DUNKIRK Football Club holds good and bad memories for yours truly. I made my first-team debut in men’s football against them, aged 15, for GPT Plessey at the back-end of the 1993-94 Notts Alliance campaign. Nearly seven years later, I broke my leg playing at their ground in a Sunday League game.
It’s fair to surmise the recollections Wes Morgan has of playing at the Ron Steel Sports Ground are all fond.
For while Jamie Vardy’s rise from Non-League football to Premier League champion is rightly the headline and Hollywood film-maker of the Leicester City story, the hulk of a man who became the most unlikely captain ever to hoist the trophy above his head yesterday served an apprenticeship in the game’s grass-roots, too.
And boy, the little club perched next to the River Trent, a couple of miles upstream from Nottingham Forest’s City Ground, are proud of the role they played in his development almost two decades ago.
Framed on the wall of their clubhouse, Morgan’s red Forest shirt sits proudly alongside the one another alumni, former Tamworth, Lincoln City and Alfreton midfielder Jake Sheridan, wore for Notts County.
It was after he was told he wouldn’t be offered a YT deal by the Magpies, Nottingham’s lesser lights remember, that the career path of Morgan, this central defender who would go on to help write a footballing fairytale, began to take on a positive angle.
Having enrolled on an accountancy course at South Notts College in the summer of 2000, he was spotted having a kickabout in a park in the Meadows, an inner-city area that has produced many future professionals over the years, by Dunkirk reserves manager Barry Campbell and invited to training.
“He only played a couple of times in the reserves,” recalls treasurer of three decades Cyril Allen, and still a member of the club’s committee. “He was a couple of stone overweight, but he oozed quality and was fast-tracked into the first team.”
Experienced
This was no fly-by-night visit to manager Andy Freeman’s dressing room either.
Playing alongside experienced Non-League lads like my old Arnold Town team-mates Kevin Marsh and Matt Irons, as well as up-and-coming recruits from local football like Aaron O’Connor, the ex-Rushden, Luton, Newport County and Forest Green Rovers striker, Morgan made 53 appearances for the Central Midlands League club.
“Andy put him in and he stayed in for the rest of that first season,” says Allen. “Because he was so strong, you didn’t notice he was only 16. He was built like a man already, though college was obviously tiring him out.
Wes Morgan with Dunkirk, right, and his Nottingham Forest shirt on display in the Boatmen’s clubhouse, left
“I was working as a roofer at the time and would go round picking two or three of the lads up. If we were playing away in Lincolnshire, at somewhere like Moorlands or Nettleham, he’d be asleep in the back of my van by the time we’d crossed Trent Bridge! He’d soon wake up when we got to the game though. He won our player of the year award and people in high places started to take notice of him.”
Strict
It was a third of the way into the 2001-02 campaign that his performances in a tough men’s league led to a deal at Forest.
“One or two had been looking at him, but Forest took him in on trial and offered him a deal,” says Allen. “We couldn’t get anything for him because we weren’t allowed to put him on a contract, with him still being in full-time education.”
O’Connor, now 32 and playing for League Two Stevenage, added: “You could see he’d play higher, you just didn’t know how high.
“Forest put him on a strict diet straightaway and said to him he was so quick, if he lost a bit of weight he’d be twice as fast. With the full-time training, he slimmed down and went on loan to Kidderminster for a spell. Then Paul Hart put him in the first team and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Indeed it is. As captain of the Premier League champions, Wes Morgan has his place in football history – and the Boatmen of Dunkirk should be proud of the role they played in creating it for him.
