Andy Gray ⭑ From A-Z since '92

It was a shock, for anyone who hadn't kept up Andy Gray's career, to see the one-time inheritor of Uncle Eddie's balletic wingplay now a big targetman heading in a free-kick.

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, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.

Or you can keep going below, with me and the young Gray we had before the even younger Grays.

It's appropriate that Andy Gray's best games in a Leeds shirt were in the shirt that made him look most like a Gray, one of the Grays of Leeds. Pristine white, as close to unadorned as sponsorships allowed in 1996, with a thick round collar and a blue LUFC script on the left breast: the kit wasn't necessary to accentuate the tall slender gait of his father Frank, or the hunched shoulders and bursts of speed that echoed his uncle Eddie, but it didn't do any harm. A Gray on the wing for Leeds at Wembley: the League Cup final in 1996 didn't leave the club much to be proud about, but this much at least was right.

Andy Gray was eighteen when he became one of a select group of players who have represented Leeds in a competitive final at Wembley. He was the best player in a white shirt on what was otherwise a miserable day. And his best days, perhaps, were already behind him. That would be according to the fan in me, though, because I can't imagine life getting much better than kickabouts in the garden with half of Don Revie's Leeds, and I can idly imagine that's what childhood was like for young Andrew. Never mind being eighteen in 1996, he was ten in 1988 when his dad with the European Cup winners' medal was 34 and still playing for Sunderland, and his uncle with all the other titles was 42. Uncle Eddie's elder mates — Billy, Norman, Allan — were all in their mid-forties and all living locally and all, if stories from the training pitches at Elland Road where Howard Wilkinson was trying to restore order were to be believed, unable to resist the smell of grass, the sight of a football. Imagine being a ten year old trying to grasp some nuance of the game, and your dad ringing Paul Madeley up and asking him to come round and show you. Andy Gray went on to do a lot in the game, but it's hard to imagine anything beating that.

And maybe it is all in my imagination and didn't happen that way, but someone was teaching him, and teaching him damn well. Uncle Eddie Gray was among his tutors in the more formal environment of Leeds United's youth team. Young Andy was soon in the reserves and soon in the first team and not, as with some of the other debutants that season, only thrown in during manager Howard Wilkinson's post-Wembley attempts to prove the club had a future with him in charge. Gray earned his Premier League debut from the bench in January 1996 and was worth his starts in the run-up to Wembley when, on paper, Leeds looked exciting: Gray was alongside Gary McAllister, Tomas Brolin, Tony Yeboah; and after Wembley, Rod Wallace, Gary Speed and Harry Kewell. At Loftus Road in his first start, wearing the even more glorious all-yellow away shirt that refined Asics' attempts at throwing back to the 1960s, Gray landed a peach of a cross on Yeboah's head for the opening goal. He had creativity and confidence Leeds were desperately wanting.

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