Can you imagine the first one? It was pathetic. I remember going to the first National Coaches’ Convention up in New York and you’d make contacts and people gave speeches and you’d buy some equipment from a bloke with a suitcase. Years later I met a taxi driver in Dallas who’d played in that very league! And that’s what I ended up doing everywhere I went in the US. When I left for Dallas after a couple of years I handed it over to the YMCA and they started the Summer Soccer League. But after a year things got bigger and more kids came around, it grew and grew. Anyway, we hammered in two goals in the end without a cross-bar, but that was the start of my exploits in seeing what had to be done in a country like the US. Then Saturday morning came around, but somebody had ripped the goalposts down and broken them into bits. So I got the job of making a set of goalposts, because there were no goals. I used to joke that there had been two very important carpenters in history – Jesus Christ and me. But then we had to find balls, refs, a place to play and I thought, ‘What have I got myself into?’ I’d worked five or six years in the docks as an apprentice and so I was a carpenter. We put an ad in the paper and a whole load of kids showed up and I thought, 'Bloody hell, what am I going to do with this lot?' But in no time at all we started a league.
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