Journeyman (12 page)

It was by far my best performance of the season and, to make up for the worst birthday ever, I got a £100 cheque as part of my ‘Man of the Match’ award.

We followed up the spanking of Halifax with a more routine 2–0 victory at home against Farnborough Town and I got the opening goal of the game.

Our challenge to the top of the table continued throughout December, including another 7–1 win away to Forest Green Rovers where I grabbed two goals. That took my tally for the season to fourteen goals from central midfield before Christmas. Surprisingly, despite my new
agent mentioning Bristol Rovers again, I still received no interest during the January transfer window.

Then, for me personally, disaster struck. It was the middle of February and we were playing Gravesend away. The game was only twenty minutes old when I twisted away from an opponent with the ball in the middle of the pitch. As I did so, my opposite number pulled my right arm – the same side I had dislocated my shoulder eighteen months before. Instantly I knew what had happened: my shoulder had come out of its socket!

With that type of injury you either need to put it back in the socket straight away or wait for a doctor to do it as the muscles around the injury spasm to protect it. I waited in the Gravesend physio room while they called an ambulance. The pain was off the scale and I asked them if they had any relief. Someone offered me a Nurofen! I didn’t think that would quite hit the spot so I politely declined.

I knew the script now – I waited in agony at the hospital until a doctor was free. I received the gas and air and was off with the fairies until they put my shoulder back into place. Once the effects of the drugs had worn off I was distraught, though. I couldn’t sleep that night. All that was going through my head was how my season was over – and I’d been enjoying the best one of my career.

After a period of letting the injury settle down, and a consultation with a specialist, it was agreed that surgery was required to ensure this would not become a recurring theme, thus confirming my worst fears.

I spent the majority of my time after that convalescing in Essex. The team did not miss me in the slightest – they went on a Conference record run of winning eleven games in a row including a 9–0 away win at Dagenham.

We finished the campaign in second place on ninety-one points, scoring 103 goals in the process. This was over a 42-game season and it would be interesting to know in how many other seasons that total would have been enough to gain automatic promotion.

My season personally finished on 14 February after playing thirty-two games and scoring fourteen goals.

I have got through another term and it is now Easter. My timetable has changed immensely, which has made my life easier, but I am still struggling with teaching and I’m feeling quite low at the moment.

School football is terrible. I want to be in a professional environment and I am miles away from that. Once I familiarise myself with the teaching I’ll probably be OK in this comfort zone and do the job for years – but I don’t want that. I’d rather really push myself and fail than never know.

To top it all off, I am back playing for Thurrock. While I was unavailable for two months, the club signed another central midfielder so I find myself playing down the right or left flank now. My form has been decidedly average and the team in general is really struggling. I am seriously considering hanging up my boots at the end of this season.

S
UMMER 2004 – INJURED
again, but I had been really effective when I was able to play the previous season. I’d had the operation on my right shoulder and was due to be fit for the start of pre-season 2004/05. But, such is the short-sightedness of many football clubs, my shoulder injury did not seem to matter too much as it was ‘only’ my upper body.

GT had made it clear he wanted me to stay but we were struggling to come to an agreement regarding my wages. Once it became evident we were not getting promoted, he came up with his best offer of £550 per week.

As I mentioned earlier, I could not have been happier at Hereford and everything had gone great from an on-the-pitch perspective. But I was also aware that I was twenty-five. I wanted to play in the Football League and needed to earn some decent money – all my hometown friends were buying their own houses and I wanted to do the same.

Money, in hindsight, should not have come into it. If I had continued to perform well, the finances would have looked after themselves. Plus, what is better: to be a bit-part player in the Football League or a key player in the Conference? I’d made that mistake once already when leaving Yeovil and was about to do the same again with Hereford, with my new agents also pushing me to move as there was obviously no value to them in me staying.

I had to give GT a response regarding my future within a couple of weeks of the season finishing. I had three concrete offers from Shrewsbury Town, Chester City and AFC Hornchurch. All were offering substantially more money so I told GT I could not accept his offer.

I still regret that decision.

A couple of days later I wrote GT a letter thanking him for saving my career. I do not know if he ever received it as he has never mentioned it. I hope he did as I really appreciate the opportunity he gave me.

None of the three teams mentioned above were exactly big clubs – and none of them really excited me – but they were all keen for me to join.

Garry Hill was the manager of AFC Hornchurch and had tried to sign me previously for Dagenham & Redbridge. There was never really any chance of me going to Hornchurch as they were playing in the Conference South, but I met up with Garry and chief executive Gary Calder (though I’m not sure Hornchurch really needed a chief exec). Their first offer was £1,000 per week on a two-year contract. I’m pretty sure if I’d been serious about joining that figure could have gone up, but I had no interest in dropping down a league. This was one of my few correct career moves as Hornchurch went bust about a third of the way through the season. I then spoke to Shrewsbury Town – by far the biggest of the three clubs mentioned. I went to Gay Meadow and met manager Jimmy Quinn, who I knew from our brief time at Reading, and his assistant Dave Cooke. Normally when you go and speak to a manager you get a gut feeling about them and the club – mine was not a good one. Jimmy, rather than speaking to me like a manager, was chatting to me like a friend and telling me all about numerous irrelevant events. I could not have cared any less about all that, to be honest. I had plenty of friends and did not need another one. What I wanted was to find out about the team, where I would fit into it and what they did in training. Jimmy and Dave were clearly good guys, but nothing they told me made me want to sign for Shrewsbury.

I visited Chester City next and met Mark Wright, their manager and former Liverpool defender. The meeting went well. He spoke positively about me and how I would fit into his team, but there were a few problems. I spoke to a few former Chester players and none of them had a good word to say about the club or Wright. These were not bitter players who had been rejected by the club, but people whose opinions I valued. With three or four people saying the same thing, I would have been a fool to ignore the warning signs. I had also heard rumours that players did not always get paid on time and, if the chairman took a disliking to you, wages could be stopped or you could even be forced out of the club. With all this evidence, and the fact I had a well-run and financially stable club like Shrewsbury showing an interest in me, it was not a hard decision to turn Chester down.

This again turned out to be a good decision as Chester lurched from crisis to crisis over the ensuing years before finally going bust in 2010.

Due to this process of elimination, I was left with just Shrewsbury Town as a real option. I tried to drag the situation out, hoping a more attractive option presented itself, but nothing did, so I went up to Shrewsbury to finalise the deal.

I arrived at Gay Meadow with my new agent in tow ready to thrash out the details of my contract. You can imagine my surprise when, in Jimmy’s office, my agent just sat there and hardly said a word while I negotiated the deal. I was pretty pissed off with that but relatively happy with my new contract.

We agreed a two-year deal on a basic wage of £800 per week. The club also agreed to pay the first three months of my rent as part of my relocation package, plus a £100 goal bonus. It meant, as this was a Football League contract, I would get paid through the summer during both years.

When I’d agreed to be represented by my new agents, I’d signed a contract entitling them to 5 per cent of my wages. They neglected to tell me that I had to also pay the VAT on that 5 per cent, so that meant £204 a month over the course of my new contract – a total of £4,896. Not bad for making
a few phone calls! I wouldn’t be surprised if they were paid by Shrewsbury too. You could argue that they had managed to nearly double my wages, but I think my performances really dictated that rise. Moreover, when I really needed them in the final negotiations, I was left to do everything myself.

The contract would run from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2006. All I had to do to confirm the deal was pass a medical, which I did. Just…

I subsequently heard from Rachel, one of the physiotherapists, that she really hadn’t wanted to pass me. Looking back, I bet the club wish they’d taken her advice!

P
RE-SEASON STARTED AT
the beginning of July. My girlfriend Emma and I had found a house to rent in Telford. Emma was moving away from home for the first time and this was great for me as it was nice to have someone by my side. Moving clubs can often be a lonely experience, especially initially.

Emma and I had first met each other – or, I should say, quite literally bumped into each other – in the luxurious surroundings of the Chelmsford branch of a Yates’s Wine Lodge about five years previously. Even then I only frequented top-quality establishments. Somehow she managed to resist my advances over the ensuing three years whenever I managed to track her down. My persistence eventually paid off as we began an on-and-(quite often)-off long-distance relationship during the two years I played for Hereford. With my newfound wealth I managed to convince her to join me on my national tour of footballing backwaters.

Stuart Whitehead, one of my new teammates, owned two houses in Telford next door to each other. He lived in one and was kind enough to allow us to rent the other one while we found somewhere to buy.

My initial thoughts when joining Shrewsbury were confirmed during pre-season training – the environment was very relaxed. I often thought Graham Turner would have been even more gutted about missing out on promotion the previous season if he had seen how unprofessional the environment was here compared to Hereford.

Shrewsbury had some really good players such as Ryan Lowe, Sam Aiston and Darren Moss, among others who went on to better things, but the team as a whole was not playing anywhere near its potential.

What also caught my eye when I got there was the abundance of good central midfielders already at the club. These included former Birmingham City captain Martin O’Connor, Dave Edwards and Jamie Tolley. I was starting to wonder where I was going to fit into the team.

I was still recuperating from my shoulder injury so, for the first few weeks, my participation in training was restricted to non-contact activity.

My first involvement came in a comfortable Shropshire Senior Cup win against Bridgnorth Town. Considering I had not played for five months, I did well. This was quickly followed by a short pre-season trip to Torquay. As soon as we got there we had a night out and I got heavily inebriated.

I have always struggled to train after a night on the booze and this was no exception: I was a shambles. A young Joe Hart, the current England goalkeeper, asked me after that session why I didn’t like training. I had to explain to him that, although it may not have looked like it, I actually love it.

We had a game against Truro the next day and I had to ask the manager if I could miss it as I still felt terrible from the night out two days before. We had two games in two days so I played in the second one and got on the scoresheet.

That turn of events probably did not show me in my best light, although the atmosphere was so relaxed at the club I don’t think anyone really cared.

The Torquay hiccup aside, pre-season went really well personally. I played in the last game of the tour away at Exeter and got a run-out in all the other important games, culminating in a home friendly against Bradford City. I was confident I had done enough to gain a starting berth in the first proper game of the season.

We started our return to the Football League at home against Lincoln City and I was in the team as an attacking midfielder. We narrowly lost the game 1–0, which was no disgrace as Lincoln had been in and around the play-offs for the last couple of years. I missed a great chance midway through the first half, though, when a recovering defender did just enough to put me off. As the game wore on, my performance deteriorated and I was replaced halfway through the second half.

Not exactly the debut I had dreamt of the night before.

I kept my place for the next game away to Macclesfield which we lost 2–1. Personally the game went a lot better and I scored my first goal for the club with a scruffy shot from the edge of the box, plus I also hit the bar with a long-range effort. Even though we lost, I was really happy with my performance. It is always a relief when you go to a new club, get a goal and prove to your new supporters that you are a good player.

Unfortunately our results did not improve and we lost our third game in a row away at Cambridge United. Not only that, but we were totally outplayed from start to finish. When I tell you Cambridge eventually got relegated after finishing bottom of the League, it probably highlights the challenge we had ahead of ourselves.

Rumours started that the manager was under pressure already. It was strange because individually we had some good players. This was backed up by what they went on to do in their careers. However, in my opinion, there was no discipline at the club. We had a lot of strong characters who needed controlling but I did not think Jimmy was the man to do that. He was a nice enough guy but still wanted to be a player and didn’t seem keen to upset anyone.

Being the strange game that football is, we found ourselves under real pressure after just three games. Our next one was at home to Northampton Town and we were trying to reverse an unwanted record of zero points from three games.

We started the game nervously, me as much as anyone, but we went on to win 2–0. This was more down to the fact Northampton were reduced to nine men rather than any great performance from us. The game was in the balance until I got the second goal in the last ten minutes. I was in the thick of the action and got ‘assaulted’ in one of their sending-offs. If my opponent’s tackle had been any higher it could have resulted in a very crude castration!

This revival did not last long as we fell to defeat in the League Cup away to Tranmere Rovers and then lost 2–0 at Oxford United, but we recovered to get a good win at home to Cheltenham and followed that up with three consecutive draws (away against Bristol Rovers and Boston and at home to Bury).

As the team found a level of consistency, so did I. Considering I had been out injured for five months before joining Shrewsbury, I was generally happy with the way I was performing.

Our renaissance came to a crashing halt when we got beaten 2–1 at home by Yeovil. After Luke Rodgers put us ahead with a great strike, we got dismantled by a brilliant opposition who just left us chasing shadows. They even had the luxury of us missing not one but two penalties.

This further confirmed how poor the rash decision I had made three years earlier to leave Yeovil was. I could have been a part of that team as opposed to running around getting nowhere near any of them.

We got a fully deserved bollocking after the game and one of the main points to come out of it was we did not pressure them enough in midfield. With that in mind, we faced AFC Bournemouth at home in the LDV Trophy (as it was then called). In one of the early exchanges, I sensed an opportunity to nick the ball from an opponent. As I slid to win the ball, my right arm got stuck behind me and straight away I was in agony.

I knew what had happened – I had dislocated my shoulder for the third time.

The familiar hospital scenario unfolded as I waited for the doctors to tend to those in a more critical condition. Unlike previous times, I actually had to go to theatre and be put under general anaesthetic so they could put the shoulder back into place. I stayed in hospital overnight.

Bournemouth were being coached by Richard O’Kelly at that time and he visited me before I left the hospital. Little things like that are why I, and many others, hold him in such high esteem.

I was really disappointed with myself once the physical pain diminished. I had only one person to blame for this happening again. When you dislocate your shoulder all the ligaments that hold the joint in place are stretched and therefore leave the joint unstable. You can rehabilitate the injury but never really tighten up those ligaments without surgery, which I’d had in March to make my shoulder stable. However, due to me leaving Hereford and not joining Shrewsbury until June, I hadn’t had a rehabilitation plan in place as I was no longer Hereford’s responsibility and Shrewsbury just wanted to get me playing. Being honest, I hadn’t really fancied spending my summer break at Lilleshall doing rehabilitation either – a terribly unprofessional approach, I know. I was clinically fine after the first operation but I didn’t do anywhere near enough work to strengthen the area. It was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened against Bournemouth.

After a brief period of wallowing in self-pity, I had to take the positives from the situation. It was an upper-body injury so, even though I would need surgery again, I could still spend a lot of the convalescence period working on my fitness and getting myself into good shape.

After a relatively good start to my Shrewsbury career I was consigned to the shadows as, once injured, you are of no use to the manager. Some do it consciously, some do it subconsciously, but you are pretty much ignored and forgotten about until you can contribute on the pitch again. A long-term
injury is bad at the best of times, but even worse when you are trying to establish yourself at a new club.

The team continued to struggle on the pitch. One incident before a game stuck in my mind and, for me, summed up Jimmy’s time as manager at the club.

We were playing Grimsby at home in a midweek League game and I had taken up my customary position in the physio’s room. The phone in the room rang and the gaffer answered it with: ‘Hello, Chinese takeaway, how can I help you?’

I was gobsmacked and sat in the corner cringing.

This was the manager of a club who was hanging onto his job for dear life. Psychologists may say this was his way of dealing with a high-pressure situation but I just found myself feeling embarrassed for him.

As fate would have it, he was relieved of his duties after the visit of Grimsby since we were rooted to the bottom of the League after fourteen games.

It is always disappointing and unsettling when the man who brings you to a club leaves but I was not overly bothered this time.

The chairman and board must have realised that a firm hand and more discipline were required. As a result they employed Gary Peters, a former player who had appeared for Aldershot, Fulham and Wimbledon, among others. He had also managed Preston North End and, at one stage, took a young David Beckham on loan.

I am going to be honest and say GP and I never really saw eye to eye. Having a lot of success with Wimbledon, where he had earned two promotions in the 1980s, had obviously had a big influence on the moulding of his footballing philosophy as he was an advocate of the very direct style of play favoured by the Dons and others. I hated, and still do hate, this style of play with a passion, though. The whole game plan is based on getting the ball forward and into the opposition’s box as quickly as
possible, irrespective of the quality of the forward ball/pass/hoof. I will admit this sort of prehistoric, high-tempo approach can have a positive short-term effect as it is quite easy to implement. However, after the initial surprise factor of five or six games, the opposition soon work out how predictable this approach is. They then drop deeper as a team, so there is no space behind to put the ball, and just wait for us to give them the ball again and again and again – which we did.

I also consider it lazy coaching – it is a lot tougher to work with a group of players, improve them tactically and technically, and be brave enough to let them make mistakes. In the long term, this will benefit the individuals and team as a whole; however, I am pragmatic enough to know that time is a commodity very rarely afforded to football managers.

Put GP’s style of football to one side though and he was not all bad. He instantly put in place some changes that actually bettered the club, such as improving the changing facilities, getting a groundsman to work on the training pitch, putting up a head tennis court, and – when the training pitches were not up to scratch – finding us alternative venues like the National Sports Centre at Lilleshall. He also started providing regular food before and after training.

These changes may not seem much but they made a big difference when put together, especially the improvement of the playing surface. When you are training on a crap surface, more often than not, you just want to get off it as it becomes frustrating and counterproductive. There is nothing worse than mistakes continuously happening through no fault of your own. I could easily shank a ball off the pitch without any help from an adverse playing surface, thank you very much! When on a good pitch though, the players suddenly wanted to stay out after training and work on their game.

Most new managers bring in their own assistant and GP was no different. Mick Wadsworth joined us, having previously worked in the Premier League for Southampton and alongside the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, Alan
Shearer and Nolberto Solano at Newcastle. I know this because Mick told me approximately eight times a day, every day. I quite liked him, though – he said what he thought and had a very dry sense of humour.

Mick regularly told me how much he admired the technical ability of Solano and other South American players. This, along with the other players we discussed, led me to believe Mick was not a huge fan of the way we played. But, being the manager’s assistant, he had to tow the party line. I don’t think their combination worked particularly well, though. Normally if the manager is a miserable git then you have a very enthusiastic and upbeat assistant to play ‘good cop’ to the boss’s ‘bad cop’. A perfect example of this was Graham Turner and Richard O’Kelly at Hereford; I will leave it to you to work out who was the miserable git of the pair. Unfortunately at Shrewsbury, GP was a miserable git and so was Mick. After a bad defeat and a bollocking from the manager, we then got a look of disgust from the assistant too.