Former Southampton coach 'stormed out' when confronted with schoolboy sex allegations

The former Southampton FC coach Bob Higgins, who is accused of sexually abusing schoolboy players, shouted and stormed out when a senior figure at the club confronted him, a jury has been told.

Higgins said he would sue anyone who made allegations against him, but had left the club within a few weeks, his trial heard.

The former coach is accused of being a “predatory paedophile” who abused young people at Southampton and Peterborough FC over a period of 25 years. Higgins, now 65, denies 50 offences of indecent assault involving 24 alleged victims.

Dave Merrington, who was hired by the former Southampton manager Lawrie McMenemy in 1985, said that by the time he arrived at the club, Higgins was already in charge of the schoolboy players.

Merrington told Salisbury crown court that on his way back from a game in February 1989, some apprentice players were “bantering” about Higgins. “One or two comments were of a sexual nature, which concerned me.”

He reported it to his bosses and was told to speak to Higgins. He met him in the players’ lounge.

“I tried to be gentle at first, to say: ‘Look Bob, you’re a family man with a good position at the club.’” He told Higgins that players had made sexual comments about him, the court heard.

“He was very angry. He jumped up and said: ‘I will sue anyone who says anything about me.’ I tried to calm him down, but he stormed out of the room. Within a week or fortnight, he had resigned.”

One of the players who was said to be on the minibus was the former professional Dean Radford. He had been coached by Higgins as a schoolboy before becoming an apprentice.

Radford told the court that Higgins abused him at a training camp and at the home the coach shared with his wife, Shirley, but he still looked up to Higgins.

“He had that power over me. I idolised him,” Radford said. “I wanted to be a footballer more than anything. He knew that. I felt I had to go along with what was happening.”

Radford made a statement to police in October 1989. Higgins was tried in 1991 but cleared, the jury heard.

Radford, who is not one of the alleged victims in the current trial, told the court that during a schoolboy residential football camp he informed Higgins he had injured the base of his spine while doing sit-ups.

Radford said Higgins told him to lie on a bed and pull down his shorts. The witness broke down as he described how Higgins allegedly sexually assaulted him. “It was painful,” he said. “I told my mum something horrible had happened.” But Radford said he begged his mother not to tell anyone what had happened.

Radford, now 47, said he often stayed with Bob and Shirely Higgins at the couple’s home in Hampshire.

He claimed Higgins would guide his [Radford’s] hands on to his genitals. “Sometimes I would pull away and you would think, ‘I don’t want to upset him’. You let him do it again.”

He said Shirely Higgins would sometimes tell him that her husband wanted to see him in his bedroom. “He would be in bed. He would ask how much I loved him, how much I wanted to be a footballer.”

Once Radford said he kissed Higgins. “He was pulling me closer, I was leaning over. My reaction was to kiss him, I didn’t know what else to do. I kissed him on the forehead. He said: ‘You’d better go to bed.’ I thought I had done something wrong, I maybe hadn’t done enough.”

Cross-examined by Higgins’s barrister, Alistair MacDonald QC, Radford denied he had been encouraged by Merrington to testify against the former coach. “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said.

Merrington was also accused by MacDonald of “putting up” Radford and two other former schoolboy footballers to make the allegations of abuse to end Higgins’s career because the pair had fallen out. Merrington denied this strongly.

The trial continues.