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GILLWAY BOYS, WE ARE HERE

IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT THE HALCYON DAYS OF MY HOME TOWN have long since passed. Tamworth, situated fifteen miles north-east of Birmingham, was once the seat of power from which Anglo-Saxon royalty ruled the kingdom of Mercia. The ancient castle, founded by Ethelflaed – the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great, no less – and later rebuilt by the Normans is a proud monument to its historic past, and the stone motte-and-bailey seemed to be a constant reminder when I was growing up that I had probably missed out on all the action.

Me and the mates I grew up with would have loved the odd bit of pillage and plunder at weekends. Especially during the summer months, when the football season had ended and we had to make do with games of cricket and a bit of apple scrumping for our entertainment. I would eventually go into battle for the Mercian – the pub for which I started playing against the hard-drinking, hard-as-nails men of the local Sunday league when I was an impressionable fourteen-year-old with an unerring aptitude for growing pimples rather than quaffing pints. Tamworth was once home to the factory that produced the three-wheeled Reliant cars made famous by the television comedy series Only Fools and Horses. Down the years, I’ve had more than a few escapades that Del Boy and Rodney would have been proud of – and one or two more that wouldn’t have been suitable for family viewing. In fact, I am pretty sure that it was only football that prevented me from having a taste of what life was like in another legendary British sitcom: Porridge.

A few of my pals – and more than fifty years later, those same lads I grew up with on the Gillway council estate are still my muckers – spent some time behind bars. And, looking back, I can see that I often seemed to be on the same rocky route to some remand centre or young offenders’ institution. In fact, not long after I had made a £300,000 move from Birmingham City to Watford in 1984, my solicitor was so sure I was about to be sent down for ABH that when it came to sentencing, he advised me to wear a cheap suit and to leave any jewellery at home. There but for the grace of God and all that.

Don’t get me wrong, Gillway wasn’t an inner-city sinkhole or a no-go area for the police – and still isn’t. Tamworth is close enough to Birmingham that your football allegiance is either Blues, Villa or West Brom, and my recollection of it is as a friendly, close-knit community where the people looked after each other.

None of us were bad lads. But the one trait I have in common with the friends I made is that I’ve never been able to turn the other cheek. I’ve also always believed that if a mate needs your help, then a true friend gives it unconditionally. For better or worse, that’s who I am.

MY CHILDHOOD WASN’T LAVISHED WITH THE FINER THINGS IN life – in fact, the first time I ate a fillet steak was when I ordered it for my pre-match meal before I made my First Division debut for Birmingham as a nineteen-year-old at Christmastime 1980. But I was blessed in so many other ways. As the youngest of three children born to William and Gladys, I had a childhood that was packed with love.

When I came into the world on Friday, 19 May 1961, Gladys and Bill already had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Carol. There are thirteen years between my brother and me and I’m ten years younger than my sister, so you could say I was a surprise arrival. Dad was a lorry driver, the hardest-working man I have ever known, and my hero. In my mind, he is sat on the shoulders of Pat Jennings and Muhammad Ali like a winning FA Cup Final captain being carried around Wembley. I spent most of my life trying to make my Dad proud. Not because he was one of those overbearing parents you see stood on the touchlines of park pitches shouting at their shell-shocked sons to ‘get stuck in’. But because he gave me nothing but his total support. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t speak to him up until his sudden death in 1997.

Mum’s life revolved around taking care of the family. Some would call it old-fashioned these days, but she got job satisfaction. Mum just loved being Mum. Following my unexpected arrival, it became clear that the house my parents rented at 21 Hawthorn Avenue wasn’t quite big enough to accommodate the growing Coton clan. My memories of my first home are dim and distant. I still wasn’t old enough to attend the local primary school at Flax Hill when we moved around the corner to a slightly bigger property at 45 Laburnum Avenue.

The first thing I noticed there, was that behind the cast-iron railings at the top of the back garden was a full-sized football pitch. In my formative years, that luscious piece of turf would become my field of dreams. Dad even cut a hole in the fence so that I could come and go at my leisure, and pretty soon I had become part of a gang of lads that would kick a ball about for hours on end, come rain or shine. Life was lived on the go. The only time I sat down was to eat my meals. We didn’t have luxuries like PlayStations, iPads or mobile phones to occupy us – and this meant we had much healthier and active lifestyles. Sport wasn’t a pastime; it was a way of life.

One of the tragedies of growing up in the twenty-first century is that kids don’t seem to be in love with sport enough to actually play themselves. They are happy to watch Messi and Ronaldo on the telly, but the closest they get to actually trying to be one of their heroes is when they turn on a games console. Too few of them want to play the real thing. They don’t seem to immerse themselves in football and other sports like my generation used to. So, as a consequence, they often become fixated with the concept of being a footballer and the wealth it brings rather than the game itself.

There was a dozen of us, all of a similar age. Ant Barlow, my next-door neighbour, is still a great friend, while Phil Rainsford, Paul Archer, Chris Betteridge and Lloyd Johnson were also part of the Laburnum crew. Chris Wilson, who is my cousin, Gav Mooney, Andy Miller and Martin Thompson, aka Tommo, are also lads I grew up with who I know I can trust with my life. Our options back then may seem limited in the eyes of youngsters today, but we were never bored. It was either football or cricket, hopping on our bikes or swimming at the outdoor baths.

We were also a group of boys all growing up together, so making our own entertainment inevitably got us into bits of bother. But we were hardly the Peaky Blinders. Our idea of a heist was sneaking into the local Corona factory, nicking a few bottles, and biking down to the Second World War bomb hole in Wigginton Park to drink it so fast that it felt like our bellies would burst. And, for those of you who aren’t of a certain age, I’m talking about the place where they produced dandelion & burdock and cream soda, not the Mexican brewery.

We did have one run-in with the law in our early teens when we commandeered a motor-bike for a few hours without the owner’s consent. I was fined £3 for my indiscretion, as well as being forced to pay 75p compensation. I also got an old-school telling-off from my Dad – and, despite his very best efforts to keep me on the straight and narrow, it wouldn’t be my last.

All I cared about from an early age were the three Fs – family, friends and football. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a footballer. My bedroom was a shrine to my favourite players, covered in posters torn from the weekly copies of Shoot! magazine that became my bible. My early years in junior football were split between playing in goal, as a centre-back and even on the left wing, but a pointer to where my future lay was that my boyhood idol was the Tottenham, Arsenal and Northern Ireland goalkeeping legend Pat Jennings. Many years later, I was lucky enough to meet Pat on a coaching course and found him to be a gentleman. He told me a tale or two about what life was like for a footballer in London during the swinging sixties. I’ll just say I was absolutely gobsmacked and leave it at that.

I have only ever asked for two autographs in my life and both are treasured mementoes up until this day. Perhaps it’s fitting that Pat and Muhammad Ali are my two sporting icons because I also earned a living using my hands. My career path was laid down at the age of eight when I decided it was time to get serious and Dad took me down for a trial with the local junior club, Gillway Boys, who played at Wigginton Park. I arrived to discover that the other players were all a year older than me so, in the age-old tradition, the little ‘un went in goal. I didn’t care. I was a weedy little kid who was so desperate for a game that I was willing to play anywhere. I just did what came naturally to me – in other words, I got stuck in and threw myself around so that I would be covered in mud. At the end of the game, Gillway’s manager, a lovely man called Peter French, came up to me and said: ‘Right, son, from now on you’re our goalkeeper.’ And so a star was born – at least in my mind. I had no doubts that this was my first step towards becoming a professional footballer.

ANOTHER GILLWAY BOY MADE THE GRADE BEFORE I DID. STEVE Fox was a few years older than me and, when he signed professional forms with Birmingham City and progressed from youth team to first team, he became a beacon of hope for all the young lads from our council estate who dreamed of following in his footsteps. Little did I know that just a few years later, I would be sharing lifts into training with Steve, a player who we all held up as our role model. Gillway is still a fantastic little club that does Tamworth proud. My visits back home have become more infrequent over the years, but when Peter French passed away in 1999 I was honoured to be invited to play in a memorial match. I’m not saying Peter had been wrong to identify me a fledgling goalkeeper in that first trial match thirty years earlier, but I did mark my Gillway return with a goal after being picked as an outfield player.

All the lads who played for Gillway also went to my primary school, Flax Hill, and I followed most of them to the Mercian School for Boys at the age of eleven. By then, I’d been bitten and consumed totally by the football bug. Gillway had formed another team for my age group, so I played as a left-winger for them on Sunday afternoons and continued as a keeper for the team of lads who were a year older because their games were always scheduled for Saturday afternoons. Like all footballers – schoolboy, amateur or professional – I had my share of joy and pain. As any player will tell you, at the time, you feel those experiences just as deeply as the triumphs and tragedies that are played out in major football cathedrals around the world. Football always matters.

I was about ten when I suffered my first dose of heartbreak. Gillway had won the league title and had reached two cup finals. The Treble was there for the taking and the Victoria Cup was a prestigious trophy to win because finals day took in all the age groups and was staged at The Lamb, the ground of non-league club Tamworth. We faced Edingale Swifts – the team we had pipped to the title by a point – and they were in the mood for revenge. We played the occasion while they focused on the cup, and their powerful striker Neil Clemson put a hat-trick past me as Swifts won 4–1. I was in tears before the final whistle and even the best efforts of my Dad failed to rouse me. Looking back, I think that learning to deal with disappointment at a young age is a good thing. You certainly don’t want to become a serial loser, but it’s important that you come up with a strategy of dusting yourself down and looking forward to the next challenge rather than sulking. It’s character building.

Me and my Gillway team-mates didn’t have to wait long to put the record straight because Edingale Swifts were also our opponents in the Challenge Cup final a few weeks later. Master Clemson turned every single dream I had into a nightmare as I fretted over what was going to happen. But this time, I kept a clean sheet while, at the other end, our own star striker went to work. Steve ‘Freddie’ French was the son of our manager, Peter. But it was a knack for goals rather than nepotism that guaranteed him his place in the team. We were 5–0 winners – and the fact that Freddie had scored every single one of our goals confirmed the popular belief that this boy was going to be the next Steve Fox. Freddie had everything. Power, pace, skill, finishing ability. He was also a good-looking so-and-so who could charm the birds from the trees and was one of the good guys, despite being a bit of a hard nut when certain situations arose.

I looked up to all the lads because they were all older than me, but the occasion when I felt I had won the respect of Freddie French was a defining day of my childhood. Gillway went into the final game of the season, away at third-placed Leicester City Supporters’ Club, needing a win to become champions. We were leading 1–0 and had reached the stage of the game when all of our parents were questioning whether the referee had bought his watch from a cheap stall on Tamworth Market, when the man in black was suddenly pointing to our penalty spot. As Leicester’s tough-looking centre-forward, a bruiser nicknamed Fes, placed the ball on the spot, one of our players asked the referee how long was left and was told this would be the last kick of the game. ‘Come on, Fes,’ one of the parents shouted from the sidelines to the burly number nine at the start of his run-up. ‘Put it away and stop this lot from winning the league.’ Fes didn’t need reminding of his responsibilities. He was glaring at me with a look of total disdain and I had no doubts that he was going to put his foot through the ball like Peter Lorimer, the Leeds United hot-shot. Sure enough, his strike carried plenty of power, but I had read the direction of his shot and plunged low to my right to save. In fact, the ball hit the palm of my hand with such force that it bounced well outside the penalty area – but we were champions. Before I could get up, I was swamped by my delirious team-mates and on our triumphant minibus journey home, I was allowed to bask in the spotlight of adulation again when Freddie French started up a chorus of ‘We’ve got the best keeper in the league’. I rate that save as the best I ever made, simply because of what it meant to my team-mates, older lads who had taken me under their wing and who now respected me. I still treasure the medals from my formative years, but I cherish the memories even more.

I EXCELLED AT EVERYTHING AT SCHOOL – APART FROM THE lessons. Football, cricket, rugby, basketball, you name it, I played it – and it soon became clear that my academic work was never going to match my sporting achievements. When I went out into the big, bad world just as the temperatures were starting to rise in the Silver Jubilee summer of 1977, I didn’t have a single O level or CSE qualification to my name. Professional football was my vocation. The only problem was, there wasn’t a club out there that shared my opinion.

I led something of a Double life when I attended Mercian. When the trial match for the school team had been held in the first few weeks of my first year, I wanted to give myself the best chance of making the team, so I instinctively picked up the No. 1 jersey and went in goal. My time as a keeper didn’t last long, however, because I suffered a shoulder injury that hampered my ability to make saves. It wasn’t serious enough to stop me playing completely, so our teacher, Mr Betts, told me to make up the numbers as a centre-half. It wasn’t a problem for me. Perhaps it’s a sign of the particular strain of madness that all goalkeepers are said to suffer from, because deep down every one of us thinks we can cut it as an outfield player. And anyway, by now I was already splitting my time with the two Gillway teams I was playing for.

Mr Betts duly told me that I would not only be his centre-half, but also his captain, and the following day I was excused from one particularly unintelligible algebra lesson to go around all the classrooms to read out the team and give instructions about what time we would be leaving school for that week’s fixture. If I was going to be allowed to skip twenty minutes of lessons every week to carry out my duties as skipper then that was motivation enough for me to prove Mr Betts right that I could be his Bobby Moore. I didn’t play in goal once for my school – that honour was left to Anthony Wilson, who had the nickname of ‘Gutsy’ because his considerable girth gave opposition strikers so little of the target to aim at. Mr Betts must have been doing something right because when we won the district schools’ league title, it was the first time in years that Mercian had been crowned champions. I also managed to play my way into the Aldridge and Brownhills district schools’ team and was once again asked to marshal the defence from centre-back.

FOOTBALL KEPT ME OUT OF TROUBLE DURING MY ADOLESCENT years. I was already taking the game so seriously that on a Friday or Saturday night, I was usually at home thinking about the next day’s match while some of my mates were walking the streets and inevitably getting caught up in the usual teenage tear-ups. I was obsessed with the game, to the point that I exploited my Dad’s job (and my older cousin Pete Wilson’s love of driving his Triumph Stag) to make flying visits to football grounds up and down the country.

During the school holidays, I would badger my Dad to take me with him in his lorry as he transported goods around the UK. He knew full well what my motive was – but he rarely needed much convincing. And so our journeys often entailed taking regular detours to see places like Stoke City’s long-gone Victoria Ground, Oldham Athletic’s Boundary Park and Darlington’s former stadium at Feethams. It was hardly Old Trafford or the Nou Camp, but I would touch the bricks and mortar of some crumbling monument to the working man’s ballet and say: ‘I’ll be playing in there one day, Dad.’ My Dad would smile and reply: ‘I hope so, son. I really do hope so.’ They were magical days, when dreams were forged. I vividly remember a trip to Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground because I was also able to get a glimpse of the pitch.

When I was fifteen or sixteen, and getting a reputation as a promising player, my cousin Pete would take me, his brother Chris and Gav Mooney for a spin in his car. ‘I’m just treating the lads to a hot dog,’ he’d tell my Auntie Eileen. What he didn’t divulge was that the burger bar he had in mind was in London, and she was too busy running the local working men’s club to notice that we’d been gone for four or five hours. Pete would have us down in the smoke inside ninety minutes, heading for the glamorous homes of Arsenal, Tottenham and West Ham United.

Apart from the odd visit to St Andrew’s, those nocturnal trips were the closest me and my mates got to a top stadium. Our weekly fix of the Football League usually came when we were watching the highlights packages on Saturday night’s Match of the Day or The Big Match on Sunday afternoon. You couldn’t tune into a satellite TV station and find a replay of the weekend’s games, while video recorders were something that we might have seen on Tomorrow’s World.

My love of football was so complete that I even swerved a date with the local sweetheart to concentrate on improving my game. I would have been about fourteen or fifteen – my hormones running riot – when I plucked up the courage to strike up a conversation with a stunner called Shirley Franklin. Every boy on the estate fancied Shirley and when she hinted that maybe we could go out together later that evening, my usual coyness about matters of the heart melted away. The fair was in town and we made a date to meet by the waltzers. I spent the rest of the day preening myself while Mum endeavoured to make sure that my bell-bottomed trousers and favourite shirt were pressed beyond even her usual perfect standards. Hair washed, a splash of my Dad’s Blue Stratos, velvet bomber jacket zipped up, and I was walking down the street like a proper boy about town. I got about twenty yards when a thought suddenly struck me. Was I really going to miss training with Gillway to hold hands with a girl on the big dipper? Five minutes later, I was changed and ready for real business. Kit on, boots in hand, I was bounding my way towards training while Shirley was most likely stood by the shooting range picking out the teddy bear she wanted me to win for her.

I never did get to take Shirley Franklin to the fair – or anywhere else for that matter – and when it came to girls I was a bit of a late starter. But it wasn’t long before I had to grow up and act like a man. I was sat in the kitchen at home cleaning my boots one Sunday morning, preparing myself for Gillway’s game later that afternoon, when there was a knock on the back door. It was my cousin Pete, a goalkeeper himself who had set up a small coaching academy in Tamworth. Pete was to later have a coaching career with Leicester City and Mansfield Town – and would die at a tragically early age. Pete was with a man I didn’t recognise, but he quickly introduced himself as Bob Evans. Bob was the manager of the Mercian pub team that played in the Tamworth Sunday League – and he desperately needed a keeper. ‘Get your kit and we’ll have you back in time to play for Gillway,’ said Pete. There was no way that I was going to turn down a game of football, but my Dad wasn’t so sure. Open-age football can be a brutal environment. There are lads who can play and want to play. There are others who can’t play and don’t want the lads who can play to do their stuff. And a few can play, but prefer ninety minutes of putting the boot in just to work up a thirst for a lunchtime session in the tap room.

My Dad wasn’t worried about the football side of it. He knew that, even at fourteen, I could look after myself. Mercian also had two big, experienced bruisers playing in central defence called Andy Sneddon and Bobby Johnson, who were as hard as coffin nails. They would be my minders. What Dad didn’t want was his lad being corrupted by the influence of men who grafted hard all week on building sites and in warehouses and used their down time to fit in as many vices as possible. Once he had been assured that my services were only required for this one game and that I would be well looked after both on and off the pitch, he grabbed his car keys and we were all off out of the door. I was about to be pitched into a man’s world.

Mercian were playing The Dolphin, a top side who had a powerhouse centre-forward called Chris Bradshaw. Chris won the league’s top-goalscorer award with the regularity of a metronome. And when he wasn’t scoring goals he was knocking seven shades out of the defenders who were marking him. A couple of minutes in, I was staring into the whites of his eyes – Chris was clean through and tearing towards me with about as much sympathy in his heart as a lion shows an antelope. My Dad reckoned that some people watching on the touchline put their hands over their eyes, but my focus was on the feet of this hairy-arsed striker who was threatening my goal. This was only Chris Bradshaw. It wasn’t as if it was Trevor Francis or Bob Hatton. It wasn’t even Freddie French. I stood tall, waiting for Chris to blink first – and he did. It was only a slightly heavy touch, but it was enough. I was off my line and down at his feet in a flash, whipping the ball off his toes and sending the big man flying over my shoulder in the process.

Mercian had a new keeper and my weekends now consisted of four matches: two on Saturday for school and Gillway and another Double header the following day for Gillway and Mercian. That kind of schedule would be frowned upon these days, when kids with just a shred of talent are hoovered up by club academies and then have their game-time limited because of the dangers of burn-out. I would agree that goalkeepers are as susceptible to both physical and mental fatigue as outfield players. But what is also glaringly obvious is that the modern-day keeper is more prone to injury and it’s my belief that this is because they over-train rather than over-play. A few years ago, when I was attending a goalkeepers’ coaching course at Lilleshall, two lists were drawn up. On one side were names like Shilton, Clemence, Southall, Woods, Seaman: old-school keepers, if you like. On the other list was Carson, Robinson, Kirkland: players who had been associated with academies or even the National School of Excellence. These lads had suffered throughout their careers with injuries. The conclusion we came to was that goalkeepers train far too much and don’t play enough games. You are far more likely to get injured during a high-intensity coaching session when you are throwing yourself around nonstop than during the natural course of a game when you won’t be expected to deal with 200 shots and 100 crosses. Every time a goalkeeper makes a full-length save, their body takes a huge impact when they hit the ground. There is even more strain on the muscles, ligaments and joints when they strive to get quickly back to their feet. I was having too much fun learning my trade to even think about being tired.

The Tamworth Sunday League became a tough proving ground for me – and I loved every minute of it. Mercian were promoted as champions at the end of my first season and the following year we beat favourites Glascote Rangers in the cup final. I was named as the club’s player of the year for a couple of seasons in succession – which took my confidence up another notch because once again I felt I had earned the respect of players who were older and wiser than me.

At the age of fifteen, my Dad told me it was time to get serious about the direction I wanted my football to take me. I was my school team’s centre-half, but I switched to the left wing on a Saturday morning. Then it was in goal for a game on Saturday afternoon and another two on Sunday. Dad made it clear that if I wanted to become a professional, then I had a decision to make. I had to concentrate on one position and give it my best shot. My Dad was the only person I ever listened to because he was always brutally honest with me. He told me that I lacked the natural speed to play anywhere but between the sticks at the highest level. It was a sage piece of advice – and I took it. We did have one run-in – when my Dad took over as manager of one of my Gillway teams. In fact, it was just about the only argument I ever had with him when I knew I was right. One of Dad’s duties was to pick the player of the season and I was expecting to get the trophy at the club’s annual awards ceremony. I couldn’t believe it when it was handed to one of my team-mates. Even the winner had a look of shock on his face when he went up to collect that most prized of trophies for junior footballers. When my Dad saw how my desperate disappointment was beginning to fester into outright anger, he took me to one side. ‘Look, son, you should have won it,’ he said. ‘But I’m the manager and I’m also your Dad. It isn’t about being fair, it’s about being seen to be fair.’ His words didn’t quell my temper. I felt cheated. But many years later when I moved into coaching at the highest level, I realised that my father had given me my first lesson in the precarious business of football management.

At the very last Mercian end-of-season awards ceremony I attended, the manager stood up to present a trophy to a player who he felt was too good to be with the club the following season. This lad, he said, was going on to much bigger and better things and would go on to play in the Football League. I was too busy knocking back the illicit half-pint of shandy that my Dad had bought me to take much notice of what Bob Evans was banging on about. But then he called me up to collect the award. Bob’s prophesy, I am delighted to say, eventually came to pass. But the road into professional football is a precarious one and there were many were times when I wondered if I would end up picking up a bit of beer money playing on a Saturday and becoming just another one of those ‘could-have-made-it’ lads who populate every Sunday league dressing room.

IN MY FINAL YEAR AT SECONDARY SCHOOL I FINALLY ATTRACTED interest from a Football League club and was training with Wolverhampton Wanderers after being approached by chief scout Joe Gardiner. There was a strong family affiliation to Wolves. My grandad, Bill Hitchcock, had been a season-ticket holder at Molineux and his son, also called Bill, inherited his allegiance to the iconic old-gold and black shirt. I reported to Molineux every Tuesday and, even forty years later, whenever I drive down Waterloo Road, I can still visualise the famous old stadium before its impressive redevelopment and its familiar pungent smell of carbolic soap. My Dad would drive me there, usually after getting up at the crack of dawn to put in a twelve-hour shift in his lorry. This was before the introduction of safety procedures like tachometers. I would leg it home from school and then recharge my batteries by having a power nap during the thirty-mile journey.

Two seasoned old pros called Roy Pritchard and Roy Little put us through our paces in the gymnasium under the stand while Mums, Dads and other family members watched from the balcony. There was no specialist training for goalkeepers. We did exactly the same exercises and drills as the outfield players and, when it came to the small-sided games that inevitably brought the sessions to a close, we would have to throw ourselves around on the bone-jarringly unforgiving wooden parquet floor. Padded mats were for wimps. I became friendly with a lad called Tony Blakemore, a Wolves fan from nearby Penn, who was by far the most talented player in our group. We all wanted Tony in our team for the winner-stays-on five-a-side games because that was a guarantee that you would spend most of the night playing. We also played full-scale matches against other Midlands clubs at Wolves’ training ground at Castlecroft.

With my sixteenth birthday approaching at the end of the season, I felt I’d done enough to earn myself an apprenticeship. Unfortunately, like thousands of others, I had read it all wrong. It was a bitter blow. It is no exaggeration to say that I genuinely thought my world had ended when Wolves told me there would be no offer. But my heartbreak was replaced by utter astonishment when Mr Blakemore called my Dad to inform him that Tony was choking on the same bile of disappointment. He was a boy we all thought was destined to be a First Division star.

In my later role as a scout and working in youth development, I have lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent urging parents not to lose their grip on reality when their son has been snapped up by an academy. It isn’t just the kids who struggle to keep their feet on the ground when they are presented with a pristine club tracksuit and training kit. Often you also see a light go on in the head of Mum and Dad. ‘My Johnny has made it,’ they’re thinking. ‘He’s a professional footballer, he’s going to be a millionaire.’ Being identified as a protégé with potential is just the start of a journey that, unfortunately, usually ends in heartbreak. Now I would never tell a mother or father that it’s wrong for their son to dream. Visualising success is, after all, a huge psychological tool that can help you realise an ambition. But there also has to be a sense of perspective. Someone has to be there to pick up the pieces if things go wrong. Too often, you see the disappointment in a young man’s eyes when he is told he isn’t considered good enough to make the grade and you know you have just witnessed a seminal moment in his life. Often the boy will look to his parents for support – only to see that they need comforting more than he does.

That said, I often wonder whether youngsters these days have the same level of dedication of my peers. I would walk through wind and rain just for a kick-about on a cabbage patch. In my early days as a professional, I even stole my Dad’s car and drove to Birmingham City’s training ground without a full licence or insurance. I know now it was utter madness, but nothing was going to stop me from making it. Of course, it was a very different era because parents didn’t have to fret about their kids walking the streets after dark or catching a late bus home. Academy scholars now get transported from door to door in liveried club minibuses for their own safety. But I do think that one of the big weaknesses of the modern system is that young players are over-protected from the character-building aspects of life that I had to grasp very early on.

I feel it is the duty of every youth coach to prepare the parents for every eventuality – and that includes the very real possibility that their son isn’t going to make it. So many talented players have been lost to the game because they haven’t been able to cope with that sense of loss.