The big interview: Garry O'Connor

It has been four months, but Roman Golubev is still not sure what the right approach is. “We never know what to call him,” he says, laughing at the end of the sentence. “Is it Harry, Jari or Garry? Can you tell us? Please?” We are sitting at a long, thin wooden table in the Lokomotiv stadium press room, before a Russian League game against Tom last Saturday. Coincidentally, “OK” flashes up on the television on the wall, then the letters spread out and a new word is formed, “O’Kohhop”. A medley of clips of Garry O’Connor in action then flit across the screen. Golubev, a writer for Russian magazine All Football, sips from his bottle of beer, then shakes his head.

“The Scottish language is not English, it’s very difficult for us to understand him. But we found a solution,” he continues, grinning furtively and glancing around the room. “Before we interview him, we ask him to speak slowly, and to speak English.” Golubev leans back and laughs again, a nervous, fluttering sound. “He does try for us.”

In the stands, the relationship with O’Connor is more lucidly expressed. Two banners are draped over the upper and lower tiers. One reads, “Scot To Score. BRAVEGARRY”, and has a picture of O’Connor dressed up like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. The other says, “Scottish The Brave”. He only joined Lokomotiv in March, the first British footballer to play in Russia, yet there are no banners or flags for any of the other players.

“Let’s score, Garry”, chant the Lokomotiv fans in dense, heavily-accented English, their red and green scarves tied round their wrists. He is industrious and links up play neatly, but on this occasion, a 1-1 draw, he is unable to add to his tally of six goals. Outside afterwards, when the supporters have mostly seeped away, a lone street stall remains. On top of a pile of replica jerseys is one with “O’Kohhop” on the back, still wrapped in cellophane. I ask if they sell many of them. The owner looks blank and shrugs. “Enough.”

Lost In Translation II: Who’s at the door?

We agree to meet at O’Connor’s apartment the following day. It is situated in an exclusive block, where the flat of Yuri Andropov, the former president, was recently sold, and which imperiously overlooks the main road that the motor cavalcade of Vladimir Putin, the current president, takes to the Kremlin each day (all six lanes are temporarily blocked off for his entourage). O’Connor is standing outside, next to the coffee shop where he spends much of his time. He seems smaller, less broadly imposing than he does on the pitch.

He leads the way past a small private park, where he often plays with “the little man” — his two-and-a-half-year-old son, Josh — and on to his apartment block.

It is dark inside, but the hallway is unmistakably old; there is a feeling of faded grandeur. The metal lift is cramped and it shudders as it climbs. A yellow and red plastic spade, belonging to Josh, lies on the floor next to the apartment’s front door, which is completely covered in dark leather. “It’s very secure,” O’Connor remarks, “nobody could break in.”

Inside, it is neat and tidy, yet seems deserted, lived in but still only cursorily; all that lies on the hall table is a bill. “Ach, I’ll send it to the club,” O’Connor says dismissively. The bedroom overlooks a building site — “they work day and night, it drives us mad” — and photographs of Josh and Lisa, O’Connor’s fiancee, are stuck up on the giant dressing-table mirror. Lisa and Josh are back in Edinburgh for the weekend, where the couple have recently bought a new home, and there is a vague sense of dislocation to the apartment, a kind of quiet rootlessness.

“I never thought I’d miss home as much as I do,” he admits, with a subdued, pensive air. “It’s always nice to go shopping, or meet up with my pals to go to the pictures. I can’t do it over here. To go out and eat is difficult because of the language and because kids don’t get in a lot of the restaurants. I’ve not been taught Russian yet, but I’m hoping to learn. So even getting a taxi is a problem. I’ve got a driver, but that’s really just during the day, then he has to go home to his family. Although he’s a good man, and if we want to go out at night he’ll pick us up for 1,000 roubles (£20).”

O’Connor seems isolated in Moscow, even in his own home, by his foreignness, but this existence is not disquieting. “I sleep a lot,” he shrugs. There is an innocence to his pale, broad features that the tattoos on his arm and blond spiky hair cannot taint. At times, he seems younger than his 23 years, but at others he can be gruffly forthright. He is still a beguiling hybrid, a young man hovering between the insouciance of his late teens and the harder realism of parenthood and responsibility.

The jarring sound of two workmen carrying out repairs spills from the living room. O’Connor glances up and chuckles. “I was lying in bed the other morning and I heard this noise at the door, somebody opening it with a key,” he says, a note of drama in his voice. “I thought, ‘Who the f***’s that?’ I walked out and these two guys were just standing there, and they didn’t speak a word of English. But I worked it out in the end, as they brought in loads of tools. We’d had a leak.”

He is animated as he relays the story, as though relishing the opportunity to tell it. His life in Moscow is enabled for him. If he needs anything, he phones the club, who also rent his apartment for him. A cook and a nanny are being organised and the majority of his non-Russian teammates live nearby, including Emir Spahic, a Bosnian defender who speaks good English and so has become the Scot’s closest companion. Yet by being cosseted, it seems he has yet to fully engage with his new life. When I ask what a typical day off consists of, he sighs and stares out of the window.

“I just sit about. I go on the laptop and email my friends. I watch DVDs, I play the computer. It’s very boring, especially if Lisa and Josh aren’t with me. It’s just a different way of doing things than at Hibs, where I’d go out with the boys and play snooker. I’m managing to get through it, but hopefully I’ll pick a bit more Russian up. I do get lonely.”

It is not that O’Connor is morose, just that he is still adapting, still attempting to feel his way round this unfamiliar existence. There was much pessimism in Scotland when he moved to Moscow, an incredulity that this young man who only two years ago was accused of assaulting an Elvis impersonator during a night out with his dad, could cope with living in Russia. Yet that is partly what impelled his decision: an urge to hurry towards shrewdness, to grow beyond what he was.

“My parents were encouraging me to go, to get as far away from them as possible,” he says, laughing heartily. “But that was part of it, to come to a new country and experience a different way of life. There is a stubbornness in me to see it through, I want to make the most of this chance. But I’ve said to Lisa that if it’s ever not right for her and Josh, if there ever comes a time when they need to go home, then we will. I’ve not told Lokomotiv, but I’m sure they’d be okay.”

Lost In Translation III: Who needs a minibus?

The imperative of wealth is omnipresent in Russian football. Teams are funded by men or corporations whose means have been bloated by the oil boom and other big businesses, so the financial limits are indistinct. Stories of excess are legion, such as one player being paid $1m for appearing in just four matches, and receiving the cash in a black bin bag. “It’s an up-and-coming league,” O’Connor stresses. “It’s a high standard of football. They’re trying to be the best in the world and money-wise they’re getting there.”

Lokomotiv are financed by the Russian state railway, which from a turnover in the region of £700m pays the club £70m annually. O’Connor receives £16,000 a week in wages, tax free; win bonuses can range from $10,000 (£5,400) to $60,000 (£32,000) depending on the opposition and the competition, and if Lokomotiv were to win the league, a reward of $1m to each player wouldn’t be unrealistic (some of the Russian players earn $150,000 a week). This prosperity is already influencing O’Connor, allowing him to indulge his passion for expensive cars and motorbikes and to build a property and investment portfolio, but it also enables his generosity of spirit.

“I’ve treated my family, such as sending my mum and gran away on holiday,” he adds proudly. “I got my mum a new Mini as well. I wouldn’t be in this position if it hadn’t been for them, so it’s good to give something back. And to go home to our new house in Scotland and relax, that makes being over here worth it. It was a good opportunity financially for my family, so that was a big aspect of coming here. I wasn’t going to get this money in Britain.”

The wealth is not a solace to O’Connor, but a justification. There is a fancifulness to the affluence, though — it creates a world of abstract impulses. Traffic in Moscow is fast and unpredictable, so he has only driven once, yet it is written in his contract that the club must provide him with two cars, “although they’ve been replaced by a minibus, which is sitting outside”. He says this with a look of indifference, as though it is utterly inconsequential. Lokomotiv also provide him, Lisa and Josh with plane tickets for return flights to Scotland, but the imagination can always refine every provision.

“I’m speaking to them about a private jet,” O’Connor explains nonchalantly. “It’s maybe $10,000 a month, they can handle that, and it could fly my family straight over. It would only be three hours or something, and no waiting in (airport) queues.”

Lost In Translation IV: Who are the Proclaimers?

While O’Connor adjusts to this new world, everything seems different and uncertain, apart from football itself. The game’s rituals and routines are reassuringly familiar. Lokomotiv have an expansive training camp on the outskirts of the city, where each player has his own room and jacuzzi, but the work on the pitch is “much the same as Tony Mowbray’s training”.

Under the manager, Slavoljub Muslin, Lokomotiv are fourth in the league and haven’t lost in 10 matches. He is a disciplinarian, so there is a clipped,

stern atmosphere which O’Connor, an ebullient, boisterous character, has had to acknowledge. “They don’t play music before games, it’s much more professional,” he notes. “I’m not saying the Hibs dressing room wasn’t professional — it was — but there was a lot of carrying on and having a laugh, with loud music. Here, it’s much more serious. And it’s impossible to join in when there is any joking around because of the language barrier, so I just have to laugh when everyone else does.”

He has fitted in adroitly enough, despite making his debut in borrowed boots that were too small because his own were lost in transit. He scored in

his second game, a cup match against Spartak Moscow, and the headline in Sport Express the following morning was “Good Start, Great Britain”. With the Russian season about to hit its halfway point, he is on course to reach his target of 15 goals, which would likely make him the league’s top scorer, and the Moscow media are taken with his robust industry. “I’ve been getting good marks in the papers,” he says. “If I stay here for three years, hopefully I can win something, have a run in the Uefa Cup and play in the Champions League. I’ve set some ambitions and after they’re done, maybe it’ll be time to come home, or go to England.”

For all that O’Connor was tempted to Moscow by the promise of financial security, it is the strength of his aspiration that is most resounding. When he talks about the future, he mentions “maybe Manchester United” and “Italy or Spain”, but those are just expressions of his sense of purpose. Above all else, he demands

of himself that this move works on a football level. “People keep asking, ‘What have you been doing?’ They think I’m a tourist, but I’m here to do a job. I’ve been to Red Square and the Kremlin, and I’d like to see the other things, but I’d rather go with my family — it would be boring by myself.”

Football provides a network of acquaintances, too, its confines drawing individuals together. O’Connor is an affable presence, his nature obliging and accessible, and so he is steadily creating

a social web of teammates and contemporaries. “I was speaking to Alexei Smertin,” he continues. “And Andrei Kanchelskis got me tickets for the theatre. I’m also going to see the Proclaimers in August. They sent a bunch of VIP passes to the club so I’m taking a group of players, although I don’t think they’ll know much about them.”

Lost In Translation V: That’s not a taxi Home is never far from O’Connor’s thoughts; it provides a reference point and a sense of perspective. He often mentions a desire to return to Easter Road one day and talks warmly of Rod Petrie, the Hibs chairman, who put together a dossier on Lokomotiv and Moscow for him, and who independently went to visit O’Connor’s parents to see if they were comfortable with the move. Yet he acknowledges that his time at Hibs was drawing to a natural end; he made his debut when he was 18 and by the time he left he was a Scotland international.

“Tony (Mowbray) was aware that I was going to move in the summer anyway, and he was prepared to let me go,” O’Connor reveals. “It maybe wouldn’t have been for £1.6m, but a few clubs down south and a team in France were after me. Not many people knew that. We had a good thing at Hibs, but now Gary Caldwell’s away, Deeks (Derek Riordan) is away, I’m away. The likes of Kevin Thomson and Scott Brown will be next to go because that’s the way it is in Scotland; you’ve got to try to secure your future. I think they quite like Kevin as a player here (at Lokomotiv).”

There has been much for him to absorb in the last four months but his resilience leaves the most resounding impression. It is his ambition, as well as the financial benefits, that brought him to Russia and that alone will sustain him. And the anomalies and idiosyncrasies encountered will be taken in his stride. “There’s a player I go to training with and whenever he gets stopped in his car, he has to give the police money,” he smiles, shaking his head incredulously. “And you can buy a car, in cash, and take it straight onto the road, no tax, MOT or anything. It’s just the way it is here.”

As we leave his apartment and walk back towards the main road, we meet Malkhaz Asatiani and Georgiy Chelidze, two of O’Connor’s Georgian teammates. There is an eccentricity to their conversation, all three adopting faltering, staccato English. Then Chelidze leads us to the edge of the pavement, where he sticks his arm out to hail a cab. It is not

a taxi that stops, but a battered old black car. There is a brief conversation with the driver in Russian, then he agrees to take me to the airport. “It’ll be fine,” insists O’Connor when he sees my worried look.

As the driver begins racing haphazardly through the torrent of traffic, I text O’Connor to say it’s like being in a dodgem car. “Easy my friend,” he replies. “Moscow very crazy.”

Taken from timesonline.co.uk