As a boy, if I wasn’t playing sport with friends, I was practising in the back garden. I found that my dad’s vegetable patch was particularly useful. The runner bean rods provided an almost perfect defensive wall and, at full height, the curly kale could almost be a tennis net.
To say I enjoyed my sport would be a slight understatement. I still haven’t quite come to terms with Chris Waddle’s penalty miss in the 1990 World Cup, and I nearly crashed my car into a Harry Ramsden’s restaurant when Jonny Wilkinson kicked ‘for World Cup glory’ in Sydney in 2003.
Grandstand
Growing up, I used to love Saturdays. Most of the day was built around Grandstand — the BBC’s sports programme that started at lunchtime and went on until the football scores were in at 5.00 pm. I had a deep love for the programme — mainly based on the powers of presenter Des Lynam. At the age of 11, I wrote Mr. Lynam a letter. It was along the lines of ‘How can I get your job?’