Speaking on The Wednesday Til I Die Podcast, Tommy Spurr has opened up on the problems he had with Gary Megson during his time at Sheffield Wednesday.
The defender played over 200 games for the Owls, but he was forced out of the club in 2011 by Megson, and there has always been a cloud of mystery over what happened between the pair.
However, Spurr has now shared his side of the story.
“It’s something people don’t get I don’t think. The way I was treated in the end and how Megson made me feel as a footballer and a person, like I left with a bitter taste, even though I had all those good times, it tainted it,” Spurr said
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The defender was then asked to expand on what happened between him and Megson, to which he replied:
“Plain and simple, like with any job or industry, if someone is not having you, you can take it.
“If he came in and said ‘look, you’re not playing and you can leave’ that’s all you want and you can accept it, even if you don’t like it, you can accept someone saying it’s their opinion, end of, it’s fine.
“But for all the bravado he gave it and the hard-man act, threatening to do this that and the other, he sent me to train one place when he’d told everyone else to train at another place. I kept training on my own and then with the academy, and then he said I wasn’t allowed to do that, not allowed at the club.
“He never gave me a reason, he wouldn’t speak to me, that’s my big bug-bear. He couldn’t even say to me ‘you’ve got no future here, you can leave’ and then he got the club secretary to ring me and say ‘you’re not allowed at the ground, don’t come in’ and this was in March, so I was like ‘what am I meant to do?’”
“It was just the fact that he’d said something, we played Plymouth and we got beat and I’d done really well, even though we’d got beat. He came in the changing room afterwards, battered us and said he wanted me to be pinning people up against the wall, but that’s not me, I’ll show it by working hard, I won’t be grabbing people up against the wall, that’s not my character,”
Bear in mind that Spurr was only 23 years old at the time, and you can see that this is a very harsh way to treat a footballer.
Of course, new managers coming in will have players they don’t want, but there’s no need to disrespect someone in this way.
Megson was of course a great manager for Wednesday, but it seems as though his man-management abilities could have done with a bit of work.
Spurr certainly deserved better than this, that’s for sure.
