AROUND THE GROUNDS
EFL • NON-LEAGUE • SCOTLAND
The former Peterborough star has left professional football at 27 to play for eighth-tier Spalding, and tells FFT how he fell out of love with a cruel game
Interview Joe Brewin
INTERVIEW MARCUS MADDISON
You’ll be a Spalding United player for 2021-22. What’s the story there?
I came away from football at Bolton in April thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this any more’. I didn’t want to be part of the game I’d lost all of my love for. The politics just got to me. I enjoyed playing but not the other stuff that comes with it, so I was like, ‘No, I’m done with this’. But then Gaby [Zakuani, his former Peterborough team-mate who is now Spalding’s manager] called me up and explained that I could play part-time. It’s been like a new lease of life for me.
When was the last time that playing football gave you joy?
When I look back at my career, I’ve not been happy for a very long time. I liked the Saturdays and Tuesdays – but I’ve always hated the day-to-day life of a footballer. I hated going to training every day. Even at Peterborough when things were going very well, there were days when I’d get in my car thinking, ‘I might just put this in a ditch, take a photo and then I don’t actually have to go in today’. I used to be ‘ill’ quite a lot, waking up with a headache and not going to training. It was a long time that I wasn’t happy, but the matchdays got me through it. For the past couple of years I’ve been on the bench, living away from home and hardly playing… I didn’t have that getting me through it, so it became a constant ‘I hate this’.