Romsey lad, Andy Cook,

a neat, left-sided player, possibly the quickest at the club,

made his debut, at left-back, at the start of the 1987-88 season, filling a two-match hiatus between the departure of Mark Dennis and the arrival of Derek Statham. Andy would get a couple of games in each of the following seasons but, by the autumn of 1989, he was competing not only with Micky Adams and Franny Benali, but with a catalog of back- and hamstring-injuries, plus a double hernia-operation. He managed a few more appearances in 1990-91, mostly playing wide left, and had agreed on a new three-year contract with Chris Nicholl. But then Nicholl was sacked. As Ian Branfoot settled in, Andy was recovering from the removal of part of a disc from his back. Having lost some of his paces – he claims to have become “even slower than Neil Ruddock” – he settled for third-tier football under Alan Ball at Exeter.

After playing fairly regularly during two seasons with the Grecians, he turned down a further two years, opting to remain in that division, at Swansea. The injury jinx struck again when he broke his right leg at Hartlepool, taking a “hospital pass” from a team-mate. The timing was awful: it cost Andy a Wembley appearance when the Swans won the Autoglass Trophy in 1994. Hamstring and ligament problems restricted him to just a handful of appearances each for Portsmouth and Millwall.

Now the wrong side of 30, he accepted an offer from Salisbury City, not only to play but to develop, from scratch, a role as Football-in-the-Community Officer. After around 250 games for Salisbury, many of them for Nick Holmes, a broken left leg finished his playing days. He managed the Reserves for a while and had his first shot at physiotherapy. Given his experiences on the treatment table, it’s perhaps not surprising that he has pursued a career in sports injuries. After a spell as physio, and then caretaker-manager, at Woking, he became Eastleigh’s physiotherapist in 2009 and was still there 10 years later. Having obtained a degree in Sports Therapy along the way, he devotes the rest of his time to running his own practice in Romsey.