Who better than David Ginola to replace Princess Diana as the Red Cross’s ambassador on landmine control? On the eve of his trip to Cambodia, the Gallic glory boy talks to Denis Campbell
The dark sunglasses, non- descript grey clothes and floppy hat pulled down over his eyes are a poor disguise. Almost everyone in the north London Italian restaurant where we meet for lunch recognises David Ginola. Heads turn as soon as he opens the door; there’s an outbreak of stares, nudges and whispers. He shrugs off the attention gracefully. He’s used to it.
Since moving to England five years ago, Ginola has worked almost as hard at building a profile for himself outside football as he has on the pitch. There was the catwalk outing for Cerruti and those ads for L’Oral shampoo (“Because I’m worth it”) and Renault Laguna cars (“It’s all worked out beautifully for Ginola”); the World Cup commentating stint for the BBC; the chat-show appearances and magazine covers; the 11- page spread in Hello!. He has also addressed the Oxford Union, passionate and ironic in equal measure, on the mortal danger facing English soccer from the huge number of imported footballers.
Today, though, the Spurs midfielder is in less flamboyant mode. As Princess Diana’s successor as the public face of the Red Cross’s worldwide campaign to ban anti- personnel landmines, Ginola is preparing for a very public and potentially risky trip to Cambodia. Next week, the day after facing Sunderland on the last day of the Premiership season, instead of indulging in the usual footballer’s summer holiday – sun, all-day drinking, nightclubs and run- ins with tabloid snoops in Gran Canaria – he will fly to one of the most heavily mined countries in Asia. As Cambodia’s fragile peace allows citizens to return home after decades of war to areas previously inaccessible because of the fighting, more minefields are being stumbled upon. Old mines create new victims every day.
The killing fields await Ginola, as does an exacting tour of duty, taking in sites such as a component factory in Phnom Penh, which makes artificial limbs for amputees, and a limb-fitting centre in Battambang, where these prostheses help victims regain mobility and self- respect. He’ll also play in a football match with some landmine survivors and witness a de-mining operation in one of the many rural areas infested with mines. A retinue of journalists and cameramen will record his every move.
It’s an unusual way to spend a summer break, even for a footballer who conforms to none of the usual stereotypes. Why is he doing it? “Landmines is a big cause, and the Red Cross a big charity,” he answers. “The Princess of Wales did so many remarkable things on landmines that when she died it would have been a shame for the Red Cross to leave the campaign like that and forget about it. It would not have been right to just remember the Princess of Wales but forget that she was working on the landmines issue.”
Ginola has already visited Angola and was deeply affected by what he saw. He played a game with some young amputees. “It was remarkable. They were playing great football, and they train every day using both the prostheses and the other leg to kick the ball. One of our team scored two goals, one with the normal leg and one with the prosthesis. Sometimes, they forget they have lost a leg. They put on a brand new pair of trainers provided by the Red Cross and they are quite happy. We try and make them think, ‘OK, this isn’t the best thing, but although I’ve blown on a mine, life isn’t finished yet’.”
One girl failed to be inspired by this can-do approach, however. “She was seven or eight. I could see in her eyes that she was thinking, ‘You, white guy, what are you doing here and can you explain why this has happened to me?’ The girl had trodden on a landmine when she and her mother were walking down a path they used every day to collect water from a pond. Her mother wasn’t injured, but she saw what happened.” Lost for words, he simply held her hand.
Ginola argues that in our celebrity- obsessed culture, names and faces have a duty to use their fame to help others. “If you are organising an event and you need to attract interest, or cheques, you need names. Without famous people, you have nothing.” It’s a responsibility he claims both to love and hate. “Sometimes, I’d like to go somewhere and be completely anonymous, like eating somewhere and not having people looking at you. Like today, you realise people recognise you. You can’t do anything silly. Everything I do, I have to be careful of my image as a father, football player, husband and person with the badge of the Red Cross. It’s like to be a priest. I have almost to be a saint everywhere I go.”
On the pitch, Ginola is a wonderfully gifted, crowd-pleasing extrovert. Two days before we met, he had shown off the full range of his repertoire in Tottenham’s 4-2 home defeat by Aston Villa.
His first touch, a cheeky backheel, drew appreciative cheers. He regularly beat two or three opponents, forced the opposition to substitute his marker at half-time and was at the heart of Tottenham’s best moves. Any time he got the ball, the level of noise – and of anticipation – rose. But the instinctive entertainer is also a team player, always looking to create opportunities for usually much less talented colleagues. He was voted player of the year last year by football writers and fellow professionals alike. However, he is now 33 and has at most five years left. So how fulfilled is he as a footballer? A pause. “Frustrated,” comes the reply. It is a refreshingly candid answer.
It quickly becomes clear that Ginola is consumed with regret and a sense of missed opportunities, which cuts deep.
“I’ve played for 15 years as a professional. When I think about my quality, my skills, what I’m capable of doing on the pitch, I deserve to be playing in a really top team. I will not say Newcastle United [his former club] and Tottenham are not big clubs,” he says, correcting himself quickly, not wanting to appear ungrateful, “but by big clubs I mean Milan, Barcelona and Manchester United.” That, he says, is his natural level.
While on Tyneside, Ginola had two chances to transfer to Barcelona. The first time, Newcastle would not release him; the second, Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff, his boyhood hero, could not get rid of two established stars whose departure would have enabled the Frenchman to come. “This kind of thing really frustrates me, because I think I would be even bigger today if I had played there for the last four or five years. I would have played in the Champions League every year.”
Instead, he has suffered disappointment as a Kevin Keegan- managed Newcastle team blew a 12-point lead to hand Manchester United the title and has spent the past two seasons as the star turn in a very ordinary Tottenham team. The success he experienced for three years with Paris Saint Germain has not dulled his view that, as his friends put it, he has been “wasting my talent” in England since 1995.
Even worse was the experience of being voted France’s player of the year in 1994 and then almost immediately being discarded by French national team boss Gerard Houllier, now manager at Liverpool. Houllier blamed Ginola for ensuring that France didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup. A misplaced pass from the winger’s boot in the final qualifying game ended up with a Bulgarian opponent and, seconds later, led to a goal which put France out. Houllier branded him “a criminal” and he was dumped from the national side. The memory still hurts.
“It’s a team effort. When you win, it’s a team effort; when you lose, it’s a team effort. People said I had killed their dream. But this isn’t fair. Everybody was hiding behind me.”
When France hosted the same tournament four years later, Les Bleus also won it by beating the mighty Brazil in the final. Ginola was in Paris as part of the BBC’s commentary team. How did he feel about his compatriots’ victory? “Very bad. It was fantastic for the French people, but on the other hand, from a personal point of view, it was terrible.” Because you should have been out on the pitch with them? He nods. An occasion of national rejoicing became a moment of intense private grief, another case of what should have been.
Ginola is already contemplating life after football. Several film scripts have arrived and he’s thinking about maybe trying to break into acting, as Eric Cantona, his fellow countryman, has been trying to do. “When you did a job like football all your life, and it was carrying so much emotion [note the past tense], to find something else that’s giving you the same kind of emotions is very difficult. I will not be able to work easily in an office because I have spent most of my life outside, on the pitch.”
Whatever happens, he thinks he will stay in England, though he will move from his house in Totteridge, on the suburban fringe of north London, to the countryside. He’s had enough of being bothered by fans who know where he lives, and has a longing for rural life.
Does coaching or management appeal? He doesn’t rule it out but reckons the relentless pressure of being a football boss would be too much. In his next life, he wants to be able to spend more, not less, time with his wife Coraline, his son Andrea and daughter Carla. “That is most important. I don’t want to see my boy any longer crying at the airport leaving for France saying, ‘I want to stay with you, Daddy’ while I’m staying here to play matches.”
Talk of his son brings him back to football and to what might have been. “I look at my boy on a Saturday morning when he’s going training, I think about when I was his age, dreaming about being a professional and dreaming about winning trophies. I still dream in the night about winning trophies. Well, life goes by very, very quickly.”