Credit: Daily Echo
James Beattie would eventually become a Premier League veteran, who, through representing clubs like Southampton, Everton, Stoke and Sheffield United, scored over 100 career goals. He also pulled on an England shirt five times during his career.
However, his story is one that shows that sometimes the scariest things in life will turn out to be some of the best decisions someone can make.
in 1998, he was a 20-year-old who was faced with a move to the other side of England, when Blackburn Rovers, his hometown club, used him to sweeten the deal of signing Kevin Davies from Southampton so Beattie was on his way down south, and he recalls hearing the news that he had to leave.
“It was a big move because it’s the first time I’d lived away from home and I was actually really upset when Blackburn said they’d sold me because that was my boyhood club.
“I remember playing golf at the time when I had the phone call from a guy called Tom Finn who was the secretary of Blackburn at the time and he said we’d sold you to Southampton and I remember I started crying at 20 and I felt like my world had ended”
Luckily for him, things worked out quite quickly and in the present day, Beattie looks back on the move very differently.
“Having travelled down here and spoken to Dave Jones and listened to what plan he had for me, it fitted in with what I was going to do in my head at Blackburn anyway.
“Looking back on it, it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me, coming down here and playing for Southampton for six and a half years.”
“I speak a lot about timing these days with coaches, managers and players and I just think that timing-wise for me, it was perfect with the right manager and then managers that came after that.”
Beattie hit the ground running and then some. During the 1998/99 season, dubbed “The Great Escape” by Southampton fans, his performances earned him the player of the season award, which exceeded the expectations he had on arrival at The Dell.
“In that first season it worked out really well with the great escape and I achieved in my mind what I wanted to achieve. Not a great situation for the club to be in, however in the end it was great and then we managed to kick on from there and progress.
“My initial plan was to go and try and make a few appearances in the first team, get a few goals which happened and then establish myself as one of the main strikers or if not the main striker for the club.”
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for him at the Saints. When Glenn Hoddle was appointed manager in 2000, Beattie was someone who he didn’t really fancy and tried to find him a new club:
“He said he was going to sell me to Crystal Palace and I said I wanted to work hard and get in the team and change his mind, so he favoured me as a player and that’s exactly what happened.”
During that period, Beattie had a trick up his sleeve, relying on the mentality he had built up during his days as a swimmer at high level in his youth. It was that mindset that got him into the side and kicked off a run of 10 goals in 10 games:
“I had a really good mentality from football and any sort of adverse things that would happen to me, I had a really good ability to be able to bounce back and I had good resilience. I think that was from when I used to be a swimmer as a youngster”
In 2001, a new gaffer arrived in Gordon Strachan, who is someone Beattie has made no secret of being his favourite manager:
“Glenn left for Tottenham and then Gordon Strachan came in who, I’ve said it many times before, was my favourite manager. He understood me and got me as a person and he managed to get the best out of me in those years at Southampton where I was scoring regularly”
The 2002/03 season was the best in his career, scoring 23 goals in the Premier League which earned him his first call up for England. However, it could have been even better had he also been able to claim the Golden Boot, an award that was taken off him on the final day of the season:
“Yes, 100 per cent I wanted to win the golden boot. I wanted to score as many goals as I could, I wanted to help the team as much as I could. I think we were a really good team, no superstars as there were in other teams in the Premier League, but as a team on our day, we were excellent.
“I was leading the whole season, I was first to 10 and first to 20. I remember the last game we played was actually the last game at Maine Road before Man City moved to the Etihad. I was on 23 goals, I think Van Nistelrooy was on 22 and Henry was on 21 or they might have been on 22 each.
“We were playing Man City and I remember I was shooting from everywhere and trying to score and maybe not remembering how the goals had come previously with the whole team being involved because you need all your teammates to score, it’s not just one player.
“I remember Claus Lundekvam running the length of the pitch, telling me off and having the right go at me, telling me to stop shooting from everywhere where I was on the pitch and I didn’t manage to score.
“We won 1-0 but I didn’t manage to score, so I was on 23. I think Van Nistelrooy got two, which put him on 24 and I think Henry got a hat-trick which put him on 25, so they overtook me on the last day of the season.”
James didn’t just have the race for top scorer on his mind as he and his fellow Saints reached the FA Cup final that year against an Arsenal side that were a year away from lifting the Premier League trophy undefeated, and who only escaped with a 1-0 win:
“We played them down here and beat them 3-2, so the belief was there. Like I said, we were on our day, a fantastic team, not blessed with loads of individual players like Arsenal were.
“We knew what we were coming up against, but I don’t think there was any fear because fear is an illusion anyway. At the end of the day, it was in the Millennium Stadium, the first FA Cup final ever with the roof on, so it was enclosed.
“We felt we deserved to be there, having had a fantastic cup run and then a brilliant semi-final at Villa Park. We felt we deserved to be there and we fancied ourselves in the game.”
Despite missing out on the Golden Boot and the FA Cup in very unlucky fashion, there was some good news in him making his international debut, although it seems his time in the international setup was anything but united:
“I felt that on my form, I deserved to be there. However, it wasn’t the greatest of experiences and a lot of players previously have spoken about it, it was very fragmented in the different groups that were in the team.
“I just didn’t manage to score, which I had a couple of opportunities to do. I remember one instance at Old Trafford where we went through and Frank Lampard, he could have given it to me and I’d have tapped it into an empty net but he had a shot and missed. So little things like that, I remember but that’s the way it goes.”
During his time at Southampton, he was given the armband, which led to a moment he holds very close to this day:
“It’s a very proud moment to captain your team, but I don’t think it changed how I played or my approach to the game. It was just very humbling and a real honour to lead my team out.
“One of my favourite pictures actually is when we played Newcastle at home here at St Mary’s and Alan Shearer was the captain of the other side. When I first joined Blackburn, he was at the club and again, someone who you can watch train and you can try and emulate in future years. It was a really, really proud moment for me.”
Due to an eight place finish and FA Cup final appearance, the Saints found themselves in a place in the 2003/04 UEFA Cup. Unfortunately, they didn’t get past the first round having fallen to a 2-1 aggregate loss to Steaua Bucharest:
“I think overall we were disappointed with our performance in Europe. I remember playing in Romania and it was absolutely lashing it down and we sold out tickets.
“A lot of people remember that European adventure and obviously, we would have liked to progress and had a good run. However, that didn’t work out.
“We were disappointed for the fans as well because they pay a lot of money to come to the games and it’s great when you can go over into Europe.
“I’ve got a few friends now who are a bit older who are actually at the games who tell us stories of how much they enjoyed it and how much they enjoyed following the team through Europe.
“It was disappointing that we couldn’t reproduce the form that had got us to the European adventure in the first place.”
Beattie’s time at Southampton came to an end in January 2005, when manager Harry Redknapp, with the club entrenched in a relegation battle, opted to sell his star striker to raise funds for improvements around the squad.
The decision to move, as a result, was not one made by James and one he wasn’t massively keen to do. Without him, Southampton were relegated to the Championship and he felt a little bit hurt:
“It wasn’t my decision, I remember Harry coming in and he said, I need to sell you, I need to sell you to get three or four players in to help keep us up.”
“I didn’t really understand his workings or his theory behind that because I’d been the club’s top scorer for the last five or six years.
“Once that decision was made, then I had to go down a path of transferring, even though I didn’t really want to, and then spoke to various other clubs and then made my decision to go and join Everton.”
“I felt bad for the club, yes.
“We spoke about good leadership and good stewardship right from the top, not just from the manager but from the chairman as well, I don’t think that, looking back on it, it was a great appointment.”
Though the decision to leave his adopted home was one that he couldn’t control, he’ll be glad to see that the Southampton faithful don’t hold that against him and his image as a club legend still remains.
Not bad for a 20-year-old who was once heartbroken to leave his childhood home.
Leave a Reply