Ex-Rotherham, Fleetwood and Manchester United midfielder Gareth Evans: A part of me died when I left Portsmouth for Bradford

Non-league Radcliffe have reinvigorated the 34-year-old’s love for the game following a demoralising stay at Bradford which left him contemplating hanging up his boots.

Pompey was the time of his footballing life, five cherished south-coast years which yielded the League Two title, a Checkatrade Trophy triumph, the club captaincy, and birth of son Atlas.

Then, in September 2020, he departed for Bradford on a two-year deal, finally severing a relationship with manager Kenny Jackett fractured beyond repair.

After 218 appearances and 38 goals for the Blues, it was the opportunity for Evans to reunite with his native north – nine years after leaving his first stint at Valley Parade.

It brought the Macclesfield-born midfielder and wife Hazel close to their families, while offering the opportunity to represent an ambitious League Two club - except it wasn’t Pompey.

‘A part of me died when I left Fratton Park”, Evans admitted to The News.

‘I was of an age when I thought it’s not going to get any better than what I’ve just had. I’m not all of a sudden going to sign for a top Championship club – and if you’re not playing in the Championship then you aren’t getting any better than Pompey.

‘I knew joining Bradford was a massive step down, this was League Two, and within a week or two of being there it was pretty clear we weren't going to get any success.

‘I didn’t actually regret my decision until the second year when Derek Adams took over, when I was treated appallingly for obvious reasons. We just didn’t like each other and that season fizzled out.

‘Mark Hughes brought me back into the fold temporarily, but, by the end of the campaign I was shattered. Mentally I’d just had enough.

‘I remember being in a hotel room at Colchester in April. It had taken us seven hours to get there because of a crash on the motorway, while my little boy was badly ill at home.

‘We had individual rooms and I sat there on a Friday night thinking “What am I doing?”.

‘I’d done this for 15 years, we still had to go all the way back to Bradford, and I didn’t expect to play very much in the game. My whole weekend was dictated by football.

‘At that stage, I wasn’t playing massive amounts. I was training all week, then getting to the Saturday and not that involved.

‘After 15 years I’d had enough of travelling the length and breadth of the country every weekend. For midweek games I’d be getting in at 4am on Wednesday morning after an away match so you’re shattered all day on Wednesday, then it’s back to training on Thursday and Friday.

‘In that Colchester hotel room, it occurred to me I don’t really need this. You almost start thinking you’d be better off with a 9-5 job from Monday to Friday than doing this, at least you’re at home more often.

‘It was an accumulation of different stuff – I'd just had enough.’

It was Stuart McCall who brought Gareth Evans back for a second Bradford spell, having previously signed him 11 years earlier for £30,000.

Within eight months, he was on his third Bantams manager following a disappointing 15th place in League Two.

Even more of a concern to Evans was the identity of the latest boss – Derek Adams.

With a mutual antagonism going back six years earlier, emanating when Evans was at Pompey and the manager in charge of Plymouth, the frosty relationship didn’t thaw while working at Valley Parade together.

‘When I arrived, the Bradford team weren’t good enough for promotion, nowhere near,’ added the midfielder bought by Manchester United from Crewe as a 10-year-old.

‘I’m pretty aware of what it takes to get out of League Two and it was all over the place. The calibre of the players weren’t good enough and, when I was out for three weeks with a hamstring injury, Stuart McCall got the sack.

‘They then brought in the youth-team coaches, these two lads who had never played professional football before. They had done all the coaching badges and were quite good coaches, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t managers.

‘Bradford announced they were keeping them in charge until the end of the season and you just knew there was no way this great club was geared up for promotion.

‘Then, in the summer of 2021, Derek Adams came in and, after a few weeks of him, I became completely disillusioned.

‘I had to read his interviews after every game, oh my goodness. I’d be in the stands watching when injured or out of the squad and Bradford would get absolutely battered, yet he’d say “I thought we were excellent today”. Being surrounded by it all the time drained you.

‘Adams would have the players in for training from 8am and I wouldn’t be getting home until 6pm.

‘You would train 10am-12pm, have your lunch, then we’d either be back outside or in the gym at 3pm. So for three hours we didn’t do anything.

‘I asked Bradford’s fitness guys about the science behind this, where’s Adams’ head coming from? They had put the same question to him because they didn’t want to be there either.

‘It was time consuming, it was ridiculous. Why are we waiting around, it doesn’t take three hours for your lunch to go down – and his response was “I want the lads to earn their money”.

‘So us sitting around for three hours in the afternoon before another session would be his version of earning your money, just so we’d still be in the building rather than sitting at home doing whatever.

‘That afternoon session would last an hour-and-a-half and, in the winter, it would be pitch black at 4.30pm and you’re still running on the Astroturf.

‘I live in Ramsbottom, on the other side of Bradford, so you have to go through the centre of the city, when you just don’t move. Then go over the M62 during rush hour and, if there’s a crash, which more often than not there was, you’re stuck.

‘Certainly three nights a week I would be getting home at 6.30pm. Fans reading this may be saying “Well I don’t get home until 6.30pm either”, but, as a footballer, there’s only so much you can do in a day in terms of physicality.

‘I’ve never had a problem with double sessions, that’s fair enough, but you can’t have lads sitting around for three hours in the afternoon, just for the sake of earning their money.’

Following his May departure from Valley Parade after 52 games and three goals, Evans received several offers to remain in League Two, yet there was reticence on his behalf.

While agonising over his next move, he even answered BBC Radio Solent’s SOS to replace the holidaying Guy Whittingham as co-commentator to Andy Moon for Pompey’s trip to Port Vale at the end of August.

Then, two weeks later, he signed a two-year deal with Radcliffe – an ambitious Northern Premier League Premier Division side possessing a clutch of fellow former Football League performers.

Evans found himself alongside ex-Leicester City, Northampton and Bury winger Nicky Adams, former Reading and Bolton midfielder Jem Karacan, and David Fitzpatrick, formerly of Macclesfield and Port Vale.

Evans said: ‘After Bradford, the plan was I’d sign for someone for a year or two, then that would be it for me, the end of my career.

‘Last summer there were offers coming in from League Two, but offers from clubs which didn’t interest me.

‘I was on reasonable money at Bradford. Now I was looking at the finances of what you’re getting as a 34-year-old to play professional football post-Covid. The landscape financially is massively different to how it used to be.

‘They don’t see you as a valuable commodity at my age and, considering the money on offer, it just didn’t make sense to play full-time football.

‘Then Nicky Adams got in touch and asked what I was doing. He plays for Radcliffe now and passed on my response to Bobby Grant, a former team-mate of mine at Fleetwood who these days is the non-league club’s player manager.

‘I was being offered more money to play part-time, with training every Tuesday and Thursday, and Radcliffe is just 10 minutes from my house.

‘I’d never played non-league before and didn’t really know anything about the Northern Premier League Premier Division, so I started looking into it.

‘The furthest trip was South Shields, about two hours away, with the majority of other clubs being Manchester-based, such as Warrington Town, Hyde United and Ashton United, while Marine are in Liverpool.

‘It just made sense. Besides, I’m quite keen on getting my foot in the door with something else and journalism is a career I’m massively trying to explore, so I’ve got the time on my hands to do that.

‘I could have signed for a League Two team for another two years and maybe got another year off the back of that then, all of a sudden, found myself aged 37-38 starting from square one three years older than I am now.

‘Obviously football for me now is in very different surroundings. The pitches aren’t great, although the Radcliffe playing surface is amazing, I think they spent £170-180,000 on it in the summer

‘We’ve been to Marine for two games, in the cup and league, playing on Astroturf on a slope, things like that aren’t great.

‘But, as a whole, I’m really enjoying it. The lads in the dressing room are a good bunch and, while some of the team are poor, I’m surprised at the level of quality in our squad. By and large, we are playing football the right way.’

Radcliffe are presently positioned fifth in the table, five points off leaders Gainsborough Trinity with a game in hand.

Last weekend they suffered a home league defeat to struggling Nantwich Town, the 2-1 loss inflicted in stoppage time in front of a crowd of 816.

Evans has made 12 appearances, starting 10 of them, weighing in with two goals and, with some inevitability, fulfilling a variety of positions, including left and right wing, central midfield and as the number 10.

He added: ‘Last year at Bradford I was fed up with some of the politics going on and full-time football in general.

‘Joining Radcliffe has definitely reinvigorated my love of football. If someone said to me you can go back to full-time football and earn what you did before, I probably wouldn’t do it. I really was that disillusioned.

‘Over the last few years, probably since aged 32-plus, I just haven’t enjoyed being an experienced pro, but that has changed since I moved here in September.

‘I’ve signed a two-year contract and, legs-wise, am still feeling really fit and not picking up niggles, missing only one game so far, and that was through illness.

‘I will keep playing while I'm enjoying it. It has got to the point now that should that ever happen, then I’ll just stop and do something else. But definitely not yet.’