I was in the footballing wilderness. Siberia, that’s what they say in the game. Where a player is said to be so far out of favour or so far in dispute with his club that his next first team game is more likely to be in the North Pole than in front of the North Bank. I was in the Siberia for coaches, my very own purgatory.
My 28 years of football were a distant memory. 18 as a player and 10 as a coach, my career could have been described as ‘journeyman’, but not in my eyes. A career that had taken me up and down the leagues in both England and Scotland, I had been a footballer. For me, that was all that mattered. Hanging on for grim death to stay in the game. Full time positions, part time positions, playing, coaching and gripping on to it all. That’s just the way it was when you were chasing the dream. My dream. Every coaching position you ever take on is your ticket to the jackpot. Fighting to prove yourself against players, boards of directors and fans so fickle, they’d have you on a pedestal one minute and a guillotine the next. And then it stopped.
For the last 18 months, the game had been a distant memory. My last coaching position had been in Carlisle with a club called Celtic Nation. A ridiculously flawed project that was intended to take a team in the 9th tier of the English football pyramid into the halcyon echelons of the Football League. It couldn’t (and didn’t) work. These dream projects never do. Millionaire sugar daddy owners, convinced by a local community club that theirs is the one to buck the trend. An unusual love for squandering hard earned cash. It ended like most of the others, on the football scrapheap.
I had prepared for this moment three years previously when I took up my latest part time position at Clyde. I had started to think about a life without football. Sure, I could still go and watch my son Lewis playing, and from there we’d go to a match on a Saturday. Furnishing my neverending lust for watching the game, without the pressures of being one of the guys responsible for the result. But it’s not the same. Having been sacked from four previous coaching positions, I needed to reinvent myself and find a steady job outside of football, to provide for my family without the pressures and constant upheaval of sackings, unemployment and moving from club to club. But I couldn’t quite let go altogether.
I trained to become a taxi driver, but this was still all part of the cunning plan to stay in the game. I’d have a steady income, but crucially if I was to be offered another, precarious part time coaching position, I could easily dovetail my job with its supposed flexibility and give myself another go on the swings. Even more bizarrely, I still harboured sneaking ambitions to get back into a full time club and my perverse logic was telling me, that at least this time, having gone through the ignominies of a potential court case and nine months waiting for a contract to be settled and unemployment, this time I’d have my job in the taxi to bounce straight back into the day after I had been sacked!
Football is an addiction and I have long since learned that I will never, ever be able to get enough of it. Sacrificing a steady job, knowing that the chances of that jackpot are slimmer than a turkey’s chances of making it to New Year’s Eve, are all part of feeding the habit.
And yet I had become strangely contented. Settled as one of many of Glasgow’s ex-footballer taxi drivers away from the pressures and skullduggery you find in football so often. I started writing and, on the back of a popular blog, I was even approached to write a book. I managed to complete over six of the most traumatic months of my life. The inspiration for everything I did, my father, died suddenly. Taxi for Farrell is dedicated to him. It’s his fault that I have such an incredible passion for the game that it kept me going back for more. He gave me the inspiration I needed to complete the book, chronicling my journey through one or two highs and some unbelievable lows during that 28 year career. And all of it, every single minute of it, I’d do again.
Drivers, punters and ex players alike always ask me, “Don’t you miss it?”
The word ‘miss’ doesn’t do the feeling of emptiness justice. Even though my job was providing me with just enough time to mask some of the feeling, it’s not enough to completely fill the void. The day to day involvement, the organisation, the training, the relief of a win (because it’s rarely joy) the desolation of a defeat, the pressure and the laughs are all impossible to replicate in day to day life.
The worst times were Saturday afternoons. Hauling battle scarred legs into the cab at 3pm to start a long night shift, just as the games were kicking off, listening to the goals flying in as the broadcasters were hopping from ground to ground for updates. As my legs and back stiffened and tightened after years of football abuse, I’d think about what managers in the dugout were going through, listen to the crowd and feel the red blaes crunching under my feet as I visualised the coaches walking down the track, head bowed after another defeat And then I’d scan the horizon for my next hire.
In my breaks, I’d work on the next chapter of Taxi For Farrell, recalling the unglamorous side of the game, perversely hoping that the phone, which had long since stopped ringing, would vibrate again and allow me a way back in. And then, it did.
It was a simple message. “Do you fancy coming back in as my assistant?”
Alex Rae had been appointed manager of St Mirren two weeks previously and having worked with him at Dundee and Notts County, and having been a lifelong friend, it was natural that everyone would assume I would be joining him. We had discussed it, as we always did, during our daily phone calls (more often than not four or five of them) and with the loose ends of my full time job to tie up, it would only take a couple of weeks for things to sort themselves out and reignite our long standing partnership. Only this time, things were different.
I had a steady, full time job driving the taxi, a successful blog and an even more successful book. I had made the first steps into a media career, doing match analysis for the BBC and numerous radio appearances. There were rumours of newspaper columns and magazine features, so it was fair to say, I was sitting very comfortably on my couch.
Why would I want to get back into an industry where the biggest likelihood is that you end up back on that scrapheap? Why would I want to risk a settled personal life and get back in among the agents, coaches and guys I had played alongside, who’d turn you over as quick as look at you when you made your way to the dugout?
Why would I subject myself to the pressures of a defeat, when it feels like your chest is about to explode and your head is full of so many different thoughts and formations, sleep is only an option, not a formality?
I’ll tell you why. Because I love being involved in football. That void I spoke about earlier is impossible to fill without football. I enjoy writing about it, but I embrace being in it, ten times more. The unmistakeable smell of all sorts of rubs and magic potions emanating from the physio room on a matchday. The training, the coaching, the organisation. The video analysis and the dressing room camaraderie. The building of an unbreakable team spirit that, when you’re having an off day, can carry you to a scrappy one nil win. The unbridled sense of achievement when something you have spent hours preparing and putting into practice on the training ground comes off in a game. Being at matches and watching them again with a purpose, scanning for strengths and weaknesses or potential signing targets. All of it, every drop of blood, every bead of sweat, every shed tear is worth it.
As a coach, you always back yourself to turn a team around and bring them success. The consequences of not being one are always there, hovering above your head like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. But for now, I won’t think about anything other than doing the best I can. Now I’m back in the game.
You can follow David Farrell on Twitter (@davidfarrellfaz)
David’s book ‘Taxi for Farrell’ is out now on Teckle Books and we loved it. We said that it was, “a brick through your kitchen window. It’s refreshing to find a footballer unafraid to have a swing at his contemporaries, but ‘Taxi for Farrell’ is far more than a score settling exercise. It’s an excellent insight into the mentality of a footballer who perhaps lacked technical brilliance, but made up for it with intelligence, guile and gigantic, swinging testicles.”
