I was Barry Bennell’s captain when I was a kid. He was the Pied Piper, like everyone says, and the most amazing football coach I’ve ever seen. There was nobody like this guy, then or now. The man could do anything with a ball. Every tournament we entered, we won everything. But it came at a price, as people are finding out now. I was lucky – I wasn’t one of the poor kids he sexually abused – but he did try it on and, when he didn’t get his way, he made sure he did everything he could to destroy me.
My team was called Pegasus but it later became Whitehill, where David White has now revealed he was abused. There was one simple reason why he kept changing the team’s name – we were so good the league didn’t want a City-affiliated team cleaning up everything. I played with Gary Speed, David White, Andy Hinchcliffe, Paul Lake and a lot of other players who have gone to become household names. We had an incredible pool – Ashley Ward, for example, a future Premier League player, couldn’t always get in our team – and we all looked up to Barry Bennell.
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