Massively Violent & Decidedly Average

by Lee Howey

  Today all this sounds incredible, but back then it was accepted practice. Bosman took his case to the European Court of Justice, claiming that this interfered with his right as an EU citizen to freedom of movement. In December 1995 the court ruled in his favour. Since then, it has not been possible for clubs to demand transfer fees for out-of-contract players joining other clubs within the EU, and the number of EU citizens in a single team is unlimited (well, you can only have eleven, but you know what I mean). It seems unlikely that the 2016 Brexit vote will see a return to the old rules in the UK.

  Too late for me, up shit-creek in 1991, this completely transformed footballers’ employment. Before Bosman, players wanted to be transferred for big money as they received a portion of the fee. To be told by your club you could leave on a free transfer was a dent to the ego before 1995. Players today will happily see out their contract and leave on a free transfer because the signing-on fee at their next club could be – and often is – enormous.

  Jean-Marc Bosman is one of the single biggest causes of Premier League footballers now being so incredibly well paid and having such power. But the zillionaires he helped to create have done little to thank him. He lost his money, ended up on benefits and descended into alcoholism. In 2013 he was jailed for twelve months for a drunken assault.

  • • •

  Barred from playing before all that, I ended up taking a job at BT at the instigation of my then girlfriend, who would eventually become my wife. I had saved enough money from my years in Belgium to put down a deposit on a house in Nookside in Sunderland. It was a two-bedroom semi, the sort of mansion that you would expect for £36,000, and it ensured that I was away from Norman and Yvonne.

  Entry to the company would require five O Levels, so I dazzled them with my qualifications in English language, maths and economics, as well as two others that I lied about, before I was placed in the post room at Swan House, a plug-ugly office block at the Newcastle end of the Tyne Bridge. Until recently, the company had been called British Telecom, but then the wackier element took over and the name was changed to BT.

  My job at that place would not have put undue strain on an idiot. I read the letters, designated where they needed to go to by giving them a reference number and dropped them into trolleys, which were then shoved around the building by others who would lob mail at whomever it was for. That was about it. My duties would not take long and when they were done, the rest of the day was mine to play keepie-uppie back in the mail room. Obviously we couldn’t do that every single working day. No, sir. Sometimes we played cricket instead. We made a parcel tape ball and someone provided a bat. My batting average was 31.67; quite respectable.

  One of the other menial tasks I would carry out during my meteoric rise in the world of office clerking, in between prolonged periods of arsing about, was to enter the flexi-time for various other staff members into the work sheets. A few of the staff were old friends of mine from school. They tended to clock up a few extra hours between them when I did this.

  Years later, the football writer for the Sunderland Echo, Geoff Storey, would write match reports including regular descriptions of me as ‘the gangling BT engineer’. This was quite an exaggeration. To this day I have yet to scale a telegraph pole and would imagine that it takes years to become a qualified BT engineer, whereas a monkey could have done my job. I also took exception to ‘gangling’ – I hadn’t gangled in years by the time Mr Storey was writing about me.

  Actually, to conclude that a monkey could have done it is not technically correct, but only because certain Health & Safety Executive approved codes of practice prohibit other primates from entering the workplace. The job paid the bills, but wasn’t at all challenging; and why it required five O Levels to play cricket and post letters I would never know. But that was the requirement and eventually I was asked to provide my exam certificates.

  This was a worry because someone had recently been given the bullet for lying about his qualifications, which was precisely what I had done. I couldn’t possibly pass two more O Levels before the end of the week, but I could attain the certificates. Forgeries of course, courtesy of a friend who worked for Edward Thompson’s, the printers. I awarded myself English literature and history, laminated them and thereby wriggled out of the problem. I decided against a PhD in forensic psychology as that may have aroused suspicion.

  • • •

  All good fun, but I missed football terribly and was doing all I could to get back to it. At BT there was a fax machine – at that time the last word in communications technology – and every day at 9 a.m. I would fax the FA in London to ask when I would be released by Hemptinne. In October 1991, after exactly 364 days of limbo, some sense prevailed and I was indeed released and free to play non-contractual football. This meant that I was still unable to play professionally for a salary, but could receive expenses – hopefully plenty of them.

  I knew Kenny Mitchell, who was from Sunderland, but a former Newcastle player. He was managing Seaham Red Star, and I began pre-season training with them to get back into condition. I wasn’t allowed to play for them, even in friendlies, until I was freed. As soon as possible I signed the forms and would be paid £60 expenses per game.

  So desperate was I to play football that I signed for another team to play on Sundays. This was Plains Farm Working Men’s Club for a ten-pint signing-on fee and £25 per game (they matched my terms). I was in a league that was a far cry from the glamour and mystique of Highbury, Anfield or even Roker Park. It was even a far cry from playing in the middle of cow fields in Hemptinne. But it was football of a variety known to men with allotments as ‘proper football’. In the technical arena of Belgian football I was revered as the most aggressive centre-forward that teammates and opposition alike had ever seen. In the Sunderland Sunday League, I was just one of many.

  My first competitive game back was for Plains Farm against Lakeside; a derby match (ooooh) and a reminder of what Sunday league football was all about. Lakeside’s centre-forward was a tough nut called Craggsy. He was being marked by my mate Keithy ‘Robbo’ Robinson, who wasn’t the meekest of blokes either, and there was much mutual antipathy and niggling.

  We defended a corner and I was on the edge of our penalty area. The ball was cleared and I was on to it, breaking away with not much ahead to stop me. I passed the last defender but was curious as to why the goalkeeper was not even looking at me.

  It was because he could not avert his eyes from the scene at the other end of the pitch, which if filmed could have been inserted seamlessly into Reservoir Dogs. Robbo was on top of Mr Craggs, developing their relationship by repeatedly punching him in the face. Even I was shocked. Such a spirited disagreement in today’s Premier League would result in headlines of ‘Football’s Shame’ and the like, as well as a ten-match ban for one or both players. The referee in 1991, Charlie Tye, also took a dim view.

  The protagonists were dragged apart, the tip of Craggy’s nose by now within the vicinity of his left ear. Standing in a puddle of warm blood, Charlie summoned them both before passing sentence.

  He firmly pronounced: ‘Now that’s it! Shake hands and I want to know nowt more about it.’

  My jaw went south. Evidently Charlie considered this to be a sufficiently punitive measure and continued with the rest of the game.

  It felt great to be back.

  Plains Farm was one of the better sides and the broad standard of the league was still fairly high. Aside from Robbo, other useful players included Steve Golightly, the Callaghan brothers, John Gamble, Kenny Mitchell, Kevin Todd and a few others. This wasn’t the Champions League, but trust me when I say that these men knew what they were doing on a football pitch. Plains Farm had won the FA Sunday Cup final at the Hawthorns in 1990, a feat they repeated in 2014 at Ewood Park, so the standard remains high even in the current era.

  Violence was endemic. I have a graphic memory of a particular punch in the ear I received from an opponent. I was getting the better of him and he
was frustrated, although ear-punching was the sort of thing that this bloke would have categorised as recreation. It was best not to take such things personally in this routinely vicious environment, and the £25 per game I was receiving was well earned. Remarkably, we were all insured, so it seems unlikely that there were many actuaries among the spectators.

  • • •

  At the end of the 1991–92 season, I moved from Seaham Red Star and up a couple of divisions to Bishop Auckland in the Northern Premier League. I was called by Bishop’s manager, Harry Dunn, as was another Plains Farm stalwart, John Gamble, and we agreed to join. Another friend, Kevin Todd, formerly of Newcastle and Darlington, was already there. They gave me £100 per game, which, along with my BT salary and money from Plains Farm on Sundays, saw that I wasn’t badly off. I started well on the pitch too. One of the first games was a 5–1 win at Worksop in Nottinghamshire where I scored four.

  It is virtually impossible to make a reasonable comparison of the standard of football I was involved with in Belgium to that at Bishop Auckland. Technically Belgium was well in advance, but there was the physical exertion and the more than occasional brutality of the Northern Premier League to consider, which would have curled hair in Wallonia. Had tackles that were considered the norm in County Durham been seen at Hemptinne, the ensuing red cards would have left a five-a-side game at best. I suppose it was symptomatic of the differences between English and continental football at any level. When I played in the Northern Premier League I was still in my early twenties and up against blokes in their thirties; literally battle-scarred men, who had played hundreds of games at a decent level, that I would have to match for aggression. No weakness or fear could be displayed, not least when you felt weak or fearful. I was a bit of a name in that league and was therefore subjected to even worse, so I knew what I had to do. And as for the Sunderland Sunday League…

  • • •

  Apart from playing twice a week myself, I was as football-obsessed as I had been as a child and watched Sunderland as often as possible. In 1992 they reached the FA Cup final. The run included a 2–1 victory over Chelsea at an electrified Roker Park thanks to a sensational headed winner from Gordon Armstrong. I was also at Hillsborough to see Norwich City beaten 1–0 in the semi-final by a much simpler header from John Byrne (who scored in every round except the final). From a neutral perspective, the semi-final wasn’t much of a game, but there were no neutrals in Sunderland and the place went bananas.

  I couldn’t get a ticket for Wembley, where the opposition was Liverpool, so I went to a cup final barbecue instead and became extremely overwrought about the game, as I always have done with Sunderland. Sick with excitement and anxiety, not to mention spare ribs, I had to leave the barbecue as soon as the game had finished to have a lie-down.

  Happily it was the Sunderland team who were given the winners’ medals. Less happily this was done by mistake. They had to go and swap with Liverpool, who had been given the runners-up gongs. John Byrne squandered a decent chance in the first half, which finished goalless. The second half was far more predictable and Liverpool won 2–0. Still, it’s far better than being dumped on your arse in the third round.

  As an aside, the way that FA Cup final tickets are distributed was – and still is – a disgrace. The 1992 final had an attendance of slightly below 80,000, with the two clubs involved being given around half of the allocation. This is a bad joke. Surely that figure should be at least 75 per cent. The idea is that all of the counties which encompass the FA are rewarded for the sterling work that they do throughout the year by being offered first refusal on cup final tickets. But the fans are the financial and emotional backbone of the game and not many businesses would treat their paying customers so shoddily. The reality is that most of the people who end up attending the final are fans of the two participating teams, who have bagged a ticket either through good connections or, more likely, being ripped off by ‘ticketing agencies’, which is another term for touts and glorified spivs.

  Anyway, rant over – except to say that twenty-two years later I was overjoyed to get tickets for my son and myself to see Sunderland in the League Cup final against Manchester City in the new Wembley Stadium. This was courtesy of a good friend and neighbour Trevor Alderson (owner of a racehorse called Roker Park). So I got there in the end, even if it was 3–1 to City.

  • • •

  I was doing pretty well at both Bishop Auckland and Plains Farm. Training was Tuesdays and Thursdays for Bishop’s. They didn’t bother with highfalutin ideas like training at Plains Farm, although they did expect you to drink in the club after the game. In that regard they ran a tight ship. You had to be in the club post-match anyway to collect your £25 and I suspect they deliberately made us wait for the cash, safe in the knowledge that we would fill the time by drinking, and then have a couple more once we were paid. By the time you left the club, at least half of your £25 would be gone. They were paying us with money that we would immediately give back. Of course, we could have used temperance, prudence and restraint – it’s just a pity that we didn’t.

  It wasn’t notably genteel at Bishop Auckland either and this occasionally applied to the supporters too. After one home game against opposition I don’t recall, but it could have been anyone, there was an almighty ruckus in the bar at Kingsway (Bishop’s old ground), the highlight of which was a beer barrel being hurled by a visiting supporter into a group of home supporters, who failed to appreciate the gesture. I did not witness the combat myself but was told about it later, including a description of how my dad had knocked someone unconscious. This astonished me, although when I say ‘astonished’ I am clearly lying.

  • • •

  Socially acceptable violence and all, life was rumbling along quite reasonably. Again, it wasn’t the football career to fulfil my wilder childhood ambitions, but I had a steady job in the Arsing About Department at BT, I was playing a great deal of footy for a significant secondary income, I had a girlfriend and I owned a house. Yet things were about to become a great deal more exciting. In February of 1993 there came a pivotal moment in my life. At first it seemed incidental, but the personal repercussions would be huge.

  Malcolm Crosby was sacked as manager of Sunderland.

  Malcolm was appointed on a caretaker basis in December 1991 following the dismissal of Denis Smith. Smith had taken the club from the post-McMenemy despair of the Third Division and all the way back to the top flight. However, immediate relegation back to the Second Division followed, as did a poor start in 1991–92. With the club in seventeenth place, Smith was dismissed and replaced by Crosby, the first team coach and a Sunderland fan.

  This was initially temporary, but Malcolm was given the job full-time after a flying start in the league and, more memorably, because he took Sunderland to the FA Cup final. The consensus is that Malcolm was a lovely man who is respected to this day as a coach, but not cut out for management. Sunderland may have reached Wembley, but they finished the season seventh from bottom (ahead of Grimsby on goal difference and Newcastle by a point) and in hindsight he was appointed on sentiment, which rarely works out in football.

  Nevertheless, his sacking was cruelly timed. Sunderland were due to play away to Tranmere Rovers on 30 January, but the match was postponed because of the weather. Three days later he was fired and it looked as though the decision had been made on the back of a pools panel home win. Bad news for Mr Crosby, fantastic news for me, and what’s more, I knew it.

  Various names were lobbed around by the media as Malcolm’s replacement, including Bryan Robson, Phil Neal, Joe Jordan and Neil Warnock. But the Sunderland chairman, Bob Murray, was not a man renowned for imagination and the job went to someone who was handily already at the club as a player: Terry Butcher.

  Butch had had an unsuccessful fourteen months as player-manager at Coventry City, culminating in the sack in January 1992. Malcolm Crosby then offered him the opportunity to resurrect his playing career at Sunderland before the start of the
1992–93 season.

  Not only did Terry Butcher replace Malcolm, he also brought with him some familiar faces from my Ipswich days. Bobby Ferguson was his assistant and John Carruthers would be his scout. I was out and about with my old mates when Butch’s appointment was announced: Eddie Harrison, Vincent Marriner, Gary Clark and others who might buy this book if I mention their names. I confidently told Eddie that I would soon be playing for Sunderland.

  ‘Au contraire,’ replied Eddie dismissively but not unreasonably. Or it was words to that effect. It may have been ‘Fuck off’.

  But I knew that if I couldn’t get in under these circumstances, then I never would. It all came about after a fixture for Bishop Auckland. It was a dour 1–1 draw at Durham City in the first qualifying round of the FA Cup at New Ferens Park in Belmont. I didn’t play with any distinction. John Carruthers was there and engaged me in some small talk after the game. I hadn’t exactly dazzled him, but he agreed to come and watch the replay ten days later.

  In the meantime there were invitations from other fronts. I was asked to train and trial at Doncaster Rovers. I travelled down with Norman and played in a game against Garforth Town that was farcical due to high winds that had overturned lorries on the A19. We played anyway. For obvious reasons it was a true game of two halves. The 110-mile car journey home took four-and-a-half hours.

  The replay against Durham City went extremely well. We won 5–2 and I scored a hat-trick. On the back of this John Carruthers got me a trial game at, of all places, Ipswich Town, who were then competing in the inaugural season of the newly formed Premier League. He had a foot in the camps of both Sunderland and Ipswich. A reserve match between Ipswich and Charlton Athletic had been arranged somewhere in London and I was to play up front alongside Paul Goddard, a former England international and quite a prolific goal scorer for West Ham among others, but now at the veteran stage.