Winston and Lose Some

These days it is not uncommon for a player to sell his potential, along with any personal ambition, for a huge wage and a spot on the bench. Look at Steve Sidwell; outstanding last season at Reading, but after a year of doing literally nothing at Chelsea for twice the money, his career’s basically over already. However, many people might not know that the man who laid the blueprint for this goes by the name of Winston Bogarde, who played just 11 times for Chelsea between 2000 and 2004, but earned more than £5million by recent estimations. Thing is, he was coming to the end of a stalling career, and following a quite farcical spell in this country, was able to bask in ridicule while sticking a couple of middle fingers up at everyone’s favourites Blues.

Going back a bit, he had a fantastic pedigree in the 90s. After a formative few years at Sparta Rotterdam, Bogarde moved to Ajax in 1994, where in one of the greatest club squads ever assembled (Marc Overmars, the de Boer twins, Clarence Seedorf, Kanu, Jari Litmanen, and Patrick Kluivert, to name just a few), he won the Champions League in 1995. A spot in the Dutch national team followed, but at the 1998 World Cup he was seen as a dissident to the team morale, filmed forcibly pushing two white teammates aside as they were trying to celebrate Davids' winning goal in the second round match against Yugoslavia. The year of the World Cup he was at AC Milan, but played just thrice before being somehow offloaded to Barcelona, where he sat for the next three years, playing just nine times in total in the second two years. His highlight at Barce was undoubtedly in a 1999 Champions League group match against AIK where he was humiliatingly substituted after just 20 minutes, prompted by nearly getting sent off for a horror challenge on an opposing striker.

Here’s where it gets good though. He signed for Chelsea in 2000 season, but literally weeks after signing his contract with the club, the newly-appointed manager Claudio Ranieri wanted him to leave. According to Bogarde’s biography (which has possibly the greatest title I have ever heard – This Negro Bows for No One) it would have been impossible to find a contract comparable to the one he had at Chelsea, so he decided to stay and honour the full term of the agreement. In the end, he appeared just 11 times during his four-year contract, reportedly earning more than £40,000 a week. Quite why Chelsea agreed to such a salary in the first place, given his lack of first-team play at Milan and Barce, is ridiculous, but kudos to Bogarde for sticking with it. Chelsea also won a domestic trophy during this period which hilariously actually triggered a bonus payment in his contract, despite the fact that Bogarde did not feature at all for Chelsea that season.

During his time at Chelsea, they repeated tried to offload him because of his inflated wages. When no-one was interested, Chelsea demoted him to their reserves and then even their youth team in an effort to force Bogarde to leave, however he just kept turning up every day and attending whatever training he was assigned to. Bogarde then claims to have been set-up in a strangely contrived drugs scandal (similar to other Chelsea players Mark Bosnich and Adrian Mutu), but still he refused to leave or sign a new contract for a reduced wage. Bogarde continued to work every day with the Chelsea reserves until he left in 2004 and retired to a life of luxury all paid by the West London club’s weeping coffers. He took a lot of stick in the press for being greedy and selfish, but whatever, if Chelsea were dumb enough to lock him into a four-year contract for such inflated wages, then how can you blame him for keeping them to their word? I reckon at about £750,000 a game he was pretty good value!

Grove Street

Hands up who remembers Perry Groves. He was a very bizarre looking ginger gentleman who played for Arsenal for six years starting in 1986. The ex-winger, now 43, won two league championship medals and a league cup medal without even really threatening to contribute. Now he’s back in the game…metaphorically speaking of course.

Mr Groves has sky-rocketed back into the news (and maybe some peoples’ hearts) this week after being arrested by police for, get this, using foul and abusive language. I have never been so appalled in my life. I mean its one thing hearing a tramp by the underground calling a hamburger wrapper “a faggot,” but to hear of such behaviour from a role model for children around the world? I am flabbergasted. He has been given a fixed penalty notice after being arrested in the centre of his glamorous hometown of Colchester, but seriously the only way to cut down on such behaviour is to stick offenders on prison ships and float them out to the high-seas to fight to the death for food.

A police spokeswoman said today: “Police issued a 43-year-old man from Colchester with a fixed penalty notice for a Section 5 public order offence of using abusive and insulting words and behaviour, likely to cause harassment.” Unfortunately we have no insight into what exactly he said, but word on the street is that it was sexually-threatening in a bestial sense, and involved the infamous ‘c-word.’ Under new legislation police fines for such offences range from £50 to £80, and can be issued for a variety of horrible hooliganistic acts including littering, creating a nuisance by causing noise, throwing fireworks and being drunk. No word on whether gun crime or drug dealing are covered by these anti-social behaviour laws but I reckon we’ll get there eventually.

Groves, who also played for Colchester and Southampton, is apparently now a sales representative and soccer pundit, while also moonlighting as a writer. Two years ago Groves, whose career was cut short in 1995 by an achilles tendon injury, wrote an acclaimed autobiography called We All Live in a Perry Groves World, lifting the lid on his boozy antics while part of the Arsenal team with Tony Adams and Paul Merson. “Arsenal's position at the top of soccer's hard-drinking league is fully justified,” he wrote, “I was a member of the serious drinking squad. When Anders Limpar joined Arsenal, he just shook his head at the way some of us would drink seven or eight pints after a game or a training session.” He also mentioned that after seeing Groves actually play, everything fell into place.