WILD AT HEART, ENERGY TO BURN
VILL Powell never imagined that the teenage tearaway shuttling him to training would one day win the Premier League golden boot.
Less still that he would play in a World Cup for England, score in the Champions League or clinch a fairytale title with Leicester City.
“Jamie was… wild,” laughs the current Brighouse manager, who played alongside Vardy at Stocksbridge Park Steels.
“That reputation, the stories about his younger days. They’re 100 percent true. I couldn’t tell you a fraction of what went on.
“I remember when we won the play-offs, maybe 2009. We’d beaten Belper to go up from Step 4 to Step 3. Our end of season do was two nights in Blackpool.
“First night, it got to 3am, 4am. Everybody was ready for beds, taxis, kebabs. Vards was the only one still wanting to carry on. ‘Where are we going? What’s open?’.
“Next morning, everyone’s hanging. Half eight, he’d eaten his breakfast and was ready to get on it again. His energy levels, his wildness – he was like a Duracell Bunny. An animal. Nobody could keep up with him.”
Vardy’s ‘wildness’, as Powell puts it, is legendary. It is perhaps partly why, as a youngster, he was dumped by Sheffield Wednesday despite evident talent. Why he was tagged by police after a nightclub scuffle during his days at Stocksbridge.
And why he was roundly ignored by the full-time game until the age of 24, making ends meet with a back-breaking job in a shin-splint factory.
Yet that same frenzied, feral tenacity would prove the driving force behind a rise to stardom unparalleled in the modern game.
“Jamie plays football like he lives his life,” explains Jamie Milligan, who played with Vardy at Fleetwood in 2011-12. “Full-tilt. Relentless. Never taking a backwards step.
“The way he eats, the way he trains, the way he has to conduct himself – that’s all improved as he’s gone up the levels. But, deep down, I don’t think his personality has changed one bit.
“He’s still the same cannonball who smashed into Fleetwood. You watch him on the pitch and he’s still got that hunger and aggression, that non-stop desire. It’s what got him where he is today – and why he’s still going strong at 33.”
Powell, a veteran of the NonLeague game, recognised those qualities from the moment Vardy emerged from Steels’ youth system in 2007.
“In terms of skill and technique, he was nothing special,” says the 40-year-old, who also came through the ranks at Hillsborough.
“The things that stood out were his fitness, his pace and his work-rate. I played Non
League and professionally for about 15 years and I’ve never met anyone on that level. It was ridiculous.
“He’d go out after work on a Friday with his mates, stay up all night. Yet he’d turn up on the first day of pre-season and decimate everyone. He’d be out there at the front, not even breaking sweat. In games, that’s what got him the majority of his chances.”
Though he bagged 55 goals for the Steelmen (including a three-minute hat-trick against Mossley), Vardy was not, in those days, the clinical marksman who needed just 211 games to amass 103 Premier League goals.
Instinctive
“His finishing used to be instinctive, foot-through-theball, hit the target type stuff,” recalls Powell. “Nothing like as cute and cultured as it is today. He probably needed ten chances to score two goals.
“But missing didn’t faze him, and he’d keep getting those chances because defenders couldn’t cope. With his pace. His ferocity.
“He wasn’t the biggest, but his aggression was off the charts. It didn’t matter how big and ugly the centre-half was, he’d never back down. If you wanted a scrap, he’d give you one – on or off the pitch.”
In 2011, after a spectacular year at Halifax that yielded 28 goals, a promotion from the Northern Premier League and a £15,000 move to Fleetwood Town, Vardy illustrated his fearless streak on his very first day at Highbury.
“He’d signed on Friday morning and been thrown straight into the team for a game on Friday night,” says Steve McNulty, who skippered Micky Mellon’s Cod Army that season.
“We were all thinking ‘Who is this chav?’. The gaffer said to me ‘Listen Macca, it’s his first time in the Conference, a new team, he’ll be a bit nervous. Just have a little word’.
“I sat next to him, started to give him a bit of reassurance. Vards just said ‘Listen mate, I’m not worried. And you don’t have to f***ing worry about me’.”
And he didn’t. Vardy terrorised York City that evening, and a week later scored his first goals in a 3-2 victory at Kettering. Within ten months, Fleetwood were a Football League side and Vardy had scored 34 times.
“When he came in, he was a bit unknown to us,” says Milligan. “But you could see straight away that he had that raw pace, that bit of nastiness. And he worked his b ****** s of every single day.
“He’d run the channels, chase defenders down, all the things you still see now. He was great for us but he must have been horrible to play against. “And I still don’t think he gets enough credit for his technicality. He’s not a No.10 who drops deep and links play but you don’t score the goals he did – left foot, right foot, two or three from the halfway line – without sound technique.”
Nor does any player score such volumes without attracting attention. By the end of the season, all but one Championship club had lodged an offer.
Offers
One of them, local rivals Blackpool, had even attempted to steal a march in the aftermath of an FA Cup victory over Fleetwood in January 2012.
“We were out for my birthday the night after the game,” recalls Milligan. “All of a sudden, my phone goes. It was the Blackpool chief exec, offering £500,000 for Vardy.
“I was half cut, a bit confused. I had to go and find Andy Pilley, our owner, and tell him what had been said. He said ‘Tell him no chance’.”
Blackpool eventually upped their offer to £750,000 but it was Leicester and Nigel Pearson – a former Wednesday skipper who had scouted Vardy since his Stocksbridge days – who eventually triumphed with a £1m bid.
It would, of course, prove arguably the finest piece of business in the club’s history. After a 12-month wobble, during which Vardy begged for a return to Fleetwood, the striker found his feet in the Championship and never looked back.
“Someone who works that hard day in, day out – and improves all the time – deserves everything they get,” adds Milligan.
“Jamie’s great strength is that he doesn’t care about anybody, or anything. His mindset on the pitch is ‘I’m going to destroy you today’ and that’s it.
“There aren’t many players like that anymore, who’ve grown up on estates, got tough, been knocked back, rejected and fought their way up. As Jamie says himself, he probably wouldn’t be where he is today if he’d come through an academy.
“He’s a terrific role model, but a hard act to follow as well. Because there aren’t many Vardys about – and I don’t know if there’ll be another.”