The Story of Dave Kitson
David Walsh, chief sports writer . The Times
It is a little after midday at Reading’s training centre in Hogwood Park on Thursday. Morning training is winding down with a seven-a-side. It is competitive and when it ends, Dave Kitson leaves the pitch quickly and without saying anything. A couple of the players shout after him, “Hey, Kits? Kits?” He doesn’t look back. Within minutes, he’s in his car and exiting the ground.
Kitson is a 27-year-old striker with an impressive goalscoring record and should he get one more against Arsenal tomorrow evening, he will have scored more goals at the Madejski stadium than any other Reading player. Not bad for a young man who spent what might have been the formative years of his football life stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s in Letchworth. During those three years in the retail trade, he didn’t even play football.
We meet at a hotel near Reading’s stadium.
You seemed to leave training in a hurry today?
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“I love playing the game but I find it difficult to deal with everything to do with football. You have a bad training day, like I had today, and you just need to get out of there.” What exactly happened during that seven-a-side? “See, that’s the tabloid journalist coming out in you,” he says.
Just curious? “In our small-sided games, people want to dribble the ball, beat a few men and put it in the top corner. I want to play our small games as Arsenal play on the big pitch. You pass, you move, you receive; you pass, you move, you receive. These games, they’re serious, at least they are at clubs like Manchester United and Arsenal. It is where you nurture your technique and your competitive attitude. These games are critical to a team’s development and it frustrates me that everyone wants to dribble, wants to shoot and this morning I needed to get away quickly.”
He got home from training and found a package in the post. A friend had sent him a present of Pele’s autobiography and after opening it randomly, he happened on a page where Pele described how he once scored 24 goals in one month for Santos. For one of the goals, he flicked the ball over the heads of two defenders, beat a third and crashed in his shot off the underside of the crossbar.
Except that the ball didn’t cross the line. Pele knew it, the goalkeeper knew it. The ball bounced up off the line and was cleared.
As Pele jogged back to halfway, the referee ran alongside. “That was such a piece of skill,” said the official, “that I decided to give you a goal anyway.” Kitson smiled to himself and felt the frustration of a bad training day drain from his body. JOURNALIST meets footballer, footballer tells story about being first noticed by the scouts at the age of 12, into the academy at 14, professional at 16, first team at 18, top of the range Bentley at 20. Then, there’s Dave Kitson, who has arrived from another planet. Somewhere more interesting, a land where you start against the garage door, where you and your mates ignore the sign that says “No Football” and you end up in a job where you stack shelves and the odds are stacked against you.
He couldn’t have done it without Kevin, his dad. “If you want to hear the most interesting life story you’ve ever heard, speak to my dad - a Sixties man who loved football, music and Shakespeare and became a carpenter.”
Kevin encouraged him to get up an hour earlier in the morning and use that hour to practise his left foot volleying against the garage door. On the way to an under10 game, Kevin would say: “Today, David, just use your left foot. Don’t touch it with your right.” But Kevin didn’t teach just football.
Kitson remembers the excitement when he first discovered Oasis, running downstairs to his dad and telling him he had to come and listen to this. Kevin went to his room, listened to Noel Gallagher and tried to be diplomatic.
“It’s good, son, but you never heard the Beatles live, did you?” So he brought Dave to his room and put on A Day In The Life from Sgt. Pepper: “I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man who made the grade . . .” And John Lennon’s voice made the hairs stand on the back of the boy’s neck.
Around the same time, his dad asked him to watch Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and the kid was again blown away. “Dad was big into reading Shakespeare and wanted me to appreciate it. Polanski’s film brought it to life for me. I mean there’s so much bulls*** coming out of Hollywood, where it’s all CGT [Computer Graphic Technology] and there was so much realism in Macbeth. A little later Macbeth was part of my GCSE English and I got completely wrapped up it, actually learned to recite the entire play from start to finish.” Sometimes, he will, travelling to a game, and Kevin will text him Duncan’s observation when he first saw Macbeth’s castle: “This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air/Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself/Unto our senses.” What he and Kevin loved about those three lines was their sound. Beautiful. In every English exam, Kitson excelled. In every other exam, well . . . better not to go there.
He grew up in Letchworth, a little street called Linnet Grove where football was the teenage religion. Karl Duguid was a friend and neighbour who became a professional at the age of 16 and the rest of the lads thought they would follow. But it didn’t happen and when the school authorities said he couldn’t just do English and Art for his A-levels, Kitson ended up in Sainsbury’s.
At first it was part-time, and then at the age of 18, he became a full-time stacker of shelves. Girls and good times followed and football disappeared. For three years he hardly played a game.
“Sainsbury’s was the making and breaking of me. I was a very shy kid who found himself at a supermarket which was a playing field for young managers who had either been born with a huge grudge or a small penis because they just wanted to take on their own staff all of the time, while wearing the same black suit every day. We were the lowest of the low, s*** on the soles of their shoes and treated accordingly. I had half a brain and gave as good as I got and they hated me for that, absolutely hated me.”
One Christmas, the shy teenager rebelled. Working a late shift, he found himself in the big staffroom, where there was a white-board for employees to write their suggestions. His gripe was the awful food the staff were forced to eat, an injustice highlighted by the excellent quality of the special Christmas dinner. Kitson took the pen in his hand.
“Why,” he wrote, “when the rest of us are slugging our guts out for peanuts, does the company deem it fit to give bonuses and presents to people for cooking one decent meal per year.” He came in the next morning to find three middle-aged ladies, friends and contemporaries of the female chef, gazing at his message. Two of them were crying. A young manager pinned a notice under the message appealing for people to sign a petition asking for the culprit to be named and kicked out of Sainsbury’s. Everyone was signing it.
Kitson needed his job, he got his friends to sign the petition, he signed the petition, but after a few days, everyone knew he was the bad guy. “What I wrote was what an angry 18-year-old would write, a bit stupid and if I’d have had any bollocks, I would have signed it. But it was strange, when people realised I was the guy who wrote the bad stuff, they were wary of me. I was ‘trouble’, but there was also a respect for me that wasn’t there before.
“The lady who did the cooking would never serve me after that, turned her back when I was around, but the whole episode changed my life. From then on, I’ve said what’s on my mind and I don’t accept the bulls***. Not from anybody. I had it at Sainsbury’s and only when I stood up for myself did I feel free.”
How he came to be a footballer is another story. Lee and Paul Devereux drank in a pub at Letchworth called the Arena Tavern and their pub team needed a centre-back. The Hitchin Sunday League, where they played, is full of men who once thought they could be a footballer and Kitson joined them. They played in the morning, drank and lunched in the Arena Tavern and that evening ended up in a club called The Bar Absolute in Letchworth.
The Devereux were season-ticket holders at Arlesey Town, who played in the lower reaches of the Ryman League and they persuaded Dave to go for a trial. Arlesey had a very good striker, Greg Pike, who suffered an horrific injury soon after Kitson arrived and, like Roy of the Rovers, Kitson’s story had begun.
“Nicky Ironton was manager and he did everything he did to get bigger clubs to give me a chance. Until I started working with Steve Coppell, Nicky was the best manager I’d had.” From Arlesey Town, Kitson went to Cambridge United and spent three seasons showing he could score. Lionel Perez, Cambridge’s French goalkeeper, inspired him.
“Lionel was this blend of mad/genius. He had that Alex Higgins thing of ‘what’s he going to do next?’ If someone gave a lazy pass in a training match, Lionel would run out from goal, catch the guy by the scruff of the neck and warn him never to do that again. You didn’t mess with Lionel and he was one of the biggest influences on my career, a great, great guy to whom I owe an awful lot.”
Cambridge’s fans loved Kitson, he scored 40 goals in 102 appearances and was then sold to Reading for an initial fee of £150,000. He has made 109 appearances for Coppell’s team and has scored 48 goals. He is now playing four divisions higher than when he left Cambridge and his impressive goals-to-games ratio is better now than it was then.
He loved Cambridge but hated the way the board told the fans they needed £100,000 to save the club and make sure they didn’t sell Kitson. The fans put money in buckets at every home game, the £100,000 was raised and the striker was then sold.
“But, look, I walk into our merchandise shop at Reading and I’m amazed at the s*** football clubs manage to sell to their fans. Football is a successful business because people are eternally bound to their clubs. And everyone in this game has their hand out, everyone wants to get rich, while the fans just get poorer. They hook you, then they hook your son, and when they’ve got as much from you as they can get, they go to the Far East for more. It’s like a big trawler, dredging the bottom of the ocean and trying to brand everything in their nets. I will never conform to that. Not in any make, shape or form. The fans at Reading appreciate me and that means a lot. I will try to entertain because I know how much their tickets cost.”
He watched Arsenal’s teams from under nines to 14s playing against Reading recently. Wanted to see how many foreign kids Arsenal had but found only English boys and excellent technique. If there’s one thing he would like to know, it is what Arsène Wenger looks for in a young footballer. He thinks about it for a second, “Wenger’s football philosophy,” he says, “Now, there’s a book I would love to read.”
It is a little after midday at Reading’s training centre in Hogwood Park on Thursday. Morning training is winding down with a seven-a-side. It is competitive and when it ends, Dave Kitson leaves the pitch quickly and without saying anything. A couple of the players shout after him, “Hey, Kits? Kits?” He doesn’t look back. Within minutes, he’s in his car and exiting the ground.
Kitson is a 27-year-old striker with an impressive goalscoring record and should he get one more against Arsenal tomorrow evening, he will have scored more goals at the Madejski stadium than any other Reading player. Not bad for a young man who spent what might have been the formative years of his football life stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s in Letchworth. During those three years in the retail trade, he didn’t even play football.
We meet at a hotel near Reading’s stadium.
You seemed to leave training in a hurry today?
Multimedia
Premier League highlights
Ahead of the game email
Multimedia
TheGame: online and kicking
Fanzine fanzone - your say
“I love playing the game but I find it difficult to deal with everything to do with football. You have a bad training day, like I had today, and you just need to get out of there.” What exactly happened during that seven-a-side? “See, that’s the tabloid journalist coming out in you,” he says.
Just curious? “In our small-sided games, people want to dribble the ball, beat a few men and put it in the top corner. I want to play our small games as Arsenal play on the big pitch. You pass, you move, you receive; you pass, you move, you receive. These games, they’re serious, at least they are at clubs like Manchester United and Arsenal. It is where you nurture your technique and your competitive attitude. These games are critical to a team’s development and it frustrates me that everyone wants to dribble, wants to shoot and this morning I needed to get away quickly.”
He got home from training and found a package in the post. A friend had sent him a present of Pele’s autobiography and after opening it randomly, he happened on a page where Pele described how he once scored 24 goals in one month for Santos. For one of the goals, he flicked the ball over the heads of two defenders, beat a third and crashed in his shot off the underside of the crossbar.
Except that the ball didn’t cross the line. Pele knew it, the goalkeeper knew it. The ball bounced up off the line and was cleared.
As Pele jogged back to halfway, the referee ran alongside. “That was such a piece of skill,” said the official, “that I decided to give you a goal anyway.” Kitson smiled to himself and felt the frustration of a bad training day drain from his body. JOURNALIST meets footballer, footballer tells story about being first noticed by the scouts at the age of 12, into the academy at 14, professional at 16, first team at 18, top of the range Bentley at 20. Then, there’s Dave Kitson, who has arrived from another planet. Somewhere more interesting, a land where you start against the garage door, where you and your mates ignore the sign that says “No Football” and you end up in a job where you stack shelves and the odds are stacked against you.
He couldn’t have done it without Kevin, his dad. “If you want to hear the most interesting life story you’ve ever heard, speak to my dad - a Sixties man who loved football, music and Shakespeare and became a carpenter.”
Kevin encouraged him to get up an hour earlier in the morning and use that hour to practise his left foot volleying against the garage door. On the way to an under10 game, Kevin would say: “Today, David, just use your left foot. Don’t touch it with your right.” But Kevin didn’t teach just football.
Kitson remembers the excitement when he first discovered Oasis, running downstairs to his dad and telling him he had to come and listen to this. Kevin went to his room, listened to Noel Gallagher and tried to be diplomatic.
“It’s good, son, but you never heard the Beatles live, did you?” So he brought Dave to his room and put on A Day In The Life from Sgt. Pepper: “I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man who made the grade . . .” And John Lennon’s voice made the hairs stand on the back of the boy’s neck.
Around the same time, his dad asked him to watch Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and the kid was again blown away. “Dad was big into reading Shakespeare and wanted me to appreciate it. Polanski’s film brought it to life for me. I mean there’s so much bulls*** coming out of Hollywood, where it’s all CGT [Computer Graphic Technology] and there was so much realism in Macbeth. A little later Macbeth was part of my GCSE English and I got completely wrapped up it, actually learned to recite the entire play from start to finish.” Sometimes, he will, travelling to a game, and Kevin will text him Duncan’s observation when he first saw Macbeth’s castle: “This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air/Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself/Unto our senses.” What he and Kevin loved about those three lines was their sound. Beautiful. In every English exam, Kitson excelled. In every other exam, well . . . better not to go there.
He grew up in Letchworth, a little street called Linnet Grove where football was the teenage religion. Karl Duguid was a friend and neighbour who became a professional at the age of 16 and the rest of the lads thought they would follow. But it didn’t happen and when the school authorities said he couldn’t just do English and Art for his A-levels, Kitson ended up in Sainsbury’s.
At first it was part-time, and then at the age of 18, he became a full-time stacker of shelves. Girls and good times followed and football disappeared. For three years he hardly played a game.
“Sainsbury’s was the making and breaking of me. I was a very shy kid who found himself at a supermarket which was a playing field for young managers who had either been born with a huge grudge or a small penis because they just wanted to take on their own staff all of the time, while wearing the same black suit every day. We were the lowest of the low, s*** on the soles of their shoes and treated accordingly. I had half a brain and gave as good as I got and they hated me for that, absolutely hated me.”
One Christmas, the shy teenager rebelled. Working a late shift, he found himself in the big staffroom, where there was a white-board for employees to write their suggestions. His gripe was the awful food the staff were forced to eat, an injustice highlighted by the excellent quality of the special Christmas dinner. Kitson took the pen in his hand.
“Why,” he wrote, “when the rest of us are slugging our guts out for peanuts, does the company deem it fit to give bonuses and presents to people for cooking one decent meal per year.” He came in the next morning to find three middle-aged ladies, friends and contemporaries of the female chef, gazing at his message. Two of them were crying. A young manager pinned a notice under the message appealing for people to sign a petition asking for the culprit to be named and kicked out of Sainsbury’s. Everyone was signing it.
Kitson needed his job, he got his friends to sign the petition, he signed the petition, but after a few days, everyone knew he was the bad guy. “What I wrote was what an angry 18-year-old would write, a bit stupid and if I’d have had any bollocks, I would have signed it. But it was strange, when people realised I was the guy who wrote the bad stuff, they were wary of me. I was ‘trouble’, but there was also a respect for me that wasn’t there before.
“The lady who did the cooking would never serve me after that, turned her back when I was around, but the whole episode changed my life. From then on, I’ve said what’s on my mind and I don’t accept the bulls***. Not from anybody. I had it at Sainsbury’s and only when I stood up for myself did I feel free.”
How he came to be a footballer is another story. Lee and Paul Devereux drank in a pub at Letchworth called the Arena Tavern and their pub team needed a centre-back. The Hitchin Sunday League, where they played, is full of men who once thought they could be a footballer and Kitson joined them. They played in the morning, drank and lunched in the Arena Tavern and that evening ended up in a club called The Bar Absolute in Letchworth.
The Devereux were season-ticket holders at Arlesey Town, who played in the lower reaches of the Ryman League and they persuaded Dave to go for a trial. Arlesey had a very good striker, Greg Pike, who suffered an horrific injury soon after Kitson arrived and, like Roy of the Rovers, Kitson’s story had begun.
“Nicky Ironton was manager and he did everything he did to get bigger clubs to give me a chance. Until I started working with Steve Coppell, Nicky was the best manager I’d had.” From Arlesey Town, Kitson went to Cambridge United and spent three seasons showing he could score. Lionel Perez, Cambridge’s French goalkeeper, inspired him.
“Lionel was this blend of mad/genius. He had that Alex Higgins thing of ‘what’s he going to do next?’ If someone gave a lazy pass in a training match, Lionel would run out from goal, catch the guy by the scruff of the neck and warn him never to do that again. You didn’t mess with Lionel and he was one of the biggest influences on my career, a great, great guy to whom I owe an awful lot.”
Cambridge’s fans loved Kitson, he scored 40 goals in 102 appearances and was then sold to Reading for an initial fee of £150,000. He has made 109 appearances for Coppell’s team and has scored 48 goals. He is now playing four divisions higher than when he left Cambridge and his impressive goals-to-games ratio is better now than it was then.
He loved Cambridge but hated the way the board told the fans they needed £100,000 to save the club and make sure they didn’t sell Kitson. The fans put money in buckets at every home game, the £100,000 was raised and the striker was then sold.
“But, look, I walk into our merchandise shop at Reading and I’m amazed at the s*** football clubs manage to sell to their fans. Football is a successful business because people are eternally bound to their clubs. And everyone in this game has their hand out, everyone wants to get rich, while the fans just get poorer. They hook you, then they hook your son, and when they’ve got as much from you as they can get, they go to the Far East for more. It’s like a big trawler, dredging the bottom of the ocean and trying to brand everything in their nets. I will never conform to that. Not in any make, shape or form. The fans at Reading appreciate me and that means a lot. I will try to entertain because I know how much their tickets cost.”
He watched Arsenal’s teams from under nines to 14s playing against Reading recently. Wanted to see how many foreign kids Arsenal had but found only English boys and excellent technique. If there’s one thing he would like to know, it is what Arsène Wenger looks for in a young footballer. He thinks about it for a second, “Wenger’s football philosophy,” he says, “Now, there’s a book I would love to read.”