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Gary Speed

James

by James
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Abra Dubravka

Abra Dubravka

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27 minutes ago, Raconteur said:

Shearer's piece in The Athletic is equally heartbreaking

 

https://theathletic.com/2966447/2021/11/26/alan-shearer-my-friend-speedo-10-years-on-through-the-eyes-of-those-who-knew-him/

 

What would be really great is you actually copied and pasted the article. 

 

You've gone to enough trouble to type and send a message to this forum after all...

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cookidge

cookidge

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2 minutes ago, Abra Dubravka said:

 

What would be really great is you actually copied and pasted the article. 

 

You've gone to enough trouble to type and send a message to this forum after all...

 

He may not have realised to be fair!

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PauloGeordio

PauloGeordio

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It was the way he walked, like a strut, on his toes, and it made Gary Speed look three or four inches taller.

When you walk into a dressing room for the first time, players try to suss you out, good or bad, and those early impressions stick. There was confidence there, not arrogance, but a kind of aura. He was measured and quiet to begin with, but his body language said a lot.

I didn’t know Speedo as a person, but I remember that strut and I remember thinking, ‘This guy has a bit about him’.

I did know him as a player; a proud Welshman, he’d won the title at Leeds United and then moved on to Everton, the team he supported as a kid. I’d played against him but didn’t realise quite how good he was until he joined us at Newcastle United in February 1998. He had that gravity-defying leap and a sorcerer’s wand for a left foot. He was brilliant and reliable. Tough. Indestructible.

He was 28, but immediately became the standard-bearer for fitness at the club, constantly popping vitamins. In running sessions, he’d lead from the front and I’d be trailing miles behind. He’d look around and laugh… Ah, man, that laugh of his. It was unexpected, high-pitched, squeaky, and your face would melt just hearing it, even when you were blowing out of your arse.

That was Speedo; always smiling through.

Something clicked. We’d do the school run, get into work early and have breakfast. We had the same ideas about professionalism. There was a core of senior players – Rob Lee, Warren Barton, Shay Given, Steve Harper – and we had a Sunday club, where we’d meet in the pub for a couple of pints and watch football. Gary would be first at the bar. That was his personality.

Speed talking as Wales manager a couple of months before his death in 2011 (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)

Our families got on well, too. Football is transient, but after Speedo left for Bolton Wanderers after six years, we’d all go on holiday together. There were golf trips with the lads. Changing rooms can be brutal, beautiful places, and when you experience extreme emotions with people, a bond is forged. It might just be a shared look, but if you were there, you understand.

November 27, 2021 marks the 10th anniversary of Gary’s death. Even now, it is impossible to compute. The Speedo I knew was happy, admired by everyone who came across him, which is pretty much unique in football. That smile – plastered across his face – was what I knew.

But the Gary I knew also took his own life and the knowing and the not knowing are still devastating.

I feel for Louise, his widow, for their boys Tommy and Ed, his parents Roger and Carol, and all the people he left behind, but it’s the smile I want to focus on here, to explain how Speedo developed as a footballer, how he touched other lives, how his story merged with theirs.

We remember you, Gary, your left foot, your ridiculous laugh. That strut.

“He played centre midfield, No 10 on his back, a mop of jet black hair and he just stood out.” This is Chris Coleman – Cookie to his friends. He first met Speeds, as he calls him, when they were both 10 and playing Welsh schools football. They competed with each other and then grew and played together for under-age Wales teams, then the first team.

When Gary died, Chris replaced his old mate as Wales manager and the weight of that responsibility was almost too much to carry. “He wasn’t here anymore, but I felt I didn’t really belong,” he says. “There was a fight going on inside me, certainly for the first 12 to 18 months of doing the job. I was really close to just walking away from it all. It was too much for me.”

For now, we rewind to the playing fields of Wales. “A lot of children just gather around the ball,” Cookie says. “They don’t understand the concept of space. Speeds did. He had that beautiful left foot but an intelligence with it. My dad would never get carried away, but I remember him saying, ‘That No 10 – best you’ve played against’. Gaz was ahead of everybody at that age.

“When I got to meet him properly, I was a bit in awe because he had a magnetism. He loved his football. He had that weird laugh, a girlish kind of sound. You’d want to make him laugh because it would make you laugh, too. I was just drawn to him. The bond had been made. We had that sense of excitement – ‘Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to have a career in football’.”

Gary signed for Leeds as a 14-year-old on the same day as Simon Grayson, schoolboy forms at first and then as apprentices.

“Speedo had everything going in the right direction,” Simon, a boyhood Leeds fan, says. “Football ability, obviously. Good-looking as well.” It took perseverance to thrive. “It was sink or swim,” says Simon. “That was the mentality you needed.”

Life as an apprentice meant living in digs, early buses, menial chores. “We’d start at 7am, cleaning boots,” Simon says. “We’d fetch senior players bacon and egg sandwiches from a cafe across the road. Our manager was Billy Bremner, a legend at Leeds, and he’d join in with the sessions, every bit as dirty as when he played. We’d do our jobs, sweeping and washing. It was a long day, but a fantastic education.”

Simon remembers Gary being “quite shy. He wasn’t from the bright city lights. He had a humble background with Roger and Carol, he was brought up in the right manner and he was respectful of everybody. He also had a confidence in his ability. He had a competitive edge in everything he did, whether it was cricket in the corridor or games of two-touch. He always wanted to win.”

Speed with Gordon Strachan and Rod Wallace in his Leeds days (Photo: Tony Harris/PA Images via Getty Images)

Does this sound too serious? “We got away with things you couldn’t do now,” says Simon. “We’d have our own court cases, dishing out punishments. One lad got tied to the goalposts at Elland Road with Deep Heat everywhere and then the hosepipe coming out… Speedo was always in and amongst those shenanigans. He loved Leeds, the club, the city, going into town, shopping, going out. He took it to his heart.”

Simon, who was up until this week manager of Fleetwood Town in League One, broke into the first team at 17, “and then hardly kicked a ball”. Was it difficult for him to see Gary, his close friend, prosper at the club he loved? “To start with you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I wish that could have been me’, but I never begrudged him success because I knew how hard he worked for it. He trained like a demon.”

Gary was a freak of nature. To pass 840 first-team appearances as a midfielder – 535 of them in the Premier League – is astonishing and his stint as a player was bookended by two important figures, Sam Allardyce at Bolton and, back where it started, Gordon Strachan at Leeds. Gordon was also a model of longevity, famously refuelling on bananas and seaweed tablets.

Gordon had arrived at Leeds as a 32-year-old in 1989, dropping down a division when he left Manchester United. “It was pure greed!” he says. Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough, who were both in the top division, were after him, but when Leeds offered him a contract, “I turned around and expected Maradona to be standing behind me. ‘How much?!’

“But it was the best thing I ever did. It rejuvenated me. I was with a group of people I felt I could push on and it gave me another lease of life. It worked out absolutely perfect. Probably the most satisfying part of my career.”

He recalls Gary’s early moments. “He wasn’t one of the guys that grabbed your attention,” Gordon says. “David Batty was the one everyone was talking about. I got engaged with Gary because he was always smiling. You know what Batts was like – it was hard to get anything out of him.

“When I saw Gary play I’d think, ‘Right, OK, you’ve got something, but there’s not enough in your game to be a top footballer’. He played everything safe. He had that aerial ability but I felt the club were just relying on that and so was he, getting into the box and seeing what happens. We’d speak about it over weeks and months. I’d say, ‘You need to do a wee bit more. You need to be starring in games’. He worked on it.

“Fitness was a big thing, too. I’ve never been too fussed about people working on their weaker foot, but Gary did it. There was also this humility about him. It’s a fantastic thing to have because it means you know you can improve. If you already think you’re wonderful, how do you get better? Gary was one of those ugly ducklings who became a swan.”

Tributes left to Speed outside Leeds’ Elland Road ground (Photo: Gareth Copley/Getty Images)

What a formidable midfield that title-winning Leeds team had; Strachan, Speed, Batty, Gary McAllister. “You’re talking about three outspoken, pain-in-the-backside kind of people – Gary shouldn’t really have been in there,” Gordon says. “He was too nice. I felt sorry for him being polluted with our nastiness! But he also calmed us down.”

The quartet worked. “Gary was the left winger, but I always felt he would be better inside because from there he could work outside and cross the ball,” Gordon says. “I came in from one side, Gary from the other, so we had a tight four which allowed the full-backs to go on. It meant that when the ball came from the other side, he could get involved, making runs, scoring goals.”

At Newcastle, Speedo would always say, “Strach did this, Strach did that.” “It was easy to talk to Gary,” Gordon says. “I got changed right next to him every day for six years and you naturally tend to bond with someone who is physically close to you. I loved sitting next to him because he was a great audience. It didn’t matter what I said, he’d laugh.

“And that silly wee laugh of his. It was a great laugh. There were bigger voices in the dressing room, but when the fun started he was always there. And I used to vet his fan mail. He was such a good-looking fella that girls would send all this stuff in and I’d go, ‘No, that’s not for you, you’re too young… No, not that one’.

“He had a devilment when he played – he realised you had to – but Gary was one of those people like Tommy Burns where you’d think, ‘I wish I could be more like you rather than like me, because even I get annoyed with me’. Lesley, my wife, drooled over him and not just because he could have been the next James Bond. He was a complete gentleman.”

Leeds lifted the title, “I hate the word ‘winner’ because too many people use it – “Ooh, I’m a born winner because I beat my kids at Ludo’ – nobody cares,” Gordon says. “But I’m sure it helped Gary grow. He realised he could compete, he wasn’t a bit-part player. Every player that year got the most out of themselves. We played a bit basic, but it was a smashing group.”

When Speedo moved on, Gordon felt a sense of achievement. “As a senior player. You get to a point where you want to be an influence. Helping people is far more satisfying than picking up a medal, trust me. A medal is great, but everybody gets drunk for a night and that’s it.

“The satisfaction comes in seeing people do well for a long period of time. There were others at Leeds who came on. Vinnie Jones even became a footballer for a year and you think, ‘How the fuck did that happen?!’ But there was nothing better than me and Lesley watching Gary play for Newcastle on the telly, thinking, ‘We helped a wee bit with that’. How much, it didn’t matter. I’d think, ‘Wonderful, wonderful’.”

In 1996, Speedo moved to Everton, his club. His debut happened to be my first league game for Newcastle, too. The previous weekend, we’d been humped 4-0 by Manchester United in the Charity Shield and I walked off the pitch at Goodison Park after a 2-0 defeat thinking, ‘What the fuck have I done?’. Gary scored.

Everton had won the FA Cup in 1995 and finished sixth in the Premier League the season before Gary joined. He and Duncan Ferguson ended his first season as joint-top scorers with 11 goals in all competitions, but it was a struggle, 15th in the table and the departure of Joe Royle as manager. Howard Kendall replaced Joe and his relationship with Speedo was less easy.

Why did it become difficult? “Probably because the other nine players were shite!” Duncan says with a roar. “We were the only two players in the fucking team! No, I can’t really remember. We had some good players, but there was a wee bit of instability and upheaval. A lot of players suffered. We didn’t have a very good team, but I don’t know what happened behind the scenes.”

Dunc joined Gary and I on Tyneside and when I said I can remember my first impression of Gary – that strut of his – I can also remember the same about Duncan. It was identical to everybody else’s; I was fucking petrified.

“I’ve got that reputation, but you know that’s not true,” Duncan counters. “I’m a big pussy-cat.”

Bollocks.

Speed celebrates at Everton with Duncan Ferguson, right, and Slaven Bilic (Photo: John Marsh/EMPICS via Getty Images)

If you got on with Dunc, he was one of the nicest guys around, but I’d look at him standing in the tunnel before matches, staring ahead and saying nothing, and, honestly, you could see that some defenders were shitting themselves.

“That was part of it for me,” he says. “I wouldn’t talk to people after a game. I would walk off the pitch without shaking hands. I used all that myth to try and put a bit of fear into centre-halves. You use everything you can. And I did play on that a bit. I’m really a big softie…”

To which I can only repeat: bollocks.

The sadness from back then is that Duncan and I played so few games together. “Yeah, that goes for my whole career,” he says. “I was always fighting injuries. Football wasn’t the problem. Getting myself fit and out there was the problem. And trying to keep away from red cards!”

Meanwhile, there was Speedo with his vitamins and sports science and incredible fitness record. “The complete opposite to me, then!” Duncan says. “Even more annoying was how handsome he was. He was never late, he was a proper professional, loyal, hardworking. He was great on a night out. Everyone wanted to be around him. He had it all.”

And then Duncan, big Dunc, hard and uncompromising and unyielding, says this: “He was a beautiful person.”

Speedo made 85 appearances for Wales. “It was huge for him,” Coleman says. “A massive part of his identity. I was the same. We didn’t always have the best team but we did have a great camaraderie, togetherness and spirit and he was at the heart of it all. He thrived on it.

Cookie starts chuckling.

“I won’t name him, but we had a manager who tried to take the captaincy off Speeds,” he says. “We were training at two ends of a pitch and the manager told Mark Hughes he was going to give him the armband. Sparky replied, ‘What has Gary said about that?’. The manager hadn’t told him yet. So he walked down to the other end of the pitch and pulled Speeds. I was there, 10 yards away.

“Do you know what Speeds said? ‘Fuck off’, he said. ‘Fuck you. I’ve worked my arse off to be captain of my country and you ain’t taking the armband off me’. The manager just mumbled, ‘That’s what I wanted to hear’, but then he had to walk back up the pitch and tell Sparky, who can’t have been very happy.

“That was Speeds. He absolutely adored Wales.”

We cherish the memories of the people who leave us. We romanticise them, too. Speedo was a special man, but I always say the same thing about Sir Bobby Robson – you don’t get to do what they did without being made of granite. Gary expected people to live up to his standards.

“We’d argue almost every day,” John Carver, who assisted Sir Bobby at Newcastle, says. “He was so competitive, so determined to be the best. At the end of training, he would say, ‘Listen, JC. I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal, but I want to win’. It was like a love-hate relationship because of how he was at the training ground.

“He could be aggressive at times, but it was part of his make-up as a footballer. You couldn’t take it away from him. But it’s also easy to manage guys like him because you know they want everything to be right. He was a perfectionist. You saw it in his appearance and the way he dressed. He trained the way he played.

“Bobby talked about his ‘Blue-chip boys’ and Gary was one of them. He was so reliable. Bobby would say, ‘You’d take him into the trenches. You’d go to war with him’. You knew what you were going to get from him and on the rare occasions he was having a bad game, you’d still get 100 per cent commitment.”

Newcastle had a great mix back then. Bobby got us up to fourth, third and fifth in the Premier League and into the Champions League. At the right time, we relaxed. “Aye, especially on a Sunday in the pub,” John says. “You used to call it ‘Super Sunday’. I’d look after you all in training on a Monday. But you deserved it. You trained hard, played hard and partied hard.”

I can only remember Speedo truly losing his rag once, when Lomana LuaLua, who was on loan from Newcastle at Portsmouth, scored against us in a league match. It was a crazy decision on behalf of the club and his 89th-minute goal meant a 1-1 draw. It cost us two valuable points at a time when we were stretched by a run to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup.

Gary helping me celebrate a goal in our time at Newcastle United (Photo: Steve Parkin/AFP via Getty Images)

“I was the first one into the dressing room afterwards and I got both barrels,” John says. “Speedo was spluttering and spitting. He couldn’t believe LuaLua had been allowed to play. He was raging, throwing things all over the place. I was saying, ‘You’ve got to stay calm. We’ve still got games to play’, but he was absolutely right. That was the worst I ever saw him.”

There was another time, in Speedo’s final summer on Tyneside.

“We were on pre-season in the Far East and I’d overheard Bobby having a conversation with Freddy Shepherd, the chairman,” John says. “Bobby was desperate for Gary to be given a new contract but Freddy was saying, ‘No, we’re bringing in Nicky Butt’. Gary was furious. Like a raging bull.”

Sam Allardyce spotted his opportunity. His Bolton teams were made up of glamorous veterans and homegrown kids and over consecutive seasons he led them to eighth, sixth, eighth, seventh and into Europe for the first time. Underpinning it all was Sam’s faith in sports science, psychology, nutrition. He would have a willing devotee in Speedo, but first he had to get him.

“I knew Freddy Shepherd quite well, so I rang him and asked about Speedo,” Sam says. “With them signing Nicky Butt he said, ‘Well, it’ll probably be time to move him on. Wait until we get back from the Far East and you can get him — but under no circumstances tell Bobby’, because Bobby wanted to keep him.

“Freddy wanted £750,000 for Speedo, which to me was a snip. The problem was convincing Phil Gartside, my chairman, to pay that much for a 34-year-old. But with the information we put together, we showed Phil that Gary was still playing like a 26-year-old. It was probably the best £750,000 I ever spent.

“We were well-versed in quality players at the time. Youri Djorkaeff, Jay-Jay Okocha, people like that. What struck me most was Gary’s attitude to life and training, the influence he had. He demanded from the younger players, which made life very easy for me.

“I had this massive backroom staff and I think we offered him something he hadn’t seen before – weight training, pilates, yoga. I wondered whether he would bother with it at his age, but he did the lot. He bought into it. He signed a two-year deal and we quickly gave him another two years. He was a great part of that dressing room. He got on with everybody and never wanted a rest. That was an absolute no-no.

Allardyce says Speed was the best value signing he made (Photo: Tony Marshall – PA Images via Getty Images)

“He suited my system completely in terms of playing with a midfield three, with one sitting and two on the side. He’d be on the left but he was a good all-round midfielder, not like today where we label people. He could shut down, intercept passes, put his foot in. He was brilliant in the air, good touch, good passer. And, of course, he could ghost in to score goals.

“Gary was always 100 per cent full-on. If he felt the youngsters weren’t pulling their weight, he would step in and say, ‘You might have got into the first team but it’s only just started, son’. He was a great advocate for the team. People don’t talk about Gary so much at Bolton because of Jay-Jay and Nicolas Anelka and the rest, but he made a massive contribution to our success.”

Sam could tell Speedo was soaking it all up. “We talked about coaching a lot,” he says. “We even talked about him doing it with us. I left Bolton earlier than I thought, but I would have taken him – he would always have had a coaching position under me. But he was going to be a manager, I think that was certain.”

Sam moved to Newcastle and Speedo headed to Sheffield United. There were 37 league appearances for them, but there was also a back injury and surgery. He still managed to complete the London Marathon, raising funds for the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, but at 40, in May 2010, he retired as a player. He stayed on at Bramall Lane as a coach.

With the new season three games old, Kevin Blackwell was dismissed and Gary was hired as manager on a three-year contract. There had been a neat little circle; he and Simon Grayson, boys together at Leeds, had done their coaching badges at the same time. “He was a student of the game, he’d learned, done all the groundwork, studied other clubs,” Simon says.

At Sheffield United, Gary picked up the phone and asked John to work for him. “My first thought was, ‘Wow’,” John says. “I was working at Plymouth Argyle, but it was a chance to come north and closer to home. It was a great feeling. I had so much respect for him and it meant he respected what I could do.

“The first session Gary did, I thought, ‘I recognise this’. It was based on some of the work we’d done at Newcastle. I loved that. When he was a player he would come up to me after a session and say, ‘That was great, I’m going to write that one down’. Or it might be, ‘I won’t bother with that, JC’. He was super-intelligent. It was a huge honour to be there. We had a great understanding.”

Gary played for Sheffield United and then managed them (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

Was Gary as relentless about coaching as he was playing? “Absolutely,” John says. “He used to get in at seven in the morning. We’d have a staff meeting, organise training and once training had finished he’d disappear into the video room, usually to watch matches and clips, but sometimes to play his guitar and sing! He would always be the last one away. Sometimes he’d take us to the pub to talk about the team over a glass of wine.

“Everything was so meticulous. Even when results weren’t great, you could see what he was trying to do, his philosophy and how he wanted to play, what his principles were, playing out from the back, going through the units, attacking, attractive possession play and high pressing. He was ahead of his time. Unfortunately, we didn’t really have the players for it.”

Did John still see those flashes of raging Gary? “No, he was calm on the touchline,” he says. “He had that high, squeaky voice when he laughed or got angry and he couldn’t really propel it to the other side of the pitch, so he’d give me a nudge to do it! He was a thinker. He had a good teacher in Sir Bobby, who believed that as soon as you lose your temper you lose your focus.”

Four months later, a bombshell: Gary was confirmed as Wales manager. “I spoke to him at the time and I just said to him, ‘Jump in, you can’t turn it down’,” Sam says. “I’d encouraged him to take the plunge at Sheffield United, but you have to grasp your opportunities if and when they come. He felt so passionately about the Welsh side.”

For John, so recently uprooted, it must have been head-spinning. “There’d been a few rumours so he sat me down and said, ‘Listen, I’ve got some bad news for you’. ‘What’s bad about it?’ I replied. ‘You love your country, it’s amazing’. ‘Yeah, but I brought you all the way up from Plymouth’, he said. “I wasn’t worried about that. He said he wanted me to go there as his assistant.

“Anyway, I did some games as caretaker manager and then Sheffield United got rid of me. Gary found out, called me and offered to pay the rest of my contract. And it was, ‘Are you kidding me?’. I told him to keep his money, but that tells you something about the guy. It tells you everything. I’m getting emotional talking about it … I was like, ‘Wow’.”

“Speeds was at Sheffield United, I was out of work, the Wales job came up and I thought, ‘Bit early, maybe, but I’m going for it’.” This is Coleman again. “Speeds called me and agreed. ‘Go for it’. I asked if he would come in with me, but he had his hands full. He was having a tough time — ‘We can’t win a game, I don’t know how long this is going to last’.

“A week later, he calls me again and says, ‘Uh, Wales have contacted me. They want to speak to me. I’ve got a meeting with them’. It went down to me and him.

“So, anyway, I get another call. ‘Cookie, where are you?’, Speeds says. ‘I’m sat at home. Why? Where are you?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’m sitting in this big leather chair in my new office in Cardiff, where you could have been’. He’d got the job. We both burst out laughing. Yeah, I’ll never forget that.

“I’d have done exactly the same.”

Gary managed Wales for 10 games, five of them wins. From the outside, it looked like the team were turning the corner. They were FIFA’s “Best Movers” of 2011, clambering up the world rankings.

And then that impossible news.

In unimaginable circumstances, Cookie succeeded Gary as Wales manager. “The whole thing was weird, surreal,” he says. “You can’t believe what’s happened. I remember doing the press conference and … how can I put it? … I just felt so guilty that I was there where he should have been. He was doing a really good job, and then he wasn’t. That guilt just stayed with me.

“I was trying to get the team going, but we were losing and everybody was depressed. It was a mixture of us feeling down because we had lost him and me going about it the wrong way. He’d made sure the hotels and training facilities were better, taking the excuses away from the players and that really helped me, but I was trying to follow him rather than being my own man.

“I was really close to saying, ‘That’s it’. But I also didn’t want to give in, so I ended up just dragging myself through it. That was probably my unhappiest time as a manager. The stupid thing is that Speeds would have said, ‘What are you playing at? Stop trying to be something you’re not’. I was trying to keep everybody happy and that never works.

Gary at his Wales unveiling in 2011 (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

“I didn’t blame the players for not believing in my game plan, because I didn’t believe in it either. The whole thing was torture. The turning point was deciding that if I was going out the exit door, at least it would be doing something I believed in. We played three at the back and got some results. I think the players could sense I wasn’t pretending.”

After losing his first five games as manager, Cookie stopped the rot. By October 2015, Wales were eighth in the FIFA rankings. The following summer, they reached the semi-finals of the European Championship.

Nobody would have been prouder of Chris, happier for his country or singing more loudly than Speedo.

How do I finish a piece like this? Where do I put the full stop?

I said at the start that I wanted to focus on the upbeat, but all of these interviews ended with the same, tricky question: When you think of Gary now, what comes into your head? I’ll let the answers run, in the order they were given.

Simon Grayson: “It’s just a feeling of sadness. When it happened, it was such a shock. I was absolutely stunned. I was Leeds manager and our next game was against Nottingham Forest. Normally I would say the last few words before the team went out and I wanted to say something about Gary, but I couldn’t. I got too emotional.

“The fans chanted for Gary for 11 minutes from the 11th minute onwards in honour of his shirt number and at the end of it, Robert Snodgrass scored with a left-footed shot. It was just meant to be. It was so poignant. I walked off the pitch looking up to the sky thinking, ‘That’s for you, mate’.”

Gordon Strachan: “I think about seeing him three weeks before he passed away. You can’t help it. It’s, ‘What could I have done? What did I miss?’ Most of us probably feel the same. But when I think about Gary I also smile a lot. That smile is what he left behind, too.”

Duncan Ferguson: “I always go back to his debut for Everton. I set up his goal. I won the flick and he came from nowhere. Must have run 40 fucking yards to get by me. That’s what I remember most. Just how happy he was, playing for his boyhood team and scoring, that big smile of his, me running right over to celebrate with him.”

Sam Allardyce: “It is a sad question and you can’t get over that because he isn’t with us anymore, but he was a fantastic personality. Managers have to be problem-solvers, but there was never a problem to solve with Gary, on or off the field. As a professional, fantastic. As a human being, he had such compassion for other people, for everyone.”

For a little while, John Carver weeps. I hope he doesn’t mind me telling you that, but we’ve all been there, JC. We’ve all done it.

“It’s very difficult… Maybe I’m not as tough as you think, you know… It still hurts and it affects people in different ways. Trying to deal with it isn’t easy. I can’t get my head around it, even now. None of us can. But we have to try and we have to remember the good things. With Gary, 99.9999 per cent of it was good.”

Chris Coleman: “There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of him at least him once. I think about him laughing – that big smile, always with a joke. Mostly, I think about him as a young boy back in Wales, when we first met, that mop of hair, such a great vibe about him. My dad’s words – ‘Good player, him’. And all that life to live.”

We miss you, man.

Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123.

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Guest HTT II

Guest HTT II

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I still think today Gary Speed would have been our manager at some point, such a tragic loss. I’ve cried 3 times (properly) in football, when Cole left (I was a bairn), when Sir Bobby died, and when Speed died. 

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Bimpy474

Bimpy474

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, STM said:

How someone can appear so happy and relaxed and then... 

 

Guys, just talk to someone. If you feel shite, just talk to someone.

 

It's something you can't explain, every day you find it hard to see the next. You love everyone around you but you loath yourself, and it's not because you do anything bad or aren't a good person.

 

That's the bit you can't explain. Why do you loath yourself ? why do you feel so low ?  It's never feeling like you're good enough, no matter the praise you receive. You can feel so high and so low in the same moment.

 

Your advice is very sound, don't hide how you feel. Talking will be the start of getting better, it'll be different for each person, but do it and don't feel silly for doing so.

 

RIP Gary x

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  • 11 months later...
Coffee_Johnny

Coffee_Johnny

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RIP. Great player; lovely man; tragic loss. We all need to support men’s mental health. There are a growing number of initiatives now, but the stats haven’t changed in the last thirty years. 75% of suicides per year are by men; only 33% of people who use talking therapy services are men. We can do better.

 

Final word, from a song that never quite took off:

? Gary… Speed! 

He scores them with his heed.

Gary Speed, Gary Speed! ? 

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Wolfcastle

Wolfcastle

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Wow. That was a Sunday too wasn't it.

Was harrowing news. When they say out of the blue. Felt really rocked that day.

Don't think I've seen that clip of him coming on at Shearer's testimonial to that ovation and not felt emotional.  I'm so glad he and we got that.

 

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