Portsmouth

After joke invite on Twitter, Portsmouth player crashes U-12 training for best surprise

Published Jan. 22, 2017 1:17 p.m. ET

Caitlin Murray

It started with a simple tweet. Portsmouth were supposed to play Saturday, but weather postponed the match and Christian Burgess, a Portsmouth defender, tweeted that he had nothing to do.

A fan responded with a tongue-in-cheek invitation for Burgess to come to help him coach a local under-12 team.

https://twitter.com/w_chitty/status/822745077705478145

The tweet might’ve been a joke, but Burgess took the invitation seriously and made a shock visit to the park for the kids’ training session. It clearly made the day of the kids, who were nearly all Portsmouth fans.

"I thought no more of it,” Will Chitty said of the invitation he sent on Twitter. "I didn’t think he’d read it to be honest. We started the session and 30 minutes in, I looked up and saw him wandering over asking for ‘Will.' I didn’t know what to say!”

https://twitter.com/w_chitty/status/822820518353076224

Burgess stayed for more than an hour helping the kids run through training sessions and doing a Q&A session afterward.

"It’s not something I have done before,” Burgess said of his impromptu visit. "I enjoyed it, so why not do it again in the future if I have time off and it’s 'round the corner?"

Either way, it was a classy gesture from a player who seems like a pretty nice guy. But Chitty thinks there’s another reason Burgess accepted his invitation: "Apparently, others on Twitter were asking him to help with homework and some guy even wanted him to dig up a tree! Ours seemed like the best thing to do,” he said.

The old adage is you don’t get what you don’t ask for, but maybe it needs an addendum: make sure what you ask for is reasonable. Well-played by the fan.

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