It’s now been confirmed by the club website that Don Murray, one of the greats of my Cardiff City supporting life, has passed away at the age of 80. There was a message on social media from a reliable source this morning giving this news and now we’ve had it confirmed by the club he served for thirteen years, most of them as captain, through most of the sixties and well into the seventies.
There had been a Just Giving type appeal for Don last season as news emerged that he was battling Lewy body Dementia, so news of his death should not have come as a surprise, but, as I mentioned on a messageboard this morning, Don had an indestructible quality to him as exemplified both by his longevity as a player and also by the fact for, someone of my age in particular, he was just always there!
Don was there for my first game watching City in 1963 when I was 7 and in 1975 when I was 19 – I literally grew from boy to man with Don Murray leading the City team out with the number five shirt on his back!
That feeling of him always being there lingers because it was quite literally true. Only Phil Dwyer and Tom Farquharson have played more games for the club than Don, but he’s a record holder as far as consecutive league games goes. There was a time in the late sixties when City were transforming from perennial Second Division strugglers to one of the best sides in the division when our back four was always Carver, Murray, Harris, Bell and for three years from 1968 until 1971, Don racked up an unbroken run of 146 appearances, while right back Dave Carver was playing 130 plus straight games as well if I remember rightly.
I’m pretty confident that Don holds another club record as I cannot believe that there is another City player from Great Britain that was born further away from Cardiff than he was. He hailed from a village called Duffus which is slightly further north of us than Dingwall, the home of Ross County, where John Buchanan hails from.
As for Don the player, I can remember being very impressed as a kid by the fact that he had captained a Rest of the World youth eleven against England youth at Wembley- that’s an indicator of youthful promise, but I don’t see how anyone could claim that his career reached the heights such an honor suggested, then again, he would to have been, say, a Beckenbauer to have done so!
For me, Don’s time at City could be viewed in two distinct parts – pre (Brian) Harris and post Harris. I’d categories the first phase as raw, but pretty effective, with the occasional spectacular own goal (one against Millwall springs to mind) and loss of discipline (although I’m not sure his record in that part of the game was really as bad as it was painted at the time).
Don needed a steadying hand alongside him and that came with one of the all time great City signings I’d say when you consider how little we paid for him. Don became one of the second tier’s best centre halves with Brian Harris alongside him.
Was he good enough for the First Division? I think we would have found out if we’d been promoted in 70/71 because I cannot believe Jimmy Scoular would have left his captain out. I reckon he would have coped with it, with one of the reasons for that opinion being that he was a better footballer than he was often given credit for – some evidence to back up this claim being offered here with the superb cross he puts in for our second goal.
Like so many defenders of his era, Don would have had to modify his game to cope in the 2020s, but how modern Cardiff City could do with a leader like Don and how we could do with a centreback who could keep himself as fit as he did!
I’ll finish by recalling a night well after Don had retired when he and several other members of the 70/71 squad were invited to an event in 2011 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the win over Real Madrid. The occasion offered a reminder of how softly spoken Don was, but I was most struck by how he and his team mates seemed so grateful to be given the chance to meet with fans to celebrate one of the great nights of their careers – Don, along with all of the other players present, came across as top blokes!
RIP
