More in hope than expectation, I contacted Dario Gradi a few days ago to ascertain whether there was any inclination on his part to speak out now we are coming up for the two-year mark since the Football Association informed him he was suspended from all football‑related activities. Two years, after all, is a long time for anyone to be banished from their work. Was it time to fight back? If he felt unfairly maligned, did he want to explain why? And because the subject matter was never going to make it an easy conversation, would he confront all the issues that – whether he liked it or not – made him such a prominent figure in the Barry Bennell scandal?
There are, after all, so many unanswered questions for the man whose 35-year association with Crewe Alexandra incorporates more than 1,200 games as manager, plus spells as managing director and, latterly, technical director. Did he, I asked, want to challenge the information that has been passed to the FA’s independent inquiry that he was once so protective of Bennell, even writing a character reference before his colleague’s first criminal trial, because in the opinion of one key witness, “my feeling is that Barry Bennell had something on Dario”? Was this the time, two years in, to address the other damaging revelations that have cropped up since Andy Woodward’s interview in the Guardian began what the FA’s chairman, Greg Clarke, has described as the biggest crisis in the history of the sport?
It probably was not a surprise that he turned down the offer, having taken legal advice, and the message came back that he did not think it was appropriate to comment. Solicitors rarely advise their clients to engage directly with journalists and that means we will have to rely on Gradi’s previous statements in which he has emphasised there has been no wrongdoing on his part. “The club are in the process of a review,” one concluded, “and I won’t be making any further comment until this is finalised.”
The problem is that was 24 November 2016 and Crewe have now abandoned that investigation while, in the meantime, there have been two criminal trials involving their former employees, with a third possible next year, and the FA is well into its own inquiry, meaning all sorts of new detail and unanswered claims involving Gradi and his colleagues, what they knew and what they did about it. One allegation that has been put to the official inquiry, led by Clive Sheldon QC, is that Crewe were aware Bennell was in a relationship with an under-age girl. Crewe have told this newspaper they are not going to comment publicly in response.
Bennell is now serving a 30-year prison sentence after being convicted of 50 specimen charges relating to boys from the junior setups of Crewe and Manchester City, his previous club, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. At least 86 others – a figure not updated since January – have reported him to the police and the man who was described in court as a “child molester on an industrial scale”, imprisoned now for the fourth time, faces the prospect of another major trial next year, involving nine complainants. That has delayed the FA’s inquiry and means it could be 2020 before the governing body decides whether Gradi, now 77, should ever be allowed to return to the sport.
Perhaps more will become clear when Chelsea publish the results of their own independent inquiry into the crimes of Eddie Heath, taking in the specific allegation that Gradi visited the parents of a 15-year‑old Chelsea youth-team player to “smooth over” one complaint of sexual assault against the club’s former chief scout. That, after all, appears to have been the story that compelled the FA to remove Gradi from the sport. Gradi was Chelsea’s assistant manager at the time, in his early 30s, and is said to have told the victim’s family that he knew Heath was “closer” to boys than he should have been.
Did Gradi suspect the same of Bennell? And, perhaps more pertinently, if not, why not? Gradi, the inquiry has been told, was so protective of Bennell he allegedly flew into a temper when he was informed, according to one account, that Crewe’s directors wanted to stop the club’s youth-team coach taking boys home to stay overnight. Gradi, like Bennell, kept bunk beds at home to accommodate Crewe’s academy players. “What are you going to do about me, then?” Gradi is said to have asked the chairman, John Bowler. “I take kids home.” That, allegedly, was the key intervention, meaning Bennell was free to continue preying on boys at the house where he kept a monkey, a wild cat, a juke box, games machines and other attractions.
Gradi, then the first-team manager, had modified his own house to accommodate boys. Indeed, he needed a people carrier to ferry them all around and, although this is far from an easy subject to address, it has been made clear to the people leading this case why so much innuendo and suspicion has followed him throughout his professional life. “You’d always see him with his arm around a blond boy,” one former Crewe academy player has told the inquiry. “He used to prefer blond boys. He had dressing gowns with the [boys’] initials on. He had a [swimming] pool that was built so it was a certain level for young boys to play in.” Gradi used to take boys on holidays and, it is claimed, had to be talked out of resigning after one game because of some pointed barracking from a number of Crewe fans behind his dugout.
The inquiry, I have discovered, has been asked to consider why a manager of Gradi’s achievements did not attract more offers from higher in the sport. One former schoolboy footballer, then 14, has reportedly given a statement to an FA safeguarding officer to allege that Gradi showed him – one of the “chosen ones” – a pornographic movie and invited him to go away skiing. Plus there is separate evidence from Bennell’s victims that seriously undermines the claim that nobody in authority at Gresty Road had grave concerns about the coach and talent‑spotter who was described during one court appearance as having “almost an insatiable appetite” for prepubescent boys.
One says Crewe were known by opponents the length and breadth of the country as “that paedophile club”. Another can recall Bennell’s appearance on the touchline leading to confrontations with parents and opposition coaches. One former player has told the inquiry: “Whenever we used to play away at, say, Manchester United, everybody used to talk about it: ‘Oh, Crewe kids are abused.’ But within the club … I talk about it as a ring fence. The ring fence was so tight within that community club that, no matter what other people said, they just carried on. It was so open.”
If any of this sounds lopsided, it is important to reiterate that Gradi has had frequent opportunities to explain, in detail, his closeness with Bennell, once a youth-team player at Chelsea, and confront all the relevant questions. Crewe have also chosen not to comment and it is not clear what, if anything, Gradi and the 81-year-old Bowler have told Sheldon’s inquiry. The club have said in the past they never received any warnings about Bennell, contrary to what their former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has alleged, and it is important to keep in mind that Gradi has not been accused of any criminal activity, whatever you or I might think about the failures that have led one senior detective on the case to question whether the entrance to Gresty Road should be painted “Tardis blue”. Tardis blue? “You walk through the door and you’re in another world.”
After two years of investigating this story, it is certainly not easy to know how, or when, this ends for Gradi. The BBC reported in February 2017 that he was planning to appeal his suspension but here we are, over 18 months on, and he is still in the same position – often seen walking round Crewe, or doing his supermarket shopping, in his club tracksuit but excluded from the sport that has shaped his life.
All that can really be said is there are more questions than answers and that, if it has not happened already, Sheldon should speak to Gill Palin as a matter of priority. Palin was once the longest-serving club secretary in the Football League and has been described as “the font of all knowledge” at Crewe. The inquiry has been told she distrusted Bennell so much she would not let her own son train with him and frequently expressed misgivings about the way the coach surrounded himself with young boys. When a complaint was allegedly made about Bennell, her reaction is said to have been: “Well, surprise me.”
We would know more, perhaps, if Crewe had been decent enough to go through with their own independent investigation rather than reneging on that promise because, they claimed, there was no need to duplicate the police inquiries. That was always a deception. It was the police’s job to look for criminality, nothing else, whereas it should hardly need explaining to any right-minded person that Crewe had a responsibility to investigate everything else. The other clubs implicated in this scandal have spent two years doing precisely that. Crewe, on the other hand, appear to have taken the stance that it is better to be criticised for inaction than finding out what truly happened and having to deal with the potential fallout from what might be uncovered.
The statement Crewe released on this subject in March also neglected to mention that Paul McCann, Bennell’s assistant, was awaiting trial after being charged with six counts of indecently assaulting a boy, from 1987 to 1990. McCann was subsequently found not guilty by a jury last month at Chester crown court. Yet the trial also heard more startling details about the practices at Crewe, including the revelation that somebody with dressing-room access was taking pictures of boys getting changed or coming out of the showers.
Gradi has been called Mr Crewe in the past because of his long association and influence at a club that size. But how can he say the club did not have concerns about Bennell when Ken Barnes, then Manchester City’s chief scout, went on record in the 1997 Dispatches documentary Soccer’s Foul Play to say that Bowler’s predecessor, the now‑deceased Norman Rowlinson, rang him for advice because Crewe “had one or two reports of him mucking about with kids”? Does Gradi recall another incident that has been officially recorded, namely of him finding Bennell with an academy player on his knee at Crewe’s training ground and allegedly doing nothing about it? And if Bennell was notorious enough to be banned from attending matches in the Manchester Youth Sunday Football League, even being forcibly removed from one fixture, why were the alarm bells not ringing 35 miles south in Crewe?
Perhaps the answers will come one day. Maybe we will get a different version of The Gradi Years, the 2000 book that depicts Crewe’s manager of the time as worthy of comparisons with Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Sir Alex Ferguson, but in 198 pages airbrushes Bennell out of the story. And maybe there will be a day when the relevant people at Crewe reach out to the players who were raped and molested, hundreds of times in some cases, rather than treating them like a damned inconvenience. It would be reassuring to think all these things were just a matter of time. Two years down the line, however, and knowing what we do, I might be kidding myself to think it is ever going to happen.