Ferdinand determined to bow out at the top

West Ham's veteran striker has no desire to blot distinguished copybook with relegation as he ponders life after retirement

A year ago Les Ferdinand was comfortably ensconced at Tottenham Hotspur, the club he had followed as a boy. He was not prospering under the regime of Glenn Hoddle, whose off-field ideas he found a little cranky, and he was struggling to overcome a recurring Achilles tendon injury. But at least he was entering the twilight of his career with a club likely to be stopping in the Premier League.

Now, he finds himself at a club writhing in the jaws of relegation, the manager who signed him hospitalised with a blocked blood vessel in the brain and a caretaker manager (albeit Trevor Brooking) with no managerial experience stepping forward to help run team affairs for what remains of a disastrous season.

Yet the 36-year-old has no regrets. "I was under no illusions when I came to West Ham," he says. "They were in the bottom three and I knew it would be a difficult task. There were several other offers for me and I could have gone into the comfort zone, or I could have stayed at Tottenham. But I'm glad I came. I've enjoyed playing for Glenn Roeder. And we have to believe we can stay up until mathematically we can't." It is Thursday morning. Ferdinand is driving to the West Ham training ground, speaking to me on his mobile phone to update an interview we did a week earlier. On Monday, the Hammers secured what could yet be three priceless points with a home win over Middlesbrough, thanks not least to a vintage centre-forward's performance by Ferdinand himself. The win, he says, seemed visibly to have eased some of the pressure on Roeder.

"He was anxious before the game. Afterwards he was light-hearted, cracking jokes almost. You could see it had given him relief. Then I got a call from a press fella at about half 10, saying the manager had been taken into hospital and wanting a quote. It was the first I'd heard. He'd given us two days off, but I went into the training ground anyway on Wednesday. There were only a few people there and they were all in complete shock. We were told we couldn't even see the gaffer because he was heavily sedated."

At 10am on Thursday, Ferdinand is no more informed than I am regarding the report that Brooking is to step into the breach. "We'll find out this morning," he says. "But if it is Trevor, I think it will be a good appointment. He's at the training ground most days, and he travels to all away games with us. He understands." What Brooking understands, I think he means, is the needs of the players. He also understands that when West Ham visit Manchester City tomorrow, he can expect no favours from his old England mucker Kevin Keegan. "But winning," says Ferdinand, "is our only option."

It goes without saying that three points tomorrow would be effective medication for Roeder, especially if Arsenal win at Bolton today. For that reason alone Ferdinand is keen to deliver, which is ironic, because one of the reasons the fans have been so hard on Roeder is his perceived neglect of Ferdinand. A caller to the Radio Five Live phone-in 606 last Saturday was apoplectic that Frédéric Kanouté had been preferred to Ferdinand in the starting line-up at the Reebok Stadium. And my mate Mark, who bleeds claret and blue, reckons that Ferdinand has not only been the club's best attacker this season, he has also been the best defender.

When we met at the training ground, I remind him that he told me he had not decided whether to stay at West Ham next season, irrespective of whether the club drops into the First Division. With things looking grimmer now than they did then, does that still apply? "Yeah. You never know in football what might happen. What's happened to the gaffer is a great example of that."

And so to Chadwell Heath training ground, one week earlier. Chadwell Heath is a scruffy, nondescript area in the Essex hinterland between Ilford and Romford. But there is nothing scruffy or nondescript about the vehicles in the car park. Nor is there anything beleaguered about the players wandering in from training. On the contrary, they seem in excessively high spirits, and there is great merriment when Jermain Defoe boots a ball which grazes the wing-mirror of Ferdinand's slinky black Mercedes.

This, says Ferdinand, flashing a mock-severe glance at Defoe, is what he found on the day he arrived. "The spirit, when I had my first training session here, was fantastic. I was expecting them to be a bit low. But in my first actual game, against Charlton away, that's when I saw that the confidence had gone. Players were afraid to make mistakes. They didn't want the ball in case they were the one to give it away." That West Ham's dismal form has lasted all season is still a surprise. As the erstwhile manager Harry Redknapp never tires of mischievously pointing out, there are few clubs with three young players of the worth of Defoe, Joe Cole and Michael Carrick.

So where do the problems lie? Not, insists Ferdinand, with Roeder's coaching practices. "I like a manager who's prepared to come out with you onto the training-ground and get stuck in," he says. "He's right up there with other top managers I have worked with. And when I give you the list you'll understand why that's a compliment: Kevin Keegan, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle, George Graham, Gerry Francis, Don Howe, Kenny Dalglish... even Christian Gross had some good ideas.

"Me and him had a few fall-outs, and his approach and manner got up some players' noses, but some of his sessions were excellent. He had a good game with a goal on the halfway line and another on the 18-yard box, and we played with two balls. It was all about stopping defenders from ball-watching." In his list of good managers Ferdinand omits – I'm sure by accident rather than design – Jim Smith. It was Smith who signed him from non-League Hayes for Queen's Park Rangers. Ferdinand was 19, driving a van for a living, and certain that a career in professional football had passed him by. Even so, it was not exactly a boyhood dream come true.

"At no time during my childhood did I think I would become a pro footballer," he says. "There just weren't enough black players to relate to in those days, and my parents were St Lucian, so football wasn't part of their thinking. They allowed me to play non-League mainly so they knew where I was on Tuesday and Thursday evenings."

The footballing apprenticeship that he missed in England he eventually got in Turkey. Smith recommended him to his friend Gordon Milne, then in charge at Besiktas, and a season-long loan was arranged. "My only impression of Turkey was the film Midnight Express," says Ferdinand. "And my first training session was in front of 35,000 people. That's when they sacrifice a lamb, and smear blood on your forehead and boots, wishing you luck for the season." He gives a huge grin. "It never happened at Loftus Road," he says, adding that he also had to throw a pigeon symbolically aloft. "But its wings had been closed for such a long time, that it landed, bang, on the ground. There was silence in the stadium. Then this little old fella came up and pulled its wings apart. I threw it up and there was a big roar."

Ferdinand so enjoyed his time at Besiktas that he tried to extend his stay, but QPR, by now in the hands of Trevor Francis (another omission from his list of good coaches, incidentally) wanted him back. He did not, he says, experience any racism in Turkey. "None at all. I don't remember monkey chants there, but I've certainly had them here." Only in the last five of his 17 years as a professional footballer has racism diminished, he says. "And that's only in the Premier League, with CCTV cameras and that. In the lower divisions I know it still goes on. And the only way to deal with it is to think: 'Right, I'm going to give this team a torrid time.' That's why I've scored so many goals against Everton, because I got a lot of stick there."

I hang my head, admitting my own colours as an Evertonian, and saying that I always thought the club had been unfairly stigmatised, that its supporters were no more racist than any others. "Well, attitudes have changed there now. And it certainly wasn't the only place. I hesitated before I signed for Newcastle, because I knew that Andy Cole had had a problem living in a little mining village, where they hadn't seen many black people. I talked to Kevin Keegan about it. I said that 10 years earlier I could never have played there as a black player. I said: 'Don't tell me the views of hundreds of thousands of people have changed in 10 years'. But he convinced me to go. He said: 'If you want to come to a club playing fantastic football, this is the place.' And I never had a problem there."

Venables was the best tactician he worked for, Ferdinand adds, but Keegan was the best, full stop. "He makes you believe that, no matter how good the opposition, you'll win the game." West Ham could do without Keegan's motivational skills tomorrow, although Ferdinand will doubtless be happy to see his old mentor, who engineered his most successful striking partnership, with Alan Shearer.

"When Terry Venables was England manager he felt me and Shearer couldn't play together, but Keegan thought we could, and we hit it off. We scored 49 goals between us in our first season together. Before then my game was about running at defenders, but there were so many good players at Newcastle, like [Peter] Beardsley, [Tino] Asprilla, [David] Ginola, I felt I was out of order taking more than three touches. I played with my back to goal a lot. But when Alan came I was free to go out wide, and he'd get in the box, and vice versa." Ferdinand's success seemed likely to continue even when Dalglish replaced Keegan as manager; indeed, Dalglish told him that he could be the best striker in the country, that only in terms of mental strength was Shearer a better player. But Dalglish was forced by the plc to sell Ferdinand, and he went to Spurs.

Ferdinand spent four years and played for four managers at White Hart Lane. Latterly, he says, he felt himself surplus to Hoddle's requirements and asked to leave. "But I didn't have a problem with Hoddle. I wouldn't say I was 100 per cent behind all his ideas, but they were ideas not of a footballing nature." Is he talking about Eileen Drewery's faith-healing regimen? "No, I was open-minded about that. It wasn't so much that... there were other things, but maybe this isn't the time to talk about them." With his time as a footballer almost up, he does not yet have a clue, he says, what he will do when he hangs up his boots, though he is certain that if he does play next season, it will be his last.

"I don't know whether to stay in football. I still love it, still get up in the mornings like a little kid. I was driving to the ground the other Saturday looking at people walking up the street with their shirts on, and I got the butterflies in my stomach and thought: 'Bloody hell, I'm going to miss this'. Coaching might be one way of keeping the buzz alive. I haven't done my [FA coaching] badge, but I've seen a lot of managers deal with a lot of situations, and I've often thought: 'If I was coach I would have dealt with that a little bit different'." Whether that's enough of a foundation for a coaching career, time will tell.

In the meantime, Ferdinand has other priorities. If West Ham go down, it will be the first relegation he has suffered. "Which is not something I want on my copybook," he says, "but that's life."

Les Ferdinand: The Life And Times

Birth date: 18 December 1966.

Birth place: Acton, London.

Height: 5ft 11in.

Weight: 13st 2lb.

Current club: West Ham United.

Position: Centre-forward.

Attributes: Big, powerful striker, with a huge leap and powerful shot.

Family: The older second cousin of Manchester United's Rio Ferdinand. Also playing alongside Rio's younger brother, Anton, at West Ham.

Early career: Played non-League football for Viking Sports in Southall and then Hayes, before joining QPR in March 1987.

Club history: QPR: Made debut on 24 April, 1987 against Coventry City. He was loaned out to Brentford in March 1988 and to the Turkish side Besiktas in June 1988. After eight seasons at Loftus Road, scoring 90 goals in 183 games, he moved to Newcastle.

Newcastle United: Bought for £6m by Kevin Keegan in 1995. Thrived on service from David Ginola and Keith Gillespie, scoring 50 goals in 84 games.

Tottenham Hotspur: A Spurs supporter as a boy, his dream came true when he sealed a move from St James' Park to the capital. Ferdinand filled the position vacated by Manchester United-bound Teddy Sheringham. Injuries hampered Ferdinand's form, though his professionalism ensured he kept fit, and was rewarded when Glenn Roeder signed him during the January transfer window in 2003.

West Ham United: Has made 11 appearances, scoring one goal.

International honours: Made his England debut on 17 February, 1993, in the 6-1 win against San Marino. Went on to make 17 appearances, scoring five goals. Also capped for England B.

Honours: Turkish Cup winner (1989), League Cup Winner (1999), PFA Player of the Year (1996).

Hobbies: Keeping fit, especially playing tennis.

They say: "I have worked with him before, so I knew what sort of human being I was bringing to the club. He is a wonderful guy and has got the ability to go with it." Glenn Roeder.

He says: "There are things more important than football, without a doubt. Sometimes people get away from the fact that this is just a game." On Roeder's sudden illness. Research: Andy Cryer