The importance of listening
MY lifetime in professional football taught me many things. Perhaps the most emphatic area of learning in this respect was the realisation that if I did not take control of my own career I would always be dependent on others, and especially managers and directors. In professional sport it is highly dangerous to allow others to negotiate the long and winding road of ones career. Having said that, no matter how much talent a professional athlete possesses there is always going to be times when he or she needs the benefit of someone else's talent or experience.

I was lucky for example, that my Dad had played professional football in the League of Ireland during the 1940s. So from the very beginning I was well used to hearing to good advice. This ability to listen I took for granted until I went to England and discovered that not all those engaged in professional footballers were good at taking advice.

I was always astounded at this. There were good experienced people at Gillingham FC when I went there but some players, and especially so if they were from in and around the London area, most times found it extremely difficult to take advice. There were players when I arrived at Gillingham who weren't in the first team and yet had excellent levels of technical ability.

They had come from one or other of the big clubs in London where the competition for places in the 1st team and reserve team would have been very intense essentially because those clubs had the pick of the crop from all around the South of England.

I found out over the coming years as I became more aware of the ways these big clubs were run, that because they had the pick of the very best, many of the big clubs did not really do their job properly and consequently laziness set in and many young players became disillusioned and begrudging in their attitude as they believed they had been overlooked and even cast aside at an early age.

This sense of disillusionment was quite catastrophic to a young man who had been led to believe from a very early stage in his life that he was going to be a top player in English professional football.

It was bad enough when, over a period of time, sometimes a very short period of time, the player found out this dream of his was not going to come to fruition.