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Football was always my life. From the first time I slept in the room my parents had created for me, adorned in footballing memorabilia at the age of four I was infatuated with the sport. From the age of six I had a Feyenoord season ticket and by the age of 10 I was playing in their academy. At that age I was touted as the next big thing, because as many of you reading this will know, the big players are generally discovered before they hit puberty and then the club's staff work their fingers to the bone to make sure that the player grows how he should, in terms of talent, mind and body.
I remember one day when I was about fourteen I sneaked out of the dressing room after training to smoke a cigarette that I'd stolen from my father. My manager found me huddled in the cold on a fire escape puffing and spluttering away on my first drags. He snatched it out of my mouth, took a drag and stubbed it out against the wall, before grabbing me by the ear and pulling me down the stairs.
"It stunts your growth. Don't follow the sheep and try and seem cool. You will never be a successful footballer if you become addicted." I seem to recall him saying.
I'm not sure what he said exactly, but the fear he instilled me kept me away from smoking until I was at least forty. When I was sixteen I was called up to the first team for a friendly and played terribly for eighty minutes, and then spent ten minutes producing some brilliance. We lost that game 4-0.
I was on the bench for the next game, and once I'd come on the same happened again. Ten minutes of brilliance and the rest wasn't even worth the cameras following me. But still, the Dutch media were having a frenzy about this new, talented player that was on the block.
I was born in Stoke-On-Trent, England to an English father and a Dutch mother. We lived in Stoke until I was three, and I remember boarding my first plane as we flew to the Netherlands so that my mother could restart her career and my father could continue to be a sports writer. He found it hard, and struggled to learn the language so spoke to me in English a lot of the time, but he got there eventually.
By the time I was twenty, I was a first team regular for Feyenoord. In 2014, the players within the game were hard to attempt to eclipse. I was not Messi or Ronaldo level, but with the right team mates I could be a top player.
When I was twenty-two, in 2016, the injury happened. I was breaking down the right wing and managed to ride a tackle and cut into the opposition box. Just as I was about to fire a shot at goal, a defender slid towards me, studs raised, and crashed into my shin as the force behind my shot connected with his foot.
I never walked properly again. Since then, I've had to walk with the aid of a stick - but that did not take me away from the sport that I had dedicated my life to. I was not uneducated, so I could have gone into any field in the game, but I decided I would do my coaching badges and attempt to make a career as a manager. My badges did not take long, and at the age of twenty-two I had managed to get my first job as the manager of a football club.
Touted for greatness, I wanted to achieve that - even if it was as a manager. I was on my way.
Great start as well, keep it up and this will be amazing.
