The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (50)

Ready, Fire, Aim (Again)

The football team I coach won again on Sunday, 3-1, away to Ravenshead, a team close to Mansfield in north Nottingham.

We're in a solid second place in the league.

We won't win the league this year because there's a team that should be in Division One (we're in Division Three), but they were put in the wrong league.

Even still, we were very close to them, but we will just be pipped at the post in the end because they won't lose any more games, and we've already played them twice.

I was never meant to be a football coach, and I had no intention of becoming one. I never really wanted to become one, and if you'd asked me, I would have said no.

But we have had the most extraordinary journey as a group, and we have two years left; it will continue to be extraordinary until I'm sad that it's finished, even though I bitch about it every Thursday night that we have to train for two hours between seven and nine.

I didn't plan to become a football coach. I didn't write it out, create a manifesto, get elected, and meticulously envision the next eight, nine or ten years of my life in football coaching before I started weighing up the pros and cons to make sure it was worth it in so many ways. I just started, tried my best, and made it up as I went along.

In the end, no one will really remember what the Mustangs did except for the Mustangs.

But sometimes you just have to begin ready fire and then aim.

If you wait for perfect conditions, somebody else will already be past you and on the way to finishing, and you may have missed your chance.

Don't wait for perfect conditions or a map to the finish line; neither of them will ever materialise.