Terry Butcher: The grief when my son passed away was all-encompassing

Resumen detallado

The former England international also explains the unexpected place his iconic blood-stained shirt is displayed, and his Diego Maradona grudge ...

My Sporting Life is The i Paper’s look behind the curtain at what drives sports stars to greatness. Terry Butcher never felt like he deserved to play for England. Now he has revealed just how important Sir Bobby Robson was for his career, the unexpected place his famous blood-stained England shirt is displayed and how he’s paying tribute to his late son Chris.

Playing and captaining England was the biggest honour of my football career but I never thought I deserved to be there. I had imposter syndrome.

I felt I had to prove myself every time I went out for England because there were a lot of people who didn’t want me to be there. I was booed once at Wembley. I think it was Arsenal fans who wanted Tony Adams in the side, so I got booed and that stimulated me to prove them wrong.

Being with England was two or three levels up from club football at the time. Some of the training sessions we used to have were scary because we had John Barnes, Chrissy Waddle, Gazza. It was harder than the games you were picked for.

I’m still as angry with Diego Maradona for the ‘Hand of God’ goal. Time hasn’t healed it and there’s still a huge amount of regret and disappointment about what he did.

People remind me about the handball all the time but I’m more disappointed with the second goal. He didn’t beat me once, he beat me twice and I nearly got to him. I was probably the width of a bootlace away from getting the ball and blocking him and I would have loved to have done that.

Maradona was the best player I ever played against, small but very strong and with a low centre of gravity. He had an incredible football brain and you couldn’t get near him. Perhaps I should have just smashed him and taken a red card.

We lost the game and I had to go into a room with Maradona for a drugs test afterwars. He couldn’t speak English very well, I couldn’t speak Spanish so I gestured at him, tapping my head and then tapping my hand as if to say, ‘Which was it?’

He tapped his head so there’s proof that he was…

Inicio del artículo, extracto de i News. Para leer el resto, abra el artículo en el sitio del medio.