even like football."

Although not as much as the tour guests, who had all stumped up their £100 and come from USA, Germany, Africa and all over everywhere, and were desperately struggling to keep a lid on their excitement.

As we walked – through the Munich Tunnel, in the stands, at the side of the pitch – they fired question after question at Cole, and waved their cameras at him at every opportunity.

And after all that, in the press gallery for a group interview session, Cole still maintained that he’s ‘not famous.’

His surprisingly down to earth and relaxed manner belies his reputation and also meant he revealed a fair amount during the tour. Before games, he’d relax in the crèche instead of the main players lounge; he got an offer to play in Australia that he thought about ‘for all of five minutes’; David May gave him the most stick in the dressing room and Dwight Yorke was ‘a bit of a boy’. Ok, perhaps we knew the last bit.

He also gave a cheeky acknowledgement that the England manager only started to notice him after he signed for United, despite the fact he’d been banging goals in left, right and centre for Newcastle.

While the tour got an hour to mill around the museum, before tucking into a hot buffet, I had a proper sit down chat with the player formerly known as Andy Cole…

SB: You talked before about the media spotlight players face; fans want to know more about you now don’t they, not just what you do on the pitch?

AC: Yeah, they do. Proper fans are knowledgeable and want to talk about the right things –the state of the game and stuff. But I think the pressure has increased. The media can be really intrusive. Most professional footballers play the game because they love it, but you want to be able to switch off from that. The media is basically saying: ‘You can’t. Whatever you do, we’ll be watching you.’ That’s like stalking.

SB: Do you think, because of the money and the fame associated with being a footballer, some people come into the game for the wrong reasons?

AC: I couldn’t agree with you more. I finished my career at Nottingham Forest and it was the worst three months of my footballing career. I went in there, there were some nice kids who wanted to learn, to achieve. But there were some kids who didn’t care too much about the game, but liked the lifestyle – the girls and the cars.

You look at a lot of the younger players coming up now and you have to ask if they’re in it for the right reasons. A lot of them don’t even like football.

SB: But that goes back to something else you said about the game – that players have become athletes first, footballers second. The football can be coached into them.

AC: It’s a lot about mentality though. It’s all I wanted to do; I lived and breathed the game. Some don’t even like it. But the lifestyle is fantastic.

SB: But it can be quite self-destructive if you aren’t given advice on how to handle that. Were you given any help or advice on how to handle the external pressures when you joined United, or even Newcastle?

AC: When I first went from Bristol City to Newcastle, I was given nothing. Basically, it was a £1.7m fee and off you go. I was 22. I’d only played half a season at Bristol City on loan. Nobody said to me: ‘these are the pitfalls, this is what you’ve got to deal with.’ And that’s why when I did go to Newcastle and did quite well, I struggled with life off the pitch a bit, with people expecting things of you. I only wanted to play football, I didn’t have any interest in that. Some people took that as; ‘look at him, he’s arrogant.’

SB: Do you think you were misunderstood during your career?

The perception of someone is based on how they are when you meet them. When I was playing, I had no interest in anything other than football and making sure my team mates, the manager and the fans thought I was good enough. Nobody really knows a person, but the media can blow them up or portray them in a certain way. They have a lot to do with how people perceive you.

SB: When was the first time you realised you’d made it. Did you ever look around you and think: ‘Blimey, this is all a bit big-time’?

AC: Never. I never believed I’d made it. When I got to Manchester United, the first question I asked myself was: ‘Am I good enough to be here’? I looked around the dressing room. It was full of big names. After being in the Premiership for just over a year, was I good enough to play with these guys? Years after, I was asking: ‘Am I still good enough to be here?’ That kept me on my toes. I always wanted to push myself. When you get comfortable, that’s when your problems start. You look back on your career and think: ‘Yeah, I did ok.’ But while you’re there, you can’t think you’ve made it.

SB: And what about England? Do you think you were just unlucky. England seemed to have a bunch of top class strikers that perhaps should have got more caps – Ian Wright, Robbie Fowler – but Shearer and Sheringham seemed immovable.

AC: I just think you get politics in football. There were quality strikers out there. Most of them would have walked into other international teams. If you weren’t scoring five in five, you weren’t good enough for England. The media kept saying you had to be ‘world class,’ but their perception of what that is was different to mine.

I’ve got not no regrets about my England career but should I have played more times? Hell yeah, because I was scoring goals for Manchester United, and doing it in the Champions’ League against better players.

SB: Did it dent your ego a bit?

AC: It made me more determined to score more goals for United. Some of the teams I played against in Europe were better than the teams England were playing, like Azerbaijan and the like. For whatever reason, the manager thought I wasn’t good enough to play for England even though I was playing against international defenders every week. It didn’t make sense to me.

SB: Is it hard to fill the gap when your career ends? A lot of ex-players go into the media.

AC: I had no idea what I wanted to do to be honest. I miss the dressing room. I put coaching off, kept saying I’d do it next year, but I look at coaching and honestly, the game is just the same as when I was playing. If you’re not a friend of a friend, you’re not going to get given a chance.

I might look at it if someone asks but I’m not going to force it. I don’t think I need a piece of paper to prove I know the game, I played it for 20 years and I know I’m good enough. Luckily, I’m working for Manchester United as an ambassador and it’s been absolutely ideal for me. I see it as an opportunity for me to do something people perhaps thought I could never do.

People think I’m not bad when they meet me. But I already knew that.