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MY ME&NTORS INSPIRATIONS
All the way through your career as a professional footballer, you are shaped by the players and managers you work with. Especially when
you’re young, when you’re more malleable and desperate to learn, looking to emulate those
who have already got to the place where you’re fighting to get to. And many of the people who you actually take these lessons from aren’t necessarily the ones whose job it is to teach you.
All the way through my playing career, I always looked to other keepers to try and improve myself, and there’s no better examples to look to than those who you work alongside every day.
During my time at Sunderland between 1992 and 1997, it’s the keepers who were at the club at the time, as well as the man who coached us for a big chunk of that, Jimmy Montgomery, were the ones who had the biggest influence on me.
There might have been more who passed through the doors at Roker Park but there were six in particular who literally shaped not just the player I became, but the person too.
It’ll probably be a surprise to most who I want to mention first but to me, without Sean Musgrave, I definitely would never have gone beyond the youth team at Sunderland. Muzzy was a year older than me and the reason why I only made a handful of appearances in the youth team in my first season. He seemed to be such a naturally gifted keeper, capable of making ridiculous saves and when I looked at him, I was jealous of him having the appearance of someone who was much more carefree than I was.
I’d always been someone who put themselves under a lot of pressure to perform well and sometimes it showed: in my performances and how emotional I’d be during games. But with Muzzy, he just seemed to enjoy every second. That’s how I perceived it from the outside.
We’d known each other for a few years, initially when I was moved up a year for a couple of games for the Sunderland Schools team, around U13s. And if I remember rightly, Muzzy played left back that game too, which I saw as him
having an advantage over me when the back pass rule came in the year I started full time.
It’s funny looking back at that time because of how you perceive things to be. A few years after we’d both left the club, on a night out in South Shields, I had a bit of a drunken heart-to-heart with Muzzy with him telling me he was gutted when I signed because of how good he thought I was, with me telling him I thought I had no chance of getting a pro contract because of how good I thought he was. I genuinely did think that and I still think that given the same chance as I was at Darlington, under a manager like David Hodgson, Muzzy would have gone to have a far better career than I ever did.
At the time we were both at the club, the three senior keepers we worked with were Tim Carter, Tony Norman and Alec Chamberlain, and for two young keepers, we couldn’t have chosen three more supportive senior pros.
I was devastated to hear of Tim’s passing. I was 15 when I began my first pre-season with the
club and Tim was one of the three pros I was assigned to look after, along with Gary Owers and Stephen Brodie. At first, I thought Tim was a bit hard with me. In front of others, he’d always be quite hard with me, taking the piss out of me, and when you’re young it’s easy to take those things personally. Which I did.
But the more I got to know him, the more he’d take me under his wing, if I needed any gloves he’d give me a couple of pairs, and when I started
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