I used to be given a fiver for scoring the winner!
He is Newcastle’s £10m striker but Dwight Gayle reveals...
‘Mum washed Beckham’s signature off my shirt!’
DWIGHT GAYLE is reminded that exactly five years ago he slipped and missed a penalty against Blyth Spartans. He was playing for sixth-tier Bishop’s Stortford in front of 297 supporters.
‘I remember that, I was fuming. I fell over as I hit it. We scored off the rebound but still, I wasn’t very happy,’ says the 26-year-old, making no attempt to mask the lingering regret of a chance missed.
‘But five years? It’s crazy how much has changed. If you had told me then I’d be here now, I wouldn’t have believed you.’
Gayle is standing on the terrace outside the manager’s office at Newcastle’s training ground. He wears the fabled No 9 on his chest. On Saturdays, in front of 52,000, he wears it on his back.
He is the Championship’s top goalscorer and player of the month for October. He is a £10million footballer. His manager is Rafa Benitez (below). Blyth is just 15 miles north but it might as well be a million miles away. Gayle’s story, like fellow non-League graduate Jamie Vardy, might one day be worthy of a Hollywood script. The ending, though, is yet to be written.
He was 20 and playing for Stansted in the Essex Senior League when, in his own words, he thought a football career had ‘long gone’. He was working in the City. Except he wasn’t a millionaire broker.
‘I was a carpenter doing office refurbs and door frames,’ says Gayle, who was living with his mum Debbie, three sisters and two brothers in Chingford. ‘I’d get up at 5am and get the train to London. I’d work for eight hours a day with my dad.
‘He wasn’t too happy when I kept on moaning to begin with, but by the end I was actually quite good.
‘I studied carpentry and passed all my qualifications. If it wasn’t for football then I’d still be doing that. I honestly really enjoyed it.’ Gayle smiles as he realises: ‘Actually, technically I still am a carpenter.’
Once he’d clocked off for the day, Gayle would use his turn of foot to beat the crowds heading for Liverpool Street Station. ‘On Tuesdays I’d rush back for training or matches,’ he says. His dad, Devon, was also a striker for Bishop’s Stortford. ‘I’d then be waiting for the manager, Terry Spillane, to pick me up in his black cab. I wasn’t playing for money. The only time I got a couple of quid was from an old man who used to watch with his dog — our only fan. If you scored the winner he’d give you a fiver.
‘I played on a Sunday morning as well. We’d have to get changed in the car with the heaters on but it was just a game with my mates who had played together for years.
‘I didn’t even think I’d go higher than that, I couldn’t get a game at Stansted for the first year. Teams a couple of levels above would watch me and not be interested. They’d say, “He’s too small”.’
Gayle, released by Arsenal aged 12 amid those same concerns, did not like the ‘skinny little kid’ tag. And so he joined a gym. Tool bench by day, bench press by night.
‘After that it just took off. I was playing on the right wing but they tried me up front and I scored. Then I scored again, and again. It felt easy,’ says Gayle.
In fact, he scored 42 times in his final season at ninth-tier Stansted in 2011. There is some hazy footage of Gayle collecting the league’s top-goalscorer trophy. In the crowd, next to the old man and his dog, was a scout from Dagenham & Redbridge. ‘Dagenham offered me a two-year opportunity really. It wasn’t a pro deal, just a chance to impress. I was sent out on loan straight away,’ adds Gayle, who subsequently scored 29 times for Bishop’s Stortford in the Conference North. ‘I got a professional contract on the back of that and it wasn’t until I started scoring in League Two that I actually realised, “I’m a professional footballer”. ‘I’d done a sports diploma and three years studying carpentry, it made me appreciate things. But I honestly think it helped not going down the academy route. I had to work harder.’ Just 18 games and seven goals later, in January, he was off to Peterborough United for £500,000. ‘Going from League Two to the Championship was the biggest shock, all of a sudden playing in front of 20,000,’ he says. Fast forward another six months and Premier League Crystal Palace had made an offer of £6m. ‘Wow. It was incredible. When they told me the deal was on I couldn’t believe it.’ He scored 25 times over three seasons at Selhurst Park Park. ‘Every ‘Everything happened so quickly, from Stansted to the Premier League in two years. Sometimes even now I have to pinch myself. But you can’t get too caught up and think that’s the end of your journey. You have to keep working hard and keep pushing, otherwise you’ll end up back where you came from.’
It was, however, during a trip back home that Gayle realised just how far he had come.
He was a wide-eyed boy when David Beckham — a former pupil and player at the same school and club as Gayle — returned as England captain to meet the local kids.
But now it was Gayle stood in front of a classroom of children at Chingford School. ‘It was amazing when he (Beckham) called in,’ remembers the Londoner, who now lives in Northumberland with his Scottish girlfriend, Stephanie. ‘I remember him signing my shirt, but I was fuming the next week because my mum washed it and his signature came off. I was so upset. He played for the same junior teams as me — Ridgeway and Brimsdown Rovers — and went to the same school, there were shirts and pictures of him everywhere. I idolised him growing up.
‘So it was nice for me to do the same and go back, although I was a bit nervous talking in front of the kids.
‘I just told them not to give up, in all aspects of life. Keep believing. No one is going to give it to you easy, you have to earn it yourself.’
For a man of relatively few words, Gayle chooses them well. When asked why he dropped out of the Premier League and into the Championship with relegated Newcastle in the summer, he simply replies: ‘I still feel like a Premier League player here. This is a Premier League football club.’
Gayle, of course, is right. Newcastle are three points clear at the top of the Championship. He has scored 11 times and is Benitez’s first-choice frontman. So what does the next chapter hold? Vardy, he is reminded, plays for England.
‘That is an ambition of mine,’ he says. ‘I look at him and it makes you realise what is achievable. But for now we want to be back in the Premier League, where this club belongs.
‘With this manager, anything is possible. He’s such a good man-manager. Everyone is right behind him, and that’s never the case at most clubs.
‘This feels like something special. All of my family have been up to see me now and they love it. For my family to see 50,000 Geordies cheering their son and their brother, it’s amazing for them. It makes them so proud.’
It all feels a long way from missed penalties against Blyth Spartans.