FORMER Blackburn Rovers winger Howard Gayle, who battled racism throughout his playing career decades ago, has blasted football chiefs for the lack of black coaches in high-profile jobs today.

There are only three black managers in all of the 92 Premier League and Football League clubs – Chris Hughton with Brighton in the Championship, and Keith Curle (Carlisle) and Marcus Bignot (Grimsby) in League Two.

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Hughton last week voiced his concerns on the issue, saying: “The lack (of black managers), particularly at the top level, is very much a concern.”

And Gayle, who starred for Rovers between 1987 and 1992 and has gone on to work as a campaigner for Show Racism the Red Card and Kick It Out, claims it’s still the case that they ‘aren’t trusted’.

The former winger revealed in his autobiography ‘61 Minutes in Munich’, released last year, that he once squared up to the ‘Anfield Iron’ Tommy Smith when the Liverpool stalwart racially abused him in training.

He endured years of monkey chants from the terraces and was branded a ‘troublemaker’ for standing up for himself.

Gayle was Rovers’ first black player when he arrived at Ewood Park, not many years after he’d been the first to play for the then all-conquering Reds.

But when his career came to and end and he tried to get into coaching, those barriers were still all too apparent.

He feels it’s still the case today.

Gayle told the Lancashire Telegraph: “Blackburn turned out to be the last club that I actually signed a contract with.

“I spent a month at Halifax, which didn’t work out, and I went and had a trial up at Carlisle, which was an absolute joke.

“So I just decided that maybe this is the time to look for another career.

“I took coaching badges and I quickly realised that a lot of the rhetoric I’d had to endure coming into football as a black player, I was now starting to see the same stereotypes within the coaching fraternity.

“It became nigh-on impossible to get a coaching job because black players weren’t seen as figures who could develop other players, lead players forward and lead clubs forward.

“I ended up correcting car bumpers for one of my friends.”

Gayle left Anfield four years before the arrival of John Barnes, who he says dealt with the racist abuse in a different way to himself.

But Barnes – who was more likely to turn the other cheek and back-heel the bananas thrown at his feet off the pitch instead of launching them back into the stand they came from – has also made public his frustrations at not being able to get a management job since being sacked by Tranmere in 2009.

“When you look at a high-profile player like Barnesy, he struggled to get a coaching job, and so it becomes increasingly difficult for the rest of us,” said Gayle.

“When you look at the contribution of black players into the English leagues, we’ve made a huge contribution, yet we’re not able to be trusted as coaches or as managers.”

Gayle fought tooth and nail to stablish himself as a black player in intolerant times, and he draws some parallels between that and the lack of gay footballers who feel capable of revealing their sexuality now.

But he also believes that if a group were to ‘come out’ together, like FA chairman Greg Clarke suggested earlier this month, they’d be surprised at the support they received.

Gayle explained: “There are similarities with discrimination, and it’s something I have to deal with through the work I do with Show Racism the Red Card, with homophobia.

“It’s been widely commented on within the game of players who were gay, and it would have been nigh-on impossible when we were playing for them to come out and be what they were because football itself wouldn’t have accepted it.

“There was this macho, hard image.

“Maybe if there’s a collection of players who are going to open up about their sexuality.

“We’ll probably have to wait a few years for them to do it as, unfortunately, we have a thing in the British game where if you’re different you can be ridiculed by people on the terraces.

“For me, when I received racial abuse from the terraces it inspired me but I don’t know how it would affect somebody regarding their sexuality.

“But I think if there was a group of players to come out and disclose who they are, I think that those players would themselves be surprised at the support they’d get, surprised by how many people on those terraces of a weekend are gay.

“They would certainly get my support.

“You are what you are and people years ago used to think that being gay was a choice, and that’s the ignorance of it.”