The Wembley Archie

Across the expansive turf of Wembley, his football kit gleaming white, a blue LUFC script on his plain shirt, the hunched shoulders are unmistakable as, with a shuffle and a change of pace, young Gray runs down the wing. Those expanses, technically, don't measure much different to any other football pitch, but if that's an illusion, it's one we all want to believe in. And so was the youngster on the wing.

Andy Gray. Eighteen years old. The boy was young but the name was old. And those shoulders, and the distinctive curl to his lips, were well known. His father was Frank Gray but he was playing like his Uncle Eddie, wearing a 1996 update of the shirt Eddie was wearing at Wembley when he won the FA Cup in 1972. That wasn't Eddie Gray's best individual performance in the famous stadium; that had been two years earlier, against Chelsea, when with an owl on his jersey he'd dazzled the nation. In the League Cup final, 26 years later, his nephew was dazzling the nation too, with the weight of the team on his young, hunched, all-Gray shoulders.

The record for the youngest Leeds United player at Wembley will pass from father to son if Archie plays on Sunday. I hope he plays as well as Andy did when he set the record. I hope that, unlike 1996, he's not the only one who does play well. The League Cup final was Andy Gray's tenth senior appearance for Leeds and he remains the only reason for any Leeds fan to look back on that day with anything other than regret. While experienced players around him froze on the big stage, struggling with an unfamiliar formation, Gray took on the unfamiliar environment — men's football — and thrived, dribbling past Aston Villa's defenders, darting into the penalty area, taking shots and trying crosses. Next to players who really had, Gray looked how his son has looked for Leeds in 2023/24, like a player who has seen and done it all.

That's where family helps. From birth, Andy had father Frank and uncle Eddie and all their friends immersing him in elite football. Archie has absorbed it all from all of them. In 1995/96 Andy even had his uncle on the coaching staff to teach him the art of the wing, after Eddie came back in summer 1995 to work under Paul Hart. Andy played seventeen games in their youth team and fourteen for the reserves, on top of nineteen in the first team in his breakthrough season.

Eddie Gray's return to Leeds felt like a sign of something. The modern, Premier League Leeds United had been built up from the Second Division by Howard Wilkinson who started, in 1988, by politely ushering ex-players like Gray and Norman Hunter out of their coaching positions and taking down any photos of their era as they left. To have a future, Wilko reckoned, Leeds had to stop living in the past. Now, after winning a league title, returning to Europe and building a new stand, Wilko was making good on his promise to bring the club's history back, and Eddie's return felt like part of that. Unfortunately, by the end of Eddie and Andy's first season with him, the past was again looking like United's best hope of a future. Fans were wishing every Revie era family tree could produce kids like Andy who, if you squinted enough at Wembley, looked like his uncle back to his best.

Wembley was a watershed for Wilkinson, who after Villa won 3-0 was booed and jeered from the pitch by fans who, four years earlier, had hailed him like Caesar. He knew things had to change. He wanted things to change. But he wasn't ready. In October 1988 he'd come to Leeds with a ten year plan for building a modern football club, and this was year eight. To get him through to ten, Wilko was relying on old professionals who might not excite the fans but wouldn't let him down — Nigel Worthington, Paul Beesley, John Pemberton, Richard Jobson. At Wembley, that no longer looked like enough to last another two years. If Wilko was to have a future with Leeds, the future had to start happening, and had to show people what he was preparing in the background.

But the future wasn't ready for the foreground. The reserve and youth teams that season were like a flash forward to the millennium: Matthew Jones, Stephen McPhail, Alan Maybury, Jonathan Woodgate, Paul Robinson. After Wembley, Ian Harte and Harry Kewell were put into the first team. The latter was obviously a prodigious talent, but Hart and Gray were still playing him at left-back in their teams so he could learn to be a winger by seeing the game ahead of him. He couldn't turn a Premier League season on his own, and Leeds only took one win and one draw from their last nine games, scoring just five goals. The watershed for Wilko was not the sort he wanted. Soon after the next season started, when a 4-0 defeat to Manchester United made the future look further away than ever, Wilkinson was sacked. 

Wembley was also a watershed for Andy Gray, which I'm sure will be discussed with his son no matter what performance Archie puts in on Sunday. Incoming manager George Graham had precious little use for teenage flair in his dour first season, and in his more entertaining second, he had Harry Kewell, now coming of age. There's no shame in Andy Gray's subsequent career, but he can tell his son from experience that no amount of Wembley headlines as a teenager can save you from, one day, being immortalised in a meme, caught smirking in the background while Neil Warnock is filmed telling his Sheffield United players to, "Enjoy it, but enjoy it by being fucking disciplined". 

Andy had a good career. Archie wants to have a great one, telling The Guardian in December that he dreams of winning the Champions League with Leeds, captaining England and taking the Ballon d'Or — and that he believes he can. A baton will be passed on Sunday, a family inheritance. But Andy will be handing down a beginning, not a destiny. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)