Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England's, and the world's, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.
McClaren's reasons, in my opinion, were not footballing ones. McClaren wanted to make an impact and stamp his authority on the England football team; what better way than to drop the previous captain! In addition he wanted to remove himself from the previous era under Sven-Goran Eriksson, where he was assistant, and therefore the dropping of Beckham was his was of saying that the failings of the team under Sven were not his fault but were more on Beckham's shoulders.
N.B. I think it's probably worth mentioning that I don't think that McClaren is a terrible manager. Nor do I think that he deserve to get any form of abuse, which occasionally turns up in the Bring Back Beckham! Your comments section of the site. I simply disagree with him dropping Beckham from the England squad as I feel he had no real reason to do so and that Beckham deserves a place in the squad at the least.
The idea behind the website was simple; get David Beckham recalled to the England squad. So, i quickly snapped up http://www.recallbeckham.com and started creating my website. The idea behind it was to get people to sign a kind-of-petition and leave comments stating that they wanted Beckham recalled to the England squad for the Euro 2008 qualifiers. On the way to watch the Croatia v England game in a pub (Wednesday October 11 2006) my girlfriend commented that "Bring Back Beckham" was much catchier so I phoned my friend James who runs FrozenWeb and asked him to register http://www.bringbackbeckham.com for me. England went on to play terribly and lose 2 - 0.
I spent that night sprucing the site up and the next day, Thursday, I started getting a few hits. I also got an e-mail from a guy congratulating me on getting the http://www.bringbackbeckham.com domain and asking me what plans I had for it. As the website hits increased I started to realise that the site could really take off so I e-mailed The Sun newspaper to ask them if they'd be interested in putting something on their site or in the newspaper about my site. Indeed I got a mention in both the Friday and Saturday editions of the paper and also on a couple of online articles:
In addition to mentions in The Sun I also got asked to do an interview with Talk Sport, interview with Radio Lincolnshire, a discussion on Five Live, and mentions in various other articles in print and online including a mention in The Times and an interview with Gainsborough Today (I was born in Gainsborough).
By Sunday October 15th 2006, 4 days after registering the website, the Bring Back Beckham! website had been hit over 30,000 times.
Beckham has yet to win his deserved recall but was very close just recently when he was unfortunately injured. The site continues to get a reasonable amount of daily hits which spike whenever Beckham is in the news. However, I'm confident that Beckham's day will come and when he smacks home one of his trademark freekicks he'll pull the famous Three Lions over his head revealing a Bring Back Beckham! T-Shirt in way of thanks to the campaign that helped him get his recall...okay, the T-Shirt thing won't happen but it would bring a smile to my face!
