Sad, dark day as 'football becomes a wee bit irrelevant'

TV VIEW:Sky Sports' Super Sunday turned in to anything but, just the most dismal of days. Swansea v Aston Villa was to be the starter before the main course, Liverpool v Manchester City, but, as Kenny Dalglish put it, "football becomes a wee bit irrelevant" at times like these.

Besotted as he is with the game, Dalglish knows a thing or two about its darker days, and yesterday was one of them, the nature of Gary Speed’s death leaving all those who knew him heartbroken and feeling just a little bit empty.

Shay Given was inconsolable as he stood for the minute’s silence at Swansea, the tears flowing for his former Newcastle team-mate, one of his closest footballing friends. During the Euro 2012 qualifying campaign, we’d grown accustomed to watching Given’s nigh-on Herculean, stiff-jawed defiance. Yesterday he dissolved into a mere mortal.

Speed’s former Welsh team-mate Robbie Savage is, it’s probably accurate enough to say, the most laddish of lads. Fast cars, babes, bling, and the like.

A few years back he filmed a Premiership Diaries series for a channel found in the nether regions of digital television-land, one episode showing him visiting his 83-year-old nan.

She hadn’t been well recently, and was, she told him, on 91 tablets a week.

She’d lost a whole lot more weight than was safe, and was worried about it.

“D’you think I’ve gone thinner Rob?” she asked her grandson.

“You have, you’ve lost some weight there – you look nice,” he replied, “I can actually see your boobs now, sticking out your top.”

She giggled, he smiled, he’d made her day, even if her weight loss hadn’t actually been something to celebrate. But it’s all he knew to say, and he was a dote for saying it.

Yesterday he didn’t quite know what to say either, breaking down on the BBC when asked to talk about his former Welsh team-mate. “The guy is a trooper,” he said, painfully reluctant to use the past tense.

“He had everything, he had everything,” he said, “he had two gorgeous kids and a beautiful wife. As my captain when I was a young boy in the Welsh squad, I could go to him with my problems,” he said, and Robbie had many problems, usually of the self-inflicted kind. But he treated Speed’s memory with the same compassion as he showed his nan, it’s all he knew to say.

It was only on Saturday morning that Speed appeared on the BBC’s Football Focus, sitting alongside Gary McAllister, calling to mind a Leeds midfield that drove them to their 1992 league title, a memory some of us have worked hard to expunge over the last 20 years.

All we needed was Gordon Strachan and David Batty and Lee Chapman and Tony Dorigo and Rod Wallace, and a few others, to join them on the couch just to complete the recurring nightmare.

Their manager from back then, Howard Wilkinson, spoke to Sky by phone yesterday, but he struggled to find the words to articulate his despair. He recalled, though, asking Speed, through the seasons, to play in every position but in goal, and monitoring his face for a negative reaction when he told him where he was playing him that day.

But there never was a negative reaction, Speed was happy to play anywhere, so long as he was in the team.

On Football Focus, he talked about the future with Wales, about their World Cup qualifying draw, about his optimism for the campaign ahead. Within a few hours he was gone.

“We think of football sometimes as being important, but it isn’t really,” said Gary Neville back on Sky, a fella who aged a year or eight trying to mark Speed and his elegant left foot through the seasons.

“He was,” said Sky’s Ed Chamberlin, as he bid us adieu, “one of the Premier League’s iconic figures.” A sincere tribute, but not accurate at all. Speed, handsome devil that he was, could have sold a million duvet covers, but he never played that game.

He was anything but a Premier League icon, he was too consumed with playing football to get wrapped up in that world of self-promoting nonsense.

He stretched his playing career until breaking point, never wanting to let go, finally retiring in his 41st year. And then he was appointed Welsh manager.

“He had everything,” as Savage put it.

He was born in the Welsh village of Mancot, which translates as “humble dwelling”. And so he lived.