Some footballers you meet professionally and instinctively warm to personally. Like Patrick Bamford. It’s partly because of all the stories of what a good guy he is. Driving up to Middlesbrough during his first spell there in 2014/15, Bamford would drop by his friend and old MK Dons team-mate Dele Alli in Milton Keynes just to check up on him, check he was eating properly. Bamford is a person who makes friends easily because he cares about people.
It says something about Bamford’s appealing character that the famously reserved Marcelo Bielsa once ran across Leeds United’s first-team training pitch at Thorp Arch to embrace the forward. Bamford was returning from injury and had just struck a superb goal. Bielsa was delighted for Bamford, and showed it.
I was at Crystal Palace’s training ground in 2015, looking for someone, and Bamford went out of his way to help. We’d never met before, I was just a lost visitor to him, yet he stopped and gave me directions. He sums up that old life mantra of parents to offspring of “work hard and be nice to people”. I interviewed him once at Thorp Arch and the photographer wanted a different angle, so Bamford climbed up a pylon.
He's also popular because he wears his many talents lightly: schoolboy tennis star; accomplished pianist; played guitar on stage with Kaiser Chiefs wearing a Viduka 9 shirt; entertaining podcaster; multi-lingual and very bright academically, four A levels, famously even offered a place at Harvard.