Back of the Net!

Thank to the big world wide web of internets, people who would otherwise never have considered picking up a pen or tapping words into a keyboard to form sentences have been handed careers as bloggers.

I am of course talking about athletes, footballers, and in particular those that post regularly on the BBC football website.

I won’t name names but some of their posts are the dullest load of old bobbins dripping in sychophancy and lacking in anything that constitutes an original opinion.

Which at the end of the day is the most basic point of blogging.

So it’s nice to see Gavin “Son of Gordon” Strachan blogging so openly, most recently on his Notts County teammates failing so poorly at Dagenham & Redbridge (losing 6-1).

What is most enlightening about this post however is not his honesty in a bad performance but his relation of the lengths lower league footballers have to go to in order to secure a contract.

There have been one or two sticky patches during my career.

Probably the scariest was just a couple of weeks before the start of the 2003 - 2004 season when I was still without a club having been released by Southend United. Drastic times call for drastic measures. We were a young family living with my wife’s mum and dad (very nice of them I might add), so I needed to get something sorted!

Having managed to get hold of a list with all the managers’ phone numbers, I tried to make contact with as many as I could. In addition to all the managers in League One and Two, I also chanced my arm with those in charge of some of the smaller Championship clubs.

This is a player without an agent representing him, desperate for a contract in order to support his family.

What is most remarkable is that Strachan’s father is sitting 500-odd miles away managing lads on £20k a week while his son is struggling to sign for a club that can realistically pay him that in a month.

This is nothing to do with family loyalty, however - but everything to do with the disparate state of football and the incredible gulf between the English Premier League and the Football League.

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