Football’s greatest heroes? Four brave men on a TV sofa
IT WAS the 40 minutes that might have changed football for ever. Four men sat on a sofa with Victoria Derbyshire, one of the BBC’s finest and most fluid presenters. They were all former players – junior, club, professional – forged in the macho foundry of terraces and roasts and bravado and locker rooms and mocking chants.
But there was no bragging last Friday. No banter. This was like watching open-heart surgery on time lapse.
As you watched these adult men talk with inconceivable courage about their own grim experiences in the child sexual abuse crisis that has engulfed football (where it’s still offside even to admit you’re gay), the decades fell away.
You were back in the 1980s and early 1990s, looking into the eyes of terrified, traumatised, broken little boys, saying in public for the first time what a bad man had done to them.
Chris Unsworth was raped between 50 and 100 times by the predatory coach Barry Bennell. ‘I kept it locked away in the back of my head and never told a soul.’
Jason Dunford, who played for the Manchester City youth team, once fought off Bennell when he tried to rape him.
Bennell ‘picked me up and tossed me over’ but when Dunford told him to get off, he was forced out of the club. Steve Walters was repeatedly abused by Bennell while playing for Crewe Alexandra.
But none of them would have been there on the sofa had it not been for a decision just a few days earlier by Andy Woodward to go public – he was also raped hundreds of times by Bennell, a beast who ‘made Savile look like a choirboy’.
‘Woody’ sat crying openly for most of the interview, overcome, and when Derbyshire at last turned to him, having read out a selection from the hundreds of supportive tweets, he said, with streaming eyes: ‘I’m totally overwhelmed… I can’t thank the public enough and the media and the lads for backing me up. I’m overwhelmed.’ It was the word ‘lads’ that had me reaching for the Kleenex Mansize.
OF COURSE, I did wonder, when my boys played football, when I was driving them hither and yon to camps and sessions on astro pitches under floodlights, were boys like them being abused by men like that? Men who harnessed young dreams and cherrypicked keen footie boys for abuse?
But it wasn’t that thought, actually, that got me. It was the steady, unflinching support of the other footballers for their mates; the waves of public sympathy; the gratitude of the abused that they weren’t reviled, but congratulated for coming forward.
It was their shared, amazed relief that they went on live TV to disclose the awful, humiliating, shaming things that had happened – and the nation and their fellow players didn’t reject them but gathered them to their bosom instead.
These men were let down by the sport they loved. But their bravery has brought them millions of new supporters, and will change the game for the better.
Well played, lads.