Читать книгу Taking le Tiss онлайн

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I was still trying to establish myself at that stage, and it wasn’t until the 1989-90 season that I became a regular. That was my first really good season and the one which made me think I had finally arrived. We played Wimbledon early on and I scored twice, one of which was my first penalty for the club. I got behind Terry Phelan down our right and managed to lob in a cross. Alan Shearer jumped for it with their centre-back Eric Young and goalkeeper Hans Segers who punched it clear. Amazingly, the ref gave a penalty for handball. After scoring that spot-kick against Newcastle, ‘Razor’ then missed one and Paul Rideout missed against Villa so Chris Nicholl decided to have a penalty competition in pre-season. I had always felt pretty confident of scoring with a free shot from 12 yards so I lined up with ‘Razor’, Glenn Cockerill, Rod Wallace and a few others whose hearts weren’t really in it. Chris Nicholl saw how serious I was about it and gave me the job.

A few games into that season, the club sold Danny Wallace to Manchester United, a move he memorably described as ‘the icing on the jam of my career’. But it meant that the manager obviously felt that Danny’s brother Rodney and I had developed enough to be able to become regulars in the side. Sadly, the move never worked out that well because Danny was plagued by injuries. At the time it just seemed that he was unlucky with niggles and strains but it turned out that he was in the early stages of Multiple Sclerosis. He has good days and bad days now, but he has done a lot of work to raise money and awareness for the charity. However his move helped me to play more games and I scored 24 goals that season. We played some fantastic stuff. Rod and I were just breaking into the team along with Alan Shearer. Tim Flowers and ‘Razor’ Ruddock were beginning to establish themselves and we still had the experience of Jimmy Case, Glenn Cockerill, Paul Rideout and Kevin Moore. And we also had a young Jason Dodd breaking through.