Massively Violent & Decidedly Average

by Lee Howey

  His instinct on the pitch, some might say his modus operandi, was to ‘get in there’. He was, to say the least, a tough lad. He loved a tackle and never went in to deliberately hurt anyone, but didn’t mind if he did. This meant that he was often underrated, because he was actually one hell of a full-back and not just an assassin. Still, if the opposition’s left-winger annoyed him or worse still (for the winger), fouled him, he would not let it go or allow anyone to calm him down. Retribution would follow.

  But as Geoff Thomas could attest, those who live by the sword and all that. Rowing that stretcher down the Roker Park tunnel was his last action for Sunderland. He never played in the first team again, but it can’t be said that he didn’t try hard enough to get back.

  As part of his rehab he was sent to the George Washington Hotel on the outskirts of Sunderland, where there was a swimming pool. Swimming is excellent exercise for someone with a leg injury, but only if the injured party can actually swim, and John couldn’t doggy-paddle the length of himself. While at the George Washington myself one day with a lesser ailment, I witnessed how undaunted he was by his inability to swim as he set about having a go anyway.

  His initial success in the pool consisted solely of not drowning. But when I returned a couple of months later with another niggle, there was John, doing length after length after length, surging through the water like a Polaris missile. There was as much dedication as daftness with John. He would work religiously on his rehab all day, every day. Sadly, his hard work would never earn him a return to the first team, but he did play another 115 games in the Football League, mainly for Scarborough.

  • • •

  The Birmingham result was only a temporary reprieve, both for me and for the club as a whole. I was soon back in the reserves. Had Phil Gray been faster, he could have been a real top-end player. But even without pace he still wasn’t going to be omitted from the starting line-up for long. He was too good, not to say too expensive for such a fate. His strike partner, Don Goodman, was even more expensive. In fact Don was then the club’s record signing at £900,000. He scored goals too. As a man who had recently plied his trade with Plains Farm Working Men’s Club, I was in no position to grumble about this. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating, however.

  Terry Butcher made ever more curious decisions. In the never to be remembered League Cup first round, second leg against Chester City at the Deva Stadium (a goalless draw), he introduced me at half-time and played me in right-midfield. If anyone reading this can explain why he did this, then please drop me a line because to this day I don’t have the faintest idea. I hadn’t played down the right since I was an eleven-year-old at St Cuthbert’s, so the possibility of Butch having watched me play there before was a remote one. I was glad to be in the team, even if it was all very perplexing – and much to the annoyance of the lads who really were right-midfielders. This was the only time I would play in that position in my whole professional career. I’d had doubts about Terry Butcher’s managerial abilities from the beginning; doubts that became increasingly augmented by incidents like this. But what was I supposed to say?

  Chester were the better side that night, but we nudged through and had the pleasure of beating Leeds United in the next round, winning 4–2 on aggregate. This was a rare highlight in Terry’s stint as Sunderland manager. Younger readers may be surprised to discover that Leeds were then one of the best sides in the country and had been champions of England only a year earlier. They featured Gary Kelly, Gordon Strachan, Gary McAllister, Gary Speed, John Lukic and Rod Wallace, but we still beat them. Twice. It was 2–1 both home and away and Sunderland have always loved to beat Leeds. Phil and Don both scored in each leg and both were excellent throughout the tie. It was a great night at Elland Road, followed three days later by the victory over Birmingham. Alas, this was to be a fleeting respite.

  Whenever I felt that the atmosphere between Terry Butcher and the senior pros could not become any more fractious, I would be proved wrong the following day. The most noticeable mutual contempt was between him and the pair who were the heartbeat of the team, Gary Owers and Gordon Armstrong. Both had been at the club since they were kids and had played in hundreds of games. The antipathy would commence without any obvious reason. It’s true that some people just don’t get on and nothing will alter the situation, but I suspect that Terry was trying to assert his authority by letting such established figures know who was boss. I don’t know why he would have thought this was necessary. Gary and Gordon were good blokes, not arrogant or conceited, or in need of being taken down a peg or two. They were Sunderland fans as well as players who knew that things were not right and so would voice their opinions.

  I don’t suppose that Terry telling Gary and Gordon, along with Anton Rogan, Tim Carter, Tony Smith and Peter Davenport, that they should talk to their agents because he wanted rid of them, did an awful lot to effect more chumminess. Nevertheless, Owers and Armstrong were both regular starters under Butcher. It seems odd that he simultaneously wanted shot of the two but didn’t think there was anyone better in his squad.

  Whenever the players were chatting socially, talk would invariably turn to extreme dissatisfaction with the manager. When that happens, there can only be one outcome. Something has to give and you can’t get rid of a squad of footballers with anything like the ease you can dispose of a manager.

  Mick Buxton was added to the coaching staff, I think by Bob Murray over the head of Terry Butcher, although I am sketchy on the details. Mick was an odd character, but he did have a decent CV. Another Sunderland native, his playing career at Burnley had been heavily chequered by injury. However, as a manager in the 1980s he won two promotions at Huddersfield and had also been in charge at Scunthorpe United. Butch must have recognised the threat as soon as Mick appeared, hanging over him like a chubby sword of Damocles.

  Mick was not quite the lad for madcap antics; in fact he was dour and introspective. We would train while he wandered alone around an adjacent field in his flat cap, like a poet waiting for inspiration to descend. Pity he never found any, because we needed some inspiration ourselves. Had we not been informed of who he was, someone would have given him a quid and said: ‘Get yourself a cup of tea somewhere nice and warm, mate.’

  Training continued joylessly and relentlessly. We turned up at Roker Park one day to find that we couldn’t use the pitch because of snow. So instead of a practice session, Ian Atkins sent us for, you’ve guessed it, a long run. I suppose any alternative might have placed us in danger of enjoying ourselves. A seven-mile route was planned from the stadium to the Charlie Hurley Centre (our training ground), back along Seaburn and ending at the famous Bungalow Cafe by Roker Beach (it overlooks the North Sea and has the best view of any eating establishment in England; try it). The cafe is atop a cliff and a further piece of running from there, down a long bank to the beach and then back again, was instructed upon completion of the initial seven miles – and to be done twenty times.

  I was among the front runners along with the younger, fitter members of the squad: Micky Gray, Martin Smith, Martin Gray, Craig Russell. The less youthful and not so keen soon began to lag behind. We finished the course and were about to amble back to the ground to do some weight training (a comparative treat), when we were told in no uncertain terms by Terry Butcher to repeat the entire course, including the twenty bank runs at its end. I was one of the more compliant members of the squad, but even I was furious. Still, as I had only a few months earlier been serving my sentence at BT, I did as I was told. At this point I was unaware of Butch’s reason for ordering us to repeat the exercise.

  It transpired that a heinous deception had taken place and he had unearthed it. Phil Gray, Don Goodman, Derek Ferguson and Andy Melville had cheated. Dressed in training kit, they had no money on their persons, but being a footballer opens doors. In this case it was the doors of the number 27 bus which dropped them off, free of charge, a couple of hundred yards from the Bungalow Cafe, which they then had the a
udacity to sprint.

  Gary Bennett was appalled by this. A man of his professional standing, in his testimonial season too, was not about to abase himself by using public transport to avoid physical exertion. The very thought was an abhorrence to him. Instead, he and Tony Norman managed to persuade a passing fan in Whitburn to give them a lift in his Austin Maestro. Buses? How plebeian. Benno was dismayed at the lack of panache that his colleagues had shown.

  Alas for everyone, including those of us who had been mug enough to carry out instructions properly, some greasy sneak, perhaps a scandalised fellow bus passenger, had informed the authorities, who failed to see any humour in the incident. Neither did I, at first.

  • • •

  The next day we were told to run from Roker Park to the Charlie Hurley Centre, where the pitches were usable following a thaw. By this time rumours were rife that the manager would be sacked. This was soon confirmed and there were some undisguisedly jubilant footballers in that changing room. I estimate that of the seventeen or so players present, about ten of them were openly chuffed. Ian Atkins was also shown the door.

  The dismissal was carried out quite cack-handedly. Butch arrived at the ground and was ambushed by the media, who had heard the rumours. Essentially they knew before he did. Apparently the deed was not carried out by Bob Murray himself. He had stood down as chairman and was replaced by another director, chartered accountant John Featherstone; although this seemed somewhat academic as Bob was still the majority shareholder and therefore remained the real boss.

  I did not share in the training ground merriment at the news. Terry Butcher and I went back a few years. I take no pleasure in someone losing their job. Aside from that, he gave me the biggest break of my career by signing me for the club I worshipped and I looked on him as a friend. I also got on well with Ian. There was another issue for me; the possibility of not featuring in the plans of a new manager.

  But all that was on a personal level. On a professional level the board had made the correct decision. It still pains me to say it, but the club was only going one way under Terry, who was sacked when he was statistically Sunderland’s worst ever manager, winning ten of his thirty-eight league games in charge – and not in the top flight either. We had lost ten league games in the 1993–94 season when he left and it was still only November. Two and a half years later when we had been promoted under Peter Reid, Terry himself admitted: ‘Sunderland have never looked back since I left.’

  The poisonous atmosphere was largely caused by Terry’s single biggest failing: man management. The biggest shock to me, having witnessed first-hand what he was like as a player, was that he didn’t command respect. Tactical and transfer failings happen to all managers at some stage, but respect was the one thing everyone thought would not be a problem. Perhaps if he had retired as a player immediately upon becoming manager it might have been better, but he had that brief and mainly awful stint as player-manager. How do you berate someone else’s performance when your own has been even worse? This was also a surprise because he was undoubtedly a fantastic centre-half in his day, which had not been so long ago. He joined Sunderland only two years after starring in England’s second-best ever World Cup.

  As a person, I won’t hear a bad word about Terry Butcher. He is a gentleman; a top bloke. But as José Mourinho would discover in 2015, when a manager at any club is disliked by the senior pros, then he won’t be around for much longer. They have always wielded that power. Two years after Terry left Sunderland came the Bosman case, which resulted in these players wielding even more. A squad tends to be close-knit. As well as being colleagues and a team, they don’t spend many days apart. They play, train, travel and take holidays together. My roomies and confidants in 1993–94 were Ian Sampson and Martin Gray. I spent more time with them than I did with my fiancée, and I knew more about them. So if a manager upsets one or two of his players, there’s a reasonable chance he could upset them all.

  CHAPTER 6

  THERE’S A SONG ABOUT ME, YOU KNOW

  The board at Sunderland had appointed Malcolm Crosby, as he was already at the club when Denis Smith was sacked. It didn’t work out.

  They then appointed Terry Butcher, as he was already at the club when Malcolm Crosby was sacked. I think we have established that that didn’t work out either.

  In late November 1993, they then appointed Mick Buxton, as he was already at the club when Terry Butcher was sacked. Read on to see what dividends were reaped by doing exactly the same thing three times in the space of two years. You may be surprised, although I doubt it.

  I mentioned earlier that when he was a coach, Mick would wander around the nearby fields in his flat cap during training sessions, contemplating the clouds and pondering the buttercups like a Tetley Tea man on a bank holiday. Yet as soon as he became manager… he was exactly the same. When he wasn’t away with the fairies, he was a very old-school type of boss.

  He recruited Trevor Hartley as chief coach. Trevor had been around as a manager and coach, having been employed by Bournemouth, Tottenham and the Malaysian national team. We never quite saw eye-to-eye. This was not in a heated toe-to-toe sort of way; he was intelligent and quite jolly. It’s just that his methods were not as helpful as he seemed to think. He would give talks that were infused with inspirational quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and other towering historical figures. He may as well have quoted Rod Hull and Emu for all the good it did, because the players just sat there exchanging curious glances, wondering what in God’s name any of this had to do with football.

  I felt Trevor was too clever for his own good. He didn’t see much merit in big old-fashioned centre-forwards either, which was even less helpful to my career than the thoughts of Alexander the Great or whoever the hell he dragged into it.

  However, it can’t be denied that matters improved for the club. Mick’s first game in charge was a 3–2 defeat at home to Nottingham Forest, with a rising Stan Collymore scoring twice for the visitors (he scored a pile of goals against Sunderland in his career), but it was a marked improvement. Forest were one of the better sides and also had Stuart Pearce, Scott Gemmill, Steve Stone and Colin Cooper in their line-up. They would finish the season in second place. The general murmur was that we may have lost as expected, but would have been walloped by Forest had Terry Butcher still been around. Harsh and unprovable, but probably true.

  The next two games were 1–0 wins over Portsmouth and Derby County (who had beaten us 5–0 on the first day, for those of you who weren’t paying attention). Of the twenty-eight remaining league games after Forest, we would lose only eight and rise from third bottom to twelfth. This was hardly epoch-making stuff and no one is likely to ever bother making documentaries about Sunderland’s 1993–94 season. But it was a distinct and welcome improvement. We had gone from being a poor team to a mediocre one. Hurrah for us. The fossilised expression is that Mick ‘steadied the ship’. It would do for now.

  It was exactly the same squad of players; so how much of this improvement was down to Mick Buxton? And what were his team-talks like? Well, think of George C. Scott in the opening scene of the film Patton, sometimes subtitled Lust For Glory. General Patton’s raw, charismatic persona and steely, mesmerising oration are such that his troops will do anything, down to their last breath, to ensure victory on the field of battle.

  Now expunge George C. Scott from your minds, because Mick Buxton was nothing like that. His team-talks were so monotonous that no one ever really listened. The sounds leaving his lips were like static interference. He may as well have been discussing quantitative easing, in Dutch. The main reason for the improved results was the collective spring in the step of the senior pros, which was in turn attributable to their vast preference for Mick over Terry Butcher. They had a vast preference for virtually anyone over Terry Butcher.

  When people say that footballers ‘aren’t playing for the manager’ they are not referring to a conscious decision. No one had made a deliberate choice to not give their
best under Terry. The problem is that when life is generally pretty miserable, your best is not as good as it would otherwise be. This is especially true in sport. As a professional footballer, if your manager can successfully cajole you into feeling more confident, then that extra 5 or 10 per cent it gives you (if we can quantify such a thing) makes a huge difference. Butch had somehow managed to achieve the opposite. It’s the same in all walks of life. Some people need an arm round the shoulder while others need a kick up the behind, and a good leader will know which approach to adopt with whom. Mick wasn’t a wizard of man management either, but as he didn’t arouse strong feelings either way, the players were happier and this was reflected in his earlier results.

  Training was about as basic as it gets. Mick favoured ‘pattern of play’ whereby we would line up against the youths, or sometimes against no one. It was to teach us where he wanted the ball to go and the positions he wanted us to take. Yet even against imaginary opposition there was still tackling, because Kevin Ball was involved. There would have been tackling during a Buckaroo tournament if Kevin Ball had been involved.

  • • •

  Sunderland’s improvement after Terry Butcher’s departure is perhaps summed up by our two games against Middlesbrough that season. We had been a bit of a shambles for the game at Ayresome Park under Butch in October and were duly pasted.

  Sunderland AFC historians may remember that game for the debut of our winger Jamie Lawrence, who had recently been released from a four-year prison sentence for robbing a bank (for his home debut against Luton Town three days later, Sunderland’s DJ played Jailhouse Rock before the kick-off; nice touch, that). When we played Boro at Roker on 16 January 1994, we were very different opposition. We had won our previous two games and only lost one out of eight since the Forest game. Confidence had gradually returned. We had limped up to sixteenth position in Division One by now, with Middlesbrough three places ahead in their pre-Bryan Robson, spending spree years. These were not heady times for either club.