“I GO into this office. I see this young, bald guy. Serious face. As weird as it sounds, I already kind of liked him.” A smile spreads as Sebastien Bassong recalls his first meeting with Alex Neil.
“I like tough people,” Bassong explains. “And I’m an observer. I don’t know him; he doesn’t know me. We just look at each other. Straight in the eye. For a long time.”
Neil spoke, “and the way he was talking, even if it was a bit . . . threatening . . . that’s what made me think, ‘I can get along with this guy.’ Because there’s no bull****.”
This was January and Bassong was back from a loan at Watford, having left after a fallout with Neil Adams, the previous Norwich manager. But their new one said: “I don’t know what went on before and I don’t give a ****. You’re a good player. Do your job and you’ll play.’” Threatening? There was one more thing. “Before you go, Seb.”
“Yes boss?”
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“If you **** around I’ll break your balls.” Bassong left, laughing gently to himself. “Ah, gosh, that was good, I thought. He’s a man,” the defender says. If that encounter was unforgettable, so have been the whole nine months under Neil. Norwich, with Bassong integral, were promoted via the playoffs and Watford went up too, making Bassong the only player to win two Championship promotion medals in one season. Now he’s back in the Premier League and playing well. He and Russell Martin are proper partners in central defence. He has just extended his contract.
“I can’t lie,” he says, “for me, Norwich and myself were over at one point. But I’m a loyal person. You give and you receive. I received from the manager and I gave on the pitch – but, really, I see that as my duty, the minimum, whoever’s in charge. So my new contract: I think I had to give him something back.”
To help him embrace Neil’s invitation to start afresh Bassong listened to his father. “My dad’s a wise man and he said, ‘Listen, this is life, you can’t pray as many times a day as you, and hold grudges.’ Coming back was a huge challenge for me as a human being. My biggest win over the past year was that I showed myself as a man.”
His father came from Cameroon and his mother and brothers from France, to see Norwich win the playoff final at Wembley. “When the whistle went, I jumped over the fence and found them in the stand. And I cried,” Bassong says. “That’s really unusual for me but sometimes it helps and everything came out, everything that I had been through over the year. And my pride in my team, because they did it, not just me.”
Can Norwich stay in the Premier League? “We’re going to fight, that’s for sure,” Bassong says. Neil’s key message is: “Nobody can outwork us.” A good dressing room “with no sappers, only energisers,” will take Norwich far.
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“People outside the club don’t really rate Norwich, for whatever reason,” says Bassong, “and that’s another reason to fight.” There’s talent and experience in Neil’s squad and his high-tempo, pass-move, positive football, has already surprised richer opponents.
“He’s not scared of anyone we play,” Bassong says. “He’s a proper leader. You feel you want to follow him. You could go to war with Alex Neil, easily. He wouldn’t let you down. When he talks, you want to go out and just, like, kill everyone! I think that he’s exactly what a club like Norwich needs. In our dressing room there are no egos. We know if we want anything that we have to work our socks off. And he’s the man for that.”
Norwich have won one, drawn one, lost one so far — and yet dominated each game. “The Crystal Palace game [a 3-1 home defeat on the opening day of the season] was a wake- up call: at this level you can play well and still lose. On the pitch Glenn Murray was saying, ‘You’re battering us, how are you not scoring?’ But that’s the thin margin,” Bassong says. “You’ve got to know how to win games.
“We need more winning mentality and I include myself. I’ve taken bookings for the same mistake, because I was, as the manager says, ‘fannying about’ on the ball. That’s Scottish, yes? Fannying about.
“It’s the kind of mistake that if we get rid of, we’ll be more efficient. We’ve got quality but the thin margin between a good team and a really good team is those details. Get rid of the ball quicker. Put it in the net, regardless of how.
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“That’s what we’ve got to get in our heads and the manager has spotted it really quick. The Championship is different — you can make mistakes [and get away with it].”
Bassong wants to reach his standards of 2012-13 when he was Norwich player of the year and even scored three times. Scoring — he last did in 2012 — is beginning to obsess him, he admits. Up for a set-piece, header in the net: he’s using visualisation techniques. After playing he might go into psychology or player-mentoring.
“I truly believe even the best players in the world, without their confidence, wouldn’t do what they do. How can you beat someone or score a special goal if you don’t believe you can? It’s amazing, the connection between body and brain. Football is in your head.
“You can spot a player without confidence straight away,” he says, remembering a young Gareth Bale at Tottenham. “He wasn’t confident at all, he was shy in life, in the dressing room. He struggled. He was about to go on loan in the Championship, then Benny [Benoit Assou-Ekotto] got injured and Harry Redknapp gave him his chance.
“He had nothing to lose, so he played free. He was at left- back, beside me. I was looking at him and he was running, with no chains holding him, trying some crazy tricks — and suddenly it all came together for him.”
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He should write a book. There would be good chapters. He began in France’s national academy at Clairefontaine with Hatem Ben Arfa and Abou Diaby in an intake that featured in a year-long TV documentary. He joined Newcastle under Kevin Keegan, had five managers in a year and any gaucheness knocked out of him by the likes of Alan Smith and Joey Barton.
Spurs was a more stand-offish, starry, dressing room, but he loved the big games and life in London. Norwich? He lives in the city centre and loves the warmth of locals — though he would build it a Eurostar station if he could.
“Sometimes I miss the liveliness of Paris or London. Norwich can be quiet – but it’s better for your football,” he laughs. “There are no distractions, nothing to do in Norwich, to be fair. So you train, go home, rest, think about your next training session. That’s good for a football player. And this is a perfect place to bring up my daughters.
“People from Norwich are very warm and it’s a family club where people are down to earth and have values. I don’t think Norwich should ever change. That would take some of the spark and the beauty of what it’s made of.”
At Norwich’s promotion party, while standing with his partner, Bassong suddenly saw his boss pointing and crossing the room towards him. Neil put an arm round his neck and drew him in. What he said was “mostly Scottish” but Bassong got the gist: well done. And then there was one more thing: “But remember. I’ll break your balls.”