Brian McBride: Strife of Brian

From the playing fields of Illinois to the football grounds of England, Brian McBride has given his all. He tells Chris McGrath about the broken nose, the plates in his cheeks and the pressure as Fulham battle to stay up

Saturday, 3 May 2008

GETTY

After rupturing a tendon this season, Brian McBride found recuperating harder than from previous injuries. 'This was more of a battle,' he says.

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Should Fulham somehow extricate themselves from their present pickle – a stunt clearly conditional on success against Birmingham City this afternoon – many will trace their recovery to that melodrama at Eastlands last week, when they were two goals down with 20 minutes to go, and won. Others, perhaps those who know Fulham better, might well find its roots in a 1-0 defeat of Everton last month, when Brian McBride's first goal after an absence of nearly six months formally restored not only the club's attacking focus, but its very heartbeat. In turn, however, those who know McBride best might instead trace the revival to a cold afternoon in Illinois, two decades ago.

McBride has played many bigger games since, a World Cup quarter-final among them, but for a gangly 15-year-old the chance to send Buffalo Grove High School into the state play-offs was without precedent. A high ball swung over, and he challenged unflinchingly. "I went up for the header," he recalled this week. "I headed the ball, the guy headed my head." His nose was broken, and he staggered from the pitch, dazed, blood pouring down his shirt.

His coach told him that he needed to go to hospital, but McBride refused to go. He wanted to watch the rest of the match. "As the game went along, it was getting tighter and tighter," he said. "We were a very close-knit group of guys, in fact a whole lot of us still talk. And I was saying: 'Come on, coach, let me go back in.' 'No, no, no.' Finally it went into extra time and he let me back."

When your backs are to the wall, a bit of backbone makes all the difference. And, plainly, the raw materials needed this afternoon were all there in McBride, back in 1988: courage, commitment, fellowship. It is when the stakes are highest, after all, that you learn most about people.

McBride is reluctant to dwell on the story. "I don't want to make a big deal of it," he grimaced. "To be honest, I think probably 90 per cent of the guys on our team would have done the exact same thing. You sort of get that feeling, you know, when you just want to help. Simple as that. You're young, you have all the exuberance possible. I felt like I could still play, it wasn't like my nose was over here" – he flattens his palm across his cheek – "it was just bent a little bit."

The episode is undeniably instructive of the character who has become so cherished at Craven Cottage since his arrival in January 2004 – if nothing like as instructive as his scrupulous failure to mention the fact that, once he got back on the field, he promptly scored the winner.

To those who assume that the Premier League produces only preening cockerels, McBride comes as a wholesome reproof. He exudes decency. It seems evident even in his physique. He might have been imported as a classic, old-fashioned centre forward, but this is no hulking bruiser. His deportment is placid, his gesture easy. He is a religious man, a family man. But while these may seem like defiant values, in modern football, he leaves them to be measured in his modesty and composure.

As a young athlete, McBride had to decide between baseball and soccer. In those days, only one offered an obvious livelihood. "But soccer's more of a team sport," he said. "You're playing for a lot more than just yourself, and I have enjoyed that. Growing up I played every sport you could possibly think of, but I just stopped [the others] because in soccer you can build the friendships and camaraderie that makes you want to do those things."

Those things... Like having titanium plates inserted into your cheeks. "Yeah, I broke my face three times," he said nonchalantly. "It's a great X-ray, very cool." And that does not include the infamous assault and battery perpetrated by Daniele De Rossi during the last World Cup. "He just opened up my face," McBride shrugged. "In fact, he probably hurt his elbow more than it hurt me, with the plates being in there." McBride needed stitches, but of course he played on.

Two other chapters in his medical history could not be treated so insouciantly. First there was the blood clot that revealed itself after a collision in his very first game in England, on loan to Preston. "I went into a tackle, 50-50, wanted to show the fans, my team-mates, that I didn't mind getting in a bit," he said. "I took a whack on my biceps, and there was a big bruise, but nothing bad, I didn't notice any pain. Four days later we played Sheffield Wednesday and when we got into the locker room afterwards my right arm was twice the size of my left one."

The doctors discovered a genetic problem, muscle around a rib pushing on to a vein. McBride flew home the next day. But it was only in recuperating from the hasty surgery that he met his future wife, Dina. "Believe me, you're talking to someone who believes there is a reason for everything," he said. "God has a plan. We were able to spend a lot of time together."

The plan must have been harder to decipher when the clot recurred. Never mind his career, for a while his life was potentially at stake. On the other hand, once the physical problem had been corrected, so too were his perspectives. And that proved just as well against Middlesbrough last August when, 15 minutes into the third game of the season, the new Fulham captain lined up a shot 12 yards out.

"David [Healy] made a run to the near post, drew a defender, the ball came across," he recalled. "I took a touch, Mark Schwarzer was coming across the goal, I knew all I needed to do was make sure I hit it – hard. So I planted, bore down and, right as I struck the ball, I ruptured my quad tendon. It was a freak thing, nobody touched me."

Again, he reduces the fact that he scored to an unspoken footnote. As such, however random the injury, it was another crisis that legitimately distilled the reckless altruism of McBride's football. At 35, however, he acknowledges that it proved much the toughest convalescence of his career. "This was the first major injury that I really had to fight through," he said. "The others were freak injuries that don't really affect your soccer much. This one was more of a battle, getting through scar tissue, getting your strength back. Everything that's simple and easy to do, just lifting your leg, I had to figure all that out again."

There were times when even this least selfish of men became exasperated, and he attributes his perseverance to the excellence of his medical and support teams. It did not help, of course, that Fulham became so palpably adrift without their captain. Player of the season with 12 goals last year, McBride had been determined to lead from the front. "I was very honoured to be made captain," he said. "So that part of it was disappointing, very much so, because I wanted to have an influence."

He would of course have no time for the suggestion that the team's renewed spirit reflects his own return to fitness. Nor, in fact, does he accept that even a game as claustrophobic as one against the team who divide Fulham from 17th place – and possible survival in the Premier League – should affect the team's basic approach.

"I think what tends to happen is that, with the whole surrounding atmosphere, the tunnel gets tighter," he said. "Everybody's focusing on this. That's probably what makes it bigger, the fact that everybody else is probably looking at this game the same way that you, as a player, should be looking at every game.

"There are things in a game like this that can pull you away from what you're supposed to be concentrating on. But 90 per cent of the time a game like this actually draws you into a tighter focus. Pressure situations are handled differently by everybody. But, hopefully, we'll handle it very well, and make the home field advantage count. This season has been crazy for us, it really has ebbed and flowed. Hopefully, we're getting everything right just in time."

In a way, a showdown of such intensity is the ultimate environment for such a passionate player. After all, even when his goals helped to beat Mexico and Portugal in the 2002 World Cup, McBride could hardly have deceived himself that the United States would go on to win the trophy. "A game like Saturday has a crueller pressure, sure, because there are consequences besides you going out of a tournament," he said. "If you go out of the league, there are huge consequences, not just for the players and staff, but for the fans – born fans, many of them, supporting whoever their parents supported, the club entwined in their upbringing."

While McBride himself was growing up in Arlington Heights, a pleasant suburb of Chicago, his parents had divorced and his mother, Maddie, stretched every dollar she earned to make sure that her three children grew up the right way. He still reveres her as his biggest influence, and it is not difficult to imagine where he found his team ethic, nor indeed his own aspirations as a father.

Dina is now pregnant with their third child. "I always wanted to find someone I could love and have a family with," he reflected. "That was first and foremost. I love soccer, I love sports. But now I have that, everything else is so much more of a bonus, I enjoy everything else so much more."

So 22 blokes chasing a ball around a park still means as much as ever? "For sure. Because I know I have nothing to be afraid of. You can give it everything you have, because I know at the end of it my wife's going to love me, my kids are going to love me, and they're going to keep wanting me to do the best I possibly can, rather than pulling me in a different direction."

And football itself has been a family to him, too, from Buffalo Grove to Craven Cottage – even his international career, which he ended after a third World Cup, with 30 goals in 95 games. Here is a man who sought more than the vainglory of 100 caps.

"I enjoyed every trip, every game," he said. "It helps you grow as a player because you get different pressures, you get put in situations you're not used to. You know, you go to Costa Rica and have to worry about batteries flying by your head. I remember warming up on the sidelines in El Salvador, and there were big tall fences, and all of a sudden these bags start popping with liquid. You look over and it's guys just peeing into bags, tying them up, and lobbing them. Woah!"

So how long will he keep playing club football? Will he stay at Fulham, for richer, for poorer? Or will he finish his career back home? "I don't know," he insisted. "They're definitely things my wife and I talk about, and some decisions need to be made. But right now we need to make sure we focus as much as possible on getting ourselves out of this."

There is certainly no mistaking the kinship he has discovered at Fulham. He speaks warmly of his debt to Chris Coleman, the former manager, for expanding his horizons; and of Roy Hodgson's relish for taking training, and aversion to footballing robots. "It's been a growing experience," he said. "I have a great connection with Fulham. It's awesome. I felt the same way about Columbus when I was there for eight years. You really get to be a part of what I consider as close to a family as you're going to get. And it's so enjoyable seeing fans that are not only passionate but very sincere. That's how I hope I come across to people I meet."

Rest assured, whoever marks him this afternoon will be left with no doubts on that account.

Cottage industry: McBride factfile

Born 19 June, 1972, Illinois

Weight 78kg

Height 6ft

*CLUB CAREER

1990-93 St Louis University

1994 Milwaukee Rampage, 18 games, 17 goals

1994-5 VfL Wolfsburg, 18 games, 1 goal

1996-2004 Columbus Crew, 161 games, 62 goals

2000 Preston (loan), 9 games, 1 goal

2002 Everton (loan), 8 games, 4 goals