THE value of an honest day's work is not lost on Chris Erskine.
It is a remark which perhaps requires some context since the Partick Thistle midfielder was sat in a plush Glasgow hotel at three in the afternoon, talking football – a place on the shortlist for the Cheque Centre PFA Scotland Irn-Bru First Division Player of the Year seeming altogether rather cushy. That he will spend today handling the league silverware when Thistle are presented with the title only added to the idea that his has become a somewhat privileged lifestyle.
It is rich reward for establishing himself among the elite of the first division, although it discounts an impoverished upbringing in the game. Without a place in a senior club's youth system after he was discarded by Clyde in his early teens, Erksine was later ushered into the first team of Ayrshire junior club Kilbirnie Ladeside by a colleague of his step-father. It was intended to offer an outlet for a kickabout, with the rest of his life provided for by a job as a pipe fitter on the shipyards of Govan and Scotstoun. Instead it has opened the door to a career as a professional footballer.
Erskine will remove his Thistle jersey in the summer after four years at the club and pull on a Dundee United shirt having agreed a pre-contract earlier this month – alongside Firhill team-mate Paul Paton – but he has not been able to shed the vestment of his time on the shipyards. A four-year apprenticeship had made any ambition of playing football professionally seem lost in a different time, while the 6.30 starts awoke him to the need to graft in order to make ends meet. And the pipes, of course.
Now 26, it is an experience which seems welded to his character and he has sought to impress the value of enterprise on his younger team-mates. "Some of them don't realise how lucky they are that they're not getting up at six in the morning. But it goes in one ear and out the other with most of them," said Erksine.
"I know what the real world is about but it was a good job and was a lot like football in a way – you had a wee squad that you worked with every day, so it was similar to a dressing-room atmosphere. I've still got some of them on Facebook. I haven't seen them in person for a while but when it came out that I was going to Dundee United a lot of them got in contact. They said they would keep my tools, just in case."
The midfielder confided that he has felt "anxious" about moving on to Tannadice since his experience of full-time football is contained fully within his time at Thistle, a feeling that is unlikely to have been helped by the rest of the squad promising to give him a kick when they face each other in the top flight next season. Such apprehension will be assuaged by the sight of a trusted face in Jackie McNamara, though, the United manager having spent the first half of this season in charge at Firhill, where he inculcated Erskine with a confidence which has brought 15 goals, a cup final appearance and a championship medal this season.
"In terms of the kind of player I am, I try and get forward and be creative, and he was all for that," said Erskine. "He just encouraged me and that was one of the attractions to going to United."
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