An older and wiser Savage

Daniel Taylortalks to a rejuvenated Robbie Savage as he prepares to face Manchester United tomorrow

THE FIRST time I met Robbie Savage, he got his boxer dog out of his car at Leicester City’s training ground and, footballers being footballers, conducted an initiation ceremony that basically involved lots of laughing, pointing “Naz” in my direction and shouting “attack”. Naz was 70lb of over-excitable muscle and fangs. But it was only a bit of fun and, as Roy Keane used to say, nobody got killed. Maybe because I managed to get in my car and lock the doors.

Savage was a wiry 22-year-old, signed from Crewe Alexandra, with a surfer’s haircut and the kind of tan that boys from Wrexham were not supposed to have.

Another memory is of him drawing level at traffic lights and demanding a race (him in a Mercedes, me in a Fiat Punto) before roaring off into the distance. Then there was the day he bounded into a room of reporters waiting to see the then City manager Martin O’Neill and pulled up his sleeve to show off his new tattoo: the Armani logo. Naturally, he flexed his bicep at the same time.

He was loud, full of himself and wore his heart on his designer sleeves. But Savage, at heart, was an ordinary – and very likable – lad. A little bit daft, maybe. But with seven A-C grade GCSEs, nothing like the popular caricature. He didn’t take himself too seriously and there was nothing to suggest his life would become the blur of flying tackles, screaming headlines and loud jeers that it is now. Everything seemed a lot more innocent back then.

Tomorrow, he will be part of a Derby County side trying to dislodge Manchester United from the FA Cup and slowly emerging from an annus horribilis that almost forgot to end. He is 34 now – older, wiser, less confrontational (he says) – but the one thing that has not changed is his self-deprecating line in humour.

“It was all brought home to me when I was playing for Birmingham City a few years ago,” he answers when I ask how his life has changed over the past decade. “I’d bought a yellow Ferrari and I was driving down the M42 when it broke down. I ended up on the side of the motorway, with everyone driving past giving me V-signs and w***** signs. Even old men and women. But you’ve got to laugh.”

He is grinning boyishly. “I’m hated. Absolutely hated.” This is the thing about Savage: notoriety has never bothered him. “I do get a buzz out of being booed,” he admits. “In fact, I thrive on it. I’ve used it all my career to get me going. It’s been part of my game for a long time now.”

Savage, after all, has lived his life on the basis that it is better to be talked about than not to be talked about. But there have been times over the past year when, by his own admission, he has wondered whether he would ever be in this position again.

“Paul Jewell signed me and I know he must really have fancied me because he’d tried to sign me for Wigan before. He brought me in from Blackburn, made me club captain, but then he obviously saw things in me that he didn’t like. He put me in a poor team, I couldn’t turn it around and I suffered like everyone else. And then I was completely frozen out.”

The indignities piled up. Savage was sent to Brighton on loan and, after an abortive trial with the Beirut club Al-Ansar in the Lebanese league, Derby took only one more call from an interested club.

“Rushden Diamonds,” he says, with the look of a man who has just found a flea in his vest. “No disrespect to them, but I thought to myself, ‘Eight months ago I was playing against Manchester United in the Premier League. Do I really want to be going to Lewes or Ebbsfleet?”

When Savage was in the team, there were boos. Not the usual ones from the opposition fans, but Derby’s own supporters. “I’d been a fans’ favourite at every one of my previous clubs. But my name was booed even when the teams were read out. In the end, I was sent to train with the kids. The kids! There have been a lot of low points, but that was the lowest of the low. I was 34, training with kids, thinking, ‘What the hell has happened to me?’ I did think it was over. I knew what people were saying about me, that my legs were gone, that I was finished.”

Savage is not exaggerating when he says that Nigel Clough has saved his career since replacing Jewell as manager. Clough was shrewd enough to bring Savage back from the wilderness and, slowly but surely, the midfielder has started to win round Derby’s fans.

“In my wildest dreams I never thought I would get back to where I am now. To do it, to come back from the dead from being booed and people asking me if I have still got a club, that makes it the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done in football. I won trophies at Leicester but, honestly, this feels even better.”

Guardian Service