Granny Val: The inspiration who kept Kalvin Phillips’ feet on the ground as he reached for the stars - The Athletic 17/6/21


Oliver Kay

There were nerves in the family section at Wembley Stadium on Sunday. The sweltering heat didn’t help either. There were sweaty brows and dry throats as well as butterflies in the stomach — and this was even before England’s opening game of Euro 2020 had begun.

Eventually, nerves gave way to excitement, which soon gave way to a sense of wonder and enormous pride among the players’ families. No family was prouder than that of Kalvin Phillips, who, making his first appearance in a major tournament, was widely recognised as the outstanding player in England’s 1-0 win over Croatia.

There was something else too: an inescapable feeling among his mother, sisters, brother, girlfriend and his agent that one person would have been prouder than anyone to see him perform like that on the big stage. As former England striker Ian Wright put it on Twitter, “Granny Val watching down with the biggest smile”.

Everybody knew Valerie Crosby as Granny Val. She was Phillips’ inspiration, the much-loved head of a large but very close-knit family. When the midfielder was agonising over a lucrative move to newly-promoted Aston Villa in the summer of 2019, it was Granny Val who put her foot down and told him to stay put.

The scene was detailed in the Amazon Prime documentary Take Us Home when she joined her grandson to witness him signing his new contract. “I was like this,” she said, her hands trembling. “Somebody said he (Phillips) might move. I said to him, ‘Oh my goodness’. He said, ‘You’ll have to sell that house and come with me’. I’ve too much to leave behind. If I left Leeds, I’ve got 23 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and I’ve got a great-great-grandchild on the way, so it wouldn’t do for me to move.”

Or, as Phillips put it, in a subsequently interview with Wright for the BBC’s Football Focus, “I told her about Aston Villa being in touch and she was like, ‘Ooh no. No, you’re not doing that’. I was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s a chance to play Premier League football. I’ve always wanted to do it’. And she said, ‘You’ve been at Leeds for ten years now. You were this close to going up. Why not give it one more shot to try to make it up and try to do something that Leeds fans and your family will never forget. Stick it out.’”



Phillips stayed, signing a new five-year contract and put everything into Leeds’ bid for promotion to the Premier League. Perhaps more than anyone, he is the face of the club’s spectacular resurgence under Marcelo Bielsa. And along with his mother Lindsay, Granny Val was the driving force behind him.

On the morning of February 18, Granny Val died at the age of 82 after a short illness. Phillips said on Instagram that he was “heartbroken”, adding, “I can’t put into words what you are to me and my family — the absolute Queen of our hearts. I just know how fortunate I was to have you in my life. She was an unforgettable person, as I’m sure many of you know. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I wasn’t for you and the heartbreak I feel now is incomparable.”

From her 17 years as a head of education and welfare at Leeds’ academy, Lucy Ward cannot remember another young player quite like Phillips. “What stood out wasn’t about his attributes as a footballer — because they all have attributes,” she tells The Athletic. “It was his character.

“There are kids who have been part of academies from when they were six, seven, eight years old and by the time they’re getting towards 16 certain pressures build up because they’re desperate not to be released. Kal wasn’t like that. He came in at 14 and he had been playing local football, enjoying himself, so he wasn’t like a typical academy kid.

“He walked in and you could see he was like, ‘Wow. I’m living the dream here. I never thought I would get to Leeds United. This is fantastic’. Every day he turned up at the academy, it was like it was his birthday. He didn’t have any of the baggage that sometimes comes from being in the academy system and thinking any small setback is the end of the world.”

But it went beyond the kid-in-a-sweetshop effect. “I often found that the ones who had a really strong female presence in their lives stood out,” Ward says. “Sometimes that’s the mum. In many cases it’s a single mum. In Kal’s case it was a single mum and a gran. His mum Lindsay and his gran Val were really strong role models in his life. They would make sure he was respectful and they never allowed him to misbehave.”

There is sometimes a rush to anoint footballers as role models, but Phillips has always seemed to embrace that idea, spending afternoons off doing charitable work with the club’s foundation. “I’m from Leeds so it’s a big part of me and I like getting to know people, find out about them, see different backgrounds and where they’ve come from,” he told the Daily Mirror in 2019. “Sometimes the struggles relate to my own struggles.”

It is a wholesome story, of a local boy made good, but Phillips’ upbringing was far from idyllic. As has been well documented recently, his father is currently serving time at HM Prison Wealstun, barely a five-minute walk from Leeds’ Thorp Arch training ground. “In prison, out of prison. He got into the wrong crowd: drugs, fighting, anything you can name,” the midfielder told The Times last year. “I’ve been to see him a few times but I don’t like going in there and seeing him in prison. I’d rather speak over the phone. I speak to him every couple of weeks.”

All of which made the strength and resilience of his mother and grandmother even more important. His mother worked in two different jobs, one of them at a pizza shop, to make enough money to ensure there was food on the table for Phillips, his brother and his two sisters — though often she herself would go hungry and would sleep on the sofa at their house in Armley to ensure the children each had a bed.


With his mother working so hard, Granny Val would end up having to take some of the strain. “His mum was brilliant and his gran was brilliant,” Ward says. “I can see her bringing him up to training and they would pile into the car. She was fantastic, his gran. She was there at every match and every training session. She was full of it. She didn’t mind using a few choice words to sort him out if she needed to, but she didn’t really need to sort him out very often because he had those same good old northern values and that is all driven by the family.”

Long before the Amazon documentary made her famous, she was part of the furniture at Elland Road on matchdays and at the academy before that. One staff member says, “People would see her in the West Stand on matchdays and say, ‘Who’s that?’. We would say, ‘It’s Granny Val’. They would say, ‘Oh, that’s Granny Val. I know about Granny Val’. Everyone knew her as Granny Val. Everyone around the club loved her.”

There was nothing cynical or manufactured about her appearance in Take Me Home. The documentary-makers wanted to focus on the story of Phillips the homegrown hero, raised just a couple of miles from Elland Road, and they were delighted when time with him away from the training ground inevitably meant time with his mother and with Granny Val, who unwittingly became a star of the series, whether by berating her grandson for his choice of trainers when signing his contract (“What have you got on your feet? Bloody hell…”) or telling him how she would love to take the bus to Wetherby one day to try to bump into Bielsa (“I think he’s lovely. I heard he goes in Costa’s. I would like to bump into him and say, ‘I’m Kalvin’s grandma’.”)

When Granny Val suddenly fell ill last February, Leeds published a post on their Twitter feed, saying, “One of our biggest fans isn’t too well at the moment. Keep fighting, Granny Val! You can do it!”

She kept fighting, but, to the devastation of the whole family, she died a couple of days later. That sense of grief went further. Typical, among the hundreds of responses to Leeds’ tweet, was one from supporter @bapuss1809, who wrote, “Sometimes people we have never met resonate with us all, Granny Val and Kalvin did in Take Us Home and in such a sad, but also dramatic and fantastic time for LUFC. Hard to beat those emotions unless you were there and Kalvin will be proud to (have) had those times. RIP Granny Val.”

When Leeds beat Southampton 3-0 five days later, Phillips’ team-mates held up a T-shirt bearing the name “Granny Val”. Pablo Hernandez pointed to the heavens and Patrick Bamford told Sky Sports, “The squad is very together. It’s a tight-knit bunch of lads and I think anyone who has watched the documentary on Amazon will see that Granny Val is a big part of the club, indirectly, and loads of people have grown to love her even without really knowing her. It’s a big loss and that (win) was for Kalvin and his family.”

And everything Phillips has done since then — through the final weeks of the season at Leeds and now on European Championship duty for his country — has been for Granny Val and for his sister Lacreasha, who died in infancy. He has a tattoo on his arm which symbolises Lacreasha. Before matches he kisses the tattoo and points to the sky.

That gesture has taken on additional meaning since he lost Granny Val in February. He knows she would have been the proudest person in Wembley on Sunday afternoon, so once again tomorrow evening he will point to the sky, determined once more to honour the inspirational woman who always ensured he kept his feet on the ground while reaching for the stars.

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