NOTHING lasts forever in football. Players come and go on a frequent basis. Can anyone really remember all of the players we got through towards the end of the last decade? Trying to remember players who played in mediocre teams or, even worse, dreadful ones can be a bit of a challenge.

It’s much easier to remember players from winning teams. We know the role they played and how they made a contribution to success. With that in mind, it’s going to be pretty hard not to remember with a great deal of fondness the impact Gary Brown and Leon Scott have had on our wonderful little club.

The first real memory I have of Brown was watching him play in a pretty youthful side in a friendly at Richmond Town ahead of the Northern League season. Having heard the rumours that he liked a tackle and had seen more red than Arthur Scargill, it was with no surprise that he spent most of the game scything down players for fun. I remember thinking he was going to provide some interesting viewing when the season began. As it was, he was actually pretty restrained in comparison to that night below Richmond castle.

Immediately identified as the club captain, Brown epitomised the spirit and soul of the team in his first season. He was open and approachable, something that was a foreign concept to us fans used to much wider boundaries between us and the players. He was a whole different type of player than we’d seen before and we took him immediately to our hearts.

Willing to play wherever the manager told him to go, every club needs that guy who will literally throw his body in to anything. It’s amazing what spirit is engendered when the team and the fans see the guy with the captain’s armband run in to a brick wall for the cause. If there was a tackle to be had or a battle to be fought, Brown was almost always the first one in.

Not far behind him would be Leon Scott. Given the beast that is Scott, it’s easy to see why he developed a cult following so quickly. Like Brown, Scott’s commitment to the cause could never be questioned. There were almost always better players on the pitch than him but what he did best was give those players a platform to shine. Every team needs a ball winner and it is a testament to how good Scott was at winning the ball that every time we stepped up a level we still needed his unique brand of rough-housing the opposing midfield.

For me the biggest difference he made was in the NPL Premier League title winning side. Having found himself out of the team early in the season for the newly-arrived Phil Turnbull, Scott finally made his mark stiffening up the midfield at Mickleover and he never looked back. I thought he was our player of that season. Without his muscle alongside Turnbull I suspect we wouldn’t have won the league.

For all of the players who have come and gone in the last six years, without the consistent presence of Gary Brown and Leon Scott, guys who were trusted implicitly by the manager to the on field lieutenants, we probably wouldn’t have enjoyed half the success.

They will be rightfully remembered for their roles in our rejuvenation and they deserve every last piece of praise and appreciation that we can lavish. Good luck to both in their new ventures.