DRUG TESTS AND CHEAP SUITS, IT'S ALL PART OF THE ROMANCE

KEVIN NICHOLSON LOOKS BACK ON A CAREER OF HIGHS AND LOWS

- MATT BADCOCK

TORQUAY UNITED had just won promotion to the Football League at Wembley but Kevin Nicholson wasn’t celebrating in the dressing room with his teammates.

Instead, he was in a small room in the bowels of the national stadium with a drug tester desperately trying to provide a sample.

“It was about 80 degrees at Wembley and I was dehydrated,” Nicholson recalls of that May afternoon in 2009. “There are all these pictures of the lads in the dressing room popping champagne and I’m not in any of them because I’m downstairs with a bloke looking at me trying to have a pee.

“They have to literally watch you do it. It’s hard enough to pee with someone watching you whether you’re hydrated or not. So I was down there, downing bottles of water, desperate to get back up with the lads and couldn’t. By the time I did they’d all got ready and gone to see their families. My dad came to the game but I didn’t get to see him because I’d been so long he’d had to shoot off !”

Until then it had been all business for the Gulls. A year earlier they’d had a good season that had “come apart” in the play-offs against rivals Exeter City. Their bid to put a shine on the season also slipped by when they lost to Ebbsfleet United in the FA Trophy final. This was about redemption.

“We were really, really good for that level,” says Nicholson, now head of coaching at Exeter. “Paul Buckle put together a team whose biggest strength was its mentality. The bulk of the squad was at its peak and he peppered it with lads with a bit more experience who could steady the ship like Chris Hargreaves.