UTD Unscripted Pat McGibbon: How United Helped Me

I thought I was going over to play in an A or B team game, but Sir Alex threw me straight into a Reserve team game against Aston Villa. I was marking Dwight Yorke and Dalian Atkinson, God bless him, so it was a baptism of fire! But I did quite well and they offered for me to come back for a three week trial that summer. The gaffer was really smart and always gave life lessons as well. I did well in the three weeks I was over and I’ll always remember one day after training at the Cliff, we were getting ready to get changed and he brought me out along with Dion Dublin. I’m big, but Dion’s bigger than me! He made me do one-v-ones with Dion, who was just about to sign for the club as well, and they ran us into the ground. After that he called me up and told me they were going to offer me a three-year deal. 

I moved over in August 1992. The following March, I was back home in Lurgan and went to the local park with Phillip, just kicking the ball around. The two of us, 18 or 19, playing like normal lads. It didn’t matter that I was a Manchester United player back home for just a few days; we were just best friends kicking the ball around the field.

The next month, Phillip was gone.

That’s a day I won’t forget.

I was training as normal and at that stage I was staying in digs under a landlady called Brenda Gosling, who was terrific with me. I came back from training and she asked me to sit down.

She said she’d received a phone call saying that Phillip had taken his own life. 

After that, they arranged for me to get home. Going from the digs back to Lurgan was surreal. It was like I was in a nightmare. I then had to go through the funeral and the wake.

The gaffer was terrific. When you look at it now, when we talk about mental health and the issues surrounding self-harm and suicide, those things weren’t spoken about. The education wasn’t there and I had to deal with it without that, but the gaffer saw it as very personal, which I totally understand. The family appreciated that. He just said: “Look, take as much time as you need and only come back when you’re ready to come back.” 

In all honesty, and I think this was hugely important, I went back quite soon after the funeral because my mates had all moved away to university, making their own lives, and I just loved football so much that it just became my outlet. I say now that I couldn’t have been at United at a better time and I just loved my time at the club. My reaction to everything was to throw myself into making a career. 

It was very, very difficult, of course. Especially in that first year. I hadn’t been at United long and was still getting over the homesickness anyway. It’s a big ask for a kid at that age. I was probably luckier that I went over to Manchester as a first-year pro, so I had a couple of years’ extra maturity, I suppose.

I got on without really speaking about Phillip to anybody. Looking back, I just parked the bus and moved on and focused on my football. I moved up the ranks and, early in the 1995/96 season, was in the squad to go to Rotor Volgograd for a UEFA Cup tie. Me and Pilks – Kevin Pilkington – were rooming together. I remember getting to the hotel, looking around and going: right, this isn’t great? We were told that we’d brought our own chefs and we’d brought baked beans and that, so we knew it wasn’t first class in a five-star hotel! I just remember getting into bed and my feet hanging out of the bed. I’m lay there thinking: I wonder how Pally’s feeling with this?