Men of Influence magazine


There is the stuff you know about – Champions League finals, FA Cups, England triumphs and disappointments. Then there are the stories that come in from listeners: of seeing Crouch dressed as a chicken having his feathers trimmed at the Brighton branch of Toni and Guy, or getting stuck into a game of Play Your Cards Right with Dev from Coronation Street on a Euston-bound train out of Stockport.

Such is his accidental ability to have appeared as a bystander or participant in so many bizarre scenarios that he can sometimes appear to be the Forrest Gump of elite football.

At other times he becomes the Peter Ustinov of the Premier League era, a raconteur telling of the time a prominent member of the Royal Family informed him his wife was out of his league, or when Steven Gerrard attended a Christmas function disguised as an old-age pensioner and riding a mobility scooter.

With the obvious caveat that the moment you self-indulgently deconstruct how a show works you are signalling its demise, there is no intention in this second series to mess with the template we stumbled upon for the first.

Each week Peter, Chris Stark and I pick a topic. Team hotels. Footballers’ houses. Kits.

The three of us discuss it briefly on WhatsApp and then discuss at much greater length in the pub. The second one of these is recorded and becomes the podcast.

It’s not Sergeant Pepper. The Bafta committee can rest easy. But in the same way that the best nights are the always the spontaneous ones, which makes you vow to plan more of them until you realise that detonates the very idea, the lack of rules liberates us to go where we choose.

Which Premier League club has the poshest shower gel in its changing rooms. How you decide who sits where on the team bus. How Graeme Souness reacts when he spots you doing yoga on holiday.

In other words, what life is really like as a professional footballer. Not the stuff you already know, or the stuff you think you know, but what really goes on.

About the height thing. Even those expecting a tall man are taken aback when confronted with the full Crouch reality. Chris and I are both nine inches shorter than our pod co-host but weigh more than he does. Neither of us is curvy.

We try not to mention it on the podcast because when you have heard something for 30 years of your life it gets a little tiresome, and also because a man from Blackpool called Karl did it for us in the first series and is still happily riding the social media backlash that followed.



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