LITMIR.BIZ

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It smashed and sent shards of glass and pottery into the next-door garden. I looked out and there was a bloke digging his lawn. He just looked up at me and said ‘all right, Stan’, as if nothing had happened.

      When Lotta left, that just gave me even more free time for shagging. I’d pick up girls’ numbers at nightclubs or even when they were wandering down the street or browsing in shops. Then I’d phone them and get them to come round to my house. I’d organise my time so that I would never be alone. I had girls in on shifts, and in the mornings I would be waking up with strangers.

      I even started to grow a conscience. The volume of girls just got ridiculous. It was horrible. It was grotesque. I have slept with a huge number of women and it still hasn’t given me what I wanted. Part of it was that I began to worry about hurting these girls’ feelings, but sometimes they knew I was seeing other people and they didn’t care. Where the guilt really came in wasn’t about hurting people: it was about spreading the emptiness of my life to so many others and seeing it reflected back in them.

      Gradually, I have stopped sleeping with women in quite such a prolific way, but I didn’t really learn my lesson in terms of simplifying my relationships. In some ways, the anarchy of my various liaisons continued to grow until it reached some sort of dubious celebrity zenith when I was seeing Ulrika Jonsson and Davina McCall at the same time and still having sex with Estelle and a Villa groupie called Linsey, just to make things a little bit more complicated.

      I seemed to have a particular talent for pulling television presenters. There was this weird crossover between our worlds. One world would feed the ego of the other in the service of the great god Television. Back in the mid-Nineties, when I was at the peak of my ability, football had suddenly become mainstream mass entertainment, as popular and glamorous as pop and the movies. Television presenters wanted to talk to footballers and, if they were female, I wanted to talk to them.

      I became an integral part of the lads and ladettes thing, that people like Ulrika and Chris Evans popularised. I knew Robbie Williams. I was mates with Jay Kay of Jamiroquai. He came to watch me at Liverpool. I got backstage passes at his concerts. I even had a fling with Sara Cox, Zoe Ball’s best mate, who used to present a Channel Four programme called The Girlie Show. It was usually her and a couple of other girls slagging off blokes as much as they could. Somebody had told me that she fancied me, so when she invited me on the show while I was playing for Forest, I accepted.

      We swapped numbers after the show and I went out with her a few times in London. She stopped off in Cannock once when she was on her way up to see her parents in Bolton. I only slept with her twice, but the next week there was a lot of gossiping in our incestuous little world that we might be seeing each other. The following Friday, John Barnes was a guest on TFI Friday and Chris Evans asked him if it was true I had a big willy. Digger played dumb but Chris Evans wouldn’t let it go. ‘Sara Cox calls him “Stan the Can”,’ he said, ‘because his dick is as wide as a can of Coca-Cola.’ I went into training the next day and I was a legend with the rest of the lads. Nothing was secret in that world. Nothing was private. Everybody knew the details of what you were doing and who you were doing it with.

      There were other celebrity flings, too. I had an affair with Jenni Falconer, the GMTV presenter, after I chatted her up at an airport arrivals gate. She said she was waiting for her boyfriend, but when I asked her if I could have her number she gave it to me without hesitating. I had a brief liaison with the model Sophie Dahl, too, after we met at the Brit awards when I was there presenting a prize. That was after yet another falling out with Ulrika.

      But my relationship with Davina McCall was an altogether more serious affair. It was my great lost opportunity, a chance of real happiness that I threw away. As usual, I only realised that when it was too late and I had plenty of time to dwell on the fact that I had turned my back on something very special.

      I first met Davina in April 1998, when my relationship with Ulrika felt again as though it was unravelling and we were having a period where we weren’t talking. Strictly speaking, we were together, but it was a sham. Events in Paris were just around the corner and I probably should have seen them coming. When I think now that I went back to Ulrika instead of staying with Davina, I know that I made a terrible, terrible mistake. Drawn back to chaos again. My curse. If Ulrika hadn’t been around, messing with my head, Davina and I would have got married. I have got no doubt about that.

      I spotted her at An Audience with Julian Clary where we were both among the invited guests. We clocked each other in that way you do and I asked her out. Davina was different. She was sorted. She didn’t play silly games. If she said something, you trusted her. She had been a heroin addict and a coke addict – you name it – and she had been saved by counselling. She had faced her demons and moved beyond them. She had been clean for ten years. She knew what she wanted out of life and she was always straightforward and honest with me. Even when I left her to go back with Ulrika, she was incredibly generous with her advice to me. In the minutes after I hit Ulrika, when I was panicking with the shame of it all, she was the first person I called.

      Even now she’s still helping me. When she heard about the dogging scandal, she phoned me and told me about the counsellor who carried her through her own troubles. She said this man had saved her life, which was about as good a recommendation as you can get. She gave me his number and I started having therapy with him. A little later, Davina told me how great she felt because she had started working out. That struck a chord with me, too. I started getting myself fit and that seemed to alleviate my mood. It gave me an aim in my life.

      When we met, Davina was on the brink of the presenting stardom she has achieved subsequently with shows like Big Brother. She was doing stuff for MTV but she still had her feet on the ground. She made me feel comfortable and secure. She was pretty but she wasn’t overtly glamorous and, unlike Ulrika, she didn’t have to be the centre of attention whenever she walked into a room. She was a self-contained, confident person. She was homely, she was kind, she was warm.

      I took her out a couple of times and it was such a refreshing change to be seeing someone who was honest. She was honest. I wasn’t. I went to New York with Estelle, and even though she was technically a friend we were sleeping together as well. When I got back I went to Davina’s place and a reporter from the Mirror turned up and told her he had pictures of me and Estelle together in New York. Davina was cool about it because she thought Estelle was just my mate. She was absolutely golden but I told her soon after that that I didn’t want to see her any more because I was missing Ulrika. I don’t know why I was missing her. I suppose it was just what I was used to. I was addicted to a fucked-up relationship where it wouldn’t be a normal day unless Ulrika and I had had a row before training every morning. Davina took it really well and I consoled myself with that, but a few years later she told me it had devastated her. She was convinced that if I could have just got over Ulrika, she and I would have been married.

      Instead of that, I got back with Ulrika. That relationship lurched on from one crisis to another until Paris and beyond. In fact, in the days after Paris, when I was public enemy number one and I was practically in hiding, Davina invited me out to Nice with her family, who had rented a house somewhere on the outskirts of the city for a few weeks. When I was at such a low ebb, that house and its grounds were like a haven for me. I ran up a £1,000 mobile-phone bill ringing Ulrika from out there, desperately trying to repair some of the damage and pleading with her to forgive me. She was in St Etienne for the England V Argentina game where David Beckham was sent off for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In a bizarre way, that gave me a respite from the attention. Suddenly, everybody wanted to hang Beckham, not me. They called the dogs off and set them chasing him around America.

      I started sleeping with Davina again while we were in Nice, but even then I hadn’t got Ulrika out of my system and Davina and I never got back together properly. I still regret that. I regret it bitterly. I walked away from a relationship with Davina that was solid and steady and positive for something that drove me to the brink of insanity.

      I was still caught up in football’s maelstrom then; still chasing the adrenaline buzz of scoring goals; still chasing famous, beautiful women. I was a member of the glitterati. I was a symbol of that age when suddenly everyone and everything seemed within a footballer’s

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