5 Specialisation
Lynn: Michael and Graeme played a lot. From 4pm they played for an hour after school. Or until 9pm in the summer. Then tea. Boys club 6-8.30pm. I’d say most nights 3 hours of football. Then Saturday morning they’d have a game, then Saturday afternoon they’d muck about. Every available opportunity. They had boys club coaching and training once a week. Then school games. Then district games. Then county games. In the summer they’d be playing other sports for the school teams. And they’d get the tennis rackets around Wimbledon. ‘Where’s my tennis racket?’ they’d say. It was always some sort of sporting activity.
When they were little all the other friends had lovely gardens. And mine was just a bare patch. You knew where they were. And I always supported all their friends coming round. Things like that. And I think that helps. And it reflects on all that they do. All their friends have ended up doing well in sports.
Vince: Graeme did different sports too. In the relay he used to run the 2nd last leg. Tremendous runner. They couldn’t catch him. They both represented the county. And a brilliant rugby player. He played at Wembley before the England rugby league final. England v Australia.
It was the North against the South. And it was, ‘Well are you gonna choose rugby or football? Try and do something different from Michael!’ because he just followed on. But he really wanted to do the football. So I said, fine, that’s what you want to do.
Lynn: They did basketball too. It was becoming a joke. Everything they went in, they won it all. They could turn their hand to anything to be fair. For that one sports year all the way through middle school. They did a presentation because they’d never ever come across a group of lads like them.
Vince: Michael was playing other sports too. Cricket, and rugby. Fast on the wing. He could shift on the wing. Athletics. Hurdles. County champion for the hurdles. And he’d never done hurdles before! He was a year young. And he beat the county champion in the final! And the next year he came runner up. But that was when he really started doing the football. And that’s when you’ve got to start deciding. If you’re going to do hurdles you’ve got to do specialist training. That was at 13 or 14. The first time Michael did the hurdles was at 12.
Lynn: But he was good at athletics had lots of different trophies for it. If you’re good at lots of different things you come to an age where you have to specialise. You can’t carry on. That was at 14 I’d say when he signed schoolboy forms. He’d made the decision and concentrated on his football for 2 years.
Michael: Most of us from the boys club were at Newcastle or Middlesbrough, training with them, so it wasn’t anything really out of the ordinary. If you played for the boys club you tended to be one of the better players so tended to be at one of the professional clubs as well.
So yeah I played for the school, played for Wallsend Town, played for the boys club team, played quite a lot of football but it wasn’t really serious, you know wasn’t like it is now where you play in the academies, where it’s really structured. It was structured but not to that extent.
At 10 we moved school. A lot of the lads who were at the boys club went to that school as well. So we had a better school team, not just at football, we’d do every sport. I think if I hadn’t probably gone to that school I wouldn’t have been as far ahead as I was.
Graeme: That middle school we moved to really had a lot of good sports, and sports people.
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