HIGHS AND LOWS
Crewe midfielder Luke Murphy on his rollercoaster ride
THE madness of Massimo Cellino. Mistreatment at the hands of Garry Monk. Industrial action, financial meltdown, and myriad other misfortunes.
“There’s not much I haven’t seen in football,” laughs Crewe midfielder Luke Murphy. “I should write a book, I’m telling you!”
Seven years ago, things couldn’t have been more different. A product of Crewe’s academy, Murphy made his debut aged 19. By 23, he had scored 25 goals in 186 games and was captain of the club.
Yet if those numbers speak of experience, Murphy was - by his own admission - still wet behind the ears when Leeds United paid £1.2m for his services in July 2013.
“Crewe was all I’d known since seven years of age,” he explains. “You could almost say I’d been wrapped in cotton wool.
“I went from a place where I knew everyone into a changing room with some huge names who’d achieved a lot in the game. I was signed as an equal but I was looking at them in awe.
“Leeds was an amazing place. Great fanbase, good people. But for that to be my first experience outside of that bubble - it was very daunting.”
Murphy spent five seasons at Elland Road. “And I absolutely loved it,” he says. “It was an honour to put on that top and I’ll be forever grateful to Brian McDermott for signing me. What a place.” Fans loved his effort, and the flashes of class. They appreciated the fact he took a paycut to extend his stay at the club. Rarely, though, did Murphy ever fulfil the potential he had demonstrated at Gresty Road.
“My whole time at Leeds, I was very inconsistent,” he concedes. “Truth be told, I probably underachieved.”
But who wouldn’t? Murphy’s years at Elland Road coincided with the reign of Cellino, a man who makes
However crazy it looked it from the outside, worse probably was Massimo (at Leeds). was a crazy, crazy man Luke Murphy
Donald Trump look mature and considered. Dubbed ‘the manager eater’ in his native Italy, Cellino ripped through seven managers in little more than two years.
Dave Hockaday was plucked from the dole queue, having previously worked for Forest Green Rovers. He lasted 70 days, 38 more than successor Darko Milanic, while Neil Redfearn, Uwe Rosler and Steve Evans fared only marginally better.
Bust-ups
Then there were the bustups, the bizarre signings, the phone calls to players and managers at all hours of the night.
“However crazy it looked from the outside, it was probably worse,” says Murphy. “A manager would come in, and if he didn’t win five out of six, he was gone.
“Massimo was a crazy, crazy man. But for some reason - I still don’t know why he seemed to take a liking to me.
“If you sat down and talked to him, he was actually a really nice bloke. I just think the way football is run in Italy is completely different and he struggled to understand why he was getting so much criticism.
“He made a lot of decisions where you thought ‘I bet if you’d just slept on that for 24 hours, you wouldn’t have done it’. He was just too emotionally involved in games. “One year, he personally signed about ten or eleven Italian players. There were no problems in the dressing room but, subconsciously, it was very much them and us. “They got a bad press, but to fit into a new country, a new style of football and a big club like Leeds when you can barely speak English - it was so tough for those lads. “Funnily enough, the person who brought everyone together was Sol Bamba. Sol had played in Italy, he spoke four or five different languages. If one person was angry at someone else, he’d be the one who mediated everything and acted as translator.
“He was a very good centre-half, but as a captain and a person he’s one of the best I’ve ever come across. He glued us all together.”
Murphy, self-deprecating and articulate, got on well with most of his managers. He liked Hockaday.
Ridiculous
“A great guy, but he’d probably admit himself that it was a huge ask to come from Forest Green to such a big job,” he says.
“I actually stitched him up a little bit. We were playing Bradford in the cup and I got two yellow cards live on Sky. Ridiculous, a total rush of blood. He got sacked after that, and I still feel awful about it.”
Murphy credits Redfearn and assistant Steve Thompson with inspiring the best six months of his Leeds career. Rosler and Evans remain friends. Monk, Cellino’s final appointment in June 2016, is a different story.
“Garry didn’t want me, which was fine,” says Murphy, who scored seven goals in 111 games for Leeds. “But he was making me train with the Under-23s. Get changed in a separate changing room. I wasn’t allowed to eat dinner with the first-team. I wasn’t allowed to see the physios.
“I don’t think I’m a bad egg at all. I’m a supportive lad even when I’m not involved, so I found that pretty hurtful.”
Salvation came in the form of Nigel Clough and Burton Albion, who had just won a fairytale promotion to the Championship.
“I was in a dark place, and going on loan to Burton pulled me out of that,” says Murphy. “They were such a friendly, family club who’d do anything to help you. It was the closest thing I could imagine to somewhere like Crewe.
“No disrespect to anyone at Burton, but we were one of the worst teams in the league. But the spirit and togetherness, the willingness to run for each other - it’s the best I’ve known.
“And the manager, Nigel Clough, is someone I love to bits. He’s easily the best manager I’ve had. How he treats players, the trust he puts in you. I’d never met him before I joined Burton, but he was the perfect person to come into my life at that point. We still keep in touch now.”
It was, though, a brief respite from the game’s chaos, a moment of calm before the tsunami rolled back in.
In 2018, Murphy joined Bolton Wanderers - just as owner Ken Anderson pulled the plug on his investment.
Strike
Over the next two years, the club lunged from crisis to crisis, including a player strike for an end-of-season dead rubber against Brentford.
“When I joined the club, I was told all the financial issues had been sorted,” says Murphy. “Then a couple of months into the season the chairman decided to stop paying wages. And not just ours - the chefs, the cleaners, the stewards, the staff.
“Everybody was in a bit of limbo and it got to a point where we went six months without pay. It was stressful for us, but we could survive. The people behind the scenes were struggling to feed their kids, to pay rent and mortgages.
“Every day, we had a onehour meeting about the situation. There were group votes, discussions. We were watching people’s lives get ruined and it seemed that the people in charge didn’t even care.
“That’s why we took the stance of not playing against Brentford. It didn’t sit well with us and - truth be told - we expected to play. We thought the threat would kick the chairman up the backside, people would get paid, and the game would go ahead.
“But they didn’t get paid, and having backed ourselves into a corner we didn’t have much choice but to follow through.”
Relegated from the Championship in 2019, Bolton were deducted 12 points for entering administration and almost every first-team player quit. But for a last- ditch takeover, the club would have gone to the wall.
“If you handed in your notice, they had 14 days to pay you in full or you could walk away from your contract,” says Murphy.
“Erhun Otzumer did that. Josh Magennis did that. The first few games of the season, it was me, Jason Lowe, Remi Matthews and the youth team. They tried hard, those lads, but they were up against big, strong men. It was a really difficult time.”
Now Murphy is back where it all began, decked in a Crewe shirt for the first time since picking up the club’s player of the year award in 2013. Doesn’t he worry that a legendary legacy that included a promotion and a Trophy victory could be sullied?
“You know, that was definitely a thought in my mind,” he admits. “I had such fond memories of my time here. It was my home from the age of seven, and we were really successful. Although it excited me, did I want to go back and dent that?
“But once I’d been around the place for a couple of weeks and looked at the quality they’ve got, I thought ‘You’re being stupid’. There’s no way this team won’t be successful.
“And the really nice thing is that I’m seeing things each day that jog my memory of the Crewe way.
“How they try to play, the values they want in a person. Passing out from the back and playing attractively. It’s all there - and it still feels like home.”