So what is the connection? It is not hues, yet all are, if not Scottish, then by my definition Scots. Two are connected by profession, two by family and island. Two are alive, one dead. One could not play for Scotland. He was not allowed. One could have. Perhaps he was never asked. The third did, twenty times. Two are seen by some as bad boys. One never was, as far as we know. Two were successful managers. One has never been. All three could play a bit.
The first, John Lyall, was born in 1940. The event took place in Ilford in Essex in England. His parents had been married five years earlier in Chelsea. They had met in London but neither was from either there or even the Home Counties and certainly nowhere near Essex. His father, James and a London policeman, is said to be from Kirriemuir. In fact he grew up there but was born in Rescobie, the other side of Forfar. However, the family was East Coast Scots through and through. James's father, John's grandfather, also James, had been born in Arbirlot and grandmother in Inverarity. And John's mother, although definitely not Angus, was just as Scots. She had been born as Catherine Murray on the other side of country on the Hebridean island of Lewis, specifically in Bac, Back in English, just to the north of Stornoway.
How good a footballer John's father had been is not certain but he was certainly an enthusiast. John's biography recounts being taken to games in Dundee in the summer holidays that were half spent in Angus. His mother, however, had impeccable footballing genes. Back, where the other half of the summer holidays were spent, was and still is one of Lewis's top teams. Today it has its own all-year, indoor facility of almost
Icelandic proportions and runs a series of teams from first down through the age-groups. But before that all was in place those genes would still out not once but twice.
John Lyall first came to footballing attention playing for Ilford and District. At fifteen he joined the ground-staff at West Ham, then in the Second Division, signed by manager, Ted Fenton. It was he who would establish the West Ham Academy not just to produce young players but play modern football. There John Lyall would play alongside other home-grown talent such as Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, Geoff Hurst and Harry Rednapp, amongst others and all would be coached for three years by a young
Malcolm Allison.
In 1957 two years Lyall won his only honour, an under-17 cap at left-back for England. Under the then rules he was not eligible for Scotland. That same year West Ham would also reach but lose the FA Youth Cup Final to Manchester United. He made his club senior debut in 1959 still under Fenton, who had taken the club back into the First Division a year earlier, over the next four seasons would record thirty-five more but also pick up a serious knee-injury. It proved untreatable and in January 1964 he was forced to retire, at the age of just twenty-three. And that might have been it but in 1961 Ted Fenton had been replaced as West Ham manager by Arsenal's assistant manager, Ron Greenwood. And Greenwood must have seen something in the still young Lyall. Shortly after being forced to hang up his boots he was appointed part-time youth team manager. That was made full-time in 1967 and when Greenwood retired in 1974 John Lyall still only thirty-four stepped up. He would remain manager for fifteen years, still a club record. He would win the FA Cup in his first season and reach the final of the Cup-Winners Cup the following year, being relegated twice and promoted once, win the Cup again and this time reached the Cup-Winners Cup quarter-final. He remains the club's most successful manager ever.
However, after leaving West Ham John Lyall's successes would continue. He spent a first season, 1889-90, as technical adviser to Terry Venables at Tottenham, with the club rising from 6th to 3rd in the league, before becoming manager of Ipswich and taking them into the fledgling Premier League. And in the meantime the eligibility rules had changed. From 1970 it became allowable for a player no matter where he was born to choose the country of his either of his parents. It meant that for the first time for eighty years a Scot born in England had the same choice as one born in India, Zimbabwe, Vanuatu and just a few others. The first two players to take advantage were Alex Cropley, son of a Scots professional, a combination of a second
David Jack and Joe Baker, who although born south of the border grew up in Edinburgh, starting his career with Hibernian, and Bob Wilson, both of whose parents were Scots, but with him born in Chesterfield in Derbyshire and spending all his playing career in England.
Nor was Wilson alone. There was David Harvey, goalkeeper at Leeds. There would be Rioch and Masson but throughout there were others with the same or even better nationality qualifications, for whom the call would never come. One would between 1971 and 1980 play 184 games at centre-half in the first half of a playing career that finished in 1992 and almost three hundred games more. He had been born in Dudley in the West Midland in 1954 the youngest of three children. His eldest sister had been born in Scotland as were both his parents. His father, like John Lyall's was also a policemen, like Lyall Snr a Sergeant, growing up in the North-East in Aberlour in whisky country on Speyside. His mother was from the South-West, from Lochmaben in Dumfries-shire, where the couple had met.
The player himself was something of a prodigy. At fifteen he was already playing at a good level in the West Midlands League. He made his debut at seventeen for Bolton Wanderers, then in the Second Division and where he had become an apprentice at fifteen, joining the first team squad in 1974. Bolton were promoted in 1978, relegated in 1980, the season after he had moved on to Sunderland. He would go on to play for ten clubs over twenty years, including Coventry again in the First Division. He would never play any international, despite dual qualification at a time when he might have played for either, or even representative football but as a manager he would do so, if briefly. As his playing career had come to an end he had player-managed in Ireland before going on to manage a further ten clubs with considerable success plus, if briefly, internationally. The country was England. The person in question is Sam Allardyce.
And then there was the Gray. Just as controversial as Sam Allardyce he is, of course, Andy Gray and the only one of the three to have played for Scotland; twenty times, scoring seven times. He is also the only one to be born in Scotland, in Glasgow in 1955. However, his playing career began at Dundee United. There, as robust centre-forward, he netted at a rate of better than twice every three games, forty-six goals in sixty-two appearances. It was the era of Jim McLean with his extraordinary successful youth policy, Gray was recruited at eighteen, one that a decade later would lead to success in Europe by which time Gray had, however, moved on. Aged not quite twenty he was signed by Aston Villa, the first of two stays, in fact the first stint he would over the next twelve years spend in the English Midlands, additionally at Wolves, Notts County and West Bromwich with two seasons at Everton in between.
But what is the connection between Andy Gray and Sam Allardyce and John Lyall respectively? In truth there is none that I know of with the former other that they might have marked each other. In 1977-8 Villa played Bolton twice, a home win and an away draw for the former, so Gray ostensibly coming out on top. And in 1983-4 Coventry faced Everton, with draws home and away and just two goals. With John Lyall, however, it is another matter. At the end of his career Andy Gray would play a season at Rangers and his involvement with youth football also seems confined to Glasgow, to three years from aged fifteen at Clydebank Strollers. But there is something missing. He had another club, one he would play for in summer months. It was Back, the team from the village where his mother was born and where he too, like John Lyall, used to spend his summer holidays. And it was perhaps from his mother that he inherited his football genes for she, like John Lyall's mother was also born a Murray. In fact, Margaret Gray and Catherine Lyall are likely to have been second cousins.