Playing in the National League North, Macclesfield are part-time and defender Sam Heathcote is one of a number of players with a job outside football.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old has gone from battling with the likes of Brennan Johnson and Yeremy Pino on Saturday to returning to his day job as a PE teacher at Stamford Park Primary School in Altrincham on Monday.<\/p>\n
“Straight back to it this morning, back down to reality,” the centre-back told BBC Breakfast. “I’m looking forward to seeing the kids.<\/p>\n
“I was going round school last week saying ‘conceding anything less than 10 we will be happy with’ and they were all laughing.<\/p>\n
“Last time a couple of them watched it when we played in the second round against Slough and the first thing one of them said to me was ‘you gave away a penalty’. They might talk about my yellow card instead of us winning. A few of them will be excited, bless them, especially the older ones that are really getting into football.”<\/p>\n
Heathcote joined the Silkmen in the summer of 2023 and has combined his teaching job with training two days a week.<\/p>\n
He teaches children from the ages of three to 11 and hopes beating the Eagles can inspire his pupils.<\/p>\n
“It will show that you can be an underdog in any story, you can achieve whatever you want and things that seem completely impossible might just become a reality because that’s exactly what happened on Saturday,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I never thought I’d be in this position to come back in on a Monday having won that game. I still can’t get over it now, it’s amazing.<\/p>\n
“I’m so happy for everyone involved to create this bit of history. We will try and milk it for as long as we can, but I know what the gaffer’s like and we will be straight back to it tomorrow night.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Playing in the National League North, Macclesfield are part-time and defender Sam Heathcote is one of a number…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-240980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}