The latest guest on our Bred a Blue podcast series is former Everton reserves goalkeeper, Jamie Speare.

By his own admission, the mention of his name to Toffees of a certain age will only prompt the response, ‘His name rings a bell’, but in the mid-late 1990s, Speare was one of a number of young goalkeepers waiting in vain for Neville Southall to give them a sniff of first-team action!

It never happened but Speare and the Blues legend struck up a friendship that has endured to this day. It wasn’t all plain sailing initially, though.

“Neville pushed me to the point that I nearly quit three weeks into the first month of my YTS,” Speare says. “He was giving that much stick out and I really didn’t know how to take it. My mum took it up with the Club, but Neville said to me, ‘If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t bother you’, and I thought, ‘Fair enough’.

“We got on great and still do. He drove all the way from Kent for my wedding, which he didn’t need to do.”

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Speare played youth team football with Graham Allen, Jon O’Connor, Gavin McCann, Jamie Milligan, John Hills, Phil Jevons, Michael Branch, Michael Ball and Richard Dunne, all of whom progressed to play senior football.

Speare came close, but just not close enough.

He played in a friendly against Aberdeen, made the odd substitutes’ bench in the Premier League and was in Joe Royle’s squads for the European Cup Winners’ Cup ties against Reykjavik and Feyenoord in 1995.

The closest he got to a senior appearance was against Blackburn Rovers, but it wasn’t as a goalkeeper!

“It was at Ewood Park and Anders Limpar went down injured,” he explains. “Joe had used all his other subs so he told me to get warmed up. Anders got back up, so I never got on!”

In this Bred a Blue conversation, Speare speaks openly about being released by Everton and talks us through his subsequent career – which included European football with Cwmbran Town, more than 300 appearances for Accrington Stanley and a short spell at Sligo Rovers.

These days, Speare in the assistant manager of Northern Premier League Division One West team Nantwich Town, after being set on his coaching career by a PFA-funded course.

It’s another fascinating story from a young man still involved in football after an Everton Academy upbringing.

Don’t miss the incredible story of the dramatic and historical Everton message that he mistakenly pulled off the fax machine at Bellefield while waiting for one for himself!

Listen to Bred A Blue below or by clicking here. To catch up on other episodes of Bred A Blue, featuring names including Phil Jevons, Matthew Pennington and Fraser Hornby, click here. 

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