Finding tools to succeed in game of life

He was deflated when he should have been elated, and brimming with pride when you’d think he’d be brimming with tears.

Paul McVeigh was just 180 minutes away from the Premier League. Norwich City had beaten Wolves 3-1 in the first leg of the Championship play-offs, Carrow Road had been buzzing and he had been buzzing too, scoring a goal and setting up another. But then as he was driving home down a side street, a little girl broke away from her family and into his path. McVeigh was only going at 20mph but the girl lay motionless on the ground. That night as she lay in hospital he knelt on a pew of a cathedral. That night football, getting back to the Premier League, meant nothing to him.

Thankfully she would recover, breaking just her collarbone, and as it would transpire, Norwich would win that play-off semi-final series with McVeigh putting in a professional shift, but there was no joy in it. All he got from that experience was some perspective. “Although football is a pastime that gives pleasure to millions,” he writes in a new book, “its importance should not be compared with the harsher realities of life.”