Charting Gary Cahill's incredible impact at Bolton Wanderers

Being little old Bolton, no thought was given to where we might do the post-match interviews – and our attempts to decipher what Owen Coyle had to say whilst squeezed into a narrow, noisy corridor, six deep, were futile. It was probably something about the Barclays Premier League, anyhow.

After hearing Gary Cahill was the player being put for the local press, we were determined not to fall into the same trap. The ever-resourceful Jack Dearden spotted a tiny room, just off the press box, and so we corralled the England defender through the low door and suddenly found ourselves in what was, effectively, a cupboard.

Not many Premier League players would allow themselves to be quizzed by journalists in such surroundings, particularly when they were 6ft 3ins tall and stooping the whole way through, but this wasn’t any ordinary lad.

If Ian Evatt has used 66 players in his two-and-a-bit years at Wanderers, then I must have easily cleared 300 different interviewees, from verbose veterans to academy graduates who could hardly string a sentence together (Josh Vela, by the way, will be playing against Bolton this weekend for Fleetwood).

And if I reordered them all in terms of quality and friendliness, Gary Cahill would be challenging for the top spot.

Whether it was in the Wembley Mixed Zone after an England game – man, I miss them – or the middle of a sun-baked training pitch in Athens, Gaz was, and is, a class act. And it blows my mind that he can be old enough to announce his retirement.

It occurred to me the other day that the first interview I had alone with Cahill had been during a time where his price tag – a reported £5million – was under some scrutiny among sections of the Wanderers fans.

It wasn’t long after his straight red card against Northampton Town in the League Cup, a night in which he had bounced off Adebayo Akinfenwa more than once before bringing down a future Wanderers loanee in Giles Coke.

Anticipating the line of questioning, he sat down, pointed at my tape and said: “Before you say owt, I know I was s*** the other night!”

The rest of the interview went swimmingly.

Cahill was a willing volunteer when it came to the community activities that Wanderers players were asked to do during the week. As the local reporter, it would often be the best chance I’d have to grab five minutes with a player without the company of the nationals – but those appearances often put me in the firing line too.

I’ve done French lessons with David N’Gog, played hockey with Adam Bogdan, table tennis with Ricardo Gardner, got soaking wet stood outside a bus with Gretar Steinsson, but the interview I grabbed with Gaz Cahill and Stu Holden in the middle of Farnworth will forever live in my memory.

Now both lads had been in the national spotlight leading up to our meeting. Stu had broken his leg – or rather Nigel De Jong had broken his leg – in a game for the US against the Netherlands and put his chances of playing at the World Cup in 2010 in jeopardy.

Stu was his classy self. He didn’t bury De Jong at the time, even though his opinions have got thornier since he had the FOX TV microphone in his hand and said he would be ready to travel to South Africa.

Gaz had been even more unfortunate. A blood clot, which had been diagnosed two hours before a game against Fulham, had needed emergency surgery and the removal of an entire rib just a few weeks beforehand.

Side note: Cahill got back into the training ground at Euxton after his operation to find it had been crammed with butcher’s offcuts, just in case you were wondering about the high-brow humour that goes on at a football club.

By the time I spoke to him in March 2010, he was still recovering, had not yet made his first team return, and had been told by the medics that one bad knock during a game could have sent the clot hurtling towards his lungs and killed him. Cheery stuff.

Regardless, he volunteered to help open a youth bar for local kids and agreed to have a quick chat with me upstairs. The interview had run on a bit, so we had to scurry downstairs so he could be announced on stage. The announcer, god bless him, might not have been a football fan, as he welcomed the two internationals to the microphone as “Stu Holden and Gary Earl Grey”. I can only assume someone has terrible eyes, or terrible handwriting.

I cracked up laughing. Gaz shot a quizzical look at the Bolton press team but took it in his stride. A few years later, after his move to Chelsea, he came to track me and the local journos down at Stamford Bridge – then in possession of a Champions League and FA Cup winner’s medal, by the way – only to be greeted by the words: “Gary Earl Grey, how are you doing!”

At the paper, we seemed to have spent years championing Cahill for an England cap. On a few occasions he had been called into the standby squad, to no avail, then when he actually did make the squad, against Kazakhstan, he didn’t play.

Finally, about a year later on September 3, 2010, he replaced Michael Dawson in a 4-0 win at Wembley against Bulgaria. And I took genuine pride in being there to see it.

One thing I remain embarrassed about, however, was getting my stats wrong when he scored his first England goal in Bulgaria a year later.

I was watching on TV when my phone lit up, and Bolton chairman Phil Gartside asked: “Quickly, what was the last Bolton player to score in a competitive game for England?”

“Michael Ricketts,” I replied, not thinking twice.

Five minutes later another number flashed up that I didn’t recognise. It was commentator, Alistair Mann, presumably having spoken to Phil.

“Just checking, Marc, but wasn’t the last Bolton player to score in a competitive fixture Ray Parry against Northern Ireland in 1959?”

I won’t repeat what I said. I was continually in Phil’s bad books back then, anyway, so one more mark against my name, pardon the pun, wouldn’t matter.

Even in his last weeks as a Bolton player after a prolonged spell of transfer speculation that had him signing for Manchester City, Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester United, Cahill was still volunteering for community duty. My last interview with him in club capacity was at St James’s High School, where he was dishing out achievement awards.

The roll call of pupils seemed to last forever – but he shook every hand, wished every winner well, and even had time to speak with me afterwards as we walked back to the car park.

The following week, if memory serves, Wanderers played at Everton. Cahill scored in his last-ever performance to help them win the game 2-1, but it was better remembered for the bizarre Tim Howard clearance that bounced over Adam Bogdan’s head. Life at Bolton, as Gaz found, was never dull.

Whether he was wearing Chelsea blue, England white or the stripes of Palace or Bournemouth in the years afterwards, I have always felt some reflected pride in the role Wanderers had in getting Gaz to that level.

Cahill deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Jaaskelainen, Davies, Nolan, Holden, Anelka, Jay Jay and Co, players who played at the top level, at the peak of their power, in a Wanderers shirt.

Whatever he does now, and I hope he stays in the game, he deserves to be a success. For all those glittering prizes he won, though, he’ll always be Gary Earl Grey to me!