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MY DAY AS THE DELL BOY Leaving home was not such a great trauma for me. I was still extremely wet behind the ears and hardly equipped for a big wide world when I left Newcastle to join Southampon as a young apprentice. At fifteen years old and only just out of school, I may have been short of academic and social skills, but I could not wait to launch myself into the only job I ever wanted. Football was all I lived for and now I had my first foot on the ladder and the opportunity was there for me to make a living from the game. Nothing was going to stand in the way of my ambition to become a professional footballer. I was accompanied on the long journey by four other north-eastern lads who had also been selected by Southampton for the Youth Traning Scheme. I missed my mum and dad and the rest of my family and friends but I kept in regular touch by telephone and went back for the summer holidays and occasional weekends. I was determinded to enjoy every minute of this new life. I worked hard and played hard, and learnt to fend myself. I had loads of fun, made many new friends and could not have asked for a better environment to grow up in, both as a footballer and as a person. It was a period of my life which helped me mature and develop an independent spirit. Those early days far from home were to benefit me immensely in years to come. The wages I was earning did not stretch very far and they were the least of the proiorites on my shopping list. In my first year I got 22.50 pound a week and in my second my weekly wage went up to 35 pound. The club paid for my digs and I was also lucky enough to get a nice little bonus-southampton provided each of their trainees with 20 pound a month for a bus pass but because I lived within easy walking distance of the ground I was able to pocket mine. Even so, when you are a lively teenager, that sort of income never seems to go very far and I was usually skint well before pay-day. I am not sure where all the money went but the other lads and I would spend much of our spare time playing snooker or going to the pictures. Every Thursday we had to go to college for business studies. I was not the most willing or able student but I went and did my best, simply because I did not want to mess up with my chances of making the right progress with the football club. The comments from my tutors were more or less a repeat of my school reports: 'Lacks concentration...could do better...easily led.' It was a familiar story but by now everybody had got the message. I was not a great student in the academic sense but no one could doubt my willingness and determination to work at my football. The real pleasure for me of being a young trainee was the time I spent at the football club. It was hard work but I loved every minute of it. We were in the charge of Dave Merrington, who was to become Southampton's first-team manager long after I left. He was a fellow Geordie and we always seemed to have a special rapport, but that didn't mean I received any favours. There was plenty of hard graft and I had to pull my weight, the same as everyone else, or face the consequences. Once when Dave overheard me having an argument with another lad about it not being my turn to do a particular job, he was down on me like a ton of bricks. 'I'll show you whose turn it is, bonny lad,' he shouted. 'Be at the ground at seven o'clock in the morning, ready to start work.' I was there on the dot to sweap out the dressing-room corridors. You didn't argue with Dave. You just got on with your work. I was in trouble with him again when I absent-mindedly left a tap running in the boot room which was on the first floor, immediately over the medical room. The water gushed through the floorboards and flooded the place. I was hauled before Dave. The punishment was to run fifty laps around the pitch in the freezing snow-not just me but all the trainees. Was I popular? Dave's argument was that we were involved in the team game and we had to share our punishment as well as our phaise. He stood there counting the laps off one by one to make sure we didn't cheat. Our working day usually began at 8:45 a.m. and we rarely finished before 5:15 p.m. As well as our football training under Dave's watchful eye, we had a variety of chores to do, like cleaning the boots of the whole playing staff, sweeping out the dressing-room, disinfecting the medical room and loding the dirty kit for the laundry. I don't know whether it is my imagination but I reckon the kids at football clubs nowadays have it much easier. In my first season playing for the Saints in the South East Countries League Division Two on Saturday mornings, I scored fifty-five goals. Southampton's first-team manager at that time was chris Nicholl and he was good enough to take a very keen interest in my progress. He would often bring me back in the afternoons for extra training-not as a punishment but to work on areas of my game that he thought could be improved. I have been blessed with a very big thighs, which may have been out of proportion to the rest of my body at that age, but were a vital attribute to me because they helped me to generate extra shooting and running power. I have never had to work too much on the development of my thigh muscles, apart from when I've been recovering from injury and there has been wastage. Maybe they were to make up for my lack of intellectual ability! My ex-colleague and so-called friend Tim Flowers has described me like this: 'When he first came to Southampton, he had a man's legs stuck on a kid's body. He looked strange but he wasn't half powerful.' Eventually those huge thigh muscles were to cause me quite a few problems. They are a great asset to me as a striker because I can hit the ball very hard, particularly with my right foot. They also give me the strength to accelerate over short distances and the leverage to launch myself at headers. |