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In a genre too often mired in platitudes, former Newcastle and Northern Ireland winger Ferris's account of growing up Catholic in Protestant Lisburn - and the football career that promised him a way out - stands out for its honesty and humour. * i Paper * Unique, interesting, extremely emotive and gives some insight that supporters have never heard before...His story is raw and will keep you engaged without using any exaggerations which try to win over readers...Ferris has pushed himself forward extremely well in his new book, so well that any Newcastle supporter's book collection will be incomplete without The Boy on the Shed in it. ( Newcastle Chronicle) But the best thing I can do, without living madly and having no life, is to basically live as healthy as possible. Football memoirs rarely produce great literature but Ferris’s The Boy on the Shed is a glistening exception.’ Guardian
Paul Ferris has a good story to tell, in fact several, Irish and Geordie, politics and football, and he tells it well, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of trying to be either lyrical or philosophical or too clever. * Hunter Davies * Newcastle United boarding a plane bound for Bermuda in 1985. Paul Gascoigne is to the left of Paul Ferris on the steps It felt a lot of time was spent on the first half of the book and very little on the second half. The first half was a better book. In particular, his early days as an apprentice footballer are by far the best read. A roller coaster read with appeal beyond football fans, this is a tale of struggle and tragedy, of love and hope, and offers humbling reality as an alternative to the traditional rags to riches adventure. * Daily Express * Ferris's wonderful memoir represents a twin triumph ... and his writing is a pure pleasure. * The Times *The Magic In The Tin is the 2nd book by Paul Ferris ex professional football player, physio amongst other things. . Writing a book was always a pipe dream and, even when the manuscript was finished and sent off, he still wasn’t sure it would ever see the light of day. Yet five years after arriving in Newcastle, during which time he was heralded by Kevin Keegan as the most exciting talent he had seen, it was all but over. It might have attracted a more traditional audience, especially in the football-mad city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to have related the title of the book to his days in St James’s Park’s inner sanctum.
The passing was the dread at the end of it, but the thought of it was there with me from I was six years old. An Irish Catholic mother of seven, she had done it all before but she hadn’t done it all before and been fragile herself. Unique, interesting, extremely emotive and gives some insight that supporters have never heard before...His story is raw and will keep you engaged without using any exaggerations which try to win over readers...Ferris has pushed himself forward extremely well in his new book, so well that any Newcastle supporter's book collection will be incomplete without The Boy on the Shed in it. * Newcastle Chronicle * I’m laughing but those two things, they just shake your confidence in everything. Where you didn’t have fear before, you have it. If I get a chest pain now I think ‘oh, what’s that?’ I have three boys and up to that point they think their dad’s invincible. Yet while such landmark events would inspire worry of one kind, it was nothing compared with the fear he felt every single day that his mother’s worsening heart condition would take her from him.
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THE days after the death of his football career were some of the most difficult. Bernadette’s passing in 1987 couldn’t have come at a worse time as Ferris struggled to make sense of an opportunity given and then gone in the blink of an eye. Paul recalls: “Until those incidents happened, you just saw the Troubles as being part of your life, just the world you lived in. But when you are ushered downstairs and see your living room on fire and have to spend the night in another family’s home, that makes it different. Paul had just finished the manuscript of the book and sent it off to the publishers when he received his cancer diagnosis two days later. “I suspected that outcome before it was confirmed and that is why I wrote what I did in the book,” he says. Ferris went further than most and was, fleetingly, a prodigy. In April 1982 he became the youngest ever Newcastle United player to play in a first division match since the foundation of the club in 1892. He was just 16 and the manager, Arthur Cox, and coaching staff were smitten. He came through with Chris Waddle – “a big, loping lazy-looking lad with a languid running style” – and was there when Tyneside went berserk with the arrival of Kevin Keegan. The mop-headed icon told him: “You can end up at Manchester United or Crewe United. It’s up to you.” Ferris was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. In 1981, he signed for Newcastle United from Lisburn Youth in Northern Ireland and became the club's youngest ever debutant when he appeared aged just 16 years and 294 days. He scored his only senior goal against Bradford City in 1984. A medial ligament injury meant he played just 14 matches and moved to Barrow F.C., with whom he won the FA Trophy at Wembley before moving into local non-league football with Gateshead.
Once a series of hamstring and knee injuries had brought his playing days to a premature end, he would retrain as a physiotherapist and eventually return to St James’s Park, working during the high times under Keegan and then the rollercoaster reigns of Kenny Dalglish, Ruud Gullit, Graeme Souness and Bobby Robson as anarchy at times descended upon the Toon. Would I do it again?” he asks rhetorically before a long pause for thought, “heart of hearts, I wouldn’t, no.” The appeal of his astute story-telling is that this book works on levels that reach far beyond football. As a youngster living in Lisburn, he saw his home petrol-bombed by loyalists and his mum and dad beaten up in the street and lived constantly with the fear that his mother’s heart condition would kill her. But when he was handed the task of saving the skin of his home town club midway through the 2008/2009 season, Ferris was the first person he called.
Former Newcastle United winger Paul Ferris was 51. He had successfully forged a post-football career as a physio, barrister and then a CEO, and his award-winning memoir, The Boy on the Shed, was just about to be published. But then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. This honest, sometimes brutal and frequently funny book tells the story of what happened next. My granddaughter [Isla] was born last February; I watch her and think, in 10 or 15 years you’ll open it and see your name in the front of the book and it’ll be a precious thing. Injury after injury saw Ferris spend more time on the treatment table than on the pitch, and robbed him of the natural gifts of speed and mobility that had set him apart. At 21, he left St James’s Park for the first time.
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