Berkhamsted Raiders thrilled with visit from England legend John Barnes

John Barnes gives advice to youngsters at Berkhamsted Raiders.

Published on 26/02/2013 13:25

Berkhamsted Raiders enjoyed a morning with England legend John Barnes when the ex-Watford and Liverpool player visited the club to help promote the 2013 FA Community Awards,

The club was the winner of the Regional FA Chartered Standard Community Club award at last year’s FA Community Awards and has continued to develop since then.

The Raiders currently boast 56 teams – starting with the U7s and going all the way through to the adult and veterans teams.

There seven girls teams and a ladies team, and a total of around 700 children play football at the club.

Whilst in Berkhamsted, Barnes caught up with Raiders chairman Keith Pollard and watched a training session, before taking questions about his own grassroots career and his community heroes.

He said: “Grassroots football is the lifeblood of the national game and without it football simply wouldn’t exist.

“The coaches and volunteers who sacrifice their time for these young footballers are priceless and deserve all the recognition they get from the FA Community Awards.

“I still remember the various coaches to this day standing in the rain when I was a young player for my local team. They wanted us to play well but more importantly to just have fun.”

Pollard added: “It was a fabulous day for the club as John is a real hero here and to see him with the kids, talking about his career and overseeing today’s training session will stay with us all for a long time.

“Winning the regional FA Chartered Standard Community Club award last year was a great boost for the club and it was fantastic to see all of our hard work paying off.

“At Berkhamsted we strive to offer grassroots football to the entire community and ensure that as many children as possible can enjoy the game we love so much.”

Nominations for the 2013 FA Community Awards, presented by McDonald’s, are now open.

To vote for a football coach, club or volunteer go to www.mcdonalds.co.uk/awards

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Berkhamsted Raiders thrilled with visit from England legend John Barnes

Top stories

Sport