Football is a simple game. That?s what everyone says.

I?m not so certain.

To start with, I don?t think it?s a game played by professional footballers anymore. At least not in the traditional sense.

Seeing a footballer out of his natural habitat used to be, not that long ago either, a little strange. An almost surreal experience.

I remember walking down Hunstanton High Street one Saturday morning and having the shock of my life when one of my teachers walked out of Woolworths.

He?d been shopping. A fairly straightforward act. Normal is what normal does in fact. Yet it was a sight that my brain, barely into its teens, simply couldn?t compute.

Surely he lived in the school" He was there when I arrived in the morning and there when I left in the afternoon. Therefore he lived in the school; he ate, slept and did whatever else you needed to do at the school. And never ever left its stark steel and glass confines.
In pretty much the same way that footballers could only ever be seen on a football pitch.

For all I knew, Graham Paddon, my childhood hero, was only ever a footballer. He wore the yellow and green kit all the time and, whenever he was not needed, he simply hid away somewhere at Carrow Road, waiting to play his next game. He and the other ten players.

Except Trevor Hockey (below). He lived in some sort of subterranean basement.

Alone.

The shock was no less earth-shattering when I went to my first ever Norwich game, arriving at the...