The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘The first time I met Cyrille we were in a hotel bar waiting to do some kind of interview and Laurie had gone off to the toilet,’ Brown recalls. ‘This big black guy walked in and looked me up and down in that way that men do. And I looked at him. Then one of the directors from the club came in and said, “Ah, I see you two have met.” Cyrille was like, “Don’t tell me you’re Nicky . . .”

  ‘At the time, Cyrille was very much a ska boy. He loved his reggae and all he wanted to know about was where the black clubs were in Birmingham. He went out with black girls, so he had to adjust to Laurie and me too. Yes, there was an instant thing between the two of them, but I also think the club threw them together to an extent because they were both black.’

  Laurie Cunningham became the second Albion player after Jeff Astle to have a piece of graffiti dedicated to him. His appeared on a brick wall at the back of the Hawthorns pub. This was the same pub the players habitually gathered at for a drink after each home game, so there’d be no doubt of them seeing it. Daubed in white paint, it said: ‘Cunningham is a black cunt.’

  The volume of abuse that had been solely directed at Cunningham in his first season at West Brom was turned up and intensified now that Regis had joined him on the pitch. If the sight of a solitary black player in the English top division was then unusual enough for him to be exposed, having two together in the same team was tantamount to inciting a kind of fury.

  At Newcastle, the week after the Middlesbrough match, a section of the home fans booed and chanted at the pair of them throughout the game. On 17 September, during a typically bruising local derby with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the Hawthorns, away supporters drummed on corrugated iron sheets at the back of the Smethwick Stand and chanted the odious litany that had first been heard in the North East the season before: ‘Pull that trigger, shoot the nigger.’ And also, ‘Nigger, nigger, lick my boots.’ Neither incident was referred to in the local or national media during or after the games.

  ‘It was very difficult at that stage for a young reporter to know what to say or do,’ contends the BBC’s Pat Murphy, then working for local radio in the West Midlands. ‘There wasn’t a platform for one to stand up and say things on air – to say that the racist abuse was disgraceful. You just didn’t do it. That was the culture of the time. You got on with it and did your job, and made sure that you praised the players as much as you could and whenever possible.’

  ‘The abuse directed at them during the Wolves game in particular was foul,’ says Dave Bowler. ‘I believe that Laurie found it harder to deal with than Cyrille; it cut a lot deeper with him. He took it more personally and, frankly, why wouldn’t you? You’ve got to remember that these guys were just nineteen and twenty-one years old at the time.’

  In this regard, football again held up a mirror image to the rest of British society and its predominantly white institutions. There was still then no legal basis to challenge racist chanting, so no action was taken to stamp it out on the spot at football grounds. Had they even had a mind to do so, it would have been pointless for clubs such as West Brom to petition the FA to intervene. The game’s ruling association declined to even pass comment on the matter, let alone address it. Both this veil of silence and the collective inertia could be said to be as much to do with sheer ignorance as with blind prejudice or a lack of concern. It was as if it were thought that the mere act of ignoring the elephant in the room might be enough to make it go away.

  At West Brom, club director John Gordon took Regis under his wing just as he had done with Cunningham, offering both of them counsel and a sympathetic ear. It was enough to prompt whispers in and around the club about Gordon’s motives, though neither player ever thought of him as being anything other than a mentor or father figure. Otherwise at the club, there seemed to be little regard given to, or awareness of, what both players were being subjected to. It wasn’t something that was debated in the dressing room, and appeared almost not to have been noticed by the rest of the team. Until, that is, the Baggies travelled to London that November to face West Ham.

  The East End of the capital had within its boundaries some of the poorest and most neglected areas of the country, and these were hotbeds of support for the National Front. Party activists were a familiar presence at the football grounds of West Ham and neighbouring Millwall. Fans of both clubs had become notorious for their hostility toward black players. In West Ham’s case, the fact that a Bermudan, Clyde Best, and a Nigerian, Ade Coker, had been recent members of the club’s first-team squad did nothing to dilute their venom. Regis and Cunningham were welcomed onto the Upton Park pitch that afternoon with a shower of bananas. It was so overt a gesture that no one could have missed it.

  ‘The two lads were very professional about it and tried to shut it out, but it got to them,’ says Willie Johnston. ‘I got stick for being Scottish, but it didn’t bother me. I told big Cyrille to open up a fruit shop. I said to him, “Listen, I’m getting the shit kicked out of me here, you’re only getting bananas.”’

  ‘There were no black people going to watch football then and we didn’t fully realise what these players were experiencing on our behalf,’ says Derrick Campbell. ‘We thought that Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis were gods. We saw them in that arena, scoring goals, doing something that no other black person that we knew of had ever done or achieved. And yet we had no appreciation of the pressure or stresses acting upon them, of what they had to cope with. Even now, that is why they’re held in the very highest esteem.’

  Cunningham gave them the last laugh at West Ham, scoring one of Albion’s goals in a 3-3 draw. It was a pattern that was followed throughout that autumn and into the first chill of winter. Regis scored goals at Newcastle, Birmingham and Derby County. Cunningham sealed a 4-0 home victory over Manchester United that secured West Brom’s position in the upper regions of the First Division table.

  On one waterlogged or frozen pitch after another, the two of them also gave lie to the belief that then endured within the game: that black players would baulk when the going got tough or the weather too cold. Regis in particular struck a heroic figure, so strong that opposition defenders bounced off him. With his chest bursting out through his shirt, he looked as if he were hewn from rock.

  ‘Cyrille had a perfect physique and he didn’t even have to work at it,’ says Derek Statham. ‘He was fast too, but not interested in running more than 100 metres. When we did cross country runs, he used to get one of the local press photographers to give him a lift back to the training ground. The rest of us would all come in knackered after doing eight miles and he’d be showered and ready to go home.’

  ‘I always thought that Cyrille looked like a god,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘The torso, the rippling physique and brave with it. He seemed a very happy soul, polite and well mannered, but there was a fire in his belly. He was sharp enough to see the game as a social release, like it was for the West Indian cricketers. He didn’t have Cunningham’s confidence, far from it, but he scored the kind of goals that we fantasise about. He realised your dreams for you.’

  On the pitch, Cunningham’s disposition was almost regal, as if he saw himself as being above the more mundane and rudimentary aspects of the game. Off it, he looked the part too in his fine, flash clothes and cruising around in the new white MG sports car that was his pride and joy. The junior partner of the two, Regis appeared more modest by comparison, but he’d also begun to enjoy the fruits of his new life. He liked a drink and enjoyed Birmingham’s abundant nightlife. He revelled in the attention it afforded him, since he was something of a ladies’ man and quick to charm.

  ‘Cyrille might seem a little bit quiet and laid-back at first, until you got to know him, but he’s very much a man’s man,’ says Tony Godden. ‘A lot of the things that I got up to with him would curl your hair, but we had tremendous fun. I remember going round to his place one morning after a night out and he was asleep in his car in the garage. He said he hadn’t been able to get into the house. I walked round
to the back door and opened it. Turned out, he’d been pulling the handle the wrong way – that was just how he was.’

  As Christmas neared, West Brom suffered an alarming wobble in form. They won just one of eight games, coming out on the wrong end of three-goal defeats against Aston Villa, Bristol City and Arsenal. The club was also dumped out of the League Cup by lower league Bury. As this wretched run progressed, rumours began to circulate in the local press that Ronnie Allen was preparing to resign as manager.

  In fact, Allen had been negotiating a lucrative contract to advise the national team of Saudi Arabia. This was much the same set of circumstances for which Don Revie had been so widely condemned. Yet Allen escaped opprobrium, largely because the London-based national media attached such little significance to events at provincial football clubs. However, Allen had also baulked at West Brom’s failure to offer him a longer-term deal. The story was broken in the West Midlands by Bob Downing of the Express & Star and the Evening Mail’s Dave Harrison, the pair of them having learned that Allen had flown out to the Saudi capital of Rijad.

  ‘Bob and I went down to Heathrow on the train and met Ronnie off his plane,’ recalls Harrison. ‘He actually offered us a lift home, and on the way back told us that he was going to leave. He said he was going to let his head rule his heart for once and make some good money. I had to ask him to stop off at a phone box so I could call in the story.’

  ‘Ronnie had lost the dressing room too,’ insists Downing. ‘At half-time in the cup match at Bury, John Wile was berating Willie Johnston for not going past their full-back and Ronnie stood up and agreed. I heard on the team bus afterwards that Willie had told him to fuck off.’

  Allen’s successor wouldn’t be announced until early the next year. He was Ron Atkinson, who’d previously been in charge of Second Division Cambridge United, and about whom Cunningham, Regis and the rest of the Albion team knew not the slightest thing.

  Chapter Five: Big Ron

  Nothing much was great or glorious about the playing career of Ronald Frederick Atkinson. He was born in Liverpool on 18 March 1939, but within a matter of weeks had moved with his family to Birmingham. As a seventeen-year-old, he signed on as a trainee with Aston Villa, which was his adopted hometown’s most prominent club. During his three years at Villa Park, he failed to make a single appearance for the senior side. Yet Atkinson did at least benefit from the tutorage of Villa’s youth team coach, Jimmy Hogan. It was Hogan who was to have the most lasting influence on how he came to think about the game.

  One of the sport’s first true visionaries, Hogan initially studied for the priesthood in his native Lancashire. He instead went on to become a professional footballer, playing for Rochdale, Burnley and Bolton Wanderers in the years leading up to the Great War. However, it was as a coach that he secured his lasting reputation as a trailblazer. In 1936, he took the Austrian national side to the final of the Olympic football tournament, and he also had productive spells managing in club football in both Switzerland and Hungary. The principles he established during his time in Hungary became the foundation for the ‘Magical Magyars’ side of Ferenc Puskás, which famously humbled England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953. Hogan’s maxim was simple and he drilled into his young charges at Villa: ‘Wherever you are on the field, if you’ve got the ball, you’re always attacking. And if they’ve got it, you’re defending.’

  Upon being released by Villa in 1959, Atkinson was picked up on a free transfer by Oxford United (the then non-league outfit were known as Headington United at the time). He went on to play nearly 400 games for the club, captaining the side through their rise from the Southern League to Division Two of the Football League. He was a stocky wing-half who was powerful but had little panache. In 1971, aged thirty-two, he returned to non-league circles to join Kettering Town as their player-manager, enjoying success and subsequently attracting the interest of Cambridge United in the Fourth Division. Atkinson took Cambridge up to the third tier of English football in 1977, and the team was chasing a second successive promotion the next season when the post of manager at West Bromwich Albion became vacant.

  At Cambridge, Atkinson made no secret of his ambitions to work at the top level of the game. He didn’t lack for assurance in his own abilities, telling anyone who listened that he was destined for greater things. Yet he was also astute enough to court more experienced football managers and acquire knowledge from them. Senior figures such as Bill Nicholson, who in 1961 had led Tottenham to the first English League and Cup double of the twentieth century, often came to Cambridge’s Abbey Stadium to scout for talent. Atkinson made sure to invite them into his cramped office after the game for a cup of tea and a chat. He was a regular visitor to Wembley for international fixtures and ingratiated himself with higher profile coaches such as Malcolm Allison, then with Crystal Palace, and John Bond from Norwich City.

  From this flamboyant pairing, Atkinson cherry-picked the accoutrements with which he was able to create his very own persona. From Allison and Bond he cultivated a fondness for flash clothes, gold jewellery and big cigars. Since Allison was known as ‘Big Mal’, Atkinson became ‘Big Ron’, a mover and a shaker in the game. This also somehow seemed to grow him in stature, though he stood much less than six-feet tall. It also concealed a keen brain and a burning passion for football, but it did what was intended and got him noticed.

  Atkinson wasn’t the first manager Albion approached to replace the departed Ronnie Allen. Their original choice had been an even younger man, 33-year-old Graham Taylor, who in 1976 had won the Fourth Division title with Lincoln City. The bespectacled Taylor had a studious look about him and took a scholarly approach to the game. However, he unexpectedly snubbed the First Division side’s offer in favour of one from another of the Football League’s basement clubs, Watford. The Hertfordshire club had just then been bought by rock star Elton John, and Atkinson was left to step into the Hawthorns’ breach.

  ‘I got a call from one of the West Brom directors, Sid Lucas, asking if I’d meet up with him and the club chairman, Bert Millichip, at a hotel near Coventry,’ Atkinson recalls. ‘It was all very much a done deal, but I was only being offered a £500 rise in salary from what I was on at the time.

  ‘When I pointed this out to Sid Lucas he said to me, “Come and have a look out back. I think you’ll like what we’ve got for you.” Sat there in the car park was a big blue Jag. I told him it was nice, but that I’d already got one at home and that mine had a bigger engine. Coming from Cambridge, they assumed I’d be driving a bloody Mini.’

  Atkinson seized the chance to step up and swept into West Brom in the second week of 1978. If he was afflicted with even a shadow of doubt about the challenge now facing him, he didn’t allow it to show. He turned up for his first day in the job resplendent in a long, black leather coat that made him look like nothing so much as a Gestapo staff officer. Dave Harrison from the Birmingham Evening Mail had been dispatched to Cambridge the week before to interview the newly appointed Atkinson and was again waiting for him outside the Hawthorns.

  ‘Ron got out of his car, bold as brass and recognised me straight away,’ says Harrison. ‘First thing he did was hand me his bag to carry into the ground. He said to me, “Here you go, that’s your job now, Scoop.”’

  The impact Atkinson had on the Albion players was just as instant and forceful. Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis were the first he encountered during that initial afternoon. They were coming out from one of the first-team squad’s favourite haunts, the Europa Hotel, just down the road from the Hawthorns. The pair of them sauntered past Atkinson, bidding him, ‘Alright, Ron.’ He stopped them in their tracks, called them back and told them in future to address him as ‘Boss’, before sending them on their way.

  He soon enough bowled up to the rest of the team. Being so ebullient, wise-cracking and self-assured, he caught each of them off guard. This went for the younger players and their older, more cynical colleagues alike. All, that is, except for one of the Irish conting
ent, Paddy Mulligan. A long-in-the-tooth full-back, Mulligan dismissed Atkinson for his bluff manner and modest credentials as a player. He referred to him not as Big Ron, but rather as the ‘Towering Inferior’. This got a laugh in the dressing room, but it marked Mulligan’s card with the new manager.

  Atkinson had arrived with grand ideas of how he intended to mould and shape the team, but he was quick and canny enough to realise that little of the blueprint Johnny Giles had first laid down at the club needed fixing. Like Ronnie Allen, he retained Giles’s model for training sessions. These were kept to fast, competitive five-a-side games that honed and encouraged the players to pass and move, and to do this over and again at speed. It was precisely this that Atkinson wanted from his side.

  The squad was split by Atkinson for these matches into the English group, known as the ‘Cream’, and the Irish and Scots, who were branded the ‘Scum’. Adopting for the occasion the identity of one of the game’s great players, perhaps George Best or the German maestro Franz Beckenbauer, Atkinson joined in on the English side alongside the likes of Cunningham, Regis and Bryan Robson. The games were further enlivened by the manager betting money on their outcome and the players tore into them as if there were a great prize at stake, kicking lumps out of each other. In any event, Atkinson invariably kept them going until his side had scored the decisive goal.

  ‘Ron set out to make an impression on us and that he certainly did,’ says John Wile. ‘But he was also able to take us on to the next level as a team. All he basically said was that he wanted us to play at a quicker tempo, to hit the front men a bit earlier and push higher up the field. He injected pace into the side and gave each of us confidence as well, because he exuded it.’

  Atkinson’s methods had the immediate effect of improving team spirit, which had dwindled under Allen. Yet to begin with at least, the new manager wasn’t able to have such a marked effect on results and West Brom’s poor run of form continued. Their first game after his appointment resulted in a 1-0 home defeat to Liverpool and the side lost again the next week by the same score at Middlesbrough. Indeed, Atkinson’s team recorded just one win in his first seven League games in charge.