No Thanks – Peter Gain

Rarely do grown men admit to hero-worshipping other grown men. It’s not the done thing, is it? We British men are a stoic lot, we’ll reserve praise to modest acceptance, rather than all-out fawning.

For a period of my life, it’s fair to say I hero-worshipped this man. There was something about the way he played and the things he was capable of that just made me sit up and take note. When he did get the game by the scruff of the neck, nobody could stop him. Nobody.

Why didn’t he play higher? That’s a question that I imagine many will ask. Some point to inconsistency, but to a point our tactics didn’t really help. We played a 5-2-3 formation with Gain as part of the two; he’d be better suited to the left wing berth or playing centrally behind the striker in something like a 5-3-2 or even our own 4-2-3-1.

His foot had more magic in it than one of Harry Potter’s wands. He was a lovely lad too, I remember meeting him in a club one night, me a dribbling mess from the evening’s excess. i was eager to shake his hand and as I did he said ‘Hello, I’m Peter’, like I had no idea who he was. I had a cactus named after him; I still do. Sadly, my cactus is set in a blue pot and blue was the colour that tempted my hero away.

I won’t go into the details of his departure. It’s old history and as far as I’m concerned this man is a hero and a legend. Sadly, he did move to Posh and had some success against us. That hurt but it doesn’t diminish his legend one little bit.