Football’s darkest secret brought into the light
NEW DOCUMENTARY REVEALS SHOCKING FAILURES IN TACKLING ABUSE
It IS Dean Radford’s description of what happened in court which makes you wonder where he found the resolve to keep up the fight against the Southampton football coach who abused so many young players like him.
Radford’s February 1989 evidence against Bob Higgins, offered at a time when very few felt able to speak out, saw the paedophile brought to trial in the early 1990s.
Higgins’s barrister then attempted to reduce Radford’s credibility and testimony to shreds, by claiming that his parents’ separation somehow made his evidence invalid.
Radford left the courtroom feeling like he was the criminal.
‘I didn’t go back to court after I’d testified,’ he says. ‘I just kept ringing the police to find out how the trial was going and whether he’d been convicted. I didn’t get a call back. I tried so many places for support. the Professional Footballers’ Association couldn’t help and then I found out that he’d been acquitted.’
It was an extraordinary verdict. Five other young players had also testified to Higgins’s crimes — but a decision was taken that six separate trials should be held.
When Higgins was found not guilty in the first of them, the other five were dropped.
Higgins marched out of court with his wife and another middle-aged woman on each arm, grinning broadly.
He would go on to abuse dozens more boys at Peterborough United.
A new three-part BBC documentary begins tonight on football’s child sexual abuse scandal and reveals far more vividly than last week’s 710-page Sheldon report what boys like Radford were up against in Higgins, who held their football dreams in his hands.
Football’s Darkest Secret reveals footage of the coach’s young players chanting his name on training runs.
‘It was like a cult and he was the Messiah,’ Radford says. ‘ We ran around on warm-ups, chanting his name. And as you ran by you would shout it as loud as you could, because you wanted him to hear your voice above everyone else’s.’
Higgins abused in plain sight. His deliberate touching up of boys as they landed from jumping exercises was inadvertently captured by local tV crews, who saw nothing in it.
He basked in his own profile. the documentary also reveals him posing for photographs in the lounge of his home, his paunch hanging out over a tight t-shirt. It was in that same home that he abused boys such as Radford. ‘Love him or loathe him, Bob Higgins is a star-maker,’ declared one local tV reporter after his acquittal.
the notion that the abuse was simply a product of the time is disproven by the fact that another Southampton coach, Dave Merrington, challenged Higgins when he heard the boys talking about it.
Merrington ensured Higgins was drummed out of the club and faced trial. ‘Dave’s actions were monumental in saving so many of us from facing more of the abuse,’ says Radford.
‘Yes, those were the 1980s but they weren’t the Dark Ages. It was still possible to see right from wrong, like Dave did.’
the Sheldon report has not brought Radford the solace he might have expected because its conclusions about what Southampton and the FA knew are baffling, to say the least.
Sheldon supports an FA claim that there were no grounds for concern about Higgins’s conduct with children until 1995, long after he had abused Radford.
Yet his report documents a meeting between the FA, the Football League and Southampton in February 1989 to discuss concerns about Higgins, who was then running a football academy.
the report concludes that it cannot prove the concerns were abuse-related.
Also that year, then- Crewe manager Dario Gradi wrote to FA director of coaching Charles Hughes, tipping him off about Higgins’s academy and implying it should be shut down. Again, the report concludes there is no proof that abuse was the reason.
In 2019, Higgins was found guilty of 46 counts of indecent assault on 24 victims, mostly Southampton and Peterborough trainees, between 1971 and 1996. He was sentenced to 24 years and three months in jail.
Radford is campaigning to reform the double jeopardy law, so that sexual offenders such as Higgins could face trial for previous abuse allegations.
the All-Party Parliamentary Group for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse has recommended such a change to the law. A petition for justice raised by Radford has garnered more than 11,000 signatures.
‘It’s taken some time to get my head around all the detail of the Sheldon report,’ says Radford.
‘ But parts of it trouble me deeply. It goes to every length to give people the benefit of the doubt and see the other side. the crimes were actually going on right in front of their eyes.’ l Football’s Darkest Secret begins tonight at 9pm on BBC1.