Those tweets were five years ago ... I’m a different person now
THERE is a mistake we sometimes make in football. We think that everybody starts out just like us. Andre Gray was not like us, not many of us anyway.
The Burnley centre forward has a background you wouldn’t want. Raised without a father, he was brought up by his mother Joanna and grandfather Terry. When Terry passed away when Gray was 13, he found alternative company on the streets of Wolverhampton.
Gang life, petty crime, friends dying, friends in prison, Gray’s life was not pretty. The scar on his left cheek is from a street fight and could have killed him. So as we judge him for the homophobic tweets he is now known to have written in 2012, he is deserving of a look at his back story. ‘People come from all sorts of backgrounds and I understand that now,’ Gray said. ‘Where I am from certain things were not exposed to me. Thankfully football set me free from those kind of things.
‘You meet people and you see other sides of life, the way people live differently. It opens your eyes in terms of sexuality and religion and everything. You realise that everyone is the same. The way I was brought up, and how I was as a youngster, was completely different to that.’
The story of Gray’s first season in the Premier League is simple, even if that of his life is less so.
He scored his first goal on August 20 as Burnley beat Liverpool at Turf Moor, only for that to be the evening that tweets sent during his time as a non-League player for Hinckley appeared in the media. Historical they may have been but they were pretty ugly all the same and a fourmatch FA ban followed.
Five months on and only now is Gray really moving forward again. The winner at home to Middlesbrough on Boxing Day was followed by a hat-trick against Sunderland.
It was this, as well as a day spent on an FA education course at Wembley, that the 25-year-old recalled.
‘I felt I could open up about things. Sometimes it’s difficult to word how you feel but it was good to hear other people’s point of view on discrimination and stuff.
‘I’ve been exposed to more now and we learned a lot from each other that day.
‘What happened in August was frustrating. I am a role model now to young people. It’s frustrating that it gets brought up to look like it’s the present when it was the past. It was five years ago. I was a different person. Listen, I had people talking to me and advising me when I was 13 and 14 but when you’re in the situation you’re in you don’t listen. So sometimes you have to learn the hard way. I was lucky to have football to set me free and expose me to positive things.’
Gray spoke eloquently at Burnley’s training ground. At face value, he did not seem to be simply paying lip service to the subject of self-improvement. Time will tell, of course, as it will with his football.
Many who watched him come through the ranks at Hinckley and Luton saw the pace and strength that we see now but little else.
Some say that it was at Brentford in 2014-15 that he began to show an increased ability to hold the ball up and appreciate his natural assets.
Now in the Premier League, it hasn’t been easy. Prior to Christ-
mas, the goal against Liverpool was his only one.
‘It was just a case of accepting that this is not like the leagues below, it’s not as easy,’ he said. ‘Three years before this hat-trick I was playing on a waterlogged pitch at Barnet.
‘I went through the same sort of situation when I was at Brentford because I had jumped up the leagues. I think I went around nine games without scoring then. I’ve tried to just keep my head down and do the right things, on and off the pitch.’.
Gray has had to leave some people behind in life to move forward.
‘It’s difficult when you’ve got people against you in your own family,’ he said without explanation. ‘It does make it harder, but you’ve got to get through it. My mum’s brought me up, but she can’t teach a son man things. So I’ve had to practically raise myself, but with her support. ‘I am still learning and there’s obviously people you have to look out for and keep your distance from. ‘ That’s been proven with people selling stories for a couple of hundred pounds, when you think they’re your friends. But a lot of people have defended me because they know I am not that person. What happened is going to be out there for the rest of my life and I’ve got to live with that.’