Wayne Harrison RIP

[dorgie]

Shocked by this.

 

Will add a touch of poignancy to the FA Cup game.

 

Same age as me

 

(hate the Wayne Rooney comparison - not at all relevant)

 

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/original-wayne-rooney-wayne-harrison-6447491

 

A footballer dubbed 'the original Wayne Rooney' has died at the age of 46.

 

Wayne Harrison was tipped for stardom when Liverpool splashed out £250,000 to buy him from Oldham Athletic in 1985.

 

The fee made the gifted striker the world's most expensive teenager at the age of 17, but a catalogue of injuries and logic-defying misfortune meant he never fulfilled his substantial potential.

 

It is understood Harrison, who retired in 1991, suffered from pancreatic problems and died in hospital on Christmas Day morning.

 

After dazzling scouts at Boundary Park and prompting the move to his boyhood idols after just five first-team appearances Harrison was on the verge of a place on the substitutes bench with the Anfield giants when he suffered his first dose of ill-fate, falling through a greenhouse.

 

At the time the ambulance service was on strike and he came close to death through loss of blood before Army medics managed to get him to hospital.

 

Other injuries soon followed - including one caused by a fall through his loft - and Harrison went under the surgeon's knife on no less than 23 occasions.

 

In 1990, still aged only 22, came the blow that would eventually cut his career cruelly short.

 

In the final minute of the final Liverpool reserve team game of the season he collided with the Bradford City goalkeeper, tearing the cruciate ligaments in his knee.

 

The following year, with the injury beyond repair, Liverpool manager Graeme Souness gave him the inevitable news that it was over.

 

Harrison took a job as a driver with Robinson's Brewery and started turning out for Sunday League side Offerton Green.

 

One pal remembers him as a 'humble, amazingly gifted man'.

 

He said: "He started off as a substitute in the second team like everyone else and that was no problem, he had no airs or graces.

 

"He made a lot of defenders look daft. The talent he had was unbelievable but he was very humble.

 

"He was larger than life, a very funny man and a lot of people are devastated around here."

 

Former club Oldham arranged a testimonial against Liverpool in 1992 but Harrison could not make it onto the field thanks to the affects of his injury.

 

It is thought he passed away at Stepping Hill Hospital after a short illness.

 

[AnfieldCop]

R.I.P Wayne YNWA

[£440,000]

RIP

 

Sad story

[forde]

Wow shocking news that. R.I.P Wayne Y.N.W.A

[Billy Dane]

Good grief I was only talking about him the other day in relation to teenagers with great potential that we had signed.

 

46 is no age at all. RIP

[Falconhoof]

Remember us signing him, poor fella.

[Cam]

Fecks sake. I remember seeing the report of his signing on Granada News. I was so excited yet worried 'cos it was a lot of money. He didn't seem to have much luck and had quite a s***ty time at various points... but by all accounts he didn't let it get to him & was a good lad.

 

R.I.P.

[Swipe]

Don't remember him to be honest. Was bit too young when he signed.

 

Very sad indeed though. Such fine margins for these young footballers.

[lfc4eva99]

RIP

[muleskinner]

terrible, poor fella.

[matty]

Really sad. RIP.

[smithdown]

RIP lad

[Case]

Remember the signing well. RIP

[Molby]

remember being really excited when we signed him

 

terrible news, really sad

[Cunny]

I'm old enough to remember us signing him

it was a very big deal at the time, in terms of the money and the media hand wringing at paying that much for a teenager.

 

sad news

[SkippyjonJones]

poor bastid.

RIP Wayne.

[melia]

very sad. RIP

[aka Dus]

Remember him signing. Bloody weird and sad how life can turn.

[charlie clown]

Terrible news - I think of all the players we have signed who didn't make it, he was the one that I would most liked to have seen as a regular first teamer. I never saw him play but I remember the buzz about him and I was dying for him to break through to the first team. RIP, Wayne.

[Cunny]

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/clubs/liverpool/article3964392.ece

 

Liverpool fans will say forlorn farewell to Wayne Harrison

 

Oliver Kay

 

A player whose life was once so rich in promise never reached the heights predicted for him, writes Oliver Kay

At 2.59pm on Sunday, Anfield will fall silent. There are times when football crowds celebrate a life with a minute’s applause, but in the case of Wayne Harrison, the supporters of Liverpool and Oldham Athletic will find that sombre, reflective silence is far more appropriate.

Harrison was the boy wonder who became the most expensive teenager in world football when, aged 17, he joined Liverpool in a £250,000 deal in January 1985. He was hyped as the next Kevin Keegan, the next Kenny Dalglish, the next Ian Rush, but he never made a first-team appearance in an injury-ravaged six-year spell at Liverpool.

He retired at 1991 at the age of 23, already a forgotten man. Last week, on Christmas Day, he died at Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport, aged 46, after suffering from pancreatic problems.

The silence that precedes Sunday’s FA Cup third-round tie will not be tinged with misty-eyed recollections of Harrison’s goalscoring prowess for either club. It will be filled, even among the few who glimpsed him in Oldham’s first team or Liverpool’s reserves, with the sadness at a talent unfulfilled and a life lost, leaving family and friends mourning the man who carried their hopes and dreams, as well as his own, as he set out on the road marked superstardom in the mid-1980s.

In some newspaper reports after Harrison’s death he was described as “the Wayne Rooney of his generation” or “the original Rooney”. On what basis, beyond a shared Christian name, it was not clear.

Both were teenage prodigies, but by the time Rooney became a household name before his 17th birthday, another poster boy for the Premier League era, Harrison had spent a decade on football’s scrapheap, working as a drayman for Robinsons Brewery. The final years of his life were a storyof unemployment, struggles on incapacity benefits, another legacy of all those knee injuries, and finally, tragically, ill health.

“It’s just so sad,” Phil Thompson, who managed Harrison as Liverpool’s reserve-team coach in the late 1980s, told The Times. “I saw Wayne a few years back and we were talking about the difficult times he had when he first went to Liverpool.

“Then he told me about all the operations he had since playing football and I just thought: ‘My goodness, you’ve had a hard time of it.’ Not only did the injuries end his playing career, they made it hard for him to live a normal life afterwards.”

Harrison never truly had a “normal life” once Liverpool, his boyhood team, had come calling. “It was a lot of money to pay for a very, very young boy,” Thompson said. “He seemed to find it difficult. He came in, trained and went back to Greater Manchester. He didn’t mix too much with the other lads and I think some of the younger lads, seeing that he had come in on a lot of money, thought it was arrogance at first, but I don’t think it was.

“For a couple of years, he stagnated. He wasn’t cutting the mustard as we’d hoped. We tried everything — the arm around the shoulder, the odd rollicking, all kinds of things, trying to do the best for him — and nothing worked.

“Then suddenly, in his fifth season [1989-90], it clicked and he started scoring goals for fun in the reserves. We used to have one-to-one chats and I remember him saying he felt the penny had dropped. He was incredible that season and I was pushing for him to be involved in the first-team squad.”

For a prolific goalscorer in the reserve team, the first team was so near yet so far, particularly with Peter Beardsley and Rush barring his way.

Then there were the injuries: serious knee ligament damage, a hernia, groin problems, a dislocated shoulder and, terrifyingly, the incident when he fell through a greenhouse as two team-mates jousted with each other while sitting on the shoulders of two others — on a night out during the reserves’ pre-season trip to Devon.

It was seen as typical of Harrison’s luck that he should suffer a 10in gash to an arm, which led to an emergency blood transfusion, during an ambulance workers’ strike.

Then came the final blow in May 1990 in the final moments of a Central League title-clinching game for Liverpool against Bradford City as Harrison suffered cruciate knee ligament damage when the opposition goalkeeper landed on him. He was sent for one operation after another, but, according to Thompson, he was “never the same again”. In the summer of 1991 he retired on medical advice.

In a rare interview, in 2002, Harrison informed The Times of his enthusiasm for his new life as a drayman, adding that he had two regrets: first that he had moved to Liverpool at such a young age, rather than continue his education at Oldham, and second that he had suffered such bad luck with injuries. “Nobody recognises me these days,” he said, “but I’m not bitter.”

The last recorded interview with Harrison was in a book called Football’s Lost Prodigies. It described him as “out of work [. . .], virtually penniless and surviving on measly incapacity benefits”. The author wrote of something upbeat in Harrison’s voice that hinted that an overdue piece of good fortune must be just around the corner. It was not.

Fortune never was on his side. In a sport littered with bad-luck stories and tales of what might have been, Wayne Harrison’s was already striking enough without this sad, sad ending.