Football, football and a moral

22^nd September 2019

Football, football and a moral

This double story starts with a quote from someone who may or may not have existed and who, if he did exist, almost certainly didn’t say this anyway, but here goes…..

"Where would any of us be, if someone hadn't taken a chance on us?" 

These words are attributed to King Arthur, or at least as scripted by BBC in their series  "Merlin"

….a pretty tenuous connection, you might think, to two recent talks given by Rotary members. The two speakers, by coincidence, each had prepared a talk around their experience with “the game”

Mike Clutton spoke of being virtually conscripted by the bank he worked for at the time into being a money steward every Saturday at the grounds of Crystal Palace. The 2/6d (12.5p) reward wasn’t great but helped Mike to provide those little extras for his young family 

From this unsought set of circumstances blossomed a second, parallel, career. As Mike’s banking career progressed so did the “Saturday Job”, which lasted all of the ensuing 33 years, ending only when Mike left London to retire to Wales. In that time the 2/6d had morphed into Mike being a senior steward and a weekly  £65 – i.e. more than 500 times as much as the original 2/6d

Alan Guinn spoke of being “talent-spotted” at the age of 9 by a teacher and, like Mike, virtually conscripted – in this case, into playing football successively for the class, the school and then for the school league at Wembley. Alan clearly showed talent and went on to play professionally for each of Manchester City Reserves, Oldham Athletic and Rossendale United, before eventually developing his professional career as an engineer at Manchester Airport

The common theme of both speakers was that they owed everything to people now long since dead who spotted something, and then developed, pushed, even, their young charge on to do things they themselves didn’t know were possible. 

In a different way, this is the story of us all. Did we ever stop to thank them when we still could?

"Where would any of us be, if someone hadn't taken a chance on us?"