Scouting is an open-ended book, really.
The thing that is attractive about working with scouts is that their football was hidden and tried.
No one knows who they are, but everyone thinks they know what they do.
To actually feel the heartbeat of football, you've got to go out with the old-school scouts.
They're out there in all weathers, at all times.
These guys go out and find that talent and confirm it.
Most of them are what we call mileage men.
They're the ones at one o'clock in the morning, driving down the M1, with a pork pie in one hand and the wheel in the other.
They're paid 40p a mile, and that's all they get.
It's a lifestyle. It's not a career.
I think football nowadays is a 24-hour job.
If you're a football person, it's constantly in your life.
You don't want to miss out on that 17-year-old that's playing at Brentford or wherever.
If you look after the world as a scout, you do not want to miss anything.
How I got into it, I had a normal job, I had a small business.
I had a friend live around the corner that played for Reading.
As his friend, he said, do you want to come with me?
Knowing I was a football knower, I went, fantastic, yeah, please.
Which is how scouting has been, really, for most of my generation, if you want.
Friend of a friend, people setting things up.
There was no, of course, mobile phones in those days.
Built it up from there, what we're talking 25 years ago.
You just get mostly head-hunted by somebody.
You get your scout pass from your club and off you go.
It is a basically just get on with the industry. It's a really strange one.
The more games you see, the better they become.
There's no good scout, there's only much 10 games, you know what it's doing.
I can promise you that.
The ones I'm talking about have probably got thousands and thousands of games,
listened to hundreds of managers and spoke to thousands of coaches.
And their catalogue of knowledge has been broadened
by the variety of people they've spoken to
and the different types of games they've seen at different levels and at different age groups.
A good scout of somebody that never closes a door on someone.
We can all have bad days, but they go back and watch them again
just to make sure that they were right saying no in the first place.
You cannot be a scout unless you love football
because we do watch some bad games in the pouring rain and the freezing cold and we travel.
It motivates me to still be in love with the game at my age.
There's a lot of people call themselves scouts, but there's very few good ones, I believe.
And the good ones are the ones who are always there.
Not maybe saying too much, just taking it all in and seeing things at some time.
I don't even see.
Coaches are coaches and they watch a game.
Scouts are scouts and we watch players and you'd be going home in the car together
and they talk about the game and I'd say, I don't remember that.
I can tell you from 1 to 22, something about every player, but they wouldn't.
They feel it in their bones and that is what really is attractive about those guys.
They are football's last romantics.
They're there at the birth of the dream.
