Luke Joyce’s career was earned, not gifted – a football story forged in the real world, not on Instagram: 600 games and more in someone’s first team, not years spent hiding in “the 23s”.
When the 36-year-old puts his feet up on the evening of January 6, he can do so with a great deal of contentment. And others can then look at what a proper journey in the game looks like.
Joyce’s time was mainly spent in England’s bottom two professional tiers, before a last dance in non-league, but it has been worth more than many of those that flit about higher up.
Instead of flirting with a few performances, building a showy highlights reel and then vanishing in his mid-twenties, Joyce worked his way down and then worked his way up again.
He worked, always. He built his life in the game, sustained it, recognised what that required from first to last, and, put simply, you don’t make the appearances he has without the kind of commitment that is football’s most basic example to any young person thinking of entering the game.
Joyce was a teenage player when he came to Carlisle in 2006, dropping from Wigan Athletic, in the Premier League, to an aspiring Cumbrian squad in League Two. He was initially a spectator to Paul Simpson’s driving team before working his way in from the fringes under Neil McDonald and John Ward.
There were occasional runs in the side but also a recognition that, with established midfield players such as Chris Lumsdon, Chris Billy and Paul Thirlwell, Carlisle were never going to offer easy routes to anyone.
Joyce, though, was always a worker, always a grafter – an athlete with a lung capacity that could have made him a serious long-distance runner – and therefore someone a manager never had to question when it came to those fundamental matters of attitude and determination.
He was also, I recall clearly, a good, straight and friendly young pro to deal with. Up the professional chain you come across players who don’t want to bother with you, think themselves either above or suspicious of reporters or other such folk around the scene.
Joyce was, at the outset, totally welcoming and decent, generous with his time, saw you on the level. In terms of his game, he recognised, in the end, that his story would have to be written differently, and when he went to Accrington Stanley in 2009 it was with this in mind.
Six years later and Joyce had again shown the way to players in a congested sport. He found his opportunity, found the level, and made himself integral to it. He captained his League Two team and grew from a responsible young player to a setter of standards at a club which, over the years, has found little room indeed for bluffers.
Three years back at Carlisle followed, from 2015 to 2018, as Keith Curle rebuilt a flagging team and realised Joyce would be a useful cog. It did not in the end fulfil his promotion dream but United were more credible in that time and at their best were a streetwise and solid unit who should, all in all, have gone up.
The peak was the autumn of 2016 when Joyce and Mike Jones provided a midfield pairing as smart and industrious as Brunton Park had seen for some years. That period also brought Joyce’s best individual moment at Carlisle’s ground: a howitzer of a goal against Crawley Town which was out of keeping with his yeoman image.
It was a popular strike for many reasons because it saw Joyce briefly in the spotlight, instead of laying foundations for the more natural stars in that team, such as Nicky Adams, Charlie Wyke and Jabo Ibehre. More often than not it was Joyce making the pass instead of taking on the shot, covering the ground rather than producing something “with jam on it”, as Curle used to say.
And if not every Joyce game was glittering (and not even every Joyce goal was glittering, if you remember that magnificently bad one he scored at Newport County)…and if he sometimes had bad and ordinary games alongside the good, well, take anyone with 600+ to their name at Carlisle’s levels and show where it’s different.
A basis of quality and temperament was always there, whatever the ups, downs, possibilities and limitations, and it is no surprise that, these years later, with a successfully-established coaching business already to his name, someone like Joyce is deemed attractive for a club (Brentford) seeking a good eye, a good brain and a good work ethic for an important scouting role.
Like his old team-mate and friend Danny Grainger, against whose Workington Reds team he will retire next month, he had the future in mind even when the present seemed busy enough, and again this can be displayed to young folk in the sport who don’t think of tomorrow until it’s too late, who wrongly consider football a gift that will only keep on giving.
We should not call people like Joyce old-school because what he stood for and stands for should be as modern as it’s traditional. Yet it’s easier to pretend to be a player these days, easy to offer things which social media will gobble up, so let’s put our hands up, as the song went, for someone who embodied durability, and the knowledge that it was what happened away from the spotlight that truly counted.
His tally, his record and the satisfied feeling when he puts his boots away next month…none of those things come by chance. That's the best message a player like Luke Joyce can possibly leave behind.
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