Free #2Sides: My Autobiography by Rio Ferdinand Page B

whole approach. To borrow a Nelson Mandela-era idea from South Africa, what we wanted was not a court case but something more like a truth and reconciliation commission, something to create light rather than heat, a way to use the incident to help educate people.
    But that never happened. We told the FA to deal with it quickly. The incident happened on a football pitch and should never have ended up in court. It was absolutely obvious what had happened and the FA should’ve dealt with the situation before a complaint even came in from a member of the public. It wasn’t difficult. Go and see Anton; go and see John Terry; look at the video; make a decision. Simple. But the FA made it sound like it was the most complicated, difficult case they’d ever seen. And they passed the buck for almost a year.

England: Hoddle and Co.
    We’ve wasted a generation
    Or two
    When England does badly in a World Cup the jokes start. They’re all basically the same joke. After the 0–0 with Algeria in South Africa it was:
I can’t believe we only managed a draw against a rubbish team we should have beaten easily … I’m ashamed to call myself Algerian.
    I love a laugh as much as anyone, but I want these jokes to be obsolete. I want England to be good again. I think we can make it happen, but to do that we need to understand where things have gone wrong in the past – and what’s wrong now.
    To play for your country is the greatest thing you can do as a footballer but most of my experiences were tinged with the feeling that we could have been doing so much better. England’s biggest problem is that we don’t produce nearly enough top-level players. Another is that we haven’t worked out how the national team should play. The days when anyone thought we could do well with old-fashioned blood and thunder are long gone. But we’ve never developed a new philosophy. What is the ‘English style’ these days? No one knows. It’s frustrating and after nearly 50 years of hurt, Ireckon it’s time we sorted it out. I’ll explain more about my ideas on that in a later chapter. But first I’ll give you my impressions of the England managers I played under.
     
    By far the best was Glenn Hoddle. I was lucky enough to work with him in the late 1990s when I was still a teenager. He had a crystal clear vision of how he wanted us to play, and how to get us there and I still think it was a tragedy for us when he was sacked for his religious beliefs. If he’d stayed I would have been a different player – and a better player – for England.
    Hoddle encouraged me to come out with the ball and sometimes even played me as a sweeper. He had a vision for me as a creative centre-back – not just defending but starting attacks, like I did at West Ham. He’d say to me, ‘When you get the ball, drive out of the back, commit someone, go past them! Don’t worry about leaving a gap – someone will fill in for you when you go forward.’ It was refreshing.
    I also loved his imaginative training methods. He’d talk to me about skills I’d done, and encourage me to do more: ‘Try things. Don’t worry about making mistakes. That’s not a problem, as long as you don’t make the same ones over and over.’
    He was only just getting started, and I’m sure if he’d stayed he would have had England playing his way. It would have been good, progressive football but with a real winning mentality. Sometimes we’d play with three at the back, other times we’d have four. Sometimes we’d go with four midfielders, sometimes five. All the players enjoyed it because it wasn’t just about passing and attacking more; it was about playing with purpose, with a real focus on being flexible and tactically creative.
    Glenn Hoddle contributed a great deal to my football education. He painted mental pictures so we could visualise the game in frontof us. He also had a knack of simplifying things and breaking things down. The manager would say: ‘If you come out of