Former football coach jailed for 20 years for abusing boys

♦ A former football coach who worked with Newcastle United was yesterday jailed for 20 years after using his position to sexually abuse 18 boys over three decades

George Ormond, 62, worked with a youth team in the city in the Seventies and Eighties, before assisting at the Premier League club in the Nineties. He used his power over ambitious boys, one aged 11, to sexually abuse them and keep them silent.

Judge Edward Bindloss, sitting at Newcastle Crown Court, said: “Evidence showed that over a 25-year period, George Ormond was a man wholly preoccupied with sex, who used his position as a respected football coach to target boys and young men in his care.”

Ormond, who had already been jailed in 2002 for abuse, was convicted on Tuesday of 35 indecent assaults and one count of indecency. Judge Bindloss said: “No one observing this trial could have failed to have been moved by the complainants and other witnesses … largely men in their 50s, largely from working class and sporting backgrounds, speaking with calm and quiet dignity about how they failed to understand what was happening to them.”