Ray Wilkins
Special tribute to one of the true icons of English football
RAY WILKINS was a man of rare grace and warmth who made people feel better about themselves even as he struggled with his own troubles. I didn’t know him well but I knew him enough to chat to him in the Chelsea press room at Stamford Bridge whenever I bumped into him there and every time I did, I considered it a privilege.
Wilkins was one of my first heroes when I was a kid growing up in south Manchester and he was the captain of Manchester United. In our later lives, he knew that and I’m glad he knew it. He was the kind of man, and the kind of footballer, who deserved to know he was valued and admired by those who looked up to him.
Generally, it is wise advice when people tell you never to meet your heroes but Wilkins was a diamond of a man as well as a wonderful midfield player. No one who knew him even as an occasional acquaintance, as I did, would have been surprised by the warmth of the tributes that were paid to him last week after his death at the age of 61.
He knew that he was a hero of mine because I wrote about it once more than 20 years ago.
I looked the article up last week. ‘Cultured ambassador with vision to pass anything but the buck,’ the headline on it read. I was pleased that it was as generous as I remembered it and as warm as I had intended it to be. Wilkins rang to thank me when it appeared, which was also typical of him.
Much of what has been written about him in the past few days has centred on the warmth of his personality. There have been particularly touching reminiscences from former QPR player Nigel Quashie and ex-England midfielder Joe Cole, from Adrian Durham and Alan Brazil, who worked with him at talkSPORT and even from a former soldier, whom Wilkins helped to save from a life on the streets. But I loved him as a player most of all. That is how I knew him really. That was how he affected me most. He was one of the players whose style and elegance helped to shape my own affection for the game and gave me an appreciation of what I valued most in the way football was played.
Wilkins was a beautiful footballer. I was 13 in 1979 when he joined United from Chelsea and I was captivated by the way he passed the ball and by his vision and his poise. He was the brains of that team and Bryan Robson was its engine. They were the yin and yang of Ron Atkinson’s United midfield.
They complemented each other brilliantly but it always seemed to me that, while Robson was adored by United fans, Wilkins was never given enough credit.
Wilkins was a midfield general who loved the ball. He was cultured and clever. He was a playmaker who controlled and read the game while Robson rampaged from box to box. Wilkins always seemed to be a step ahead. He hated losing possession. He would have fitted in to any of today’s top teams.
But he was under-appreciated for a while. He lost the captaincy of United and England while he was recovering from an injury in 1982. He lost his place in the United side to Remi Moses, too. It became fashionable to criticise him for playing square balls. Some liked to call him The Crab because they said he always moved sideways.
‘He can’t run, he can’t tackle and he can’t head the ball,’ the former United manager, Tommy Docherty, said in his new role as a polemicist. ‘How can people call him a world-class player? The only time he goes forward is to toss the coin.’
If Docherty had been a pundit 20 years later, I suspect he would have said the same about Xavi.
It only made me like him even more when others scorned Wilkins. It can sometimes be like that with your heroes.
Wilkins proved his doubters wrong and gave those of us who had stayed loyal to his cause plenty to rejoice in. I was in the Stretford End on March 12 1983 when, with the clock ticking down at the end of an FA Cup tie against Everton, he hit a perfectly weighted pass into the path of Lou Macari, who nodded it down for Frank Stapleton to volley into the top corner. That is probably still my favourite United goal. A couple of months later, Wilkins scored one of the great FA Cup final goals with a lazily elegant curling left-footed shot against Brighton and Hove Albion. United drew that game but won the trophy after a replay.
United fans still fretted that Robson would be tempted from Old Trafford but it was no surprise to those of us who loved Wilkins that it was him who AC Milan took instead. They appreciated the kind of style and cultured passing they had seen in Wilkins. In a bittersweet way, his move felt like a kind of vindication for those of us who had always championed him.
In many ways, he was ahead of his time in an English game that was still mainlining on muscularity. He identified that when I spoke to him for that article in 1996, when he was the player-manager of QPR, struggling to keep them in the top division.
‘It is strange the way things have turned,’ said Wilkins. ‘I used to get criticised for playing square balls and yet you watch games like Liverpool and Newcastle the other night and people are talking about how they strung 25 passes together before this goal or that goal. Now 15 of those will have gone sideways and backwards, but they have kept the ball and that has always been my philosophy.’
It has been said since he died that, like so many of his fellow professionals, he struggled to cope with life once his playing career was over and he was denied the drug of doing what he was best at.
I don’t know if that is true but I hope he knew how loved and admired he continued to be by those of us who had always regarded him as a hero.