Читать книгу Goals to Gold - Lee Sandford - Страница 26

Shortly before I signed with Stoke, my beautiful daughter Chloe was born. Her mum and I had only been together for a short time and, sadly, the relationship didn’t last. As any parent will tell you, the birth of a child changes your life, irreversibly, forever.

A big part of my focus now had to be on my job security and I knew I had to keep earning my living as a footballer. I had no other qualifications; I wasn’t trained to do anything else. Playing for Stoke City was safe – I knew I would always be welcome and wanted at Stoke. Maybe a part of me had been thinking with my head when I signed with Stoke after all because at this stage in my life, with my responsibilities, it wasn’t so much about playing for England and the glory anymore, it was about having a steady job and providing for my dependents. I doubt I could provide particularly well for a family on the jobs I could get with my CSE in Woodwork, or my O-levels in Pottery and Art!

When you’re 16, you can’t imagine being 21, let alone 31 or 41. When I was at school, I believed all I would ever need to do in life was to keep being good at football. I thought that, as long as I kept fit, stuck to the training regime and did my best out on the pitch, that I would always have a job. However, once I’d been out in the real world for several years, reality hit home. I saw players retire, get injured and get the sack. It occurred to me that you can’t depend on talent alone and that there will always be mitigating factors outside of your control. I realised that if anything ever happened to stop me from playing football, I’d have nothing to fall back on. It scared the hell out of me.

So when the PFA (the Professional Footballers Association, the footballers’ trade union) announced a scheme to give young footballers the opportunity to get a university degree, I jumped at the chance and in the autumn of 1995 I arrived at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Alsager campus with 14 other local footballers and football-related professionals, including coaches. The degree was in Sports Science and Coaching. I didn’t have a clue what to expect. On our first day, the lecturer told us all to go off to the library and choose a book. We could choose anything we wanted but, once we had picked something, we had to bring it back to the room and read a passage out loud to our fellow students.

I was browsing the shelves of the library when I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was one of my old mates from my Portsmouth days who’d signed with Stoke around the same time I had. He looked miserable. He told me he couldn’t hack it – he didn’t have the balls to read something out loud in front of all the other guys. He quit on the spot; he didn’t even come back to the lecture room that day.

For me, this opportunity came at exactly the right time in my life. I was ready to learn again. I was 27 and I’d had an amazing six years at Stoke, playing football and having fun, but I knew my big partying days were behind me. I had to plan for the future and this seemed like a great way to begin.

It was tough going, being back at school after more than ten years! Out of the 15 of us who started, only about half of us graduated. I was glad I stayed the course. Apart from anything else, it taught me that there is nothing to be gained from quitting. Quitting is actually the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s easy to hit a wall and give up, declaring, “I can’t do this.” We will even kid ourselves that we don’t want to do something just as an excuse not to finish it.

All of us who started that degree were out of our comfort zones. We knew the football pitch, not the library stacks, but those of us who stuck it out were well rewarded. It’s one thing in life doing the thing you always believed you were destined to do, but there is nothing like the feeling of being awarded something you were fairly convinced you could never achieve.

There were other new influences in my life around this time. I was in a steady relationship with an older woman who taught me a great deal about life and business. It was probably my first, proper adult relationship and it grounded me. She was a fitness instructor and had opened her own health club right in the middle of the late 1990s fitness boom. She was a successful businesswoman and I learnt business practices and skills from her that I still use today.