Ex-footballer David McVay comes face to face with himself in new play by Billy Ivory based on his Notts County diaries
David McVay's professional football career spanned only nine seasons, during which time the imprint he left on the game was such that the title he chose when he was encouraged to publish the journal he kept during part of that time seemed entirely apt. Diary of a Football Nobody , first published in 2003, was exactly as described: a collection of daily reflections, reproduced exactly as they were written at the time, on life as a player of modest ability plying his trade with a club associated mostly with modest attainment, in his case Notts County, the world's oldest football league club, during the 1970s. McVay gave up keeping the diary, he recalls, early in 1976, thanks to "a lager-logged brain and an incurable bout of apathy" and though he had the foresight to stow his ramblings in a drawer rather than bin them, it was not in any expectation of revealing them to a wider world. Yet for the next couple of weeks they are being not only revisited but broug