It was my first day at Carlisle United and I was jogging round a pitch with a young keeper called Paul Heritage. “We’ve been crap all season – if we go down, it won’t be your fault, and if we stay up, you could be a hero,” he told me. “What if I got the winning goal?” I said, tongue in cheek. Three weeks later, it happened.
When I agreed to sign for Carlisle on loan from Swindon, I didn’t even think about where they were in the league. I phoned my dad to tell him about the move, but 30 seconds later he called me back. He’d put Ceefax on and said, “You do realise where they are, don’t you?” I said, “Yeah, they’re up north.”
He said: “No,…
