The man who walked into Downing Street as Prime Minister once played left wing directly in front of me.

I’ll say up front, I’m not a political person. I don’t follow it closely and I’m not here to fly a flag for anyone. So take what follows not as a political opinion but as something rarer than that. It’s what I saw with my own eyes, twice, long before the rest of the country was deciding what it thinks of Andy Burnham.

The day he lined up in front of me

I played for Leigh RMI back in the day, and I’ve just dug the match report out to check I hadn’t romanticised it over the years.

26 July 2003. Everton at Hilton Park, pre-season friendly, 825 through the gate. Their side had Leon Osman, Nick Chadwick and Kevin McLeod in it, and Osman put them ahead on 32 minutes with a twenty yarder.

We got level on 67. Alan Moogan gave a free-kick away on the right hand side of the box, I floated it into the middle, and Ged Courtenay climbed above the Everton defence and glanced a header past a young Iain Turner.

Then, with two minutes left on the clock, on came the Member of Parliament for Leigh.

Burnham took up the left wing. I was at left back behind him, and I’ll be straight with you, most of my afternoon had gone on worrying about Osman rather than about our new winger. The report describes his arrival as comic relief. Fair enough.

But think about it for a second. Here’s a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool Everton fan who could have sat in the stand, safe and adored. Instead he pulled on a Leigh shirt against the club he’s supported his whole life, in front of a crowd, knowing full well he might get skinned or make a show of himself. Two minutes or ninety, he still had to walk out there and do it. He didn’t have to. He did it anyway.

That’s the first thing I ever learned about him. Grit. Courage. A willingness to try something new and put himself in the arena rather than watch from the side. You can’t fake that. It shows.

The day he turned up for us

The second time, there was no crowd at all.

Back in 2006, we were launching a tiny business. Sport and activity for children, nobody had heard of us, no reason on earth for anyone important to give us the time of day. We had Olympic gold medallist Duncan Goodhew coming to a school to help us launch, which was a big deal for us, and we asked our local MP if he’d come along.

He came. In person. And what struck me wasn’t that he showed up, it was how he was when he got there. Humble. No airs. He gave his time properly, talked to the kids like they mattered rather than using them as a backdrop, and treated a nobody little business like it was worth his afternoon.

You could see the sport, the activity, the education side of it wasn’t a box he was ticking. He actually cared about it. He gave us the best possible start on a day that meant everything to us and, to him, could have been just another Tuesday.

I’ve watched him from a distance ever since, and that passion has never left him. Sport, young people, the North, the underdog. Whatever you make of the politics, the man has been consistent about what he believes in for as long as I’ve known of him.

The kind of leader he is

If you asked me to sum him up from what I’ve actually seen, I’d say this. A people person. Kind. Humble. Adventurous. Courageous. Someone who, at his centre, likes people and wants good things for them, and who’ll put himself on the line to try.

Part of me is genuinely made up to see a man like that reach the very top. Proof that decency and a bit of Northern grit can take you all the way, and that you don’t have to be the sharpest-elbowed person in the room to end up leading it.

Stability is a leadership skill

Here’s something worth sitting with. We’ve churned through seven Prime Ministers in a decade. Imagine that in a business. A company that got through seven chief executives in ten years wouldn’t be thriving, it’d be crumbling. No strategy would survive it. No team would know where it stood. Nothing would ever get seen through, because the person who started it would be gone before it landed.

What gives me a bit of hope is that Burnham seems to know it. He’s talked about wanting to stay, to hold the role long enough to actually get things in order, to think in years rather than news cycles. Whatever you make of his plans, that instinct is dead right. Real change, in a country or a company, needs someone willing to hold the wheel long enough to steer. Stability isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t trend, but it’s the ground everything else gets built on.

The worry I can’t shake

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also a little worried for him. And this has nothing to do with parties or policies. It’s about leadership.

My worry is simple. He might be too nice.

What he wants to achieve is enormous, and I suspect it will be a great deal harder than he currently plans for. The very thing that makes him good, that warmth, that instinct to bring people with him, is the thing that gets tested to breaking point at the top. Kind leaders get taken advantage of. People-pleasers get pulled in fifteen directions. And nice, without steel behind it, gets eaten alive by rooms full of people who mistake it for weakness.

I’ve seen this in business more times than I can count. The warmest, most decent leader in the company, loved by everyone, quietly drowning because they couldn’t bring themselves to have the hard conversation or disappoint the people they cared about.

Here’s what I’ve learned watching it, and it’s the one thing I’d say to him if I ever got the chance. Kindness and toughness are not opposites. The best leaders are both at once. You can be warm to people and hard on the standard. You can care about someone and still tell them no. The kindest thing a leader can do is often the firmest. Softness that can’t say no isn’t kindness at all, it’s avoidance wearing a friendly face.

Rooting for him

So I’m rooting for him. Not as a political statement, but because I once watched him put himself on a pitch against his own heroes, and then give a tiny business the best day of its early life for no reason other than he thought it mattered.

People like that don’t reach Downing Street very often. When they do, you want them to make it count. I just hope he holds onto the kindness and finds the steel to protect it, because he’s going to need both.

He made something happen for us, once, when he didn’t have to. Here’s hoping he can do it for the rest of us now.