The world was at his feet

We had a pretty decent team at our school. One of them went on to Sheffield United and, although things did not work out for him there, he is now enjoying life at FC United.

Others, like myself and 2008 Apprentice star Alex Wotherspoon, had to be content with a place in the B team – a side more for the willing than the highly talented.

But no-one at our school compared to Collett when it came to football.

When he arrived at the age of eight, he was a slight and reserved figure. An unremarkable character.

But word spread pretty quickly. This kid could play.

People tended to stick to their own age groups but Collett was straight into the school team, still two years younger than everyone else.

A clever player with an eye for goal, he was a star. The world was at his feet.

This week, Collett made national headlines after being awarded £4.5m in compensation for a football career wrecked by injury.

He had been Manchester United Academy’s young player of the year before a broken leg on his reserve-team debut in 2003 destroyed his career’s gathering momentum.

He missed out on the three-year professional contract that was about to come his way and, although he did return for the reserves, things were never the same.

Spells with New Zealand Knights and Dutch minnows AGOVV Apeldoorn shortly preceded retirement.

I have never seen the tackle, committed by then Middlesbrough youngster Gary Smith, so it would be unfair to judge the validity of the compensation ruling.

To many £4.5m will be a surprisingly large sum and it would be easy to label this 23-year-old as another money-grabbing wannabe and tar him with the same brush as all other professional footballers.

But, from my experience, Collett just wasn’t like that.

I do not recall any of the cockiness you might expect from a kid so far ahead of his peers in a sport that is so fashionable.

He seemed quiet, intelligent and remarkably focused – the latter a point acknowledged by Sir Alex Ferguson during the recent hearing.

No matter what one thinks about the figure of £4.5m, that Collett’s career faded away is a great pity.

I am pretty confident he will not waste that money on an array of Bentleys and £200,000 kitchens.

He may have chosen to sign for Manchester United, but Collett is one of the good guys.

* A confession here on my part. Whether it’s the Olympics or a major football tournament, I like a good theme tune and opening titles.

After an excellent tradition in this field, the BBC have gone all cartoon on us for Euro 2008 and the Olympics.

It took me until Tuesday before an older colleague informed me that the whole monkey thing was, among other things, a reference to a cartoon from the 1980s.

I wasn’t the only one wondering what on earth it was all about, and even now I know I’m still not sure what it has to do with the Olympics.

Stick to the sport next time, please.