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Gavin Peacock lived the dream, playing Premier League football and appearing in an FA Cup Final in a career of almost two decades in which he played professionally more than 600 times.
But he found himself called to become a Christian minister, leaving his homeland for a new life as a pastor thousands of miles away in Canada. Now he has returned to lead a church in a Kent village, and we sent reporter Rhys Griffiths to meet him…
At the age of 18, Gavin Peacock appeared to have the life that every young boy who grew up with a football at their feet would dream of.
After a promising rise through the ranks of youth football that had culminated in appearances for the England Schoolboys team, he had signed professional terms with top-flight London club Queens Park Rangers and a career at the pinnacle of the game beckoned.
But still the teenager felt a nagging sense that something was missing.
“I had grown up really just thinking football's everything. It's everything that will make you happy - it’s the schoolboy dream,” the 57-year-old explained over breakfast at a cafe close to his home in Bexley.
“And then when I got it, because football was my God if you like, if I played well I was up, if I played bad I'm down, up and down. And I'm thinking, wow, my sense of happiness and purpose is tied up in football alone.
“So I’m questioning a little bit the purpose of life and all of that.”
At the time Peacock was still living at his family home in Barnehurst and one day he dropped into a local Methodist church, where the minister told the teenager about a youth group he hosted every Sunday evening.
“I pulled up to that meeting that night in my Ford Escort XR3i, a proper little 80s sports car,” he recalled.
“I've got the job, I've got the potential career, a little bit of money in my pocket, everything that the world says will make you happy, and there's about half a dozen young people my age in that minister's front room that didn't have at all what I had.
“But when they spoke about Jesus Christ and when they prayed there was a joy and a reality they had that I did not have.”
Hearing the minister speak about the Bible and the message it contained proved to be a turning point for the young footballer in his quest for greater meaning in life.
In fact, he believes the sense of fulfilment he found in religion may even have helped him out on the pitch.
“Suddenly I thought, ‘yeah, that's it’. My biggest need was not the approval of the crowd on Saturday, it was to be in the right relationship with the living God who had made me for himself and saved me through his son.
“And I believed, and all of a sudden it's like a turnaround. You're going in one direction in life, self-centred, focused on just achieving your own glory, and then you turn towards God and now I understand my purpose.
“All of a sudden football went from being God to not being God. Jesus is God, and football fell in its right place.
“Then because my identity wasn't tied up in football I actually felt more relaxed. I could be the best footballer that I could be because there was something bigger than that.”
Following in dad’s footsteps
Peacock admits that becoming a footballer always felt like a natural path in life. After all, he grew up with a surname that for a certain generation of fans in Kent and south east London was synonymous with the red shirt of Charlton Athletic.
His father, Keith, played 591 times for the SE7 club, behind only legendary goalkeeper Sam Bartram. Keith would later go on to join the coaching staff at The Valley during Charlton’s most successful spell of the modern era under manager Alan Curbishley, and in 2011 had a short spell as the club’s caretaker manager.
“I grew up around the smell of the dressing room, going down to The Valley, watching my dad play,” Peacock said.
“He was a good dad, but he would coach me as well. He never forced me but always encouraged me. So it was one of those things where it just seemed natural that I just wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps.”
Selection for the England Schoolboys side put the Bexley Grammar School boy on the radar of a number of top sides – including the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool – because, unlike a number of his contemporaries, he was still not yet affiliated with any club, a situation he credits to his father’s guidance and knowledge of the game.
At just 15 years old the promising youngster was given the opportunity to train with the first team at west London outfit Queens Park Rangers, then managed by the future Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur and England manager Terry Venables. As expected, it proved a baptism of fire.
“You think you're good as an England schoolboy, and then, woah, it's up another level,” he remembered.
“The speed and the strength, because I wasn't big, I was still developing, and now it's not just playing for fun and schoolboy stuff – it's business.
“So that's the difference, and you've got to be able to handle the dressing room. You get a bit of stick. The older pros will test you out, to see if you've got the mettle, you know, because if you can't handle that off the field, you can't handle a dressing room, you're never going to be able to handle it in front of 30,000 people.
“I’d had a good training and upbringing with my dad and I knew what to expect, but still, I have got to go through it myself.”
Signing his first professional contract - and joining the Gills
After finishing his O-levels, Peacock signed professional terms with QPR on a deal worth £400 a week. Not bad for a lad just out of the classroom, but still a world away from the huge sums now available to teenagers landing deals with Premier League clubs.
He was also gaining further international recognition and was part of an England under-19s squad – alongside the likes of Paul Merson, Neil Ruddock and Paul Ince – that toured South America in 1986/87 under then England boss Bobby Robson.
Now his job was to try to break through from the reserves and cement his place in the first team at Loftus Road in what he described as the “big, bad world of professional football”.
An attacking midfielder with an eye for goal, Peacock knew he wanted to play through the middle of the park, but opportunities under Venables’ successor Jim Smith were proving limited.
“Remember, there’s only two subs in those days,” Peacock explained. “I’m kind of in and out of the team, on the bench a little bit, and Jim Smith was starting to play me out wide.
“I wanted to be in the centre. I’d envisaged me being a goal-scoring midfielder.
“But my dad was manager of Gillingham. We were sitting across the breakfast table, I'm getting ready to go into QPR training, he's getting ready to bomb down the A2 to Gillingham for training, and he's looking thoughtful.
“He said, ‘I’ve got some injury problems, do you fancy coming for a month on loan?’ Definitely, because I was a little bit impatient to be in that first team week in and week out.
“He said I would play every week, unless I had two bad games and he'd drop me. So I signed for Gillingham, and it was bittersweet, because my dad got sacked a few months later, which most people thought was a panic move and pretty unjust.”
The move to the Medway club in October 1987, initially a loan deal which was then made permanent for a fee of £40,000, proved to be a springboard for Peacock. In his first season at Priestfield he was named the club’s young player of the year, and the following campaign he was honoured as the fans’ player of the year.
His 12 goals in 81 appearances for the Gills were enough to convince then AFC Bournemouth boss Harry Redknapp to part with £250,000 for his services in the summer of 1989, at that time a record fee for the south coast club.
It was that year that Peacock had married his wife, Amanda, and the couple were already well-versed with the often itinerant lifestyle that comes with a career in professional sports. After little more than a year in Bournemouth, they would soon be on the move again.
‘Harry Redknapp said Newcastle had come in for me - did I fancy it?’
“One day in training I see Harry on the phone, and usually he’s buying a player, or having a bet on the dogs, and he comes over to me and he says, ‘Gavin, Newcastle United have come in for you. Do you fancy it?’
“And immediately I've gone, ‘that’s the move, that's the one’.
“I had three of the best years of my life up there. My grandad, my dad's dad, was a proper Newcastle fan all his life. It made his life when I signed, and he pulled me aside and he said, ‘son, if you sweat blood for them they will forgive you many mistakes on that field, because if they got a chance to pull on that black and white shirt, they would sweat blood’. And I always remember that.”
Despite his family’s close connection with Charlton Athletic, Peacock’s first ever football shirt as a child was the black and white stripes of Newcastle. So how did it feel when he made his debut for the Magpies and pulled on those famous colours for the first time as a player?
“It was Leicester away, I remember it, and I saw my number eight shirt hanging up in the dressing room and I've got goosebumps.
“I thought, ‘wow’. And ever since I pulled on that shirt, I just felt one of them. And the fans took to me, we had a great relationship and I sweated blood for the team.”
Peacock had been brought to the north east by his former QPR manager Jim Smith, who was succeeded in the dugout at St James' Park by Argentina World Cup winner Ossie Ardiles.
At this time Newcastle were playing in the second tier of English football, and under Ardiles the team was drawn into a relegation fight in the 1991/92 season. If lost, it would have seen the club drop to the third tier for the first time in its history – and face the very real danger of going out of business.
So in February 1992 the board brought in future England boss Kevin Keegan to steer the side to safety. Everything came down to the final match of the season.
“Kevin comes in, and in his first season we have to play against Leicester away to stay up,” Peacock said.
“If Newcastle go down, it's the first time in their history they're in the third tier, who knows what would happen. And I score; we win 2-1.
“My grandad had had a stroke a few weeks before, and I took him my number eight shirt and I gave it to him in the hospital. He couldn't say much at the time, but there was a tear in his eye, and he never washed that shirt because I had sweated blood for his team, and then my dad gave it back to me after he died.
“So it was a lovely story. My Newcastle days were good.”
Disaster had been averted on the final day, and the following season Keegan’s side swept all before them as they stormed to the league title and elevation to the Premier League. Peacock was a key member of the promotion-winning team, plundering 18 goals in all competitions and winning the club’s player of the year award.
Keegan’s compassion
On the pitch it was looking like, in the words of a hit single released that season, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ for a player hitting the peak years of his playing career.
Off the pitch, however, things were about to change. Amanda was pregnant with the couple’s first child, and just weeks after the season came to a close she gave birth to their son, Jake.
“It was a very, very difficult labour - two days in labour she was. Our son was born, Jake, but as he was born we saw he had one hand.
“It was a complete shock because in those days we only had one scan, and maybe the way he was lying [did not show it], so it kind of rocked us a bit, but our faith stood firm.
“And he was very compassionate, Kevin [Keegan] - that's one of many great things about Kevin - but there were things bigger than football and he understood that.
“He understood people and he kept calling me, because it was the summer, and I said, ‘listen, I think my wife needs to get back near her mum, with family’. And he said, ‘I don't want you to leave, but if you're not happy at home, you won’t play your best football’.
“Within a month I got a phone call, ‘Gavin, it's Glenn Hoddle, I'm just taking the Chelsea job and I want to make you my first major signing’.”
Wise’s mind games with Cantona
The 1993/94 Premier League season proved one to forget for the Stamford Bridge club, as Chelsea finished the campaign in 14th place. But Peacock’s goals had helped the Blues reach their first FA Cup Final since 1970, where they would face that season’s Premier League champions Manchester United at Wembley.
The chance to appear in the showpiece final at the national stadium was a dream come true in and of itself, but although they went into the match as underdogs there were reasons for Chelsea and their fans to believe.
They had beaten Alex Ferguson’s United side home and away that season, 1-0 on both occasions. And the scorer of the decisive goal in each of those games? One Gavin Peacock.
“It's red v blues, it's north v south, and we've been their bogey team in the league,” he recalled of the 1994 final at the old Wembley.
“It's just electric, walking out there. You come down that tunnel and they see you at the far end first and the noise just ripples around.
“It was a rainy day and we started really well. We're giving them a few problems, and 20 minutes into the game the ball dropped and I read it, flick it from my right to my left, I'm 25 yards out, and I've hit a volley, I didn't even feel it go off my left foot.
“I thought ‘this is good’ and I'm watching Peter Schmeichel and he starts to backpedal like that. It’s like everything's gone into slow motion. I'm thinking, ‘it's going in, it's going in, one-nil, Peacock scores again, we're gonna win the cup’. And then bang, it hits the crossbar, and it's out.”
The teams went back to the dressing rooms at half-time with the match still goalless, and Hoddle was delighted with his players’ performance in the first 45 minutes. But he warned them to expect an onslaught from Ferguson’s side when the game resumed.
With an hour gone, United won a penalty after a poor challenge by Eddie Newton on Denis Irwin in the box. The Manchester club’s enigmatic French star Eric Cantona would step up to take the spot kick – but not before Chelsea’s captain attempted a little bit of mind games.
“Dennis Wise goes up to Cantona, and he looks up at him and he goes, ‘£50 says you miss’.
“Cantona just looks down at him and kind of just waves him away like that, collar up, looks around again, strolls up and pops it in the bottom corner. And we're going, ‘well done, Dennis, that really worked’.
“Ten minutes later, penalty again. This time he goes over to Dennis, he looks down at Dennis and in this deep French accent he goes, ‘double or nothing’. And then he strolls up and puts it in the bottom corner. And the true story is that Dennis signed a £50 note and gave it to him after.”
In the space of just nine second half minutes Chelsea found themselves 3-0 down, a strike from Mark Hughes and two from the spot for Cantona leaving them dead and buried. An injury time finish from Brian McClair capped a comprehensive win, and United’s 4-0 victory sealed the Old Trafford club’s first ever league and cup double.
Hanging up his boots
That double meant the FA Cup runners-up qualified for the next season’s UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, giving Peacock a taste of European football as Chelsea progressed to the semi-finals, where they were narrowly eliminated by Spanish outfit Real Zaragoza over two legs.
The 1990s were a time of change in English football as what started as a trickle of foreign imports turned into a flood. Chelsea were one of the clubs at the forefront of this revolution, with the likes of Dutch icon Ruud Gullit and Italian forwards Gianfranco Zola and Gianluca Vialli bringing a touch of continental glamour to west London.
Roberto Di Matteo’s arrival at Stamford Bridge produced competition for Peacock in his preferred role as an attacking midfielder, and in 1996 he returned to QPR.
In 2001 he had the opportunity to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining Charlton Athletic on loan. By this stage his career was increasingly hampered by injury, and he only made a handful of appearances for the club. However, he will always be linked to one of the most famous days in the Addicks’ modern era, coming on as a substitute in a 4-2 win against Arsenal away at Highbury.
From pundit to preacher
After bringing the curtain down on his playing days, Peacock toyed with the idea of coaching, but instead embarked on a successful second career in the media. He appeared across the BBC, featuring on Football Focus and Final Score, working for the broadcaster at international tournaments, and appearing as a pundit on Match of the Day. But soon he felt his life being guided in an altogether different direction.
“I just really started to sense a call to ministry,” he said, “and I spoke to the leadership at my local church and they affirmed certain things, and I began to kind of get a couple of chances to preach.
“Then I did some studies at Cambridge, and once I started studying I knew then, I said to my wife I was going to give up a second dream career. I said, ‘what about if we look at going away to anonymity for a while’, and then people would just take me for what I'm saying from the Bible, not ‘oh, he's the ex-footballer guy or he's the BBC pundit’.”
That quest for a fresh start and an opportunity to explore a new path away from the limelight took the family – by this time a unit of four, following the arrival of daughter Ava – to Canada, where Peacock undertook a three-year Master’s course in Divinity at Ambrose Seminary in Calgary.
“If I was to just go straight from the BBC into ministry here, people would be confused a little bit, like ‘we'll come to hear him because he's the BBC guy’.
“I wanted them to hear what I had to say from the Bible, because that's what’s important, not my own opinion.
“I knew also that it would be a test of our faith, because we were leaving our family, we were leaving our friends, we took our kids out of school. They were 15 and 12 - difficult ages to move. So I knew it would be a test of our faith and a life experience.
“We moved from here to a small mountain town just outside Calgary of 10,000 people. I've just finished the Euros in Austria and Switzerland with the BBC, and I'm driving in -20C, I'm studying Hebrew and Greek, and I'm thinking, ‘what have I done?’ And of course I've moved to a country where football really isn't on the agenda.
“We were going to come back, and then I had this encounter with a guy who was lead pastor of this church and he said, ‘you can go back and take your own church there, or would you come on board here?’ Which I did.”
Returning to Kent
Now, after more than a decade as an associate pastor at Calvary Grace Church of Calgary, Peacock has returned home to take up a role as locum pastor at Bethersden Baptist Church, near Ashford, where he is due to spend a year before the arrival of a full-time pastor.
“I think my wife and I are at a new stage and season of life,” he said, reflecting on the decision to leave Canada and return to England.
“We've got children in Canada that have grown now. I’ll be the locum pastor there, preparing the church in this next year for a long-term guy that will come in. Then we'll see what happens at the end of that year in terms of the long term. I'm hoping that the church will flourish and the young families will come and join.
“Christian ministry is a calling, so you go where the Lord calls you and where doors open. It's been very clear that this door has opened, to help this church out for this year, and then we'll see beyond this year what it looks like for us. I'm excited to see what God might do in Bethersden.”
It has been a remarkable journey for Peacock the footballer, Peacock the husband and father, and Peacock the Christian. Does he think that it has been a path that was already mapped out by a higher power?
“I think the Lord has planned all our lives and nothing is by chance,” he answers thoughtfully.
“I couldn’t have seen it coming. I think there are certain ways our lives turn that we could never have seen coming, and there are difficult providences in life as well. But the great thing about being a Christian is there's always hope because even in our deepest sufferings God is always working things for good, so your faith is strengthening, you've got hope for the future, your hope for beyond this life.
“With the rate of depression now, even amongst young people, it's a loss of hope. You can live without food and water for a fair while, but you can't live without hope for more than a minute, and the Christian worldview gives you hope in this day and the day to come.
“And in your trials, which everybody has, we can know that there’s even purpose in those trials. We're souls and we have a God that made us and there's a hope if we have faith in Jesus Christ for this day and the next.”