by Lee Howey
We endured an early onslaught, but otherwise there wasn’t much in the first half-hour to denote the gulf in class to a casual observer (in the unlikely event of such a person existing). Then I intercepted a careless ball from Ginola in midfield, which I stroked to Waddle (if in doubt) who was just inside their half. He fed it out to Micky Gray on the left. Micky cut inside and struck a fine low shot past the keeper from eighteen yards.
Oh, my.
We went berserk, particularly Ordy and me. We were still fans as well as players, and as roomies we had spoken of little else for weeks. In theory, this should have silenced the place, but it became apparent at that moment just how many Mackems had sneaked into the ground. Before half-time, Shearer missed a one-on-one with Lionel Pérez. The home supporters became ever more anxious, angry, frustrated and quiet as the game progressed. How on earth could Sunderland be winning? The enormity of an away victory did not need to be impressed upon anyone. This was not supposed to happen.
Sadly it didn’t. It took them a while – the seventy-seventh minute to be precise – but Warren Barton headed down a hopeful Ginola cross, which landed behind me at the feet of Shearer, who had, typically, peeled away to score a tap-in. Even then we almost reclaimed the lead. Bally walloped one from the edge of the area into the face of Shaka Hislop, who made a save without knowing much about it. Thus ended a fine game of football and a draw was still a good result for us – and a bad one for them.
While it was 1–0 in the second half, I struck a powerful header direct from a Chris Waddle corner. I really did meet it well. But it hit Hislop. Six inches higher and it would have been a goal. Two–nil, no way back for the Mags and a gigantic step towards safety. I alluded earlier to my goal at Portsmouth that set us off on a run to promotion, toppled governments and discovered new planets. Well, that would have been considered triviality itself compared to a second at St James’. Ballads would have been written about me, T-shirts printed with my image on the front, and I would never have to pay for a drink in Sunderland ever again.
If, if, if, if, if…
But here’s a funny thing. Twenty years after my meaty, oh-what-might-have-been header at Newcastle, someone sent me footage of it – and I had no recollection of it whatsoever.
Unusually for a derby, only one yellow card was shown all afternoon. To me.
• • •
Next Sunday we were at home to Liverpool and it was a somewhat dispiriting experience. When we saw their team sheet, we assumed that Robbie Fowler would be a lone striker. So it was agreed that I would mark Robbie tightly with Ordy covering. This plan was put into the long grass when it transpired that Steve McManaman would also play as a striker, something he rarely did. John Barnes was behind them ‘in the hole’. Those three saw a great deal of the ball and were quite magnificent. They caused us carnage, although it was only 1–0 at half-time.
I hadn’t got near either striker, not even to foul them. As I sat at the interval, I felt for the first time in my life that I really was out of my depth. Fowler and McManaman had done this to more celebrated players than me and would do so for some years to come. I had nothing to answer their ping-ping, pop-pop, one-and two-touch football. My confidence descended further when I missed a good chance with my head when I really ought to have scored. I was so self-absorbed that I didn’t hear a word the manager said.
Not long into the second half, it was 2–0. Fowler and McManaman now had a goal apiece. It then seemed to be an issue of how many Liverpool would put in; an alarming thought. I had endured my worst forty-seven minutes in a match.
Then, inexplicably, my problems went away. Liverpool seemed to think that they had won and almost appeared to lose interest, which is dangerous against any opposition. Paul Stewart scored from a Waddle corner with most of the second half remaining. As all bad commentators say, we now had a game on our hands.
However, there were no more goals and the better side won. We hadn’t played badly overall, but this was irrelevant, as we needed points. We were now in a relegation spot for the first time that season and there were only four games to go.
• • •
The following Saturday, we went to play Middlesbrough at their recently opened Cellnet Riverside Stadium. Obviously it was always going to have a humdrum atmosphere compared to our previous away game at Newcastle, but, allowing the head to usurp the heart for a change, this was a more important fixture. Middlesbrough were one place and one point behind us, with two games in hand.
Although I was less stressed playing in defence than in attack, as we warmed up, the anxiety of this game gave me a headache. In fact it was rather more than a headache; it was a stabbing pain to the back of my head that I still occasionally suffer from, and I had to pop a couple of paracetamol before kick-off. But I eased myself into the game by giving Fabrizio Ravanelli a couple of juicy whacks in the opening minutes. Wallop! That’s what happens to round-dodgers.
He summed himself up with the instructions he kept repeating to his junior strike partner, Mikkel Beck.
‘You run. I stay here.’
Ravanelli wanted to be what we called a ‘goal-lagger’ at school, while Beck did all the work. Fine centre-forward though he was, this was not what the occasion demanded. Beck did as he was told. Perhaps there was a drink in it for him, although I doubt it. He ran to wherever Ravanelli pointed, to no great effect.
Darren Williams had been brought in by Peter Reid to manmark Juninho, the decidedly tricky Brazilian. Darren was only nineteen and perhaps our fittest player, so this sounded like an eminently cunning strategy – until we found out that Juninho was on the bench.
We would just have to find something else for Darren to do. So, seconds before the break, Chris Waddle took an in-swinging free kick from our right. I was waiting on the edge of the six-yard box, but the ball never got near me. Darren rose higher than anyone and, unchallenged, put a superb header into the empty net.
Juninho was introduced early in the second half. The man was about as skilful as footballers get and we spent much of our time yelling at one another to clatter the little sod – if indeed any of us could get close enough to do so. He was routinely skipping past everyone and it was as though there was more than one of him.
But it wasn’t enough for Middlesbrough. The game finished 1–0 and restored a great deal of our confidence. Surprisingly, it was Sunderland’s first victory at Middlesbrough since 1962, when Brian Clough scored the winner.
I worked out that the thirteen players we used that day cost about £2.5 million. With the phenomenal amounts of money Bryan Robson had spent, Boro had been heavy favourites. Just to twist the knife further, Darren Williams was a Middlesbrough native too. It was probably his greatest moment, even if it did cost his parents their front window. The match was accurately summarised later in the supernal 2001 book Let There Be Light:
It was amusing to watch Match of the Day and see 7 million-pound striker, Fabrizio Ravanelli, being made anonymous by Lee Howey, who cost about a tenner. That said, the winning goal was scored by Darren Williams whose fee was easily in the hundreds.
It was a devastating blow for Middlesbrough. After that, they would win only one of their remaining five games and finish second bottom in what was a strange, strange season for them. Having spent many millions on Juninho, Ravanelli, Beck, Emerson, Festa, Branco and others – plus their massive salaries – they had obviously expected more. They reached both the FA and League Cup finals in 1997, but lost them both.
Their season was encapsulated when the FA deducted them three points for failing to play a fixture at Blackburn. They claimed, somewhat dubiously, that they could not field a full team due to illness. To retrieve the points, they enlisted the expensive help of George Carman QC. Carman was the most celebrated barrister of his day. In criminal trials, he had successfully defended Jeremy Thorpe, Ken Dodd and one of the Guildford Four. He had won libel cases for various newspapers, as well as Imran Khan, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Richard Branso
n and Elton John. Two of his victories effectively put Jonathan Aitken in jail for perjury and financially ruined Gillian Taylforth.
He didn’t get Middlesbrough their three points back.
• • •
The pressure to avoid the drop is always intense for the usual professional and financial reasons. At Sunderland in 1996–97 there was added onus because we would be playing in a new stadium in August.
The Stadium of Light was the finest sports arena in England when it opened and it’s still one of the best now. Which division we were in marked the difference between playing Manchester United before a raucous full house or facing Bury in a less animated and less-than-full house. Bob Murray pronounced himself ‘petrified’ at the prospect. The Stadium cost an initial £19 million. Relegation would cost about £10 million: an enormous amount, even if it does seem quaint today.
Two days after Middlesbrough, Paul Stewart, Chris Woods, Allan Johnston and Steve Agnew were given a tour of the new place while it was still under construction. Sitting in a hard hat on the floor of the unseated terrace of what became the West Stand, Paul mused aloud that the front row would be considerably further from the touchline than we were used to at Roker Park. He then alarmed the tour guide by leaping to his feet and bellowing: ‘Stewart! You’re fucking crap!!!’
He sat back down and reflected: ‘Ah. I’ll still hear that.’
• • •
The next fixture, our third last, was a Tuesday night home game against Southampton, who were two points and one place behind us. This was every bit as crucial as the Middlesbrough match. But by contrast, this one was a disaster.
Despite it being at Roker, we booked in for the afternoon at the George Washington Hotel along the road, for the pre-match meal and a rest. I was rooming with Ordy again. We were already aware that Niall Quinn would not be starting the game and were perplexed by this. Twenty-two minutes into the match, Alan Neilson played the ball into the air above our penalty area from the Southampton right. As I was about to head it, it curled away from me and I only got the slightest of touches on it instead of the firm header intended. The ball landed precisely between Gareth Hall and myself, perfectly at the feet of Egil Østenstad, who took his goal well.
Quinny was brought on for Johnston immediately afterwards and Southampton’s defenders couldn’t cope with him. He had one cleared off the line before hitting the bar from the rebound. Then he went close with a volley. The defenders might not have been coping with him, but they were somehow contriving to keep a clean sheet. The game was really only played in one direction after Southampton took the lead. I hit their crossbar with a header and there was a sequence of other near-misses.
Peter Reid buoyed us at half-time with a speech that was later broadcast on Premier Passions.
‘I don’t give a fuck about losing, but I’ll tell you what I give a fuck about. Losing shite!’
No one could quite bring themselves to tell him that all he had to do to attain grammatical correctness was employ the adverb ‘shitely’. It wasn’t a high priority at this stage.
Somehow, there would be no more goals. In other circumstances we might have dismissed it as ‘just one of those nights’, but the result was all that mattered, because when we kicked off our next game we would be in the bottom three. An international break meant that we now had eleven days to swear, kick things and generally rid ourselves of frustration before facing Everton in the last ever league game at Roker Park. With Neville Southall, Gary Speed, Duncan Ferguson, Nick Barmby (again), Dave Watson and the others coming to town, this was not expected to be easy. The match took place on Saturday 3 May 1997, two days after Tony Blair’s landslide general election win. If we were to avoid relegation, he would probably have claimed credit for that too.
Despite the pressure, training was no different from normal and the mood was as light-hearted and positive as it had ever been. There was no point in thinking about Southampton, or anything else that we couldn’t change now. It was all about Everton.
History weighed upon me. I was quite emotional about this fixture, but I think it was in a positive way. Roker Park had been around since 1898, so it held immense sentimental value for every Sunderland supporter, myself included. We were all excited about the new stadium, but my heart remained at Roker, even if its demolition was the right thing to do. A mercy killing. Whatever the result might be, it would be a source of considerable pride for me just to have played in the game.
We had more than one reason to be nervous and for the first third of the game, it showed. Adding even more to the tension was that although they were in twelfth place, Everton were not mathematically safe. They needed this too. Then on thirty-five minutes everything changed. Attacking the Roker End, Micky Gray floated a high cross towards the back post which Duncan Ferguson, quite inexplicably, shoved away with his left hand raised far above his head. This led to the most fraught, gut-churning penalty kick imaginable. The importance of it did not need to be mentioned. Whoever was about to take the kick deserved credit for doing so, even if he was about to make a complete arse of it.
He didn’t. As he proved again in 2016, Paul Stewart was (is) a man of stout heart. Looking considerably calmer than he must have felt, he appointed the ball to the spot before smashing it unstoppably to the right of Neville Southall to score the final ever goal at the Roker End. We would have no further problems that afternoon.
Strange as it may seem, Peter Reid’s chat included: ‘Relax. The worst thing that can happen is you get beat. So fuckin’ what?’
The stress was virtually expunged on fifty-seven minutes when Southall handled the ball marginally outside the Everton penalty area in the ‘D’. Chris Waddle then took a free kick that could not have been bettered by any other footballer on Earth. It travelled like a surface-to-air missile, past the wall and into the top left-hand corner of the net at the Fulwell End.
The way I celebrated, I may as well have been in the Fulwell End. The record attendance at Roker Park was (officially) 75,118 against Derby County in 1933. By 1997, a full house was only 22,000, but the 22,000 watching us play against Everton made the place as deafening as anyone could remember. We were animated by the fervour. Every time we won the ball a roar went up, the fans putting wings on our feet, fire in our hearts and all those other things that poets waffle on about. A magnificent occasion with which to end an era. When that sort of momentum is with you, you win. It was one of the best games to play in of my entire career, although I personally didn’t have a great deal to do.
The honour of scoring the last goal at Roker Park went to Allan Johnston. Waddle crossed from the left with his ‘wrong’ right foot and Allan headed it away at the back post. Cue more noise, more delirium and more belief. Of the seven goals we had now scored since Waddle’s arrival, he had created five and scored one. That was about the last thing to happen on the Roker Park pitch during its ninety-nine years.
Well, almost.
Duncan Ferguson had become increasingly agitated as the game progressed. He had conceded the penalty, received no joy from Ordy and myself and had been subjected to repeated and highly effective pestering from Darren Williams, who was having a fine game. When Darren had taken the ball from his toes for what must have been the twentieth time, Ferguson’s temper went the same way as the three points and he was about to dispose his ire upon Darren, who was significantly smaller than the 6ft 4in. Scotsman. Most people were.
But Ferguson was only an inch taller than I was* and his failure to pick on someone his own size infuriated me. I stood between the two of them to growl as much at Ferguson, adding that he was, in my estimation, a ‘Scotch twat’.
Perhaps this presents me in an heroic, albeit inarticulate light, so I should add that the first thought I had after speaking was: ‘What are you thinking of, Lee? It’s Duncan Ferguson!’
In 1995, he had become the first British footballer to be jailed as the result of an on-field assault: headbutting an opponent while playing for Rangers a year earlie
r. After serving his forty-four days, he was praised by a Scottish Prison Service spokesman who used the ill-considered phrase: ‘He kept his head down.’ It wasn’t his first offence either.
I stood my ground and pretended I wasn’t fearful. Perhaps he was mindful of his past, as well as the yellow card he had already received for the handball, but nothing else occurred. Besides, his teammates dragged him away. It looked to the crowd like common ‘handbags’. It didn’t feel like it.
At full-time, it was 3–0 and I headed down the tunnel where I kept an eye out for Ferguson, but he had lost interest. We returned to the pitch to perform a lap of honour, then had the inevitable drinkies.
• • •
I didn’t want to leave Roker Park that day, but had to. A minibus arrived at the ground to collect Richard Ord, Martin Smith, Micky Gray and me. The remaining seats were then filled with Ordy’s mates from Murton. We were on our way to the NYMEX, now the Manchester Arena, for a boxing match that night. Sunderland’s Billy Hardy was challenging Naseem Hamed, a bit of a berk but a sublime fighter, for the WBO and IBF World Featherweight titles. What a day for our city this would be if Billy could pull it off.
After a roadside pick-up of ten cases of refreshments from Aidy Marshall, we pulled in again a few miles down the A19 where we were joined by an attractive stripper called, I believe, Goldie. She demonstrated her art, although she was followed in the car behind by her husband, lest you should think it was in any way tacky or distasteful. She alighted after about half-an-hour. I have no idea who hired her.
We watched Robin Reid win a tough bout against Henry Wharton before Billy took to the ring. Ordy and I bought two drinks each in anticipation of a long fight. We roared at his entrance as we knew how good it would make him feel. This was his hour.