LONG READ

Andy Gray: 'I Was A Shy Boy... Football Is Responsible For My Confidence And Personality'

In an interview originally published in Everton's matchday programme this month, Andy Gray talks about gaining his voice through football, a non-negotiable confrontational playing style, an ‘awful’ two years after leaving Goodison Park, revised attitudes to mental health and overdue recognition for Howard Kendall’s ‘great’ team.

“The record shows,” sings Frank Sinatra, “I took the blows. And did it my way.”

The lyrics could have been crafted for Andy Gray, the sort of centre-forward people would talk about going to war for his team.

The former Bayern Munich captain Klaus Augenthaler remembers Gray’s name loudly rolling around Goodison Park, a menacing call to arms, as Everton got hold of the German team 36 years ago.

Gray battered Bayern defender Norbert Eder into submission that night. The West Germany international, who would play in the following year’s World Cup final, was “off the pitch, getting his nose fixed” when Everton scored their second goal of a brutal European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final.

But you couldn’t play like Gray, all that physicality and aggression and absurd bravery, without paying an injury tax.


There were six knee operations before joining Everton, where Gray added a league title, FA Cup and European trophy to the League Cups won with Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

The top scorer in English football in 1976/77 – he hit 29 in all for Aston Villa – and winner of two prestigious player-of-the-year awards in the same season, does he wonder what might have been without the injuries?

“No,” replies Gray, quick as a flash.

“That would be greedy because I achieved so much.

“I did it my way, playing my way, getting caught, getting injured, going into tackles when I shouldn’t have and ending up in hospital.

“That was me.

“I wouldn’t have been the player I was if I pulled out of tackles, if I hadn’t roughed-up people.

“And what more would I have wanted? I won league titles and a European competition, scored in European and FA and League Cup finals, won a Golden Boot and was voted the best player in England.

“The only thing missing was a World Cup finals.

“The rest is perfect.”

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When BSB head of sport Andy Melvin wanted a lead pundit and co-commentator for the fledgling company’s football coverage in 1990, Gray was the golden ticket.

Melvin identified a born broadcaster, boasting the presence and authority and courage of his convictions to go with the footballing pedigree and boyish passion for the game.


There were Gray’s underrated communication skills, too, the ability to inform without talking down to an audience.

BSB merged with Sky and the daring BSkyB paid £304m to screen the new Premier League for five years from 1992.

Monday Night Football was introduced and Andy Gray’s Boot Room gave birth to a new wave of detailed tactical analysis for entertainment.

“Andy Melvin tasked me with putting his ideas in place,” says Gray.

“With the Boot Room, he reminded me of a night I was talking about tactics, moving bottles of beer about, and he said, ‘I want you to do that on television’.

“I said, ‘What, move beer bottles?’

“No. But we had a guest and a Subbuteo board and would talk tactics.

“I felt pressure because of the effort and money invested by Sky.

Monday Night Football was groundbreaking.

“It took so many hours to get it right.

“We did reinvent it [football coverage].

“Jimmy Hill reinvented it in his way.

“We took it on from Jimmy and moved it into the next century.”

Gray and the equally brash and combative Peter Reid were the alpha males in the first incarnation of Howard Kendall’s exceptional mid-1980s Everton.

The Scot “hated getting beaten” and couldn’t come to terms with anyone not sharing his outlook.

“I’d have done anything to win a football match,” he says. “Legal and semi-legal.

“And I found a kindred spirit in Reidy.”


Gray has three older brothers who “were better footballers than me at a young age”.

Being the inferior talent was the starting point in forming Gray’s competitive streak and, we learn, giving the Scot his voice.

“My brothers weren’t as driven, so maybe I got all their ambitions heaped on me,” says Gray.

“I was the baby and had to run with them.

“I wasn’t an outgoing kid, I was quite a shy child.

“It was only when I went on a football pitch there was a personality change.

“Even as a schoolboy, I remember hollering at people if they weren’t up to scratch, I was doing that at 10, 11, 12.

“Yet I was a shy person off the pitch.

“I think football gave me a confidence and personality I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Gray admits there was no grand plan when joining Everton from Wolverhampton Wanderers in November 1983.

All he knew was Goodison Park qualified as a better bet than Molineux, where a club unrecognisable from today’s slick and ambitious operation was desperately impoverished and a relegation certainty.


Everton were hardly tearing up trees themselves, stuck in the lower reaches of Division One.

“Not only were Everton in a bad way, I was,” says Gray.

“The age I was, I needed to be challenged before I lost all confidence.

“It was an opportunity to get inspired again.”

Gray was soon marvelling at the talents of Trevor Steven, Kevin Sheedy and Graeme Sharp and questioning, ‘Why are we down here?’.

When Kendall’s side beat streetwise Southampton in the 1984 FA Cup semi-final, he knew the tide had turned.

“The final was a foregone conclusion, I never thought Watford would be good enough to beat us and I was right,” says Gray.

“The semi-final, for me, was bigger than the final.

“In that tie – and the three Gillingham games [a protracted fifth-round tussle] – we stood up and were counted and for the first time showed what we were made of.”

Gray confirms the magical former wide player Steven’s recent recollection in these pages of Kendall’s squad comprising self-appointed A, B and C teams.

“It wasn’t us, saying, ‘You guys aren’t as good as us’,” says A-team member Gray.

“It was, ‘We have been around the block, you guys are coming up but watch and learn and take it on board.

“On tour, we’d say, ‘Where are the B team going tonight? ‘Oh, for a cup of tea, the A team is going for a drink’.


“It wasn’t done with any malice or looking down our noses at the lads.

“It was a daft little thing and everybody bought into it.

“Reidy and I were outgoing personalities… the young boys came with us and very quickly got into the habit of hating being beaten.”

A serious injury for Adrian Heath on 1 December 1984 opened the door for Gray to partner Sharp up front.

He was 28 and a vastly different player from the young shaver who stormed English football after leaving Dundee United for Villa in 1975.

“I was fit and young and ambitious and trying to make a name for myself back then,” says Gray.

“I had so much to learn and an insatiable appetite for learning.

“I wanted to do everything and would throw myself into situations I shouldn’t have.

“By the time I was at Everton, I had to change.

“I couldn’t do at 28 what I could at 21 – not as often, anyway.

“I was still hugely competitive but in a more controlled way.

“I was more thoughtful at 28, 29, I was reckless when I was 21.”

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Back to Sinatra.

Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

Andy Gray’s regrets are indeed few. But they merit discussion.

The story of his abrupt Everton departure is well told.

For the unversed, Kendall told Gray in the summer of 1985 that the impending arrival of Gary Lineker would relegate him to understudy.

Gray’s “pride was hurt”, he was “angry and upset with Howard”, and he rejoined Villa.

He accepts today he was rash and admits getting over the fact he was no longer an Everton player was a prolonged process.

“Oh, yeah, hugely,” says Gray, his tone downbeat.

“It was a really sad time, really sad.

“I had knee trouble when I went back to Villa and never found the form I had the first time.


“It was rough, it really was.

“It is a wonderful club but the two years when I went back were really awful.

“But that’s it. Things happen and sadly it ended at Everton the way it did.

“It was wonderful while I was there.”

Gray, to be clear, had no issue with Kendall’s wish to strengthen. “I had been that player going to take someone’s place at various clubs,” he says.

In the summer of 1997, it fleetingly appeared that Gray would be charged with the difficult calls.

He spoke to then-chairman Peter Johnson about the Everton manager’s job but despite fevered speculation never received an offer.

Gray didn’t get as far as thinking about potential signings but knows what his Everton would have looked like.

“I would have played fast and attacking football,” he says.

“I wouldn’t have wanted my defenders passing it 50 times across the back before going forward.

“I’d have loved possession of the ball but I’d have wanted to get it forward quickly and with control and to create as many chances as possible.

“With Howard, we played fantastic football but weren’t shy of putting the ball in the penalty area or getting it forward.

“Why wouldn’t you get the ball to your front men, the people who win the game?

“Defenders save the game but have more of the football than attackers today.

“People have told me I might have been quite good but that’s easy to say, I don’t know.

“It’s one thing, along with not playing in a World Cup, that I wonder what could have been.”


The story of Everton’s Kendall-inspired surge to prominence is beautifully told in director Rob Sloman’s film Howard’s Way.

Reuniting with old colleagues for the November 2019 St George’s Hall premiere felt like being transported back to 1985, says Gray.

“It was as if we’d never been apart,” he continues.

“Rob believed our team didn’t get the credit we deserved.

“He’s right, in many ways, we didn’t.

“People who watched Howard’s Way said, ‘Wow, you were a good team, weren’t you?’.

“We weren’t a good team, we were a great team.”

Proceeds from Howard’s Way are diverted towards The People’s Place, Everton’s mental health facility that will spring up in the shadow of Goodison.

Gray admired England forward Jesse Lingard’s readiness to speak out last month about a dip in his mental wellbeing.

“In my day,” says Gray, “if you’d said you had mental health problems, you wouldn’t have been laughed at – but the attitude would have been, ‘Don’t be so stupid, get on with it, you’re not feeling right’.

“Fortunately, now, we understand mental health is a major issue and can’t be overlooked.”


Gray’s outwardly indestructible confidence when he played was for real – “Not a lot bothered me,” he shrugs – but after an exit from Sky played out in the public eye 10 years ago, he reached a dangerously low ebb.

He told the Scottish Daily Record newspaper he’d contemplated taking his own life, adding: “It was horrendous. I was being hung, drawn and quartered by everybody.”

Living in Qatar, where he works for television channel beIN SPORTS, Gray has found the past year very difficult, too.

“If you have problems mentally, it is horrible,” says Gray.

“Men have historically thought of it as a weakness, ‘I can’t show I don’t feel right or am struggling, because people will laugh at me’.

“No, it is the opposite.

“It is wonderful to see Everton trying to help.

“Especially now, coming out of this pandemic.

“I know how I have felt, I’ve hardly seen my wife for a year.

“That is hard.

“And people have gone through a lot worse than me.

“More than ever, we need to look after mental health.”

Gray’s television career could have begun as a presenter with STV, where Melvin oversaw sports output, had Graeme Souness not intervened with an offer to play for Rangers.

One season at Ibrox, in 1988/89, represented a “dream come true” for the boyhood supporter, the league title was the “wee cherry to stick on top” of the enormous helping of success with Everton.


Seven months with non-league Cheltenham plugged a gap before starting with BSB.

Gray watched a “mindblowing” amount of football for Sky and maintains a similar schedule in the Middle East where he’s been since 2013.

“I could never get fed up with football,” says Gray.

 “It is a very different game from when I played, less physical and more studious.

 “Players don’t take chances so much, there are fewer percentage passes.

“That’s how it is – but it is still brilliant.”

Gray sees “positive signs” for Everton and is convinced unusually lax home form will turnaround when fans return and Carlo Ancelotti’s team can “play on emotion” at Goodison Park.

 Manager Ancelotti’s “very good” recruitment is a major point of encouragement, with Gray expecting the Italian to “beef up” his squad this summer.


 “Ben Godfrey is the biggest positive for me,” he says.

“I have been so impressed with that kid, anywhere he is asked to play, he plays so well.

“Whoever was responsible, that was an inspired signing.

“I like him a lot. He has had a great season.”

The view from Gray’s apartment balcony features two “magnificent” stadiums, poised to host the 2022 World Cup.

Always prepared to go out on a limb, Gray reasons a November and December tournament, when players remain fresh, allied to elite training facilities, modern infrastructure and limited travel requirements, will add up to a “great World Cup” in a “little country with huge ambition”.

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To think I did all that.

And may I say, not in a shy way.

Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way.

Gray’s beIN SPORTS contract expires in the summer of 2023.

“I love it here,” he says.

“If they think I’m good enough, I might stay for a few years yet.

“I never tire of the view or waking up in the sunshine every day.”

Doing it his way is still working for Andy Gray.