Alan Maybury ⭑ From A-Z since '92

This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme. Or you can keep going below, with me and what might have been for Alan Maybury.

It says a lot about Alan Maybury's quality that he was the first of Paul Hart's second generation of youth players to start a Premier League game for Leeds United, in February 1996, more than a year before he captained that team to victory over Crystal Palace in 1997's FA Youth Cup final.

It also says something that he once nearly had his knee broken by Lazio's Pavel Nedved, and that years after leaving Leeds he was lining up for Aberdeen against Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup. After captaining Republic of Ireland's Under-21s he won ten full international caps, and this was the company he should always have been keeping — the Premier League, European club competitions, international football.

At Leeds, Howard Wilkinson took Maybury straight from the youth team, not long turned seventeen, and started him before he started Harry Kewell, before Ian Harte; this was long before David O'Leary took over and, after they'd matured in the reserves, he put his faith in Stephen McPhail, Jonathan Woodgate, Paul Robinson, Alan Smith and Matthew Jones. Admittedly, Maybury's debut partly came about through Wilko's frustration with Tomas Brolin. After the high profile Swedish international intimated to Wilkinson that he wasn't up for doing much defending against Liverpool, and then played like it in a 5-0 defeat, he was dragged along on an away trip to Aston Villa, left out of the team and made to load the kit-bins onto the team coach between bleats to journalists. Maybury, meanwhile, did the hard work Wilkinson wanted in midfield before going off at half-time with a knock in a 3-0 defeat.

Wilko liked old heads he could trust, and he liked young players with old heads he could trust, so it wasn't surprising he liked Alan Maybury. He became one of the few young players George Graham gave time to, while off the pitch a reporter noted his maturity when opening a new Leeds United shop in Dublin, while Lee Sharpe's jokes fell flat and Ian Harte giggled nervously. "I play some weeks but I am not truly established in the side," Maybury was saying. "Sometimes it's Gunnar Halle playing at full back or else Gary Kelly might be there instead. Neither Gunnar nor I have managed to nail down the position."

Gary Kelly was both Maybury's biggest problem and then his biggest help. Initially projected as a centre-back, Maybury matured into a right-back, and while Kelly was not an old player himself he had, over 200 matches, held that position since summer 1993. Maybury's hope had been to profit from George Graham's negative tactics that sometimes pushed Kelly forward as a defensive right-winger, but often Graham would choose the experience of Halle to back Kelly up down that side.