Giles Smith: Andros Townsend defies the club-hopping stereotype

Still, 16 clubs: that’s got to take real energy, a burning curiosity for the next horizon, and a rare talent for looking enthusiastic while holding up new shirts. Yet will Townsend get his due? I doubt it.

The standard label here is “journeyman”, and it always feels dismissive. Paradoxically, since that term was coined, the word “journey” has itself gone on a journey, gaining a coat of glamour, such that it can now, with varying degrees of strain, be used to dramatise a passage through a reality television show or to lend fizz to a career in telesales. Slap “man” on the end of it, though, and “journey” goes right back to where it came from, and suddenly we’re describing a dull, quotidian service-provider.

Contrast the almost regal status afforded the single-club loyalist — your Jamie Carraghers, your Ryan Giggs’s, your Harry Kanes (almost). Fans love a one-club player, it’s true, but that’s because we recognise ourselves in them. After all, it’s exactly the kind of stupid thing that we do: ignore the cascading fountain of choice that life offers us in favour of a numbly repetitious succession of known experiences.

But let’s face it, for players one club is easy. You just need to have no ambition to better yourself, while possibly also being slightly suspicious of foreign food. We should be thinking more highly of such fearless voyagers as Marcus Bent (13 different English clubs and one in Indonesia), Rivaldo (15 clubs in six countries across four continents) and Jamie Cureton (22 clubs, nine tiers of English football, still at it at nearly 50). Nicolas Anelka played for 11 clubs and got little more than a reputation for mercenary greed out of it rather than the acclaim his appetite for ceaseless personal reinvention and temporary accommodation alike clearly deserved.

Of course, even as he unpacks in Mueang, Townsend still has a way to go to catch the goalkeeper John “Budgie” Burridge, who signed for 29 different clubs in England and Scotland between 1969 and 1997 and may have some claim to a world record in this category. However, while by no means wishing to knock the shine off this breathtaking achievement, I do notice, on closer examination, that at 13 of those clubs Burridge didn’t make a single appearance, and at the risk of getting into an unhelpfully recessive “trees in a forest”-style philosophical debate, have you really represented a club if you haven’t played for it?

Anyway, better, surely, to think of these legends of the short-term contract as footballing versions of Michael McDonald. McDonald, you will know, is the singer whose soulful tone and falsetto-free upper range became a coveted flavour in US coastal pop of the 1970s and 1980s, and whose work as a backing vocalist on recordings by innumerable hit artists has left a golden thread running through some of the greatest modern music of the last half-century. If you’re calling McDonald a journeyman or a “hired hand”, it’s because you’re deaf.

Applying the McDonald analogy, then, Townsend’s early time at Tottenham Hotspur was his formative period with the Doobie Brothers. His five-season patch at Crystal Palace between 2016 and 2021 was the decade-defining call-and-response segment that he brought to the bridge of Christopher Cross’s Ride like the Wind. And this spell with Kanchanaburi Power is, if he plays it right, his version of popping up out of nowhere on a rather good 2017 Thundercat track.

And even if he gets it wrong and it’s more like the somewhat sticky Dolly Parton ballad that McDonald duetted on last year, his legend is still secure and I’m still applauding him hard for being out there and doing it.

Photograph by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns