All logic dictates that Peter Crouch should not have had a particularly successful career. That is not to say he lacks talent – as the old and tired maxim goes, “he’s got good feet for a big man” – but he entered football at almost precisely the same time as the traditional target man began to go out of fashion at the top level.
This has been borne out by the journeyman nature of his time in football: no team has ever wanted to commit to building around a striker in Crouch’s mould, and he has duly been shunted from club to club. However, he has been successful everywhere he has gone. It is telling that he has enjoyed multiple stints at a lot of his clubs, most notably Portsmouth and Tottenham; the grass is not often greener when Crouch is disposed of.
Stoke City is the only club where he has made a century of appearances, and yet he is loved by fans of each team he has graced. His cult status was truly cemented when he entered the exclusive list of players to reach 100 Premier League goals.
Even from his academy days, Peter Crouch had to get used to being moved around. From ages 10 to 12 he was enrolled in Brentford’s setup, before moving on to QPR and then, at the age of 14, Tottenham. However, the regular moves were not based on a dislike of his style – he was simply a sought-after talent.
The switch to Tottenham took place in 1995, when the role of target man still very much had a place in English football, and to find a player with Crouch’s combination of physical attributes and technical ability was considered hitting the jackpot. It was therefore unsurprising when, after three years in the academy, Crouch was handed his first professional contract by Spurs. However, at this point, Crouch got his first taste of the struggles he would have to fight to overcome throughout his career.
By this time he had grown to a staggering six foot seven inches, it made him seem like little more than a novelty option, a potential Plan B perhaps, but with no real place in a top side. This was the perception amongst the Tottenham hierarchy anyway; he was unable to get anywhere near the first team between 1998 and 2000, and in 2000/01 was shipped out on loan to Dulwich Hamlet and IFK Hässleholm.
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Even at these lowly clubs he was to an extent shunned, making a combined total of 14 appearances for the two sides. Conny Olsen, coach of Hässleholm at the time, recalls an incident from Crouch’s stint at the club. He had been put into the reserves after just one senior appearance, and their opponents, Häcken, were laughing at the bizarre spectacle of this giant of an Englishman plying his trade in a Swedish reserve fixture. They were not laughing for long, though. Crouch netted five goals against them and was soon around the first team a little more. He ended his time there with a respectable three goals in eight appearances.
This was not enough for his parent club. Following his return from loan he was immediately sold to his former club Queen’s Park Rangers, having not made a single appearance for Spurs. QPR were in the equivalent of the Championship at the time, and yet the man who couldn’t get regular minutes at Dulwich Hamlet was immediately catapulted into the first team. Finally, Crouch was at a club that was willing to place faith in him.
He duly delivered, with the steady consistency that has seen him notch up 100 Premier League goals without ever being immensely prolific. He reached double figures in the league, scoring 10 goals in his 42 appearances, and bagged two in three in the FA Cup. His performances caught the eye of fellow Division One side Portsmouth, whom he moved to for the 2001/02 season following QPR’s relegation and financial troubles.
At Fratton Park he enhanced his reputation still further, improving on his tally of the previous season to score 18 goals in just 37 matches. This would be quite a tally for anyone, let alone a 21-year-old at a side that went on to finish the season in 17th. With the world seemingly at his feet just two years after being forced to ply his trade in Sweden’s reserve leagues, Crouch made the step up to the Premier League with Aston Villa.
It was at Villa Park that he would encounter his first proper professional struggles. He was afforded a fair number of minutes in the immediate aftermath of the £5 million pound deal in March 2002, making seven appearances and scoring a respectable two goals in the latter half of the season, which included a strike on his home debut. However, in his first full season, Crouch was limited to just 14 appearances, failing to register a goal.
He took some criticism for the poor spell and has since admitted that he was simply not ready for the Premier League at the time. Nevertheless, Graham Taylor’s Villa could undoubtedly have done more to help. In 2003/04, Crouch was sent to Norwich on loan, performing well there and managing four goals in his three-month spell, but the writing was on the wall for him at Villa Park. After making just one more appearance for the Midlands club, he was sold to Southampton at a £2 million loss for the start of the 2004/05 campaign.
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This was the time when Crouch, now 23, truly began to make a name for himself in the Premier League. Prior to his season at the Saints, he was relatively well-known because of his height – by the end of the campaign, he would be known for his footwork.
At first, it didn’t look as though Crouch was going to experience such a change in fortunes as, up until Christmas, he continued to struggle for minutes. In the meantime, Southampton dispensed of not one but two managers, and so began one of the defining relationships of Crouch’s career: his link-up with Harry Redknapp.
Under Redknapp’s tutelage, Crouch thrived. Despite his slow start, he ended the Premier League season on double figures, racking up 12 goals. He was also crucial to the Saints’ FA Cup run, scoring four times in five games to help the team to the quarter-finals. This included a 94th-minute winner from the spot in the fourth round against his old club Portsmouth.
His late-season form prompted yet another move. Crouch’s performances had not been enough to prevent Southampton from finishing bottom of the table, so he gratefully accepted the offer from newly-crowned European champions Liverpool. This was without a doubt the biggest step in his career, and there was some scepticism amongst the Liverpool fans regarding the signing. Yet again, however, Crouch worked to displace the doubts, and his performances over the following three seasons won over the vast majority of fans. To this day, he is remembered fondly by the Anfield faithful.
As is the story of Crouch’s career, it was far from an easy start. It took 18 games before he finally scored – at this point he was understandably regarded as a flop. With Crouch, any bad patch leads to criticism about his style, and many questioned why Liverpool had decided to recruit this type of old-school target man.
Somehow, however, he clawed his way back from the brink. One year on from when he finally broke his duck, not a single fan would have dared question the technical side of Crouch’s game. On 27 September 2006, he scored a goal that has gone down in Liverpool folklore – a stunning overhead kick against Galatasaray in a 3-2 victory.
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It was this Champions League campaign that Crouch is remembered most fondly for on Merseyside. He scored a further six goals in a run that saw Liverpool reach the final of the tournament. His league form was never quite what it had been at Southampton, with Crouch repeatedly just missing out on the double-figures target, but he certainly put in some memorable performances. Chief amongst these was a perfect hat-trick in a 4-1 win over Arsenal in 2007.
When he parted ways with the club at the end of the 2007/08 campaign, he did so with a solid 22 league goals to his name and, more importantly, the respect of the fans.
Crouch left Anfield for his old haunt, Fratton Park, where he linked up with former boss Redknapp. There was a rumoured £11 million price tag on his shoulders, but Crouch had learned from his Liverpool experience and showed no indications of pressure. He scored on his third league start, against Everton, and continued to score at the steady rate of around one in three for the rest of the season.
It was at this time that Portsmouth’s financial crisis was coming to a head, so circumstances once again forced Crouch to move on; he was one of many players sold for big money fees in the summer. This opened the door for a return to another former club, Tottenham. Eleven years after he signed his first professional contract at White Hart Lane, he finally made his debut. Who else should give it to him but friend and mentor Harry Redknapp.
Their third partnership was not quite as successful as the previous two, but Crouch by no means struggled during his spell at Tottenham. Again, it was Europe where he thrived. Having scored the goal against Manchester City to confirm Champions League qualification at the end of 2009/10, he then spearheaded a remarkable campaign that saw the London club reach the quarter-finals.
He scored a hat-trick to help overcome Young Boys in the qualification round, notched in both games against Werder Bremen, turned home a Gareth Bale cross against Inter Milan and then scored against the other Milan club to take Tottenham into an unlikely quarter-final clash against Real Madrid. Crouch was sent off in that fixture – slightly souring the memory of his contribution to the campaign – but he is still regarded as a cult hero amongst Spurs fans.
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The striker left the club at the start of 2011/12 as, at the age of 30, he was no longer able to stake a claim for regular football at Spurs, so he made the move to Stoke City.
By this time his international career was also over. Starting around the time he joined Liverpool and ending shortly after the 2010 World Cup, Crouch’s time on the world stage is something of an enigma. His minutes-per-goal for England is, astoundingly, below 100, yet he never cemented himself as a first choice striker. Perhaps the target man snobbery was perhaps more pronounced in the international setup than it was anywhere else.
At the Brittania, he made people question exactly why Spurs and England had deemed him surplus to requirements, reaching double figures in a league campaign for the first time since his second spell at Portsmouth. The 10 goals were scored over an impressive 32 matches, highlighting the strong shape his body was still in.
Crouch’s game time was even higher for the next three seasons, managing 34 games in 2012/13 and 2013/14, and 33 as recently as 2014/15. Those three campaigns saw a useful combined return of 23 goals, taking his personal tally in the top flight to 96. Following 2015/16, however, it looked as though a great career might end agonisingly short of the century landmark as the likes of Mame Biram Diouf, Jonathan Walters and Joselu severely limited the Englishman’s game time, and he failed to add a single goal to the tally.
Thankfully, in a career of peaks and troughs, Crouch is managing to end on a high. Stoke’s poor start to the current campaign prompted Mark Hughes to look to his big man, and Crouch has shown the world that he’s still got it. Following his reintroduction to the side, the goal-counter ticked agonisingly nearer to 100, until finally he got what he was looking for in a 1-1 draw with Everton in February.
Fittingly, Crouch dusted down the old robot celebration to mark the occasion. Fans of every club he has played for throughout the years no doubt stood up to applaud the achievement; it is no more than he deserves. Forty-eight of the goals came with his head, with the remaining 52 ranging from tap-ins to stunning bicycle kicks. Not bad for a big man
By James Martin @JamesMartin013