Interview: Dominic Matteo, footballer, on playing for Scotland and England and why he walked away

HE WAS born in Scotland, supported Scotland each time they played England and even once owned a Queen of the South tracksuit.

Yet six-times capped Dominic Matteo never quite felt like he belonged in the Scotland team.

What he remembers as some hostile headlines perhaps didn’t help. But Matteo’s experience is instructive at a time when the Anglo-Scot debate has again flared up. Matteo made his debut for Scotland when in his mid-twenties. That it took so long is something that would never happen now with Detective Superintendent Mick Oliver, Craig Levein’s national team scout, on the case. Not that it would have needed any great sleuthing skills to uncover Matteo’s credentials.

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A quick dip into a Rothman’s Yearbook would have revealed everything that needed to be known about someone whose father owned a fish and chip shop in Dumfries, taking time off on a Saturday to follow Celtic home and away for 27 years. Matteo lived the first four years of his life in Dumfries and Galloway while his father, though of Italian extraction, was also born in Scotland, even if he says some journalists refused to believe it.

“I remember something in the Scottish Press which talked about my dad not even being Scottish. I was like: ‘get your facts right, guys’. It upset me a little bit. And I remember I didn’t get too much backing from the Scottish FA either. My agent wrote a letter saying he was disgusted.”

As many photographs in his newly released autobiography In My Defence prove, he lived in a Scottish tracksuit, even after his family relocated to Southport. “I don’t know how much more Scottish you have to be than actually being born there,” he says.

The exasperation is still clearly evident ten years on since he last pulled on a dark blue shirt, when Scotland, in Berti Vogts’ first game in charge, fell 5-0 to France. It was nothing personal, but following this game he informed Vogts that he was no longer available for selection. To be fair, a combination of injuries almost ended up crippling him, as did his willingness to take medication enabling him to play through them.

“I have been back a couple of times, just to be on the terraces,” he says, when asked whether that was it between him and Scotland. He’s quick to dismiss the idea that it had been a convenient relationship. “I always watch the Scotland games,” he points out. “It’s a bit hard when you go to my local [Matteo lives in North-west England], there’s not many Scotland fans there. You have your own little television in the corner.”

Matteo even endured barracking from England fans while watching Argentina v England on the Japanese island of Sapporo, after Scotland – and Matteo – had failed to reach the World Cup finals in 2002. He couldn’t win. They were angry at him for switching allegiance having won four Under 21 caps and after one England B appearance. “I was sat with my agent, near Rio Ferdinand’s family,” recalls Matteo.

“I had a lot of friends in the squad like Robbie Fowler, so I thought I’d go and watch. It’s surprising that you can go and watch a game of football and still get abused. Don’t get me wrong, it made me laugh at the time. But it’s sad that grown men actually bother to give someone stick while they are watching an England game.”

Matteo played in four of the World Cup qualifiers, including both pivotal games with Belgium. “My Scotland career started too late,” he says now.

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“To be honest, it was getting to the stage where I would turn up for squads and I would be struggling. At that stage in my career I wasn’t training much. I was playing, then having an injection, and then playing again.”

He eventually had to wear a left boot a size-and-a-half too big in order to account for the swelling during games. “It’s difficult to play for your country in those circumstances,” he says. “I was not training that much. I was ticking over, and playing on a Saturday. I thought it was the right decision for me [to retire from international football]. Younger Scottish players could probably come in and do better. Unfortunately, that’s not really happened.”

Matteo broke into the Liverpool first-team at the age of 18, something that would see the Scotland scouts scuttling down to Anfield these days. There is an obvious comparison here with Danny Wilson, whose appearances for Liverpool have been far more sporadic and yet the centre-half – the position where Matteo played, or at least wanted to play (he only featured there once for Scotland) – has already won five international caps. At his age Matteo, too, was able to boast an international pedigree, but for England. Possibly this served to make Scotland a bit more hesitant about approaching him.

Stuart McCall famously dilly-dallied on the touchline in order to avoid committing himself to England. Matteo, on the other hand, played for England in the Under-21 international tournament in Toulon and, from his account, had a ball.

In his book, he says he considers “those few weeks in France to be among the best of my life”. But another sentence, where he talks of “booze playing a big part in our fun”, hints at a player whose outlook was one shared by countless amateur players up and down the land. It’s just that he happened to play for clubs who where then among the biggest in the land.

Matteo had a perfect view of some of the most defining moments of the first decade of what was then the Premiership, looking on from a captain’s perspective as Leeds United imploded financially and, when younger, swaggering around the Wembley pitch in a white Armani suit prior to the FA Cup final against Manchester United in 1995, on the afternoon when the ‘Spice Boys’ legend was born.

“No one would remember that had we won,” he says now. He still has the suit, not that he has ever worn it again. “It’s a bit tight around the arse area,” he explains before admitting that a combination of age, injuries and a once-riotous lifestyle has taken a toll on his once-svelte figure.

Matteo liked to party. Hard. It’s why In My Defence can often startle. He makes Mike Tindall look like a two-can Dan by comparison. Matteo’s laddish credentials have been established long before you reach Chris Moyles’ afterword – “I would love to say, as a Leeds United fan, that it was football that brought us together but that would be a lie – it was booze,” the Radio One DJ writes. Perhaps this trait, more than other, was the broadest hint that Scotland made up a large part of Matteo’s DNA. He might not have commandeered a boat without oars and then taken it out into the Atlantic but he once water-skied across Lake Windermere when utterly banjaxed, despite being officially absent from the Liverpool team due to injury. Further inviting harm to his person was the fact that Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock could be heard from the boat urging his then Liverpool team-mate on.

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“Once you are finished the football game you go for a few pints with your mates – for me it just seemed a normal thing to do,” he says. Ruddock and Matteo were fast friends and the union led to many lost weekends. This included one labelled www, so-called because they got blitzed in Warrington, Windermere and Wigan over 48 hours. Having read the book, you have already made a mental note to clarify something he says about how a typical night-out with Ruddock would involve “sinking 20-25 pints of Guinness”. A combined total, surely?

“No, that was each,” he confirms, remarkably. “I know it sounds ridiculous. We went to Dublin one time, and we did get through over 30 pints each. I remember thinking to myself that I didn’t feel too bad. I think that is when you have a problem. But I didn’t think it was impressive. Razor’s a big guy and I was always fit as a fiddle back then because my background was in athletics. It went out my system quickly. I had a few big sessions when I was playing. But not before games.”

Not that anyone should mistake this for ardent professionalism. He even had a habit of turning up late for international gatherings having had a skin-full. Before Craig Brown finally snared Matteo for Scotland he had come very near to making a full England appearance. Just three months after he cheered Scotland on against England in Euro ‘96 – he watched it in a bar in Faliraki, naturally – Matteo was called up by Glenn Hoddle for a World Cup qualifier against Poland.

Liverpool team-mates Robbie Fowler, David James, Steve McManaman and Jamie Redknapp were also in the squad. “The lads had become used to having a few drinks on the way down so persuaded the two drivers to stop off on the way,” he recounts in In My Defence.

“I didn’t know any better and just went along with it. By the time we got to the hotel we were quite drunk. We also arrived late, which didn’t go down too well.”

Hoddle had a quiet word with Matteo after training one day, and though he was one of the few not named in the match squad for the Poland game he was included again for the next home qualifier, against Italy. It was a fateful occasion. Although he was again left out of the match-day squad he met Brown at the game, and his international ambitions were about to take a lurch to the north. But even then England remained on the radar. Hoddle rang him before the following month’s friendly against Mexico and told him: “Dom, you’re definitely playing”.

But Matteo got injured again, Hoddle eventually got sacked and “with him went any hopes I had of playing for England”. If this doesn’t sound like he had been holding out for a Scotland approach then he assures you that it’s because he had all but given up hope, while he also admits to being somewhat indignant at the time it took the Scots to call.

“I played all my career in England and I think maybe the Scottish fans thought ‘who is this?’ when I turned up,” he says. They thought it was just because I could not get a game for England. It was actually the other way around with me. I was asked loads of times to play for England. I was actually waiting for Scotland. I couldn’t believe that Scotland did not know that I was Scottish.

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“I didn’t understand how people from Scotland could slip through the net. Obviously they are making efforts now to make sure people don’t.”

These days Scotland hoover up anyone with even the faintest Scots bloodline, to the dismay of some. Unsurprisingly, Matteo is in favour of this approach. His own first squad included the likes of Don Hutchison and Matt Elliott. “I just think that if they have Scottish heritage and they can make the squad better then you have to go that way,” he says.

“Ireland do it. They have qualified [for Euro 2012]. You are not telling me all their players are born in Dublin. It is always great to have as many Scottish boys as you can in the team but I think even if it’s only their uncles or aunties who are Scottish, it doesn’t matter – get them in!”

Matteo got them in all right, even when finally called up by Scotland. He made the mistake of “getting leathered” at the first meet-up. “Craig [Brown] was okay though as he didn’t mind the lads having a few pints,” he recalls in his book. He’d long retired by the time Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor famously pushed on through until dawn after a match against the Netherlands, and prior to a crucial meeting with Iceland, but you feel he is qualified to give his view, even though it is not offered from a moral high ground.

“I think we’ve all had curfews, and we’ve all broken them,” he says. “I played with Barry at Blackburn. He was a good player, a good footballer. Obviously rules are there and I think if you overstep the mark you have to be punished. I think that in this day and age things get blown out of proportion a lot more. But I am not condoning people getting drunk and then going out and playing football.

“It was always a Sunday for me,” he continues. “I was never one for going to nightclubs and that kind of stuff, I was always quite happy in my local boozer. That’s the way I used to do it. I’d sit in my local and have a full breakfast, then have a few pints of Guinness. A few pints would turn into a lot of pints.”

He admits the book was a hard one to write – or at least relate to his ghost-writer. “Obviously I liked to drink and I had to tell the truth,” he says. This is before we even get to the gambling, which saw him place bets for as much as £100,000 on a single horse race. He stopped when he suddenly realised he was blowing his daughters’ inheritance. Matteo now runs a bar in Leeds among other business interests. His life would sound like the footballers’ cliché had it not been lived quite so close to the edge.

In my Defence: Dominic Matteo – The Autobiography, published by Great Northern Books, £16.99