Recalling Bradford City striker Andy Cook's Carlisle United youth days

“It flew into the top corner. Unbelievable goal. Even the Bury bench were clapping,” recalls Eric Kinder, Carlisle’s former Under-18s boss.

“Mike Sheron, the Bury coach, was looking at me. I just had my arms folded. He said, ‘Surely you’re gonna clap that?’ I said, ‘Mike – he does that every day in training’.”

‘He’ is Andy Cook, the former United youth striker who returns today as a 32-year-old League Two marksman with Bradford City. The Boxing Day fixture in League Two pits the Blues against one of the fourth tier’s leading scorers.

It also brings Cook back to the place where he started out in the professional game, as a prolific young player if not a successful United pro. Cook has had to make his career elsewhere and, as he leads Mark Hughes’ line this afternoon, memories of his teenage impact at Carlisle come back.

“Everywhere he’s been, he’s scored goals,” says Kinder, and this has been the case ever since, in 2007, Cook first came to his attention.

“In early June that summer, I’d sorted all my [youth team] intake, but then Neil McDonald, our manager, announced that I wouldn’t have Gary Madine or Stephen Hindmarch, because he was going to promote them to the first team. That was going to leave me without a centre-forward," says Kinder.

“I rang a couple of contacts in the north east, and someone I knew at Middlesbrough said Durham Schoolboys were playing Lancashire on Saturday morning at Middlesbrough’s training ground. ‘There’s a big lad, 6ft 4in, playing for Durham – scores a truckload of goals but isn’t a very good footballer’.

“I drove from Blackburn to watch the game. He [Cook] didn’t score, and was a big lump, looked a bit clumsy, but I needed that centre-forward - and he was my type of player.

“As a coach at Carlisle I’ve always had a big target man and we’ve had success out of it. My contact said, 'Don’t be put off by him – he scores a truckload'. He’d been let go by Middlesbrough after a six-week trial, but when [my contact] sent me his scoring record in junior football, it was phenomenal.

“I said we’ll go with it. I gambled. And in his first season with us he scored something like 36 league goals.”

Cook, back row fourth from left, in Carlisle United's youth team in 2007 (Image: News & Star)

Cook was not, to say the least, an archetypal young footballer. His technique was unpolished, while he was not a young athlete. The teenager was not known as a lover of gym work, of training drills or nutrition. It is said that Claire’s Bakery, with its pies and bacon rolls, was to the striker’s liking rather more than the kind of refuelling recommended to young players.

To the untrained eye, he appeared an ungainly figure. Yet one feature of this somewhat awkward teenager was undeniable.

“Goals,” says Kinder, who now coaches in the Indian Premier League with Bengaluru FC, as assistant to the former Bradford boss Simon Grayson.

“There are three people I’ve worked with over the years who’ve just loved scoring goals over and above everything else. There was Joe Garner, and Jordan Rhodes was the king of them all. He wasn’t interested in playing football, he just wanted to score goals.

“Cooky was the same. He would be sulking when we’d go out for training – ‘Do we have to do this?..’ – but in finishing, or four-v-four games, he’d come alive. And scored truckloads, from every angle, every distance.

“Even today, I tell strikers that goalscorers score goals in training games, and that comes from Andy Cook. If our youth team had done well on a weekend, a game of four-v-four or five-v-five, with no coaching, used to be their treat in an afternoon.

“Cooky would score loads, 20 or more, from thunderbolts to ones where he’d fall over and score. I once saw him miss from six yards, hit the bar, the ball came back out, hit his head and went in. And that was him.”

Kinder believes he got the best out of Cook because he got to grips with the side of his character which some, but not all, of his managers over the years have also grasped.

Cook, right, scores for United in a friendly at Falkirk in 2010 (Image: Barbara Abbott)

“He needed to be loved,” he says. “As a youth team player he got himself into a couple of scrapes over incidents, and got in trouble with the manager a couple of times. He didn’t like training. He wouldn’t get himself into the best shape. He was a little bit difficult to handle. But if you got him on your side he’d produce.

“That year when him and Gary Madine played together, it was frightening.”

In hindsight, it was one of the best under-18 strike pairings the Blues have seen for many a year, as Cook combined with Madine who, via a chequered journey, has carved out a Championship career.

Both started in Carlisle’s famous FA Youth Cup victory over Manchester United in 2008, when Madine and Hindmarch scored amid a prolific collective season.

“Gary was a far better footballer, but Andy was a better goalscorer,” says Kinder. “So you had a footballer and a goalscorer, both 6ft 4in, playing up front in youth football – you can’t go wrong.

“In that team we had Dan Wordsworth and Tom Aldred at the back, solid as a rock. Alex Mitchell was a good goalkeeper. Jonny Blake and Matthew Wood would run themselves into the ground in midfield. Conor Tinnion had a bit of class on the left. And then you had Madine, Cook and Hindmarch, who were sensational.

Cook, after two prolific youth team seasons, earned a pro deal at Carlisle but was later released (Image: News & Star)

“They all had their little flaws, but all three should have played a lot of Football League games. Gary’s had the most success, with Stephen you couldn’t quite get to know what made him tick, and Cooky didn’t quite grasp that you had to be a physical specimen.

“But he scored 70-odd goals for me, and didn’t take a penalty in that time – he didn’t like taking them. And at 32 now, he’s had a career.”

Cook progressed to a professional contract at Carlisle but was unable to push into the first-team reckoning of Greg Abbott – another former Bradford man – at a time Carlisle were in League One, and forwards like Scott Dobie (yes, another ex-Bantam) were more senior figures.

“I remember a pre-season game when he got his pro contract, we played Gala Fairydean in a reserve game. We were winning 7-0 at half time and Andy scored six,” Kinder says.

“Greg told me to take him off at half time, and I was thinking he must stand a chance of playing against Blackpool in the first-team’s next friendly on the Thursday. He was on the bench but never got on.

“It just didn’t quite happen for him. I remember going up to Celtic for a reserve game, we won 1-0 and he scored. We played them again a while later, won 2-0 and he scored both. He went to Workington loan, and then Barrow, before the decision was made to release him.”

Kinder says that decision was understandable given that the raw materials looked, well, raw. Cook was not, after all, a leader in training-ground fitness runs, was not the leanest of athletes, and it may have been hard to pinpoint exactly where he would fit in to a side hoping to progress in the third tier of the professional game.

Yet he did not give up on his hopes of a professional career. At Barrow, he signed permanently, and soon began scoring again. “Dave Bayliss, the manager there, loved him and got the best out of him,” Kinder says.

Cook in action for Carlisle against Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Youth Cup in 2007 (Image: News & Star)

“Andy had a strange sense of humour, but was a very likeable person when you got to know him. He’s had certain managers who’ve gone with his quirky sort of ways and got the best out of him.

“He’s a very shy person too. Doesn’t do interviews, keeps himself to himself. But as soon as he realises you’re with him, he’ll open up to you.”

Cook had two increasingly prolific spells in south Cumbria, either side of a stint at Grimsby Town, and come 2016 had established a name as a fearsome non-league scorer. This was underlined when he joined Tranmere Rovers and fired them back into the Football League.

A big break at Walsall followed, and Cook contributed 18 goals for the League One club. A spell at Mansfield Town followed, before a loan at Tranmere, a loan at Bradford, and duly a permanent move to Valley Parade in the summer of 2021.

Along that journey he has had some managers who’ve embraced him, others who have not been able to reconcile the raw aspects. Yet this season he has been in ravenous form, scoring 16 goals in 24 appearances, collecting player of the month awards and spearheading a side managed by a man who knows a little about effective centre-forward play.

“I told Andy when Mark Hughes took over, ‘You’re in trouble here – he’s not gonna have you’. But one thing about Mark [with whom Kinder worked at Blackburn] is that he does like the Robbie Savages, Craig Bellamys; people who some others wouldn’t like.

Cook has scored 16 goals under Mark Hughes, left, at Bradford this season (Image: PA)

“When Hughes went in to Bradford at first, he left him out. I had other people I’d worked with asking me if he would be up for moving – Matt [Taylor] at Exeter, Gary [Bowyer] at Dundee. But then in pre-season he got a hat-trick, a couple in another game, and started the season on fire.

“I can understand why other managers might not fancy him. But Mark seems to be getting the best out of him. I imagine he likes the fact he’s a handful. And he scores goals.”

He is not far away from 200 career strikes now, and it is interesting to reflect on the fact that none came for the club who were first to take that chance on him.

“I think he’ll look back at Carlisle and [consider that], if he knew what he knows now, he would have done it differently," Kinder says.

“I believe he’s now the fittest he’s been. He’s clearly got his head down. And it happens. The penny drops at different times with some people.

“One thing you have to say about Andy is that he has stuck at it and made a career. And with his CV, if he doesn’t get on somewhere, another club will take him.”

Does Kinder imagine that Carlisle should look upon him as one that got away?

“Definitely. Carlisle would probably say that, at the time, they were in League One and he was never getting into that side. But in my opinion, Andy would have got in any Carlisle side from the time Keith Curle got them in the play-offs [in 2017] onwards, maybe even from Graham Kavanagh’s time [2013-14].

“I think a lot of clubs will look back and think they should have had a go at him.”

Something else not yet on Cook’s CV is a goal against Carlisle; a gap he will be out to fill today.

“I remember the game against Bradford in [March] 2021, when Carlisle won 3-1,” adds Kinder. “I was watching from the Pioneer Stand, and he missed a sitter. He was clean through, and chipped it.

“I can always remember saying to him as a kid, ‘Don’t try and be clever, just smash it in’. I walked across the pitch at the end of that game, and he was sat in the penalty area. As he saw me approaching him he said, ‘Don’t say it, because I know – smash it’. So he’d remembered something.

“He still rings me, still the same person he always was, throwing abuse at me. He says, ‘Are you still telling everyone you dragged me out of the gutter?’, and I say, ‘Too right I am!’

“I’m pleased to see he’s done what he’s done. Whatever he is or he isn’t, you can’t argue with his goals. He’ll be a handful on Boxing Day, I’m sure.”