Sweaty Balmer interviewed

Now assistant player-manager at Hamilton Academicals who are in the Scottish Cup quarter final tomorrow, former Charlton defender Sweaty Balmer is interiewed in The Times today. He was formerly at Clyde which I should have known as I 'follow' the Bully Wee in Scottish competitions given that they are the Cumbernauld team. His move north of the border makes sense given the impenetrability of his Glaswegian accent.

Sweaty talks about his time at The Valley:

Balmer’s own input at Clyde and Hamilton has owed much to the lessons he learnt from Alan Curbishley, his manager at Charlton. As a centre-back, Balmer was with the club when they returned to The Valley in the early 1990s, and a tinge of sentimentality enters Balmer’s conversation as he remembers those days.

“They were fantastic times,” he says. “I loved the game down there. It was just little short, sharp things with Curbs, such as instead of running 50 yards, how to run 10 yards and kill the space.

“It’s a lot more tactical down there; it’s about things like shape. We’re trying to introduce it here but it’s hard. You’re asking some players to do something that they can’t actually do, so the gaffer and I are trying to keep it simple in terms of passing and training routines.”

Full interview at: Sweaty