Sports reporter Neil Bonnar has always dreamed of being a top footballer -- so he jumped at the chance to train with Wanderers' coaches for a day
BEING an optimist, I could see a lucrative career change in the pipeline when Bolton Wanderers offered me the chance to be a player for the day.
A seven-figure salary, a Ferrari on the driveway of my luxury new pad on Chorley New Road and 25,000 adoring fans worshipping my every move on a Saturday afternoon.
I had heard a lot about how these footballers live, and I wanted my piece of the action.
At 16, I was told by Bury I would never make a footballer. Not because I was too small or slow -- but because I was rubbish.
Well, 24 years have passed -- 10 of them spent honing my talents in the Rochdale Sunday League -- and I finally felt ready to add something to Sam Allardyce's Premiership squad.
I was not too old -- one month younger than Wanderers' 41-year-old second-choice goalkeeper Kevin Poole, for a start. And Allardyce had already said he was looking for three or four new signings before the closure of the transfer window in a fortnight's time.
Maybe that was why he invited media types such as me -- especially me, I bet -- to undergo a day's training under the watchful eyes of his assistant Phil Brown, first-team coach Neil McDonald and his team of highly-qualified staff, including a female Tai Chi expert and a sports psychologist.
To me, it all added up -- Wanderers wanted players, they invited me to train, I wanted to be a Premiership footballer. My resignation letter was being formulated in my mind and my imagination was running wild. All I needed to do was impress with my fitness, strength, power, ability and knowledge of "shape".
I was to learn that the latter had nothing to do with the size of one's belly -- although there were some medicine-ball-under-the-shirt physiques among my two dozen fellow press, radio and television colleagues who spent the day as crimson-faced with exhaustion as I was. Instead, "shape" has more to do with the players' positioning during a match -- and I was soon given one big lesson on that score.
After 15 minutes of eye-opening coaching from McDonald, I realised that I had been standing in the wrong place throughout every minute of my 10 average years as a centre-half in pub football. If only I had been given this advice 15 years ago.
Being more of a regular in tap rooms than dressing rooms these days, I knew that the word among pub sages was that footballers just spend a couple of hours running around a field and then go home.
How wrong they were. There was enough science going on at Wanderers' impressive Euxton training ground in Chorley to give NASA a run for its money.
Heart rate monitors, fitness graphs, computers linked up to weight training machines, the list goes on -- and Wanderers swear by every innovation. The team's results back up those beliefs.
And there is no hiding place from those computers, even during a match. The players' every move is monitored and analysed with a computerised system made by a company called Prozone, which delivers up to 18,000 statistics per game.
So, I did the runs, the weights, the Tai Chi, defensive coaching, had a couple of games watched by Phil Brown, sat through the fascinating Prozone demonstration and was uplifted by the motivational talk by psychologist Mike Forde.
But my world came crashing down when Brown broke it to us that, while there was some talent in our ranks, there was no one who could cut it in the Premiership.
Just as I had when I was 16, I realised I had all the enthusiasm and determination in the world to be a footballer. I was just lacking one vital ingredient -- ability.
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