Daniel Taylor
There has not been such a kerfuffle in Stamford since its last famous resident passed away in 1809. The townsfolk have waited a long time to fte a home-grown celebrity, and the emergence of the archetypal local-boy-done-good could hardly have gone unnoticed in a town which is usually prefixed by the word “sleepy”.
The town’s only other claim to fame is as the burial place of England’s fattest man, so the meteoric rise of Malcolm Christie has been cause for much celebration in this tranquil corner of Lincolnshire. After gatecrashing the English premier league with five goals in his first six starts, Christie signed a new four-year contract at Derby recently to make himself one of the club’s highest earners.
His form suggests the premiership’s latest goalscoring prodigy may have the temerity to upstage Liverpool’s Michael Owen and Emile Heskey soon; no small feat for someone who was stacking shelves at a Somerfield store less than two years ago.
It has hardly been a conventional route for a player whose swift acclimatisation to the top echelon has been the catalyst for Derby’s significant improvement recently.
Yet Christie is anything but the stereotypical footballer: he lives with his parents, drives a middle-of-the-road car and still shops at the supermarket that used to pay his wages. In an industry engulfed by extravagance, his boy-next-door demeanour is unfashionable yet refreshing.
“People may think it’s a sleepy old place but it suits me and I like the family life,” he says. “Everyone at home just thinks of me as Malcolm, the lad who used to play in the local Sunday league and work in the supermarket.
“Working at Somerfield was just a necessity to get some money while I was playing non-league and studying at college for a diploma in business and finance. Professional football was still just a dream and I was thinking about a career elsewhere. So I took a job working in the dairy at Somerfield, putting out the orders of milk, yoghurt, cheese and so on.
“It was a bit boring doing the same things every day but it’s given me a sense of perspective. You see a lot of young lads who have come through the youth systems and they don’t know what real work is. I’ve come into football the hard way. It’s only now I’m getting the rewards.”
In the grand scale of things the 55 000 manager Jim Smith paid for Christie 18 months ago scarcely merited a paragraph. But his introduction has left such an impression that Smith decided to reward the 20-year-old with vastly improved terms.
“He reminds me a lot of Gary Lineker,” says Smith. “I don’t always like making those sort of comparisons but they have the same eye for goal, similar movement and positional sense. They’ve even got the same temperament.
“When you look at some of the prices being bandied about these days, unbelievable figures for average players, you have to say we have got ourselves a real bargain.”
For someone not given to rash statements, Smith’s assessment speaks volumes about the progress of a player who has averaged almost a goal every game in his career, from Market Deeping Rangers in the Peterborough League to Nuneaton Borough in the Nationwide Conference.
At this rate Christie could find the day approaching when he is opening supermarkets. In the meantime he will continue to lead as normal a life as possible for someone fast gaining celebrity status in the town he calls home.
“I don’t think of myself as a different person,” he says. “The only thing that’s really different is my bedroom. I used to be a Manchester United nut and it was a shrine to my favourite players. But I’ve had it redone now. I’ve gone off United a bit, especially after they beat us.”
On Saturday afternoons the staff at Somerfield gather around a radio to find out how their former colleague is faring. “The lads in the butchery keep everyone informed about whether he has scored,” says the dairy supervisor Sharon Barnes. “This town isn’t used to having famous people on our own doorstep, so we make the most of them when they come along.”
They still have a lifesize model of Daniel Lambert, all 330kg of him, in the museum on Broad Street. He could soon have a bantamweight challenger for the title of Stamford’s best-known export.