Damien Duff sat down recently in the company of Mr Ganges himself for a candid interview on the Graham Hunter podcast. It's a really insightful interview on a fascinating life in football. Duffer is especially candid when talking about his apprenticeship at Blackburn, and how he went from being a timid homesick teenager to a man who'd become one of the all-time greatest Irish footballers.
It seems Tim Sherwood was integral in that process.
Sherwood was the captain of Blackburn at the time, and Duffer reveals the misery that Sherwood put him through in his early days at Blackburn - rituals that went on at every football club in England.
"Tim, yeah, jokingly, made my life hell. I used to clean his boots for two years. If he got polish on his hands when he was putting them on in the morning, he'd call me in front of the club really and abuse me in the canteen, but it was just character-building. That's what football is. Nowadays, he'd probably get done for bullying for that, whereas I was pretty soft, but I still wouldn't change it."
"He made my life hell but it was always with a smile and a grin. He was the captain of a Premiership-winning team and he knew my name. To me, it made me think he thought something of me."
Duff talks about some of the other hazing rituals that went on at football clubs during his teenage years --- naked ice baths, doing saunas with your clothes on, pouring cups of urine on people --- which have mostly been removed from the game now. It's a bygone world of football that he describes - cleaning showers, going to youth matches in Hiace vans driven by Alan Irvine.
But as he makes clear, it's that environment that forged him. And the moneyed atmosphere of today's youth football world is clearly corroding the game.
There's much more on Duffer's career below:
