Patrick Bamford and the art of making memories and friends
Striker leaves Leeds United
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.