I was pleased to see last week that Dave Merrington was celebrating his 70th birthday.

I remember when I rang him to join the staff at The Dell.

He had left football and was doing council work in Burnley dealing with troubled youngsters.

He was quite surprised to get my call and I said I wanted someone like him to come and coach my youngsters, who were not necessarily troubled but were in that 16-18-year-old range.

He asked for time to think and rang me a week later and said “I’ll come down to see you.”

He later told me: “The next day after we spoke there was a knock on our door and a gentleman said is ‘your house for sale?’ “My wife and I looked at each other and thought ‘this is a message’,” and he decided to come and talk.

My youth system was up and running by then and Dave has rightly been given great credit for helping through the youngsters I put him in charge of such as Matt Le Tissier, Alan Shearer, the Wallace brothers and the rest.

I wanted Dave to instil high standards in the youngsters off the pitch as well as on it, and he certainly did that.

He is of course a long-term pundit on local radio and so is still involved in football, as he should be.