by Paul Rees
‘But then, I don’t think Laurie was ever really happy as a person. There was always something missing from his life. He was kind of like a lost soul and there may have been an inner frustration at not knowing what to look for, or what it was that was going to make him feel satisfied.’
That summer, the country as a whole appeared to be engaged in a battle with itself. The surging optimism of the post-war era turned to dread and despair as the self-image Britain had of itself as a global power vanished to the past. With it, the nation’s moral compass began to shift.
The new Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, encapsulated a general air of resigned desperation when dolefully announcing a marked decline in British living standards. Real take-home pay had fallen by up to 5 per cent. A more vociferous response was still then brewing among Britain’s white working classes, and this rising tide of bitterness and resentment continued to benefit the National Front. In council elections around the UK, the NF polled over a quarter of a million votes. In more than a third of the ninety-two seats it contested in Greater London, it usurped the Liberals as the third-most popular mainstream political party. That August, there were violent clashes between NF supporters and bands of protestors on the streets of Lewisham in south London and the Birmingham district of Ladywood.
The preceding June, Queen Elizabeth II had celebrated her Silver Jubilee. To mark the occasion, millions joined in street parties the length and breadth of the land. These festivities had a sepia-tinted afterglow to them, as if refracting a fading idyll – the dying idea of the nation as both united and glorious. The opposing view, one of a younger and more cynical generation, was articulated by the spitting guitars and sneered vocals of the Sex Pistols. Their venomous ‘God Save the Queen’ single was the most-bought pop song of those long, hot months in spite – or because – of it being banned by the BBC. A gentler, but just as emphatic tilt at the country’s prim and proper traditions was taken by an otherwise unremarkable sitcom, Robin’s Nest. This was the first programme of its kind to show an unmarried couple living together on British television.
Looking at football, one could see the state of the nation in microcosm. At the end of the previous season an English club, Liverpool, had defeated the German champions Borussia Monchengladbach in the European Cup final in Rome. This was a flickering monument to English supremacy, a panacea for the failures of the national team and the turgid fare that was being served up in the Football League. It also brought some respite from the ugly spectres of hooliganism and racism that were stalking the game’s terraces.
Euphoria at Liverpool’s triumph passed like a shadow, with deeper and more lingering truths to be derived from the item that replaced it on the national newspapers’ back pages. This was the story of the resignation of the England team manager, Don Revie. A grubby saga, it was shaped three summers earlier when Revie, who’d built a successful Leeds United side in his own stern image, took over the national team from Sir Alf Ramsey. The buttoned-up Ramsey had won England the World Cup in 1966, but failed to guide them to the finals of the tournament in 1974.
Revie’s reign was ill-fated from the start. England crashed out of the next major international tournament, the 1976 European Championships, again at the qualifying stage. They were making a faltering start to their campaign to reach the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina when Revie walked out of his job, having negotiated a £340,000 contract to coach the United Arab Emirates. In the press and the corridors of power at the Football Association, Revie was portrayed as having the morals of a snake, a gutless captain abandoning his sinking ship. The FA banned him from working in England for ten years.
Media and public alike lobbied for the brazen, outspoken manager of Nottingham Forest, Brian Clough, to be Revie’s replacement. Clough’s Forest side played exciting attacking football, almost an anomaly at the time, and he’d led them from the depths of the Second Division to promotion the previous season. However, he was no diplomat and his barbed outpourings had frequently ruffled feathers among the game’s top brass. Clough ultimately was too much for the people running the English game to stomach and the FA ignored the clamour for him, opting instead for West Ham’s Ron Greenwood, the very image of the dutiful company man.
Laurie Cunningham, who would have his own reasons to regret Greenwood’s appointment, returned to West Brom in time for the new season. Albion’s fans had found it easier to warm to him than had his team-mates, and he was idolised among them. If the rest of the squad questioned this as fact, well, the club’s annual opening day would have put them right. On a hot August afternoon, hundreds of kids from local schools trooped along to the Spring Road training ground and Cunningham was besieged. At one point, the weight of bodies pressing down upon him hunting his autograph became so great that a policemen was forced to intervene for fear that he’d be crushed.
Cunningham had heard rumblings of there being a new, younger black player at the club, of course he had. Of how he seemed like a force of nature and had so nonchalantly rolled over the indomitable John Wile. But he didn’t attach much importance to such things, most often preferring to talk about anything other than football. In any case, he hadn’t yet met Cyrille Regis, and out of sight was out of mind.
‘The first teamers were the big boys and they walked around the place with a strut, an air of confidence about them, Laurie as much as anyone else,’ says Regis. ‘Whereas I was still just nineteen years old and had only played three or four games in the reserves. But I was finding my feet and getting into the groove.’
Centre-forwards had attained a special and cherished status at West Brom. The man who wore the number 9 shirt for the club was expected not only to score great and important goals, he was also required to be a kind of mythical figure, one capable of rousing feats. It had been this way since Billy ‘W.G.’ Richardson had prowled opposition penalty areas in the thirties and forties. A former bus driver from County Durham, Richardson scored 202 goals in just 320 appearances for the club. Four of these came in a dazzling five-minute spell against West Ham United in 1931. He bagged two more that year to win the FA Cup for Albion against Birmingham City.
In the fifties, Richardson’s mantle was assumed by Derek Kevan. A hulking Yorkshireman, like Regis, Kevan had come to West Brom as an unrefined teenager. Known as ‘The Tank’, he used his considerable bulk to bludgeon through opposition defences and netted 157 goals during his ten years at the Hawthorns, one for every 151 minutes he was on the pitch. He left Albion’s fans with a lasting impression of him, scoring a hat-trick in his final game for the club against Ipswich Town in 1963.
Kevan’s successor, Jeff Astle, was best loved of all and his exploits earned him the grand sobriquet of ‘The King’. His extra-time goal against Everton, one of 174 that he notched for the club, won the FA Cup in 1968. With it, he also became the first man to score in every round of the competition in a single season. So feted was the genial and unassuming Astle, it was claimed, perhaps apocryphally, that a piece of graffiti daubed across a canal bridge in the Black Country town of Netherton that read ‘King Astle, WBA’ was under a preservation order from the town council.
Richardson, Kevan and Astle were also each selected to represent England. This furthered an expectation among the club’s fans that as a matter of course West Bromwich Albion would boast the best centre-forward in the land – a conviction that had been shaken ever since Astle’s departure in 1974. No one called his replacement, Joe Mayo, ‘The King’ or indeed anything of the sort. A committed but restricted footballer, Mayo was eventually packed off to Orient, a makeweight in the deal that had brought Laurie Cunningham to West Brom and for which he was most fondly recalled.
The current incumbent was David Cross, about whom there seemed nothing remarkable, despite his averaging a goal every other game since joining the Baggies the season before from Coventry City. The unloved Cross started the first three games of the 1977–78 season, scoring in each of the opening two, a 3-0 home win against Chelsea and a 2-2 draw at
Leeds. Yet he was as ineffective as the rest of the team in succumbing 3-0 to the might of Liverpool.
Four days after their humbling at Anfield, West Brom faced a home midweek League Cup tie against Rotherham United of the Third Division. Cross had picked up an injury at Liverpool. Expecting to win, Ronnie Allen decided to pitch Cyrille Regis into the first team for the cup match. Regis walked to the Hawthorns from his digs in Smethwick that evening, past the gaggles of supporters mingling on the streets outside the ground, unrecognised and unknown to them.
‘I felt a mixture of fear, apprehension, nervousness and excitement,’ he recalls. ‘I got into the dressing room and there was Willie Johnston, John Wile and also Laurie Cunningham getting changed. I knew them by sight, but we didn’t know each other. There was a television on in the corner and as I started to get stripped off, I felt sure that each of them was looking at me and wondering if I was good enough for their team.
‘The biggest crowd I’d played in front of up till that point had been 500. All of a sudden, two months later, there were 15,000 people out there. I was scared, churning up inside. But you know what men are like – I gave off an air of confidence and braved it out.’
In the first half of the game, Regis was full of huff and puff, and he charged round like a young bull. He was playing on nothing but instinct, since all that Allen had told him to do beforehand was go out and enjoy the experience. He had a couple of chances, missed them both, but still he kept showing for the ball and wanting to make a decent impression. West Brom had coasted into a 2-0 lead in the second half when the referee awarded them a penalty.
‘Tony Brown, who usually took the penalties, was injured and Willie Johnston had been nominated in his absence,’ says Regis. ‘For some inexplicable reason, the West Brom crowd started singing, “Cyrille, Cyrille.” Willie Johnston had the ball in his hand. He just gave me this knowing look and nodded at me. I’d never taken a penalty before, not even for the school team, but I went up there and scored. Then I scored another goal and we won 4-0. And that was it, the start of my career.’
‘The story that night was nothing to do with Albion winning the game, which wasn’t surprising. It was all about this kid,’ remembers Bob Downing, a reporter for a local newspaper, the Express & Star. ‘Nobody had known what to expect; Ronnie Allen had even had to tell us press guys how to spell Cyrille’s forename. But when this lad came out wearing the number 9 shirt . . . I mean, my God, his physique was incredible.
‘You’d have thought that a young kid coming into the side against a team that could put it about a bit would be intimidated, but he scared them. You could see fear in the eyes of their defenders. The crowd took to him in an instant. He could’ve been black, yellow, bloody polka dot for all they cared. And once you’re an Albion centre-forward and the fans have taken to you, you’re only going one way.’
After the game, Regis went along with Johnston, Cunningham and half the West Brom first team to the Hawthorns pub sited at the back of the main stand. The landlord bolted the doors and kept the beer flowing until three o’clock the next morning, players and supporters joined together in drinking to their good fortune. Sat among them, Regis didn’t say much that night, though he sensed a rapport developing with the diffident Cunningham. Yet deep down, unspoken but undoubted, he knew that his chance had come and that it was now up to him to grasp it.
He retained his place in the side that Saturday for a League match against Middlesbrough. The League Cup was one thing, but now Regis would be pitting himself against First Division defenders. This was the biggest leap up the football ladder he had yet attempted. If he now proved to be nothing more than a flash in the pan, he would have a long, hard fall.
The game was twenty minutes old when Regis picked up the ball on the halfway line, put his head down and ran at Middlesbrough’s goal. He shrugged off one, two, three challenges, swatted them aside like flies, and then crashed the ball into the net for the winning goal. During the rest of that game, the Hawthorns crowd sang a new chant. The words of it resounded around the ground for weeks on end: ‘Astle is back, Astle is back.’
‘He looked like he’d come out of a cartoon strip, like Popeye,’ says Dave Bowler, a Baggies fan and author of the book Samba in the Smethwick End. ‘In that sense, he was a throwback to another era. You could imagine that if you were able to get on the pitch, you’d want to play like Cyrille. There was something Sunday League about him, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. You could tell that he loved playing the game.’
‘Cyrille was a raw talent on the field, but I tell you what, he was exciting,’ says John Wile. ‘When he got the ball, he seemed to have just one thought in his mind, which was to go for goal. Nobody scored goals like that in the professional game. If you like, it was a very naive way of looking at it, but it was effective. And because of his strength and size, he physically frightened people.
‘With the background he’d had, I think he also appreciated just how much of an opportunity it was for him. He was like a sponge, always wanting to learn. If you told him to run a certain way, he would, he was that keen. But, phew, what a player he was.’
Regis accepted an invitation from Cunningham to go out that evening in Birmingham. They were joined by West Brom’s 22-year-old goalkeeper, Tony Godden, another lad who hailed from the south of England. Cunningham took the pair of them dancing. Regis and Godden looked on admiringly as he spun one girl after another around the dance floor, the smoothest operator in the room. Cunningham and Regis hit it off together straight away. Each of them Londoners and just over a year apart in age, they were a couple of black guys on the make.
Once he’d exploded into West Brom’s first team, Regis was barely out of it. Ronnie Allen showed so much faith in his young striker that the more experienced David Cross was shipped out of the club that December. The local papers were also quick to extol Allen’s new-look side, the Express & Star declaring Regis and Cunningham to be the ‘deadly duo’. Regis’ new team-mates took to him just as fast, whereas Cunningham continued to confuse and confound, as elusive to them as ever.
The rough and tumble atmosphere of the dressing room, with its in-jokes and endless ribbing, held no fears for Regis since he’d come to it from a building site. He took whatever was thrown at him on the chin, and gave as good as he got. It helped too that he was a smoker and had been since he was sixteen. This gave him an instant in with the cabal of senior players who congregated after training each morning to puff on a cigarette and shoot the breeze. These were Willie Johnston, his fellow Scot Ally Brown, another of Albion’s strikers, and the Irish midfielder Mick Martin, a man of caustic wit.
Yet Regis was also open and gregarious by nature. He enjoyed the company of others and had a ready laugh. When he was so engaged, the big, broad grin that stretched across his face would light it up. By contrast, Cunningham was invariably a brooding presence in the dressing room, removed from whatever was going on around him. Regis’ positive influence did bring him out of his shell on occasion, but not so that most of the other players would ever feel that they got to know or comprehend him.
‘Although outwardly he looked flamboyant, with how he dressed and walked, deep down Laurie was shy as a person,’ says Regis. ‘He was the quietest guy in the dressing room and a lot of people took that to be arrogance on his part. But I think it was much more a form of self-protection. He kept his distance until he warmed to someone or got to know them.’
‘Laurie was never very forthcoming and he could be quite moody too,’ says Dave Harrison, who ghost-wrote Cunningham’s weekly newspaper column for the Birmingham Evening Mail. ‘You could go into the ground on Saturday lunchtime and sitting all on his own would be Laurie. You’d be able to tell just by the look on his face whether he was going to have a good game or not.
‘He used to get horrendous stick from defenders, who’d kick him off the pitch within the first five minutes of a game. If he was in the mood, he’d just get up and get on with it. If not, he’d vani
sh. But he was a phenomenal, frightening talent. You went to watch him in training and it would be an education. He could do things with his feet and manipulate the ball in a way that was almost Houdini-like and would enable him to get out of any situation. I think the other players were prepared to tolerate him because of that ability.’
An intensely private man, it was almost as if Cunningham cocooned himself in a suit of protective armour. There were parts of this that even Regis couldn’t penetrate. His friends did come to appreciate his droll-but-keen sense of humour. He was an avid Monty Python fan and would roar with laughter watching pratfalls or slapstick. Yet his deeper, darker corners were off limits to all but Nicky Brown.
‘He loved watching shooting stars, and the joy on a child’s face would bring him glee,’ she says. ‘If he witnessed cruelty, intolerance or abject nastiness of any kind he would react and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. Lies made him mad. So did politicians. But also there being bad music at a club, a taxi not turning up at the right time or the fried chicken place not being open when he wanted it.
‘There was always dance music on in the house and we read together all the time. He loved the outdoors. If it was raining, we’d go out and get wet, then come back in and spend the rest of the day in bed. If we didn’t have to get up, we wouldn’t. We’d stay there all day, looking through magazines, watching films. And we’d order out for takeaway food and eat it in bed.’
As he had at Orient, Cunningham gathered around him and Brown a small but tight group of people from the football club. In the stead of Bobby Fisher and Tony Grealish, at West Brom there was Regis, whom he allowed to get closest, Tony Godden and also Derek Statham.