Brotherly Love
HOW DOES AN ordinary family from an ordinary street produce three England internationals?
There was nothing to distinguish the Nevilles from anyone else in Bury. We grew up, like most families in the town, in a little two-up, two-down. I was the eldest, born on 18 February 1975. Tracey and Phil, the twins, followed two years later.
We are a normal working-class family. There are no famous sporting ancestors. Yet, somehow, we won a combined 218 caps for our country – at football and netball – between us. Tracey went twice to the Commonwealth Games and World Championships, representing England seventy-four times before she suffered injury problems. Phil has played fifty-nine times for England and could still do a good job for his country now. I won eighty-five caps and went to five major tournaments.
Perhaps other families – the Murray brothers, the Williams sisters, the world-famous Charltons – have their own explanation for how they all came to succeed at sport. Speaking for the Nevilles, I can only point to Mum and Dad. It was our parents who gave us a love of sport and the tools to succeed at it.
People often ask who my heroes are, and I normally say Bryan Robson. But it is my mum and dad really. They have been great parents, now wonderful grandparents, in just about every way. They deserve all our medals and caps.
Thanks to them, sport was at the heart of family life. Mum and Dad were never professional athletes but they were mad keen amateurs. My mum played rounders, netball and hockey to a decent county level. She’d take us kids along to netball and we’d play with a ball in the corridor of the gym. We’d go to her rounders matches and play in the field. My dad played cricket and we’d be kicking a football or bowling at each other in the outfield.
All the while we were picking up the habits and joys of sport. To us kids it was just fun but, looking back, I guess we were also laying the foundations of our future careers. We always seemed to have a ball in our hands or at our feet.
My parents also passed down the qualities of hard work and a determination to give your very best every day. When we were growing up, my dad was a lorry driver for a luggage company based in Oldham. He would leave our house while it was still dark, sometimes at four a.m., for his run down to Northamptonshire just so that he could be back by early afternoon to play sport himself or, more often than not, to give us a lift to football or cricket. It didn’t matter if he had all day to do a job, we’d still hear him creeping out of the house before light to get his day’s work finished as early as possible. That attitude would rub off and serve us kids well down the years: get up, get on with things; make the most of your day, don’t waste time. I’ve been up early all my life. I don’t do lie-ins. Attack the day!
Mum and Dad also taught us to value loyalty. As kids, we’d have our squabbles, but we quickly understood that nothing mattered more than family. We loved each other even if we didn’t say so. That bond is unbreakable, and it would prove invaluable for Phil and me as we grew up not just as teammates at Manchester United but at times as rivals for the same jersey.
I can honestly say, for both of us, that we never forgot that family came first. If I had to give up my place in the team to anybody, I’d always prefer it to go to Phil more than anyone in the world. I don’t know if that’s unusual. You hear a lot about sibiling rivalry but, because of the way our parents brought us up, there’s never been a place for jealousy or selfishness in the Neville family.
We shared a bedroom right up to the days when I was a United regular at nineteen, and I know I must have driven him mad as a bossy older brother. But we weren’t just brothers, we were best mates.
We have different natures. The Nevilles are incredibly tight-knit. My dad is an extremely sociable bloke and he likes nothing better than a drink and a chat. But we rarely entertained at home. The family house was like our castle. He just didn’t want people inside. I’ve picked up the same trait. I can be begrudging of intruders. I like my space and limit those who get close. We’re such a tight family that it can be hard for others to break inside.
I’ve also got the Neville stubborn streak. To understand the Neville stubbornness you only have to know the story of how my dad got the name Neville Neville.
Just after he was born, a midwife came in and picked up a clipboard on the end of the hospital bed. ‘Neville?’ she said. ‘Oh, that’s a nice name for your new boy.’
My great-aunt was there and she jumped in. ‘Oh no, it’s not Neville. That’s his surname. Neville Neville? We can’t be having that.’
My nan was not a woman to be messed with. She wasn’t going to be told which name she could or couldn’t pick for her own son. ‘And why not Neville Neville? I’ll call him what I want.’
So it was out of sheer bloody-mindedness that my dad came to have his name. And plenty of people would say I inherited that streak of pig-headedness from my nan.
My mum’s side are more placid, and that’s Phil. He’s always been the most easy-going of the three of us, and I’m certainly the most intense. Tracey sits in between. There was a slightly closer relationship between the two of them in the early years. Being twins, they were in the same class at school. But we all became equally close. You just can’t fall out with Philip. He won’t row with anyone and he’s been like that since he was a kid.
We had our little scraps on the floor but my dad would have battered us if it had gone any further. Discipline was important. We never took liberties with my parents. If they said we had to be back by nine, we’d be back. I remember at the age of thirteen coming in a quarter of an hour late one evening and my dad leathered me up the stairs. I didn’t do it again. A lesson always stayed taught in our house.
Mostly it was sport that brought me and Phil together. Whenever there was a minute spare, we played football and cricket. We would play all day and all evening. Two years isn’t a big age gap so we did everything together.
We used to head down the road to this huge field in Bury, the Barracks. We’d put a jumper down on the ground, I’d whack the ball high into the air, and the competition was to see who could get the ball on to the jumper, trapped under their foot. It was one against one, just the two of us locked in battle. Imagine it, two Nevilles going at each other for hours at a time. You wouldn’t have sold many tickets. Or seen many goals, even if we’d played until midnight.
There were times, many times, when we went to the field together and walked back separately, one ten yards in front of the other, after taking lumps out of each other. But it was never more than healthy competition. Even though I was older by a couple of years, we were well matched. Phil was quick to mature physically, playing above his age group all the way through school. I never did that.
It became obvious early on that my little brother was naturally gifted. He found sport easy – at least that’s how it seemed to me. He was two-footed right from those early games at the Barracks. Playing cricket, he was a left-handed batsman who threw with his right. That summed him up: brilliant off both sides. Phil had this grace which marked him out as a natural.
At football, I had a chance of making it as a player; Phil was a certainty. I struggled to make the county team; he played for England schoolboys at every level, going down to Wembley in his smart blazer, the cream of the crop. Teams wanted me; they begged to have Phil.
It was the same in cricket. I was pretty good, an aggressive right-hand batsman who could give the ball a whack. At thirteen I made it into the Greenmount first team in the Bolton League, competing with grown men. It was a high standard with professionals, including some frighteningly fast bowlers from the West Indies. I learnt a lot about courage from facing down the quickies.
I scored enough runs to be selected for Lancashire Under 14s and then the North of England schoolboys team. I was picked to bat at number three, with a lad called Michael Vaughan at four. I might have made it into the England junior team. The Bunbury Festival was effectively the trials for the national squad, but I broke a finger slip-fielding.
I was decent, maybe good enough to have made it as a pro, but Phil was a cut above. He was selected for Lancashire Under 13s, 14s and 15s and was easily the standout player in a team that included Andrew Flintoff. At fifteen, Phil was playing for Lancashire seconds. That’s the men’s team. If it hadn’t been for football he could have gone on to play cricket dozens of times for England at every level, there’s absolutely no doubt about that.
For both of us sports-mad kids, it helped to have this competition. I had a younger brother keeping me on my toes and he had a bigger brother to topple. We were great for each other, pushing each other on, though I remember one cricket game when I decided to put him in his place. He’d annoyed me, so when we batted together I kept taking singles off the last ball of every over, hogging the strike. I don’t think he faced a ball for about half an hour. Then, as he got more and more frustrated, I ran him out. It was one of those rare occasions when Phil blew his top. He was fuming as we drove home, me and my dad laughing our heads off about it.
Most of the time Phil sailed on, calm, skilful, in control. He was a class act with gifts that set him apart from me. Like millions of young boys, I dreamt of being a footballer. In my imagination, I was the next Bryan Robson. But I wasn’t even the best sportsman in my own family.
Starting Out
IT ALL BEGAN on the pitches of Littleton Road in Salford. I was one among around two hundred kids having a trial for the great Manchester United. I was a midfield player, the next Bryan Robson in my dreams, but I wondered how the scouts could detect talent in this sea of schoolboy footballers. There were so many of us. How could I hope to stand out?
This was 1986, a year that will go down in history because that’s when Alex Ferguson came down to Old Trafford to start his revolution. It was the year I joined United too, on the very bottom rung of the ladder, aged eleven, though that’s less celebrated.
Our head teacher had put in a few of us for the trial and, despite my doubts, I must have done OK because a letter arrived a few weeks later asking me to join United’s Centre of Excellence. It was like a golden ticket inviting me inside the chocolate factory.
On Mondays and Thursdays after school my dad would drive me to the Cliff, the training ground nestling between houses in Salford where Best and Charlton honed their skills. These days United train at a massive out-of-town base at Carrington with security gates barring the entrance to a huge complex of pitches and state-of-the-art facilities. The Cliff had one outdoor field and an old sports hall, but it was a hallowed place for a young United fanatic.
It was at the Cliff that I said hello for the first time to Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, who joined a couple of years after me. Though, looking back, I suspect it was less of a hello and more of a grunt. Butty and Scholesy weren’t the types for niceties.
My first impression of Butty, even at thirteen, was that he was hard as nails. He wasn’t the biggest but he didn’t care less who he came up against, he’d just rattle right through them. I was central midfield at the time and I hated facing him. He was intimidating, a schoolboy Roy Keane.
Scholesy’s talent was less obvious to the eye. He was small for his age. You certainly didn’t think that you were seeing a guy who would become one of the best in the world. He was asthmatic and struggled to get up and down the pitch.
It’s amazing to think that I was still playing with Scholesy twenty-five years later. I can’t say we clicked straight away, but we became great mates. He’s never been someone to waste words, but in later years we’d always go to the same café in the middle of Manchester on the morning of a match for a natter. It became our way of relaxing.
Scholesy’s attitude to the game has always been brilliantly straightforward. He thinks football’s a simple game complicated by idiots. Others can talk all day about formations and tactics. ‘Give me a ball,’ he’d say, ‘and let’s just get on the pitch.’
Training with Butty and Scholesy, I realised how high the bar was set – and in my mind I fell a long way short. I was probably the best player at my local club Bury Juniors, but they’d come through a far tougher school. They’d both been scouted playing for Boundary Park, the best youth team in the area. Compared to them I was timid. Eventually I joined them at Boundary, turning my back on my pals, so I could try to keep up with them.
I needed to give myself every chance to improve. Ben Thornley had joined us at the Centre of Excellence and you couldn’t tell whether he was left-or right-footed. Each year seemed to bring a new crop of talent.
I was a decent town player, but I honestly didn’t know whether I would make it through the first big cull of our young lives at fourteen, when we would find out if the club wanted us to sign schoolboy forms for the next two years. I didn’t know what to expect when my dad said he was off to see Brian Kidd, the head of the youth system.
My game was coming on and I couldn’t be faulted for effort. I’d turned up for every session, loyally driven down by my dad. But was I really going to make the grade with all these better players around me? Butty and Scholesy were certain to be picked. I had no confidence that I’d hear good news from my dad.
There are a few moments you look back on – those crossroads moments – and wonder how life might have played out differently. I wasn’t nailed on to be a professional footballer. I knew that. United were out there grabbing every kid they could find with talent. A whole different path might have opened up that day, one that didn’t involve United, or football. I knew the club couldn’t keep us all on.
I can still see the look on Dad’s face when he came to pick me up at school to tell me about his meeting with Kiddo, the smile he couldn’t suppress. I’d made it over the first big hurdle. And as I sat in the Steven Street chippy eating my chips and gravy, the news just kept getting better. I’d not only been offered two years of schoolboy forms to the age of sixteen but a two-year apprenticeship to follow. Four years at United, an invitation to become a YTS on £29.50 a week.
I couldn’t believe it. United wanted me. I’m not the type to become too emotional, but I did shed a little tear.
What I couldn’t know or appreciate at the time was that, desperate to turn around the fortunes of United, the boss had decided to overhaul the youth structure. He was staking the club’s future on bringing through players. He was following the great tradition of Sir Matt Busby who’d built the club on home-grown talent.
Who knows what might have been if the manager hadn’t possessed that bravery and vision? He’d taken over a massive, underachieving football club. The pressure for instant results must have been intense. But he was willing to put in the time, the resources and the energy to build a lasting youth structure. And then he had the guts to put his talented kids into the team.
Appointing Kiddo to head up the academy was a masterstroke. He was one of United’s 1968 European Cup-winning heroes, though the great thing about Kiddo was his ability to make you feel at ease. Right from the start, he was your mate, the guy always looking out for you, his arm round your shoulder. I loved the way he was always happy and buzzing.
Kiddo was the good cop compared to Eric Harrison, a scary Yorkshireman who became a huge presence in our lives as schoolboy trainees. But what was really amazing, reflecting the manager’s determination to make this youth policy work, was how much the first-team coaches were also involved. The standard of coaching we’d receive on Monday and Thursday nights was out of this world for fourteen-year-old kids.
The manager’s assistant, Archie Knox, would pay us visits, and occasionally the manager himself. He’d have been at work since the early hours but still he’d walk across the Cliff car park and come and cast an eye over us in the evening as we played in the freezing-cold indoor hall. He was already showing the attention to detail that would drive us on throughout our professional lives.
We’d be practising and Archie would come in. You felt like standing to attention as soon as he walked through the door. He’d put on these passing sessions and speak to us in a Scottish accent so thick most of us couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Until we screwed up – then you’d hear every word loud and clear.
The intensity was incredible. Pass, pass, pass. Get it wrong and you’d be called out to do it again. It was tough, physically and mentally. There was to be no larking about. Do it right or do it again. Drive your passes. First touch. Control the ball. Pass. Move. We were learning the courage and skill necessary to take the ball under pressure and move it on quickly and precisely. Everything had to be done at speed. I can still hear Archie barking at me not to ‘tippy-tap’.
It was a hard school, and just to make it that bit tougher, in the school holidays there would be an influx of talented kids from out of town competing for places. David Beckham arrived one summer, aged fourteen. We were training when the boss himself walked over, his arm around the shoulder of this skinny kid with gel in his hair. He was wearing a brand-new United tracksuit and his best trainers. Apparently he’d won a Bobby Charlton soccer schools competition, but we were just thinking, ‘Who’s this flash git?’ A Cockney, too.
He was so slim he looked like he’d be blown over in a gale. At first glance you wondered what could be so special, but when we started training he could deliver a ball better than anyone I’d seen. His technique was straight out of a textbook; the body angle, the grace, the spin on the ball. He looked stylish. He played midfield too, my position, so here was another rival.
Robbie Savage, a flash kid from Wales with terrible dress sense, and Keith Gillespie, from Northern Ireland, were two more who would turn up in the holidays, and suddenly from being in the first XI among the schoolboys I’d find myself on the bench feeling like a spare part. I’d play for the Under 15s and Under 16s in regular games through the winter but be left out when the big matches came around.
The biggest of all was the match against Lilleshall, the FA’s academy. They included the best hand-picked lads in the country. All the top coaches and scouts came to watch, including the boss. I was on the sidelines, a substitute, when Ryan Wilson – who’d become better known as Ryan Giggs – scored an unbelievable goal, an overhead kick that was out of this world. I’m sure I cheered – I hope I cheered – but I felt a pang of anxiety that makes me shudder to this day. What a goal. I couldn’t even dream of pulling off a skill like that.
I didn’t have the flair or natural ability of others, but I flatter myself that I was a good learner with organisational qualities. Maybe it comes from being an older brother, but I’ve always been bossy. And I was a hard worker, sticking in the hours, doing everything I was asked, never slacking. But those were the minimum requirements when the time came to leave school at sixteen and, alongside Becks, Scholesy, Butty and the rest of the apprentices, see if I could carve out a full-time career at United.