Son of Hibs star speaks out on being 'bullied' while at Aston Villa under sacked coach Kevin MacDonald

Alan Brazil, the son of former Hibs cult hero Ally Brazil

“There was a time he shouted over at me in training and told me I wasn’t a player and I thought to myself ‘well, your day will come, that kind of behaviour is going to come back to bite you one day’,” Alan Brazil, the son of former Hibs cult hero Ally Brazil, said.

And that day came for MacDonald this week when Villa parted company with the 58-year-old former Liverpool player. MacDonald had been under investigation by the West Midlands club after Gareth Farrelly, a Villa trainee during the early ‘90s, had accused the Scot of “incredibly aggressive bullying” in a newspaper interview last year.

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Edinburgh-born Brazil was scouted by Aston Villa and signed a four-year contract with the Premier League club on July 5, 2001 – the day of his 16th birthday. He stayed for three of the four years, playing alongside the likes of Gary Cahill, Steven Davis and Gabriel Agbonlahor, but returned north of the Border in 2004 after failing to make it into first-team plans. While the managers at Villa changed almost on an annual basis back then, one constant on the training pitch was MacDonald. But that stability in the academy wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“Kevin MacDonald was a good coach, I don’t think anyone will disagree with that, but I can see why he has lost his job – he was a bully,” says Brazil, now 34 and working as a landscape gardener at Heriot-Watt University’s Riccarton campus.

Brazil had followed his dad’s post-Hibs career at Forfar. But leaving high school in Edinburgh to become a full-time footballer in Birmingham would have been tough for any teenager and he found it difficult to settle. Far from being sympathetic, MacDonald mocked Brazil’s homesickness.

“There were some players at Villa who didn’t want to go to training because of him,” adds Brazil. “I was homesick for the first year-and-a-half and there were times when I was allowed to go back to Edinburgh because that’s what I needed. He would make stupid little comments about that.”