AFTER witnessing the birth of my daughter I've come to realise that football has a lot in common with labour and it's not just because there's lots of heavy breathing, swearing and shredded nerves.

At the end of the last football season the most important thing in the world happened, my daughter Molly Niamh McKinney was born on the morning of Tuesday, April 28 after a three day-labour.

This was without a doubt the single most stressful, terrifying and ultimately uplifting thing that has ever happened to me.

It topped Aston Villa winning the League Cup in 1996 and let me tell you I never thought that was going to be beaten.

Unfortunately, Molly's arrival meant that I missed the end of Harriers' heroic but failed attempt to earn a place in the Blue Square Premier play-offs.

Infact, Emma my wife was induced on the morning of the key end-of-season clash at home to Kettering.

While the love of my life began the slow journey into full-blow birth-giving mode, Harriers' own Football League aspirations reached their own make-or-break moment.

Emma's pregnancy had been like the longest ever pre-season and football metaphors surrounded me.

We touched up the ground (completely decorating the house for the new baby) and introduced an entirely new kit - only this time it was for a little one not a football team.

In a particularly ambitious move we also turned our spare room into the nursery, much like a club sprucing up an old stand.

So when the action kicked off on that fateful Sunday I thought I was ready, much like the hopeful fan on the morning of a new season. How wrong I was...

At first my pre-season training (pre-natal classes) paid off, I looked calm and composed as I helped keep Emma calm and meticulously timed and noted down the regularity of her contractions.

Like a team far too confident of their success, I was quickly knocked out of my confidence when Em went into full blown labour.

All of a sudden I crumbled like a Brazilian midfielder under a hefty challenge from Roy Keane. I became a headless chicken paralyzed by fear and a feeling of helplessness that could only be known by Michael Carrick as he was given the run around by Barcelona in the European Cup final.

Luckily, there was the physio, Emma's mom Pat, who metaphorically kept me grounded with sound advice that soothed like a wet sponge.

The labour then went on and like England in a semi-final, the action lurched into the dreaded extra-time and penalties when Emma was whisked into surgery in preparation for the decisive action.

As I waited to be called into the room only England players before a shoot-out could understand a fraction of the fear and panic that made my stomach acid boil.

But unlike our national team, when it comes to the crunch the good doctors and nurses at Birmingham Women's Hospital knew what they were doing and after some teasing with forceps, Molly emerged crying like Paul Gascoigne and bellowing her arrival like the Holte End in full voice.

A mightily relieved Emma held our daughter in her arms and we both burst into tears, knowing that no silverware on the planet could match the prize that we had been entrusted with.

Like a substitute who only came on in the last minute of a cup final, I basked in the glory as my wife, who had done all the real worked, passed her to me. I knew then that my life would never be the same again...until the next one!