WE’RE ALL FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES IN FOOTBALL

IT’S STRANGE how often we hear at this time of year that a team at the bottom are ‘fighting for their life’. We rarely, if ever, hear that a team at the top are fighting for their life.

The minimum that a fan should expect of any professional footballer is that he should be fighting for the lives of everybody in his club.

We all know that people’s emotional worlds are made better or worse by the next result.We all know the power of the club to their masses. Our collective role in professional sport is to constantly fight to create a winning environment in which everybody who belongs can share in better, not lesser, life feelings.

Whether a team are top, 12th or bottom, they ought to be fighting for their life. There is no time like the present to become better; no time like now to deliver more. Anything less than ‘more now’ should not be enough for anybody.

Against the odds, my team are currently eighth. We haven’t got the fanbase or the budget to compete with the bigger clubs in our league.We had to change round nearly our entire playing squad this year.

We blooded many lads from lower league football. And we have suffered the freakiest of injury crises. Not too many teams are currently playing without a single fit centre forward!

But the lads have dug in, looked for no excuses, ground out ten unbeaten results in 11 and given themselves an outside chance of creeping into the top seven. All by trying their very hardest to get better and to find answers, not dwell on problems.

At the end of the season, nobody will be able to say that they didn’t fight for their lives.

In this game there are talkers and there are doers. Those that get over the line will have deserved it and I bet they never stopped fighting for their lives.