Hard man cried like a baby

NORTHERN Star skipper Jimmy Dean was reduced to tears by the club’s heartbreaking FA Vase exit.

The hard-man midfielder welled up in the wake of the city club’s extra-time defeat at the hands of Dunston UTS.

“I cried like a baby,” said Dean. “I’m 30 this year, I’ve been playing football for a long time and you don’t get opportunities like this every day.

“I’m as sick as a pig right now and so are the other lads. We’re really down to have lost because we could have won the game.

“We were a bit naïve at times though and that probably ended up costing us, but we feel we did enough to deserve a replay at the very least.

“Don’t get me wrong, it would have been really hard up there, but you never know what might have happened.

“We’re a small club and we don’t have a lot of money. There are clubs in this competition with budgets five times the size of ours so we can be massively proud of what we have done.”

Dean broke the deadlock on Saturday with a stunning first-half goal. He is not exactly renowned for banging in them in from long range, but let fly to great effect on this occasion.

“I had my white boots on so thought why not have a go,” he added. “I just hit it and luckily it flew in.

“It was a great moment to score in a game like that, but I’d have swapped it for still being in the Vase.”

Fellow Star goalscorer Karl Gibbs felt the same way. The prolific frontman nodded Star into a 2-1 advantage early in extra-time, but they couldn’t turn it into a winning position.

Gibbs said: “We’ve been on a great run and done ourselves proud, but to lose like that is horrible.

“I thought we should have beaten Dunston, but we made some silly mistakes and you can’t do that in games like this.”