I still woke up every morning grateful I was a footballer... I don’t think there’s a better life,I have been really blessed
NO RAY, HONESTLY, THE PRIVILEGE WAS ALL OURS
CRIPPLED by debt, and managerless after Eddie McCreadie’s walkout over the club’s refusal to provide a company car, Chelsea was the picnic hamper of English football – a basket case.
A giant new stand, three gleaming tiers of it, towered over careworn Stamford Bridge as if a mother spaceship had landed in a scrap yard.
And the glory days of Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson and Charlie Cooke were fading more rapidly than a holiday tan.
It takes exceptional talent for an 18-year-old to captain a fashionable London club on its uppers. Fortunately for Chelsea, Ray Wilkins was a special character. Destined for promotion from barracks to officers’ mess from a tender age, dear old ‘Butch’ was not just a safe pair of hands to lead them out of the wilderness after relegation in 1975.
His passing range, and occasional goal worthy of preservation orders in the archives, was as flamboyant as the fashion sense which earned him his affectionate nickname.
It was Wilkins who kept the blue flag flying when everything else about the club screamed half-mast.
We shall remember the freshfaced leader of men, who launched his 84-cap England career while playing in the second tier, when Chelsea didn’t have two brass farthings to rub together. Ray Wilkins died in hospital yesterday, aged 61, after a cardiac arrest had left him in an induced coma. If there was a gong for the nicest man in football, he wore the crown.
“I don’t find being considerate, or trying to help people, a weakness,” he said in 1999. If only there were more Rays of light than chancers and talentless sharks, sport would be a better place.
When Wilkins was sold to Manchester United for £825,000 in 1979, it restored Chelsea to an even keel financially at a stroke, but he remained true to his first footballing love.
Twenty years later he returned to the Blues’ nest as Gianluca Vialli’s assistant, a role he also fulfilled under Luiz Felipe Scolari, Guus Hiddink and Carlo Ancelotti’s regimes.
By now he was revered in four countries – including Italy, where he was one of the first British players to succeed in Serie A with AC Milan – after an astonishing playing career spanning 24 years and 11 clubs.
“When I finished my career playing for Leyton Orient and Wycombe, I was waking up every morning still grateful that I was a footballer,” he said in 2010. “I don’t think there’s a better life. I’ve been blessed.”
No, Ray – the privilege was all ours. We shall remember that articulate passing range, the voiceovers for Tango TV ads in the 1990s, and his occasional pearls of wisdom as a pundit, such as the glorious line: “That’s exactly how you head a ball – with the head.”
For a player who was allegedly preoccupied with passing sideways, Wilkins didn’t half score some spectacular goals.
There was the double-lob for England against Belgium at the European Championship finals in 1980, and the curling effort for Manchester United in the FA Cup final 35 years ago.
And Wilkins’ place in Old Firm legend was assured when he speared home a memorable volley in Rangers’ 5-1 win against Celtic 30 years ago.
Chelsea’s season may have boiled down to FA Cup glory or bust, but if Antonio Conte was seeking inspiration to salvage a trophy from a difficult campaign, his team surely needs none now.