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Duberry walks tall
DAVID WALSH
The resilient Leeds United centre-half, one of Elland Road’s great survivors, is determined to tackle Arsenal today
So much has changed at Elland Road. Old faces have disappeared, the new faces are fewer, and where once there was strident expectation, pessimism rises from beneath the ground and dampens everything. Trevor Birch, the new chief executive, meets journalists to offer a necessarily austere appraisal of the new circumstances. “Something needs to happen here,” says one of the older hands.
At the Leeds United store, a giant portrait of Alan Smith in the team’s away strip stands to the right of the entrance. Alongside is another giant message, this one proclaiming: “SALE.” You smile at the irony: will Smith go in the January sales, or will the club simply sell a few more LUFC T-shirts at the knockdown price of £4.50? It is hard to credit that less than four years ago this club was in the last four in the Champions League. The team of David O’Leary, with Rio Ferdinand, Jonathan Woodgate, Harry Kewell, Lee Bowyer, Olivier Dacourt. When, a year later, they reached only the last four of the Uefa Cup, it seemed like abject failure. Where did it all go wrong? Out of the dressing room at Elland Road walks Michael Duberry, the centre-back who everybody said would leave the club. But here he is, clad in a light-blue tracksuit, his Premiership status reflected in the glint from the stud in his left ear and the designer watch on his left wrist. What a journey he’s had, 28 years old, but with enough water under the bridge to flood the whole of Yorkshire.
This afternoon he will be at the centre of the Leeds defence and central to the team’s defiance. Rejected by several Leeds managers, he has become a sort of cornerstone for the club’s caretaker manager, Eddie Gray. His partner, Natasha, will strain to hear when the home crowd chants “Dubes”. For her, there is still the fear of the fans’ disapproval.
How has Duberry survived the forced sales, the purges, the life rafts inflated to get men off the Titanic? It’s a long story, and his five-season career at Leeds has been no fairy tale. “It’s actually been quite frustrating,” he says. “So many times I was left out of the team and I couldn’t do much about it. The club had great centre-halves. First ‘Woody’ (Woodgate) and Lucas (Radebe), then Rio and Woody, Rio and ‘Dom’ (Dominic Matteo), and I didn’t grumble. If they were playing well, the manager had to stick with them.
“The frustration came when there were injuries and the manager looked elsewhere. Like when the right-back was played centre-back in front of me, or even when a midfield player was played in my position. That was hard to accept.”
Duberry was unlucky once. He got into the team in his second season, played well against Barcelona in the Champions League and was outstanding in the 1-0 defeat of AC Milan at Elland Road. At the time it seemed a defining moment in his career at the club, but in the very next game, he snapped his Achilles tendon against Derby. By the time he had regained fitness, Ferdinand was at the club.
Most people said Duberry would be on his way, that O’Leary had lost faith in him. Duberry is strong and quick, but not a good passer of the ball. The manager believed that could be improved, but, says Duberry with a hint of understatement: “I was never a flair player. I had this at Chelsea when Ruud Gullit was the manager. ‘Ruudy’ never really fancied me. I was this stiff English centre-half who could just head it. Too stiff to play.
“Obviously, Ruudy had been playing alongside (Franco) Baresi and (Paolo) Maldini, so he had a pretty high standard. He would have his little digs and I would hear his little mocking comments; he didn’t always instil confidence in me. He played me, then he dropped me to play himself, and that was hurtful. He was a great midfield player, but when he played at the back, the team leaked goals. We had a weird relationship.
“My lack of flair stemmed from my childhood. My parents are from the small island of Montserrat in the West Indies. My dad’s game was cricket; he had no interest in football. Mary, my mum, took me to football, and because I was big and athletic, I progressed. But I never had that desire to go out and do keepy-ups against a wall. Because I didn’t do it when I was young, I shied away from it when I was older. You see other kids doing it, you kind of get embarrassed, and that makes you shy away from it even more. I’ve always been a player who knows what he can and cannot do. I think that’s one of my strengths.”
Some coaches warmed to what Duberry offered, others simply did not want him in the team. Graham Rix was sympathetic and taught him much. They remain good friends. If Gullit hadn’t played himself at centre-back, he might have picked Ken Bates before Duberry. Glenn Hoddle sometimes played him, although he was never Hoddle’s kind of defender. Gianluca Vialli had more enthusiasm, but with Marcel Desailly and Frank Leboeuf on the staff, Duberry was a distant third in the pecking order.
After that came Leeds: a new start, but the same old story. Often third choice, sometimes fourth or fifth, rarely in anybody’s first XI. His relationship with O’Leary deteriorated towards the end of the manager’s reign. By then, Leeds United were in freefall. Bowyer and Woodgate had been in Hull Crown Court; the club was in the gutter. Peripheral to so much on the field, Duberry was a central character in the trial of his teammates.
He testified that the Leeds solicitor Peter Cormick advised him to stick to his story after he told him he had given a false statement to the police. Cormick denied this. Duberry’s revised testimony incriminated his best friend, Woodgate.
“It was hard for me, because Woody had a great rapport with the fans, he was a northern lad, and here was this London boy from Chelsea telling a different story. I done what I done for a reason. In my eyes I had no option but to tell the truth. There’s no more to be said than that.
“Woody and I had been really close, best mates. It put a big strain on the relationship. After the second trial, we stopped speaking and we just weren’t getting on. But time sorted things out. We’re now good friends again, we speak regularly, we have a laugh and a joke, there’s no old grievance. This is not me saying this for diplomatic reasons, this is how it is. We phone each other, hammer each other like we used to.
“But an experience like that hardens you. It was the same for Woody and ‘Bow’ (Bowyer). You have emotions that you have to bury. It affects those closest to you as much as it affects you, if not more. At first it was tough for me with the fans, because Woody was so popular, and though I didn’t want to seem arrogant or aloof, I took a step back from them to protect myself. So you end up avoiding the good guys as well. It was a hard situation.
“I had good friends and my family to help me at that time. What your mum, dad and brother say, that’s what tells you if you’ve done right or wrong. They told me I had every right to hold my head up, and that’s what I did.”
The rift with Woodgate and the controversy over his evidence in court led to the widespread conviction that Duberry would be sold. At the time Leeds had Ferdinand, Woodgate, Matteo and Radebe, and right-back Danny Mills had played well when switched to centre-back. With O’Leary also unconvinced, it seemed certain that Duberry would go.
Instead, the then chairman, Peter Ridsdale, offered him a new five-year contract. Duberry accepted, and, to put it mildly, the manager was surprised. His surprise was a shock to Duberry. “But I didn’t dwell on it, just tried to figure out who the next man would be (as Leeds manager) and wondered if he would fancy me.”
The next man was Terry Venables. He spoke with Venables, told him how frustrated he was not to be in the first team and that he would rather be elsewhere than playing reserve- team football. The new manager said he appreciated the honesty, but kept Duberry in the reserves. He didn’t cry when Venables headed south, but waited to see who would arrive on the next wave into Leeds.
Peter Reid came and told him that if he was fit, he would be in the side. It was the first time any manager had said that to him, and as Leeds escaped the threat of relegation last season, Duberry was central to the defence. He yearned for the new season to begin, desperate to pick up where he had left off. But at the beginning of the season he fractured a cheekbone in the last preparatory game and that was it, eight weeks out.
When he returned, Roque Junior was at the club — a World Cup winner. Duberry was back where he had almost always been. “It was déjà-bloody-vu for me. Again I wasn’t figuring, not even on the bench, and the team was conceding lots of goals. As the results continued to be bad, I kept thinking that I would get in, but I didn’t. And to think that I thought Peter Reid half-liked me.”
Reid went the way of O’Leary and Venables. Duberry waited with renewed hope. Eddie Gray took the reins, a man with so much history at the place that he could have written Duberry’s biography. Gray has picked him for every match since then, and at last the player thinks that things are looking up.
His mother keeps a scrapbook detailing the ups and downs of his career. There hasn’t been much over the past four years, but it’s been good for the past couple of months. His young daughters from a previous relationship, Kayci and Aaliyah, tell him they’ve seen him on television, and Natasha, his partner for the past two years, is expecting his third child.
“Things are actually going quite well now,” says Duberry. He says it as confidently, as hopefully, as anybody at Leeds United would dare.
Duberry walks tall
DAVID WALSH
The resilient Leeds United centre-half, one of Elland Road’s great survivors, is determined to tackle Arsenal today
So much has changed at Elland Road. Old faces have disappeared, the new faces are fewer, and where once there was strident expectation, pessimism rises from beneath the ground and dampens everything. Trevor Birch, the new chief executive, meets journalists to offer a necessarily austere appraisal of the new circumstances. “Something needs to happen here,” says one of the older hands.
At the Leeds United store, a giant portrait of Alan Smith in the team’s away strip stands to the right of the entrance. Alongside is another giant message, this one proclaiming: “SALE.” You smile at the irony: will Smith go in the January sales, or will the club simply sell a few more LUFC T-shirts at the knockdown price of £4.50? It is hard to credit that less than four years ago this club was in the last four in the Champions League. The team of David O’Leary, with Rio Ferdinand, Jonathan Woodgate, Harry Kewell, Lee Bowyer, Olivier Dacourt. When, a year later, they reached only the last four of the Uefa Cup, it seemed like abject failure. Where did it all go wrong? Out of the dressing room at Elland Road walks Michael Duberry, the centre-back who everybody said would leave the club. But here he is, clad in a light-blue tracksuit, his Premiership status reflected in the glint from the stud in his left ear and the designer watch on his left wrist. What a journey he’s had, 28 years old, but with enough water under the bridge to flood the whole of Yorkshire.
This afternoon he will be at the centre of the Leeds defence and central to the team’s defiance. Rejected by several Leeds managers, he has become a sort of cornerstone for the club’s caretaker manager, Eddie Gray. His partner, Natasha, will strain to hear when the home crowd chants “Dubes”. For her, there is still the fear of the fans’ disapproval.
How has Duberry survived the forced sales, the purges, the life rafts inflated to get men off the Titanic? It’s a long story, and his five-season career at Leeds has been no fairy tale. “It’s actually been quite frustrating,” he says. “So many times I was left out of the team and I couldn’t do much about it. The club had great centre-halves. First ‘Woody’ (Woodgate) and Lucas (Radebe), then Rio and Woody, Rio and ‘Dom’ (Dominic Matteo), and I didn’t grumble. If they were playing well, the manager had to stick with them.
“The frustration came when there were injuries and the manager looked elsewhere. Like when the right-back was played centre-back in front of me, or even when a midfield player was played in my position. That was hard to accept.”
Duberry was unlucky once. He got into the team in his second season, played well against Barcelona in the Champions League and was outstanding in the 1-0 defeat of AC Milan at Elland Road. At the time it seemed a defining moment in his career at the club, but in the very next game, he snapped his Achilles tendon against Derby. By the time he had regained fitness, Ferdinand was at the club.
Most people said Duberry would be on his way, that O’Leary had lost faith in him. Duberry is strong and quick, but not a good passer of the ball. The manager believed that could be improved, but, says Duberry with a hint of understatement: “I was never a flair player. I had this at Chelsea when Ruud Gullit was the manager. ‘Ruudy’ never really fancied me. I was this stiff English centre-half who could just head it. Too stiff to play.
“Obviously, Ruudy had been playing alongside (Franco) Baresi and (Paolo) Maldini, so he had a pretty high standard. He would have his little digs and I would hear his little mocking comments; he didn’t always instil confidence in me. He played me, then he dropped me to play himself, and that was hurtful. He was a great midfield player, but when he played at the back, the team leaked goals. We had a weird relationship.
“My lack of flair stemmed from my childhood. My parents are from the small island of Montserrat in the West Indies. My dad’s game was cricket; he had no interest in football. Mary, my mum, took me to football, and because I was big and athletic, I progressed. But I never had that desire to go out and do keepy-ups against a wall. Because I didn’t do it when I was young, I shied away from it when I was older. You see other kids doing it, you kind of get embarrassed, and that makes you shy away from it even more. I’ve always been a player who knows what he can and cannot do. I think that’s one of my strengths.”
Some coaches warmed to what Duberry offered, others simply did not want him in the team. Graham Rix was sympathetic and taught him much. They remain good friends. If Gullit hadn’t played himself at centre-back, he might have picked Ken Bates before Duberry. Glenn Hoddle sometimes played him, although he was never Hoddle’s kind of defender. Gianluca Vialli had more enthusiasm, but with Marcel Desailly and Frank Leboeuf on the staff, Duberry was a distant third in the pecking order.
After that came Leeds: a new start, but the same old story. Often third choice, sometimes fourth or fifth, rarely in anybody’s first XI. His relationship with O’Leary deteriorated towards the end of the manager’s reign. By then, Leeds United were in freefall. Bowyer and Woodgate had been in Hull Crown Court; the club was in the gutter. Peripheral to so much on the field, Duberry was a central character in the trial of his teammates.
He testified that the Leeds solicitor Peter Cormick advised him to stick to his story after he told him he had given a false statement to the police. Cormick denied this. Duberry’s revised testimony incriminated his best friend, Woodgate.
“It was hard for me, because Woody had a great rapport with the fans, he was a northern lad, and here was this London boy from Chelsea telling a different story. I done what I done for a reason. In my eyes I had no option but to tell the truth. There’s no more to be said than that.
“Woody and I had been really close, best mates. It put a big strain on the relationship. After the second trial, we stopped speaking and we just weren’t getting on. But time sorted things out. We’re now good friends again, we speak regularly, we have a laugh and a joke, there’s no old grievance. This is not me saying this for diplomatic reasons, this is how it is. We phone each other, hammer each other like we used to.
“But an experience like that hardens you. It was the same for Woody and ‘Bow’ (Bowyer). You have emotions that you have to bury. It affects those closest to you as much as it affects you, if not more. At first it was tough for me with the fans, because Woody was so popular, and though I didn’t want to seem arrogant or aloof, I took a step back from them to protect myself. So you end up avoiding the good guys as well. It was a hard situation.
“I had good friends and my family to help me at that time. What your mum, dad and brother say, that’s what tells you if you’ve done right or wrong. They told me I had every right to hold my head up, and that’s what I did.”
The rift with Woodgate and the controversy over his evidence in court led to the widespread conviction that Duberry would be sold. At the time Leeds had Ferdinand, Woodgate, Matteo and Radebe, and right-back Danny Mills had played well when switched to centre-back. With O’Leary also unconvinced, it seemed certain that Duberry would go.
Instead, the then chairman, Peter Ridsdale, offered him a new five-year contract. Duberry accepted, and, to put it mildly, the manager was surprised. His surprise was a shock to Duberry. “But I didn’t dwell on it, just tried to figure out who the next man would be (as Leeds manager) and wondered if he would fancy me.”
The next man was Terry Venables. He spoke with Venables, told him how frustrated he was not to be in the first team and that he would rather be elsewhere than playing reserve- team football. The new manager said he appreciated the honesty, but kept Duberry in the reserves. He didn’t cry when Venables headed south, but waited to see who would arrive on the next wave into Leeds.
Peter Reid came and told him that if he was fit, he would be in the side. It was the first time any manager had said that to him, and as Leeds escaped the threat of relegation last season, Duberry was central to the defence. He yearned for the new season to begin, desperate to pick up where he had left off. But at the beginning of the season he fractured a cheekbone in the last preparatory game and that was it, eight weeks out.
When he returned, Roque Junior was at the club — a World Cup winner. Duberry was back where he had almost always been. “It was déjà-bloody-vu for me. Again I wasn’t figuring, not even on the bench, and the team was conceding lots of goals. As the results continued to be bad, I kept thinking that I would get in, but I didn’t. And to think that I thought Peter Reid half-liked me.”
Reid went the way of O’Leary and Venables. Duberry waited with renewed hope. Eddie Gray took the reins, a man with so much history at the place that he could have written Duberry’s biography. Gray has picked him for every match since then, and at last the player thinks that things are looking up.
His mother keeps a scrapbook detailing the ups and downs of his career. There hasn’t been much over the past four years, but it’s been good for the past couple of months. His young daughters from a previous relationship, Kayci and Aaliyah, tell him they’ve seen him on television, and Natasha, his partner for the past two years, is expecting his third child.
“Things are actually going quite well now,” says Duberry. He says it as confidently, as hopefully, as anybody at Leeds United would dare.