When Gary Phillips began life in football, he rubbed shoulders with Cyrille Regis and Bryan Robson on a daily basis. Aged just 18 at the foot of his 20-year career, Phillips couldn’t have been better placed to start a journey that would lead to coaching at a Premier League club.
He would work under Ray Clemence and Bob Wilson in future jobs and build a post-playing career at teams across the country.
It started, however, with “you went in goal and they’d fire balls at you.”
The difference between Phillips’ formative years and today’s teenage ‘keepers’ is, he says, a “chasm”.