Child abuse torment at the heart of Dyer chaos

THE chaotic life of Kieron Dyer has provided plenty of material used to beat him up in print over the years. Even his mother’s disclosure that she would be on hand to keep an eye on him at the 2002 World Cup, after his selection by England, prompted a sneering piece about ‘the part-time shop worker from Asda’ as one so- called writer described her at the time.

But every life is a process of cause and effect. Buried in the background there is generally some kind of explanation for the mayhem. The picture of Dyer came into much clearer focus through a compelling interview with oliver Holt in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday.

Dyer revealed the sexual abuse inflicted on him as a child by an uncle, in whose care he had been left. He related the small details of the trauma: the redbrick house in Ipswich, the clothes he was wearing that night, his mother Jackie’s number — 214576 — which he rang after fleeing to the telephone in the hall. It didn’t need spelling out that this episode has remained branded across his mind for nearly 30 years.

‘I was so scared at night that I would sleep at the bottom of my mum’s bed until I was 16 and they used to take the mickey out of me — the whole family,’ Dyer said. ‘(They would) call me a sissy. I had my mood swings. They’d say, “Don’t talk to him today, he’s moody”.’

But there was also a broader sense of the desolation which seemed to occupy the early years of the young Dyer’s life, which was quite obviously a hand-to-mouth existence. Dyer was in his uncle’s care that evening because his mother was, as usual, working the late Friday night shift at Tooks Bakery on the old norwich Road. She and his father, Leroy Dyer, had separated. Dyer’s autobiography, Old Too

Soon, Smart Too Late, serialised in Sportsmail this week, reveals an individual who missed a father’s presence. He needed discipline as well as someone to provide attention — both seem to have been in pitifully short supply.

In the Mail on Sunday interview he went on to say: ‘I don’t want to use what happened to me as an excuse for the mistakes I made. In my life and football career, I made monumental errors. But I had a choice. I knew what was right and wrong and you can pick what’s right and what’s wrong.

‘But with the abuse, it’s probably the only thing where I didn’t have a choice. There was nothing I could do about that one moment in time and it formed my life.’

of course, an attempt to understand what was missing in the lives of Dyer and his siblings — his sister was jailed for nearly six years in 2008 for supplying heroin and crack cocaine — can only extract so much empathy.

HIS tales of the high life among the Baby Bentley Brigade confirm him to be an emblem of football’s most unregimented excesses.

There is something unpleasant about his story, told today, of how, at the cards table, he ‘smashed’ a member of the England squad into such debts that he asked if he could pay Dyer back in instalments.

Dyer, by then earning millions a year, ‘got standing orders or bank transfers from him every month’. In another extract tomorrow he talks about how his lifetime ambition included owning a Ferrari.

The extracts and the autobiography no more make its subject likeable than they excuse his behaviour. But they do add substantially to the sum of our understanding — perhaps revealing why, having found an escape route denied to so many children rooted in working- class poverty, Kieron Dyer wasted so much.

His reflections on such a journey make for compelling reading. Certainly the Under 16 team he now coaches at Ipswich would do well to learn from his tale.