“Mark Clattenburg said I threatened to follow him home, which I didn’t. He said I threatened to set fire to his car, which I probably did. He said he’d never felt less safe in his career and had to hide in his dressing room for two hours after the game.”
This is one of those anecdotes which ups the ante with every sentence and there will come a time when Simon Walton no longer wants to tell it. He disliked Clattenburg intensely — “He was an absolute idiot. So arrogant. Most referees you could have a laugh with but not him” — but a coaching career is beckoning and preaching good discipline comes with that territory.
“If you asked anyone they’d say I’m still an angry guy,” Walton jokes, and nine red cards as a player have him bang to rights before he starts detailing his run-in with Clattenburg. Walton likes to be transparent, a self-professed hothead, and in an eight-match stint as Maidstone’s caretaker manager last season he was booked twice in the dug-out. “That’s not a good thing,” he says. “Even I’m thinking ‘come on, that can’t happen anymore.’ Believe it or not, I’m growing up.”
This is Walton’s 17th year as a professional and he began it as a 31-year-old, which says something about the fledgling he was when he broke through at Leeds United. History has him as the second-youngest player ever to turn out for the club, beaten only by the incomparable Peter Lorimer and a margin of 405 days.
Today Walton holds the position of player-coach with National League South side Havant and Waterlooville and, on this Wednesday morning, training has fallen to him. Havant’s manager Paul Doswell is otherwise engaged and his assistant, the former Leeds striker Ian Baird, is in Spain. Walton’s father tended Baird’s garden when the striker was at Elland Road in the 1980s. “If he was here, it’s the first thing he’d have told you about,” Walton says, with a roll of his eyes.
In Yorkshire, the last clear memory of Walton might be the day in 2007 when he lost his rag with Clattenburg near the end of a game between Leeds and Cardiff City. Clattenburg sent him off for diving six minutes from time and a furious Walton — then on loan at Ninian Park — stuck his foot through the fourth official’s electric board as he walked towards the tunnel. “That cost me eight grand and a trip to the Welsh FA,” he says. “The defence Peter Ridsdale (Cardiff’s chairman) gave was ‘well, it was in his way.’ I didn’t stand much of a chance and Clattenburg was accusing me of all sorts. Ridsdale ended up paying the fine for me.”
Walton’s career was like that from the get-go; a feisty and uncompromising midfielder who was prone to incidents — not all of them his fault — which held him back. When you speak to Walton, there is no trace of aggression in him; only humour and some frank, such-is-life honesty about the path he is on. Havant’s players are responsive to him and run through his session diligently on an artificial pitch around the corner from the stadium. He fires constant instructions at them: “Keep the tempo up, stay behind the ball, one touch only.” The precision of the work makes the point about how rapidly the standard of the non-League game is improving.
Walton is 32 with a body that tells him he ought to be knocking 40 by now. There are early starters in professional football and there are players like Walton, a wunderkind who was catapulted into the first team at Leeds on his very first day as a full-time scholar.
He was 16 and already marked out as a special talent but the speed of his trajectory was enforced. The club had been relegated from the Premier League, countless players were leaving and the chaos in the foreground was difficult to exaggerate. Kevin Blackwell, Leeds’ newly-appointed manager, was beginning preparations for the Championship with a threadbare dressing room. “It was needs must,” Walton says. “On day one there were about eight of us in first-team training, which is probably the reason I was there.
“If you look at how academies work now, I missed out on almost the whole process. I skipped through about four stages. Peter Reid had given me a taste in the previous season, not as a treat but as a bit of experience because he thought I was doing well. I trained with the first team a few times and I travelled to a couple of games. It was the sort of gentle thing you do with kids.
“I dislocated my shoulder in a youth cup game and missed the end of that season so in my head I needed to get going again. But on the first day back, my first day of training full-time, I was basically a first-team player. It sounds crazy and it was crazy but I won’t lie. I was absolutely buzzing.”
There are relatively few coaching or medical staff who would countenance progress so quick. As Walton concedes, 16-year-olds making regular senior appearances are extremely irregular. But he was physically strong, a ball-winning scrapper who loved a tackle, and he wasted no time throwing his weight about at Thorp Arch.
“I was a boy in a man’s body,” Walton says. “I had Jonny Howson at the same youth level as me and if you’d looked at Jonny back then, you’d never have dreamed of putting him in the first team. He was the total opposite: skinny and needing to go through more of the process, which he did.
“The first team wasn’t totally new to me. I’d played in the reserves when the reserves were serious. My first game was at Liverpool and I had Ian Harte at left-back, Lucas Radebe at centre-back and Michael Bridges up front because he was coming back from injury. Scotty Carson and James Milner were playing at that time. It was a proper level.
“At first we’d come to an agreement with my school that I’d miss Fridays to train with the full-time lads. So my mates were there doing lessons and I’m at Thorp Arch training with Mark Viduka and David Batty, my idol. The education officer wasn’t very happy and that all came to a head after a while but my only thought was ‘Sweet. This is brilliant'”.
Walton lived in Garforth on the east side of Leeds and went to Sherburn High School before studying at Boston Spa as his coaching at Thorp Arch reached a more serious level. There was a constant conflict of interests between football and education and Walton left school after scoring his first senior goal away at Reading during a midweek game in October 2004.
“I was supposed to do a test the next day but we got back so late from Reading that I missed it,” Walton says. “The school got in touch to say I was wasting their time. Blackie (Blackwell) told me I should leave and focus on football so I did. You’re 16 and being told you don’t have to go to school because you’ve got a career as a footballer. It’s not a hard sell.”
Walton’s stock had been rising for several months, fuelled by transfers out of Elland Road. Leeds were compelled to cut their cloth by relegation and Alan Smith went to Manchester United. Newcastle United bought James Milner. And Batty — after an unhappy period in which caretaker Eddie Gray refused to play him — retired. A deflated and unimpressed fan base asked who the next homegrown sensation would be. Walton looked like the one.
Attention on him intensified in July 2004 when he scored and was sent off in a pre-season friendly against Valencia at Elland Road. It was Walton all over. Blackwell had asked beforehand who wanted to take penalties and Walton stuck his hand up.
“We had older players there, like Michael Ricketts who was above his station at the best of times, who moaned and were obviously thinking ‘who the **** does this kid think he is?’ But I wasn’t bothered.” In the second half, Brian Deane was fouled in Valencia’s box and Walton, in front of the Kop, earned a 2-2 draw by whipping a penalty into the bottom corner. “It was a pretty tense moment,” he says. “You go from being full of it and confident about penalties to thinking ‘there are 20,000 watching. Oh shit!'”
Walton had already been booked for one foul — “quite an achievement in a pre-season friendly” — when he failed to hear the referee’s whistle and dived into another tackle, leading to a scuffle in the middle of the pitch. Blackwell took his sending off lightly and gave Walton a high-five as he left the field but their smiles were gone on Monday morning when the FA informed Walton that he would be hit with a four-game ban. It complicated Blackwell’s plan to hand him a competitive debut against Derby County on the first day of the Championship season.
“It wasn’t a laughing matter,” Walton says. “We joked about it at first but on the Monday Blackie pulled me in and said ‘you’ve killed yourself here’. Surprisingly enough, I had a suspension hanging over from the previous season. But somehow the club secretary, Ian Silvester, wangled it so the ban would apply to Under-18 and reserve matches. It was only a couple of days before the opening game when I knew I’d be able to make my debut.”
Walton was 16 years and 329 days old when he appeared against Derby on August 7th 2004, a little short of Lorimer’s record of 15 years and 289 days. “It brought me a hell of a lot of attention,” Walton says. “The Valencia game was the start of it. It was the first time I’d thought ‘Jesus!’ I was in every national paper and I can remember some of the headlines — ‘Red Hot’, ‘Teen Sensation’, all that sort of stuff.
“I heard some comments from Gary McAllister comparing me to Batty, my favourite player. You do get a bit carried away. I didn’t go big-time or anything like that but you can’t not be affected by all that going on around you. You get swept up in it all. I was getting asked to do interviews all the time but Blackie stopped me speaking to anyone until around Christmas.”
Blackwell had ways of keeping Walton in check. He would force the midfielder to wash his car from time to time and Walton kept the job of cleaning the away dressing room after games at Elland Road. “It was bizarre because I’d play, get changed into my matchday suit, wait for the opposition to leave and then sweep it out,” he says. “It was hard love and I wasn’t always happy with it. There were times when I felt like people were batting me down just because they could.
“I’m grateful to Blackie for giving me my debut but we didn’t always see eye-to-eye. I’m hot-headed and I speak my mind. Some of what went on I agreed with, some of it I didn’t and if I wasn’t happy then I said what was in my head. Some of the scuffles I used to have in training, even at 16… but it’s one of the reasons I got on so quickly. The other lads loved it.”
Over two years, Walton made only a small splash at Elland Road, in and out of the team and rarely used on the way to the Championship play-off final in 2006. His abiding memory of that game is the way in which it dictated his career. Leeds were in perilous financial straits; stable enough if they won promotion to the Premier League but destined for serious hardship and probable insolvency if they didn’t.
Walton, who was worth a decent fee, says he was called into a meeting with chairman Ken Bates before the final and told he would be sold if Leeds were beaten by Watford (they were ultimately trounced 3-0 at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff). An angry Walton insisted he had no intention of leaving.
Publicly, Walton’s departure to Charlton Athletic for £500,000 a month later came as a surprise. “It wasn’t a surprise to me,” Walton says. “I’d been told in no uncertain terms that I’d be going if we didn’t go up. The club needed the money. That was it.
“Ken Bates pulled me into a meeting and said there were five offers on the table. If we didn’t go up they’d be taking one of them. But I didn’t want to leave and I wasn’t going to take that so I told him straight. His response was ‘you better hope we win on Sunday then’.
“I’d already turned down other clubs the previous summer. I could have gone to Liverpool, I could have gone to Spurs like Aaron (Lennon) but I was a Leeds fan. I’d had a season ticket for years, including the season when I made my debut. I bought one then because I hadn’t expected to be in the first team. But it was made clear to me that I couldn’t stay and that things would be made difficult for me if I did.
“After the final, we all went back to St David’s Hotel in Cardiff. Everyone was there and I had a bit of a meltdown. I was 17, an aggressive little lad, and I was telling anyone who would listen ‘I’m ****ing going nowhere!’ But the agency I was with at the time, they talked me into it. They told me the club was about to go to shit. Which, in fairness, it did.”
Walton was so unhappy with his treatment that in the aftermath of his transfer to Charlton he stopped attending games while Bates was chairman. He gets to Elland Road whenever he can now and was at Leeds’ play-off semi-final ties last season but the manner of his exit, the cold nature of it, left a “very bitter taste”.
“For a while I had no interest in going,” he says. “I didn’t fall out of love with the club because I’d never do that but I didn’t want to be at games while he (Bates) was around. I read something from him where he said that I thought I’d outgrown the club and that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Other players were getting bad-mouthed too. I wasn’t having it.
“The season after I left was a shambles and when they got relegated (to League One), I was gutted about it like any other fan. But where he was concerned I did think ‘it serves you right’. I’ve never spoken to him or bumped into him since. It’s probably for the best because I’d say things I’d regret.”
Walton has seen the world in English footballing terms and Havant and Waterlooville are his 19th club. Leeds account for only 37 of his appearances but he has made more than 400 in his career and the view that he underachieved is not one he shares. “I should have played more than I did at a higher level and sometimes I look back and think ‘what if?’ But if I look at it sensibly and when I really think about it, I’ve done alright.”
On several occasions he was cursed with bad luck. Walton chose Charlton because the club were established in the Premier League, knocking on the door of Europe and in good health under Alan Curbishley. But after 15 years in charge, Curbishley stood aside in the summer that Walton joined, causing Charlton to lose their stability and the plot. “I had three different managers in the season I was there,” Walton says. “It was just my luck. I go to a club who were going places and straight away they start to fall apart.”
He took a loan to Ipswich Town and played, by his reckoning, the best football of his life there. But around Christmas in 2006, Charlton recalled him with the promise that he would play in the Premier League. Walton went back and expected to be involved away at Arsenal on January 2 but the managerial reins at The Valley passed from Les Reed to Alan Pardew and everything changed.
“I knew what the shape would be for Arsenal and as far as I was aware I’d be going there and playing,” Walton says. “When we got the teamsheet I wasn’t even on the bench. Pardew was straight up about it. He just said he needed more experience. That was how it went.”
It was not all bad. Charlton housed Walton in an apartment in Canary Wharf, a 19-year-old with everything at his fingertips, and he made the most of it. “I didn’t go over the top but I was no James Milner angel, put it that way,” he says. “I don’t think I ate in that flat once.
“It was a total change of scene, a lad from Garforth on his own in Canary Wharf. I was late for my first game — a pre-season game, fortunately — because it took me two hours and six minutes to drive six miles to The Valley. I’ve never forgotten that battle with the Blackwall Tunnel.”
Football had a way of doing him in. He sealed a £200,000 move to Queens Park Rangers a year after leaving Leeds for London but broke a leg in pre-season. A couple of years later, he accepted what he thought was an exciting transfer from Plymouth Argyle to Sheffield United, where Blackwell was manager, and was promised that 10 games on loan at Bramall Lane would be enough to convince Sheffield United’s board to pay the money to sign him permanently. In his first game, he ruptured ligaments in one knee.
“Sheffield United was the injury that really killed me,” Walton says. “That was a bad time mentally. I was only 23 and it was the second time I’d been unlucky like that. I thought I’d get my contract and get through 10 games easy. I didn’t even make it through one.”
But here he is, nine years later, edging into management and outwardly content. It is crass to say everything happens for a reason but Walton stayed in London after joining Charlton and has found work with Chelsea’s academy, one part of their vast scouting network. Havant and Waterlooville are knocking on the door of promotion from National League South and they are the equivalent of a full-time set-up, with breakfast and lunch laid on for the players (it’s a very moreish lasagne today) and a full backroom team in place. Doswell insisted on Havant training during the day rather than working to an evening schedule.
Non-League is a serious environment and Walton says every team he has played for at this level proved to be more organised than Crawley Town, the last EFL team he turned out for. Crawley had no established training ground and there were days when Walton and his team-mates would be waiting until an hour before a session to find out where it was taking place.
“Non-League isn’t non-League as you used to think of it. If you watch the games, whatever you think of the quality, the desire is 100 per cent there. The National League is basically professional nowadays. Jobs are on the line.”
So much so that on the night before taking training at Havant, Walton sat and mapped out a plan from start to finish: the rondos, the three-on-threes, the short games where space is limited and players rotate in and out. There are older heads than Walton here — Nicky Bailey, the ex-Millwall and Middlesbrough midfielder is one of them — and their respect for him depends on the quality of his drills.
“Before I started coaching, I’d have been with my missus having a drink and thinking about anything other than football,” he says. “I get a buzz off playing still but coaching is new and fresh and I’m serious about it. I sat for ages last night writing a plan. You can’t just turn up and wing it. The lads wouldn’t have it.”
You can almost hear the transition from centre circle to technical area, the softening of a temperament which might almost stretch far enough to give Clattenburg the benefit of the doubt. “It’s still there,” Walton says. “You are what you are and you can’t be soft. But yeah, I’m changing.”
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