Dwight Yorke enjoyed a brilliant career, tearing up the Premier League with Aston Villa, winning the treble with Manchester United and playing until he was 37. And he did it all despite being labelled a playboy.
Everybody knows what former Aston Villa manager John Gregory said about Dwight Yorke in the summer of 1998.
Having recently lost his star striker to Manchester United for £12.6million, Gregory confessed to some dark thoughts.
“Dwight openly stated to me that he wanted to play for Manchester United and not Aston Villa,” he said. “That really hurt me, and if I had a gun I would have shot him.”
Fortunately for Yorke, the performances of Villa strikers Julian Joachim and Dion Dublin cooled Gregory’s lust for murder.
But Yorke would receive further threats — less well-documented ones — over the course of his four-year Manchester United career.
In the early 2000s, around the time of Eminem’s stalker anthem ‘Stan’, the anonymous owner of dwight-yorke.co.uk carried out some mild blackmail against the striker.
“I wrote to Dwight Yorke a few months ago asking if he would be interested in buying this domain name,” they wrote. “I also offered to write a fan site for him at no cost. All I asked was for a small mention in the Manchester United matchday programme.”
A fair offer, and no mention of guns. Here was an opportunist simply seeking a small favour from an idol.
But Yorke never replied to the troubled fan.
“Now I imagine Dwighty boy must be quite busy with his life,” the angry webmaster wrote. “But he couldn’t even be bothered to send a short reply saying that he wasn’t insterested [sic] and for me to stick it.”
To reiterate: ‘Stan’ had just come out.
Weirdly, the webmaster’s revenge against Yorke involved posting photos of Katie Price, as well as links to her work, on dwight-yorke.co.uk. (Yorke and Price were dating at the time.)
Although it’s hard to see how this would have troubled Yorke, it was clearly an attempt to shame the footballer.
The aggressor even vowed to keep up the fight: “Everytime [sic] he changes a girlfriend, this site will change with him as well! A bit like a shadow you could say.”
United success
Back in 1998, Yorke was leaving defenders chasing shadows, you could say, after forming a deadly strike partnership with Andy Cole.
For three years the duo, born less than three weeks apart, exploited the final throes of the 4-4-2 era.
Strangely, though, that partnership might never…
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