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My home is Cardiff. More specifically, my home is Trowbridge, on the eastern edge of the city, on a 1960s estate near the Eastern Avenue, the dual carriageway that cuts a swathe through the suburbs on its way out to the M4. I live in Penarth at the moment, on the south side of the city, in an apartment that looks out over the sea. I’m recently divorced. I’m exiled from the house I once lived in with my wife and children in the countryside to the west.
But I’ll always think of Trowbridge as home, the 1960s estate, with its streets named after Welsh towns and areas. Abergele Road, Caernarvon Way, Prestatyn Road, Aberdaron Road, Menai Way.
They’re the names of my childhood, the names of the streets and crescents I used to dash along to get to ABC Park, where I’d play football with my mates.
Along those streets I’d sprint, through the little alleyways where knots of youths used to gather to smoke dope or sniff glue or try to get high from air fresheners. I’d join them in time, watching and shuffling around uneasily, trying to be part of the group.
I suppose some people would think of it as a rough area, a place of unemployment and delinquency. It never seemed that way to me. I had a happy childhood. I grew up a happy kid. Happier there than I ever have been since, happier than when I was a footballer living behind gates and walls and fancy intercom systems with built-in cameras.
When I was a small kid, we lived in Swinton Street, by Splott, close to the docks, closer to the city than Trowbridge was. The railway tracks were at one end of our road and trains trundled past there, heading out of Cardiff Central east towards England and London. At the other end was Splott Park and behind that was the giant spread of Allied Steel and Wire where my old man worked. They closed it down in 2002. It was sold on to a Spanish company. Its great blue bulk still dominates that part of the area, but most of the jobs went.
There was a time in Splott when you could see the flames and the sparks dancing in the night air from the famous old Dowlais ironworks and women worried about putting their washing out on the line because it would get covered in a film of fine red dust. Cardiff used to be an ironworks and steel town but the industry was dying when I was a kid. In 1978, the year before I was born, thousands of jobs were lost when the East Moors Steelworks closed down.
But there was a great sense of community. Originally, people had been transported there from the Valleys to work in the factories and it was still a traditional working class area where it felt like every door was open. If my mum ever shut herself out by mistake, she’d knock next door and the neighbour would send her kid round through our back garden, through our back door and he’d open up for us at the front.
I always felt like we had a decent living from what my mum and dad did. We were happy enough. My mum was a cleaner and my world was all about playing in the warren of streets round our house, Baden Powell School, Splott Park and Splott Baths. My dad, Douglas, worked at Allied Steel and Wire for as long as I can remember even though we moved away from Splott, a few miles further east to Trowbridge, when I was five.
My dad knew his place in the family. My mum was the number one and she ran the house. They were great parents and even though I was a bit of a daydreamer, I was a happy kid. I knew my mum loved me and we were a happy family. A lot of the men in the area would spend all evening, every evening, down the pub but my dad knew that if he went up there, there was a certain time he had to be back and he was back at that time. He abided by that.
My mum and dad still live in Trowbridge. They live in the same house they lived in when I was growing up. In times of trouble or uncertainty, that’s where I’ve always returned. I see now that it was called one of the most deprived areas in south Wales when I was growing up but I never thought of it like that.
We had a bigger house in Trowbridge than we’d had in Splott, the roads weren’t as busy and I began to play an awful lot of football. My dad loved football.
He used to go and watch Cardiff City as much as he could. He had three kids – me and my brothers, Paul and Matthew – so I’m not sure my mum allowed him to go that much but he would come home talking about players like Jimmy Gilligan and Paul Wimbleton, the mainstays of that team that played in the old Fourth Division.
My first game was Cardiff City against Newport County in the 1987-88 season. It was 4-0 to Cardiff. Gilligan got two and Alan Curtis got two. Cardiff got promoted that year and they were great days even though there were rumours practically every week that we were close to going out of business.
I hear people now talk about fans ‘deserving’ something at clubs for the bad times they might have endured. In that era, Cardiff supporters turned up and watched a poor standard of football week in, week out in dilapidated, decaying stadiums.
You could stand where you wanted and I flitted around so much at one game that I realised afterwards I’d watched from all four stands. When it got to five minutes from the end, I’d go and meet up with my dad at a pre-arranged spot so we could go home together.
I’m not sure whether my own love of football followed on from my dad’s. Maybe. Or maybe I was just a naturally competitive kid. My brother, Paul, was two years older than me and I hung out with a lot of his friends. That made me into a better player very quickly. We used to play down the field at the bottom of my road. It was called the ABC Park and we played there constantly.
It was a bit of a higgledy-piggledy park, shoehorned between the rows of houses on the estate. It sloped quite heavily from north to south. I’m not even sure why it was called ABC Park. I think it was because there were some climbing frames there and they had been labelled A, B and C to differentiate them from each other.
There were no goalposts and there were so many kids playing that, most of the time, you couldn’t find a spare patch of grass. They’ve built a BMX track there now. I see articles about it in the Western Mail sometimes. The last one was about the fact that the council had had to put security guards there because gangs of kids were congregating and throwing stones at local houses. There’s graffiti sprayed on the garden fences that back on to it.
I played my first match for my school, Trowbridge Juniors, when I was seven. My dad was surprised when he found out I’d been selected. Most of the kids in the team were a couple of years older than me and I was small for my age, too. I was skinny and under-developed but I was quick and clever and I was always desperate to win. My dad was still dubious about it but Paul told him how good I was, so he came to watch.
We played against Gladstone Primary School from Cathays and I won a penalty when a kid tripped me in the box. Whoever got brought down for the pen usually took the spot-kick. Those were the rules in park football, anyway, so I thought it was mine. But this was serious stuff. They told me there was a regular penalty taker and it was my mate Stuart Solomon. The Gladstone goalkeeper had glasses. I thought we couldn’t miss but those specs were working wonders for him and he saved it. We drew the game and went away feeling very deflated.
I soon got other opportunities to play. When we had our kickabouts down at ABC Park, a scout from Pentwyn Dynamos would turn up sometimes. We were miles away from Pentwyn, on the other side of the Eastern Avenue, so they must have been pretty desperate but they still wouldn’t consider me because I was too small. So my dad told me that if I got enough players together, he would help me start a team.
I went around loads of kids’ houses, knocking on doors. My dad found someone who ran a team called Caer Castell, near Rumney High School, and I had soon found enough kids for us to start an Under-10s side there. Our first game, inevitably, was against Pentwyn Dynamos. We played on Rumney Recreation Ground and won 4-0 and I scored all four. That was the start for me. I played on Saturdays for the school team and on Sundays for Caer Castell and when I was nine or ten, I was selected for the Cardiff and District boys side. I played for Cardiff Schools, too. One cup game over two legs, we played against Deeside Schools and Michael Owen was playing for the opposition.
I became a good player just by playing. By playing constantly and by playing with kids who were both older and better than me. I saw tricks other kids did and I had the ability to absorb what had just happened. I’d try to imitate it myself and then I’d practise what they had done. Then I’d try that trick on another kid.
I still do that now. I never stop learning. I could see a 19-year-old kid do something today and I’d try it tomorrow in training. I think that’s given me an edge sometimes, that ability to innovate. My biggest concern with most young kids now is that they don’t have that edge to want to be better than their mate. You don’t see kids on the parks now, not the way it used to be anyway, and when they’re attached to clubs, I think they’re comfortable in their own zone. Football takes such good care of you now at every age group that some of the hunger’s gone.
I wanted to be the best against everyone. Mainly, when we were kicking about, we used to play something we called FA Cup Doubles or Singles. I’d be distraught if I didn’t win it. If we had an eight v eight game, I had to win that eight v eight. That was when I got the most pure enjoyment out of football, better than any time I’ve been playing as a professional.
There are a lot of kids I haven’t spoken to since then whose names I still know off by heart. I hope they’ve gained some satisfaction from what I have been able to achieve because I certainly appreciated what they gave me. Even some kids who might not have thought they were any good, I learned something from them just by the fact they were enthusiastic enough to come out and play every day. Playing against them every day improved me as a player.
There was one kid I remember in particular. His name was Andrew Evans. He was four or five years older than me and when I was eight or nine years old, I thought he was a kind of football god. We used to play in informal matches on Tesco’s Fields, which was an expanse of pitches a couple of miles from my house, and Evvo played in this brilliant blue Everton strip with white shorts. He had tricks. He could do body swerves, he had everything. Whenever I tried to tackle him, I couldn’t get anywhere near him.
He could have been somebody. He really could. There are kids like him in a lot of communities, kids that have got a raw talent that makes them stand out when they are young. But, like a lot of those players, Evvo just didn’t have the commitment you needed to make it. He was such a good player but he was totally relaxed about it. Too relaxed.
A lot of people tried their hardest with him. One of the coaches used to go round to his house just to get him to matches and now and then Evvo would say he didn’t fancy it. He’d say he was staying in bed. One day, when I was 11 and he was 15 or 16 and still in school, he told me he was going to be a dad. I asked him whether he wanted a boy or a girl but most of all I wondered how the kid was going to grow up and how Evvo was going to provide for it.
It hit me a bit, that. He was still a hero of mine and he was a hero round the area because he was such a good footballer. He went to play men’s football when he was 15 or 16 and he was scoring five or six every game. But he was never going to go anywhere because he didn’t want to. He was never going to push himself through it. Seeing the way he drifted out of the game helped me because I knew what I had to do.
It made me realise that it wasn’t enough just to be supremely gifted. It made me realise, even as a kid growing up on an estate, surrounded by normal kids who just wanted to have a laugh, that I was going to have to live a different kind of life if I was going to have any chance of making it. I was going to have to be separate. There would be loneliness and I realised that, too, but I wanted to be a footballer so badly that it didn’t deter me.
Evvo drifted into doing what most boys drift into. He had the ability to be special but only I know his name now. The only time he has ever been mentioned in the newspapers is when I have mentioned his name in an interview.
I find that sad, really, because people should have known his name, all around the world. He had the talent but he did not have the strength. Every area in every city in Britain has got people like that.