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Crewe fans’ forum a chance to put chairman on spot over Barry Bennell

A sign outside Crewe's Gresty Road ground
‘One guy I know is so ashamed of the club he used to support he wants his name removed from Gresty Road’s brickwork’ Photograph: Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images

They are holding a fans’ forum at Crewe Alexandra on Monday. The title is “Let’s Talk About Football” and that’s very clever if, presumably, it means that anyone who is impertinent enough to ask about the issues that have made the club international news can be shushed down by the people at the top table.

A similar event was held in December 2016 and the chairman, John Bowler, began that one by making it clear it was a football‑only discussion. No awkward questions, thank you very much. No googlies thrown in. And no surprise, to be honest, if we go back to Barry Bennell’s first convictions in England, in June 1998, and the following day’s coverage in the Crewe Chronicle about his nine-year sentence. Crewe’s reaction was contained in a single paragraph at the bottom of the page. “The Chronicle asked Crewe Alexandra to comment but were told that the chairman, John Bowler, was unavailable.” And that, in a nutshell, is what we are dealing with here, sadly.

Bowler did make himself available in May 2015 – exactly a week after Bennell was sentenced to another two-year stretch – when he went down to Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE for services to football and talked again about his pride, having joined the club in 1979, to have helped Dario Gradi build their youth system. Gradi had already been awarded an MBE and the two men were given the freedom of the borough in 2013 because they had “changed the way the world thinks about Crewe” and “nowadays the television and the newspapers talk about ‘classy Crewe’”.

Peter Kent, the leader of Crewe and Nantwich borough council, cannot ever have imagined when he came out with those words how they would look five years later. But in fairness, a lot of people might have thought the same given the number of column inches devoted to the club’s production line and the absence of coverage when it first came out, almost a quarter of a century ago, that Gresty Road was actually football’s house of horrors.

Not, however, the players who had to suffer Bennell’s depravity at the club he had wrapped round his little finger. One of his victims recalls being physically sick when he heard Gradi’s MBE was recognition for Crewe’s work with children. There is no suggestion Gradi knew boys were being abused but that player’s story, in particular, makes it clear why he feels so aggrieved. “Barry got me in one of the portable buildings where he had his office one day,” he says. “He made me sit on his knee and he had his arms round me, stroking me. Dario walked in and inside my head I was screaming for help. I was 12. But he [Gradi] just carried on exactly as normal, going about his business.” The club and Gradi did not respond when asked for their comment about these events.

Gradi remains suspended by the Football Association from all football-related activities – though the governing body has never formally explained why – and has been accused of trying to “smooth over” a complaint of sexual assault from a 15-year-old boy against Eddie Heath, Chelsea’s chief scout, in the 1970s. Gradi, who has always denied any wrongdoing, was in his 30s at the time and assistant manager at Stamford Bridge.

Yet there are others at Crewe who should be facing questions about what they knew. Today, for example, I can report for the first time that the FA’s independent inquiry has been told by one of the people giving evidence that Gill Palin, now retired but once a key member of staff, had many reservations about Bennell.

Steve Walters, Gary Cliffe, Chris Unsworth and Micky Fallon, victims of Barry Bennell, speak outside Liverpool crown court after the former coach’s conviction
Steve Walters, Gary Cliffe, Chris Unsworth and Micky Fallon (left to right), victims of Barry Bennell, speak outside Liverpool crown court after the former coach’s conviction. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AFP/Getty Images

Palin was once the longest-serving club secretary in the Football League and has been described as “the font of all knowledge” at Gresty Road. The inquiry has been told she vehemently disliked the club’s youth-team coach and expressed misgivings about his relationship with the boys. If Clive Sheldon, the QC overseeing the inquiry, hasn’t already spoken to Palin, it should be a priority.

Crewe’s position is that they never knew anything was untoward until Bennell was arrested in Florida in 1994 and that he left the club for “football-related reasons”. Bennell, on the other hand, says it was because of a complaint. My information is that he was challenged by a number of parents after one training session and, within two days, was gone.

That was in 1992 and it can also now be reported that on 29 May that year Gradi wrote to the parents of one boy from the centre of excellence. “I do not want any of the boys who attended the centre to go to other coaching sessions or games organised by our former youth coach Barry Bennell,” he states. “If this is going to cause you a problem then I will be pleased to talk to you about it personally.” Gradi’s office and home numbers are attached but there is no further explanation and he has not been willing to supply this newspaper with one, either. He, Bowler and Palin, as well as the club itself, have chosen not to comment after attempts were made to contact them by the Observer this past week.

Unfortunately for Crewe, that still leaves plenty of questions when their former managing director Hamilton Smith has repeated his allegation that he warned the club about the man a judge has just called the “devil incarnate”, and when you remember the account that Micky Fallon, one of the players who has just helped put Bennell back in prison, gave to the Guardian last weekend. “I struggle to see how the people at Crewe didn’t realise Barry Bennell was potentially a risk when he had all those children staying overnight and there was so much rumour and innuendo,” was a standout line. “Because everybody else seemed to know.”

Crewe’s kids, he recalled, were known to opponents as “the paedophile lads” and there are many, many people who can back that up. Plus this feels like an appropriate time to recount a story I first wrote in late 2016 about Bennell being so notorious that one of Manchester’s junior leagues was warned in 1990 that if he turned up on talent-spotting duties for Crewe he should be asked to leave and the police called if he refused. Gradi, of course, is on record saying there was “never any cause for concern”.

One guy I know, previously a Crewe fan, now tells me he is so ashamed of the club he is asking for his name to be removed from the brickwork of Gresty Road. Others have said they will demand answers from Bowler at Monday’s event, no matter what he says about keeping it to football. There are plenty of decent Crewe fans who find it unfathomable – like many of us – the same regime is still in charge.

Maybe Bowler could be directly asked why neither he nor Gradi, whose association with Crewe goes back to 1983, consider it a resignation matter. Perhaps someone could ask why the club still had team photographs featuring Bennell on their walls as recently as last February. And what, precisely, were the “football-related reasons” they claim were behind his departure?

Perhaps it could be asked why Crewe’s match-day announcer posted on Twitter in August that he was hopeful “all those shithead journos who tried to bury DG [Gradi] and our club could be heading for one hell of a kick in the bollox”.

Or maybe someone could raise the story of Andy Woodward’s civil action against the club. Andy was one of the kids raped hundreds of times by Bennell. When the verdict went in favour of Crewe, he says the club’s lawyers were high-fiving in front of him. Classy Crewe, indeed.

As for the independent investigation Crewe announced 15 months ago, will anyone from the club be good enough to explain when, if ever, they are going to get round to it? Manchester City are a year into their one and, if nothing else, seem determined to shine a light on the club’s darkest corners. The FA’s inquiry is out later this year. It’s a perfectly reasonable question: when do Crewe start theirs?

More than anything, I do hope someone has the temerity to ask what the relevant people made of Hamilton Smith’s allegations of a cover-up when he appeared on the Channel 4 documentary Football’s Wall of Silence and stated unequivocally – just as he did to the Guardian in November 2016 – that he had told the club’s directors, including Bowler, in the late 1980s about a specific complaint relating to Bennell.

Smith left Crewe in 1990 and his account is that when he went to see Bowler years later, aggrieved that Bennell was now in prison and Crewe were still maintaining they had never received any warnings, the man sitting opposite him denied the initial conversation ever took place. Bowler, according to Smith, was a “lying bastard”. And, despite repeated requests, the chairman of Crewe Alexandra has never responded to that allegation.