He'd Be In My Team At Kilbirnie

DAVIE Wells was one of the last guys to step, blinking into the light at the end of a hard shift down the pit - pause briefly in the pit head baths before going off to play football at quite a high level - for when he succeeded Dick Malone in the number two Ayr United shirt, the Honest Men, under Ally MacLeod's managership, were a power in the land.

Davie came from New Cumnock and began with Glenafton Athletic in the clan wars which are Ayrshire Junior football. After he finished playing, Davie managed his beloved Glen, was Ally's Number Two in his later, less-successful spells in that tiny office under the Somerset Park stairs and even had a couple of short spells as caretaker boss - Wells had in other words met the Bobby Robson test of a footballer: he had time on the grass.

He also had a benchmark for a player: a man who wouldn't bottle the challenges, who would face up to intimidation on the park and contribute. That measure was: "Aye - he'd be in my team at Kilbrinie". Visiting clubs NEVER get it easy at Kilbirnie Ladeside's home park, it's a place which separates the men from the boys.

David Beckham would be in my team at Kilbirnie. It may be fashionable now to disregard the man's achievements in football; to fail to see Beckham the player because of Beckham the brand; to condemn him as over-hyped and over-paid.

But, in a montage of clips of his great goals on Friday night's final Jonathan Ross programme on BBC One, we saw something most of us had perhaps forgotten - the guy could play.

Interestingly, most of the many goals with a definite Wow!!! factor were scored early in his Manchester United career, in the days before he married Victoria and became a global phenomenon, a "personality" rather than a player; before he fell-out with Fergie and left Carrington, the Manchester United training ground where he was perhaps happiest in his entire life.

No player who has won over 100 caps, captained his country, and won the prizes and honours which have come Beckham's way can be deemed a failure or an under-achiever. Those silverbacks among us in the ranks of the fans with lap tops might be disinclined to put him alongside Best, Law and Edwards on the very top step of the Old Trafford pantheon of heroes - but, he was undoubtedly United's best English player since Bobby Charlton.

In the pre-1966 days, when it was not a treasonable crime for a Scottish football fan to admire English players and wish that the likes of Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Greaves, Gordon Banks, Tommy Lawton and Charlton had been born Scottish - we would have welcomed Beckham too.

Is it symptomatic of the way money and television has distorted football's values that today, some of feel, for all he has achieved - there might have been more to be got out of David Beckham? He is the consumate football man and a credit to the game.