EFL stars, at 40 years old
Kevin Ellison and Aaron Wilbraham are two of only three 40-somethings playing in England’s top four tiers – but neither will talk of the ‘r’ word just yet. FFT meets the grizzled duo to discuss shifting standards, ‘Terrible Tuesdays’ and baked beans
Wilbraham & Ellison reminisce
English football’s greatest survivors haven’t spoken to each other for a while, so they start with the big issues. ‘‘Do you remember when you were dressed up as a chicken on that night out in Manchester?’’ asks Aaron Wilbraham. “I do...’’ chuckles Kevin Ellison, who adds, ‘‘What did Rickie Lambert come out as?’’ Wilbraham ponders for a second, then replies, ‘‘I think it was Sylvester the Cat.’’
When the 6ft 1in chicken that was Ellison crossed the road, he and Wilbraham were in their early-20s and playing for Stockport County. They are now 40, as two of only three quadragenarians in English football’s top four divisions.
Ellison, oldest of the pair by eight months – and briefly joint caretaker player-manager of League Two Morecambe this season – is 30 days younger than Crawley Town midfielder Dannie Bulman. Wilbraham, meanwhile, will be at third-tier Rochdale until at least June 30, having rocked up at Spotland last summer.
Over nearly 25 years, the duo have made more than 1,300 appearances for 22 different teams and scored almost 300 goals. When the average career of a professional footballer spans a mere eight years, how did they get here?
‘‘I think it’s because we’re both working-class lads and had to work so hard to get into football in the first place,’’ Wilbraham tells FFT. ‘‘It’s made us appreciate it and do everything to make our careers last as long as possible.’’
Amusingly, both were told they weren’t good enough to make it as pros when they were 16. Ellison, who had been associated with Liverpool from the age of eight, learned by letter that he wouldn’t be offered a contract; Wilbraham was told in person at Manchester City. ‘‘I remember crying all the way home in the car because I was absolutely devastated,’’ remembers Wilbraham, who washed pots at Ciao Italia in his home town of Knutsford while writing to clubs seeking trials. Ellison, brought up a stone’s throw from Anfield, had unsuccessful trials at Burnley, Blackpool, Everton and Tranmere Rovers while working as a labourer on building sites. ‘‘I was the one sent out to the chippy to get the dinners,’’ he says. ‘‘At the trials, I was told I was no better than the players already on their books, but I had a desire to prove them wrong.’’ Wilbraham lived on a council estate with his older brother and sister, and a half-brother 14 years younger. They were raised largely by mum Gail, a dinner lady who sadly died in December. ‘‘My dad was in and out of prison and passed away when I was 16,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve never had it easy. Over the years, I think I’ve looked for father figures within football. I’ve taken little bits from so many people to become what I am today. It sounds clichéd, but the battle has made me.’’
He was especially close to his grandparents. Maternal grandmother Margaret bought him a pair of Patrick boots for £2.50 from a charity shop, and in his first season wearing them,
“EVERY DAY IS A BATTLE WITH ACHES AND PAINS, BUT AS SOON AS I RUN AROUND I FEEL 21 AGAIN”
Wilbraham scored 102 goals for youth team Middlewich Town. ‘‘Whenever she bought me anything as a child, whether football gear or clothes, she used to tell me, ‘This is coming out of my headstone money’,’’ he smiles. He later repaid her with a marble headstone to be installed at the cemetery where members of his family are buried. ‘‘We always used to go over to the cemetery on Christmas Day – when she spotted it, she was so shocked and delighted that her legs wobbled,’’ he recalls, welling up at the memory.
The forward’s other grandparents, Bill and Muriel, passed on their lifelong devotion of Manchester City, and after being signed by Stockport, an 18-year-old Wilbraham made his full debut for County in April 1998. ‘‘It had to be against City at Maine Road, didn’t it?” he grins. “When the fans were singing Blue
Moon, I was so confused that I almost joined in! City scored and I equalised with a volley. I didn’t really know how to celebrate, so I just ran around like a complete nutter.’’ The Hatters lost 4-1; Wilbraham’s goal had briefly levelled proceedings inside six minutes after home debutant Shaun Goater had handed City an early lead.
Gary Megson, then-manager of Stockport, liked Wilbraham’s enthusiastic approach and gave him a three-year deal that lifted his wage from £42.50 a week to £300. It was at Edgeley Park where he received the moniker by which he’s known throughout the game today: ‘Alby’. Youth team manager Joe Jakub took a long look at Wilbraham – tall, rangy, a cartwheel of elbows and knees – and saw an albatross in human form... albeit minus the 11-foot wingspan.
Aged 20, Wilbraham joined Moss FK – then of the Norwegian top flight. He was sent on loan with fellow Hatter Kent Bergersen, who showed him around his home city of Oslo. ‘‘He was well-known and I remember there being paparazzi waiting for us at the airport,” explains Wilbraham. “He was a top bloke. He liked a ciggie and the odd beer, and fancied himself as a bit of a Bryan Adams with all his long hair. It did me good having to get by on my own at Moss. I can still speak Norwegian – how to greet people and order some food in restaurants, that sort of thing.’’ Back in England, ex-three Lions midfielder Carlton Palmer became his player-manager at Stockport in November 2001 and remains the undisputed banter king of Wilbraham’s career. ‘‘His speed of thought was incredible,” laughs the striker. “His main theme was how wealthy he was, but he did it in a funny way. He’d say, ‘What are you lads on, two or three grand a week? That fell out of my pocket this morning running for the team bus.’ No one could ever shoot him down.’’ And then there’s Liverpool native Ellison, who in November took joint caretaker charge of Morecambe with fellow Shrimps stalwart Barry Roche, after Jim Bentley fled for Fylde. By 2001 he had already been a non-league player for five years when, aged 22, he made the giant leap from sixth-tier Altrincham to top-flight Leicester City for £50,000.
Not that his bank account noticed – losing his match fees from Altrincham and jacking in the building job meant Ellison took a wage drop to join the Foxes, who paid him £750 a week. He played just a few minutes under Peter Taylor in March 2001, replacing Dean Sturridge in the latter stages of a 2-0 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford. ‘‘It still feels like yesterday,’’ he smiles. ‘‘I had three or four touches but that’s enough – it means I can say I played in the Premier League!’’ He continued a nomadic career for several northern outfits before signing for Bentley’s Morecambe back in 2011. He’s now close to 400 Shrimps appearances. Wilbraham was 32 when he finally made his Premier League debut, in December 2011. On his top-flight bow, as an 80th-minute substitute for Norwich City, he was soon tasked with tackling Everton’s Marouane Fellaini. ‘‘I went on, and the first thing I had to do was mark him at a corner,” he recalls. “He kept on telling me to f**k off and I said, ‘I’m having you’. I enjoyed playing in the Premier League. It’s less of a physical battle and you get far more time on the ball. A lot of players don’t want to get hurt or cut, which I don’t mind.” Wilbraham scored one goal in the Premier League – against Fulham in March 2012 – but it meant he’d netted in each of England’s top four divisions. ‘‘I started that season as about the seventh-choice striker,’’ he tells FFT. ‘‘The manager, Paul Lambert, sometimes singled me out and said to the other lads, ‘Look, he’s 32 and running about like a c**t – why can’t the rest of you put in a shift like him?’’’ Both veterans believe that a willingness to embrace sport science has extended their playing careers. They do yoga, have personal training routines, pay strict attention to diet and map out specific periods for rest. ‘‘As soon as we come off the pitch now, we get a recovery shake and supplements,” says Wilbraham. “There’s usually a meal prepared, often pasta, and other stuff available to aid your recovery the following day if you think you need it.” Wide grins fall on their faces as they remember the old days. ‘‘The only grub we ever got was beans on toast,’’ says the former Stockport striker. ‘‘There’d be 40 pieces of bread jammed in a big
toaster and an old woman stirring a giant tin of beans. Team bonding was a big thing and that meant boozing. After away matches on Tuesday nights, we’d have a shower, get on the bus, not bother to rehydrate and go back to Stockport. Someone would phone ahead to Rileys snooker club in the town centre and the owner would have 10 pints of Strongbow ready for each of us when we arrived, even if it was the early hours.’’
These days, Ellison seldom sips any alcohol, sighing, ‘‘It can take literally four or five days for me to recover from a proper session.”
Modern training regimes mean footballers doing concerted bursts of activity focused on hitting a 180-bpm heart rate – again, a tad different to ’90s life where mere survival was the aim of the game.
“They ran you until you dropped,’’ explains Ellison. ‘‘Tuesdays used to be the hardest day in football and were called ‘Terrible Tuesdays’, when you ran and ran. If you didn’t play well you did extra training, and extra running. It was really a kind of punishment.’’
At Tranmere, the squad was regularly made to run up and down Moel Famau, the highest hill of north Wales’ Clwydian Range at nearly 2,000 feet. ‘‘If you did that these days, they’d call in the police and have the club done for cruelty,’’ he laughs. When Ellison started out, most bosses were like army drill sergeants. ‘‘I didn’t mind shouty managers – they go much easier on players these days, especially academy lads,” he continues. “If they chew them off, some of them might go under for the whole season.
I’d say only one in 10 managers are like they used to be when I began my career. They adopt a more pastoral approach now, checking on players’ family lives and so on.” The game has also changed. ‘‘It’s much less physical,’’ says Wilbraham. “The referees are stricter on what they’ll allow, and managers don’t want you to rush in and get booked or possibly sent off.’’ They believe another factor in their longevity has been their attitude. ‘‘I’ve never sulked if I’ve been left out of the team and I wouldn’t complain or confide in anyone at the club,’’ insists Wilbraham. ‘‘I’d hate to be viewed as a snake. My missus is the only one who will know if I’m unhappy with a manager.’’
Ellison has no time for ‘vibe killers’ either. ‘‘It just spoils it for everyone if you’ve got someone moaning all the time,” he says. “I know I’m gobby, but you have your say and then you get on with it.’’
The Liverpudlian has gone through more than most, though, and last year he revealed that he suffers bouts of depression. He wants to play at any level for as long as possible and remain in the game when he finally retires, since he believes it to be good for his state of mind. He concedes that football can bring excruciating pressure, however.
‘‘The boss at one of my clubs was getting a lot of grief,” he says. “We were coming out of the dressing room, running onto the pitch, and he kept me behind. He more or less told me his job depended on how I played and asked me to save it. That’s a hell of a call to place on someone.’’
Ellison knows as well as anyone – after stepping in to lead Morecambe earlier this term prior to Derek Adams’ appointment, he won his solitary league game as gaffer, as the Shrimps struggled in League Two. Both Ellison and Wilbraham find that their age goes before them. ‘‘If I get an injury, people are too keen to say, ‘It’s your age’,’’ says Ellison. He suffers occasional soreness in his pelvis, but ‘‘it just means I’ll avoid playing on harder
“HOW CAN I BE 35 FOR PACE ON
FIFA WHEN I’M FASTER THAN MY TEAM-MATES? THAT’S AGEIST...”
surfaces or artificial pitches. Everything I do, whether it’s resting or seeking out some new protein, is designed to prolong my career for as long as possible.’’ Wilbraham has needed operations for slipped discs, ankle problems and a hip injury. ‘‘Every day is a battle with various aches and pains, but once I warm up and run around I feel 21 again – it’s worse if I have two days off,’’ he adds with a grimace. Ellison was peeved when he was given a 35 pace rating on FIFA 19. ‘‘I think it was me and a Chinese guy who were the slowest players in the world,” he says, rolling his eyes. “How can that be when I’m faster than some of my Morecambe team-mates? They’ve just seen my age and marked me down automatically. That’s ageist, that is...’’ When he turned 40 last February, the club made him a cake. The figure in a football kit making its way across icing was Ellison, replete with Zimmer frame. When FIFA 20’s ratings were announced, his pace had miraculously ‘soared’ to 43.
In January, 40-year-old Wilbraham’s goal against Newcastle United (above) – set up by teenager Luke Matheson – earned Rochdale an FA Cup replay at St James’ Park. The high point of his career, though, came in 2018, when he bagged the winner that kept Bolton Wanderers in the Championship with just two minutes of their final game against Nottingham Forest to go. ‘‘I’d never done it before and I’m not a religious person, but at half-time I looked in the mirror and asked for help from people close to me who have passed away,” he admits. “I said out loud, ‘Nan, Dad – I need you now.’ Even as the game wore on and we were 2-1 down with five minutes left, I had this feeling something special was going to happen.” Most of the 18,000-strong crowd ran onto the pitch at full-time and Wilbraham, sans shirt, was held aloft on fans’ shoulders. One supporter, 25-year-old Mark Yates, had the striker’s face tattooed on his leg. ‘‘I felt sorry for him, as I was released two weeks later,’’ laughs Wilbraham.
On finally calling time on his playing career, he plans to become a football agent. ‘‘I’ve played in all four divisions and know a lot of people, so I’m sure I can pass a lot of things on to players,’’ he says. Meanwhile, Ellison is still admiring his pal’s mighty tree-feller’s beard. ‘‘What’s that about?’’ he asks. ‘‘It grows in about seven different colours, so I dye it black,’’ says Wilbraham, before ordering pea and ham soup. A few minutes earlier, he had claimed that he was a pescatarian. “Can you eat ham?’’ queries Ellison. ‘‘Oh, no...” he realises, before deciding that soup and facial hair are a bad combination anyway. Perhaps wisdom doesn’t come with age after all...