The Athletic.

Hello and welcome to a special episode of Straight Out of Cobham with me, Matt Davis-Adams

and Pat Nevin as we discuss Pat's autobiography, the accidental footballer, which is available now.

Pat, many thanks for joining us today.

We'll get to the book momentarily.

But first, tell us a bit about the process of writing this and getting it out during a pandemic

because that was quite a challenge.

It was.

But the way I did it was very unusual, I think, certainly for people to play football. Somebody just annoyed me one day. And I sat down in front of a, and if you've read the prologue, you'll understand. And I just sat down and started writing. And it flowed out. I hadn't really looked back. But I didn't go to a publisher. I didn't speak to anyone. I didn't tell anyone I was doing this. I just started writing because I've always kind of fancied getting routed it. So that was the process of how it was written. And then I thought after about 120,000 words, I had, wait a minute, I better show this to someone in case it's rabbit, sure. And anyway, Murray looked at it, great publishers,

particularly Jake who's there, and he said, I like this.

And I think books are supposed to be harder to put together than that.

So that same is easy.

But then it was, I can read to make sure it read as well as I wanted it to read, which took a little bit longer.

So it only took three weeks to write initially, which is incredibly quick.

But then after that, I really took some time in it and made sure it was right and juggled about a bit.

But that was still well over a year ago.

This book was finished and I edited everything and got it in place long before the pandemic

started. And it's a lot different planet we were on then. So that was that done. But then

publisher said, you know, getting it out now is tough because in the pandemic,

there's problems with warehousing and all that sort of stuff or the technical stuff.

And then they delayed it.

And it could have been out last Christmas.

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