Latest Articles
The Final Day Connections Quiz - The Questions
And so, the Premier League is done for another year. Celebrate/console yourselves with a quiz about the connections between the teams playing this weekend...
The Final Day Connections Quiz - The Answers
How did you get on?
All Articles
This is a preview of The Secret Footballer's weekly column. The full version will appear on his website - The Secret Footballer.com - on Saturday...
There's a club if you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you, so you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to die.
Perhaps I was played out of position or perhaps football had simply moved on and I had failed to adapt. Whatever the truth (and a huge amount has been written on it) I will always maintain that I was played out of position.
Signing for a new club is a nerve-racking experience at the best of times. I knew I was a good player but the change was simply too much to take all in one go, not least for my wife and, perhaps inevitably, I ended up parting ways with the club on less than amicable terms while my wife and I attempted to make sense of the wreckage that we had once called our marriage.
Notwithstanding one or two individuals (that shall remain nameless) holding a metaphorical gun to my head, the move was my fault. I gambled the happiness and the wellbeing of the people I love the most for the possibility of a few more people singing my name for a few more years and for a few more quid.
You live and learn.
Aside from all the things that I could have done to prevent the move, I do wish that I'd been more vocal as to why things were not going to plan. But when you are at a new club and you don't really know the motives of the people around you, the whole thing can become a lonely and depressing saga.
It wouldn't have taken a lot, a carefully worded sentence to the right journalist would at least have provided a footballing reason for my slow start. Something like; 'I am very committed to the club and although I'm happy to be part of the team, I look forward to playing in the position that I'm used to.'
You shut your mouth, how can you say I go about things the wrong way?
***
This week on www.thesecretfootballer.com ... Our man inside the game talks candidly about how being played out of position not only affects performance on the pitch, it can ruin lives off it.
You can follow The Secret Footballer on Twitter here, or buy his book here, which we reviewed here
Post Comment
