Carra honed his skills on Bootle streets where community is everything

Below is a summary of the full article. Click here for the full version from Echo or go back to LFC Live.

All three have spoken about their time playing on the streets or playing fields of their local neighbourhoods, and credit those experiences as helping to shape the footballers they became.It's a vision which certainly resonates with Jamie Carragher, who we spoke to at the Brunswick Youth and Community Centre (the Brunny), on Marsh Lane in Bootle. It was great, we all loved it and doing it, but I think the attention the kids get now at academies, I think is better.“[...] I was part of a street football culture where professional clubs didn't really have much hold on you.

I used to go to Liverpool once a week for an hour, in a gym over the road from Anfield, the Vernon Sangster."You’d finish with a five-a-side at the end for 15 minutes, you'd have a warm up for 10 minutes, and you'd do a few little bits and bobs."All the footballers came from the street, so everyone would say 'oh that proves that it was right', but there was no other way you could come through, there was no academy to go to back then."Now, if you asked me, would I rather have gone and been at Liverpool three or four times a week and played for Liverpool of a weekend rather than playing for my Sunday league team? Who’s getting anything out of that?"When you actually think about it, you look back at it, I'd rather have been playing against Everton or Man United and close games against people of the same ability, playing with the same ability as you and against the same ability."I always think the best level of football I played in was actually school's football, not Sunday league football.

They were tight games and they were good games, so I always think of that as a good level of football.Jamie Carragher was recently named as a local ambassador for Bootle's bid to become the UK's first ever Town of Culture.The competition is open to small, medium and large towns, and has the aim of bringing local investment, and to create opportunities for people in the arts and culture sectors.Bootle's involvement is being facilitated by Sefton Council which has made sport and community two of the central pillars of the bid, and certainly of interest to Carragher who speaks about the importance of these concepts in his own life.Jamie mentions the role of places like the Brunny and how they have evolved into vital community hubs. The Brunny has evolved and it's not just known as a youth club now, but it's a community hub where people of all generations come and get together."Today we have bingo in one part and the older fellas playing walking football in the back.