EXCLUSIVE
KEVIN ELLISON’S Premier League career lasted six minutes – as a substitute at Old Trafford – and the framed shirt is hanging on his mum’s wall.
From that walk-on part for Leicester City at the Theatre of Dreams, it’s been downhill all the way to the bottom of the pile at Morecambe.
And he wouldn’t have missed the journey for all the shrimps in Morecambe Bay.
At 40, Ellison is not quite the oldest player in English football’s top four divisions. Dannie Bulman (right) at Crawley is 23 days older, and when their clubs meet next month the air will be thick with gags about Zimmer frames and bingo.
They even bumped into each other on holiday in Magaluf, and the chirp followed a largely ageist agenda.
“When I play against Dannie now, I tell him he’s too old to wear brightly-coloured boots,” said Ellison, ahead of today’s long-haul trip from the League Two seabed to Colchester.
That’s probably a bit rich coming from a bloke who gets asked when he is going to grow up by his mam after taking his top off to celebrate his last goal, a late equaliser against Northampton.
“At least it shows how much I still love the game – and how I have no regrets about the way my career has turned out.”
Ellison does not dine out on his six minutes of fame at the top table, but he deserves to make a banquet out of 21 seasons in the professional ranks yielding 718 appearances and 143 goals. But his memory was jogged, on a night out with a few pals earlier this season, when the pub TV happened to show highlights from the 2000-01 season.
Suddenly, Ellison twigged that it was the 2-0 defeat at Manchester United where he made his senior debut, after making the leap from nonleague Altrincham to the top flight, as former England Under-21 boss Peter Taylor’s £50,000 punt.
“There I was, on the touchline, getting ready to come on for Dean Sturridge,” said Ellison.
“I could honestly still remember it like it was yesterday, but it gave me goosebumps again.
“That was the first time I had actually seen footage of me as a Premier League player, 18 years down the line.
“I grew up wanting to be a professional footballer, and maybe I wasn’t good enough to play at the highest level, but I can always say I’ve done it.
“The lads tease me that it was only six minutes, but some of them weren’t even born when it happened.
“Actually, it was more like 10 minutes, because there were four minutes of Fergie time added on.
“To be honest, I probably didn’t take my chance at Leicester as much as I could have done or should have done.
“I was a Liverpool fan as a kid and went to their centre of excellence. I’ll never forget the letter I got to say they were getting rid of me at 15.
“It broke my heart to get a kick in the teeth like that, but it didn’t do me any harm to get a taste of the ‘real’ world before I found another route back into football.
“When I left school, I worked on a building site with my uncle, knocking cement mixes in the wet and cold. I left to help out another uncle, delivering beds and furniture.
“So I’m quite lucky – I know that when football stops, and I have to get on with the rest of my life in the outside world, I won’t be scared to get stuck in.
“But I hope that’s not for a few years yet – Morecambe is a great place to keep you grounded and remind you that football isn’t all million-pound pay cheques every month.
“Our manager, Jim Bentley, is the longest-serving gaffer in the League and in eight years he’s never paid a penny in transfer fees for a player. That’s an incredible achievement in itself.”
The league table, with Morecambe propping up all four divisions, reads like a threatening letter, but Ellison has been here before, and 18 months ago he was at the vanguard of a great escape on the last day of term at Coventry.
“At 40, I don’t want a carnival to celebrate staying up,” he said.
In comedian Eric Morecambe’s home town, all that Kevin Ellison asks is that the grand old game continues to bring him sunshine.