Many stars have risen from Manchester United’s academy, but perhaps the brightest of them
all could have been a player few have heard of.
Adrian Doherty would never make a first-team appearance for United. But his name is spoken
with reverence by anyone who saw him play and, while very little footage exists, the
testimony to his talent is deep, rich and compelling.
“Imagine a bit of Ryan Giggs, a bit of Andrei Kanchelskis and a bit of Cristiano Ronaldo,”
wrote Tony Park, in Sons of United, a Chronicle of the Manchester United team, “then put
it all together.”
Giggs himself doesn’t disagree. He spent much his youth career on the opposite wing
to Adrian and remembers someone “destined for a career at the top”, who “could have
done anything in football”.
Gary Neville is also highly complimentary, so too a host of other academy players whose
paths crossed with Adrian. The admiration is unanimous and yet, bizarrely, almost none
of it was made public until Oliver Kay’s book, Forever Young, was published in 2016.
He was never discussed. His memory was allowed to fade.
Adrian was born on June 10th, 1973. The son of Jimmy and Geraldine and one of four children,
he was raised in Strabane, in County Tyrone, a mile from the Irish border. Strabane was
a place hit hard by industrial decline in 1970s, but it was hit harder by the Troubles,
becoming a frequent battleground between Unionists and Republicans.
Adrian’s friends remember a happy childhood, though, and an intelligent boy who took easily
to any sport he played. Particularly football. He was obsessive and dedicated, spending hour
after hour in the local park, dribbling a ball between empty bottles and used cans,
timing himself as he went.
Adrian would develop a reputation as a blindingly quick winger. He was full of skill and changes
in direction and had a low centre of gravity, which years later, a senior United figure
would liken to that of Romario, the great Brazilian forward. Adrian was an incendiary
talent and, at 13 years old, was playing for Moorfield Boys Club, which at the time was
run by Matt Bradley.
“He was”, remembers Bradley, “the nearest thing I have seen to another George Best.”
By the end of 1986, Adrian had attended trials at Nottingham Forest and Arsenal. Knowing
that the Doherties were a Manchester United family, Bradley took matters into his own
hands, writing a letter to Alex Ferguson, urging United to take a look.
Scout Eddie Coulter was dispatched, was quickly impressed and, in August 1987, Adrian, alongside
a young goalkeeper, Michael Nash, and a talented midfielder – the future Liverpool, Celtic
and Leicester manager – Brendan Rodgers, was invited to attend a trial in Manchester.
Doherty was immediately impressive. “He was one who made you look up” remembered
Brian Kidd. “Adrian could light it up. United offered an apprenticeship which would begin
in 1989, with Alex Ferguson calling the Doherty house in Strabane to break the news.
When it began, apprentice life was difficult for Adrian. He lived in digs a few hundred
yards from The Cliff, the club’s old training ground, and the routine was at odds with his
personality. He was a bright, free-spirited, quirky boy who was passionate about literature
and music, and who, between the regimented training sessions, the puerile initiations,
and the hours of boredom after training, found it hard to adapt to the banality of his new
routine.
To pass the time and with some of the money from the £29.50 a week he was earning, he
bought himself an acoustic guitar. He had grown up a Bob Dylan fan, a legacy from his
father, and on Saturdays, when most of the other scholars were watching the first-team
at Old Trafford, Adrian would often give away his complimentary tickets and go busking in
the city centre.
But he was homesick. Manchester was a different world. Tall, busy and imposing. In November
’89, he even briefly returned to Strabane and was only coaxed back to England after
United allowed him to move out of digs and live with a Manchester family who were originally
from Strabane.
But while social adjustment was difficult, football was not. He starred for the B team,
United’s fourth XI, and become a regular for the A team. Whenever he or Giggs featured
in one of those sides, the other players were instructed win the ball, move it, and feed
one of the two wingers.
By the second half of the 89-90 season he was also featuring for the reserves and, for
the first time, training alongside players like Mark Hughes and Bryan Robson with the
first-team.
In the spring of 1990, an injury crisis even saw him travel to Southampton for a First
Division game, with the possibility of appearing on the bench and – if he came on – becoming
the club’s youngest debutant since Duncan Edwards. It was extraordinary progress for
a first-year apprentice, let alone a 16 year-old who – according to Archie Knox, Ferguson’s
assistant manager – ‘must have been about 5 stone wet through’. A wee waif, in the
words of goalkeeper Jim Leighton.
Adrian didn’t make his debut at the Dell, but he did collect a win bonus. While other
16 year-olds might have bought new trainers or designer clothes, he bought an old fashioned
typewriter on which, in time, he would tap out short stories and poems.
Manchester United would offer a five-year contract in the summer of 1990. At the time,
it was the longest and richest contract the club had ever offered a 16 year-old. Adrian
declined the offer, telling an amazed Alex Ferguson that he would prefer one or two years.
Both parties eventually settled on three. After Adrian and his father left Old Trafford
and asked his son why, he replied that he couldn’t be sure whether he’d still want
to be playing football in 5 years.
He wouldn’t be. And the choice wouldn’t be his.
On 2nd March 1991, the day that Ryan Giggs made his Manchester United debut, Adrian Doherty
was sat in the Old Trafford stands, nursing a sore knee. A week earlier, he had been injured
in an A team game against Carlisle United’s reserves - by a tackle rather than a foul,
a 50-50 in his words – and, though he didn’t know it at the time, he would never be the
same player again.
The nature of his injury remains a cause of conflict. In March 1991, a sprain of the medial
collateral ligament was diagnosed. Two and a half months later, he was even playing again,
in a youth tournament in Zurich. A few weeks after that, he appeared in the first of two
end of season games in Trinidad, but complained afterwards of pain in his knee.
In July, the first MRI scan was taken, revealing a proximal tear of the anterior cruciate ligament,
but no surgery was recommended. In September, with no sign of improvement, an arthroscopy
was performed but, again, with no reconstructive surgery. Instead, Doherty was sentenced to
rehabilitation in The Cliff’s gym and would eventually see the pitch again in December,
for a B team game.
It would be a disastrous comeback. His knee would fail him. This time, with no ambiguity:
his anterior cruciate ligament was damaged and a reconstruction was the only course of
action.
In the aftermath, Adrian embraced the other life that he had been building. He had been
busking since he arrived in Manchester, sometimes he would even perform on coach journeys for
his teammates and by 1992 he had become a regular at open mic nights in city. He even
formed a band - the Mad Hatters - and, in May of that year, in the early summer of 1992,
he spent the better part of a month in New York, performing under the name McHillbillly
and becoming a minor part of the East Village scene. The introvert in nature was an extrovert
at heart.
But football was over. He would return to England for one final season at Manchester
United and would make a few B and Reserve team appearances, but his contract wouldn’t
be renewed. His damaged right knee still wouldn’t full straighten, his power and acceleration
were gone; to this day, the handling of his injury remains a point of contention between
the Doherty family and Manchester United.
He would play again. Briefly, for Derry City. But he left football behind, seemingly not
needing it or becoming embittered without out. He would spend two and a half years in
Preston, working in a chocolate factory. Then a few months back home in Strabane at a local
hosiery factory. On a whim he moved to Galway, becoming a day porter at a hotel, before working
at a cleaning company and then a home bakery.
Everywhere he went, the stories are the same: of someone everyone liked. Of a gentle soul
who read Rimbaud, wrote poetry, dabbled in Gnosticism and meditation and who thought
deeply about life and art and the meaning of existence.
In May 2000 Adrian set off one final time, taking a job for a Dutch furniture company.
After he arrived in Holland, his exact movements remain elusive. What is known is that on May
7th, on a Sunday morning, he was retrieved, unconscious, from a canal in the Hague.
He would remain in a coma for over a month, long enough for his mother, father, sister
and elder brother to fly to Holland be by his side. But on the morning of 9th June,
2000, Adrian Doherty died, the day before his 27th birthday.
At the time he was admitted to hospital, there were no drugs present in his bloodstream.
Nor, according to Dutch police, was there any indication of violence. Contrary to the
innuendo which would sully his memory in the years after and hurt his family a great deal,
Adrian had just been on his way to work when he had fallen in. He couldn’t swim; it had
been a terrible accident. His was a life taken in tragic circumstances.
But it was also one lived in many different ways, deserving to be remembered as such.
A free-thinker, an original, and also a precocious footballing talent, one revered by anyone
who saw it first hand. Adrian Doherty was unique.