I want more’
Xavi and Raul. Seven hundred supporters, double the average crowd at Bishop’s Stortford, turned out to watch him mark his achievement by scoring twice in a 3-2 win over Brightlingsea Regent.
“It was a very proud moment, without a doubt,” he says. “There are some legends in that list, now my name is among them. A thousand games: to think some people retire after 200. And yeah, I do remember most of them. Particularly the ones I scored in.”
Not, he admits, that there will be many more. Now he has taken over as manager – combining his duties with running the club’s academy in a nearby school – he finds himself on the pitch less often.
“One of the hardest parts of the job is knowing whether I should play myself,” he says. “I pick myself if I feel I can do a better job. It’s a balance because, for sure, when you are out there, you can’t manage the team, you have to concentrate on your own game.” Though, he admits, even when he concentrates all his efforts on his squad, there are limits to how much he can draw from them.
“You can’t teach goalscoring instinct. You can help people get better at it, but they have to have that mentality within them,” he says. “One thing I’ve learned, you can’t get too frustrated. For these lads, football is not their life, it’s a hobby. I can’t scream and shout. I just have to encourage them.”
And he acknowledges that he would willingly stop playing if his ambition to coach full-time were compromised by his continuing to search for goals.
“I’d retire tomorrow if I was offered a full-time football job. There’s only two options for me ending it. Either my body tells me I can’t do it, or someone says here’s a full-time job in the game. Media, coaching, management: there are a lot of jobs within football that I think I could add value to.”
But in the meantime, today Bishop’s Stortford are away at Haringey Borough and Cureton, the manager, suggests he will be picking a certain record-holder to start the game. “We haven’t scored for a couple of weeks, we need goals,” he says. “So I’ll be starting, yeah.”