Charlie Adam is preparing for the game against Manchester United on Sunday that might secure Blackpool's place in the Barclay's Premier League, while Chris Burke is coming to terms with Cardiff City's failure to reach the npower Championship play-off final on Tuesday night.
Their concerns, in terms of football, are pressing, but also of a starkly different nature to many of the youth players they worked alongside at Murray Park.
Ten years have passed since Blue Heaven was recorded, a BBC Scotland documentary that followed the experiences of a group of boys training with Rangers, and featured Adam and Burke. A follow-up has been made, highlighting the fortunes of six of the players from the original series, with Adam and Burke the most successful.
Darryl Duffy has played for seven clubs in nine years since leaving Rangers, while Jordan McMillan is the only player still at Murray Park, although he spent much of this season on loan at Wrexham. But it is the experiences of the other three players which tells of the challenges faced moving from youth to senior football.
David Ford, a quick and skilful winger, was released at the end of the original Blue Heaven because he was too small. He has barely played football since, and now stacks shelves on the night shift at an ASDA store. John Johnstone, a tall but limited striker, made his way through the lower leagues and now plays for Arthurlie, the junior side, while working as a roughcaster.
And Callum Reidford, a goalkeeper, was playing part-time for Stirling Albion this season, although he was unemployed for a spell after being made redundant from his job at a shipyard. Only Ford seems to retain resentment. The original footage saw him being told by Jan Derks, then the head of youth at Murray Park, that he was too small. Ford drifted out of the game, and he talks poignantly about losing his dad to Motor Neurone Disease three years ago.
“It was really bad for the family,” he said. “He was the top man, in my eyes anyway. I’m going to play football again. The best I’d get now is amateur.” Adam talks about being frustrated at not playing often enough for Rangers – “I’d come in for an Old Firm game, then I wouldn’t play again for five or six weeks” – and Burke admits that he moved to Cardiff for the same reason. McMillan, too, is facing a similar decision, with only one year left on his contract.
For Reidford, the story is one of application.
“My attitude was stinking for a couple of years, I was leaving Murray Park early,” he says. “If I had the chance now, I’d be there all the time. Cars were my problem with the money. That’s what I regret, the stupidity of a young boy with too much money.”
For Adam and Burke, Murray Park was a beginning. Duffy and McMillan are still in the game, but for the others there is a sense of loss.
n Blue Heaven – Where Are They Now, Tuesday 24 May, BBC Two Scotland, 9-10pm
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