SPLATTERED BY EGGS, BUT NOW I’VE CRACKED IT
WHATEVER his first job in football management throws at him, Sam Ricketts will never be scared of the high jump.
And when he asks Wrexham players to run through brick walls for him, Ricketts can truthfully tell them he’s been there and done that – on horseback.
As a schoolboy, he looked like following in the footsteps of his father Derek, a former show jumping world champion, and his uncle John Francome, a seven-times National Hunt champion jockey, into an equestrian vocation.
Everything pointed to a career tackling Burghley rather than Burnley until, at 13, he sailed over the jumps at the Horse of the Year Show qualifiers and told his father: “That’s me done – I want to play football now.”
Ricketts’ dad, who managed Team GB’s Olympic show jumping team, was not altogether surprised.
Although his son grew up around horses, and there were always 20 or so in the yard at home, Ricketts often insisted on putting goalposts in one of the paddocks.
Now he is harnessing the bravery he acquired in the saddle on one of the toughest endurance courses in football with 46 fences – the National League, where Wrexham have been marooned since 2008.
“When you’ve fallen off horses and demolished fences, it makes you fearless,” said the 37-year-old.
“My grandad built one of those puissance walls, made from hollow red wooden bricks, in our paddock and I hated it. I once got my stride pattern all wrong, me and the pony went flying through it and smashed it to smithereens.
“Coming off a horse is character-building – it doesn’t hurt, as long as a big stallion doesn’t land on top of you, and you get back in the saddle. I just looked at the wreckage of the wall and thought, ‘At least I don’t have to jump over that thing any more.’ I probably stopped riding before the fear factor could kick in.”
His change of direction served him well. He played in the top five tiers of English football, winning promotion to the Premier League with Hull in 2008 and collected 52 Wales caps. He would not have swapped that for 1,000 clear rounds at Hickstead.
“In the space of 12 months I went from playing in front of a few hundred people at Leigh RMI for Telford in the Conference to international football with Ryan Giggs just in front of me,” he said.
“When I go through the 92 League clubs now, there aren’t many I haven’t played at. You draw on all those experiences and try to take them into management.
“I remember what it was like starting out at Oxford, when 20 players would turn left to go training with the first team squad, and four of five of us left behind would turn right and train by ourselves – no coach, no supervision, just keepy-uppies and head tennis to keep us occupied.”
Wrexham, like so many relegated from the Football League, have found it harder to make the return journey than their loyal rump of fans would have liked.
But Ricketts has made an impressive start at Wrexham and, on Non-League Day, he takes them to Dagenham and Redbridge, whose owners include former Manchester United keeper Tim Howard and New York Yankees shareholder Peter Freund. He knows it will not GLENN MURRAY reckons he is in “a different universe” as the second-highest scorer in the Premier League after having eggs thrown at him as a non-league substitute.
The 35-year-old Brighton marksman chose Non-League Day to chart his inspirational rise from the bottom to the big time.
Murray told the BBC’s Football Focus: “The lowest point in my non-league career came when I was a teenage substitute for Workington Reds in a game at Blyth Spartans and some kids started throwing eggs at me and the other subs as we were warming up.
“My life now in the Premier League (below), where we get treated ridiculously well as players, feels like I am in a different universe. But I would not be here playing for Brighton at the age of 35 if it was not for those days I spent outside the Football League at the start of my career with Netherhall, Workington, Carlisle (top) and Barrow.
“They did not just act as a springboard for my career, they helped me rediscover my love for a game that I had become so sick of as a teenager that I almost quit for good.”
Murray’s winner at home to West Ham before the international break was his fifth top-flight goal of the season. It lifted him to joint-second in the scoring charts behind Chelsea’s Eden Hazard.
Yet Murray has never forgotten the life lessons that have since helped him to keep his feet on the ground.
He added: “When I left Carlisle for the first time at the age of 16 in 2000 I hated football. I had a really technically-minded coach but I wasn’t really much of a technical player so that was me out of the picture. I went from there to playing for a local side, Netherhall, on Saturday and Workington Reds Under-18s every Sunday, and started smashing goals in right, left and centre.”
Murray was able to get back into the professional game after a trial with Sunderland and returned to Carlisle.
“The manager told me he hadn’t made his mind up about me, and offered me the chance to go to play for Barrow in the National League North and earn some money. I did that and scored 10 goals in 10 games and gave him no option but to give me a contract. A few months later we had won promotion to the Football League – I had made it at last, and the rest is history.”