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Once a series of hamstring and knee injuries had brought his playing days to a premature end, he would retrain as a physiotherapist and eventually return to St James’s Park, working during the high times under Keegan and then the rollercoaster reigns of Kenny Dalglish, Ruud Gullit, Graeme Souness and Bobby Robson as anarchy at times descended upon the Toon. But then the 52-year-old former footballer from Northern Ireland is well used to life dealing him a difficult hand. I was in hospital the February after getting my prostate out when I got the offer from [publishing company] Hodder. When I was getting treatment then, I wanted to wait until it was all over before the book came out.” The Boy on the Shed reveals an impressive triumph of human resilience over adversity as well as a truly gifted wordsmith. * Sunday Mirror *
I couldn’t help sneaking in a few chapters just after it arrived, and it centred around Ferris’ younger years in Northern Ireland during the height of the troubles. But I saved the main consumption until I was on holiday over Christmas and in a position to spend some quality time reading. I was glad I did. The storyline grows as the author grows, and the book has a sort of half-time. Growing up and rising to fame is the first half. The half time break is where injury strikes, and the second half of the story takes the reader right up to the present day. Injury after injury saw Ferris spend more time on the treatment table than on the pitch, and robbed him of the natural gifts of speed and mobility that had set him apart. At 21, he left St James’s Park for the first time. Whether that’s the right way for football to go, I’m not sure, but after five years of being a professional footballer to walk away with nothing… football was a very different game then. It wasn’t in the stratosphere then that it is now.” Ferris was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. In 1981, he signed for Newcastle United from Lisburn Youth in Northern Ireland and became the club's youngest ever debutant when he appeared aged just 16 years and 294 days. He scored his only senior goal against Bradford City in 1984. A medial ligament injury meant he played just 14 matches and moved to Barrow F.C., with whom he won the FA Trophy at Wembley before moving into local non-league football with Gateshead. Ferris was far from a typical footballer (those usually being lads who never had the academic ability to excel at anything beyond the sports arena); as his disillusionment with the game he loved to play grew, so blossomed a calling to a different career: the law. He tells us all about that journey, too.Football memoirs rarely produce great literature but Ferris's The Boy on the Shed is a glistening exception.' Guardian This is a brave yet humorous book which will serve a valuable purpose by highlighting that this disease can be beaten and hopefully encouraging that every man goes and gets a PSA test regularly a prevention is far better than cure. I also think of my brother-in-law’s brother, who was shot dead by loyalists. Like my mother and father, he was non-political. All of them just wanted to bring up their children as best they could. A lot of people like them suffered at the hands of the IRA as well.” It is also not a run-of-the-mill book about football, but a well-rounded, exceedingly candid account of his life on and off the pitch and of his family, warts and all. ( Belfast Telegraph)
Paul Ferris has a good story to tell, in fact several, Irish and Geordie, politics and football, and he tells it well, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of trying to be either lyrical or philosophical or too clever. ( Hunter Davies) It felt a lot of time was spent on the first half of the book and very little on the second half. The first half was a better book. In particular, his early days as an apprentice footballer are by far the best read. Today, thanks to a chance meeting with multi-millionaire businessman Graham Wylie, Paul is the managing director of a health and fitness company that recently opened five new outlets and plans to open several more in the coming months.
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Yet while such landmark events would inspire worry of one kind, it was nothing compared with the fear he felt every single day that his mother’s worsening heart condition would take her from him. My brother Patsy died in his late 50s. Joseph had a bypass many years ago. Elizabeth, my sister who doesn’t smoke or drink, has had two stents put in, my brother Eamonn has had two stents I think put in, my sister Denise has had a stent, my brother Tony in New Zealand – who was an ex-professional footballer – has had stents. Paul Ferris (born 10 July 1965) is a Northern Irish former footballer, physiotherapist for Newcastle United, barrister and author. I'm a big football fan and a big book fan so I read a lot of football biographies and autobiographies. However, what I've learnt is that you shouldn't read too many football books in a short space of time otherwise they tend to merge into one. And to a degree, that's what happened here. I read 'The Boy on the Shed' straight after reading another football autobiography and what do you know, there were some common themes: talented youngster stands out at a very young age, dreams of achieving success at a glamorous club and is then bullied in his apprentice days. Football biogs then tend to describe the player's career at whichever level he ends up at. And so it goes for this book.
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