Donkey Derby

Most pros are thoroughbreds

Next time you label a professional or highlevel footballer as terrible, awful, or shocking, just have another think about what you are saying.

I went to a training session with a team in 2010, and subsequent reflection on this and where it placed me in relation to the rest of the footballing world, made this point hit home very hard. Let me explain:

The training session was with Charnock Richard FC in Lancashire, and I went along with a friend of similar ability. This club have a first team, a reserve team, and an academy team, so as new players, and 18-year-old ones at that, we were put in the academy training group.

I was so off the pace it was untrue. In the past I had played for various teams, in standard youth leagues and at school, and always thought I was alright at football. I never thought I was outstanding by any means, but always thought I could pull my weight in a game. So when training with the third string of a club whose first team are even now, in 2014, in the eleventh tier of the English Football League pyramid, I didn’t think it would be such a struggle.

How wrong I was. As opposed to previous training sessions I had attended with standard youth teams, where the ratio of fitness-drills-practice games was a bit more equal, this was heavily fitness biased. In 2010 I considered myself to be relatively physically fit, but I was one of the last to finish every shuttle run and every set of obligatory sit-ups or press-ups in between.

Come the drills I was so tired that my passes were spraying in all sorts of wayward directions, and by the practice match, which took up a small section at the end of the session, I was literally chasing shadows as balls were

pinged in neat triangles around me. When I did get a touch of the ball at that stage of the evening it was invariably an awful one. The players there seemed so conversant with the ‘two touches only’ code for training matches that it was no wonder their play was so effective, ruthlessly making a mockery of the team I was placed on.

When I got home, and thought about all of this some more, it really opened my eyes. Ten tiers of football below the Premier League is where the Charnock Richard first team now sit, meaning that there would be some further margin in ability between them and the third string academy team I was training with. That I was so much off their pace says it all in terms of just how good you have to be to make it as a professional, and reveals how much sacrifice must go into attaining both that, and playing in high level semi-professional or amateur leagues.

So when I have sat at Premier League or Championship games and heard the likes of Jason Roberts and Danny Murphy not only branded with an angry showcase of derogatory terms, but even booed by our own fans, it has made me wince.

Obviously football is fiercely competitive and completely results-based, but what some people would consider to be the ‘dead wood’ of their team could absolutely embarrass most of us, such is the relative nature of the game. It has so many levels.

The point I am making is that it is so easy to just sit there and dismiss a player as being shocking, or to lament your team who are playing on TV while you sit in your boxers drinking a Carlsberg, with a bowl of nuts resting on your festive belly. But when you add some perspective, in this case provoked by a personal experience, your viewpoint can change.You can then realise where you would sit relatively in comparison to these athletes, and that they are outstanding to a level many of us could not even dream to reach. In Clarke Carlisle’s autobiography,

You Don’t Know Me, But… , he makes a similar point. Two football fans he got chatting to on a train branded Robbie Savage as ‘crap’. Carlisle says, “I find it ludicrous that a guy on a train can give a summary judgement on the talents of a man who had a 20-year career in football. During that career, he amassed 537 league appearances, most of them in the Premier League, he won the League Cup with Leicester City, helped in several promotions and won 39 international caps, but yet he was instantly dismissed.”

Carlisle goes on to bemoan “a complete lack of appreciation from most fans of what it takes to become a professional footballer, and what you have to give up to reach that goal.” He goes on to say that “when you have achieved it, it then takes more effort to be a successful one, and even more again to be an international”.

These quotes chime so well with what I surmised having been outclassed in that training session in 2010. Maybe all of this could serve as food for thought for other football fans, and remind them that the player they berate as being dreadful is actually unbelievably good, even if they do seem sub-standard in the context of their surroundings.

When I wrote the first draft of this piece, I actually branded my own performance at the training session as awful. But then I realised I was doing exactly what I was criticising! The point is I was only bad in relative terms, and if a load of blokes with two-left feet who hadn’t played football in 20 years had turned up and leered at me for an hour, I wouldn’t have taken kindly to it.

I see it as a culture of cynical back-seat-driving, a world of would-be Sir Alex Fergusons who seem to know it all.Yet these people can often rely on the perspective of televised football with camera angles which are completely different to what the players are seeing, along with hindsight and replays. It all fits into the wider world, where a general expectation seems to be to always want better or more. A friend who takes his Dad to Ewood Park for home games recounts a memorable match where his old man was still moaning despite Rovers being ahead by a five goal margin.

I know the quality of a football player is relative to the level they are at, and I am sure many people will take this as assumed when they make such off-the-cuff comments, but look how offended Clarke Carlisle was when his peer was dismissed without a second thought. “But he’s an absolute donkey!”

Is he?