Thread by @OliverKay

This is Adrian Doherty, who would have turned 50 today, described by Sir Alex Ferguson as “the boy with the most amazing football skill, but happiest with his books, poems and guitar.”

And by one of his ex #MUFC youth-team-mates as “Bob Dylan in a No 7 shirt”

#adriandoherty

I first stumbled on Adrian’s story in 2011 when researching a feature on Ryan Giggs. I asked @TheRealBozza and @Alan_Tonge whether Giggs stuck out a mile in #MUFC youth team, expecting to hear "Yes of course he did."

Instead, both replied: “Have you heard of Adrian Doherty?”

Only very vaguely.

Beyond his home town of Strabane and a tight band of #MUFC youth aficionados, Adrian seemed totally unknown as a footballer. There was nothing about him on the internet except a tribute put together by Matt Bradley, who coached him as a youth player in Derry.

Matt’s tribute include two press cuttings ten years apart: this one from @MENSports in March 1990 when Adrian, 16, was lined up to make his first-team debut at Southampton, “tipped behind the scenes to make the kind of impact not seen since George Best was given his chance”

... and this one from the Derry Journal in June 2000: “Tributes flow for tragic soccer gem.”
Adrian had died, a day before his 27th birthday, after falling into a canal in The Hague, having moved to the Netherlands for work.

How did I not know this story? How had such a hot prospect, at a club the size of Manchester United, drifted out of football and drifted so far from consciousness that the story of his death -- and therefore the story of his life -- appeared to have passed almost everyone by?

I immediately started exploring it as a potential story for The Times. I tracked down Adrian's father Jimmy, who thanked me for my interest but initially declined. But he did tell me things about Adrian -- not just about his football but about his poetry and his music.

He told me how Adrian would spend Saturday mornings playing for the #MUFC youth team, terrorising opposition full-backs ... and then give away his first-team tickets and get the bus into Manchester city centre to spend the afternoon busking near the Arndale Centre. What an image.

The more I heard about Adrian Doherty, the more desperate I became to tell his story: from Troubles-era Strabane to Manchester, suffering terribly with homesickness, hating the dressing-room culture and how the apprentices were treated, falling out of love with football, stunning

Ferguson by rejecting a 5-year deal because "I might fancy doing something else before then" ... and then digging deep, turning it around, putting himself on the verge of a first-team debut, only to suffer a knee injury in an 'A' team match v Carlisle reserves in February 1991.

Whereas Giggs made his debut a week later, Doherty (after cruciate ligament damage was finally diagnosed months later) managed only a few more games at reserve/A/B team level before leaving #MUFC almost unnoticed in 1993. He briefly played for @derrycityfc and retired aged 20.

The Giggs/Doherty thing fascinated me. Sliding doors etc. One goes on to achieve greatness, fame and fortune. The other ends up living in such obscurity (working in a chocolate factory in Preston, living above a pub in Galway) that even his tragic death went largely unreported.

But more than anything, Adrian's "otherness" fascinated me. At a time when young footballers were becoming more materialistic and image-obsessed, he was the opposite, dressing like a student, no interest in clothes. As for cars, he cycled to training. Here's @RobbieSavage8

It wasn't just music, poetry & (lack of) fashion sense. It was his personality.

"Hippy-like", says @RobbieSavage8.

"A bit eccentric," says Steve Bruce. "Certainly off the wall."

"He wasn't like the rest of us," says Giggs. "He was unorthodox in how he dressed & how he acted."

They didn't know the half of it. They didn't know he was reading the Koran, Dante, Edgar Allan Poe, Carlos Castenada, studying transcendentalism, Zoroastrianism, joining an esoteric group and a gnostic group. They thought he was just an oddball with a guitar and bad trainers.

One of my favourite "Doc" stories is how, injured in May 1992, he decided on the hoof, during a night out, to go to New York to try to get a record deal. He broke into his brother's student house to borrow a suitcase, got the first bus to London the next morning, then flew to

New York, where he spent the summer playing in bars in Greenwich Village and meeting guys like @PalefaceOnline, who very clearly remembered Adrian -- or rather "McHillbilly", as he was known in music circles -- when I contacted him more than 20 years later theathletic.com/1818788/2020/0…

By that stage, music had totally overtaken football in his mind. After @derrycityfc he largely turned his back on it. Of all the people who met him in his years living in Preston and Galway, he told very few about his time as one of the great prospects at Manchester United.

My colleague @mwalker2771 tracked him in Galway in 1999 to ask if he fancied doing an interview. Adrian wasn't remotely interested. Even when friends asked him about his time at #MUFC he gave very little away. Their views vary on the extent to which the experience scarred him.

In researching Forever Young, I started out with the idea that he could have been another Giggs but I came away with the feeling he was far too interesting and far too multi-layered to have done that. Giggs, Gary Neville and others believe he would have made an immediate impact

had he made his first-team debut at 16/17, but they and others struggled to imagine him doing it week after week, year after year. He would have hated the spotlight. It's easy to imagine that, after five years, or even just five games, he would have had enough and walked away.

I asked Adrian's friends and family what he would have been doing with his life had he still been around today. "Nothing would have surprised me with Adrian," his brother Gareth said. "It could be anything. Literally anything at all."

One of his friends felt he would have gone to university and perhaps, ultimately, academia. Another said he would have carried on playing music and reading poetry at open-mic nights and festivals - whether on stage or not - and that he "would be a wow. People would love him."

I loved the suggestion of Colin Telford, who was in digs with him at #MUFC: "Sitting on a fence in the middle of nowhere, playing his guitar, happily watching the world go by. Or sitting in a bar, having a pint & then, after a few drinks, getting his guitar out and busking away."

You can read more about Adrian Doherty in Forever Young, but far more important than "my" book is HIS story. It's tragic that his life was cut short and that he wasn't to write his own story. Thinking of Jimmy, Geraldine, Gareth, Ciara and Peter today ❤️ #RIPdoc #adriandoherty