Author Topic: The Athletic  (Read 73212 times)

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AlbionFan

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #50 on: December 24, 2019, 05:46:57 PM »
Thank you overseas baggie that's good of you.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #51 on: December 24, 2019, 06:19:20 PM »
There was a good article in The Athletic about Rob Green, Chelsea goalkeeper standing up to Sarri in a team meeting
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #52 on: December 24, 2019, 06:22:14 PM »
There was a good article in The Athletic about Rob Green, Chelsea goalkeeper standing up to Sarri in a team meeting

I saw a page on Facebook quote something from this. Almost immediately, you had the keyboard warriors replying with the obvious - "Didn't happen!"

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #53 on: December 25, 2019, 03:18:01 PM »
Overseas Baggie any chance of you putting up the Gareth Macauley interview just released please?

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #54 on: December 27, 2019, 08:10:09 AM »
Anyone able to post the GMAC interview please? Looks like it could be a interesting read

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #55 on: December 31, 2019, 07:00:50 PM »
Anyone post the gmac interview?
AND ITS 5 FOR THE BAGGIES...BOING BOING TAKE THAT

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #56 on: December 31, 2019, 07:25:55 PM »
There were many signs for Gareth McAuley that West Bromwich Albion were losing their way, but the image of Saido Berahino flying around the training ground on a hoverboard was among the more memorable. Then there was the sight of police surrounding the team hotel in Barcelona after the accidental theft of a taxi and his own uncharacteristic rant on another bizarre trip to Spain.

It all added up to a frustrating end to one of the most legendary Hawthorns careers of modern times — one that could easily have unfolded across the Black Country at Wolves.

McAuley spent seven years at Albion but, by the time of his departure in 2018, a little of the the shine had been removed from his sparkling stint with the club.

“It was tough after all that hard work to see where the club had gone to over the previous 18 months or more,” McAuley tells The Athletic, in his first full-length interview since announcing his retirement this summer. “It wasn’t a club I recognised. It wasn’t the club I had joined, where everything was so well organised. It had almost gone full circle back to the madness I’d had at Leicester.

“The back end of the Steve Clarke time was the point at which they needed to build and they didn’t do it. They went away from their plan and their structure and they didn’t have any foresight. The ending annoyed me because we’d sat down and had a conversation and they told me they wanted me to stay, so I’d gone into the summer thinking I was going to be playing in the Championship and I had shelved my other plans.

“Then I got a phone call four days before we had to report in to pre-season, basically saying they had changed their mind and they didn’t want me any more.

“I was thinking, ‘OK, you do realise you’ve killed me here?’ At least big Darren Moore had the decency to ring me and tell me. He said I was too old but I’m not sure how much say he had in the decision. Not that much, I don’t think.

“In football, things like that happen but it annoyed me, and the fact they put it all on Mooro. There were other people who could have made the phone call — people who I’d known for a long time.”

Five years earlier, things had been very different for McAuley. The man who had been an unheralded free transfer signing from Ipswich Town in 2011, making his Premier League debut at the age of 31, had been one of the players of the season as Albion finished eighth in the top division under Clarke. It was then, he believes, that the seeds for the club’s decline were sown.

“When we finished eighth in the league (in 2012-13), that was the point when we thought the club needed to back Steve more than they did and go and replenish,” he says. “I was in my thirties, Brunty (Chris Brunt) was getting to 28 or 29 and Mozza (James Morrison) and others were the same.

“We used to say to Richard Garlick (the former technical director) and people like that, ‘You need to replace us.’ I don’t care how good people’s statistics are in Belgium, Holland or wherever, it’s not the Premier League. The Premier League is different.

“They needed to bring in players to eventually replace us senior players, but they just kept bringing in people to bulk out the squad who were never going to play. The only one they brought in who became part of that core group was Craig Dawson. In the end that led to the crumbling of the foundation of the team.”

The crumbling that McAuley describes had begun at the end of Clarke’s 19-month reign but gathered pace during the now infamous tenure of Pepe Mel. One rant by McAuley during a training camp in Jerez has gone down in legend and the man himself believes it hastened the effective removal of Mel from the helm.

McAuley also believes the decision by the Albion board to remove Dave McDonough, the former video analyst who had risen to prominence with the change of management, and to appoint Keith Downing as de facto head coach, helped Albion turn around a season that was spiralling out of control.

The dispute at the heart of the Mel experiment is, by now, well-known — a Spanish coach with a vague idea of a high-pressing style but without the English vocabulary to explain it, versus a group of players built for and suited to a very different football approach.

“When a coach comes into a football club you get the first impressions,” McAuley recalls. “I was injured so the boys all went out and trained, came back in and asked how it was and they said, ‘Oh my God!’

“Dave (McDonough) appeared from nowhere with full-on gear with his initials on and we’re all thinking, ‘Who’s this guy?’

“For me, you can’t get your point across if you can’t communicate properly with your players. Claudio Yacob was trying to translate at times and he was a player. Right from the start it had disaster written all over it.

“One day we trained at the stadium and we were having breakfast. We were playing Swansea in the next game, in a six-pointer, and they had played the previous night on telly. Keith Downing asked Pepe if he had seen the game and he replied, ‘Barcelona and Real Madrid were on the TV.’

“I threw my knife and fork down and walked out raging. I was that tense that I ended up pulling my calf in the warm-up. But I’d had to walk out otherwise I would have strangled somebody.

“It all came to a head after the Jerez trip. The training ground there was soaking wet and was almost unplayable. We just shouldn’t have been on the trip. When I lost it we were three days into a six-day trip.

“You must train with a purpose but we were just training for the sake of it, which was winding me up. I bit my lip for a couple of days but eventually I lost my rag and just called out McDonough, reminded him we’d got a Premier League game against Fulham in a couple of days and asked him what we were going to do.

“We were watching videos of Rafa Benitez’s teams instead of watching videos of us or of Fulham.

“I would usually have been constructive and level-headed in what I said, so when I lost it I think it made people at home take notice and that might have been a little bit of a turning point. The suits at the club had a word with Pepe and told him it wasn’t really working and Keith and Dean were in charge for most of the second half of the season. Pepe was still there but he was just the face of it.

“We gave it as long as we could before the trapdoor started to appear and it was clear, enough was enough.

“We carried on training but one by one people were being called in and asked by people in the front office what was going on and for the good of the club and your own career you had to be honest.”

Tony Pulis could not have been more different to Mel. The Welshman arrived at The Hawthorns in 2015 like a force of nature and, following a brief and unsuccessful stint with Alan Irvine at the helm, provided some much-needed direction.

He did not do it, though, without ruffling some feathers.

McAuley had always revelled in clear instructions and under Roy Hodgson (more on Roy later) had thrived on his task being kept simple. Under Pulis, though, that was taken to extremes.

“Tony is an enigma as a character,” he says. “He played me for most of his time at the club but he made me play his way. Before that I had been told to win it and give it to better players. Under Tony I wasn’t allowed to do that — I had to go long.

“After we had turned down £18 million, or whatever it was, for Jonny Evans, we were playing Leicester and I started winning it and passing it to Jonny because he had got to the point where he just wouldn’t play it long.

“So I gave it to Jonny and he would play out from the back, but Tony clocked on to what was happening and the message was I had to go long or I wouldn’t play.

“In training the boys were killing themselves laughing because they knew if I got the ball they weren’t getting it, whereas if Jonny got it they could play a bit. Jonny was worth £20 million to the club so Tony couldn’t leave him out. I was 36 and I had no sell-on value so he could leave me out.

“By the end the supporters weren’t enjoying it and, to be honest, the players weren’t enjoying it. Even if you’re getting results it becomes monotonous. You can’t express yourself on the pitch.

“But, to begin with, it was getting results so you just do it.”

After Pulis came Alan Pardew and an ill-fated 21-match reign that led to relegation from the Premier League after eight seasons. His reign reached its nadir with “Taxigate”.

Pardew’s idea of bringing his squad together with a Catalan bonding trip ended in disgrace as four of McAuley’s team-mates broke a curfew after a team night out, took an ill-advised spin in a taxi around a McDonald’s car park, turned inadvertently on to a major highway and ended up delivering the cab back to the team hotel. It added to the sense of chaos that surrounded the final months of his time at The Hawthorns.

“Me and Brunty went down for breakfast and ‘Daws’ was there and he said, ‘Look out the window.’ We looked out of the window and said, ‘Woah, what is going on?’ The police were there and they wanted to take everyone in for questioning.

“Then John Carver (Pardew’s assistant) held a meeting and said, ‘If anyone has anything they want to come forward about, now is the time to do it.’ And the lads did.

“It was just a case of, ‘What is going on?’ Then we had to travel back and play Southampton in the FA Cup. When we were leaving it had all been kept quiet, but then it got into a Spanish newspaper and the lads were checking their social media on the way home and it all went ‘boom’.

“I went from not being in the team, to being in the team when Kieran Gibbs got injured, and then to being captain when Jonny was stripped of it. I remember thinking, ‘My season can’t get any weirder than this.’ Then we lost the game so at that stage I was wishing I’d been in the taxi!

“That was another trip that we shouldn’t have been on. We had played Chelsea, stayed over in London, flew to Barcelona and when we got there there was no structure to the trip.

“The training times were in the afternoon so it was basically, ‘Go and fill your boots, have a night out.’ So we had a night out, all trained the next day — in bits because we’d had a few drinks — and we thought that was it. But the next night we were allowed out again. It was Champions League night so we stopped off the watch the football, most of the lads went back and we woke up the next morning to find police surrounding the hotel!

“It was an interesting time under Pards and I got on pretty well with him, but for me the team needed structure putting into it again. You can’t just turn up in the Premier League and play freely against teams. You have to have a structure and we never had that.

“Again it pretty much fell on the players to sort it out, but back then if you said something in the dressing room then before you left the ground it was out in the press. It was getting leaked out.

“Alan talked well on TV and when we got him in to replace Tony I thought it was a good appointment. But it didn’t work out like that. If as a coach you’re not getting results you have to do something different but we just kept turning up with the same plan and it wasn’t working.”

If McAuley found parts of the Pulis and Pardew eras tough to deal with it was, perhaps, because he had been spoiled at the start of his time at Albion. He signed for Roy Hodgson, in the summer of 2011, as a free agent in his thirties who had done well for Ipswich but had never tested himself in the Premier League.

His signing was not received well by many Albion fans. Wolves had spent more than £4 million in the same transfer window to fill their centre-back vacancy with Roger Johnson from Birmingham. Albion had considered Johnson too, so the decision to plump for McAuley brought inevitable accusations of penny-pinching.

“Had he gone to West Brom I would probably have gone to Wolves,” McAuley reveals in an admission that, in light of the way his and Johnson’s moves turned out, will get Albion fans smiling and Wolves supporters wondering what might have been. “There was a possibility of that. But I wanted to go to West Brom for a reason. When I was going to Ipswich in 2008 there was a chance to go to West Brom but they kept saying, ‘We’re not sure.’

“Roy Hodgson was the deciding factor — and the chance to go there and prove people inside the club wrong and show them, ‘You’ve missed three years.’

“I always made sensible decisions and that was one of them. When I met with Roy in a back room of the Holiday Inn at Junction 7 of the M6, I knew I wanted to play for him. Roy just made me feel comfortable and made me feel like he could make me better. He is the best I have had manager-wise and coach-wise.”

Like most Albion players of his era, McAuley speaks with reverence when discussing Hodgson, who in a season and a half at the club achieved 11th- and 10th-place finishes with a team new to the top flight and left the foundations for Clarke’s even more successful campaign.

“His language was colourful and the Roy you see behind closed doors is different to what the public sees,” smiles McAuley. “One of the most memorable things was when he was angry and he kicked a big wooden block that sits in the dressing room at The Hawthorns. I don’t even know what it does but it sits there and it doesn’t move. He walked in and volleyed it and you could tell it must have hurt but he didn’t let on.

“He didn’t lose it that often. He was always very constructive. But when he did lose it, you knew about it. Roy didn’t care who you were or what you’d done, it just mattered that you would do what he asked.

“You always knew that if you did what he asked you to then, nine times out of 10, you’d be in his team. But if you wanted to go off and do your own thing for your own reasons then he won’t have that relationship of trust with you.

“When I went there my job was easy — win the ball and give it to better players. That’s the way I liked to play.”

It was under Hodgson that Berahino began to come to the fore and under Clarke that he made his first-team breakthrough. By Pulis’s reign, however, the most talented forward to come through the Albion academy was no less an asset, more a problem, after Albion’s refusal to sell him to Tottenham Hotspur in the summer of 2015 sparked a temperamental meltdown from which the striker never fully recovered.

The young Berahino frustrated and angered his senior team-mates but now McAuley speaks only with sadness about a remarkable talent that is destined never to be realised.

“Saido is a lost soul,” said the Northern Irishman with a sigh and a shake of the head. “He was a tremendous footballer when he didn’t have the distractions and the money and he was just raw, fresh and clean. His finishing was unbelievable and he always had confidence in his ability.

“We wanted to help Saido and we wanted him to stay because we knew when he was happy and he was on it he would score goals. But he would have three or four weeks when he was ‘on it’ and then he would have a couple of weeks when you would look at him and say, ‘Saido, you’re fat’ because you knew he’d had two or three weeks off.

“Then he would get his head back on it and go again.

“He frustrates me because he hasn’t fulfilled what he should have done. He was ahead of Harry Kane in terms of England at one stage. He did some crazy stuff and by the end we all just thought, ‘Do what you want.’

“He brought a hoverboard into the training ground at one time and he was whizzing around on that. He used to bring his dog in, somebody would look after it while he was training and it just used to wander around the training ground. He did that a few times. He would be late and you could tell he was doing it on purpose to try to irritate people.

“Because we knew how good he was, we tried to get him back on side but I think in the end he couldn’t get his head around the fact the club had stopped him getting that move to the Champions League (club) that he wanted.

“But we tried saying to him, ‘You’re in your early twenties, get your head down and it will come.’

“Initially he always had a big smile on his face and he was great around the place. But then everything came to him, everyone knew who he was and wanted a piece of him. It’s just a case of how you deal with it and he hasn’t dealt with it very well.”

McAuley was no stranger to football’s craziness or to dealing with big characters. He had played for Leicester City in one of the most turbulent periods of the club’s history and for Ipswich under the uncompromising Roy Keane and emerged from both experiences with his trademark dry, considered humour intact.

“Leicester was my first experience of all the stuff that happens around football — the business side of it, the money and all the pressure,” he says. “It was a real eye-opener. In the first year we battled away and got safe in the Championship and then the takeover happened, Milan Mandaric came in and the circus arrived in town.

“All these players arrived — experienced players like Bruno N’Gotty and Radostin Kishishev and we signed an Iranian lad called Hossein Kaebi. He came to play at right-back in the Championship and he was about 4ft tall, built like a twig and couldn’t speak a word of English. He had a translator who would shout instructions from the side of the pitch.

“By the time Ian Holloway came in I think there were 40-odd professionals. Players were coming in who were never going to play. He got us all in a sports hall after a few days and basically split us into two groups. He apologised to one lot because he needed to work with a smaller group and you can’t train with 40 players.

“They had spent so much money that Mandaric was trying to get some back and they were actively trying to sell players. I’d had a phone call from an agent to say I’d be moving and I’d said to someone in the treatment room that I would probably not be there by the weekend.

“Someone told Ian Holloway and I got the ‘curly finger’ to go into his office. I told him I was apparently being sold and he knew nothing. He got on the phone to the agents I used at the time and put it on speaker, and they were telling him I’d had enough.

“I knew nothing about it. That was an eye-opener for me as to what could go on. Leicester had appointed agents and they had contacted people who looked after me and I was oblivious to the whole thing.

“I ended up going at the end of the season after relegation but at least they got some money back for me.”

McAuley signed for Ipswich and spent three seasons there, playing under Jim Magilton, Keane and Paul Jewell, before moving to West Brom after the Suffolk club finished 13th in the Championship.

By the end of last season, McAuley’s career had gone virtually full circle. His first memory of football was as a six-year-old, called up to be a substitute for his junior school team and lying flat on the sidelines of a sloping playing field above his hometown of Larne to shelter from a biting wind.

He played in a boys’ club in Lisburn with future international team-mates including Grant McCann, David Healy and Aaron Hughes but turned his back on the chance of a career in England after several trials.

“I came across but I didn’t really like it,” he says. “I didn’t like being away from home. I was from a small town with family. I never saw football as a job until Aaron Hughes made his debut for Newcastle — I had played in the same team as him and I suddenly thought I had to give it a go.”


jimmyj

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #57 on: December 31, 2019, 07:26:11 PM »
By then McAuley had learned his trade in the Irish League for clubs including Crusaders and Coleraine. He was 24 and a full-time draftsman when Lincoln City and Keith Alexander brought him to the English game.

So, when McAuley played his final competitive game for Rangers under dim floodlights at a windswept Cowdenbeath in January 2019 and helped them to a 3-1 Scottish Cup win, he had returned to his footballing roots.

That he ended his career playing for the club he had dreamed of representing as a Protestant schoolboy in Northern Ireland is a sense of enormous pride. He is proud, too, of his role in helping Steven Gerrard establish himself at the Ibrox helm.

“Just to play there once would have been enough for me,” he admits. “It would have been nice to win something but I really enjoyed it. It was everything I thought it was going to be.

“Initially it was a bit strange because when I played in the Premier League I could get away from football. In Glasgow it’s different. It’s life and death and it’s mad, but I enjoyed it.”

His move to Rangers was always intended to be limited for one season and then, when the time came to leave at the age of 39, he was presented with a big decision but one which came naturally.

Now he is scouting for Rangers at games in England on an ad-hoc basis and, after fulfilling a promise to enjoy his first Christmas off for many years with his young family, he hopes to begin a coaching career in 2020.

“I kind of knew when I left Rangers that that was it, but I had a few chats with Michael O’Neill and he wanted me to play on for Northern Ireland,” he says. “Physically I could have played on but mentally I was ready to stop.

“I would have had to find a club and I had offers but to me it wouldn’t have been fair to the club because I would have been going there purely to prolong my international career for Michael.

“It seems a strange thing to say but I think I’d just grown out of it and my pathway is more in coaching now. My shin pads were older than some of my team-mates — that’s when I knew it was time to stop.

“I said to my missus the other day that I left home for Lincoln with a bag of clothes and now I’ve got a wife, two kids, a house and a good career behind me.

“Now I just need to get my head around what I want to do next.”

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #58 on: December 31, 2019, 07:49:20 PM »
Many thanks Jimmy J!

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #59 on: December 31, 2019, 10:30:16 PM »
Thanks for sharing - a great article.

He clearly has a brain and will follow his coaching career with interest. Would be nice to have him back at the club in some capacity in the future, possibly even the hot seat... 

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #60 on: December 31, 2019, 11:00:25 PM »
Great interview! Nothing to revealing but nice to put a personality to a largely low-key figure that played a very significant role in the best times i've known as a Baggies fan.
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #61 on: January 01, 2020, 10:30:56 AM »
Thank you for posting jimmyj.

Another insightful and well written article from The Athletic and what a player and man Gmac is, loved him!
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #62 on: January 01, 2020, 11:58:36 AM »
A cracking read thanks for posting.

Just an observation whilst not a fan of Jenkins the beginning of this loss of 'direction' does seem to coincide with the time Jenkins took a back step and eventually left the club.

Perhaps not linked but it does seem that Jenkins is the common theme in this 'direction' for all his faults.

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #63 on: April 26, 2020, 10:30:11 AM »
Does anybody have the recent Graham Dorrans article with Steve Madeley to post?
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #64 on: April 26, 2020, 12:22:47 PM »
Does anybody have the recent Graham Dorrans article with Steve Madeley to post?

I'm interested in that! Does it explore the problems he had that were reported at the time?
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #65 on: April 26, 2020, 01:58:28 PM »
Dorrans: ‘I’d sit alone in WBA dressing room at breakfast. You had to earn it’

We are five minutes from the end of our interview when I let Graham Dorrans in on what has been on my mind for most of the previous 40.

“I’m trying to put this politely…” I tell the hero of West Bromwich Albion’s promotion to the Premier League a decade ago. “But it’s like talking to a different guy. Back in the day, you could be quite hard work!”

There is a hint of laughter on the line. It seems this is something Dorrans has heard before.

“I think a lot of people did mistake my manner for something else,” says Dorrans, now aged 32 and, despite the coronavirus lockdown, attempting to rejuvenate an injury-hit career with Dundee in the Scottish Championship.

“Me being shy, sitting there and not speaking to people — I think a lot of people might have thought it was rude. But I was just shy. That’s what it was. There is no beating about the bush. I wasn’t sitting here thinking, ‘I don’t want to speak to him.’

“But you grow up. I’ve got a family and I’ve got kids and people change. Things you go through in life change people, but I totally get the fact that people can perceive you a certain way when you’re sitting there and not really speaking to people.”

Dorrans did do his share of interviews during seven seasons at The Hawthorns.

But none of them lasted nearly as long as this one has. And, it turns out, it was not just journalists who could find it hard to weigh up the lad who joined from Livingston in the summer of 2008 and who, two years later, was Albion’s most talked-about player.

“For probably the first two or three years I was at West Brom, everyone said the same thing about me,” he admits.

“I was quiet, I was shy, I would go in in the morning, get changed, sit on my seat in the dressing room while all the other boys went in to get their breakfast.

“For me, with the way I was brought up and the way I grew up, going in with them wasn’t on. I was going down there to play with boys who were established in the Premier League and for somebody that had just come down from Livingston, I wasn’t going to just stroll in there.

“Nowadays, a lot of boys just go in for their breakfast. I just thought you had to earn that. The boys always used to tell me to come in and get my breakfast but I didn’t. I was always a shy boy so I just used to get changed and just sit there until it was time to put my boots on and go out and train.

“I was a shy boy who left my Mom and Dad’s house at 20 years old, but it was the making of me, so it was great. I was living on my own for the first time ever.”

Happily for West Brom supporters, while Dorrans wasn’t a great “talker” in his time in the Midlands, he could most definitely play. For nine glorious months in the 2009-10 campaign, he did it better than anyone else in the Championship, even with Newcastle United winning the title ahead of Albion.

Dorrans bagged 19 assists — the best tally in the league — to go with 13 goals as Roberto Di Matteo’s men ended the season 11 points adrift of Chris Hughton’s Newcastle but 12 clear of third-placed Nottingham Forest.

“It’s still, to this day, the best season of my career,” says Dorrans. “I absolutely loved it. From the moment I moved down to West Brom, all the boys were great with me.

“The first year down there was in the Premier League and I knew that was all about me bedding in. But come the second season, I was ready. I was a bit disappointed when Tony Mowbray left, but Robbie Di Matteo was great with me.

“I was trying to get myself established and when you get a new manager you’re never too sure. With the player he was, there was excitement at him coming in. For me to work with somebody like that was exciting. I still wondered in pre-season whether I would be his cup of tea and against Newcastle on the first day of the season I was on the bench, so you’re still thinking, ‘I’m not sure.’

“But Di Matteo, Eddie Newton [assistant manager] and Ade Mafe [the former Olympic sprinter and fitness coach] were brilliant for me and I think all the boys liked them.”

It was a remarkable campaign for a player who, just two years earlier, was visiting Albion for a week in an effort to impress Mowbray enough to earn a contract south of the border. Dorrans had done enough at Livingston to convince Mark Proctor, his manager, he was worth recommending to Mowbray, a former Middlesbrough team-mate.

Mowbray snapped up Dorrans ahead of two more planned trials at English clubs, yet the youngster figured just eight times as West Brom finished bottom of the Premier League in 2008-09 ahead of the manager’s acrimonious departure for Celtic.

Few fans foresaw the role the unknown youngster would play in the 12 months that followed.

“The step up from a Scottish League One team to a team who were in the Championship at the time but had just got promoted for the following season, I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is what I’ve always wanted.’

“When you’re growing up, you want to go and play in the Premier League and I was getting that chance. But I knew it was only a chance. I knew I wasn’t going down there to play in the Premier League every week.

“Spending that season was great, but you do get a bit frustrated. I went to see Tony a few times because I wanted to come back up to Scotland on loan. There were a couple of teams from the SPL interested and I just wanted to get football again. But Tony and Mark Venus wanted me to stay there and train with the first team every day and play reserve games, and at the end of the season it paid off.”

Any highlights package of West Brom’s promotion under Di Matteo — a second for the club in three seasons — would have Dorrans as its poster boy.

It was not a role that sat easily with a quiet boy from Barlanark in the east of Glasgow. He insists, though, the rapid rise was taken, by and large, in his stride despite his then-girlfriend, and now wife, Yvonne being restricted to weekend visits by her ongoing studies in Scotland.

“The way I was brought up, you just deal with it,” he says. “I wasn’t one for going out at the time. I had my flat in Sutton Coldfield that I enjoyed. My mates came down and spent time there and if we wanted to go out we would maybe go to the pub across the road and have a couple of beers and then go back and sit in the flat. That probably helped.

“But all my childhood I really wanted to be a footballer and when you get that chance you don’t want that chance to pass you by, so I gave everything I could.

“I think being so young, and maybe a bit naive, helped. Maybe when you’ve got older and played a bit more, you start to think about things a bit more. I wish I could have adopted the same things you do when you’re 20 or 21 but you don’t.

“You’d think you’d get more experienced and deal with things a bit better, but for me I think I’ve gone the other way and started to think about things a bit too much.”

Dorrans believes his role in promotion helped him maintain the momentum that began with his August goals against Bury and Rotherham United and took him all the way to the opener at Doncaster Rovers in the April as Albion completed the job with three games to spare.

“I had the freedom of going down there with no pressure,” he says. “Coming from Livingston and going to a club like that, nobody expected me to be the one who was top scorer or anything like that.

“But we had a great squad. We had Scotty Carson, Dean Kiely — what a character he was around the place — Jonas Olsson, Steven Reid came in that year… so when we got promoted it wasn’t because of me, it was because of the squad we had.

“If you look back, we had Roman Bednar up front, but if he hadn’t scored for a couple of games then Simon Cox was coming on and banging a couple in.”

Dorrans certainly felt it in 2010-11, when his exploits in the Championship meant an inevitable expectation that he would be the Premier League’s next breakout star. He had signed a lucrative new contract that summer after a series of bids from West Ham United, culminating in one worth around £8.5 million, had failed to persuade Albion to do business.

“My agent had been speaking with West Brom about getting a new deal so that was my main focus, then he phoned me and said West Ham were interested and had made a bid,” says Dorrans. “But it never got as far as me travelling to West Ham or speaking to them.

“Once I was aware of the bid, I had a conversation with West Brom and they made it clear that they didn’t care what came in because I wasn’t going. I had signed a new contract before that. It was good, decent money, and I had two or three years on my contract.

“So they made it clear they weren’t selling but they were willing to negotiate another contract and I was happy and settled at West Brom so I wasn’t ever going to bang the door down and ask to go. I would have stayed at West Brom for my whole career if that was possible, but things change.”

Things began to change quickly. Having played 45 games in the Championship, he figured just 21 times in his first Premier League campaign. Di Matteo was sacked midway through, making way for Roy Hodgson to mastermind Albion’s best spell of Premier League football.

For Dorrans, though, there would be no repeat of the heroics that got them back to the top flight.

He did have good days — a spectacular goal against former admirers West Ham in a 3-3 draw under caretaker boss Michael Appleton and a late winner in 2011-12 to end the club’s 30-year wait for victory at Stoke City. Yet for most Albion fans, there was a sense of anti-climax that Dorrans’ top-flight career never hit the heights of what had gone before.

The man himself takes a different view while acknowledging that he became a victim of his own success.

“The season before there was no pressure on me, then you’re going into a full season where everyone is expecting things from you,” he says. “It’s a different ball game, a different league and a way of playing. But I thought I did well. It would have been nice for me to go and get another 17 or 18 goals in the Premier League but that’s difficult when you’re fighting to just be 17th in the league and not go down.

“Even when Roy Hodgson came in, I was playing right and left midfield and my job was to get back more than it was to get forward because we just had to be solid. But I was happy to do that. I loved playing under Roy. He is one of the best managers I’ve had.

“If you’d told me when I signed for West Brom when I was 20 that I would play that many games in the Premier League and had the career I had with West Brom I would probably have laughed and thought you were joking.”

By February 2015, Dorrans was on his way out of The Hawthorns, his first-team place having been lost due to a series of injuries, managerial changes, higher-profile signings, the return to form and fitness of his good friend James Morrison and a hitherto unreported issue with Hodgson’s successor, Steve Clarke.

“It was brewing from when Steve Clarke came in because, for whatever reason, he isolated me and put me out of the team and I wasn’t really involved,” recalls Dorrans of his fellow Scot.

“There were conversations about maybe leaving then. I honestly didn’t want to leave but when you’re not playing you start to think, ‘Where am I going with this?’ I was still training with the boys every day but I wasn’t involved on match day and he never really told me what was going on. I can’t really remember, but I probably did go and tap on his door. But I don’t think I got much from him.

“Then Pepe Mel came in [in January 2014] and I played for the first five or six games under him and started to feel really good again. But fast forward again, Tony Pulis came in [at mid-season in 2014-15] and I started to get the feeling I wasn’t his sort of player. He was respectful and good to me. He told me he would like me to stay but he couldn’t guarantee I would play so, for me, knowing I wasn’t going to play, I still felt I had a lot to give and I wanted to get out and play.

“I had the chance to go to Norwich, who were pushing for the Premier League.”

Dorrans spent two and a half years at Carrow Road, initially on loan, helping Norwich to Championship play-off final victory in 2015 and making 21 further Premier League appearances to add to his 113 for Albion. Then, in the summer of 2017, the chance came to fulfill another boyhood dream by playing for Rangers.

He took it and though the move eventually turned sour through injuries, that did not dilute the joy of playing for his boyhood club.

“There had been a couple of conversations throughout my career about Rangers, but when it came up that time I knew it would be the last chance,” he says. “I grew up a Rangers fan and it was always something I dreamed of doing, so I pushed for it as much as I could.
Boyhood Rangers fan Dorrans loved his two years at Ibrox, despite only starting 16 league games (Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images)

“I played against Manchester City and Arsenal, played at Old Trafford, scored at the Etihad, but for me my debut for Rangers against Motherwell, when we won 2-1 and I scored the two goals, is one of the best feelings I’ve had in my career.

“I was growing up as a kid watching Rangers for my whole life, so doing that in front of all my mates who were in the crowd was a feeling that will never leave me. And although it never worked out at Rangers for me, that feeling alone was enough to tell me it was the right decision.

“I played three-quarters of my first season, played 18 or 20 games and scored five goals, which isn’t a bad return. But I got two bad injuries that set me back and the new manager [Steven Gerrard] came in and I missed pretty much a full season.

“I was trying to get back in but things happened at Rangers that I wouldn’t really want to get into too much. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get myself fully fit and the manager decided I wasn’t going to be involved.”

Despite the setback the midfielder, who turns 33 in May, speaks with genuine excitement at linking up with former Livingston team-mate James McPake, and of using this spell with Dundee as a springboard back up the leagues. He has signed a contract that takes in this season and next but has not ruled out moving on, even back to England.

“It’s been great for me just to get games again,” he says. “When I missed those two years I missed the feeling of being with the lads every day and training.

“It’s hard when you’re injured, regardless of how the team is doing, when you’re working your balls off in the gym every day and looking out of the window and seeing the boys training. You can feel isolated.

“So Dundee has been great for me to get that feeling back of being out with the boys, training every day. I’m still only 32, so I think I’ve got a few years left in me yet and I think I’ve proved over the last six, seven or eight months that I’ve played that I’m fit now. So we will see what the future holds.”

Then comes another unexpected revelation.

The boy who would barely say boo to a goose when he left his parents’ house to join West Brom in 2008 is now considering a career in management.

It seemed inconceivable a few years ago. But now, for a personable, confident, articulate Dorrans, it seems a sensible proposition. He has seen and experienced a lot in football and outside it. He and Yvonne suffered the agony of stillbirth in 2011 when their daughter, Logan, was born prematurely. Another daughter, Ava, survived meningitis a year later when she was just three months old.

They remain a solid family unit, though, and as Dorrans sits at home on the outskirts of Glasgow with his children — Leah, 17; Ava, now eight, and son Austyn, six — he is looking to the future.

“I have started my coaching badges. I started doing my B Licence when I left Rangers. I have been in the game since I was 16 years old so I definitely want to stay in it but I still feel like I’ve got three or four more years to play.

“After that I definitely want to stay in the game and maybe get back to West Brom one day.”
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #66 on: April 26, 2020, 02:32:43 PM »
I'm interested in that! Does it explore the problems he had that were reported at the time?


Not a bad piece, Madeley, to his credit, hasn't overstated Dorrans' Albion career like many on here, which it would have been the easy thing to do.


Rumours at the time were that GD and his wife had suffered a significant personal tragedy, which is obviously not covered here.
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #67 on: April 26, 2020, 02:48:04 PM »
It's briefly mentioned in the article but he kind of took one for the team under Hodgson etc and played as a winger, primarily defending.

I think due to Morrison improving so much at the time it put Dorrans out of the picture a bit, still he was a decent player in the Premier League and excellent in the Championship.

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #68 on: April 26, 2020, 02:48:38 PM »

Not a bad piece, Madeley, to his credit, hasn't overstated Dorrans' Albion career like many on here, which it would have been the easy thing to do.


Rumours at the time were that GD and his wife had suffered a significant personal tragedy, which is obviously not covered here.
Do you think they had Other problems besides the the tragic loss of their stillborn daughter.

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #69 on: April 26, 2020, 02:53:14 PM »
Thanks for posting Vienna Baggie. Great article. Always had a soft spot for Dorrans and that was probably my favourite time support Albion, when the likes of Mulumbu and Dorrans would arrive for tuppence and have a big impact. Hard to think they peaked with us.
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #70 on: April 26, 2020, 02:57:39 PM »
Thanks for the post Vienna. Interesting read.

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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #71 on: April 26, 2020, 03:01:59 PM »
Do you think they had Other problems besides the the tragic loss of their stillborn daughter.
Yes that was it, very sad time for them.
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #72 on: April 26, 2020, 03:13:54 PM »
He was great in that championship season - it’s a shame that his career never blossomed in the Premier League

That free kick against Preston is still the best free kick I’ve seen at the Albion.
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #73 on: April 26, 2020, 03:15:17 PM »
2009-10 Was certainly a great season for Graham.I saw nearly all the games that season, and although I am not normally a stats person, that return of 19 assists and 13 goals was quite phenomenal , and I would be interested to know who are the players in the championship most likely to match that this season (assuming we finish it). I am sure Jacko will come up with half a dozen or so  ;)
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Re: The Athletic
« Reply #74 on: April 26, 2020, 03:18:02 PM »
Excellent insight and lovely to read that Graham has a real attachment to our club. I feel he’s one of us.

Many thanks to Vienna Baggie for sharing that.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these blokes are people, like the rest of us, with hang ups, personal problems and insecurities. This article is a well put together reminder about that.

Also, I thought that the part about Graham playing for his boyhood club, Rangers, was super to read. Albion have always been my club and even now, in my 60’s, I occasionally dream (at night) of turning out in the blue and white stripes. While I’m asleep it’s glorious, when I wake and realise it was a dream, I still feel the glow and the pride. It’s what football is all about.
« Last Edit: April 26, 2020, 03:20:01 PM by Chipperfan »
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