Former Aston Villa and Wolves winger Tony Daley decides it’s time his tales were brought to book

Instead, they had already been and gone.

Daley arrived at Molineux having played 290 games and scored 38 goals during nearly a decade at Villa in which he also earned seven England caps.

And yet the winger would make only 49 more appearances as a professional, after being hit by a series of serious injuries.

Revealed for the first time in his recently released autobiography, The Daley Record, is the fact the ill-fated £1.25million move across the Midlands should possibly not have happened at all.

“I found out years later there had been some concerns about my knee during the medical and the doctors wanted to take a closer look,” explains Daley. “But Graham Taylor, Wolves manager at the time and who I’d obviously played under at Villa, was eager to get the deal done and told them he was happy with it. Graham wanted his man and that was that.”

Trouble began in pre-season when it emerged Daley was suffering with a cruciate ligament injury sustained unknowingly months earlier while still at Villa. After several months rest he made his debut off the bench during a 3-3 draw with Millwall in late October, only for his knee to give way and force him off within minutes. Sidelined for the rest of the season, Daley would then suffer a ruptured patella tendon the following summer.

“You wouldn’t mind so much if it was a few niggling injuries but to be hit with two massive ones in such a short space of time, that was incredibly tough,” he says.

While the situation was frustrating for Wolves and their supporters, the physical and mental impact on Daley was considerable.

“I felt like the world had collapsed on me,” he says. At one point the stress became so bad, Daley developed irritable bowel syndrome. Failing to talk more about his struggles was, he claims, the biggest regret of his playing career.

“It was different then,” he says. “There was a fear that if you admitted you were struggling it would be seen as a sign of weakness. Team-mates would tell you to just get on with it. and the view of the outside world was: ‘You are a footballer earning all this money, what do you have to be upset about?’

“During the last World Cup you saw England players talk openly about their well-being and mental health. That is the way it should be.

“I was fortunate to have Graham Taylor, who was very forward thinking and at one point provided me access to a sport psychologist. That helped but at the time it was kept quiet. These days players will talk quite openly about using a psychologist. It was a few years later through conversations I found out a few of my Wolves team-mates had visited one. At the time, you would never admit it.”

Daley’s candidness when discussing his experience at Wolves may come as a surprise to those who know him as an almost universally positive spirit and it needs pointing out that, while never less than honest, his book is for the most part a happy story about a boy who made his dream come true through maximising his natural talent.

“I still remember as a 10-year-old being asked what I wanted to be,” says Daley, who grew up in Newtown, Birmingham, a short bus ride from Villa Park. “My answer was always a footballer. I wanted to play for Aston Villa and England and I was going to do everything in my power to make it happen.”

Daley has loved everything about football for as long as he can remember. As a child, the only thing which rivalled it was tapdancing, in which he became proficient enough to appear in a stage show starring Toyah Wilcox.

“I wish I’d kept it going but from about the age of 11 football completely took over,” he smiles. “I tell you what, though, I’m sure tapdancing is part of the reason I had such quick feet on the pitch. I certainly needed them!”

As a youngster, Daley idolised Mark Walters, another winger who grew up near Villa Park and became a professional at his boyhood club. He can still vividly recall sitting on older brother David’s shoulders on the Holte End as they watched Villa play Ipswich late in the 1980-81 title-winning season. Barely four years later he would be making his senior debut, in April 1985, aged just 17.

While there will always be a debate as to how much injuries prevented Daley from realising his full potential, the fact many Villa supporters who watched him play would list him among their favourite-ever players says everything about his legacy as a true cult hero.

That is something which has hit home while promoting the book, the writing of which he describes as being both ‘humbling and cathartic’.

“People had been asking me to do one for years but it wasn’t something I had really considered,” he says. “But then one day my son was showing my eldest granddaughter, Maia, some clips of me playing and she kept on turning round and looking at me and saying: ‘That’s not you, Pops!’.

“It was then I thought, why not leave some history for my family to read, to let them know the story?

“It has been humbling to look back. When you are in the middle of it all, it is just your life. But when you start remembering some of the stories and realise the things you achieved, you think: ‘Wow, what a great time that was’. I thrived off getting people off their seats.”

There has also been the chance to reconnect with former team-mates and colleagues including Walters, Andy Townsend and Mick McCarthy, the latter of whom hired Daley in 2007 as Wolves’ head of sport science and conditioning, a post he would hold for nearly a decade.

They have written three of the 11 testimonials which feature at the end of the book, while Ron Atkinson and Steve Bull have both penned forewords in tribute to a man generally regarded as one of the nicest in the sport.

His friendly persona, however, should never be viewed as a weakness. Now coaching elite and amateur athletes as part of his 7Daley health and fitness business, Daley has the same determination and steel as when he when he first joined Villa as a 14-year-old apprentice. He lives by his convictions, too. At the age of 55, he looks at least 10 years younger.

Daley belongs to a generation of players whose careers seem so recent and of which highlights can be viewed within seconds online. And yet his book also serves as a reminder of how much sport and society has changed. Daley’s first professional contract, signed after he had made his debut, was for £150-a-week, a far cry from the thousands now earned by academy players.

“I thought I’d hit the big time,” he laughs. “I’ve no issue with the money players get these days. They are entertainers and the better players are never motivated by it anyway. They want success.

“But do some lose their way, or get into a comfort zone because they get a lot of money at the start? Probably. It is the same as in any other profession.

“I was brought up being told if you want to achieve in life you have to work for it. Nothing was ever going to be too much hard work for me.”

The Daley Record, co-written with Simon Goodyear and published by Morgan Lawrence, is available to buy now. For more information on 7Daley visit 7D-fitforlife.co.uk