Football: Back to his roots; Davenport determined to play in Wirral again.Byline: NEIL MACDONALD Neil Macdonald (born 1957) is an award winning Canadian journalist who currently works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Macdonald worked as a print journalist for many years. He joined the CBC in 1988 and covered Parliament for approximately a decade. IT IS not quite the World Cup, but Peter Davenport is determined to get back his international clearance to allow him to play football in Wirral. Davenport, a feature for the Queens and Cammell Laird For the football team see Cammell Laird FC. Cammell Laird, one of the most famous names in British shipbuilding during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came about following the merger of Laird, Son & Co. of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell & Co. the season before last, was forced to hang up his boots in the peninsula last year after he registered on the playing staff at Bangor City, the League of Wales The Welsh Football League is a different league, which is a feeder to the League of Wales. The Welsh Premiership is the national football league for Wales and is at the top of the Welsh football league system. team he manages. Complicated rules over playing in Wales and England meant it just wasn't practical to do both, but Davenport said: ``I signed as a player at Bangor in case of emergencies, but I should have kept playing myself. ``I would rather play the kids for Bangor and play for the Queens, that's assuming they'd select an old crock crock - [American scatologism "crock of shit"] 1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For example, using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, Unix "make(1)", which like me. ``I've been to watch the Queens and Laird a couple of times and I'll never forget where my roots are. ``I love playing local football in Wirral, while I've also got the Masters football tournament coming up and I need to be fit for that.'' Despite his desire to pull his shooting boots on again, Davenport has few complaints after a tremendous season with Bangor. After a titanic tussle with full-time club Barry Town for the league - eventually finishing third - they also just missed out to Barry in the Welsh Cup. However their position was good enough to win them a place in next season's UEFA UEFA Union of European Football Associations UEFA n abbr (= Union of European Football Associations) → U.E.F.A. Cup first round, all this after nearly being relegated the previous year. ``Europe is exciting because if we make it through that round, more bigguns come in like Aberdeen and Hadjuk Split, and we were only a few points away from the Champions League at one point,'' he said. ``It was a great achievement to do as well as we did because I had 15 players all year and because loads of games were washed out, we were playing Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday from February. ``The lads struggled through injuries and strains to keep going as long as they did, which is a tremendous testament to them. ``I enjoyed being involved in management again too, and everyone at the club has been fantastic.'' One of the star performers for Davenport was striker Marc Lloyd Williams, who netted 47 league goals in a remarkable display of forward play. Davenport said: ``He scored an amazing amount of goals really, but he will be the first to acknowledge the team he had behind him. ``People like Clayton Blackmore, Aled Rowlands, Simon Davies - they all pitched in creating good chances and if Mark had scored with every chance, he'd have been in the high 300s.'' But after turning the club around from strugglers to contenders, Davenport admitted success brings new problems for any manager. ``It is obvious we made a few people sit up and take notice, so other teams will come sniffing around to try and poach poach damage caused to sodden pasture by the hooves of cattle and sheep. In clay soils and when the ground is sufficiently wet the damage caused by a heavy stocking rate of sheep may be very high. Said also of the take-off in front of a jump in an equitation course or a race. a player or two,'' he said. ``That means my challenge is to keep the same squad together and bring in one or two lads who will improve the team. ``Last year I was lucky in that the lads I brought in gelled really well and gave everyone a lift.'' He added: ``Teams will also treat us with more respect now than they did this year. There are going to be expectations on us and we know that is going to be difficult. ``We are up for that battle though and are ready to meet the challenge. If we can do that we can have another decent season.'' CAPTION(S): RETURN: Peter Davenport |
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