Andy Gray provides football editor Mat Kendrick with a candid account of his three spells at Aston Villa
The word ‘we’ hangs powerfully in the air, like a certain Aston Villa centre forward in his prime.
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Not ‘wee’ as in small, although there are prolific mentions in Andy Gray’s distinctive Scottish burr of that too as he enthusiastically describes how Villa were the making of a wee boy from Drumchapel in Glasgow. But ‘we’ as in us, ‘we’ as in a shared, collective experience. ‘We’ as in the Villa.
Gray has been gone 30 years, was forced out by two legendary managers and wrecked his body for the claret and blue cause for little or no thanks. So when he still refers to Villa as ‘we’ during a compelling interview with BirminghamLive’s Claret & Blue podcast it just goes to show the love and respect the 65-year-old retains for the football club that put him on the map.
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Not that he had the faintest idea where Aston Villa was when he asked his mother Margaret to locate a road atlas after a life-changing phonecall in 1975.
Gray was a big deal in Scottish footballing circles having burst onto the scene as a 17-year-old at Dundee United, whose legendary boss Jim McLean warned him of his impending sale at the start of his third season, telling him: ‘I don’t think I can teach you any more. In all honesty if I don’t sell you I’m holding you back because you’re too good for this league.’
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German club Schalke enquired about Gray and it later emerged that Rangers, the boyhood club where he would eventually lift the Scottish top flight title 13 years later, were also interested. But it was when he was called to answer the landline at his mum’s Glasgow home that his fate became clear. McLean told him Dundee United had agreed a fee with Aston Villa – and to get to the airport sharpish.
