Finals Place Somehow Eluded Serial Medal Winner Andy

It says something about a player if he can win so much and still feel a shade unfulfilled. Such regret is a direct result of the burning ambition that helped produce such a warrior on the pitch in the first place.

Andy Gray collected League Championship, European Cup Winners Cup, FA Cup and League Cup winners’ medals, plus 20 Scottish caps, sundry individual awards and the honour of once being Britain’s most expensive player.

But the last month or so has brought home to him the stand-out omission from his outstanding playing CV.

“I was very disappointed not to go and play in a World Cup,” he told us in an exclusive interview from the Middle East. “I played in many qualifying games and should have gone to a couple of finals.

“I look on that as a frustration in my career. I thought I should really have gone to Argentina in 1978 and Spain four years later.”

In the countdown to the tournament hosted by England’s conquerors in Atlanta last night, Gray scored twice in a victory at home to Finland, one of them a volley that was voted Scotland’s goal of the season. But he was sent off in a qualifier away to Czechoslovakia and handed a three-match ban.

He was still named in Ally McLeod’s initial squad for the finals but, despite a fine performance in front of the manager in Villa’s 3-0 win at Albion in the spring, he missed the decisive cut as Joe Jordan, Kenny Dalglish and Derek Johnstone were selected at his expense.

Rather than spending time in South America, the striker worked on ITV’s World Cup panel that summer alongside Pat Crerand, Kevin Keegan and Elton John.

He didn’t play an international game for two years after his dismissal for retaliation in Prague but returned against Austria in what proved to be McLeod’s final game and was then picked by Jock Stein to face Norway.

After his record-breaking move to Wolves in September, 1979, Gray won another 13 caps and scored in a 4-1 win over Portugal and twice against Canada.

There might have been more appearances but a late-season Wolves-Arsenal game – largely meaningless for those with Molineux interests at heart but distantly relevant in the chase for European places – prevented him from playing in the Scotland v Northern Ireland clash later that weekend.

“If missing out on the 1978 World Cup had been a big blow, 1982 was even worse,” he wrote in his autobiography, Gray Matters. “Although I was at Wolves and we weren’t a great side, I’d played nearly all the qualifying matches and thought I’d done well.”

Gray saw himself as a strong contender alongside Dalglish, Jordan or Steve Archibald and added. “When Jock called me at home and said he was taking Paul Sturrock of Dundee United instead, I was flabbergasted…..

“….Looking back, I’d have to say my domestic form had been patchy. We were up and down and maintaining consistency was difficult. I was the sort of forward who was completely reliant on service and, in a poor team, that was sometimes in short supply.

“So my international career stalled again and I spent another World Cup in the TV studios, this time at the BBC with Bob Wilson and Emlyn Hughes.”

Although Gray contributed strongly enough to Wolves’ immediate and surprise promotion under Graham Hawkins in 1982-83, his international career was in decline.

He surprisingly won only one cap while becoming a multi champion at Everton – that against Iceland in the mid-1980s – so he was much less hurt when Alex Ferguson rang him with the news that he wouldn’t be taking him to the Mexico World Cup in 1986.

By then, he was in his second spell with Villa, where Graham Turner was manager, and now has to live with the consolation prize of having gone to World Cups in France, Japan and Korea, Portugal and Qatar as a pundit.

Talking of which, in the wake of the June 4 story we wrote about Andy, there is indeed a follow-up to what the future might hold for he and his long-time studio colleague, Richard Keys.

We caught him in reflective mood both about his long stint in Qatar and about his flirtations with past World Cups and he concluded: “I was one of the best players in British football, had just won the PFA Young Player of the Year and PFA Players’ Player of the Year awards in England but Ally McLeod felt I wasn’t good enough to be in Argentina.

“Not going to a finals is one small omission among all the things I achieved as a player but an omission nonetheless.

“As for the TV work in Qatar, it has been wonderful but it’s time to come home; time to see more of the family. Not that I will be sitting on my backside.

“We still have ideas which we’re going to set in motion. The plan is to let the World Cup happen and take the summer off, then be doing something after that.”

*Ex-Wolves midfielder and backroom man Rob Kelly is in Slovakia with Bolton for the week after being appointed as the Championship newcomers’ assistant coach.