After a long career on the field, Tony Gale showed similar longevity off it, moving into a media role and covering – by his own count – more than 2,000 matches. But it could easily have gone in another direction.
Offered a player-coach role at then-champions Blackburn Rovers, Gale instead elected to return to London for a final season of first-team football.
“I could have had an easy path into coaching,” he says today, “by coming to the tail end of my career and starting a coaching career with the Premier League title winners.
“That was probably the biggest regret of my professional playing career: that I didn’t take up that extra season at Blackburn Rovers.