By Oliver Holt

The Times
May 9 1998

Shearer’s public image is of a hero, a good guy, sometimes dull and mundane. A sinister side to his nature has recently come to the fore, however, and brought unwelcome attention By Oliver Holt

The small suite at the Durham County Cricket Club ground looks like a film set. There are cameras everywhere, some hand-held, some on tripods. Men fiddle, fixing filters around a lens. In one corner, a crew is testing light levels. A pattern of thick cable coils across the floor like writhing snakes. The curtains in front of the big picture windows are shut.

A coat rack has myriad shirts of different designs and sizes draped over it and there is a long cabinet, its surface cluttered with boxes of boots and more shirts in cellophane packets. And there is a clipboard with a written timetable on it - the afternoon schedule for Alan Shearer.

He walks in with that loping, hip-heavy swagger that has become so familiar on the football field. He talks briefly with an adviser outside, surveys the shirts on offer and observes curtly that someone is a “shit-for-brains”. He wanders out on to the balcony, spots someone he knows below and yells a torrent of mock-aggressive, blue-tinged abuse.

For a second, still smiling at the bawdiness, he stops to stare at the two groundsmen busy rolling the cricket square. Shearer looks at them, working alone and unhindered, the image of unadulterated sporting simplicity from another age. Then he turns back inside and closes the curtains.

The simplicity that was once a footballer’s life and which he has made a virtue out of following - he once said he relaxed on a day off by creosoting his fence - has eluded him of late as the ephemera that goes with being the England captain and the FA Carling Premiership’s most expensive player crowd in.

Several weeks ago, he was supposed to have been involved in a fracas with his team-mate, Keith Gillespie, the winger, during a “golfing weekend” in Dublin. The joke doing the rounds at Newcastle United was that after Gillespie had been laid out flat on his back and bleeding from a head wound, Shearer had said that was the best right cross he had seen all season.

Then there was the incident two weeks ago with Neil Lennon, the Leicester City midfield player, when the Sky Sports cameras appeared to show Shearer kicking him full in the face as he lay on the floor. In the hysterics that followed, some MPs and fair-play aficionados demanded that he be omitted from the England squad for the World Cup.

On Wednesday, stung into action, the Football Association charged him with misconduct. A few days before, he had been accused of breaking the nose of Ramon Vega, the Tottenham Hotspur defender, with his elbow. And this is the man that Freddie Shepherd and Douglas Hall, the disgraced Newcastle directors, knew as “Mary Poppins”.

The excitement over his misdeeds has reached such a pitch that Glenn Hoddle, the England coach, felt moved to launch his own defence of the man upon whom so many of his World Cup hopes lie. “I have spoken to him at length in recent days,” Hoddle said. “I have watched the incident at Leicester many times on video and I am 100 per cent sure that what happened was accidental. I do not accept that Alan Shearer would deliberately harm a fellow professional.”

The reality is that Shearer is a rough, aggressive sort of bloke, not a flawless do-gooder, not a saint. Against all odds, he has managed to remain a normal man, blunt and uncomplicated. “Despite the millions you earn, do you still consider yourself working-class?” I asked him. “I am working-class,” he said.

He has got jagged edges like any working man, like any rugged centre forward. He gets kicked, he kicks back. He was lucky not to be sent off for what he did to Lennon, but his plea that what he did was unintentional, that it amounted to an exaggerated loss of balance, is plausible. Less relevant was the excuse Shearer offered several days ago that he, like his father who still leaves for work at 6am each morning, is committed to everything he does.

Mostly, he suffers because of the heightened expectations others have of him. The public expect him to score goal after goal without a blip; the moral majority howl and carp if he is anything other than demure and the journalists who clamber over each other to secure an interview with him long for words of wisdom that never come. Shearer is not a Ruud Gullit or a Gianluca Vialli. He cannot charm malevolence away. In public, he is prosaic.

What was the last book he read? “I don’t read books.” What were the last films he saw? “The Full Monty and Titanic.” What does he do to relax? “I spend time with my family. I have got two daughters who are too young to know their Dad’s a footballer. They just want to play with their Dad. I like to play golf, too, but apart from that, that’s me, I’m afraid.”

He does not seem to care what most people think. He wore a T-shirt recently that had a slogan on it reading “I’m having a nightmare”. He was smiling in the picture. Face-to-face, he is a mildly intimidating presence. His smiles are paper-thin, borne out of politeness; cursory, not something to waste too much time over. Mostly, he glowers in the way that he does on the opening credits to Match of the Day.

He could stonewall for England, too. So the noises off, the crude comment, the yelling and the refusal of a cup of lukewarm tea, assume an absurdly overblown significance because they are almost all you have to cling to. When the camera rolls or the tape whirrs, the guard goes up and the control freak takes over.

“Yes, I do like to be in control,” he said. “I do like everything to be laid out, to know what I’m doing. I’m very impatient. I like things done yesterday, which is probably a fault of mine. I like things to be neat and tidy and organised. I say what I want and show what I want and I keep things private.

“There is a different side to me, but when you give an interview or when you speak to someone and you are meeting them for the very first time, it is very difficult to get on well with them, because it doesn’t happen like that. You’re guarded when you meet someone you don’t know and so I’m exactly the same.

“It does not bother me that some say I’m dull and boring because the people that do know me will tell you a different story. It is very difficult to be open with people you don’t know. There is nothing I can do about the fact that the real me does not get across and it is probably difficult to know the real me.

“But there is another side to me and I do like my private life and I am not going to talk about certain things, and if people don’t like that then so be it. I am in the business to play football and to enjoy football and that is the most important thing. If people don’t like my style, then I can’t do anything about that. I have been like that since I first entered into the game and it hasn’t done me bad in the past, so I am not going to change now.

“To be honest, the press lads have got a job to do and you do it to the best of your ability and you are no different to us, and if it gets you a good story you have done well. I suppose it’s like us scoring a goal. I understand that, that’s not a problem to me. My motto in life is ‘if you give 100 per cent then no one can ask any more’.

“It bothers me what the supporters think of me, certainly of the team that I am playing for. You are always going to get stick from opposing fans. That is a fact of life, it has been going on for donkeys’ years and that will continue, whether it is me or whoever comes along in ten years. But it bothers me what my manager thinks of me and what my own supporters think of me because if they like me, then I must be doing the job I am being paid to do.”

Some of this is trotted out like a mantra, a well-rehearsed chant that he has been through again and again. His answers act like an antidote to any question, subduing them, battering them into submission. None of this he does unpleasantly, just matter-of-factly, part of the job that has to be done, a duty performed diligently but without enthusiasm.

Fame is not a problem for him, he says. Maybe he can’t take his daughters to McDonald’s as often as he would like, but he can still go to the working men’s club with his Dad on a Sunday. “There’s not a great deal I miss,” he said. “It is a wonderful life to be a footballer and if anyone tells you different, then they’re lying.”

The only way to provoke him into anything remotely spiky is to be confrontational. “Do you ever lose control?” I asked. It was a week or so before the clash with Lennon. “Not really, no, never have done,” he said, and then with a warning smile, “not yet”.

“What about Dublin,” I said, “wasn’t that a loss of control?” The expression changed then and became set and stern. “You don’t know what went on in Dublin, do you?” he said. “No. Well, you can’t ask me a question about it then, can you?”

The only thing left is to accept defeat. You can’t beat Shearer so you have to join him in cliché. As a talker, a self-revelatory man of words, he is not even premier league. He saves all his best answers for the football field, where life is still simple.