Earlier today, we saw how Mick McCarthy was doing what he does best and giving another Irish international a chance to get back into football. At 31 Kevin Foley has plenty of time talent left in him and McCarthy is the ideal man to get that out of him but it's just one more example of how things are far from simple outside the Premier League.
Foley left Copenhagen last summer and has since been on trial at the likes of Reading and Shrewsbury without earning a new contract. It can be tough going to try and get back in the professional game and one man who knows what Foley is facing is Stephen Hunt. He's 34 now and when his contract with Ipswich came to an end, it would have been understandable were he to look at coaching or move into the media on a full time basis.
Hunt is a man who just loves playing football and having secured a deal with Coventry this week, that has become very clear indeed. Tony Mowbray, the Coventry boss, has been speaking to the Coventry Telegraph this week after securing Hunt's signing. And if there was any doubt about how much passion Hunt had for playing in League One and contributing to Coventry's promotion push then you only need hear the extent to which Hunt was keen to get involved according to his new boss.
I was sitting at home watching a match on the telly about ten days ago when my phone rang, it wasn’t his agent or a third party trying to open a deal, it was the boy himself who asked if he could come and train.
He just wanted to get his boots on and feel like a player again. I told him there won’t be a deal there because we are pretty overloaded with attacking players and he understood that. But he lives relatively locally and because he phoned me himself I agreed he could come in.
In other words, he was pretty much told no, but simply didn't take that answer and convinced Mowbray to give him a chance. And by the sounds of it, the Coventry boss is fairly happy with that outcome.
Knowing his career he is what you see which is a bundle of energy – a very likeable lad who has always got a smile on his face and he’s very talented with the ball.
He can pick passes that some of our younger players don’t even think about, let alone see, and it just made sense to me to give him a contract.
It's easy to be cynical about the life of a footballer but when you hear stories like that, it's great to see that the sheer love of the game is enough to keep going and plugging away.
