by Lee Howey
This managerial appointment would be a lucky one for Bob Murray, the club, the players, the supporters, the press (who considered Reidy to be ‘great copy’) and for Peter himself. It would not be a perfect seven-and-a-half years, but Peter Reid was to leave Sunderland AFC in an unquestionably better condition than he’d found it.
• • •
A highly significant season had a mediocre start. We lost 2–1 at home to Leicester City, who had just been relegated. Leicester were among the favourites for promotion. They would go up through the play-offs after replacing their manager Mark McGhee with Martin O’Neill in December. It was a tight game and defeat was hard to bear. I was an unused substitute. Obviously I would have preferred some time on the pitch, but at least I was back in the fold, as per Peter’s promise.
We then had the League Cup first round, first leg at Preston North End of Division Three. This was tricky. Preston would go on to win their league and the 1–1 draw was a decent enough result, more so because we’d been far from brilliant. That was the night when Brett Angell scored his one and only goal for us. For the Sunderland fans who made the effort to travel to Deepdale, it was a real ‘I was there’ moment, like being on Dealey Plaza, or when Dylan went electric. It was also Gordon Armstrong’s final appearance for Sunderland.
I was confined to the bench that night too. Brett’s final game for Sunderland came four days later at Carrow Road in a goalless draw with Norwich, who had also just been relegated. I replaced Brett with twenty minutes left and had a decent game. I would have scored the winner had some idiot not put a post in the way of my header.
This brought us to the second leg in the League Cup at home to Preston. It was a strange game and in its way quite an important one. The fans had so far been given nothing by way of excitement this season; a defeat and a goalless draw in the league and a draw in the first leg against a side two divisions below us. In other words, more of the same.
I had done enough at Norwich to merit a start up front and was very happy to make it. But at half-time the patience of our supporters was being tested to its limits. Not only were we losing 2–0, but we deserved to be. It was about as bad a forty-five minutes of football from a Sunderland side that anyone could remember. Frustration bubbled over, with Kevin Ball and Alec Chamberlain almost coming to blows on the pitch. It had been a shambles and right then Roker Park was not a pleasant place to be.
The team-talk at the interval consisted entirely of our manager going berserk – and not without due cause. He simply erupted and tore lumps off the whole XI, including me. I felt that individually I had performed quite respectably, winning headers and holding up the ball well. I didn’t feel that I deserved to be keelhauled along with everyone else. However, a cursory glance at the vibrating veins on Reidy’s left temple suggested that this was possibly not the moment to say as much. His language may have been obscene, but it was also unambiguous.
Within four minutes of the second half, the mood was transformed – largely by me. Immodest, I know, but being the star turn was an occasion to be savoured, so please allow me to cling on to it.
First I controlled a poor clearance on the edge of the Preston box with my left, then bent the ball into the bottom far corner with my right. It was a good finish. Two–one and back in the game. Very soon after that we were level. I flicked a free kick from the right with my head and struck Ryan Kidd for an own-goal. Two–two. It then became a question of whether Preston could hold out. With five minutes remaining, Craig Russell surged into the box and the keeper parried his shot. After a scramble, the ball broke kindly to me and I just smashed it in with my left. The final score was 3–2: 4–3 on aggregate. I had scored two and gamely tried to claim the own-goal as part of a hat-trick (our superbly biased stadium announcer boomed out my name over the PA system for all three goals, but it was not to be).
Still, I was officially man-of-the-match and was awarded a prize for my efforts. The League Cup was sponsored by Coca-Cola in those days and they provided this bounty. In the next round, Paul Bracewell was given a man-of-the-match award for which he received a rather snazzy mountain bike. I’m a cyclist and would have appreciated that. Instead I received a black polyester bomber jacket with a huge Coca-Cola logo on the back. It was hideous, and forty-six seconds after it had been presented to me, it was presented in turn to a swing bin. Martin Gray wouldn’t even give it to his dog to sleep in. Ross would have been insulted.
The bomber jacket was not the main consideration of the evening. It was important to get through the tie. This was similar to beating Carlisle United in the FA Cup early in 1994. It was not a momentous achievement for Sunderland to beat Preston, nor was anyone seriously contemplating a trip to Wembley on the back of it. But the effect on morale had we been beaten, as we very nearly were, could have proved a decisive setback.
Paul Bracewell said at the end of the season:
I think the turning point was the home game with Preston. We had already lost at home to Leicester City on the first day of the season and we were losing 2–0 at half-time in the cup-tie. Then all of a sudden we pulled the game out of the fire and it just gave the lads belief to go on from there.
He still wouldn’t give me the bike.
We got away with it. It was also our first win of the season and we carried some confidence into the next game, three days later against my good friends from Wolverhampton Wanderers. This was the day of Geoff Thomas’s ‘vengeance’. We won that game too, 2–0, and I set one up for Andy Melville. The visiting fans gave me no little gyp throughout the afternoon, but it’s easier to ignore at home. Then there was a useful draw at Port Vale. This was progress. Slow, but still progress.
A big bonus of the Preston victory was a League Cup tie against Liverpool, the holders, in the second round. This was another two-legged affair and we lost 2–0 at Anfield, where Micky Gray missed his second most famous penalty (we missed an awful lot of penalties that season). We lost the home leg 1–0 after Martin Smith and Rob Jones, their right-back, were sent off for fighting. But we had performed well and there was much encouragement from the two games. If we could do that against Fowler, Rush, McManaman, Redknapp, Barnes and the rest of a team that would finish third in the Premier League that season, then what could we do against teams in our own division?
(I have to say that Liverpool’s superstars of the era were a good set – down-to-earth and friendly. They seemed like an even better set after we had played Manchester United in the FA Cup three months later.)
Not that we were getting carried away. There was a pleasant return to Portman Road where I caught up with many old friends. It would have been even more pleasant had it not been 3–0 to Ipswich; an Alex Mathie hat-trick. Again, though, despite the scoreline, we actually played very well. I remember Bobby Saxton showering me personally with praise afterwards. It was ‘one of those days’. The main problem was scoring goals.
Ipswich also saw the first start for Paul Stewart, on loan to us from Liverpool. He was an experienced striker with England caps and had scored for Tottenham in the 1991 FA Cup final. He injured his knee at Portman Road; end of loan. However, he returned permanently in March on a free transfer and proved an important player that season. Like Ball and Bracewell, his experience was a big asset and he was great to have around.
• • •
The mention of Paul Stewart and the dark events that were revealed in 2016 compel me into an unpleasant digression. It was then that he went public to reveal that he had been sexually abused as a child by a coach for four years. This came as a shock to me. I had no knowledge of this, or any of the other appalling crimes that were committed against other players of a similar age to myself. Nothing of that nature ever happened to me, and if things happened at any club, then they were never mentioned to me.
But I can see how the environment for undetected abuse was created. The brutality that took place – at every club – was accepted. ‘This is a man’s game…’ and all that. You had to take it. As apprentice
s, we would be routinely told that we were useless, we were going to be sacked, we would never be footballers, etcetera. Such approbation was publicly bawled at us too, as was the pointing out of mistakes. Everyone went through it and this was partly why so many trainees failed to make it.
As a sixteen-year-old at Ipswich, I was once told by Brian Owen to go and train with the first team. I was the only youth to be afforded this honour and was excited and nervous in equal measure. Terry Butcher, Eric Gates, Paul Cooper, Frank Yallop, Mark Brennan and other established names of the time would be there. It was daunting.
During the warm-up, Bobby Ferguson singled me out for ridicule because of the way I was running. I felt humiliated and it was the closest I ever came to tears. I have to say that none of the senior players made me feel even worse by laughing. They were embarrassed themselves, presumably because it brought back unpleasant memories.
Several weeks later, I trained with the first team again. I played the ball to a teammate, but was told by a disapproving Bobby that I had made the wrong pass. He then tersely informed me as to what I should have done. Lecture over, we resumed play and when I next received the ball I made exactly the pass he had recommended. This annoyed him.
‘Have you fucking not got a mind of your own?’
Bobby and the other coaches did not do things like this because they enjoyed mistreating people. It had a purpose. Indeed, it was well-intentioned. Nietzsche reckoned ‘That which does not kill us, makes us stronger’, so he might have fitted in well as part of the backroom staff at Ipswich. The point was that the verbals we were receiving in training did not compare with what we could expect from the terraces if we were to ever play in the first team; and the more equipped we were to shrug this off, the better.
Complaining about this was not an option. To do so would make you less of a man and wouldn’t do much for your chances professionally. You therefore accepted your fate. Youngsters, hundreds of miles from home and with no recourse, were eager to please and, as we discovered many years later, this environment coupled with the usual threats was ideal for people who were most certainly not acting in anyone’s long-term interest. At least I was an adolescent and therefore less vulnerable than the victims, the crimes against whom would only emerge in their middle-age. They were children.
Paul Stewart was in his thirties when he arrived at Sunderland and I was aware that he had an issue with drink. I didn’t know there had been a drugs issue too. His problems were something a non-victim can never fully understand and I wish him nothing but the best for the rest of his days.
• • •
On 28 October, almost a third of the way into the season, we faced Barnsley at home. By then we had played thirteen, won five, drawn six and lost two. We were fifth in the table and, although the pundits were not sitting bolt upright at our improvement, this was obviously the best we had been in years. We had scored a modest average of a fraction more than a single goal per game. But we were very difficult to score against. Confidence had gradually built. We weren’t wonderful and had won only two home games, but had become better than merely steady. No one was making any bold predictions but, for the first time since I had joined, promotion to the Premier League was not out of the question.
I personally had one of my best days against Barnsley and not just because of events on the pitch, although they helped too.
We were leading by a Craig Russell goal at half-time, but he went off injured on thirty-nine minutes and was replaced by me. Seventeen minutes into the second half I won a header, knocking the ball down to Phil Gray, who played it to Steve Agnew on the right; I then galloped into their box. Aggers duly presented a beautiful cross that I reached before the defender, scoring with, if I may say so myself, a quite spiffing low, diving header.
We were in complete control of the match and had been since it started. It almost goes without saying then that we allowed Andy Liddell to pull one back for Barnsley to instil the wrong kind of excitement in the latter stages of the game. But the final score was 2–1, which meant that I had bagged the winner (yes, it’s a team game, but we all want to score the winner). I played well too. We had even met the criteria for a bonus.
Afterwards, I was being ushered around the building to speak with various media as I had scored the winner (I may have mentioned that already). During my wandering I heard an oddly familiar Scottish voice calling my name. I turned around.
‘Lee! Lee! Well done today. You had a good game.’
It was John Duncan, my old manager at Ipswich, who had clearly not given a shit when I was told as a teenager that I would never be able to play football again. That was in 1988. It was now 1995 and it’s possible that he didn’t remember the incident. I did.
By this stage he was manager of Chesterfield again, so I have no idea what he was doing at Roker Park. My initial reaction was one of shock; shock that he had appeared, shock that he had spoken to me, but shock most of all at the simple fact that it was him. I was temporarily nonplussed. That was in the second or two required for the terrible, painful, seven-year-old memories to come flooding back.
Back in 1988, when I was in Suffolk and most of my right knee was in Cambridgeshire, the people at Ipswich were very good to me; a distraught youngster. I had not forgotten this. But I hadn’t forgotten Duncan either, who had been the exception to the well-wishing. His callous indifference – ‘D’yer know any other trades?’ – had appalled me then and it appalled me now as it flashed back. Now that I had made it in football at a high level with no thanks to him (quite the reverse), and on a too-rare day when I was the man-of-the-hour, he appeared to be schmoozing and treating me like a long-lost friend. It took a split second for my mind to register that he wasn’t my boss any more. Then my spleen was opened.
I don’t recall verbatim what I said to him, but I do know that ‘Go fuck yourself!’ was at the heart of my short, succinct and unequivocal speech. He possibly knew the reason for my philippic. If he didn’t, then that was even worse. Either way, he was taken aback and left in no doubt as to my opinion of him as a human being.
It took perhaps a couple of hours for my anger to subside, by which time I was at home. I had never expected to see Duncan again and much had happened since our previous meeting. When I had ceased fomenting I began to feel rather pleased with myself and even glad that we had met again.
There is a French term, l’esprit d’escalier, which literally means ‘staircase wit’. It refers to those moments when you walk away from an argument and get halfway up the stairs, then think of some witheringly witty putdown that you wish you had said earlier, but by then it’s too late.
Well I had no feeling of l’esprit d’escalier after being reacquainted with John Duncan. ‘Go fuck yourself!’ is unlikely to make its way into a book of quotations to be whipped out at dinner parties, but it served its purpose. Duncan was jarred, embarrassed and left like a salted snail when I marched away from him. Nothing cleverer, wittier or more incisive would have done the job any better. There is many a more literate response than ‘Go fuck yourself!’ but none delivers the same satisfaction. It felt good.
It was an unintended consequence, but John Duncan had made my day better still. I have never seen him since and don’t suppose he’s been searching for me either. Looking more broadly at life, it reconfirmed that I had done myself a wonderful favour by ignoring his ‘advice’ all those years earlier.
• • •
My chances of starting games as a striker had been hampered further by the arrival of David Kelly from Wolves.
Ned, as he was known, was from the Midlands. Like so many others he was able to represent the Republic of Ireland in spite of being about as Irish as Boney M. He won twenty-six caps. Ned had done pretty well at Molineux but had really made his name at Newcastle when they stormed the First Division in 1992–93, with Ned averaging a goal every other game. Upon Newcastle’s promotion he was sold to Wolves for £750,000. Although not quite as successful in the Black Country, as well as bei
ng a few weeks short of his thirtieth birthday, he eventually cost Sunderland £1 million. This was still a big fee in 1995; especially for a club outside the Premier League (the British record at the time was only £8.5 million, paid to Nottingham Forest by Liverpool for Stan Collymore).
Yet another expensive signing had shoved me down the pecking order. I looked even less likely to feature when he announced his arrival with two goals in his first three games, including the winner at Crystal Palace (when we also missed two penalties). However, Ned’s time at Sunderland would not be the highlight of his career. Hindered by an ankle injury that excluded him from the second half of 1995–96, loss of form and sometimes being played out of position, those were the only two goals he would ever score for us. He was never expected to notch as prolifically as he had done at Newcastle, yet it was surprising how badly things went for him. Far less was expected from Kevin Phillips when he joined two years later; the moral of the tale is that you just never know.
Ned was a good player, an easy-going bloke and I liked him. I was also more relaxed about his arrival than I had been about that of Brett Angell. I was becoming used to the disappointment of new strikers arriving and being selected ahead of me. Apart from that, I was coming to be considered as much a centre-back as a striker. Peter Reid and Bobby Saxton had told me as much. This was a great asset for me as it gave me double the chance of selection that the other fringe players had.
Another reason for liking Ned was that he was completely useless at three-card brag. All you needed to beat him was caution because he never folded; a trait he shared with Mike Hooper, our reserve goalkeeper on loan from Newcastle. Sometimes I would make more than my salary from the card school on the team bus.