Please give me a chance

THERE is no way of knowing for certain whether the arrow of political correctness has penetrated the shoulder, let alone the heart, of professional football. Somehow you very much doubt it. There remains something distinctly primeval about the game.

On the day Claudio Ranieri took up his managerial post at Chelsea, for instance, the Italian's agent told me that Graham Rix's next stop would be unemployment. When I asked him why, he said Ranieri had taken one judgmental look at the Stamford Bridge assistant manager and found him to be sartorially challenged, not the bella figura he demanded. Soon, the guy who had supported Gianluca Vialli throughout the club's unprecedented run of success found himself out on his ringed ear.

Three years later, Ranieri of Rome is thriving in West London.

Indeed, everything in his Stamford Bridge garden is so pristine you can almost envisage the dramatic sight of Charlie Dimmock yomping over the landscape to give it her five-star blessing.

But what of the man allegedly dismissed for his appearance rather than the way he went about his business? Does Rix have anything to smile about? And yet the events of the next few days will go some way to determining his disposition.

Last week, Rix fired off his 31st job application in approximately 20 months. His was the "staggering CV" which landed on the desk of Partick Thistle chief executive Alan Dick. He also applied for the Livingston vacancy. "Staggering" means exactly that. Rix played 464 first-team games for Arsenal, winning 17 England caps, and captured six cups in his eight-year coaching spell at Chelsea, working closely and compatibly with Glenn Hoddle, Ruud Gullit and Vialli, and then, not so compatibly, with Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth.

Any form of football logic tells you he should be gainfully employed. Instead, he is waiting to see whether those impressive qualifications plus a generous endorsement from his former henchman Jim Duffy will be enough to secure him a slot on a Firhill shortlist. He is not mainlining on confidence, however. There have been so many disappointments, so many rejections. He has been interviewed only twice. He asks himself why all the time, without reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

Rix, whose headmaster brother encouraged him to stop wearing the earring lest it offended any more elements of football society, explains that many of the jobs for which he has applied have been of a modest nature. "I suppose they'd have laughed at me at Chelsea had they found out what I was in for," he recalls. "And yet usually there's no reply. I think a lot of them are frightened off because they think I'll ask for £3 million a year. Of course I won't. I'm not that stupid. I'm not looking for megabucks, or the Real Madrid job.

"Look, I just want to get back into the game. I want to sit down in front of a chairman and his board of directors and tell them what I've got to say and how I want to go about things. I've been in the game day-in day-out for 30 years, I've got a good record and have all this information and stuff I want to impart to people but am not getting a chance to.

"This is the longest I've never done owt. I'm frustrated. I want to get on with my life. My wife Linda is working her socks off at the moment. I want to look after her and the kids properly. Sometimes you feel that you should be driving a cab or opening a bar, but then I see someone in the game who is absolutely useless, and then I think I've got a chance. The good thing is I've always been straight with people, ask men like Gus Poyet and Gianfranco Zola. I never told them porkies."

Could it be that his past is holding him back? Rix spent six months in Wandsworth after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a 15-year-old girl. You might expect him to avoid the subject. Instead, he points out that the offence occurred while he was on the Chelsea pay-roll and that they kept his job for him during the incarceration. Certainly, Vialli believed in him, visiting him three times.

"I don't know if the prison thing puts people off. I'd be disappointed if it did," he adds. "I mean, I paid quite a heavy price for what I did. Sure, I made a mistake, but I didn't come out with any bull**** and try to weasel my way out of it. There were mitigating circumstances (which will appear in the book he is writing), but I've taken my punishment and tried to get on with life. Those six months inside changed me. I had to look at myself and ask myself what I was doing and where I was going? I learned a lot about what was important to me, not football, winning a game and having a laugh, but my kids and the people I loved.

"There was plenty of time, 184 days and 184 nights, for reflection. I kept a diary. I spoke to my lawyer and asked him if I could use it in my book. It turned out I could use it as an aide memoire. Almost every day I wrote something, many of them stupid things, but I must have written 150 times: 'Keep smiling, Ricco,' and drawn a little smiley face. It was as if to say to myself: 'You're in here with some right tough cases, but don't worry about it. You're going to get through with this, so keep your pecker up.' So if I didn't give up in prison, I'm not going to give up in football."

Rix, who had a season at Dundee 10 years ago, hails from Doncaster, the land of the straight talker. He admits he was quivering with fear when he entered prison in March 1999 and again when he blinked his way back into daylight.

"I'd only been out a couple of days when I went to a local shop for a packet of cigars. This massive skinhead came over and told me he was a West Ham fan. I thought he was going to pin me up against the wall and do me. Instead, he says: 'I thought it was diabolical what happened to you! Scandalous! But we're playing you on Saturday and I'm going to boo you.' That was the general response I've had from people."

There were other obstacles to be climbed, particularly when he began attending games again. He recalls one of his first matches was against Manchester United at Old Trafford, and the crowd hammered him with the enthusiasm of blacksmiths hammering metal. Rix was obliged to go down to the touchline to speak to a player but, with the din becoming more hellish by the moment, he forgot what he had to say and had to ask the player to nod his head as if he were receiving instructions.

Rix's agent, Spencer Cohen, is testing the temperature of the publishing game with a synopsis. It promises to be typically frank and revelatory.

Cohen wants to call it Keep Smiling.

Right now, there is understandable cynicism rather than laughter from Rix.

"Last night I spoke to Tony Adams, who has taken over at Wycombe. He said the football and the training was the easy thing. It was just everything else that went with it. There's so much money going out of the game and people getting money that they don't deserve. The game needs a massive injection of honesty, integrity and respect because no-one seems to give a toss about anyone any more."

You can be sure detailed chapters will be reserved for Redknapp and Ranieri. Rix recalls one ironic moment in the summer of 2000 when he and Vialli were walking through a forest in Holland, only a few weeks after Chelsea had beaten Aston Villa in the FA Cup final. "Luca turned to me and said: 'Who's the next manager? Is it you?' I was nonplussed. I asked him what he was on about. He replied: 'I won't be here very long.' He knew then. There were rumblings. When he got the sack, though, I still could not believe it.

"Ten days before Ranieri was due to join, Colin Hutchinson pulled me into his office and said: 'If you stay cool, you'll be all right. We need you to take the team against Leicester on Saturday.'

"I didn't want to do it, because I knew Ranieri was going to bring in his own people. Can you imagine how I felt? I think we lost at home. I had no enthusiasm whatsoever. I could see the writing on the wall in big, bold letters.

"It was obvious from day one when he came that I was out. I gave him two or three days to find his feet, then I went to see him with the interpreter. I asked if there was anything I could do to help him. He said he really appreciated it.

"He never spoke to me again. Every day me and Ray Wilkins would go in. I never gave him any reason to sack me. I was there early, got my kit on and watched training while sitting on a ball. I did absolutely nothing.

"Lads like Poyet, Marcel Desailly and Dennis Wise were getting embarrassed at the way I was being treated. Eventually, Zola went to see Ranieri and told him: 'You've got to sort him out. You can't do that to him.'

"Hey, Ranieri and I got changed in the same room, but we never spoke. It was scandalous how I was treated. Eventually, they called me in and paid me up, the minimum they had to pay."

If Ranieri's name brings a suggestion of bile to Rix's throat, the mere mention of the name Redknapp makes a visit to the toilet obligatory. Rix was given the Portsmouth job by chairman Milan Mandaric. Duffy became his No 2.

It was not long before the chairman was telling Rix that he was bringing in a director of football.

"I got a phone call from Mr Mandaric saying he wanted to bring in someone. I told him I would like to be involved in the decision-making. Obviously, I was going to get somebody who was going to help me and be on my side.

"A week later, Harry came in. I was at a hotel having a couple of days away with my missus. Harry phoned and told me he would like to meet me.

"We all met. 'Graham,' he says, 'I don't want your job. I'm telling you now. I don't want your f****** job'. My missus, to this day, says she believed him. 'I was looking right into his eyes,' she said.

"Harry, though, did not give me one bit of support. Not one. I was hardly getting any money to spend and yet now I see him signing players on 25 grand a week. I believe they spent a fortune on agents' fees during the summer."

Football abounded with careless whispers towards the end of Rix's tenure at Portsmouth, most suggesting that he had not only lost the will to manage, but had disappeared down a pit of depression.

Again, he surprises you with his candour.

"Probably I was depressed. As far as I was concerned, the chairman didn't want me there and neither did Harry. I was getting it from all sides. They got rid of Duff and I didn't have an ally in the boardroom. I loved going training with the lads every day, but I hated the rest of it. It winds me up just thinking about it."

The loss of Duffy was particularly worrying.

"So many things had happened. Our goalkeeper, Aaron Flahavan, got killed in a car crash, there were a whole lot of other things that went on that I can't talk about. I asked Duff about eight months into the job how he thought I was doing. He was and is a man I could trust with my life.

"I knew if he thought I was doing s*** he'd have told me straight. Instead, he says: 'How the hell you're surviving I don't know. You're doing brilliantly'."

The good times bring respite to Rix's face: he smiles as he recalls the days he helped Vialli with his English by talking to him on imaginary mobile phones; the bronze medals Vialli ordered for his backroom staff before the 2000 FA Cup final; the words he and the Italian would share at the intervals.

"We'd go somewhere and have a chat, then I'd speak in the dressing room while he got his breath back.

He'd say: 'Ricco, do what you want, but don't take me f****** off!' We were good together."

RIX does not ask for your pity. He has a lifestyle many would envy in that he stills keeps up a close friendship with Vialli, he scouts for Watford, going to as many games as possible, and spends every other day on the golf course.

Last Wednesday, he partnered his old boss Hoddle at Wentworth. "I'd be a liar if I said there weren't times I feel sorry for myself," he says, "but it lasts approximately four seconds.

"And then I say to myself: 'B***** off, man. You've had a great life and you've still got a lot to offer'."

All he asks is another chance.