Micky Fallon, one of the former players Bennell has been convicted of abusing, reveals the horrors he endured and asks how Crewe did not realise the coach was a risk when opponents called them ‘The paedophile lads’

There is a scar on my cheek that will always be there to remind me about my childhood. Over the years, I’ve got used to it being there, I suppose. But whenever anyone asked how I got that scar I would just say as little as possible and move on swiftly. It was easier that way because, if I said what really happened, that would mean explaining I used to be at Crewe Alexandra. I knew if I said those words I’d have to get my head in a space that took me back to that football club. And from the age of 18, since the day I left that club, I’d shut down that part of my life off and, until now, never wanted to revisit it.

The truth is not easy for me to explain. For 32 years, I denied everything. I read the interview with Andy Woodward that opened all this up and for a while I carried on pretending it hadn’t happened to me. Steve Walters, another of my old Crewe mates, was next and, though it hit me like a ton of bricks, I still couldn’t bring myself to admit straight away I was another one. It’s only now, after an awful lot of soul-searching, that I feel strong enough to do it. But it’s tough, really tough. It isn’t easy admitting you were one of Barry Bennell’s boys.

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To begin with, I thought Barry was brilliant. I was a 12-year-old from Plymouth and, for a kid in the mid-1980s, his house was like something out of a movie. He had a cinema room with the biggest TV I’d ever seen. There was a pool table and arcade machines and upstairs a room full of old football shirts and memorabilia. There was a Pyrenean dog and an Alsatian named Zico, after the Brazilian footballer. He kept a monkey and there was a puma wandering round the lounge. He’d somehow got this puma wild and tamed it. ‘Just don’t touch it,’ he’d say, ‘don’t go too near’. It would pace round the back of the sofa and you didn’t dare move.

Barry was charismatic – friendly, bubbly, chatty – and he went out of his way to make me feel like Crewe was the place to be. I was quite small for my age and he would always tell me how brave I was. He would big me up in front of all the other lads and I’d think: ‘This guy is great, I love this.’ He had this little trick with the ball as if to say: ‘Look at me.’ He could keep it on his knee, behind his head, all the flicks – stuff I’d never seen before. People call it freestyling now but he was doing all that in the 1980s.

Barry had seen me playing for an under-12s’ team called Prince Rock, run by Steve’s dad, in Plymouth. He’d asked me to go to Crewe for a trial and, naturally, my parents were concerned about me travelling so far. I’d never been away from home apart from a two-day school trip and they didn’t know Barry Bennell. But I was with Steve and they put their trust in Crewe. The club invited me back and, after that, I’d get the train to Crewe in my school holidays and stay with Barry. Lots of us did.

Everything changed at Christmas, 1984. I’d turned 13 that December and on Christmas Eve there were four of us staying overnight with him. We were play-fighting, mucking about, when his Alsatian came in. I went down to meet it. ‘Hello Zico.’ And it went for me, biting my face. It was pretty bad, with lots of blood. Everyone screamed, panicking, and Barry got the dog off me. It was obvious it needed stitches – it bled for two days – but he wouldn’t take me to hospital. ‘You don’t need to go to,’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine.’

Instead he put us all in his car and drove us into Manchester to get some plasters and ointment from a pharmacy. The pharmacist took one look at me and said I needed to go to hospital. I was upset, in shock, with my face bleeding. But Barry was adamant. ‘We will just sit there for hours and it would ruin Christmas,’ he said.

Play Video 7:38 Barry Bennell: unmasking of football paedophile who ruined young lives – video explainer

We got back in his car and, on the way back, he decided to do a detour into Moss Side. ‘Do you know where you are now?’ he said. ‘You’re in one of the worst parts of Manchester, you need to be careful now.’ There were groups of lads on the corner and it was getting dark. ‘This is my territory. These are gangs. You can’t even stop at the lights here. Don’t open your windows they’ll shoot you.’ Then he started slowing down as if he was going to stop. We were kids, terrified, we just wanted to get out of there.

Looking back now, I know it was deliberate – intimidation, scaremongering, call it what you like – and why he was trying to scare us. When we got back to his house he turned off the lights and put on a horror film – Nightmare on Elm Street. We sat on the sofa and I remember him saying to me: ‘You must be homesick. Come and have a hug if you’re a bit upset.’ It wasn’t unusual for him to be affectionate. But then he touched me. I flinched. But I thought it must have been an accident. Then it happened again, beneath a blanket. I was wearing shorts. The thing that really got me was his smile and his sheer look of ‘I can do this’. That’s when I panicked. I remember saying I had to move – and I did.

The next day, Christmas Day, I woke up and my whole world had changed. He had that look again. It was a smile, but it had a sinister side to it. I just remember that smile and the way he looked at me in the kitchen. ‘All right?’ he asked. It was intimidation but, at the same time, he was still being friendly, still keeping me onside. From that day on, I knew my time at Crewe would be blighted but I said nothing, too scared to mention it. We had a training session a few day laters and he started bigging me up again. In my head I was thinking: ‘Maybe it was an accident’ But twice?

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Nothing else happened on that trip. I went back to Plymouth and I think the next time I returned to Crewe was February half-term. My mum and dad had spoken to the club and I can just remember the inner fear – that feeling of ‘my God’ – when they told me I was staying with Barry again and that he’d be picking me up from the station.

On the train to Crewe I hoped it would be OK. ‘I want to be a football player and this is how I achieve that,’ I told myself. ‘Continue doing what you’ve been doing – concentrate, train, play, improve – and just hope it never happens again.’ But he’d tested the water. I knew, deep down, what was going to happen but again I was too scared to say.

I was sleeping on one of the top bunk beds when he came into my room that night and woke me up. I froze, I panicked. For a split second I thought: ‘Am I dreaming – is this real?’ But you know very quickly it’s real when someone is doing that to you. Although it was dark I could see him standing there and the silhouette of his wavy, curly hair. I was on the top bunk so I would have been at the perfect level for him.

He kept a monkey and there was a puma wandering round the lounge. He’d somehow got this puma wild and tamed it.

After that, there was one further occasion it happened to me, again in the middle of the night and the same room. But then it suddenly stopped, it never happened again as far as I thought or knew. Barry had gone down to Plymouth, along with the manager Dario Gradi, to ask my mum and dad about signing me when I turned 14 – and my mum could be quite vocal. ‘Why are you all single men at Crewe?’ she started asking.

They were invited to Crewe to have a look around and she started again. ‘Why are so many of you men single? Bit weird, isn’t it?’ I’ve asked her about it since and she just said she found it strange but didn’t mean anything by it – just a protective motherly instinct, I guess. But my personal view is that unsettled Barry and maybe he saw my parents weren’t pushovers.

After that, I got a very different Barry Bennell – the bully. ‘You’re a weird kid,’ he’d say. ‘You’re strange, you all are from the west country, you tractor boys.’ Suddenly I got the cold shoulder. Not long afterwards, we played in the Milk Cup in Ireland and I broke my arm during a game. We didn’t have a physio so Barry came on. ‘Come on, what’s wrong with you?’ he said. I told him I was in agony and I couldn’t move my arm. ‘Well, get off the pitch then.’ He just left me there, on the side, with a broken arm until one of the lads came to hospital with me. Barry wouldn’t even come with me to the hospital. I got back to the hotel that night, my arm in a sling, and he didn’t say a word. He just gave me a look. ‘Fuck you,’ it said.



It reached the stage where he would bawl me out so often after games, telling me I was shit, that I would think: ‘Well, at least if I’m shit that might stop you giving me an apprenticeship when I’m 16.’ I didn’t want to be at Crewe any longer. My heart wasn’t in it. I could have gone back to Plymouth Argyle, stayed at home and my football career probably would have gone in a very different direction. Yet Crewe did give me an apprenticeship and Barry was switched so he was in charge of the older boys – with me, among them. Even when I thought I’d escaped him, I couldn’t get away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Walters’ decision to speak out about the abuse he suffered prompted Micky Fallon, a former Crewe team-mate, to follow suit. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

That should have been the defining moment for me – the time to tell my parents I couldn’t go back to Crewe, and why. For whatever reason I didn’t have the balls to do it, too scared and with a feeling of guilt. I had another two years at Crewe and I hated every minute. I was miserable. I’d desperately wanted to be a footballer but when Dario Gradi and another coach, Kenny Swain, told me I was being released I can just remember thinking: ‘Thank fuck for that.’ It should have been one of the worst days of my life, my dream broken, but it was actually one of the best. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. They told me Exeter City had been in touch, and I could go there on loan. I said: ‘I want to go – and I want to go tomorrow.’ I went and closed that chapter down, and from that day on I put my horrid memories as a child at Crewe Alexandra in a little box in the box of my mind, never to be opened again.

I ended up having a semi-professional career at a number of clubs – Saltash United, Liskeard Athletic, Truro City, Taunton and Tiverton Town – but for a while in my early-20s I went down the road of self-destruction. I’d got to a stage of my life where I’d become alcohol dependent and thought: ‘I really don’t want to be here any more,’ on one occasion trying to take my own life before the intervention of a police negotiator, for three hours, to stop me. I spent two years going through counselling to put my life back together, fighting my demons.

Since then I’ve rebuilt my life. I have a successful career as a civil servant, three wonderful children and an incredibly supportive family and partner, Gayle. I’ve spent 20 years working from the bottom to where I am today. But I’m still an emotional person and I have bad days. I’ve had flashbacks and panic attacks. And I’m angry, too that my parents put their trust in Crewe to ensure I was safe and that club didn’t do more to protect me and all those other children. Crewe let my parents down in all of this too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Micky Fallon, centre, with Chris Unsworth, left, and Steve Walters outside Liverpool crown court after Barry Bennell was convicted of abusing them and other young players. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

It’s important to remember this next bit: the abuse was not just an odd occasion, it was over many years with God knows how many boys. 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 about him. Because everybody else seemed to know. Playing for Crewe, we’d get it all the time. ‘The paedophile lads,’ opponents called us. We played Manchester United, Manchester City, Everton, Liverpool, all of them, and it was a common theme. When we got a bit older we studied at the same college as the United and City lads. ‘Oh, you’re from the paedophile club, eh?’ they’d joke.

Quick guide Crewe Alexandra statement Show Hide An extract from Crewe's statement after Barry Bennell was convicted: "The club would therefore like to reiterate that it was not aware of any sexual abuse by Mr Bennell, nor did it receive any complaint about sexual abuse by him, either before or during his employment with the club ... The club wishes to make it absolutely clear that had it had any suspicion or belief that Mr Bennell was committing acts of abuse, either before, during or after he left the club’s employment, the club would have informed the police immediately. The thoughts of everyone at the club go to the victims and their families at this difficult time."



Barry had so many boys staying – five, six, seven at a time – that I’m sure he purposefully invited more children than there were beds. That way, there would always be boys sleeping with him. ‘You can have mine,’ he’d say, ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa.’ And yet, the next morning you’d see Barry come out of his bedroom as well. Andy, the poor lad, was often there. Others, too. It would freak me out. At bedtime, I would actually run to the bunk beds.

The worst part for me personally is that, speaking to some of his other victims, I’ve also found out now they witnessed him abusing me while I was asleep. I had some kind of control over what I knew, but that has opened up something in my mind I don’t have control over and led to lots of other questions. How many times? What did he do? That’s been incredibly hard to digest.

Until now, I couldn’t tell anyone what happened and even when Andy’s story came out I carried on with that pretence. I was walking past WH Smith in Reading railway station when I saw Andy’s face on the front of the Guardian. ‘Bloody hell, is that Woody?’ I read it – and my heart sank. Then I put the paper down and I pretended I’d never seen it.

I’m 46 now and, after all these years of living with a secret, I actually feel better for talking about it

That was how my brain was working – if you tell yourself you never saw it, you really can convince yourself it never happened. But then the story was picked up by the television news. Then, for the next 48 hours, it seemed wherever I went it was ‘Andy Woodward, Andy Woodward …’ Texts started arriving: ‘Have you seen that lad at Crewe? You were at Crewe – what’s going on?’ I denied everything. My brother rang. My mum and dad rang. ‘I remember little Woody – shit, nothing happened to you, did it?’ I still denied everything.

Then I got another call from my brother. ‘You better sit down,’ he said. ‘Steve Walters has come out as a victim of Barry Bennell.’ That hit me really hard. Steve and I had spent six years together at Crewe and were mates before our Crewe days. And that, in my head, said: ‘Now you’ve got a decision to make, mate – you either accept it happened for the first time ever, or you carry on pretending.’ I carried on pretending for a few days and then I watched Andy, Steve, Chris Unsworth and Jason Dunford on the Victoria Derbyshire show and saw their bravery, pouring out their hearts. I rang my partner, then my brother and I told him I was coming to see him. ‘You’re going to tell me something about Crewe, aren’t you?’ he said.

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I’m 46 now and, after all these years of living with a secret, I actually feel better for talking about it. I don’t have to pretend any more, I feel I can get on with my life and accept past events. I now have a journey ahead involving counselling to help me move on. I’m proud that I’ve been asked to be an ambassador of the Offside Trust, the organisation that has been set up to help victims of child sexual abuse. Supporting others in similar situations will never be easy. However I already feel that having this role is helpful to me in my journey.

My biggest regret, like many others, was my silence. It’s brought me huge guilt over the years. If I’d broken that silence it could have prevented the abuse for so many others. But we all feel that burden and regularly question ourselves about why we kept quiet. I hope my work with the trust can help provide that awareness to encourage children of today to have that courage if something doesn’t feel right to speak out and tell someone.