Post by Rustin Cohle on Feb 14, 2019 11:54:19 GMT
An old article from 2017. I'd say it's worth the click but it's behind a paywall so I've reproduced it here.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/manchester-uniteds-class-of-92-return-to-their-mentor-eric-harrison-in-his-darkest-hour-2hjf78gdq
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/manchester-uniteds-class-of-92-return-to-their-mentor-eric-harrison-in-his-darkest-hour-2hjf78gdq
Manchester United’s Class of ’92 return to their mentor Eric Harrison in his darkest hour
As he stood in the hallway, bearing gifts — a carrot cake that he had baked with his kids, plus a bottle of whisky — David Beckham was abruptly told to take off his shoes. He smiled nervously and did as he was told.
Even now, a quarter of a century later, Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and the rest of Manchester United’s fabled Class of ’92 find themselves in thrall to Eric Harrison. His voice, faltering now, still makes them stand to attention. Back in their youth-team days, they feared him. From there grew respect and later, as his teaching sustained them through their glorious careers, reverence.
Now, though, there is pity, there is dismay and there is deep, deep affection for a great football man whose mind has been ravaged by dementia.
The 79-year-old’s condition has been a secret guarded closely by his family, who have watched in growing despair as the illness has taken hold and tightened its grip. A few months ago his grandson, Joseph Hilditch, felt enough was enough. “My dad still has all the players’ numbers in his phone,” Vicky, Harrison’s daughter, says, “and, unbeknown to me, Joseph contacted a few of them — Ryan, Paul, Gary — and said: ‘My grandad isn’t so good. Are you all right coming to see him?’ Within a week, they had all come round. Joseph hadn’t breathed a word of it to me. I just went round one morning and Ryan Giggs was there. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’ve come to see your dad.’
“It was funny,” Joseph says. “The lads said they still almost felt on edge when they were around him.”
“You could see the respect was still there,” Vicky says. “They were also visibly shocked because he wasn’t the man they knew. My dad only really recognises us, his immediate family. Beyond that, he still has some of the names in his head but he doesn’t really recognise anyone now. There was a slight look when they walked in, as if he knew it was someone, but really he didn’t know they were there. They were great, though, and it was so lovely of them to come.
“On the back of that, I think Gary told David Beckham, who got in touch and asked if he could come up. We didn’t tell anyone he was coming. We didn’t want a frenzy.”
“I told a few of my mates he was coming, but I didn’t tell them when,” Joseph says.
“David had driven up to Halifax from London and he seemed nervous when he came up the drive,” Vicky says. “I could see he was shocked and upset at first, just like the other lads were. He had brought a cake that he had baked with his kids — a carrot cake, lovely it was — and a bottle of whisky, which was lovely of him.
“I’m not even sure my dad realised he was there most of the time, but it was so nice for him to come all that way. He had lunch with us and my daughter asked him every question possible: ‘How many tattoos have you got?’, ‘Has Brooklyn got a girlfriend?’ He was amazing, they all were, and it was just lovely to see what my dad meant to them.”
As a player, Harrison was happy to be described as a journeyman, a wing half whose happiest times came when he was playing for Halifax Town in the old Third Division North before spells with Hartlepools United (under Brian Clough), Barrow and Southport. He would revel in the camaraderie of it, drinks with family and friends in the bar afterwards, but on the pitch he was intensely driven. A team-mate from that era recalls him as a fearsome warrior whose tackling was X-rated and whose pre-match rituals revolved around streams of invective about the opposition: “How much do we f***ing hate Tranmere Rovers? And what are we going to do to them?”
His daughter laughs at the suggestion, which was also put to her by Beckham, Scholes et al, that her father could be mildly terrifying. “It was funny because I warned David that my dad had starting swearing occasionally since the dementia,” Vicky says. “David said: ‘Started swearing?! When we were with him, every other word was the F word!’ ‘I know, but not when he was at home.’
“I know there were always two sides to him. The football side and the home side. His team-mates used to call him ‘Chopper’, but at home he was very placid, very calm; a lovely man, a lovely father. He would never have dreamed of swearing in front of us.”
Football was an obsession, though. On his wedding day, in October 1962, he exchanged vows with Shirley at lunchtime before playing for Halifax in a 2-2 draw with Shrewsbury Town at The Shay a couple of hours later. “He turned up at the evening do with his team-mates,” Vicky says. “He missed my sister Kim’s birth because he had got concussed that afternoon. He was elsewhere in the hospital at the time.”
Even in his playing days, Harrison studied for his coaching qualifications in the belief that a career on the touchline would suit him. He coached under Gordon Lee at Everton before receiving an unexpected call from Ron Atkinson, whom he had befriended years earlier during their time doing national service for the RAF. Atkinson had just taken over at Manchester United and felt Harrison was the ideal candidate for a vacancy as youth coach.
When Alex Ferguson took over in 1986, he felt the club’s youth-development operation needed an overhaul. He told Harrison that, Mark Hughes apart, United were not producing top-class players and suggested Harrison would have to raise his game if they were to rival the production line at Manchester City, who had just won the FA Youth Cup. Harrison argued the deficit to City was a matter of scouting, not coaching. “We’ll do a deal,” he told Ferguson. “You get me better-quality players and I’ll get you more youngsters in the first team.”
And the rest, Vicky says, is history.
Harrison used to call it the best job in the world, working with some of the best youngsters in the country at Manchester United. He felt it was not about teaching them new skills, but about instilling good habits and the right values. Giggs, Beckham and Scholes had talent by the bucket-load, but the challenge was to harness those skills and to develop them into players who could not just meet but raise the standards required in the first team.
He wanted them to play fast, incisive football, the way Ferguson prescribed it, but, for the Class of ’92, like all who went before and afterwards, there was also a heavy, intense emphasis on foundation work. One mantra was about always looking “there and there”, a glance over each shoulder, before receiving the ball: “If I don’t see you looking there and there, I’m taking you off.” Another, more generally, was about ensuring that they played with their hearts as well as their heads: “It’s not about the badge; it’s about what’s underneath it. If you’re wearing that badge and you’re not competing harder than your opponent, I’ll drag you off and you’ll never wear it again.”
Harrison used to describe his approach as “90 per cent arm round the shoulder, 10 per cent kick up the backside”, but it is the 10 per cent, that his players remember most vividly — not least his tendency to bang on the windows, from his room overlooking the pitch at The Cliff training ground if he saw their levels drop.
“It was like joining the army and Eric Harrison was sergeant major,” Giggs wrote in his autobiography. “I had some real bollockings from him and you couldn’t answer back. He was an intimidating man. He would think nothing of sending a player off during training, then following him to the touchline, looking him in the eye and challenging him to disagree with the decision. Anyone who got that treatment would hold up his hands and say: ‘You’re right, sorry.’ He was tough, but he was also an excellent coach and tactician. He made the game so easy.”
His success could be seen not only in the development of Giggs, Beckham and Scholes into world-class players, or indeed the less glitzy success stories of Gary and Phil Neville, Nicky Butt and Wes Brown, but in the insatiable hunger and winning mentality that sustained them all — individually and collectively — throughout their glorious careers. There is a nature-versus-nurture debate to be had here, as well as enormous credit due to Ferguson, but those players never stopped embracing Harrison’s old-school values. As Beckham has put it: “Eric might have had a talented group of lads to work with, but the credit goes to him for turning us into footballers and turning us into a team.”
“I know he was tough on those lads, but he loved them — not just the ones I’ve mentioned but also the ones who didn’t make it,” Vicky says. “He loved his job, but he said the worst part by far was having to release players. He hated that. We met Raphael Burke recently and he said he felt at the time that my dad was too harsh on him, telling him he needed to be stronger, but that he realised years later that my dad had been right.
“He loved Scholesy, absolutely loved him. Mark Hughes was another, from the earlier years, but he loved all of them. He would never have a bad word said about any of them. Although he was very hard on them at the time, he retained a really strong bond with all of them. He had a real connection with them all, as we have seen since, sadly, he got ill.”
Harrison had cut down his coaching commitments by the time the relentless spirit of his Class of ’92 led Manchester United to Champions League glory in 1999. Then came spells working under Hughes as a coach for the Wales team and a scout at Blackburn Rovers. Other scouting gigs followed, the last of them at Huddersfield Town, as did a role in charge of the short-lived David Beckham Academy. “David really looked after my dad,” Vicky says. “He was starting to have health issues by then.”
Towards the end of his working life, scouting trips became a chore — a worry, even. Harrison started fretting about parking arrangements at grounds he had visited dozens, even hundreds, of times before. He began calling his daughters, regularly, in a panic about his car insurance renewal when it was not due. “He knew at that stage that something wasn’t right,” Vicky says. “He, of course, got it diagnosed. That was about three years ago.”
Harrison was diagnosed with mixed dementia. This typically combines elements of vascular dementia, which causes gradual deterioration in language and communication, and Alzheimer’s disease, affecting memory, cognitive ability and insight. “It has been horrendous,” Vicky says. “One of the first things was having to get rid of his car, which was hard. Since then, it has just got worse and worse.”
There is an obvious question to be asked about whether the family believe his issues stem from football. After cases involving Jeff Astle, Nobby Stiles, Martin Peters, Ray Wilson, Stan Bowles, Jimmy Hill and many others, the FA and PFA commissioned a study this year to ask whether, as anecdotal evidence appears to suggest, “the incidence of degenerative neurocognitive disease is more common in ex-professional footballers”.
“A few people have asked us that,” Vicky says. “What I would say is that my grandad, my dad’s dad, had it too. If he hadn’t had it, maybe I would have felt: ‘Yes, it’s definitely because of football,’ but, as it is, I’m not totally convinced. Obviously when my dad played football, it was that hard leather ball with the stitching on it. It can’t have done them any good. If I sat down with someone and they had all the statistics, maybe I could be convinced.
“What I know is that my grandad and my dad have had it. I could get it, but hopefully, with more people talking about it, with all the research that’s going on, there can be a breakthrough — if not for my generation then I desperately hope for my children’s generation. Hopefully by talking about my dad’s situation, we’re doing some good. We’re doing a bike ride in September, London to Brighton, 54 miles, to try to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.”
In the meantime, Harrison and his family, like so many others, will live with the devastating effects of dementia. “My mum [Shirley] has been amazing. She has done the most incredible job with him,” Vicky says.
“Her outlook is, ‘He’s my husband and he’s not going anywhere and I’m going to look after him.’ I’ve been over this morning and he said: ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ He still has that side, even though the dementia has taken a lot of him away.
“Every day he’ll get up and they’ll take the dog for a walk and they’ll go into town for their lunch, potter around and come home. That’s their daily routine and he’s fine as long as that’s happening. He goes to daycare once a week. He’s at the stage where he might need to go a bit more.”
As for football, sadly, it is a million miles from his agenda. When United honoured the Class of ’92 in May, inviting all the players and coaches to Old Trafford to mark the 25th anniversary of their FA Youth Cup triumph, Harrison’s family picked up an award on his behalf. “There was absolutely no way he could have gone, sadly,” Vicky says. “It’s a shame because he would have loved to have seen lads like Chris Casper, Ben Thornley, Raphael Burke. We spoke to Sir Alex, who was brilliant with us. He said to us: ‘Your dad helped to make this club.’ ”
Harrison has only the most remote sense of that legacy. “He will wear an old Manchester United coat,” Vicky says, “and if he meets people, he’ll say: ‘Manchester United, Class of ’92.’ Or he will say to Joseph: ‘Have I told you about the Class of ’92?’ He knows there’s something, but he doesn’t know what.”
Does he still watch football? “That’s one of the saddest things,” Vicky says. “Football has always been his major passion. He would always stop everything to watch any match — any football, any level — so it was devastating for us when he lost interest in watching it on TV. That’s when we knew he was completely changing. That’s what dementia does. Until this, football had been his life.”
As he stood in the hallway, bearing gifts — a carrot cake that he had baked with his kids, plus a bottle of whisky — David Beckham was abruptly told to take off his shoes. He smiled nervously and did as he was told.
Even now, a quarter of a century later, Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and the rest of Manchester United’s fabled Class of ’92 find themselves in thrall to Eric Harrison. His voice, faltering now, still makes them stand to attention. Back in their youth-team days, they feared him. From there grew respect and later, as his teaching sustained them through their glorious careers, reverence.
Now, though, there is pity, there is dismay and there is deep, deep affection for a great football man whose mind has been ravaged by dementia.
The 79-year-old’s condition has been a secret guarded closely by his family, who have watched in growing despair as the illness has taken hold and tightened its grip. A few months ago his grandson, Joseph Hilditch, felt enough was enough. “My dad still has all the players’ numbers in his phone,” Vicky, Harrison’s daughter, says, “and, unbeknown to me, Joseph contacted a few of them — Ryan, Paul, Gary — and said: ‘My grandad isn’t so good. Are you all right coming to see him?’ Within a week, they had all come round. Joseph hadn’t breathed a word of it to me. I just went round one morning and Ryan Giggs was there. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’ve come to see your dad.’
“It was funny,” Joseph says. “The lads said they still almost felt on edge when they were around him.”
“You could see the respect was still there,” Vicky says. “They were also visibly shocked because he wasn’t the man they knew. My dad only really recognises us, his immediate family. Beyond that, he still has some of the names in his head but he doesn’t really recognise anyone now. There was a slight look when they walked in, as if he knew it was someone, but really he didn’t know they were there. They were great, though, and it was so lovely of them to come.
“On the back of that, I think Gary told David Beckham, who got in touch and asked if he could come up. We didn’t tell anyone he was coming. We didn’t want a frenzy.”
“I told a few of my mates he was coming, but I didn’t tell them when,” Joseph says.
“David had driven up to Halifax from London and he seemed nervous when he came up the drive,” Vicky says. “I could see he was shocked and upset at first, just like the other lads were. He had brought a cake that he had baked with his kids — a carrot cake, lovely it was — and a bottle of whisky, which was lovely of him.
“I’m not even sure my dad realised he was there most of the time, but it was so nice for him to come all that way. He had lunch with us and my daughter asked him every question possible: ‘How many tattoos have you got?’, ‘Has Brooklyn got a girlfriend?’ He was amazing, they all were, and it was just lovely to see what my dad meant to them.”
As a player, Harrison was happy to be described as a journeyman, a wing half whose happiest times came when he was playing for Halifax Town in the old Third Division North before spells with Hartlepools United (under Brian Clough), Barrow and Southport. He would revel in the camaraderie of it, drinks with family and friends in the bar afterwards, but on the pitch he was intensely driven. A team-mate from that era recalls him as a fearsome warrior whose tackling was X-rated and whose pre-match rituals revolved around streams of invective about the opposition: “How much do we f***ing hate Tranmere Rovers? And what are we going to do to them?”
His daughter laughs at the suggestion, which was also put to her by Beckham, Scholes et al, that her father could be mildly terrifying. “It was funny because I warned David that my dad had starting swearing occasionally since the dementia,” Vicky says. “David said: ‘Started swearing?! When we were with him, every other word was the F word!’ ‘I know, but not when he was at home.’
“I know there were always two sides to him. The football side and the home side. His team-mates used to call him ‘Chopper’, but at home he was very placid, very calm; a lovely man, a lovely father. He would never have dreamed of swearing in front of us.”
Football was an obsession, though. On his wedding day, in October 1962, he exchanged vows with Shirley at lunchtime before playing for Halifax in a 2-2 draw with Shrewsbury Town at The Shay a couple of hours later. “He turned up at the evening do with his team-mates,” Vicky says. “He missed my sister Kim’s birth because he had got concussed that afternoon. He was elsewhere in the hospital at the time.”
Even in his playing days, Harrison studied for his coaching qualifications in the belief that a career on the touchline would suit him. He coached under Gordon Lee at Everton before receiving an unexpected call from Ron Atkinson, whom he had befriended years earlier during their time doing national service for the RAF. Atkinson had just taken over at Manchester United and felt Harrison was the ideal candidate for a vacancy as youth coach.
When Alex Ferguson took over in 1986, he felt the club’s youth-development operation needed an overhaul. He told Harrison that, Mark Hughes apart, United were not producing top-class players and suggested Harrison would have to raise his game if they were to rival the production line at Manchester City, who had just won the FA Youth Cup. Harrison argued the deficit to City was a matter of scouting, not coaching. “We’ll do a deal,” he told Ferguson. “You get me better-quality players and I’ll get you more youngsters in the first team.”
And the rest, Vicky says, is history.
Harrison used to call it the best job in the world, working with some of the best youngsters in the country at Manchester United. He felt it was not about teaching them new skills, but about instilling good habits and the right values. Giggs, Beckham and Scholes had talent by the bucket-load, but the challenge was to harness those skills and to develop them into players who could not just meet but raise the standards required in the first team.
He wanted them to play fast, incisive football, the way Ferguson prescribed it, but, for the Class of ’92, like all who went before and afterwards, there was also a heavy, intense emphasis on foundation work. One mantra was about always looking “there and there”, a glance over each shoulder, before receiving the ball: “If I don’t see you looking there and there, I’m taking you off.” Another, more generally, was about ensuring that they played with their hearts as well as their heads: “It’s not about the badge; it’s about what’s underneath it. If you’re wearing that badge and you’re not competing harder than your opponent, I’ll drag you off and you’ll never wear it again.”
Harrison used to describe his approach as “90 per cent arm round the shoulder, 10 per cent kick up the backside”, but it is the 10 per cent, that his players remember most vividly — not least his tendency to bang on the windows, from his room overlooking the pitch at The Cliff training ground if he saw their levels drop.
“It was like joining the army and Eric Harrison was sergeant major,” Giggs wrote in his autobiography. “I had some real bollockings from him and you couldn’t answer back. He was an intimidating man. He would think nothing of sending a player off during training, then following him to the touchline, looking him in the eye and challenging him to disagree with the decision. Anyone who got that treatment would hold up his hands and say: ‘You’re right, sorry.’ He was tough, but he was also an excellent coach and tactician. He made the game so easy.”
His success could be seen not only in the development of Giggs, Beckham and Scholes into world-class players, or indeed the less glitzy success stories of Gary and Phil Neville, Nicky Butt and Wes Brown, but in the insatiable hunger and winning mentality that sustained them all — individually and collectively — throughout their glorious careers. There is a nature-versus-nurture debate to be had here, as well as enormous credit due to Ferguson, but those players never stopped embracing Harrison’s old-school values. As Beckham has put it: “Eric might have had a talented group of lads to work with, but the credit goes to him for turning us into footballers and turning us into a team.”
“I know he was tough on those lads, but he loved them — not just the ones I’ve mentioned but also the ones who didn’t make it,” Vicky says. “He loved his job, but he said the worst part by far was having to release players. He hated that. We met Raphael Burke recently and he said he felt at the time that my dad was too harsh on him, telling him he needed to be stronger, but that he realised years later that my dad had been right.
“He loved Scholesy, absolutely loved him. Mark Hughes was another, from the earlier years, but he loved all of them. He would never have a bad word said about any of them. Although he was very hard on them at the time, he retained a really strong bond with all of them. He had a real connection with them all, as we have seen since, sadly, he got ill.”
Harrison had cut down his coaching commitments by the time the relentless spirit of his Class of ’92 led Manchester United to Champions League glory in 1999. Then came spells working under Hughes as a coach for the Wales team and a scout at Blackburn Rovers. Other scouting gigs followed, the last of them at Huddersfield Town, as did a role in charge of the short-lived David Beckham Academy. “David really looked after my dad,” Vicky says. “He was starting to have health issues by then.”
Towards the end of his working life, scouting trips became a chore — a worry, even. Harrison started fretting about parking arrangements at grounds he had visited dozens, even hundreds, of times before. He began calling his daughters, regularly, in a panic about his car insurance renewal when it was not due. “He knew at that stage that something wasn’t right,” Vicky says. “He, of course, got it diagnosed. That was about three years ago.”
Harrison was diagnosed with mixed dementia. This typically combines elements of vascular dementia, which causes gradual deterioration in language and communication, and Alzheimer’s disease, affecting memory, cognitive ability and insight. “It has been horrendous,” Vicky says. “One of the first things was having to get rid of his car, which was hard. Since then, it has just got worse and worse.”
There is an obvious question to be asked about whether the family believe his issues stem from football. After cases involving Jeff Astle, Nobby Stiles, Martin Peters, Ray Wilson, Stan Bowles, Jimmy Hill and many others, the FA and PFA commissioned a study this year to ask whether, as anecdotal evidence appears to suggest, “the incidence of degenerative neurocognitive disease is more common in ex-professional footballers”.
“A few people have asked us that,” Vicky says. “What I would say is that my grandad, my dad’s dad, had it too. If he hadn’t had it, maybe I would have felt: ‘Yes, it’s definitely because of football,’ but, as it is, I’m not totally convinced. Obviously when my dad played football, it was that hard leather ball with the stitching on it. It can’t have done them any good. If I sat down with someone and they had all the statistics, maybe I could be convinced.
“What I know is that my grandad and my dad have had it. I could get it, but hopefully, with more people talking about it, with all the research that’s going on, there can be a breakthrough — if not for my generation then I desperately hope for my children’s generation. Hopefully by talking about my dad’s situation, we’re doing some good. We’re doing a bike ride in September, London to Brighton, 54 miles, to try to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.”
In the meantime, Harrison and his family, like so many others, will live with the devastating effects of dementia. “My mum [Shirley] has been amazing. She has done the most incredible job with him,” Vicky says.
“Her outlook is, ‘He’s my husband and he’s not going anywhere and I’m going to look after him.’ I’ve been over this morning and he said: ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ He still has that side, even though the dementia has taken a lot of him away.
“Every day he’ll get up and they’ll take the dog for a walk and they’ll go into town for their lunch, potter around and come home. That’s their daily routine and he’s fine as long as that’s happening. He goes to daycare once a week. He’s at the stage where he might need to go a bit more.”
As for football, sadly, it is a million miles from his agenda. When United honoured the Class of ’92 in May, inviting all the players and coaches to Old Trafford to mark the 25th anniversary of their FA Youth Cup triumph, Harrison’s family picked up an award on his behalf. “There was absolutely no way he could have gone, sadly,” Vicky says. “It’s a shame because he would have loved to have seen lads like Chris Casper, Ben Thornley, Raphael Burke. We spoke to Sir Alex, who was brilliant with us. He said to us: ‘Your dad helped to make this club.’ ”
Harrison has only the most remote sense of that legacy. “He will wear an old Manchester United coat,” Vicky says, “and if he meets people, he’ll say: ‘Manchester United, Class of ’92.’ Or he will say to Joseph: ‘Have I told you about the Class of ’92?’ He knows there’s something, but he doesn’t know what.”
Does he still watch football? “That’s one of the saddest things,” Vicky says. “Football has always been his major passion. He would always stop everything to watch any match — any football, any level — so it was devastating for us when he lost interest in watching it on TV. That’s when we knew he was completely changing. That’s what dementia does. Until this, football had been his life.”
