Brian Deane: "All of a sudden I took some stopping"

Nobody helped Brian Deane be Brian Deane more than Brian Deane helped himself.

"I think I was born to play football," he says, and he did, as a kid and an adult, as a local amateur and a Premier League professional, for Yorkshire Amateurs in Leeds and for Benfica in Portugal. He won back to back promotions with Sheffield United, played at Wembley, played for England, and was Leeds United's record signing. Brian Deane did it.

"When I was a kid, I was always better than most other kids. I broke my leg at sixteen, but I knew that was not going to stop me. I knew that by hook or by crook I was going to be a professional, because that's what I was born to do."

But destiny isn't always enough. Destiny didn't help Brian follow his schoolmate David Batty from Leeds City Boys to a Leeds United apprenticeship, the path that was taking a generation of players — John Sheridan, Scott Sellars, Tommy Wright, Denis Irwin, Terry Phelan, Andy Linighan — from the local football scene to the Second Division. Destiny alone couldn't overcome the racial tension in the city that meant a kid like Brian, raised in Chapeltown by parents who had arrived in Leeds as part of the Windrush generation, was at the back of the queue.

"I knew Terry Connor, because he had grown up there as well, so there was that link," says Brian, of the black centre-forward who broke through at Leeds at the start of the eighties. "But it just seemed impossible to follow him. As a community we never really imagined that we were good enough. There was some real talent there, but there was a lack of encouragement that killed a lot of people's aspirations and dreams.

"I took a bit of a leaf from Terry's book, because he had gone to Foxwood School, and looked for opportunities to get outside of the community. My desire to be a pro was so strong that I decided I wasn't going to be affected by racism, but I was scared all the same. When I was getting the bus to go to John Smeaton School for trials with Yorkshire Amateurs, me and my friend Michael Phillips were the only two black kids out of 150, and we were genuinely scared of being beaten up."

Destiny wouldn't do it; Brian Deane had to. "People don't really understand racism," he says, "Unless they could be black for a day and go through some of things people like me went through. They don't understand why you say you had to be better, because it was like a boxing match where you have to knock somebody out to get a draw. That's the way you had to be to even get a chance."

When Deane got chances, he buried them, because he was better, and he was resilient enough to make sure people saw it. In the Third Division, he scored twelve goals in a relegated Doncaster Rovers side, and was signed by Sheffield United. Their rise through the divisions, with Deane and Tony Agana becoming one of the league's most prolific partnerships, "Were some of the happiest times of my life," says Deane, but survival in the Premier League was not enough for Sheffield United's bank account or for Deane's aspirations.