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http://footballeveryday.co.uk/2015/...s-john-burridges-eccentric-journeyman-career/
<< They say that you need an element of madness in your psychology to be a goalkeeper. John Burridge, a hard-as-nails, eccentric football journeyman wasn’t just a quirky goalkeeper (and this before spending five months at The Priory), but throughout his twenty-eight-year career with twenty-nine clubs, he lived an extraordinary lifestyle as well. Burridge’s career story is the stuff of Hemingway or Dickens; in Burridge’s case, he went with John Blake Publishing to publish a fascinating autobiography, “Budgie,” in 2011.
Alongside a compilation of interviews, the book reveals a madcap footballer high on a ninety-minute drug. At forty-six, when he finally retired from football, the withdrawal rocked his world and the ensuing depression forced him to spend months in rehabilitation.
In Plato’s Allegory of the Tunnel, humans are chained in a cave, facing the back wall. All they can see is an occasional shadow, until one breaks free and is astonished to find a world of color and beauty. Upon returning to the cave, this person is met with hostility from the others for his unbelievable tales, as all they’ve ever seen is the greyscale of the cave wall.
Burridge added a rainbow of color to his world of football and claimed the numerous quirks that defined his footballing legacy were simply ahead of his time. For him, his upside-down world made complete sense and he spent his entire career searching for a club that could understand him. Through the twists and turns of his character, he told The Scotsman: “At training, in the gym, winning all the cross-countries, not smoking, hardly drinking, I was Mr. Dedication.”
Speaking in an interview with the Daily Mail, he added: “When you love something as passionately as I do and you can’t do it, people call you nuts. They call you crazy. But basically I am totally in love with football and there’s no other life for me. There’s nothing else I can do. Life. Nothing else.”
Burridge shifted back and forth across this line separating lunacy and genius. In some cases he was proven right – such as wearing gloves, warming up before games and maintaining a healthy diet; at other times he was a nutcase. Yet despite taunting opposition fans, constant fights and wacky warmups, he’ll claim it worked given that he is still the oldest player ever to have featured in the Premier League. Welcome to the world of John Burridge, where the insane is sensible.
Burridge’s path to a professional football career was unorthodox, like most things in his career. His self-described “horrendous” upbringing toughened him; he grew up in the small mining town of Great Clifton near Workington, Cumbria, on the Northwest coast of England. Like most of the men in the town, his father was a miner. When Burridge was a child, his father brought him down in the mines and it was here, many feet below the ground in a northern English town that Burridge realized he had no intention of becoming a miner.
Originally, he didn’t only play football. As a pre-teen and young teenager he specialized in boxing and also played rugby with the local miners. On one occasion, his father smashed right into him (smash emphasized by all caps in his book) without looking back. These games hardened Burridge.
However, “football was always my main passion,” he says – not the least because his father bought him a football every Christmas. For some reason, he was always attracted to the position of goalkeeper. “I don’t know why, but I was attracted to the one position that made you stand out from the crowd. I was a born showman.”
Burridge was built for the job. Having worked on a farm from a young age, he had developed a broad chest at an early age.
Eventually, the scouts started arriving at his doorstep. Yet Burridge admits in his book that he was ashamed of his house. There were no ovens or stoves and all of the cooking was done by fire. Nor were there any indoor toilets. If any of his family needed to use the toilet, they would either have to go out back or use small “piss pots” in their bedrooms. Each morning, Burridge had the responsibility of cleaning these. Sometimes, though, his father would just take a leak right out the window.
“Tony Waddington [manager of Stoke City] drove all the way from Stoke in his big car,” Burridge recalled of the first of these scouts in an interview with the Daily Mail. “Well, it was wash day, and the back yard was covered in p***. My dad used to go out the window. It had accumulated. Waddington had this Prince of Wales suit on. He’s gone a*** over t**, hasn’t he? The stink!
“He came in anyway and offered an apprenticeship, which was £5 a week in those days, no matter the club.
“My dad’s first question was, ”How much?” ‘Five pounds plus accommodation,’ said Waddington. ‘Dad said, “F*** off. Get out me house.”
The burly Englishman eventually settled at his local side and soon broke into the first team. The Daily Mail tell of a story when Burridge offered his father a free ticket to come see him play, only for his father to turn down the offer. Yet during the match a pitch invader threw a pint glass at an opposition player and it happened to be Burridge’s father, who had paid to get in. Burridge at least says that it showed his father’s “compassionate side.”
It was these days living on 38 Concrete Terrace where Burridge became as hard as the address itself. “By the age of twelve I was a man,” he says.
After impressing at Workington, Burridge earned a move to Blackpool in the old First Division. He kept a clean sheet on his debut against Everton and the following Tuesday played Manchester United. Burridge was still only nineteen and before the game he made sure to get some autographs.
Burridge here began to build his collection of fights, brawling with Bob Stokoe after a meeting with Sunderland.
“Mad? I fought with all those managers because I was right. I was revolutionary, me. I was Bosmaning before Jean-Marc Bosman,” he told The Scotsman.
“You definitely have to be different to be a goalie. Not all great guys are normal, you know.” He reaffirmed the idea that all geniuses are mad.
The goalkeeper notched one-hundred-and-thirty-one more appearances for Blackpool in the span of four years, the most time he has spent at any club in his career. He then moved from Aston Villa to Crystal Palace, Queens Park Rangers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Sheffield United, Newcastle United and Hibs all within the space fifteen years.
“If I’d had a good season and got a club like Wolves or Palace or QPR promoted, which I did, making them millions, I’d be first into the manager’s office to ask for top wages or I was off,” he explained in an interview with The Independent. His track record shows this ploy failed more often than not.
Of all of those clubs, he told The Independent that his favorite manager was Terry Venables at Newcastle. “Terry Venables by a million miles and playing for him at Crystal Palace in a great young team with kids like Kenny Sansom,” he said. “Terry taught me more in six months than other managers in six years.”
He told the Daily Mail: “Under Venners, I could be myself. As long as we were winning I could do anything.”
In a radio interview with TalkSport, Burridge said that he also developed a close bond with Andy Grey at Villa and when the pair reunited a few years later at Wolverhampton Wanderers, Grey put up his friend. The night before matches, Grey would keep Burridge on his toes all night by throwing random fruit at him and expecting the goalkeeper to catch it.
Burridge’s warmups only got more spectacular the day of the game. Old footage still exists of him somersaulting and leaping around the pitch on his own. However, he had a method to his madness.
“If a player doesn’t go out until five to three, the crowd hits him and the cold hits him,” he told The Scotsman. “Folk thought I was showing off with all the somersaulting but that goes back to Palace where the head groundsman wouldn’t let me take a ball on to the pitch before games.
“All right, some of it was showing off.”
He certainly did a lot of showboating. At Crystal Palace, where he told the Daily Mail he felt most at home, he says: “I did a somersault when we went 2-0 up [to Ipswich]. The crowd went crazy. When the fourth went in I thought I’d climb the crossbar. I sat on the angle and shouted to the crowd, ”It’s a great game from up here and I’m seeing it for nowt.’”
Yet buried in an insane record of being on the books at twenty-three clubs between 1993 and 1997, history obscures a man who legitimately loved football.
He claims to be the first goalkeeper to use gloves in dry conditions in Britain and maintained a diet based off of African tribesman, as opposed to the stable football diet of fish and chips at the time. “You don’t play until forty-six if you’re not dedicated,” he told The Independent.
“I used to get the piss taken out of me right, left and center but now everyone’s doing those things.”
Most footballers tell themselves that they’ll move on when they’ve started their decline, only to look back at one point and realize that they’ve already slid. This mentality never took to Burridge – he just wanted to play as long as he could. Yet in late 1997, he too hit his own wall. At the time he was a player-manager for Blyth Spartans and did coaching gigs for Newcastle on the side.
“I was on the bench with Kevin Keegan and his staff at a game against Arsenal one day, and I just started crying,” he told The Independent. “Kevin asked what was the matter and I said, ‘I just want to play’.”
Burridge was unsure what to do with his life outside of football. He became reclusive to the point where he considered ending his life altogether. “If I’d had a gun or a cyanide tablet I would have used them,” Burridge the Daily Maiil. ‘That’s how bad I was. I was looking for a way out.”
He opens his autobiography in these moments, when his wife and Keegan had eventually had Burridge put in a rehabilitation center – The Priory. “They say when you go mad, the men in white suits come to take you away. That’s not true. It’s the men in green boiler suits.”
These men took Burridge into a six-month stay at The Priory. There, he managed to realign his focus after hearing other people’s terrible tales in group therapy. Upon release, he left England and took his family to Oman, where he still resides. He stated that he had to get out of England to fully recuperate because of its ties to his career and also the weather. He has been a goalkeeping coach there for years and takes credit for discovering former Wigan and current Reading goalkeeper Ali Al Habsi. Between jobs he has also worked as a television pundit.
Rewind to a 1992 television interview and he said: “At a quarter to five on a Saturday afternoon and I’ve kept me clean sheet, that’s what life is about. Keeping clean sheets.”
In 2011, nineteen years later, through the thick and thins of a journeyman career and the depression that followed, he told the Daily Mail that he still lives for football.>>
<< They say that you need an element of madness in your psychology to be a goalkeeper. John Burridge, a hard-as-nails, eccentric football journeyman wasn’t just a quirky goalkeeper (and this before spending five months at The Priory), but throughout his twenty-eight-year career with twenty-nine clubs, he lived an extraordinary lifestyle as well. Burridge’s career story is the stuff of Hemingway or Dickens; in Burridge’s case, he went with John Blake Publishing to publish a fascinating autobiography, “Budgie,” in 2011.
Alongside a compilation of interviews, the book reveals a madcap footballer high on a ninety-minute drug. At forty-six, when he finally retired from football, the withdrawal rocked his world and the ensuing depression forced him to spend months in rehabilitation.
In Plato’s Allegory of the Tunnel, humans are chained in a cave, facing the back wall. All they can see is an occasional shadow, until one breaks free and is astonished to find a world of color and beauty. Upon returning to the cave, this person is met with hostility from the others for his unbelievable tales, as all they’ve ever seen is the greyscale of the cave wall.
Burridge added a rainbow of color to his world of football and claimed the numerous quirks that defined his footballing legacy were simply ahead of his time. For him, his upside-down world made complete sense and he spent his entire career searching for a club that could understand him. Through the twists and turns of his character, he told The Scotsman: “At training, in the gym, winning all the cross-countries, not smoking, hardly drinking, I was Mr. Dedication.”
Speaking in an interview with the Daily Mail, he added: “When you love something as passionately as I do and you can’t do it, people call you nuts. They call you crazy. But basically I am totally in love with football and there’s no other life for me. There’s nothing else I can do. Life. Nothing else.”
Burridge shifted back and forth across this line separating lunacy and genius. In some cases he was proven right – such as wearing gloves, warming up before games and maintaining a healthy diet; at other times he was a nutcase. Yet despite taunting opposition fans, constant fights and wacky warmups, he’ll claim it worked given that he is still the oldest player ever to have featured in the Premier League. Welcome to the world of John Burridge, where the insane is sensible.
Burridge’s path to a professional football career was unorthodox, like most things in his career. His self-described “horrendous” upbringing toughened him; he grew up in the small mining town of Great Clifton near Workington, Cumbria, on the Northwest coast of England. Like most of the men in the town, his father was a miner. When Burridge was a child, his father brought him down in the mines and it was here, many feet below the ground in a northern English town that Burridge realized he had no intention of becoming a miner.
Originally, he didn’t only play football. As a pre-teen and young teenager he specialized in boxing and also played rugby with the local miners. On one occasion, his father smashed right into him (smash emphasized by all caps in his book) without looking back. These games hardened Burridge.
However, “football was always my main passion,” he says – not the least because his father bought him a football every Christmas. For some reason, he was always attracted to the position of goalkeeper. “I don’t know why, but I was attracted to the one position that made you stand out from the crowd. I was a born showman.”
Burridge was built for the job. Having worked on a farm from a young age, he had developed a broad chest at an early age.
Eventually, the scouts started arriving at his doorstep. Yet Burridge admits in his book that he was ashamed of his house. There were no ovens or stoves and all of the cooking was done by fire. Nor were there any indoor toilets. If any of his family needed to use the toilet, they would either have to go out back or use small “piss pots” in their bedrooms. Each morning, Burridge had the responsibility of cleaning these. Sometimes, though, his father would just take a leak right out the window.
“Tony Waddington [manager of Stoke City] drove all the way from Stoke in his big car,” Burridge recalled of the first of these scouts in an interview with the Daily Mail. “Well, it was wash day, and the back yard was covered in p***. My dad used to go out the window. It had accumulated. Waddington had this Prince of Wales suit on. He’s gone a*** over t**, hasn’t he? The stink!
“He came in anyway and offered an apprenticeship, which was £5 a week in those days, no matter the club.
“My dad’s first question was, ”How much?” ‘Five pounds plus accommodation,’ said Waddington. ‘Dad said, “F*** off. Get out me house.”
The burly Englishman eventually settled at his local side and soon broke into the first team. The Daily Mail tell of a story when Burridge offered his father a free ticket to come see him play, only for his father to turn down the offer. Yet during the match a pitch invader threw a pint glass at an opposition player and it happened to be Burridge’s father, who had paid to get in. Burridge at least says that it showed his father’s “compassionate side.”
It was these days living on 38 Concrete Terrace where Burridge became as hard as the address itself. “By the age of twelve I was a man,” he says.
After impressing at Workington, Burridge earned a move to Blackpool in the old First Division. He kept a clean sheet on his debut against Everton and the following Tuesday played Manchester United. Burridge was still only nineteen and before the game he made sure to get some autographs.
Burridge here began to build his collection of fights, brawling with Bob Stokoe after a meeting with Sunderland.
“Mad? I fought with all those managers because I was right. I was revolutionary, me. I was Bosmaning before Jean-Marc Bosman,” he told The Scotsman.
“You definitely have to be different to be a goalie. Not all great guys are normal, you know.” He reaffirmed the idea that all geniuses are mad.
The goalkeeper notched one-hundred-and-thirty-one more appearances for Blackpool in the span of four years, the most time he has spent at any club in his career. He then moved from Aston Villa to Crystal Palace, Queens Park Rangers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Sheffield United, Newcastle United and Hibs all within the space fifteen years.
“If I’d had a good season and got a club like Wolves or Palace or QPR promoted, which I did, making them millions, I’d be first into the manager’s office to ask for top wages or I was off,” he explained in an interview with The Independent. His track record shows this ploy failed more often than not.
Of all of those clubs, he told The Independent that his favorite manager was Terry Venables at Newcastle. “Terry Venables by a million miles and playing for him at Crystal Palace in a great young team with kids like Kenny Sansom,” he said. “Terry taught me more in six months than other managers in six years.”
He told the Daily Mail: “Under Venners, I could be myself. As long as we were winning I could do anything.”
In a radio interview with TalkSport, Burridge said that he also developed a close bond with Andy Grey at Villa and when the pair reunited a few years later at Wolverhampton Wanderers, Grey put up his friend. The night before matches, Grey would keep Burridge on his toes all night by throwing random fruit at him and expecting the goalkeeper to catch it.
Burridge’s warmups only got more spectacular the day of the game. Old footage still exists of him somersaulting and leaping around the pitch on his own. However, he had a method to his madness.
“If a player doesn’t go out until five to three, the crowd hits him and the cold hits him,” he told The Scotsman. “Folk thought I was showing off with all the somersaulting but that goes back to Palace where the head groundsman wouldn’t let me take a ball on to the pitch before games.
“All right, some of it was showing off.”
He certainly did a lot of showboating. At Crystal Palace, where he told the Daily Mail he felt most at home, he says: “I did a somersault when we went 2-0 up [to Ipswich]. The crowd went crazy. When the fourth went in I thought I’d climb the crossbar. I sat on the angle and shouted to the crowd, ”It’s a great game from up here and I’m seeing it for nowt.’”
Yet buried in an insane record of being on the books at twenty-three clubs between 1993 and 1997, history obscures a man who legitimately loved football.
He claims to be the first goalkeeper to use gloves in dry conditions in Britain and maintained a diet based off of African tribesman, as opposed to the stable football diet of fish and chips at the time. “You don’t play until forty-six if you’re not dedicated,” he told The Independent.
“I used to get the piss taken out of me right, left and center but now everyone’s doing those things.”
Most footballers tell themselves that they’ll move on when they’ve started their decline, only to look back at one point and realize that they’ve already slid. This mentality never took to Burridge – he just wanted to play as long as he could. Yet in late 1997, he too hit his own wall. At the time he was a player-manager for Blyth Spartans and did coaching gigs for Newcastle on the side.
“I was on the bench with Kevin Keegan and his staff at a game against Arsenal one day, and I just started crying,” he told The Independent. “Kevin asked what was the matter and I said, ‘I just want to play’.”
Burridge was unsure what to do with his life outside of football. He became reclusive to the point where he considered ending his life altogether. “If I’d had a gun or a cyanide tablet I would have used them,” Burridge the Daily Maiil. ‘That’s how bad I was. I was looking for a way out.”
He opens his autobiography in these moments, when his wife and Keegan had eventually had Burridge put in a rehabilitation center – The Priory. “They say when you go mad, the men in white suits come to take you away. That’s not true. It’s the men in green boiler suits.”
These men took Burridge into a six-month stay at The Priory. There, he managed to realign his focus after hearing other people’s terrible tales in group therapy. Upon release, he left England and took his family to Oman, where he still resides. He stated that he had to get out of England to fully recuperate because of its ties to his career and also the weather. He has been a goalkeeping coach there for years and takes credit for discovering former Wigan and current Reading goalkeeper Ali Al Habsi. Between jobs he has also worked as a television pundit.
Rewind to a 1992 television interview and he said: “At a quarter to five on a Saturday afternoon and I’ve kept me clean sheet, that’s what life is about. Keeping clean sheets.”
In 2011, nineteen years later, through the thick and thins of a journeyman career and the depression that followed, he told the Daily Mail that he still lives for football.>>
