Manchester United’s Seven Deadly Sins: #6 – Lust

Jaap Stam

Lust: Lust isn’t just a sin limited to the tabloid tales of Ryan Giggs, The Doc and anything vaguely linked to Dwight Yorke. It could be something better, something enjoyable (or none of those, but that is very much the aim).

Looking and scrolling through various dictionary websites to numbers 4, 5, 6 and 27, it’s been decided that ‘Lust’ can indeed be kept clean (and unintentionally prudish): any examples of love for the club, yearning (trophies!), craving (money! power!), pleasure (the various successes of a great football club, duh!) and relish (mmm, relish) all apparently constitute lust. Read on Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy.

Lust: Wanting Dante.

But Stam, why are you so mad?

Retirement is just about the only way a high-profile footballer can leave a big club feeling happy and satisfied. In Red, the happy and satisfied Gary Neville recalls the moment he caught Jaap Stam emerging from Sir Alex Ferguson’s office in a ‘state of shock’.

“I’m out of here,” Stam would tell him. “I’m flying to Rome to sign for Lazio tonight.” How did it get so bad, so quickly for the Dutchman? Stam was only a United player for three years but, Rob Smyth writes, “had the enduring impact of a one-club man.” Indeed, Ferguson has spoken openly about Stam in the past, wishing he had stayed longer.

The Neville and Stam exchange, as written in the former’s book, was: “You’re under contract. You can stay.” “No, he wants me out. There’s no point staying where I’m not wanted.”

Has Ferguson been honest about why he’d let him go? There was his age (and the money Lazio were prepared to pay in relation to that), his fitness and also Head to Head, Stam’s very own book.

Nobody but the Scot is certain of the impact the autobiography had on Stam’s United career, but it can’t have helped, even as nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence. The serialisation of Stam’s book in the Daily Mirror – then edited by a gleeful Piers Morgan – caught everyone’s attention: he had alleged that Ferguson approached him at PSV without the club’s permission and that, apparently, the manager encouraged going to ground easily in order to win a penalty.

David Beckham, he wrote, would never “be asked to take a turn in the black chair of Mastermind,” while the Neville brothers were known as “busy c*nts … for their endless grumbling.”

Though Gary Neville was not pleased it made the papers, he knew it was “meant affectionately.” You simply had to read on to find that out: “Gary’s desire to chatter actually turns into a benefit for the team,” Stam wrote. “Before we take to the pitch he’s always discussing how the particular game should be played … he’s impressed me so much that I’d even stick my neck out and say he’d make a good manager.”

Beckham, meanwhile, is “not thick, he’s just a normal guy having to put up with a lot of sh*t thrown at him by people who don’t even know his true personality.” And when Simon Kuper interviewed Stam just weeks before it all went to pot, he noted that the player “worshipped Alex Ferguson.” Stam’s book was written with good intentions. And he loved United. He just had a funny way of saying it.

Neville and Blackmore 4eva

It might have been the frequent hairstyles or simply the dearth of handsome faces in the United dressing room, but, in the early 90s, Clayton Blackmore was, in Gary Neville’s own words, the team’s “pin-up defender.” It was perhaps why his team-mates stuck a life-size picture of the Welshman that young apprentices were forced to make love to, as part of their initiation.

Neville recalls: “… as Barry White music played, whichever unlucky apprentice had been chosen would have to dance around the table and pretend to get off with Wales’ right-back. I can’t tell you how excruciating that is for a 16-year-old in front of heroes like Mark Hughes and Bryan Robson.”

This would happen as Blackmore watched on “pi**ing himself with laughter like the rest of the first-teamers.”

“Refuse to make love to Clayton properly and a second-year apprentice would smash you over the head with a ball wrapped up in a towel,” Neville continued. “God it hurt.”