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training pitch once. Then I refused to come back out for running. When I felt really unhappy, I was looking for ways to get myself out of it. But the people at Norwich were absolutely fantastic. I will always be grateful that they persevered with me.
    Martin O’Neill had been appointed the first team manager that summer. He wasn’t particularly sociable with apprentices like me. In fact, he didn’t even look at you. The only contact I had with him was walking past him in the corridor at the training ground but even in those circumstances, I knew there was a kind of magnetism about him.
    Because I didn’t go home at weekends, I had to clean up the first team dressing room after matches at Carrow Road and the best part of it was hanging around just outside the door, listening to the way O’Neill talked to the players. He would praise some of them like you wouldn’t believe and he made some ordinary footballers play very, very well. Some of them never played at the same level again after he left that Christmas.
    But he wasn’t shy about getting stuck into someone if he felt they weren’t pulling their weight. I remember one occasion. He had signed a guy called Matthew Rush for more than £300,000 from West Ham. It was O’Neill’s signing, a biggish signing for Norwich and Rush was a flash Londoner who had a healthy opinion of himself.
    But in one of his first games, he came on as a substitute for about 20 minutes and didn’t do particularly well. Martin absolutely destroyed him after the game. He called him a big-time Charlie and generally lambasted him for his lack of effort and quality. I was impressed. It showed he didn’t care who he got stuck into. I admired that about him.
    Martin didn’t take any interest in the apprentices but the reserve team boss, Steve Walford, who has been part of Martin’s coaching team wherever he has gone in football, went out of his way to get to know me. He was brilliant to me. Even when I was 16, he gave me a lift back to my digs a couple of times. He told me about his debut at Spurs and about how, when he first began playing for West Ham in the early ’80s, the hardest team he played against was Liverpool. As a Liverpool fan, that was music to my ears.
    Then there was John Robertson, who until recently was the other constant in Martin’s managerial life. Someone told me that he had been a proper player once. I know that now. I know that people thought he was a genius, that he was Brian Clough’s favourite player at Nottingham Forest, that he won European Cups. But back then, I’d look at him with bandages round his knees, puffing on a cigarette and think ‘no chance’.
    It didn’t work out for O’Neill and his staff at Norwich, though, and they were out before Christmas, 1995. They were replaced by Gary Megson and although I didn’t really think it would make much difference to me who was the first team boss, Megson soon made it plain he thought I had a future and the homesickness that had been crippling me began to fade a little.
    I moved out of my digs after a few months. Tom Ramusat lived in some digs called The Limes with six or seven other apprentices from the club and I asked Norwich’s youth development officer, Gordon Bennett, if I could move in with them.
    It was more like living in a B&B than being cooped up in someone else’s home and Gordon fixed it up for me. I began to settle in a bit better. I was quite professional. For all the problems I had been having, I was trying to take my football as seriously as I could and do the right things. Most nights, I would go to bed on time. If we had a game the next day, I would go to bed on time because I wanted to play well.
    Most of the other boys would stay up. There was no one to keep an eye on us like there would have been in more traditional digs. As I was the youngest of the kids in there, I became the victim of a lot of practical jokes and pranks. One night, we were playing Scrabble, which wasn’t really my