OLD HEAD BULMAN HAPPY TO THINK ON HIS FEET
FOR someone who thinks he is not very good at football, Dannie Bulman has had a very long career. The 41-year-old played 103 minutes in Crawley’s 6-5 FA Cup victory at Torquay last Sunday, and still can’t get enough of the game.
He claims to have no special routine to keep him going at such an advanced age, although nowadays the fast food has been ditched in favour of more nutritious, freshly cooked grub.
‘I was eating turkey twizzlers – all the rubbish that’s banned now. Anything quick and easy. Now it’s fresh meals every night,’ says Bulman.
So, new diet aside, what is the secret to his footballing longevity?
‘I love training, I love playing football. It keeps me young being around young people,’ he explains.
This is the first season in which Bulman has been picking and choosing sessions but before that he would train flat out every day.
‘I was never one to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs as I would get bored. I’d rather be out there playing,’ says the midfielder, who once branded himself as ‘below mediocre’. Even now Bulman admits his survival against younger players is reliant on his knowhow.
‘I am not good at dribbling so it’s one or two touches and give it to the better players,’ he says. ‘I can’t do anything else. It’s about knowing what you are good at.
‘It’s about reading the game and knowing where the ball is going to go because you are not going to get there as quickly at my age.’
It is an approach that has kept him in work while others often drift out of the game not long after turning 30.
Bulman’s age attracts plenty of abuse, particularly at former clubs, but he does not care about that, or the digs he receives from his team-mates on the training ground.
‘They tease but I will be on the winning team in the five-a-side so I get the last laugh,’ he says. The highlight of his long career was winning promotion with Oxford at Wembley to re-join the Football League in 2010.
He also won a League Two play-off with Wimbledon in 2016. ‘But I had a drugs test straight after so I couldn’t really enjoy the celebration,’ he recalls.
‘All my family were in the VIP suite and I was trying to pee into a cup as a man watched while my team-mates were getting drunk.’ In a career spanning more than two decades he has played under a lot of managers and cites Chris Wilder, now at Sheffield United, as the best.
‘I was with him at Oxford. The details and man management is spot on,’ he says. ‘He allowed the boys to have a drink when they needed to and runs the balls off them when they need to.’
Now in his third spell with Crawley, the Broadfield Stadium legend describes life under Steve Evans, Town’s boss from 2007 to 2012, as a rollercoaster.
‘It was the good, the bad and the ugly. He could tear you down Saturday and be your best mate on the Monday. It was always entertaining,’ says Bulman who recalls the lads buying sweets to enjoy in their rooms in Portugal. Evans got wind of it and ordered a youthteam coach to get a cut. Bulman recalls: ‘One player sent back a bag of Maltesers with all the chocolate gone. He lost his mind – but found it funny.’
And when Crawley got drawn against Manchester United in the 2011 FA Cup, Bulman laughs at the memory of Evans being starstruck in the company of fellow Scot Sir Alex Ferguson.
‘He brought a fancy bottle of wine and was trying to get a selfie outside the ground with him, leaning inside his car. Alex probably didn’t know he was,’ laughs Bulman.
Speaking of his own relationship with the Sussex club, who visit Harrogate tomorrow, Bulman says: ‘They just accepted me straight away.
‘In my first spell I came from Stevenage where I wasn’t playing. As soon as I put a shirt on and ran out onto the pitch the crowd really responded to how I played. They got me back smiling and I have never stopped smiling playing for them.’
He has paid those fans back. In his second spell the club won promotion into the league in 2011 and they went up again the following year.
‘To get a double promotion with any team is quite special,’ says Bulman. ‘The friends I had in that squad were some of the best I had in my career.’
The veteran took on a player-coach role in the summer in the knowledge he cannot play forever. But with John Yems’ side having made a bright start to the season – Town are eighth in the table – Bulman hopes he still has time to help them back into League One.
‘Realistically, it’s probably my last season but you never know,’ he says.
‘Hopefully we can take advantage of the lack of fans away from home and try and get our away form a bit better and keep the push going,’ he says.
‘It is the best job in the world. You go in, have a laugh with your mates and get paid for it. It can’t be that bad.’