Ex-Pompey striker Ryan Bird recalls ‘insane’ Fratton Park noise – and recalls personal heartache led to him contemplating quitting football last year

Injury permitting, the utility player will be part of the Slough Town squad for the play-off semi-final on July 25 - providing the Rebels beat Dartford this Sunday.

It could therefore be a glorious end to an extended 2019/20 season for the player who spent just over a year at Fratton Park after being plucked out of non-league football by then Blues boss Guy Whittingham.

It was a spell which included a short loan period at Hawks in September 2013, at the same time John Marquis first arrived at Portsmouth on loan from Millwall.

But Bird has revealed his personal tragedy which led to him thinking he might quit playing football shortly after signing for Slough last summer.

He told Slough’s website https://www.sloughtownfc.net/ about the heartache of his wife suffering a stillbirth.

‘It was a terrible time for us, something you don’t ever forget, something you don’t ever think you’re going to go through,’ said Bird.

‘When I started the new season I didn’t really want to play football, I didn’t really want to do anything, I was so close to quitting.

‘I said to the manager maybe I need a couple of weeks off or the whole season off … but the lads got me through it, they were a massive part of it.

‘I didn’t show any emotion at the time, I didn’t cry, everyone around me was showing emotion so I thought I had to stay strong for everyone else.

‘I just kept it tucked away, that’s how I deal with things.’

Bird scored his first Slough goal in an FA Cup tie against Chippenham last October - and he revealed the ‘emotion’ that greeted his strike.

‘The baby was due to be born around that time, so it was almost as if there was an angel looking down on us that day,’ he said.

‘The Chippenham goal made me release quite a lot of emotion.

‘We had a night out after that, I wasn’t going to go because that was the weekend our daughter was supposed to be born, but I got home and my wife said ‘you need to go out, it was a good day for everyone, have a few beers with the lads.’

‘It was a good night and that made me realise I need to carry on playing.’

Happily, Bird and his wife became parents during lockdown - the healthy baby now around 10 weeks old.

In a wide-ranging interview, Bird also spoke of his spell at Fratton Park and the club’s ‘amazing’ fans who produced an ‘insane’ amount of noise - even for games in the fourth tier.

But he also admitted Pompey’s poor form at the time was tough to handle, making for a ‘daunting’ atmosphere to play in.

Bird was catapulted into the Football League after scoring over 40 goals for Burnham in the Southern League Central Division - the same level of the pyramid as Moneyfields currently play at.

Whittingham had no doubt seen something of himself in Bird, given that the manager had started his career at non-league Yeovil Town in the late 80s before arriving at Fratton Park.

Bird was offered trials at Pompey and Wycombe, but signed for the former after scoring twice in a friendly against Hawks at Westleigh Park.

‘The assistant manager said if I did well they’d sign me, and I scored after about 40 seconds, a flukey goal,’ Bird recalled. ‘I scored again after about 20 minutes and at half-time I was getting changed, we were only playing 45 minutes each, and I was told I had a contract.

‘I was going to go on trial with Wycombe just to see what it was like. In hindsight, if I’d gone to Wycombe, I would have played a lot more games.

‘Portsmouth had just come down, they were still getting 14,000 crowds, they had a point to prove - they had to play senior guys to try and go back up again. I was never going to be starting every single week.

‘I had players like Patrick Agyemang in front of me, he’d played in the Prem, David Connolly played about 50 internationals .. it was one of those that because I’d done so well they thought they might as well take a chance on me.

‘It was hard adjusting ..the first week of pre-season I was getting home and just falling asleep because my legs were so bad.’

The Fratton Park faithful certainly left an impression on Bird.

‘The fans were amazing, some games it felt like a Premier League game, the fans were so loud,’ he recalled.

‘Our away fans were louder than any other home team crowd, they’d have 4-5,000 and if we had 500 our fans would always be louder.

‘I went through three managers when I was there, it was a bad time .. when there’s 14,000 fans and you’re not playing well they weren’t always encouraging you to be honest .. rightly so, it’s a massive club, they should be winning games.

‘Some times you went out there thinking ‘this is going to be daunting’, it was a bit of a hard time to be honest.

‘You’ve got to be tough to play there and not let the crowd get on top of you.

‘None of the managers really got it right and we almost ended up getting relegated to the Conference, and that would have been so bad for Portsmouth, I think they would have gone bust had that happened.

‘The expectations were so, so high every single week. You’re expected to win the league but we were nowhere near it to be honest.’

After six sub appearances in League Two - as well as his loan spell at Hawks - Bird was handed his first Pompey start in November 2013 against Exeter at home. He had scored his first goal for the club after coming off the bench at Torquay a week earlier.

It was a home debut to remember, Bird netting twice in a 3-2 victory.

‘The first one, it was a bit of a lucky header, it went down and looped over the keeper - when it went in, the noise was insane,’ he recalled.

Following Whittingham’s sacking later that month, Richie Barker took over and Bird’s appearances dried up - culminating in what would be a successful loan move to Cambridge United.

The switch saw him become a Wembley winner, Bird scoring the first goal as Cambridge - then in the Conference - defeated Gosport Borough 4-0 to lift the FA Trophy.

Bird had previously scored all three Cambridge goals in their 3-2 aggregate semi-final win over Grimsby Town.

He then picked up an injury which denied him another run-out at the national stadium - Cambridge returning to win the play-off final and book their EFL return ticket.

Having signed a two-year deal at Fratton Park, Bird was desperate to leave after just 12 months.

‘I wanted to rip my contract up, ‘I wasn’t really playing, coming on for 10 mins here and there,’ said the man who made five league starts for Pompey and another 15 off the bench.

‘I said to the captain Ben Chorley, ‘can you have a word with the manager (Andy Awford), I really want to leave’. Luckily he ended up having a word and I signed for Cambridge on deadline day (in August 2014).

‘I could have gone to other places, but I was so desperate to go back there as I’d enjoyed it so much.

‘They had four strikers but stupidly I thought I’d get in there because I’d done so well (in his loan spell). In hindsight, I shouldn’t have gone.’

The player has been constantly on the move ever since.

Bird spent a season at Yeovil, in 2015/16, before returning to Hampshire to sign for Eastleigh. But that was short-lived, and in early 2017 he was back in the EFL at League 2 strugglers Newport County.

Vital winners against Morecambe and Accrington helped the Welsh club narrowly avoid relegation.

Moving on again to Dover, Bird was one of the National League’s top scorers in 2017/18 with 16 goals. He then spent a season at Maidenhead before signing for Slough last summer.

Having started his career at Burnham in defence, before being converted to a striker, he returned to a defensive role in 2019/20.