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.