by Lee Howey
At approximately 2 a.m., Micky Gray, Martin Smith and Craig Russell lurched through the doors of whichever watering hole the rest of us were in. Micky was crying and approaching me for protection.
‘Big man! Big man!’ he wailed. ‘Someone out there’s just kicked me in the face.’
My natural sense of injustice at this meant that I was ready to extract retribution. Why not? I was young, fit, physically imposing, loyal to my friends and – most importantly of all – had about a gallon-and-a-half of San Miguel inside me. I walked out into the street behind Micky, shadow boxing, followed by some equally stupid teammates.
‘Who was it Micky? Who? Who? Who? Tell me?’ I was ready for action, wondering who they would get to play me when this was made into a film.
We looked round and saw on the other side of the pub car park that about thirty local youths had gathered; glowering, shouting, threatening and indisputably outnumbering us. At this point even being young, fit, physically imposing, loyal to my friends and containing about a gallon-and-a-half of San Miguel somehow didn’t seem sufficient for the task in hand. I wasn’t a complete idiot.
A couple of them came over and began to thrash out a treaty with Phil Gray and Derek Ferguson; probably the two least diplomatic people there. Negotiations broke down at an early stage when a Spaniard began to chase Phil around the car park with a pint glass in his hand. They ran past me and I managed to stop the irate local. I gestured to the assailant that he ought to put down the weapon and that he and I should sort out matters properly. He eventually understood and, while he was still putting the glass on the bonnet of a car, I took a short but swift run-up and nutted him in the mush with quite some precision. He rolled under the car.
Admittedly this was underhand. But when the Marquess of Queensberry sat down to write his rules he did so alone, undistracted by irate Spaniards wanting to stick a pint glass up his arse.
Whatever. My lack of wisdom instigated a mass brawl. Not everyone in the squad joined in with the activities, although I couldn’t be sure who had opted out, as I was otherwise occupied. I suspect it was the cleverer ones.
I had one gentleman with his back to a wall and was rat-a-tat-tat punching him. As he fell, he grabbed the new shirt my wife had recently bought me and pop went the buttons in various directions. Sirens could now be heard and we still had enough wherewithal – just – to abandon the scene with immediate effect. We then made our way back to the hotel, in my case bare-chested, by a less conspicuous back-street route.
Today, virtually everyone in the West has a phone in their pocket with the facility to take pictures, which can then be seen anywhere in the world within a minute. Thinking back to Fuengirola and our Christmas parties, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Martin Smith later gave us an unexpurgated version of the assault on Micky Gray that had instigated a potentially huge disgrace upon our club. It turned out to be virtually self-inflicted. This is what had happened:
Micky, who could be intoxicated on a standard packet of wine gums, had drunk a few bottles of lager and began to feel the call of nature. Rather than go to all the trouble of using a toilet in a bar (he considered this to be a logistical nightmare), he simply relieved himself against the rear wheel of a Suzuki 125. The owner of the vehicle saw this and began, quite justifiably, to remonstrate. In Málaga it is probably safer to sleep with someone’s wife than it is to piss on his bike. However, Micky did not comprehend how he could possibly be in the wrong and took a swing at the bloke, whom he thought was behaving unreasonably.
Micky’s already limited skills as a pugilist were further restricted by San Miguel, which meant that his punch connected with nothing but the night air and, like a character in a bad sketch, he went flat on his face. The same face was subsequently administered with a retributive kick from the scooter-owner, who then walked away. Micky’s version of events had omitted considerable detail. Had Martin given me this prequel earlier I would have done nothing because really it served Micky right, and a whole squad of First Division footballers would have been preserved from some of Fuengirola’s more widely attended fisticuffs.
We shuffled back into the hotel at 3 a.m. and were informed that some of the others were in a bar at the top of the town (Micky Gray had gone to bed). The curfew was by now something of an academic point, so we decanted ourselves into a taxi to join them at this bar, which was called El-Something-Or-Other. The place was inhabited by a number of young ladies dressed for a party and the drinks were vastly overpriced. Had this been a few hours earlier when we had clearer heads, we would have realised within seconds that it was a brothel. As it was, it took some time for this information to register. Perhaps it was called El-Knockio-Shop.
We were shocked to the marrow. Five quid for a can of Heineken in 1995 was nothing short of outrageous.
At around 6 a.m., we were back at the hotel for two entire hours of unbroken sleep. Before that, I noticed that my hand had swollen considerably and I slept with it in a bucket of ice that the staff had given me. We were pumped for information at breakfast by Kevin Ball, who had done the captainly thing by actually adhering to the midnight curfew. Micky Gray eventually joined us to louder cheers and more good-natured abuse than his pumping little head would have liked. He was wearing dark glasses to disguise the biggest shiner that any of us had seen since… well… the one that Bally had worn at Christmas.
The golf day was a success and I had a better round than was generally expected of someone with a swollen hand, two hours’ sleep behind him and a hangover. Football Focus got what they wanted, too, although Micky was kept well away from the cameras. In fact the whole trip went well in as much as no one was actually hospitalised (with the possible exception of a Spaniard or two). We genuinely bonded on that excursion. As far as I am aware no one was ever fined or even spoken to about the ridiculously unprofessional manner in which we had conducted ourselves. It was never mentioned by anyone in authority, even though everyone knew about it. Micky’s gleaming black eye and my Fred Flintstone hand had aroused instant suspicion and a full account was soon made known to pretty much anyone who was interested. The clientele of the Museum Vaults was apprised of the facts, so you can safely bet that Mick Buxton was too.
The remainder of our time in Spain was conducted with considerably more decorum and we certainly avoided the town centre.
• • •
We returned home and, after reflecting upon yet another diplomatic triumph for SAFC on foreign soil, discussed tactics for the cup tie.
Despite my heroics against Bristol City six weeks earlier, scoring possibly the ugliest pair of goals that any Sunderland player would ever manage, I was still nothing like an automatic choice for the first team. By the time we played Spurs, I had made just two starts all season, so any time at all on the pitch before the Match of the Day cameras would be a bonus.
A day or two before the game, Mick took me to one side and told me I would be in the starting XI. At centre-back. I had literally never played in that position in the first team anywhere; not at Sunderland, Hemptinne, Bishop Auckland, St Aidan’s or Plains Farm Working Men’s Club. Nowhere.
Against a side of Spurs’ undoubted attacking ability, we were going to play three centre-backs, Gary Bennett, Andy Melville and me, in the hope of absorbing pressure and scoring on the break. I was extremely pleased yet somewhat bemused. I would be pitted against Jürgen Klinsmann, undeniably one of the greatest strikers in the world at that time. He would captain Germany when they won the European Championships at Wembley the following year. He had already won the World Cup in 1990 and would be named third behind George Weah and Paolo Maldini for the 1995 FIFA World Player of the Year award. If I got bored with Klinsmann I could always go and sort out Teddy Sheringham, who was equally crap. Then there was Nick Barmby and other quality attacking players. It would be like marking the Red Arrows.
It should be said that I was not completely inexperienced as a centre-back, having played there a few times for the rese
rves. Only recently I had come up against Ronnie Tucknutt, a nippy little striker who turned out a few times for Rotherham United’s second-string. He never quite made their first team, but when he left football he opened a thriving ironmongery in Houghton-le-Spring. He could be a handful on the football pitch too. However, if forced to choose, I would have to say that Klinsmann was the better player.
Fair enough, Ronnie Tucknutt is someone I have just invented. But I still think he illustrates a point.
We knew what we were up against, but we were ready. The game kicked off in weather as fair as could be expected near the banks of the River Wear in January and for a long time our game plan worked. We frustrated them and created a couple of decent chances ourselves. Personally, I put in a few good tackles against opponents who were infinitely more famous than me, and my passing wasn’t bad either; all live on BBC Television, too. I sincerely hoped that Mr McAuliffe had tuned in.
I was coping reasonably well with Klinsmann, who attempted his trademark dive once or twice. I may have politely mentioned this to him in passing. His English was excellent, but didn’t need to be for him to understand the words I was using to describe his routinely dishonest attempts to win free kicks.
Teddy Sheringham played with his chest out and was supercilious, acting as though the whole occasion was beneath him. In fact he was every bit as arrogant as Geoff Thomas had been. The crucial difference was that Sheringham had the talent to back up his arrogance. What a player. Not that any of this did him any good in the first half, which ended goalless. So far, so good.
But the shock that the BBC were hoping for would not come to pass. The match was turned in the fiftieth minute. Sheringham hit our post; the ball rebounded to David Howells who passed to Gheorghe Popescu who placed the ball to his right of the goal, bringing out a quite magnificent left-handed stop from Gary Bennett.
The only thing to sully Gary’s superb reflex save was the fact that Alec Chamberlain was our designated goalkeeper. The referee, Mike Reed, could have made a name for himself by ignoring the most blatant handball anyone had ever clapped eyes on, but he didn’t. He behaved with shameless competence. Gary was given a distinctly uncontroversial red card, before Klinsmann gave Alec no chance with the penalty, deliberately placing it with total precision into the bottom right corner; the sort of dirty German trick we had come to expect. Thirteen minutes later, Sheringham and an own-goal had made it 3–0. Phil Gray retrieved one before Klinsmann scored his second.
It could have been worse with ten men and under the circumstances we had performed respectably, although that didn’t mean it wasn’t a bad day. Either way, it was an interesting first game for me as a centre-half and a tough, yet invaluable experience.
• • •
The Sunderland–Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup fourth round tie of 1995 would ordinarily be long forgotten by everyone, except perhaps those with a vested interest. But it was restored to public consciousness nineteen years later for the most regrettable of reasons.
Playing at right-back for Spurs that day was twenty-year-old Sol Campbell, better remembered as a centre-back during a highly successful, medal-strewn career that saw him capped seventy-three times by England, playing in three World Cups. He was given a tough time by Martin Smith and was at fault for Phil Gray’s goal. But that is not Mr Campbell’s abiding memory of the game. In 2014 he gave an interview to Evan Davis on Radio 4’s Today programme, describing his experience of Roker Park almost two decades earlier – as he remembered it.
He claimed:
Every time I touched the ball it was monkey chants.
As a footballer you start saying to yourself ‘what is this all about?’ I’m an England player and you’ve got the whole stadium ringing of monkey chants every time I’ve touched the ball. It was a scary, kind of confusing moment for me.
Let us pass lightly over the fact that he wouldn’t be an England player for another sixteen months, because that isn’t exactly at the heart of the issue. He gave another interview later the same day to Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Radio 5 Live.
He told her:
One of my earliest encounters with it [racism] was at Sunderland. Yes it was a long time ago. It was at Roker Park. I was playing for Tottenham in the FA Cup. Basically, every time I touched the ball I was subjected to monkey chants; every single, every single time I touched the ball.
It was a very confusing time for me. I was nineteen, twenty. I’d never really experienced that level of racism before. It wasn’t really recorded.
Not recorded? He’s correct about that. The game was broadcast live on national television, with highlights shown later, and no racism was recorded. There might be a reason for that. It must have been ‘confusing’ because, if it did happen, it was most certainly not on the scale that Sol Campbell supposes. That is not to say he wasn’t subjected to any pea-brained racism that day, which is disgraceful and something I wholeheartedly condemn. All footballers will receive a dog’s abuse at some time from spectators, for whatever reason. This does not justify racism and hopefully the days we recall from the 1980s in this country, of bananas being thrown at black players, are far behind us. Matters had improved by 1995, but even today there is much to do. Sadly there is still racism among the support of every club; some of it sinister, some of it simply mindless.
But ‘every single, every single time I [Sol Campbell] touched the ball’ at Roker Park?
I know he is wrong about this because I was on the pitch with him and many, many people I know were in the crowd. Between us we would have noticed if the Nuremberg-style frenzy as described by Sol had actually happened. I don’t remember any racial chanting. What I also definitely have no memory of – and nor does anyone I have spoken to on the subject – is ‘the whole stadium ringing of monkey chants’.
That was a ludicrous claim. Undiluted rubbish. No media referred to any racism, as they surely would have done. Martin Smith spent most of the afternoon within a few feet of Sol and has no recollection of any racist incidents whatsoever. Martin and Sol knew each other personally too from the England under-21 squad and Martin recalls no conversation with Sol after the game. Admittedly and for obvious reasons, Sol’s ears were probably more attuned to racial abuse than Martin’s or mine. However, Gary Bennett, a black player who made the fifth most appearances in Sunderland’s history, didn’t notice anything either.
Even a single instance of racism is embarrassing to the huge majority of football supporters. But what Sol Campbell said about that fateful January day requires clarification, because it was an exaggeration, to say the least; bordering on an insult. This is because ‘the whole stadium’ suggests that each and every Sunderland supporter present was/is a racist, including my family and friends.
His claims in 2014 went largely unchallenged by the media, except in the Sunderland Echo. This is understandable as I don’t suppose that Evan Davis or Victoria Derbyshire were prolific attendees of Sunderland home games in the 1990s. Sol repeated the claims in his authorised biography, the zanily entitled Sol Campbell: The Authorised Biography. Indeed, his comments about Sunderland’s supporters were made on a number of occasions. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
Perhaps I have strayed into cynicism here, but the comments that took him nineteen years to utter created bad feeling on Wearside. I make no claims for the moral perfection of every single Sunderland fan, but the overwhelming majority of them – and British football fans generally – deserve better. I stop short of saying that Sol Campbell, an otherwise fine ambassador for our sport, should apologise – I don’t know how he felt – but I don’t recognise the version of events that he related.
CHAPTER 8
THE SEASON COULDN’T END QUICKLY ENOUGH
Sunderland supporters appreciate the quality of the likes of Klinsmann and Sheringham, or their modern equivalents, even if they are playing for another team. Their appearance at Roker was the last of the rare pieces of excitement during the Mick Buxton era. Indeed, nothing of interest to any neutral h
ad happened to Sunderland since the club reached the 1992 FA Cup final. It remained a thrill for me to play for the team I loved, but it can’t be denied that as 1994–95 lumbered on, SAFC was moribund.
The fans were acutely aware of this. The game after our cup elimination to Spurs was a 1–1 draw at home to Port Vale, then a 1–0 defeat at Charlton. I won’t be insulted if your eyes are drooping at these riveting recollections because I don’t remember a great many games from the rest of that season myself. I looked those two up.
The mediocrity continued on Wednesday 8 March when we travelled to Wolves, where I played the whole game but notably failed to enamour myself to the Molineux faithful. It had only been eighteen months since the Geoff Thomas incident and football supporters have elephantine memories. Lightning was about to strike twice.
Wolves had a decent side and would finish the season in fourth place. They now had Don Goodman in their line-up, as well as Mike Stowell, Steve Bull, Peter Shirtliff, David Kelly, Mark Walters, Paul Birch and the Dutch defender John de Wolf.
His full name was Johannes Hildebrand de Wolf, so you can see why he preferred John. John de Wolf of Wolves. His shaggy hair and beard meant that he actually resembled a wolf and he was known on the terraces as ‘de Wolf Man’; about as droll as nicknames get in football. As wolfy as a full moon. Could anything be wolfier? It was widely assumed that there would never be a more lupine arrangement in the whole of the professional game, a notion that was disproved in Germany in 1998 when Wolfgang Wolf became manager of Wolfsburg.
John, a Dutch international, had joined from Feyenoord for £600,000 just three months earlier and become an instant crowd favourite. He could certainly play, but the Wolves fans also loved his aggression, ruthless tackling and goading of opponents. The difference between a cult hero and a dirty sod is defined by whether or not the individual concerned plays for your team.