Month: October 2018

Danny Murphy has told talkSPORT there is a ‘lot more to come’ following the revelations of sexual abuse that have rocked football in the past week.Two former Crewe youth players, Andy Woodward and Steve Walters, were the first to break their silence over the abuse they suffered at a young age at the hands of their former coach, Barry Bennell.Former Liverpool and Tottenham striker Paul Stewart and ex-Manchester City and England attacker David White have also come forward to reveal their own childhood traumas.Murphy, who began his career as a youngster at Gresty Road, insists this is just the tip of the iceberg, but believes long-standing boss Dario Gradi ted with Watford’s stand over Dimitri Foulquier.Foulquier was outstanding for Getafe last season, helping them to a stunning fifth place finish.Watford called back Foulquier over summer and Marca says they refused to send him back to Getafe for a newknew nothing of the horrors unfolding at the club.“I’m very saddened by it all,” he said on the Jim White show. “There’s a lot more to come. I don’t think it stops with Crewe. That would be ridiculously naïve.“This is going to be blown apart and I encourage anybody listening to speak out because why try to hide anything, even if it’s negative? Put it out there, let’s get to the bottom of it.”Murphy’s association as a youngster with Bennell at Crewe was brief, but he admits he was not surprised by the recent revelations.The former Liverpool and England star added: “When it first came out, sadly, no, I wasn’t shocked because obviously Barry had already been to prison many years ago for the same crimes he’s been accused of now.“I was a bit surprised by who it was [who’d been abused] because I knew him. He was a bit older than me, but I played with him at Crewe, Andy [Woodward].“I know his sister was married to Barry for a while so it was kind of even more of a shock in a way, but the more I thought about it and remembered back to my time [at Crewe] it made sense.“My cross over with Barry was quite quick. I went to Crewe when I was probably 12, 13, and he left soon after. I had probably only a year, if that, with him and in and around him. Some of the lads he’d coached were five, six, seven years before that. So he knew those lads a lot better than me.“Strangely, the guy himself was quite charming, a good coach, quite well liked with the lads because of his great skills and the sessions he put on, but there was a certain side to him that was aggressive and he was a bit of a bully to certain victims – within the coaching, I’m talking about. So he did have two sides to him.“It was only really after he left and I got to know some of the lads that I started hearing little whispers and rumours if you like, but when you’re 14, 15, 16 at a football club with a lot of lads, things do get said and you don’t really have the intelligence to takn striker Richarlison doesn’t expect him to be allowed to leave this summer.The Brazil international is a target for Inter Milan.”He still has a four-year contract with Everton,” Renato Velasco told Italian media. “I think there will be some officie them in, process them and think of a bigger picture.“I took stick myself from some of the older lads because I stayed with [manager] Dario [Gradi] for many years off and on, as in weekends here and there because I couldn’t afford to travel backwards and forwards to play the games. I used to get stick – ‘oh, you’re one of Dario’s boys’, all that stuff – but it goes over your head a bit.“I feel sad that my fantastic memories of Crewe – and I think there will be other lads in my boat – aren’t shared by all of those I thought they were shared by. It was a fantastic environment for young kids to be in. Families and parents were welcomed in, there were lots of family days.”Gradi is yet to speak publically following the claims about Crewe, the club he has been synonymous with for more than 30 years, but Murphy is convinced his mentor has nothing to hide.He added: “Dario was like a second father to me, a perfect gent, a brilliant coach and somebody I still look up to. I sincerely believe that if he had any indication of anything going on he would have done something about it. Well, I have to believe that. That’s the relationship I had with him.“So I’m sad he might be tarnished and the club is tarnished because it did so much good work and still does, but unfortunately when you get something like this, the questions have to be asked.“Crewe have to open the doors now to the authorities and answer anything that needs to be answered and just put it all out there because the problem has been people keeping quiet about it, not talking about it, not opening up.“Let me tell you how some of these things happen, and it’s not difficult. [Football] is an easy breeding ground for someone like Barry Bennell.“There are lots of football tournaments, not just for professional clubs, but Sunday League clubs, amateur clubs all across the country. They go away and play in tournaments, in the UK and abroad. And you get 15-20 lads, sometimes four or five different age groups, going with four or five coaches staying in average accommodation where everyone crams in. That’s what happens.“I went to a tournament in Blackpool. Barry took the team. I think we were four or six to a room, a little pokey room, and later on I heard he would oversubscribe the amount of people to the room, and that was another opportunity for him to get close and stuff like that, that’s what I was told.“I didn’t experience that so I can’t say for sure, but those are the type of things you started hearing as you got older but, to get back to the point, the opportunity to be around children continually is easy for a football coach, and now looking back it makes absolute perfect sense that that’s what he would do. It’s all about accessibility.“And the other key, which is what Andy Woodward was talking about, is all these children are desperately seeking guidance to become a footballer.And that particular coach, if he does it right, becomes your shining light. He becomes the one that can make it happen for you.“Luckily for me, when I was at Crewe, Dario was that man, [along with] Kenny Swain, Alex Gibson. For a lot of those lads who were there, it was Barry. He could make or break them. He had the power.“It’s the power of, ‘I can make you a good player or not’. And then [there is] the fear of children, of course.”