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« 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!â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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If it is him I can't see this lot getting much better, we'll scrape a play off place at best and he'll be gone again in the summer with us back to square one. Come to think of it I'd predict the same with many of the other names thrown around... And I'm usually optimistic.