There will be plenty of folk who think this trip Down Under is just a jolly for us hacks, writes Michael Gannon in Sydney . Mrs G is apparently one of them.
I keep telling her I’m still awake at three in the morning because of the jet lag and the fact there’s a cracking boozer in the Rocks part of town that’s open until the crack of dawn is purely a coincidence. No, this has been hard graft and there was another tough shift the other day when Everton arrived. The Premier League boys were willing to have a chat with us but we’d have to drag ourselves all the way to blooming Bondi Beach for the privilege. Ach, well okay then.
I guess there are worse places to dig out the dictaphone and this jaunt will certainly come to mind no doubt when we’re huddled together in the howling wind and rain on some Premiership touchline in a few weeks. Mind you, Bondi wasn’t quite what it said on the tin. It was more like Baltic Beach.
Sydney suffered a bit of a cold snap in the last few days. There was the hail storm that interested the Celtic welcome bash and there was a breeze down Bondi that could have halved you in two.
The locals didn’t seem to mind and there were still plenty of beach bums and bikinis on show. Not that we were looking...
There were also some familiar faces in the Everton crew. Among the group was former Celtic sports science chief Jack Naylor. The big man worked with Carlo Ancelotti at Chelsea, Real Madrid and PSG before spending five years at Parkhead and then going to RB Leipzig and on to Everton.
He’s enjoying the toffees but you’d doubt he’d ever eaten any. Naylor is built like a tank and looks like he has about 5 percent body fat. So when it came to jumping into the water at Bondi, there were severe second thoughts.
This place is famous for sharks so if we all dived in, who would the great whites be eying up? Naylor would barely be a snack, while yours truly looks like an all-you-can eat buffet. No thanks.
Former Rangers kid Nathan Patterson was there as well and you can take a lad out of Glasgow and all that. He was straight in and while the Aussies were moaning the water was a bit nippy, the Scot is made of tougher stuff. The talk was Patterson told his teammates it was just like Troon…
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