Overview

'Football is a game of lows punctuated by a few highs.' Gordon Strachan Ben Smith, professional footballer. Recognise the name? Of course you don't. That's because most of Smith's seventeen years in the game were spent outside the vaunted, big-money environs of the Premier League, and this unique sporting memoir is all the richer because of it. 1995, and a young man named Ben, with a dream of playing professional football, arrives at the training ground of one of England's biggest clubs to begin his journey. Aged just sixteen, he shares pre-season sessions with the likes of Dennis Bergkamp and Ian Wright at Arsenal. Surely his career can only go one way from here? The next seventeen years duly see him descend from Highbury to obscurity in a career that involves seasons playing for Reading, Yeovil, Weymouth, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Southend, Crawley, Kettering and Sudbury AFC, and features three promotions, one relegation and some very memorable FA Cup games.Smith candidly describes the contract negotiations, the insecurities, the fear and realities of injury, the house moves, the impact on his personal life, the wet Saturday afternoons playing in front of 500 people, and the many team mates, opponents and managers who left an indelible mark on his career. This is the memoir of a quintessential journeyman footballer. Honest, intelligent, brutally unsentimental and often hilarious forget the 'Secret Footballer' and the usual ghosted life stories of pampered Premiership stars, Journeyman offers a real insight into what it is like playing season after season, with no financial safety net, in the unfashionable far reaches of the English game.

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9781849548540

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Reviews

Put down the latest predictable ghost written life story of a pampered Premier League star for this eye opening chronicle. John Richardson, Sunday Express 5/5 The playmaker lifts the lid on lower-league life at Hereford, Crawley and beyond. FourFourTwo

Author Information

Ben Smith is a former professional footballer who was born and brought up in Witham, Essex.During a seventeen-year football career, which initially promised so much but was ultimately anticlimactic, he played (with varying degrees of success) for a wide range of clubs across the lower leagues of the profession. Ben also successfully studied for a degree in management, as well as attaining his UEFA football coaching badges.After retiring from the professional game, Ben went on to work as a secondary school teacher and subsequently began teaching and coaching within football academies. Alongside this new career, Ben played semi-professionally for AFC Sudbury, Thurrock and, very fleetingly, Maldon & Tiptree FC. He now resides in West Sussex.

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