I was going to put this up last week but the thread went on a bit longer than I expected and I forgot. It's an article from a few years back about Alan Davies, who tragically (or hilariously, depending on your point of view. Plenty of people hissing by me at the derby, bless them) took his life thirty years ago. It's a long article but worth reading I think.
Katie and Sophie Davies smile as they examine the mementoes of their father’s life in football. There is Esso’s FA Cup centenary coin collection, which he completed as a ten-year-old. There is the FA Cup winner’s medal that he won with his beloved Manchester United 11 years later and the newspaper cuttings that testify he was an “unknown” as he did so. There are a handful of Wales caps, too, and articles chronicling his time at Swansea City, pictures of him smiling with his leg in plaster. There should be a Juventus shirt from the night he scored against them at Old Trafford, but, their mother Deborah sighs, “he gave it away”.
That is the kind of person Alan Davies was. An unexpected recent addition to the family’s collection is a Brazil shirt from a match he played against them in 1983, sent by Joe Allon, his team-mate at Newcastle United and Swansea. Their father was always giving things away. “He was just a lovely, normal, everyday bloke,” Deborah says.
Katie has only the haziest memories of her father. The clearest is of them laughing on a trip to a llama farm. She does not remember the last time she saw him on February 4, 1992. Sophie never knew him. She was born six weeks after that fateful morning when, having kissed his pregnant wife goodbye and dropped four-year-old Katie at school, again with a kiss, he drove to a remote lane on the Gower peninsula and, to the shock and enduring bewilderment and grief of all who knew him, took his life.
The family have never previously sat down with a journalist to talk about him and it seems odd to them that, after 24 years, his story should be any more resonant this weekend simply because Swansea are playing Manchester United. They are right. The void is ever-present, in no way linked to the fixture list. “But it’s just nice that someone would actually take an interest,” Sophie says. “It’s nice to tell his story.”
Alan Davies was, as the newspapers put it on FA Cup final morning in 1983, the kid who had come from nowhere. Well, not quite. Growing up in Blackley, Greater Manchester — the son of a police inspector and a secretary, both from North Wales — he idolised George Best and long dreamed of emulating him on the wing for Manchester United. His talent gave him a chance of living that dream when he began an apprenticeship at Old Trafford at 16.
“He was a great lad, a lovely boy,” Scott McGarvey, who was an apprentice in the year below, recalls. “Quiet, but a great sense of humour. His one-liners would crack you up. He was a really talented footballer, a natural — his touch, his ability to see a pass and beat a man. Some might have wondered why he wasn’t ‘pumped up’, but he wanted it just as much as everyone else.”
At 19, some way off the first team, Davies was put on the transfer list by Dave Sexton. Just as the youngster considered joining Shrewsbury Town, Sexton was replaced as manager by Ron Atkinson, who saw a talent worth persevering with. Davies finally made his United debut against Southampton in May 1982, aged 20, but he remained in the reserves for another 12 months until an injury crisis ruled Steve Coppell and Remi Moses out of the FA Cup final against Brighton & Hove Albion. The late Laurie Cunningham, on loan from Real Madrid, was expected to deputise at Wembley, but a hamstring problem raised doubts about his participation. Ashley Grimes was next in line, but Atkinson was not sure the left-footed Irishman’s versatility extended to playing on the right wing. The wild-card option was Davies. Atkinson tried him out in United’s final two league matches, but it was still a surprise when, with Cunningham failing a fitness test the day before the final, the 21-year-old got the nod.
Deborah was as shocked as anyone. Friends from the same area, they had been going out since they were 17 — “and everything always had to revolve around football”, she says — but she was not expecting to be summoned to Wembley to watch her Alan play in the FA Cup final. Neither was she prepared to be photographed at Manchester Piccadilly station as the girlfriend of the “unknown” who was about to hit the big time.
The final went like a dream. Davies played well in the first game, a 2-2 draw, and even better in the replay, setting up the first two goals for Bryan Robson and Norman Whiteside in United’s 4-0 win. Five days later he made his Wales debut against Northern Ireland and then played against Brazil in Cardiff. “The month of a lifetime,” he called it. “But when you live at home with your parents, you don’t walk on air very long.”
“He was playing alongside his idols,” Deborah says. “He was a mega United fan and he was doing what he had always wanted. Then he came back from the summer break and broke his leg really badly in a friendly game. It was a real mess. After everything that happened just before, that was bittersweet.”
The leg break took a toll and Alan Davies never got back to the dizzying heights of May 1983. The comic-book storyline seemed to have been resumed when he resurfaced the next April and, again the man for the big occasion, scored as a substitute in a European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Juventus at Old Trafford. But he made only three more appearances for Manchester United before he was sold to Newcastle United for £50,000 in 1985.
“We hit it off straightaway,” Allon, his team-mate at Newcastle, says. “Al had more nicknames than any player I’ve ever come across. He was ‘AD’, ‘The Welsh Wizard’, ‘The Druid’. Because of his long hair and his moustache, he was ‘Gringo’, ‘The Mexican Bandit’, loads more. He was really popular, a really dry sense of humour, and a great talent. The problem was that Jack Charlton left straight after signing him. Willie McFaul had different ideas and Al didn’t get much of a look-in.”
Davies and Allon were among those players released by Newcastle at the end of the 1986-87 season. Terry Yorath offered to take the pair of them to Swansea, then in the old Fourth Division. Davies thrived as a big fish in a small pond, excelling as they won promotion. “He liked it everywhere he went, but he really enjoyed Swansea,” Deborah says. “We had Katie by then and Alan had some really good friends — Joe Allon, Steve Thornber, people like that.”
“He was just a cracking lad,” Thornber says. “We were a tight-knit squad: Russell Coughlin, Chris Coleman, Andy Melville, Robbie James. Al and I would go out, the two of us, or with our partners. We became really good friends.”
Did he ever talk about the trajectory of his career path since those heady days at United? “He wasn’t that type of person,” Thornber says. “If anything, he would have joked about it. He wasn’t the type to boast about what he had done.”
“He was a great mate and such a top bloke,” John Chard, a well-known figure in South Wales football circles, says. “There was no pretension about him. He would drive a normal car, buy his clothes at Topman. He was so down-to-earth, as good as you get.”
Davies followed Yorath to Bradford in 1989 and then followed him back to Swansea a year later. He always enjoyed playing for Yorath. After Frank Burrows replaced Yorath in March 1991, Davies drifted out of favour at Swansea, struggling with injuries again. By the time he turned 30 in December 1991, with a second child on the way, he had begun to wonder whether he should hang up his boots and do something else. “I remember him saying he fancied becoming a lorry driver,” Thornber says.
The routine was that a group of Swansea players would meet at a café for breakfast and take turns to drive to the training ground. On the morning of Tuesday February 4, 1992, Alan Davies did not show. The others shrugged and headed off to training without him.
“There had never been any sign that he had been ill or depressed, nothing whatsoever,” his widow Deborah says. “I would describe him as a positive person. The Sunday he was fine; we’d taken Katie out. Monday he was fine. The Tuesday morning I remember he was watching TV while I was getting ready for school. I said to him, ‘Are you OK? You’re quiet.’ He said, ‘Yes, fine.’ He got in the car, waved, dropped Katie off at school and that was it. I never saw him again.”
Deborah received a call from Swansea at lunchtime, asking whether her husband was there. “No,” she told the secretary, “he’s not back from training yet.” Then one of his team-mates, Paul Chalmers, knocked on the door to ask if he was around. She began to feel something was not right. Alan did not have a mobile phone, so she called Steve Thornber’s house. Thornber, back from training, said Davies had not shown up at the café that morning. He went to see Deborah to try to get to the bottom of it. Had his car broken down? Had he had an accident? Why had he not been in touch?
The anxiety escalated with every hour that passed until the answer came with a knock on the door that evening. “I opened the door and saw my doctor standing there and my friend Margaret and two or three guys stood behind,” Deborah says. “I knew instantly they were going to give me bad news. It was just unreal. It was horrible.”
Davies had been found dead at the wheel of his Vauxhall Cavalier in a lane just outside the coastal village of Horton, 15 miles from the family home. A hosepipe had been attached to the exhaust, filling the car with poisonous fumes. The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide, concluding that Davies had taken his life after becoming depressed by fears that his football career was over.
There had been no warning, Deborah says. “You just wouldn’t have had a clue,” she says. “I didn’t know. Nor did anyone else.”
With hindsight, were there any tell-tale signs? “Honestly, no,” she says. “Looking back, I knew he was quiet, but I wouldn’t have associated it with being down or whatever. I always felt he was a positive person.”
On the pitch, things had begun to look bleak. Davies had been injured in a match against Torquay United on October 26. He had suffered setbacks in his recovery, as well as from flu, and when, after a period in the reserve team, he returned to the first team after a three-month absence, away to West Bromwich Albion on January 25, he was substituted with Swansea 2-0 down. That they won 3-2 without him, before he lost his place for matches against Darlington and Stoke City, can have done little to raise his spirits.
“Looking at it,” Yorath says, “I would imagine the biggest trouble he had was that slide from Manchester United down to Newcastle to Swansea and then, after I left, playing in reserve games or friendly games in Welsh villages. To me, he always seemed fine — I always saw him as a cheeky chappie — but you don’t always know what goes on in people’s minds.”
“We had been out for a drink the night before,” Thornber says. “There was no hint, nothing. He had no issues with gambling, drinking, women. He and Debs were great. A lovely daughter, another on the way. I can only think it was an accumulation of things — coming towards the end of his career, feeling he wasn’t going to be able to provide for his family like he had before — but I had never seen any sign that he might have been depressed'
“Maybe there was an underlying thing with the way his career had gone,” Allon says. “I had never got that impression, but he must have been in a dark place. That’s what people would never have realised back then. Depression is an illness.”
“These days there is so much more support there for players as far as mental health is concerned,” Thornber, now a youth coach at Bradford City, says. “What was depression then anyway? It would have been, ‘Come on, snap out of it.’ Now we have mental-health programmes and workshops. I pass on my experience of what Alan went through. It’s helping people to talk if they have a problem, which is probably what Alan, sadly, couldn’t do.”
It’s good to talk. As the Davies family do so, there is laughter alongside a few tears. Katie and Sophie are in their 20s now, a credit to their mother and, she tells them, to the father they never knew. There is no bitterness or resentment towards him from any of the family. The question “Why?” endures, but so does the love.
“I often used to think, ‘Is someone going to tell me something somewhere along the line?’, to explain it, but no one ever has,” Deborah, who has not remarried, says. “Different things go through your mind. ‘Could it have been this or that?’ But no, nothing. That’s what I found so difficult. How can someone be feeling that and you not realise? Did it come overnight? I honestly don’t know.
“We have just got on with life. I didn’t want the girls to grow up with a stigma about their dad. I wanted them to realise that life isn’t perfect but to appreciate who he was and all the good things he did. Sophie never had the chance to meet him, but she still grieves deeply over him. He’s still her dad.”
“We like to see the positives, not the negatives,” Katie says. “We’re really proud of what he achieved and of mum for bringing us up as she did.”
“We’re lucky that we’ve got a nice story about dad to go alongside what happened,” Sophie says. “A lot of people in this situation don’t have that.
There's also an article here about Alan's daughters from 2018.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co...r-who-14141033
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by dembethewarrior
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